Unsettling the Postmodern or the Infinite Dignity of the Concrete

Abstract

Postmodernity is something that can be found in a multitude of current discourses. It is necessary to ask ourselves what this reality means, and to do so we will have to know its genesis, if we want to understand its present; and we will have to judge its present if we want to open up paths for the future. From the yearning for totality that characterised enlightened reason, whose greatest exponent is to be found in Hegel, we arrive at a total disenchantment with this reason, since an explanation of totality eliminates the possibility of surprise. In the face of this, postmodernity clearly signals the end of the age of reason, but it does so, and this is the tragic thing, in the modern way, by becoming an explanation, once again totalising, of reality. The future will open up to the extent that the dignity of the concrete is rediscovered, and this will be possible through the evidence that appears in the suffering and death of the victims of history. In this post-modern world, the art of storytelling and the philosophy of the face can be the vehicles for man to meet the Other again.