The Future of the Post: New Insights in the Postmodern Debate

The current volume brings together a collection of essays from the conference The Postmodern Condition: Forty Years Later held at University of Genova on December 2019. Taking advantage of the fortieth anniversay of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-Francois Lyotard, a book that initiated the cultural explosion of postmodern philosophy, in order to relaunch and further investigate the ongoing debate around the essential meaning of postmodernity, the end of postmodernism and the advent of new aesthetics, philosophy and social structure of feelings that have (or tried to) overcome the postmodern paradigm. The book thus brings together two interwoven but often separated themes: on the one hand, the analysis of the vitality, legacy, topicality and historicizing process of postmodernity and postmodernism; on the other, the analysis of the debate around the crisis of the postmodern paradigm and of the advent of new conceptual frameworks, often born out of a direct refusal of postmodern critical discourse and philosophy. Through the filters of different philosophical and aesthetic paradigms, the book thus offers a complex description of contemporary society from the 1980s down to the present moment, dwelling on crucial topics such as the relationship between humanity and technology, the digital revolution, the social role of representations, the dialectics between image and reality, and the vitality of postmodern stylistic features (quotation, metafiction, appropriation etc.).