Jean-François Lyotard
“Politics: It is not a genre, it is the multiplicity of genres, the diversity of ends, and par excellence the question of linkage. It plunges into emptiness where ‘it happens that…’. It is, if you will, the state of language, but it is not a language. Politics consists in the fact that language is not a language, but phrases, or that Being is not Being but There is’s.”
Driftworks Libidinal Economy
Phenomenology Heidegger and “the jews”
Discourse/Figure The Differend
The Postmodern Condition; A Report on Knowledge Just Gaming
Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event The Inhuman
The Confession of Augustine Lesson on the Analytic of the Sublime
Postmodern Fables The Assasination of Experience by Painting—Monory (with Jacques Monory)
Lyotard was a tireless thinker of the political and ethical. Of all the people we have discussed in these colloquia, he is the most versatile. Versatility was, for him, not a character trait nor (purely) an aesthetic manner of being (he was not a flaneur: interested in everything, distracted by everything, amused by everything,…). Versatility was, he felt, a political/ethical demand. One of his favorite formulas for political demand was “it is happening” and, for him, this “it is happening” demanded something that was not clearly presentable. (In 1953 when Chou En Lai was in Geneva to help negotiate the end of the Korean War he was asked by a journalist what he thought of the French Revolution. He replied, “It is still too early to tell.” The uncommon intelligence of this reply was to acknowledge that the Revolution was, in some way, still happening. The Revolution was not confinable to a set of dates and persons the contextualist historian can write down for us to memorize.) If Lyotard read widely, if he read Aristotle or Adorno or Augustine or Freud, it was not to reconstruct that demand to which they responded with their writing, but to hear in them a demand placed on the present writer, Jean-Francois Lyotard. Lyotard was, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe said, experimental, active, gay, innovative, affirmative, satirical, pagan… These were characteristics of the postmodern thinker. (Whereas, Lacoue-Labarthe says, the modern thinker is melancholic, regretful, in mourning, nostalgic, sad…) Versatility was required by the postmodern because what one might call the forces of closure, whatever they may be (capitalist homogenization of all human production, leveling of discourse in to pure media events, normalization of the forces of the psyche via psychoanalysis, the Americanization of all cultures on the planet, and so forth) were everywhere and hence had to be resisted everywhere. He was a champion of a kind of intellectual turbulence and, in temperament, akin to Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. (I don’t think that is too unfair to say.) They each felt a demand to be ceaselessly intellectually creative and to encourage creativity in all spheres of life from philosophy to political struggles.
[On the other hand, Lyotard is nowadays more or less completely neglected. He abandoned his early Marxism (because Marxism is a ‘grand narrative’, a point to which I shall return) and became instead, to some, an exemplar of late capitalism as analyzed by Frederick Jameson. That is, his intellectual versatility and mobility are now considered emblematic of the versatility and mobility of Capital. Lyotard was an intellectual multi-tasker. This criticism is somewhat unfair as, that which impelled him was not pleasure nor practical exigency, but an ethical imperative. No one who knew him ever doubted this. Abandoning materialist obligation in favor of a transcendental obligation is the more serious crux of the dispute.]
One of his intellectual attempts was to apply (“link”) aesthetic categories to politics. Reading Kant’s analysis of the beautiful he detects a demand for community based, not on reason, not on destiny, but on sentimentality. Recall that in the Critique of Judgment the experience of the beautiful is simultaneously a demand for consent. That is, without any criteria, I say of this thing ‘it is beautiful’ and I require that everyone else judge it as beautiful. The subtle point is that while my judgment of the thing is completely subjective (groundless and indifferent with regard to the existence of the object) I find that I am caught up in a movement of coercion by which the thing itself and my manner of apprehending it adapt to each other producing a beautiful feeling. Although the judgment is subjective, the feeling of beauty, in a sense, robs me of my own subjectivity and I experience something like subjectivity in general or, what Dante and Marx call, a general intellect. The sentiment of the beautiful, for Kant, is not calming, soothing, reassuring, but is turbulent, intrusive. When I have taught the 3rd Critique to students they are always dismayed by this ‘demand’ that all subjectivities consent to ‘my’ experience. But the point is not so strange. How many times do we go to a movie, look at a landscape, read a particular novel and then immediately call our friends to say: You have to see this movie! Visit this landscape! Read this novel! I cannot present to you the criteria for this but I demand consent of you nonetheless, just as I myself have been coerced by the experience. Lyotard, in an essay on the theme of community, calls this sensus communis because a necessary part of this aesthetic experience is that some potential community must already be involved in my feeling of beauty. There is an implicit, but completely unrepresentable, politics involved. Or a potential politics. Lyotard then transfers such an experience to the possibility of making ethical and political judgments likewise, that is, without rational criteria, without rationally agreed upon universal terms, norms, or categories.
The book The Differend takes up the experiment of understanding and trying to apply justice (an abstract category, if you like; or a horizon of possibility necessary to being human, if you prefer) to cases involving heterogeneous language games (a term he borrows from Wittgenstein). The problem is the incommensurability of language games and the presupposition that in cases of legislation all “sides” of a dispute agree (or are forced to agree) to a single language game (or regime) whose reasonableness depends on the possibility to represent a claim for all to examine. He takes a case from Werner Herzog’s film Where Green Ants Dream. Briefly, Australian aborigines are in dispute with a mining company. The mining company has deeds, titles, proofs of ownership, etc.: verifiable evidence of ownership. (That’s one language game.) The aborigines claim that the land the company wishes to mine is sacred, suggesting a different meaning of ‘ownership’ or, more strongly, contending the very notion of ownership of certain kinds of land itself. (That’s another language game.) The judge asks the aborigines to produce a buried corpse in court to legitimize their claim via the agreed upon rules of ‘evidence’. But, if they dig up a corpse, they will have violated the sanctity of the land and will have lost their argument. The land will no longer be sacred. It’s a double bind. Whatever the judge decides, he or she violates some inviolable principle. In another case Lyotard takes up the claims of European Jews who survived the Holocaust and who are confronted by a rational historian who wishes to question the reality of their suffering in some accurate, measurable way. Getting to the point: in order to legitimately prove the extent of their victimization the Jews need to provide witnesses as to what the Nazis actually did. But no Jew who went into the gas chamber when the jets were turned on…Consequently, there is and will be an element of doubt as to what can legitimately be said to have happened, there will always be a speculative element as to what happened, or, for Lyotard, an unpresentable aspect to what happened (and indeed is still happening). The truly differential victim is the one deprived of justice and also of the means to show the injustice. Lyotard’s point is to show that any one language game will sooner or later run into cases where the very process of adjudication produces still more victims. (His inspiration here is in part from Emmanuel Levinas for whom any particular, real, concrete, empirical, actual attempt to render justice to some other person is only a reduction of a prior transcendental obligation that can never be satisfied. Hence, in Levinas, the requirement for always more philosophy without any lack of attention (a nearly psychotic philosophy, in my view), and, for Lyotard, the need for ever more experimentation, versatility, creativity, etc.) The problem is to try to do justice to the unpresentable.
[With regard to Globalism and its discontents I don’t see how Lyotard is not a helpful thinker. In particular with regard to racism. Slavoj Zizek will say that racism is a clash, not of classes, but of fantasies. The miners above fantasize that they can own land because they possess pieces pf paper; the Aboriginees fantasize some sort of sacredness which cannot be rationally verified. Which fantasy takes priority? For Zizek, that is where the State steps in, and I don’t see how the State steps in except in Lyotardian fashion. That is, without any criteria that would elevate one fantasy above another. The solution would have to be creative, interesting, but not final.]
Connected to this is Lyotard’s distrust of grand- or metanarratives and his distrust of theory in general. Lyotard is not John Rawls. He is not attempting to contrive a grand theory that can resolve differends. A Rawlsian axiom or a Marxian clash of classes will not always be the trump card in any dispute. The differend is the feeling that some wrong has been done, is being done, and the problem is that there is no frame within which to identify the specificity of the wrong. There is instead the necessity of indeterminate justice, or justice without criteria. In contrast to the sensus communis which Lyotard derives from the Kantian beautiful, there is in the case of justice the Idea of justice which he derives from Kant’s analysis of the sublime. In this analysis Kant describes the case where a certain feeling, or tonality of the soul—the experience of grandeur, for example—eludes the imagination’s power of presentation. This causes the subject pain. But, ‘higher’ than imagination is Reason: the power to think without the props of representations. In the sublime feeling the imagination yields to the superiority of Reason’s ability to conceive of an Idea even though reason cannot describe, re-present the Idea to the satisfaction of the imagination.. The truly Lyotardian judgment does not become a prescription for all future judgments. No one is a master judge. One “links” phrases, judgments, in the attempt to testify to the unpresentable (the unpresentable wrong and the unpresentable Idea of Justice).
I suppose what sets Lyotard apart from those we have looked at in the colloquia is the indispensability of affect, feeling to any thinking of politics, community, justice. Affect is always in play for students of literature and the arts, but Lyotard wants to put it in play in philosophy and political thought as well. My point in defense of Lyotard is that affect tends to de-structure; that’s why it is not properly Marxian, nor Humanist, nor Enlightenment. Affect, feeling, emotion is de-basing, embarrassing, but it affirms itself in spite of any structure. (This is more my theory than Lyotard’s, I admit.) Consequently, in the two samples I have provided you will not see his careful argumentation and analysis of this or that text or political situation. Instead I want to give you more a sense of what it feels like to encounter a versatile thinker such as he was.
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