The future of postmodernism is assessed in terms of key themes: from the language of desire, the limits of representation, and the revaluation of values, to the feminist rewriting of patriarchy and the critical archeology of deconstruction. Eighteen essays review the postmodernist difference inscribed in modern philosophy. Traditional concerns and preoccupations--the subject, the will, the body, language, representation, and metaphysics--are placed in question through re-readings of rationalist, dialectical, psychoanalytic, aesthetic, and patriarchical values incorporated into modernist thinking. The figures of Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Derrida are treated in their multiple facets, and in relation to their importance for postmodernism within the continental philosophical framework.