№ 2 - 2005
Martyanov V.S.
Post-modernity: Revenge by “the Accursed Side of Modernity”

According to the author’s theoretical presumption, “the first world”, i.e. the Western civilization, has entirely realized the political project of Modernity. But the realization of the project has at the same time proved to be its exhaustion. Moreover, the neoliberal globalization has revealed Modernity’s historical-civilizational limitariness due to the unique nature of “the West”. The actual transformation of programmatic parties and social groups demonstrates that fundamental political objectives now cannot any more be found in, nor, correspondingly, borrowed from, the profaned “great ideologies”. Under the conditions of the total modernist project’s disintegration, it is in “the accursed side of Modernity”, appearing as post-modernist theory, that material for political Utopia is beginning to be drawn. But, being the reverse side of Modernity, Post-modernity just reverses the dualism of the binary codes that modernist political thought used to operate with, so that pathology and norm just switch places. Proceeding from these considerations, the author concludes that Post-modernity cannot be regarded as real alternative to Modernity, for, being unable to affirm the universal, the total, it does not produce its own Utopia (objectives, values, ideals) and does not call into being a new political subject.