ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by analysing two of the thinkers whose work put the term ‘postmodernism’ in the mainstream of intellectual debate: Fredric Jameson and Jean-Francois Lyotard. The deconstruction of subjectivity in all its forms—from the post-Lacanian emphasis on the subversiveness of desire to the Foucauldian genealogies of disciplinary and sexual subjectivity—are definitively postmodern. One of the most famous images of the state of the postmodern subject appears in Fredric Jameson’s article ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. Jameson is not an enthusiast for the postmodern. Other key theorists of the postmodern have no patience with the Enlightenment and its grand theories. One of the most significant is Jean-Francois Lyotard, in his influential text The Postmodern Condition. The subject is seen in Freudian terms: accidentally, yet somehow inevitably, the human becomes the intense focus of processes of identification and meaning-making that find in the body signs of stable identities and truth—gender, family role and sexual orientation.
