Abstract

This article tries to explore the continuities and discontinuities of postmodemity with modernity. While affirming that the boundary between modernity and postmodemity is not clear and well demarcated, it also tries to show there is no complete transition from one to another. What is postmodern is neither a singular school of thought nor a linear historical period, but the complex of questions arising from the extolling of reason and progress the Enlightenment project of modernity. This has affected philosophical discourses and research projects both of natural and human sciences. Hence the ambivalent relationship of between postmodemity with modernity: lack on faith on the claims of modernity on the one hand, and a heightened fulfdlment of modernity on the other. Thus the article explores how this intriguing relationship both of critique and of connivance affect different spheres of human life including politics and economics of our society that can be characterized, with a certain measure of cynicism, as the fetishism of commerce and of spectacle.