ABSTRACT
Most of us are familiar with the usually cited characteristics of postmodernism: decentered, fragmented, ironic, self-refl exive, heterogeneous, fl uid. Postmodernism has abandoned (or realized the illusory nature of) metanarratives and foundations, particularly such Enlightenment foundations as truth or reason.2 Indeed, postmodernism’s antifoundationalism has oft en been seen as its most basic, even foundational, characteristic. Nonetheless, most of us would also recognize terms that serve as virtually foundational within postmodern and poststructuralist discourses: power, desire, the unconscious, language. Such terms have not evoked the same suspicion as have those foundational concepts associated with the Enlightenment, liberal humanism, or western metaphysics, such as truth, reason, justice-or love. What could possibly seem more bourgeois, more sentimental, more embedded in a history of passé, failed, or oppressive discourses than “love”? Although many feminist and postmodern theorists have been much more comfortable with terms like trauma or violence, love has reemerged in discourses of even the theoretically sophisticated and the politically committed. Love becomes both an ethical and a political foundation-and a source of hope-in the work of such postmodern feminists as bell hooks and Julia Kristeva.
