IAPL2012-CB-0531-052.. - The International Association for ...

communist bloc, but also a vision of the world revolving around class struggle and
more widely a vision of politics as a practice of conflict and a horizon of emancipation:
not only revolutionary hopes or illusions, but utopias and ideologies in general, or, in
the most comprehensive formulation, “grand narratives” and beliefs about the destiny
of humankind—not only a period of history, but “history” itself understood as the time
of a promise to be completed. The time in which we live can thus be described as the
time that comes after the end, a time “post”.
We must have a closer look at the narrative of the end and ask the question: what
exactly has come to an end? What exactly are those “grand narratives” that are said to
be over? A “grand narrative” means a global plot that proposes an understanding of the
global evolution determining the transformations of our lived world. What is said to be
over, is the optimistic narrative making history both a principle of intelligibility of the
“state of things” and the scene of a possible transformation of that “state of things”.
That narrative entailed two main theoretical articulations. In the first case, evolution is
linked with knowledge: evolution produces knowledge of the evolution which, in turn,
allows those who know to have an impact on evolution. In the second case, the state
of things is linked with the possibility of its destruction: the same reasons that account
for the existing order are the reasons for which it will be superseded. The future will
happen for the same reasons that hinder it from being present. The most accomplished
form of narrative was given by Marxist theory. The same necessity that has produced
the state of things named capitalist exploitation has also produced knowledge of
that state of things, knowledge of the historical necessity entails the destruction of
capitalist exploitation. Knowledge gives both the intelligibility of the phenomena of
our lived world and the weapon in the struggle for a new world.
In short, the idea of the grand narrative entails a sense of the historical evolution, a
sense of the intelligibility of our lived world and a sense of its possible transformation.
My point is that what is described as the end of that narrative, what is presented
as the “time in which we live” is in reality a rearrangement of those elements. Our
time —meaning the dominant description of the state of things that constructs the
frame of our present—has not eliminated historical necessity. Nor has it eliminated the
Marxist mode of intelligibility of our lived world. It has only disconnected them from
the sense of the possible with which they were linked. The celebrated end of the grand
narrative changed only one articulation in that narrative: it changed the way in which
it staged the relation between the possible and the impossible. But, even in doing that,
it remained faithful to its logic.
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