ABSTRACT
A basic axiom of postmodernism in the English-speaking world is that the end of the modern era that it heralds also marks the end of the ‘Enlightenment project’ that is allegedly its consummate expression. Indeed, many regard hostility to the Enlightenment as ‘the pathognomonic sign of the postmodern’, in the words of Arthur Goldhammer.2 ‘And what is postmodernity,’ asks Slavoj Zˇizˇek, ‘if not the ultimate defeat of the Enlightenment in its very triumph.’3 One of the more striking features of the ‘postmodern turn’ for Johnson Wright is ‘the extent to which its leading proponents have been willing to focus their critical energies on a single polemical target – the European Enlightenment, held to be the first source of the illusions of modernity from which postmodernism promises to release us’.4 For Hugo Meynell, a writer is postmodern to the extent that ‘she repudiates the norms of cognition and evaluation that were propounded and applied by thinkers of the Old Enlightenment, and inveighs against the abuses to which they may be supposed to have given rise’.5 Claims of this sort pervade English-language commentary on postmodernism.6
