Russia in Global Affairs

For citation, please use:
Lukin, A.L. and Korol, A.Yu., 2025. Is Postmodernism the Most Appropriate Paradigm for Conceptualizing Postliberal Politics? Russia in Global Affairs, 23(3), pp. 90–105. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2025-23-3-90-105

Postmodernism has become a catchword in contemporary socio-political discourse, yet defining it is difficult. It is protean, infinitely multifaceted, and resistant to description by its very logic: by rejecting logocentrism, it rejects categorization and labeling, including of itself.

Paradoxically, indefinability is one of postmodernism’s greatest strengths. As society, politics, and technology become increasingly multidimensional, complex, and uncertain, postmodernism may emerge as the most appropriate—perhaps the only—paradigm for understanding them.

Postmodernism has long been associated with left-liberal and progressive ideologies, but its progenitors were not leftists, and today its right wing seems to be ascendant. In the 21st century, we will likely see postmodernism in its full, untruncated version.

Many of postmodernism’s features are exemplified by Russia, especially through its plurality of self-identification: as the center of European culture (Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 2024), as the Russian World, and as a Eurasian civilization (Foreign Policy Concept, 2023). The impending triumph of postmodernism offers a promising future for Russia.

The winding path of postmodernism: from Kant to Foucault 

In the public mind, postmodernism is firmly entrenched on the Left: opposed to hierarchical order and capitalism, supportive of egalitarianism and marginalized groups. GPT-4o names eleven thinkers as socio-political postmodernism’s most important figures: Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Richard Rorty, Chantal Mouffe, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek. Russian GigaChat gives similar names. Most of these figures belong to the ideological Left, their ideas contributing to the development of modern feminism, queer theory, and critical race theory.

The Left’s appropriation of postmodernism can and should be challenged. Although the term ‘postmodernism’ was coined by Lyotard in the late 1970s, many consonant issues were raised in Plato’s The Republic. In his monumental work, the Greek philosopher explored the relationship between knowledge and power, and how their interplay gives rise to social structures and discourses. Thus, the path to postmodernism has been long and non-linear.

Postmodernism as a distinct movement began to take shape at the end of the 18th century, largely as a counter-reaction to the Enlightenment’s cult of rationalism and its attacks on religion. Immanuel Kant, who represented both the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment (Hicks, 2004), voiced skepticism about the possibility of understanding external reality, thereby laying the groundwork for postmodern thought.

The next significant step was made by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), inspired by the German mystic Jakob Böhme (1575-1624) (Magee, 2001). Hegel viewed the world as an ever-changing process of self-awareness. According to Hegel, God created humanity in order to cognize Himself through human consciousness. Rejecting Kant’s concept of the ‘thing-in-itself,’ Hegel asserted that the subject and object are interpenetrating entities. A phenomenon needs an object for existence and a subject for meaning. Through these relations, man constructs a network of concepts that imbue the world and man with meaning. In this way Reason constructs the external reality, in which the specific is subordinate to the general, and man is embedded in the world, not isolated from it. Therefore, it is not the individual but reality (or the Absolute Spirit) that cognizes itself. Cognition is realized through dialectical contradiction between thesis and antithesis, followed by their synthesis. Ultimately, truth is seen as an ever-evolving process. In fact, in Hegel’s philosophy, Being (das Sein) is replaced by Becoming (das Werden) (Hegel, 2004). Everything is both something and nothing concrete.

According to Hegelian dialectics, an antithesis of Hegel himself was destined to appear sooner or later. It was Arthur Schopenhauer, whose works are imbued with skepticism and even contempt of life and the surrounding world. The author of The World as Will and Representation saw the Universe as a mad, hostile, chaotic variable, which does not create any logical and reasonable systems, pulsating randomly without beginning, end, or metaphysical meaning (Schopenhauer, 1819).

Friedrich Nietzsche continued the tradition of negating metaphysics. However, against Schopenhauer’s pessimism and denial of life, he proposed the will to power. Nietzsche saw that the Christian foundation of European civilization was eroding, opening the way to nihilism. Crucially, he proposed that the “Twilight of the Gods” is inevitable. God is dead; humanity must recognize this. Universal nihilistic destruction can be stopped only by Superman (Übermensch) able to create new values with his spirit and creativity (Nietzsche, 1886).

Martin Heidegger is usually considered an existentialist but can also be regarded as a father of postmodernism. Heidegger emerged as part of the Conservative Revolution in the interwar and postwar periods. Notably, he came from a religious family and initially studied theology. In fact, his entire philosophical system resembles de-theologized Christianity (just substitute ‘Being’ for ‘God’). Heidegger synthesized various branches of irrational continental thought while revising many of its concepts. He was keen to show the importance of the irrational in human life: humans are abandoned in Being, like everything around them. In these conditions they have to build a relationship with the outside world. In Heidegger’s system, time is no longer linear; it is broken and cyclical. Humans can change the future by influencing the present and reinterpret the past on the basis of the present. The Event (das Ereignis) intrudes into the gap between different eras and transforms the course of affairs, connecting disparate temporal frames. From this proceeds the ‘contingency,’ the absence of predetermination/necessity, that is so important for postmodernism (Heidegger, 1967).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, attempting to solve the fundamental questions of philosophy, concluded that it is necessary to analyze language itself. A word’s various meanings in different contexts, or its insufficiently specific definition (e.g., of ‘God’ or ‘beauty’), are the main reasons for philosophical problems. According to Wittgenstein, language has essentially assumed the role of God in shaping reality (Wittgenstein, 2021) (An idea that parallels the Left postmodernists’ preoccupation with the problem of discourses.) Wittgenstein’s ‘language play,’ contextualized meaning, and other ideas are now embedded in large language models (LLMs).

Until the mid-20th century, nascent postmodernism was predominantly on the right-conservative side in the political spectrum. Its “takeover” by the Left happened during protest movements in the West in the 1960s, which culminated in the Paris youth riots of 1968, condemning the liberal-capitalist system less on economic than on cultural grounds. Based on Heidegger’s critique of human nature’s mechanization and instrumentalization, postmodernism has transformed into a leftist critique of metanarratives and basic sociocultural institutions such as capitalism and the patriarchal family.

The main goal of left-wing postmodernists such as Foucault and Derrida was to quash the dominant metanarrative and “denaturalize” the institutions and values built upon it. These goals are to be achieved through deconstruction and genealogy, the latter using the concept of Heidegger’s Event (das Ereignis) to reveal the contingency of power structures. Any metanarrative, according to genealogy, is constructed through the interpretation of initially unrelated ‘scenes’ by means of an Event.

In other words, something happens that alters further succession of phenomena, forming a new order of things.

For example, if the People’s State of Bavaria, created by the Socialist Left and led by the Jew Kurt Eisner, had survived the Freikorps’s strikes in 1919, Hitler would most likely not have risen, and the Second World War would not have occurred. A moderate socialist government, having won in Bavaria (and perhaps in the rest of Germany), would have set a different discourse (Foucault, 1969) in which Jews would not have been the enemy. From Derrida’s deconstructionist perspective, the very idea of an “inevitable Hitler” is an error of retroactive assumption (Derrida, 1993): he could have remained an ordinary moderate socialist and not joined the anti-Semitic National Socialism that had existed long before Hitler.[1] The preservation of the socialist Bavarian republic would have been an Event that would have prevented the Being of National Socialism’s victory (Heidegger, 1959).

Thus, postmodernism’s long evolution has yielded a number of common motifs:

• Rejection of metaphysics and metanarratives that claim universal hegemony.
• Increased attention to language as constituting reality.
• Acceptance of the world’s ontological unity and integrity. Many postmodernist works contain a relational thesis of the connectedness of “everything with everything”, or “everything in everything”, partly reflected in the concept of ‘intertextuality.’
• Emphasis on contingency, i.e., indeterminacy and even randomness of the course of events (Karelin, 2015).
• Irrationalism and mysticism, which were particularly characteristic of rightist pre-postmodernists (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger). However, if we look at the leftist postmodernists and recall that for them language constructs reality, then the question arises: To what extent are they mystics themselves?
• Rejection of the possibility of complete and objective knowledge of reality; denial of human reason’s omnipotence. Positivism, rationalism, empiricism, and the entire modernist enlightenment project are nothing but contingent discourses and therefore have no privileged status.

Postmodernism is not inherently leftist. One could even argue that it sprang from Kant’s and Hegel’s attempts to save Christianity from Enlightenment attacks. According to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, the Enlightenment’s rationalist project dehumanizes humans, depriving them of room for creativity, spirituality, and faith. Therefore, it is necessary to return to the “origins” (Nietzche) or “remember true Being” (Heidegger).

Postmodernist pluriverse

Today, the tree of postmodernism has two major branches: the conventional right-conservative and the conventional left-liberal. Left-wing postmodernism has been dominant since the mid-20th century, but its influence seems to be waning, while right-wing postmodernism is experiencing a renaissance.

Above all, within Western civilization itself, a counter-reaction to wokeism and other excesses of left-wing liberalism, genetically linked to left-wing postmodernism, has begun. The New Reformation of the West (Slezkine, 2024) did not turn out to be so invincible and unstoppable. Donald Trump’s triumph in November 2024 suggests that right-conservatism’s rise in key Western countries is not an aberration but a sustainable trend.

It is not yet clear how far—and for how long—the West’s socio-political pendulum will swing back. But even if Western societies, after some pause and adjustment, continue the neo-Bolshevist cultural revolution (Slezkine, 2024), it has less and less chance of becoming a world revolution—it will only be one of many ideological models that exist in the world. It may not even be the “first among equals.” This circumstance is largely due to the emergence of increasingly powerful non-Western centers of power.

In principle, each of the non-Western polities—if it has real rather than nominal sovereignty—presents a particular model of development that may be attractive to others.

Among non-Western narratives, the ‘Chinese model of modernization’ clearly tops the list. This is due to China’s growing geopolitical weight (it is already perceived by many as a full-fledged superpower) and to its impressive socio-economic success. CPC-led modernization seeks to create a “new form of human civilization” that will surpass capitalist modernity (Lomanov, 2025). Beijing emphasizes the national-cultural specificity of the Chinese model but also hints unobtrusively at its potential universalism: “The Chinese model of modernization shows the Chinese national color but at the same time has important and far-reaching significance for the world” (Piao Yangfan, 2022). Promoting the concept of the Global Community of Shared Future, China has successfully engaged discursive power, partly inspired by the ideas of left-wing postmodernist Foucault (Denisov and Zuenko, 2022).

The Chinese model is a synthesis of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist socialism and techno-capitalism spiced with traditional Chinese modes of governance, such as Confucianism. True, China lacks individual freedoms, but do people really need an often-unbearable freedom?

Unlike China, Russia does not shy away from direct confrontation with the neoliberal West, whose ideology is condemned as “totalitarian,” “intolerant,” and “aggressive” (Putin, 2024). Vladimir Putin favors “healthy conservatism” and “traditional values.” The Russian leader does not hide his antipathy to revolutions: “Russia exhausted its limit of revolutions back in the 20th century” (Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 2021). Putin often sounds like the 18th-century English conservative Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. It is no coincidence that the ideology of modern Russia is consonant with some rightist conservatives in Europe and North America, who see Russia as the last major state that adheres to the values of what was once a European and Christian civilization (Montgomery, 2016).

Russia has another advantage: it is aesthetically appealing. In contrast to the ugly chaos of Western wokeism, the conservative-traditionalist order of Putin’s Russia radiates a powerful aesthetic.

It is a beauty one might find in the worlds of The Lord of the Rings or Dune. Like Hollywood epics that capitalize on medieval plots, the appeal of Putin’s “universe” can be partly tied to themes of masculinity, hierarchy, and wonder. “Verily, not in satiety shall his longing cease and disappear, but in beauty! Gracefulness belongs to the munificence of the magnanimous” (Nietzsche, 1885).

India constitutes a remarkable alternative. In many ways, India is the best possible ideological world. It is democratic but illiberal. India is deeply religious, but its faith is not as binary or eschatological as the Abrahamic religions are. If India achieves success in socio-economic development at least comparable to China’s, then the Indian spiritual-ideological model could become a very attractive option for the world, especially the Global South. Another remarkable feature of the Indian path is its rejection of anthropocentricity. Explaining Narendra Modi’s doctrine of Vasudhaiva Ktumbakam (“One Earth, One Family, One Future”), Indian intellectuals emphasize that the family encompasses all living beings, in line with the Global Bharat[2] principles (Narlikar, 2024).

In the emerging world of new postmodernism, it is not only the biggest players that get to have their own model-narratives. Iran (Islamic theocracy), North Korea (Juche), Singapore (capitalist technocracy), for example, come to mind.

There will be much less proselytizing in the 21st century. The states that are “standard-bearers” in ideology will favor the export of their models, but in most cases they will not make active, let alone aggressive, efforts to do so. We dare suggest that we have entered an era of the decline of universal ideologies, both political and religious. Today, almost all non-Western states postulate the world’s spiritual and ideological pluralism. From ideological monotheism, humanity is returning to polytheism. Even the West may finally give up its pursuit of the world’s conversion.

America after Trump will continue to consider itself a shining “City on a Hill,” but will hardly be ready to leave that cozy hill on crusade.

The pluriverse of polities that have abandoned ideological expansion may resemble the world of self-sufficient but mutually harmonious monads of Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds.” Was this not the world order prophesied by Samuel Huntington in 1993, at the “end of history” and “unipolar moment”? “For the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to coexist with the others” (Huntington, 1993, p. 49).

As some Russian theorists note, such a world would combine material globalization and economic interdependence with ideological heterogeneity and value pluralism (Safranchuk and Lukyanov, 2021). Unlike the fully autonomous, non-communicating Leibnizian monads, the state-civilizations of the globalized postmodern pluriverse actively interact, and individuals may even move from their home polities to those that are more in line with their value preferences (President of Russia, 2024).

The most radical variant of the postmodern pluriverse is that of British philosopher Nick Land, who proposes to extend the anarchy of international relations into all spheres of socio-political life, multiplying sovereign entities literally ad infinitum (Land, 2022).

Non-simultaneity of the postmodern world

The universe of advancing postmodernity will feature not only coexisting civilizations, but also coexisting time periods, the “non-simultaneity” (Ungleichzeitigkeit) proposed by German philosopher and sociologist Ernst Bloch in the early 1930s. Bloch noted that the different strata of a society can exist within different temporal eras (Vershynin, 2021). Even before Bloch, Vladimir Lenin spoke about heterogeneous temporality in relation to the Russian Empire of the early 20th century: “…the most backward system of landownership and the most ignorant peasantry on the one hand, and the most advanced industrial and finance capitalism on the other!” (Lenin, 1972). An instance of Ungleichzeitigkeit witnessed by one of the authors consisted of two loudly cackling geese at a busy crossroads in a Chinese metropolis. As a resident explained, the neighborhood, now home to offices of high-tech companies, had recently been a rural area.

Non-simultaneity is by no means new, but in the 21st century it is reaching an unprecedented scale, in which large segments of society, even within the same state, can live in very distant economic, technological, and ethical eras. Moreover, the emergence of fundamentally new technologies can resurrect seemingly long-gone historical phenomena.

In the next few decades, progress in artificial intelligence and robotics will yield androids that physically resemble and intellectually surpass Homo Sapiens.

Will future societies resemble ancient Greece or Rome in their slavery-like exploitation of sentient beings that have zero rights?

The Dark Enlightenment is an intellectual-philosophical trend that emerged in the Anglosphere around 2010. Its name (coined by Nick Land, formerly a professor at the University of Warwick and now a resident of Shanghai) refers at once to the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment (Land, 2012). Also called the Neo-Reactionary movement (NRx), it is, in fact, an apologetics of non-simultaneity.

The Dark Enlightenment can be considered a variety of right-wing postmodernism. Nick Land and another key figure of the Dark Enlightenment, American blogger Curtis Yarvin, also known as Mencius Moldbug, deny many of the ideals of the classical Enlightenment: liberalism, progressivism, egalitarianism, and democracy in general. Moreover, Land rejects anthropocentrism and humanism, arguing that human values and morality are insignificant in the face of more powerful and impersonal forces such as capitalism and technology. Humanity is nothing more than a temporary stage in a larger evolutionary process driven by machine and economic systems. Yarvin, drawing inspiration from Antiquity and the Middle Ages, advocates for replacing liberal democracy with more efficient forms of government, such as libertarian monarchy.

Yarvin and Land borrow from left-wing postmodernism’s favorite techniques, such as deconstruction, but use them to deconstruct liberalism’s Cathedral—the political-academic complex of Western mainstream media, universities, and government agencies.

New religiosity

The decline of “grand narratives,” including religious ones, does not mean that materialism and rationalism will prevail in the postmodern world. There is already a noticeable growth of various forms of religiosity and mysticism, viz. Narendra Modi meditating in a cave (The Hindu, 2024), White House counselor and evangelist Paula White calling on “angels from Africa and South America” to help Trump (Independent, 2020), or South Korean presidents consulting with shamans (Robertson, 2024).

An example of new religiosity, characteristic of the postmodern elite, is the nondenominational Christian techno-billionaire Peter Thiel, one of the main donors to Trump’s presidential ambitions and a mentor to current U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance. Thiel’s views are a blend of conservative libertarianism, hypercapitalism, and transhumanism (Goldberg, 2025).

Another factor, likely to foster new expressions of religiosity and mysticism, is the possibly approaching technological singularity. For example, in February 2025, Microsoft announced a new kind of chip for quantum computing that can solve problems considered unsolvable (Microsoft, 2025). The coming decades may see quantum computers paired with artificial intelligence to produce miracles—things that cannot be explained by the human mind. Quantum mechanics, as physicists themselves admit, fits poorly with certainty and causality (Feynman, 1967), and the behavior of neural networks is already inexplicable to those who write their algorithms (Vox, 2023). Left with their marvelous and perhaps monstrous creations, humans will have an even greater need for God and the other world. Lovecraftian “cosmic horror” that accentuates the powerlessness of humans in the face of incomprehensible and unknowable forces may become one of the prevailing motifs.

*  *  *

Postmodernism was born in the Enlightenment, evolving alongside modernity and in reaction to it. Politically and ideologically, postmodernism was initially more right-conservative but then swung sharply to the left. Today we see postmodernism returning to its illiberal roots. At the same time, its poststructuralist and left-liberal legacy has not disappeared. Per Hegel’s formula, postmodernism has progressed through the stages of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Postmodernism is finally attaining coherence and completeness, as well as political influence and legitimacy. Right-wing postmodernist Alexander Dugin is Russia’s “number one philosopher.” The postmodernism of the Dark Enlightenment is intellectually fertilizing the Trump administration. Mencius Moldbug (aka Curtis Yarvin) is on friendly terms with Peter Thiel and has a hotline to many top White House officials, becoming one of the leading ideologues of the new America.[3]

In its full version, postmodernism is perhaps the only helpful way of conceptualizing the coming era—not anti-liberal but post-liberal. By destroying the logos of rational-liberal discourse, postmodernism creates conditions for the reincarnation of old myths, legends, and traditions. If there is no model of an ideal world (the ‘end of history’) to conform to, civilizations find themselves in a world where their own self is revealed to them. The postmodern, postliberal world will be a pluriverse of narratives and historical epochs.

It will be a wondrous and marvelous world, where everything is contingent and arbitrary, nothing is certain and nothing is impossible. It will combine supertechnology with belief in the supernatural. Transhumanism based on new technologies will lead to the emergence of superhumans—both superheroes and supervillains. It will be a universe of The Avengers, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, and By the Pike’s Command (a Russian folk tale)—all at the same time.

Postmodernism will serve not only as a philosophical and intellectual legitimization of the new pluriverse but also as its connective tissue. Russia, as an essentially postmodernist country, should be comfortable in this new world.