The End Once Again: Art and Politics at the Close of the Century

[...]anti-foundationalism flourishes and this time it appears as if we will take our existential freedom seriously, but minus the melodrama, and that we will also apply the lessons of post-structuralism-the constructedness of all concepts, the decentered self, the privileging of undecidability-but consistently, without exception. What lover of rhetoric can sneeZe at a millennium? A more honest posing of the problem would admit that we will almost certainly see some figural shape, at the same time that we can decide, more or less freely, whether it will be an angel, a rough beast, or simply a human form that greets us, looking back or ahead, or even staring blankly. [...]as we approach the year 2000 we are tempted by configurations of exhausted millenniums made new, because of the reassurance they give us, even while increasingly we suspect that such visionings are too secure in their closures and false significances. For Brodsky, the Russian émigré-turned-American Poet Laureate, such extension would best be achieved through culture: "For there is no other antidote to the vulgarity of the human heart than doubt and good taste, which one finds fused in works of great literature, as well as your own."