On postmodernism

This question is a bit of a poser for me because I’m frankly not sure whether one can use the term “contribution” when one considers the effect to have been ambivalent. I feel this way for two reasons: first, I was a literature graduate student in the 1990s, so I felt the full brunt of the influence of postmodernism in that discipline, for better or worse; and second, I have spent the last two decades combating Holocaust denial, so I know how postmodernist historians have insufficiently addressed the issue with which Kevin Passmore opens his essay.

That said, I think it’s fair to say that there are some positive effects, primarily those related to the instinct to challenge established narratives. That structuralism and poststructuralism undergird the collision of postmodern literary theory and historiography is, I think, ultimately incidental. Although we might be more comfortable with this collision with the notion of multiple truths of the absence of grand narratives, the underlying importance of facts has persisted, as noted by Passmore: “We cannot go to the past to confirm that the First World War took place, but we do have plenty of evidence […] It is theoretically possible that this evidence could have been fabricated, but more probably it was not.”[1]

If there is one text that stands out in this context for me, it is Jean-François Lyotard’s The Differend, which directly engages the most visible Holocaust denier of the time, the Frenchman Robert Faurisson. There, Lyotard addresses directly the impossibility of meeting Faurisson’s demands for evidence directly: “The only acceptable proof that [gas chambers were] used to kill is that one died from it. But if one is dead, one cannot testify that it is on account of the gas chamber […] according to my opponent, there is no victim that is not dead; otherwise, this gas chamber would not be what he or she claims it to be. There is, therefore, no gas chamber.”[2] In this way, Lyotard demonstrates that the whole demand is made in bad faith and therefore does not warrant historical engagement. In some ways, this is more successful than attempting to meet Faurisson’s challenge.

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[1] Kevin Passmore, “Poststructuralism and History,” in Writing History: Theory and Practice, edited by Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner, and Kevin Passmore (London: Oxford UP, 2003), 132, emphasis in original.

[2] Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, translated by George Van Den Abbeele (St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 3-4