Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix

Abstract

involves a change in people's relation to the problem of meaning: simplifying a great deal, I would say that the modern is the consciousness of the absence of value in many activities. If we are interested in what is new in modernity, it is not knowing how to respond to the problem of meaning. Romanticism, as the absence of meaning and the consciousness of that absence, is modern; so is something like dandyism, orwhat Nietzsche calls active nihilism, which is not only the consciousness of the loss of meaning, but also the activation of that loss. Secondly, modernity sought a philosophical and political response to romanticism and dandyism: in otherwords, it attempted to produce what might be called a grand narrative, examples of which are the narrative of emancipation beginning with the French Revolution, and