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The year 1968 marked a turning point in the global social order. Everything changed after 9/11. The years between laid the necessary groundwork for the years after 9/11. Had something like the planes crashing into the World Trade Center and Pentagon occurred in, say, 1967, the postmodern world would have looked very different. This chapter contains a review and critique of post postmodern social thought. It focuses on four figures: Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ran-cière, and Slavoj Žižek. They reacted against postmodernism, which itself was a reaction against modernity. Here modernity refers to a historical period that begins at the turn of the twentieth century. Postmodernity is also a historical period beginning at the turn of the twenty-first century and marked by 9/11. In contrast, modernism and postmodernism refer to artistic and intellectual sensibilities with different and vaguer dating. Modernism began in the nineteenth century, postmodernism after the post—Second World War era, about 1970.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137387066_9

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