PARA/ INQUIRY Postmodern Religion and Culture Victor E ... - IMIC

In this critical space opened by Nietzsche, one needs to attend to the multiplicity,simultaneity, and undecideability of origins and ends.Within paracritical inquiry, this endeavorposits an anoriginal origin that is viewed, from the beginning, as primordial radicality; in otherwords,paracriticalinquirysuspendsoriginasgenesisandendasapocalypse.IfwelookagaintoNietzsche’sphilosophyasa“source”ofpostmodernthought,notonlyisthebeginningofartisticand critical enterprises postponed,theendispostponed as well:They place that which comes at the end – unfortunately! for it ought not to come at all! –namely, the “highest concepts”, which means the most general, the emptiest concepts, the lastsmoke of an evaporating reality, in the beginning, as the beginning. This again is nothing buttheir way of showing reverence: the higher may not grow out of the lower, may not havegrown at all. … That which is last, thinnest and emptiest is put first as cause in itself, as ensrealissimum. 1One sees with a certain degree of clarity the effects of this double postponement of end andbeginning, meaning and value, in the writings of Nietzsche that emphasize the essentiallyhermeneutic dimension of human knowledge of the world [die den Menschen etwas anghet].The world, we learn, is merely an autobiographical world, largely unwritten for Nietzsche’sprogeny, today’s postmodern thinkers and writers. Nietzsche’s ambivalence towardUrsprungsphilosophie has carried over into the contemporary anti-foundationalistepistemologies of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard. 2 It is thisradicality of thought that positions Nietzsche as a pre-postmodernist, to be followed by thephenomenologists and, later, the existentialists who questioned the presence of a delitiscent22sacred truth anchoring human life. Postmodern para/inquiry, as a form of metacritique,begins, then, with a fissuring of the language-world of intelligibility and the collapse ofexclusive structurality.Artists, philosophers, and writers in the age of postmodernism continually pay tribute toNietzsche’s thought by addressing the heterogeneity and ultimate inaccessibility of originand end. It is because of this desultory activity that postmodernism often, and perhapswrongly, is described as collage, eclecticism, and pastiche. To express a postmodernsensibility that goes beyond the cultural commonsense, writers and artists often disrupt andfragment the “ontos” and “telos” of their works. For example, the German artist ThomasSchütte emphasizes the contrast between nature and simulacrum. His Schwarze Zitronen(Black Lemons) subverts the point of origin (nature) by recreating the form in glazed blackceramic (art). His Kirschensäule (Cherry Column) again subverts the notion of origin bycasting Classical architectural style, the triumphal column, in the everyday material of massculture. Artists such as Schütte, in an age of postmodernism, occupy an uneasy position inrelation to postmodernism in so far as the label “postmodernist artist” suggests a styledirecting a creative process, when, actually, it should be understood as a term descriptive of astyle. Following the example set by pre-postmodernist philosophers such as Mircea Eliade,Søren Kierkegaard, André Malraux, and Friedrich Nietzsche, whom I will discuss in moredetail later, today’s artists easily cross disciplinary and aesthetic parameters. Painting, forinstance, is not always flat and representational. Literature is not always a still-life in words.In the age of postmodernism, the world of imagination is not cast as simply an analog to theworld of nature. Postmodern works of art, and literary texts especially, demonstrate thisambiguous link that is forged between language and the/a real world. Just as painting is not