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The theme of postmodernity, which first appeared within aesthetics, has been displaced to ever wider areas until it has become the new horizon of our cultural, philosophical, and political experience. In the latter realm, to which I shall here limit my analysis, postmodernity has advanced by means of two converging intellectual operations whose complex interweavings and juxtapositions have, however, also contributed to a large extent to obscuring the problems at hand. Both operations share, without doubt, one characteristic: the attempt to establish boundaries, that is to say, to separate an ensemble of historical features and phenomena (postmodern) from others also appertaining to the past and that can be grouped under the rubric of modernity. In both cases the boundaries of modernity are established in radically different ways. The first announces a weakening of the metaphysical and rationalist pretensions of modernity, by way of challenging the foundational status of certain narratives. The second challenges not the ontological status of narrative as such, but rather the current validity of certain narratives: those that Lyotard has called metanarratives (meta-recits), which unified the totality of the historical experience of modernity (including science as one of its essential elements) within the project of global, human emancipation. In what follows, I shall consider the status of metanarratives and offer as basic theses: 1) that there has been a radical change in the thought and culture of the past few decades (concerning which there would be no inconvenience in considering it as the entry to a sort of postmodernity), which, however, passes neither through a crisis nor, much less, to an abandonment of metanarratives; 2) that the very