Modernity, Postmodernity, and Adolescence

Modernity—and its procession of cultural and societal crises—is already a very old question: it is enough to open the most minor textbook of the history of ideas to know that modernity goes back to the times of the discovery of America. That is the historic moment when the West in a sense came out of itself and began to launch itself on an indefatigable search to outdo itself. Modern times open with this moment when everything shifted and an upheaval occurred in civilization, based on a way of life that was articulated on permanent change in all areas: technical, scientific, political, aesthetic, philosophical, etc. Since then, nothing has resisted this conquering way of life, destined to destroy all the old values, rites, and social habits, even when it led to a feeling of instability, permanent crisis, and tensions in subjectivity, and of recurring “uneasiness with civilization” (Freud), to which the younger generations, who are coming into in an extremely unstable world, are particularly sensitive.

Modernity is certainly already ancient, five centuries old, but it proved necessary to wait for the middle of the nineteenth century to notice it. It took the poet to name the new course followed by the vessel upon which humanity had embarked, to perceive this drift of civilization, or more, civilization as a drift : it was Baudelaire who invented the term “modernity” and who described, in Aesthetic Curiosities, the new subject: “So he goes, he runs, he looks. What does he look for? Certainly, this man, such as I depicted him, this solitary person endowed with an active imagination, always traveling through the great desert of people, has a purpose higher than that of a pure stroller, a more general purpose, other than the fleeting pleasure of the circumstance. He looks for something we could call modernity.” One suspects, according to this definition, that this “solitary person” may forever run, looking for modernity, without catching up with it because it is in a sens