ABSTRACT
This chapter has two basic aims. The first is partly by way of response to Habermas's explicit criticisms to elucidate the concept of cultural postmodernity that can be found in French theory. Western social theory over the past fifteen to twenty years has been marked by a paucity of communication between Germanic-critical and Gallic-structural inputs; moreover, relations between those Anglo-Americans who drew inspiration from the former and those influenced by the latter have been characterized frostily by silence. The chapter discusses the neo-Nietzscheans indeed have conceived of their work in terms of social mediations, in terms of the shift towards a post-industrial capitalism, and in close conjunction with the micro-politics of the new social movements. If aesthetic postmodernity has entailed the supersession by the unconscious and the bodily of the hegemony of the symbolic in literature, in the fine arts, in music, then postmodern theory has meant, for Foucault, Lyotard, and Deleuze, to turn narrative or the story against discourse.
