Postmodernity and Social Theory

The late Gillian Rose characterized the postmodern rejection of metaphysics as a triumph of social theory over philosophy, a triumphy that “re-enacts the earlier reaction, coterminous with the founding of modernity, according to which philosophy after Kant was ‘superseded’ by social theory . . . . It resulted in the fateful diremption between the conceiving of law as regularity, as positive, and the conceiving of ethics, the ought and the good. The social theory and the philosophy which emerge from this diremption always attempt a forced reconciliation of that which they have made residual by their exclusive accentuation: Comte’s positivist law would found a new Church, while Nietzsche’s Zarathustra would invent New Law Tables.”

Philosophy, “overunified under some title” by postmodern theorists – onto-theology, presence, totalization, closure – “is then indicted for this traditionalist pretension, and, once again, it is turned into social theory: ‘truth’ is revealed to be a value among values; ‘rationality,’ ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’ to be types of domination; the faculties of the soul to serve the administration of bodies; while reflexivity and conceptuality are said to be posited by ‘discourses,’ so that meaning is merely the mark of arbitrary, differential signalizations; philosophy of history is seen to be continuous, narratological confection of paralogical discontinuities.”