Postmodern resignation reduces action to existential necessity without hope of change.

Evidence

But in that other rea1m, roo, all one can say is ‘we aren’t dead yet’ The presumption again is that the apocalypse, the demonic end of the world, is at hand; we shall soon all be dead, and our laughter, if it is laughter at all, is the laughter of the day before the world ends. One acts, in other words, not because one hopes to change anything but because one is condemned, by existential necessity, to act; we are back to Beckett’s formula- ‘I can’t go on I will go on’ - which Rushdie himself quotes most approvingly in his other essay, ‘Outside the Whale’ I do not have the space here to offer a detailed reading of that odd essay - odd in the sense that it is so very good in so many ways and yet, in the last instance, so profoundly marred by Rushdie’s aesthetic of despair. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 616

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Critical positions must inhabit liberal individualism without full hope of teleological change. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1266; The belief that change is impossible dissolves the obligation to act — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 316; Surrendering autonomous thinking to a collective constitutes the deepest form of resignation — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 273 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The belief that change is impossible dissolves the obligation to act #expands (0.90) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 316
• Existentialist despair means relying only on what lies within one’s own will and action #contradicts (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 16
• Surrendering autonomous thinking to a collective constitutes the deepest form of resignation #complicates (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 273