ABSTRACT
Earlier this month – July 1998 – I delivered to Routledge the typescript of a new book provisionally entitled Why History? Considerations on the Possible End of History and Ethics Under the Impact of the Postmodern. In it I argued – not least through a series of ‘case studies’ of Derrida et al. – that postmodern ways of thinking possibly signal not only the end of history in its modernist upper-case (meta-narrative) and lowercase (professional/academic) forms but, thanks to its celebration of the moral aporia (of the radical ‘undecidability of the decision’), of traditional ethics as well. And that, as a consequence, this desirable collapse of history and ethics carries with it not only a reconsideration of the discursive phenomena which have lived under such signs, but also raises the much more fundamental question of whether or not we still need to reconsider them at all. For perhaps we are now at a postmodern moment when we can forget history completely. Perhaps we are now in conditions where we can live our lives within new ways of timing time which have no reference to a past tense articulated in a discourse which has become, as it were, ‘historically familiar to us’, and start to formulate new moralities without recourse to moribund ethical systems.
And I argued that we can think of letting history and ethics go because we now have, in the rich imaginaries provided by postmodern-type thinking – a postmodernism shorn of all historical and ethical back-ups – all the intellectual resources we need to think in future-orientated, emancipatory and democratizing ways.
