INTO THE ABYSS — FROM THE HALLS OF ACADEMIA TO THE COVER OF VANITY FAIR: “The Caitlyn (née Bruce) Jenner case has engendered if not a new subject at least a newly publicized and sensationalized one. For an old-timer like myself, transgenderism is reminiscent of the postmodernism that swept the universities several decades ago,” Gertrude Himmelfarb writes in the new issue of the Weekly Standard:
Indeed, transgenderism now looks like a more dramatic, audacious, and, it may be, perilous form of postmodernism. Like postmodernism back then, so transgenderism today is moving very far, very fast. Before it goes much further, one might look back upon its predecessor as a cautionary tale, recalling its aspirations but also its tribulations.
A passage from an article I wrote almost 20 years ago may help put the current issue in historical perspective:
Imported from France (which had acquired it from Germany), postmodernism made its appearance in the United States in the 1970s, first in departments of literature and then in other disciplines of the humanities. Its forefathers are Nietzsche and Heidegger, its fathers Derrida and Foucault. From Jacques Derrida postmodernism has borrowed the vocabulary of deconstruction: the “aporia” (the dubious or enigmatic nature) of discourse, the “indeterminacy” of language, the “fictive” nature of signs and symbols, the self-referential character of words and their dissociation from any presumed reality, the “problematization” of all subjects, events, and tests. From Michel Foucault it has adopted the focus on power: words and ideas as a means of “privileging” the “hegemonic” groups in society, and knowledge itself an instrument and product of the “power structure.” Thus traditional discourse and learning are impugned as “logocentric” (dominated by the word), “phallocentric” (dominated by the male), and “totalizing” or “authoritarian” (in the presumption that reality can be contained and comprehended).
Read the whole thing.
RELATED: Speaking of Heidegger, ‘Professor Shocked, Shocked To Find Out Prominent Nazi Was An Anti-Semite.’