ABSTRACT
Postmodernism started within the field of architecture (Jencks, 1977). Considering Derrida’s 1966 ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ as the birth of PoMo, as McHale has claimed (McHale, 2015), is highly troublesome for many reasons. Within (Continental) philosophy, it largely remained a marginal phenomenon. It was an almost exclusively Franco-German battle, and mainly related to Lyotard and Habermas, with only minor trespassings by Gianni Vattimo in Italy and Richard Rorty in the USA. Instead of entering into its second phase of the pars construens, the ripples caused by the postmodern pars destruens pebbles (which, notwithstanding its rather circumscribed importance did have a considerable effect on Modernity, and consisted mainly in the end of grand narratives, of certain types of philosophical discourse, and of certain types of institutions) that had been thrown in the pond of (European) philosophy, however, crossed the Atlantic and eventually returned in a messy (Rapaport, 2001), translated form. What resulted from this was the ‘birth’ of that bizarre something known as ‘Theory’—with a capital T, understood as post-structuralism, post-postmodernism, or post-humanism, in a non-exclusive way—that came to light in the late 1980s and early 1990s and is still somewhat, albeit spectrally, roaming around.
