Cassandra Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Thierry Chervel writes,

The Koran tells the truth – says the Koran. The Koran is just a story say "The Satanic Verses". They blurt out the truth. They place the myth within a picaresque novel where revelation is constantly rearranging itself to conform to the vagaries of everyday politics. The "Verses" write themselves into historical conditionality, they tell how the myth was fabricated. The novel was written at the apex of the postmodern corrosion of the concept of truth. And that is recognisable in its tangled wilderness of miracles, versions and visions. But its goal is quite clearly blasphemy – at least, according to the administrators of that particular truth. Ayatollah Khomeini never read the novel, but he was quite clear about the challenge it contained and he acted accordingly – like the thunder god he is caricatured as in the novel.

Postmodern culture had not reckoned with the fury of the Ayatollah's reaction. After all, was there ever a more peaceful time than the 1980s?

Yes, in 1968 left-wing intellectuals were still taking the run-up to a world-historical salto mortale, only to find themselves landing with bums in university chairs – pension entitlements included. But it was a cheerful awakening. The postmodern movement was an airy island of refuge for all those who no longer wished to believe in the "grand narratives." In 1966 it had still been somewhat painful when Michel Foucault wrote off the dispute between Hegelians and Marxists as a tempest in a teapot. But now intellectuals were comfortably settling into a hammock of relative truths, reflexive constructions, ironic allusions. The theorists of world revolution, who had recently been so agitated, now divided the variegated world neatly into the pigeon-holes of systems theory, post-structuralism and gender studies. The situation seemed stable. Nothing was serious. Life was post-historical long before Francis Fukuyama's "End of History." Simulation theorists were having the time of their lives ...

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