The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One

by Hanzi Freinacht

Exit Newton. Enter Foucault. Michel Foucault, the leading French philosopher of the 1960s and 70s, is perhaps the most emblematic of the innovators of the postmodern cultural code.[111] The philosophically most stringent one is probably Jacques Derrida. Actually, let’s quote Derrida himself: “Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.”[112]