43	BARBARIANS

Postmodernity is the milieu where what Heidegger predicted in his essay “The Age of the World Picture” is realized. It’s an important essay for me.

In that essay he portrays the modern society of his epoch, the epoch of scientific specialization. Sciences grow more specialized, so we are always learning more and more, but gradually these specializations construct images of the world irreconcilable among themselves. So that in the end there’s something like an explosion, an impossibility of having an image of the world. In my view (although Heidegger never said so), this is what the postmodern is: it’s the idea of a society over which no single principle can exercise domination any longer.

The idea of the postmodern as fragmented society is found in Jean-François Lyotard. That was another important reading for me. Lyotard and I became friends, and he came to Turin to teach for some months.

Modernity is self-consuming, it consumes itself with the dissolution of strong rationality, the central rationalities, with this crisis of visions of the world no longer able to unify themselves. With the multiplicity of the sciences. But that’s what’s good about the postmodern.

How did we arrive at this? How did we arrive at ceasing to believe in history as something unitary and progressive, something that, as it moves along, is going forward toward completeness? When the colonial peoples compel us, in point of fact, no longer to be Eurocentric, because if there is a unitary line in history it’s the one we Europeans have drawn. Nobody ever dreamed that the unitary line of history went through China. It went here. The others were primitives, barbarians, underdeveloped.

When—and we realized this above all at the time of the oil crisis, in the 1970s—we could no longer refer to the Arabs as poor devils, because if they turned off the taps we’d all be in big trouble, at that point the colonial era was really over.

From then on history is no longer thinkable as a linear and unitary process, and the full weight of the plurality of cultures and languages makes itself felt willy-nilly. We receive the words of other cultures, or rather, the other cultures start talking for themselves, and maybe firing rifles too, forcing us to think differently.

Once again, this idea is closely connected to my Heideggerism. Heidegger doesn’t think that Being can be known in the way that Aristotle and Plato conceived it, that is, that there is a hard core, a primum, because Being thought in that way is only one more object among many.

Incapable of thinking Being in that way, Heidegger’s philosophy responds to historico-destinal events. That is, not only did the Berlin wall come down, but in that moment the world changed.

This is the postmodern too: to correspond to Being means to correspond to its pluralization.

From that one also arrives at the idea that if someone wants to maintain central rationality with force, he is a dangerous enemy. And you can take up arms against him, for example.

A few classical Marxist thinkers reply that we postmodernists are cheerleaders for late capitalism.

The very idea. I couldn’t care less if they call me that. But naturally, I think they have it all wrong.