Postmodernity: the great unifying narrative or collective amnesia.

Abstract

The article offers a critical examination of postmodern thought and its impact on contemporary life, focusing on the disappearance of unifying explanatory frameworks and the fragmentation of human experience. Drawing on thinkers such as Lyotard, Lipovetsky, Vattimo and Bauman, the author argues that postmodernity is characterized by distrust of grand narratives, the rise of individualism, everyday hedonism and an increasing indifference toward collective responsibility. This condition produces what the author calls a “solidarity amnesia,” a social forgetting that weakens our capacity to build shared projects, recognize the suffering of others and sustain meaningful ethical commitments. Methodologically, the article employs an interdisciplinary approach that integrates philosophical theory, contemporary sociology and cultural analysis to show how consumerism, immediacy and media saturation shape modern subjectivity. The objective is to demonstrate that while postmodernism freed individuals from oppressive structures, it also created new forms of emptiness, disorientation and apathy toward public life. The study concludes that in a context of fluid and volatile identities, recovering memory and solidarity becomes essential to resist the ongoing fragmentation of meaning.