Postmodern Language and the Perpetuation of Desire

Abstract

undisputable and Nietzschean chic to the ahistorical range of possibility: Sollers, de Sade, Flaubert, Balzac, Zola (to name a few of Barthes' elect, practitioners of this art). It is my contention, however, that among twentieth-century texts there is, besides a random list of texts of intermittent bliss, a group distinctively postmodern in their deployment of interstitial bliss as organizing principle, as recapitulation of the essential nature and condition of life itself. Here the most lifelike of models is made from a language least like life's own. For these texts, out of the dynamic and the discrete elements of bliss (desire), a particular intersection of metapsychology, metaphysics, and neurobiology provides a syntax and grammar of postmodernism. The last work of James Joyce and that of his notable contemporary, Virginia Woolf, offer rich studies of both the superficial strangeness and diversity and the identical underpinnings which characterize the postmodern, the flickering of eros between culture and its destruction. Here what Woolf called thoughts without words,' a protracted and infantile bliss as palliative to the persistent dream of lost unity, suggests the elaboration