ABSTRACT
At the twilight of postmodernism, one can observe far from unprecedented and unanticipated rebirth and activization of divergent social groups and movements, globally conceived of as “minorities,” cartographically pushed to the margins of society (materialism) and ideologically interred under the monument of dominant culture (idealism): Maghrebian immigrants in France, lesbians and homosexuals in Poland, immigrants in the United States, and urban violence, to name just a few. This return of the repressed, social ideological forces appears to coincide with the resurgence of powerful conservative doctrines (neoconservatism, essentialism, new spiritualism) and theories as a reaction to the former. These universalizing and regulatory, thus unifying and oppressive, narratives are best depicted by Jean François Lyotard in his work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. He defi nes what he calls “meta-narratives” as systems that endeavor to explain cultural phenomena in terms of a single overarching principle, the quest for ultimate truth and order in human experience (Lyotard, 1993, p. 72). Signifi cantly, both Lyotard and other postmodern authors (e.g., Henry
Giroux, Jacques Derrida) refer to postmodernism as a general “incredulity toward meta-narratives” (Lyotard), or utter distrust in “universalizing categories or general abstractions that deny the specifi city and particularity of everyday life, that generalize out of existence the particular and the local, that smother difference under the banner of universalizing categories” (Giroux, 1993, p. 463). Interestingly enough, however, it is diffi cult to concede that they put their sole existence in question, which by implication makes one consider them as substantial explanations of the world and processes one participates in. Deleuze, in his critical diagnosis, makes a point rather disdainfully, “We always have the beliefs, feelings, and thoughts that we deserve given our way of being or our style of life” (1983, p. 1). Stated otherwise, the way we think and experience the world around us, and us within it, does not refl ect, but rather, is expressive of the way we are and vice versa. As Moira Gatens puts it succinctly in her Spinozian reading of Deleuze, “One’s power of being does not affect but is expressed through one’s power of thinking,” which consequently leads her to evince that “one’s power of thinking is inseparable from one’s power of being” (1996, pp. 168, 165). Admittedly, the aforementioned oppositional phenomena can well be read as the “returns,” the former of the repressed and the latter as a wave of rationalizing meta-narratives. These two tend to occur simultaneously, one always being considered as a reaction to the other.
