if all the constitutive features of Postmodernism were identical with and coterminous to those of an older modernism

triumphantly dispatches it into the past more adequately than the doomed, gallant, vain, peremptory Faulknerian evocation of what has long since vanished

in other linguistics this particularizing function is taken over by the virtually wordless operation of the deictic -- the "this" or "that," the pointing at the otherwise ineffable specificity of the unique object in the here and now)

Marxism is indeed not a political philosophy of the weltanschauung variety, and in no way "on all fours" with conservation, liberalism, radicalism, populism, or whatever

since it involves political apostasy

Insurance companies [...] seem obnubilated with a spurious apotheosis in which to the naked eye they seem on the point of transmogrification into socialism

These wise restrictions, which include a salutary warning as to the essential impoverishment of the themes themselves, did not prevent the modernists from making much of time

A careful reading of the Manifesto, however, suggests a somewhat different way of thinking about Marx's view of capitalism as a stage, for it can be grasped as a kind of enormous black box or "vanishing mediator,"

a religious modernism offers the spectacle of a theological hermeneutic of great refinement

endowed with elaborate and supple casuistries, which can have no great appeal in an age that despises hermeneutics as such and has little need for casuistry.