Jean Baudrillard, Radical Thought.
Baudrillard's essay explores the difference between "reality" and "thought." In doing so, it opens windows on several of the Ten Commandments of the Postmodern, including this one. The "reality" of the persisting, connected, objective liberal humanist self with an immortal soul cannot survive the exploration of radical thought here.
Kroker and Weinstein, The Hypertexted Body.
Kroker and Weinstein at Ctheory depict the body in postmodern cyberspace in a mode of seeking to become the Internet. To imagine an Emersonian concept of the person with a soul while reading this text is to go to the heart of the conflict between postmodernism at its extreme formulation and the modernist tradition, which lies rooted in the whole Western mind-set. When reading Kroker and Weinstein, one needs to wonder about satirical intent: we have not yet measured on a balance scale how deeply they are plumbing the satirical in their vivid description and how much they think they are offering neutral observation.
Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols, Chapter 6, Cliff Steele.
By analyzing a comic strip character, Shaviro seeks to illustrate how the Cartesian mind/body dualism, upon which the liberal humanist self is based, disappears in postmodernity.
White and Hollerick, Nietzsche at the Mall: Deconstructing the Consumer.
Daniel R. White and Gert Hollerick analyze the "church of the consumer." In so doing they touch upon major PROGRAMME themes relating to a program for improvement, the autonomous self, and a viable politics.
Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodernism: A History.
This history of the idea of the postmodern provides a context for looking at the disintegration of the idea of the liberal humanist self.
Louis Dupre. Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture. New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1993.
Dupre seeks to show how the modernist "subject" emerged from the break-up of classical and medieval understandings of the cosmos in the early Renaissance and its relation to a newly objectified "nature."
Honi Fern Haber. Beyond Postmodern Politics: Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Haber wants to rescue postmodern politics from its self-created double bind. But she does not do so by trying to resurrect the basis of the old politics, the liberal humanist self. She lays that tired body to rest in an engaging introduction.
Are These Shoes Made for Dancing?
In this ESSAY, we summarize and comment on the title essay of Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Jameson seeks to show us how the loss of depth relationships led to the repudiation of the "centered bourgeois self."