ABSTRACT
There seems to be a certain degree of consensus among representatives of fields as diverse as the hard and the soft sciences, the humanities and the spiritual that we are currently witnessing a change of paradigm. In “The Crossroads of Transmodernity” (2017), the Spanish philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda defines Transmodernity as “the paradigm that allows us to think our present,” a dialectical synthesis between Modernity and Postmodernity. Rodríguez Magda distinguishes between “narratives of celebration” – those that help consolidate the dominant discourse – and “narratives of the limit,” which act as the Jiminy Cricket of the emerging zeitgeist. This chapter reads Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist (2006) as an example of the latter. The novel, set in Sydney following a fictional failed terrorist attack, is not so much a denunciation of Islamic fundamentalism, which Rodríguez Magda sees as an uneasy mixture of “premodern tradition and modern, technological development,” as, borrowing from Joyce, a “nicely polished looking-glass” exposing such evils of contemporary society as corruption, the excesses of counterterrorism, fake news and post-truths. The fact that the novel is framed by two brief extradiegetic reflections on the idea of love and that characters, especially the protagonist, often ponder on the nature of human relationships, invites a complementary reading in the light of Jeremy Rifkin’s theories on empathy. For Rifkin, a new paradigm is a matter of life or death, and tapping into our innate capacity for empathy constitutes the only way out of the current conundrum, namely, the emergence of global consciousness in a world in crisis.
