Maxime Morin writes it straight away: it is not yet another lexicon of the world.
No, his
Dictionary of Postmodern Life
(Les Équateurs, 2023) is not intended to
“pile up the behaviors and habits”
of those who populate our time.
This primer is a sort of survey of the commonplaces of our world.
And to penetrate inside received ideas, it is better, precisely, to get rid of received ideas.
To read without moderation.
Extracts
Activism.
Entertainment for the left-wing electorate.
Apoliticism
.
Modesty of the right-wing electorate.
Bourgeois.
All the others are bourgeois.
Not me.
Unemployment.
Rising.
Dead.
Everyone is going to die except Elon Musk.
playlist.
Everyone should have their own.
Closely linked to the principle of individuation which governs current existences.
Example
: “And you, what kind of music do you listen to?
- A bit of everything, how about you?
- The same."
See: individualism, music.
Progress.
Ideology according to which the perfection of human stupidity is infinite.
THE
FIGARO.
- You write in the preamble “We did not start from an idea of postmodern life
: we went in search of postmodern life”.
What does this postmodern life look like
?
Maxim Morin. -
What I wanted to describe by speaking of “postmodern life” is a life lived at a distance from itself.
I was thinking in particular of a text by Theodor Adorno, where he speaks of “mutilated life”.
This mutilated life is today an existence spent in representation, and in particular digital representation, outside of itself.
Is postmodernism “the ideology of the end of ideologies”
,
as Antoine Compagnon asserts?
Postmodernism is the moment when you think you have got rid of all ideologies, while you live totally in them.
It's a bit like what I'm saying with the definition of “nihilism”, it's about the thing that everyone thinks they don't need, when in reality we all more or less do.
What terms best illustrate postmodern life
in your book?
The objective of my work was not to make a lexicon of fashionable words, but rather to grasp the current definition of already old terms.
And I think the word “distance” is quite apt to describe postmodern life as a whole.
I had to decline the theme of distance in many of the definitions that I propose.
The purpose of this work is really to explore the common places, it is a walk in the distance that we have put between us and ourselves.
Maxim Morin
There are also all the words related to “self-entrepreneurship”, like a kind of illusion of autonomy.
The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard talks about it very well.
Have we tipped into the Republic of the podcast, which you define as “the accomplished form of thought”
?
I became interested in this word because, today, as soon as someone wants to create a work, they do it through the podcast.
I feel like it's some kind of public extension of WhatsApp voice messages.
Finally, isn't the term
"
post-modernism
" a sort of portmanteau of the kind there are so many?
We can also cite
"
liberalism
"
,
"
neo-feminism
"
...
Yes absolutely, it's a portmanteau word.
Thus, in the very title of my dictionary, we are already in the commonplace and the cliché.
I regretted a little, once my book had been published, not to have put an epigraph in order to distance myself from this term "postmodernism".
Moreover, the definition that I give of it is deliberately tautological.
Like the figure of the "beauf", aren't we all someone else's postmodern
?
Exactly, it is also the definition that I give to the term “bourgeois”, that is to say what we accuse everyone of, without seeing that in reality we take part in it.
What is the role of illustrations in this book?
The illustrations respond to the same desire as the definitions, namely to make a kind of parody of an encyclopedia, or more precisely an encyclopedia in farce, as Flaubert says about Bouvard and Pécuchet.
This book also reinvests the visual commonplaces of what is called postmodernity.
The purpose of this work is really to explore the common places, it is a walk in the distance that we have put between us and ourselves.
Dictionary of postmodern life, written by Maxime Morin and illustrated by Marguerite Hennebelle, ed.
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