ABSTRACT
The theme of post-modernity, which first appeared within aesthetics, has been displaced to ever wider areas until it has become the new horizon of our cultural, philosophical, and political experience. The narration of the beginnings of post-modernity as with all beginnings involves a multiple genealogy. This chapter traces this in relation to a particular tradition Marxism which constituted both one of the highest points of the emancipatory narratives of modernity and one of their first crises. The indifference to the Marxist tradition, however, leads to an important loss as regards the constitution of a radical politics. Post-modernity does not imply a change in the values of Enlightenment modernity but rather a particular weakening of their absolutist character. Humankind, having always bowed to external forces God, Nature, the necessary laws of History can now, at the threshold of post-modernity, consider itself for the first time the creator and constructor of its own history.
