Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Question of Identity

Abstract

This article looks at identity as a major issue addressed – but ultimately left unsolved – by the discourses of both modernity and postmodernity. On the one hand, modernity, from its totalizing, universalistic perspective, emphasizes a unified, coherent subject and a generic human nature at the expense of the multiple, the heterogeneous, the contradictory, the individual, the different, the local, the particular, the concrete. On the other hand, the duplicitous postmodern discourse – focusing on difference, plurality, heterogeneity, specificity, and decentredness – both destabilizes the subject, and renders indeterminate the very concept of difference, which partakes of the same multiplicity and instability as everything else in the postmodern universe.