Introduction

This chapter explores both what is useful and what is harmful in the postmodernism of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Richard Rorty, and the poststructuralism of Michel Foucault, for the project of an oppositional politics, and then suggests ways to move beyond postmodern politics to a politics of difference. In insisting on the universalization of difference, postmodern politics forecloses on the possibility of community and subjects necessary to oppositional resistance. Rorty is the most influential representative of the Anglo-American branch of postmodern politics. The chapter formulates an oppositional politics where politics is conceived broadly enough to include what bourgeois liberalism has either relegated to the sphere of the private, or suppressed altogether. Lyotard sees his paganism as resulting in relativism and feels this relativism must be overcome because he retains an enlightenment conception of politics. His “paganism” gives way to Kantianism because he remains stuck within the old framework.