ABSTRACT

The end of the Cold War did not bury just communism. With the same enthusiasm and in the same spirit it buried two centuries of Enlightenment, two centuries of which in the end the Cold War constituted only its most intense historic period, its most vigorous geostrategic expression and its most complete ideological form. Our feeling of an exceptionally strong change in world order after the fall of the Berlin Wall is coupled with our equally enormous inability to interpret it, to give it meaning. Though all the upheavals we experience daily can have several meanings, nothing indicates they have a meaning, if by meaning we imply the triple notion of foundation, unity and final goal: ‘foundation’ meaning the basic principle on which a collective project depends; ‘unity’ meaning that ‘world images’ are collected into a coherent plan of the whole; and ‘end’ or ‘final goal’, meaning projection towards an elsewhere that is deemed to be better. With the end of the Cold War these three principles were dislocated from each other. ‘Market democracy’ apparently triumphed, yet seems itself more incapable than ever of defending the debate over its foundation. Political, economic and financial disorders fit less and less readily into a common explanatory framework, though they have never been so interdependent. Finally, the need to project ourselves into the future has never been so strong, while we have never been so poorly armed on the conceptual front to conceive this future, which leaves a wide gap between the historic rupture that confronts us and our difficulty in interpreting it. These gaps are at the origin of the world crisis of meaning. It is to the damaging divorce they cause between the play of meaning and the play of power that this book is dedicated.