Quoted By:
The postmodern revolt against authority rediscovers in confused form the originary anteriority of the peripheral subject to the constituted center. But it ignores the fact that the individual before the existence of the center is not yet a subject; his appetite, mimetically enhanced, is not yet desire. Humanity is born from the sign in relation to whose originary referent it is always second. What the gesture of representation represents is outside and ontologically prior to it, however tortuous the relationship between the real object at the center of the circle and the eventual idea of the unique God that expresses the quintessence.
Postmodern resentment of central authority ends up by demanding from this authority a new degree of self-knowledge to justify its role. Which is, in the last analysis, what the resentful subject always really demands from the central authority he claims he would abolish, but without which he knows despite himself that he could not exist.
I belive, though, that the age of post-modernism has already ended. We are entering an era of post-post-modernism, or post-formalism.