“Una radicalidad particular”: el legado vanguardista en la ética postmoderna

Abstract

This article explores the avant-garde background to postmodern radicalism, and it thereby offers a genealogical critique of themes in this strand of postmodern ethics. To begin, the collapse of structuralism led poststructuralists/postmodernists such as roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to appeal to sites such as the body and strategies such as transgression. They derived these sites and strategies from the avant-garde: we might trace their history through Dada, surrealism, and situationism. Moreover, these avant-garde movements inspired the appeals to similar sites and strategies by postmodernists such as Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard. But, while several postmodernists remained wedded to avant-garde sites and strategies, they rejected the concept of the “real” by which the avant-garde had legitimated their ethics. The article concludes by exploring the way this legacy posed difficulties for postmodernism, and how these difficulties might be resolved.