Mapping Left-Wing Thought — Part (4)
Postmodernism and the Genealogy of Deconstruction in Left-Wing Thought
Aydin Areta

In this part of the first seminar in the Iran Horizon project (Mapping Left-Wing Thought), the discussion focuses on postmodernism as a critical style and a hermeneutics of suspicion: a current that destabilizes concepts such as fixed truth, stable identity, historical progress, and epistemic certainty. The discussion then connects this tendency to a deeper crisis in the condition of modern humanity: a human being who can no longer easily rely upon any certain axis, comprehensive value, or stable meaning and consequently, instead of creative freedom, falls into doubt, suspension, and a kind of analysis paralysis.

This condition is then explored through several important figures in modern and existential thought: Dostoevsky’s excessively self-conscious and suspicious Underground Man; Kierkegaard’s anxiety and inability to make the leap of faith; Nietzsche’s collapse of horizons of meaning after the “death of God”; and Sartre’s concept of bad faith. In this reading, the problem is not simply doubt about truth, but a kind of existential loss of axis—a condition in which the human being can no longer find a clear point upon which to rely in order to act, choose, and stand by an inner truth.

The next section places postmodernism in tension with the Enlightenment project. The Enlightenment relied upon reason, progress, institution-building, law, and the possibility of ordering society intelligibly. Postmodernism, through its increasing suspicion of these very concepts, moves toward deconstruction, the horizontalization of truth, and the destabilization of structures and traditions. In this framework, particularly through reference to Foucault, the discussion shows how knowledge, truth, and norms come to be understood within relations of power, and how this perspective can reach a point where legitimate authority, shared language, and any inhabitable order are also seen merely as masks of domination.

Finally, this part attempts to clarify postmodernism’s relation to the later Left, progressive liberalism, and wokeness, showing how these currents, despite their differences, often share a horizontal impulse: exposing domination, defending those who have been excluded, and distrusting vertical structures. The central argument, however, is that when this horizontalism loses the capacity for self-criticism, it collapses into suspicious horizontalism—a condition in which not only domination, but every form of legitimate authority and every possibility of shared truth, is understood as an instrument of domination.

YouTube access to the seminar:
https://youtu.be/TACBuCE5qtA
Instagram access to the seminar:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DX1telwxWgR/