Francesco Postorino. È finito l’Occidente? Primi vagiti della “nuova postmodernità”
Revisited editorial abstractus (en)
This work examines the long trajectory through which Western civilization has interpreted the tension between Being and Becoming, reconstructing the genealogy of the two “spaces” introduced by Plato and remaining operative up to the collapse of modernity. The premise consists in identifying how, from ancient philosophy to the postmodern era, our cultural history has progressively witnessed the erosion of Being in favor of an increasingly invasive Becoming, culminating in the rise of a new epochal scenario in which the all-flowing (πάντα ῥεῖ) becomes an undisciplined and totalizing force.
The methodology adopted is historical-speculative in nature: through a diachronic path, the work intersects philosophy, sociology, psychology, and cultural analysis to show how the dialectic between stability and change has been reinterpreted at various moments of the Western tradition. It ultimately outlines a map of the transformations of the Self and the Other in modernity, postmodernity, and the contemporary “new postmodernity.”
The innovative contribution lies in identifying the threshold-event represented by the 2020 pandemic, interpreted as a point of no return that dissolves the last symbolic and relational residues that had survived within postmodernity. For the first time, Becoming no longer appears as a dialectical rhythm nor as a destabilizing but still containable force; instead, it emerges as an absolute flow that annihilates both the ancient “second space” of Being and the first Heraclitean space of change. What follows is an unprecedented context in which the Self, deprived of the Other that once grounded it, loses ontological consistency and drifts toward a condition of “no one,” immersed in a formless anxiety without antibodies.
The conclusions show that the new postmodernity marks the sunset of the cultural presuppositions that, for centuries, enabled the West to generate historical, political, and symbolic re-actions to the world’s chaos. The disappearance of bonds, of the search for meaning, and of reference to the Other dissolves the very possibility of stability, project, and resistance. Contemporary πάντα ῥεῖ no longer leaves spaces of suspension nor ontological footholds: in their place stands a horizon dominated by the formless, where action flows without re-action and the Self loses its unity within change. The work thus offers an original interpretive key for understanding the anthropological and symbolic crisis of the West in its passage beyond postmodernity.