Hegel and Postmodernity: Towards In-Finitude
Hegel and Postmodernism: Philosophy and Society Issue Presentation and Discussion
Vol. 35 No. 2 (2024): Filozofija i društvo / Philosophy and Society
edited by Saša Hrnjez and George Hristov
Bara Kolenc: Hegel and Postmodernity: Towards In-Finitude
The end of postmodernity, however, is not marked by the collapse of the Eastern bloc. On the contrary, with the conceptual massacre of communism, this collapse produced a certain void of the ideological space, in which the postmodern illusion took its most audacious leap (as in the case of Fukuyama, for example). The premonition of the end of the postmodern era came quite unexpectedly exactly ten years later, in 2001, with an event that traumatically stuck both in the seeming infinity of the postmodern condition and in the immaculateness of the American dream. The end of postmodernity was indicated with the collapse of the New York Twin Towers, which once mirrored in their glass windows the Statue of Liberty. This was an “impossible event” the images of which we watched over and over again on television and of which anniversary we began to commemorate as a reminder that a certain picture of the world had come to an irrevocable end. A collective shock that shattered the concrete foundations of the neoliberal dogma, a trust in the stability, the solidity of the West, confronted the world with the most immediate doubt of the rightness of its doing. The pictures of flaming, falling people leaping from the two phallic symbols of power, financial success, the prosperity of the neoliberal cosmic order, and most importantly, its inviolability and its complete safety, had such a surreal effect that surrealism lost all meaning in an instant.
The collapse was not metaphorical – it was real. The fire site of the twins turned into a scar – a physical remnant of the past in the present, and a dumb witness of the Statue of Liberty started sinking due to climate change. The scar is indelible and, as long one does not identify with it, it has a certain cathartic effect (remember Tyler Durden). But the problem of those who consider themselves invincible is that they find it hard to bear their scars. They turn them into reminders, and monuments, and repress the real experience of the wound. The 11th of September was declared the US Patriot Day, and international war against terrorism was announced. September 11th was, in this sense an “absolute event”, to use Baudrillard’s expression. It was not so much a symbolical event (this is in what it turned to be retroactively, precisely by commemorating it as a sort of “reminder”), but a real event that had (or still has) effects in the symbolic, that is, on the level of discourses and ideologies. Thereby, it turned into a symbolic event, of which the effects are again – real. In a purely Hegelian sense of an event in history that makes history, 9/11 was a historical event.
B.K.
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