## 1. Biographical Sketch



Born in Vincennes, France on August 10, 1924, Jean-Francois
Lyotard was the son of Jean-Pierre Lyotard, a salesman. As he reports
in an autobiographical essay that opens *Peregrinations: Law, Form,
Event* (1988), while schooling in Paris lycees, he had
dreams of becoming a Dominican monk, a novelist, a painter, or even a
historian. During the second world war, he acted as a medic during the
liberation of Paris and he became a father soon after studying
literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne University in Paris (he
failed entrance twice into the more prestigious Ecole Normale
Superiour), which certainly cut off any dreams of becoming a
monk. As for being a novelist or artist, he says he had an
"unfortunate lack of talent", and an "obvious
weakness of memory" meant he could never be a good historian
(*Peregrinations*, 1-2). He met Gilles Deleuze
(1925-1995) while studying at the Sorbonne and his work would
later influence Lyotard's *Libidinal Economy* (1974). Lyotard
produced an M.A. dissertation, "Indifference as an Ethical
Notion", whose central belief in indifference he would spend his
career repudiating. In 1954, he would publish a study on phenomenology
(a textbook treatment that would go through some ten editions) and
became a philosophy professor at a lycee in Constantine, the
capital of the French department of East Algeria, having passed the
*agregation* that enabled him to do so
(*Peregrinations*, 2). Lyotard came to Algeria at a propitious
time: near start of the Algerian revolution that would ultimately
liberate the country from France in 1962, the colony had a
revolutionary air that he inhaled in full. After his arrival, Lyotard
immersed himself in the works of Marx while updating himself on the
Algerian situation. As the revolution began in 1954, Lyotard joined
*Socialisme ou Barbarie* (Socialism or Barbarism), which also
included Claude Lefort (1924-2010) and Cornelius Castoriadis
(1922-1997), important political thinkers in their own right.
Lyotard became an astute and strident political militant over the next
fifteen years, writing works that would later be collected in
*Political Writings* (1993). He edited and wrote for
*Socialisme ou Barbarie*'s journal as well as leaflets
given to protesters and union workers, and this work left him little
time for academic philosophy ("Resisting a Discourse of
Mastery", 174). He returned to Paris in 1959, becoming until
1966 a *maitre-assistant* at the Sorbonne, when he
finally gained a position in the philosophy department at the
University of Paris X, Nanterre. In 1964, he broke with *Socialisme
ou Barbarie*, joining *Pouvoir Ouvrier* (Worker's
Power), quitting that splinter group two years later and, as often
happens on the French left, losing many of his closest friends along
the way as his distance from Marxism became clear. Around the same
time, he began to attend the seminars of the French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). This was an important moment as
Lyotard lost faith in the all-encompassing philosophy of Marxism,
which offered, especially in the variant of the French Communist
Party, a single key to history and its end. This loss of faith in
Marxism's "metanarrative" would expand to encompass
all those available in modernity, a fact that would come to mark all
his remaining writings. This didn't keep him from participating
in the events of May 1968, helping to organize the March 22 movement
in Nanterre. Three years later he would publish *Discourse,
Figure* (1971), earning him the degree of *doctorat
d'etat*. In light of the revolts of 1968, the French
government set up a radical university in Vincennes, which Lyotard
would join, becoming *maitre de conferences*. Two years
later, he published a work he later dubbed "my evil book",
*Libidinal Economy* (*Peregrinations*, 13). This work
remains an important thinking of immanence and what a body politic
would be like if reduced only to its libidinal pleasures and the
blockages that make institutions possible. That Lyotard would later
repudiate this difficult and complex work should say much to those who
would reduce him to advocating a postmodern pastiche where any
pleasure is good as long as it provides some intensity of feeling. In
1979, he would publish *The Postmodern Condition*, which was
instantly taken as emblematic of what was underway in the West, right
or wrong. Many would take up his call, as he put it in the book, to
"wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the
unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of
the name" (*Postmodern Condition*, 82). The work was both
descriptive of what we today would dub neoliberalism's
functionalization of knowledge--what can be known has value only
insofar as it can increase the future economic productivity of the
researcher or student--and prescriptive that the loss of
metanarratives *should* be underway. With the fame gained from
this book, Lyotard would go on to lecture all over the world, while
acting as a major contributor to the College International de
Philosophie in Paris. In 1979 and 1983, he published *Au juste*
(translated as *Just Gaming*) and *The Differend*,
respectively, two works that remain important to anyone thinking a
postmodern politics. His later works, such as *The Inhuman*
(1988) and *Soundproof Room: Malraux's Anti-aesthetics*
(1998), concentrated on aesthetics, an enduring theme as early as the
1970s, but always while extending conclusions he reached in *The
Differend*. In April 1998, Lyotard died of leukemia in Paris.


## 2. Intellectual Background



Lyotard's intellectual milieu is one that crossed major events
in French philosophy and, of course, in global history. His writings
would encounter the dominant Marxism of the French political and
academic milieu, while also, over a long career, he would debate with
writers in existential phenomenology, structuralism, and eventually
post-structuralism, the latter being the moniker under which his works
are commonly placed. Lyotard's first book,
*Phenomenology* (1954), demonstrated the import of that
movement on his early thought. Husserlian phenomenology, by way of
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(1908-1961), was dominant in the era's existentialist
movements, and Lyotard's work attempts to find a place for
phenomenology in light of the Marxism dominant on the left, especially
in the human sciences (e.g., sociology, history, and linguistics).
Like Sartre, who attempted to wed his existentialist emphasis on the
irreducibility of subjective experience and Marxian analyses, which
led to his *Critique of Dialectical Reason* (1960), Lyotard
wanted to understand if there was a way to take up the era's
dominant phenomenological bent in French philosophy in terms of the
Left's adherence to Marxian analyses. Ultimately, he argues for
phenomenology's place to speak to experiences beyond what is
articulable in language, while also following its founder, Edmund
Husserl (1859-1938), in arguing that it could provide the
sciences with their grounding in the essence of their areas of study:
what is the meaning of history for the historical sciences? What is
the social for the sociologist? For Lyotard, these questions cannot be
answered from *within* these sciences themselves.



Unlike Sartre, Lyotard does not seek a dialectical fusion of freedom,
as found in existentialism, and necessity, as found in the objective
laws found in the various sciences. Rather he seeks a "third
way" of thinking of history that shows how ultimately
phenomenology cannot speak to the movements of history found in
Marxism, but he also rejects any incipient structuralism of the period
that would denude the human of its place in history
(*Phenomenology*, 131). For structuralism, as it would come to
define itself over the next fifteen years in works by Lacan and Claude
Levi-Strauss (1908-2009), among others, the human subject is
largely the effect of discursive grammars in which it is
produced. But most importantly for his later work, Lyotard argues that
phenomenology offers a way not to think a single key to history, some
one meaning to which it must answer, but rather stipulates that
history, for phenomenology, has "*some* meaning"
(*Phenomenology*, 131, his emphasis).



Nevertheless, Lyotard judged phenomenology to be ultimately
reactionary, unable to respond to the ways in which the economic
relations of production produce given conscious states, that is, how
subjectivity is founded in objectivity. In this way,
Lyotard's work for the next decade would look to identify and
illustrate these relations of production, especially in the Algerian
situation, but time and again he chafed against Marxism's cookie
cutter approach, which denied cultural differences as epiphenomenal to
the same economic forces it would find everywhere. The events of
May 1968--and the vibrant intellectual period of France during
the whole of the late 1960s--would have an indelible impact on
Lyotard's work. Marxism failed, he believed, to account for the
alliance of bourgeois students and workers together demanding
liberation, while the French Communist Party's siding with
Charles de Gaulle's government in helping bring the May 1968
events to an end scandalized many on the left. Marxism, Lyotard
believed, failed to account for the desire that pushed those very
students into the streets in the first place. Structuralism, for its
part, Lyotard averred, was ultimately too intellectualist to account
for the sensuous and figural gestures that were very much a part of
the anarchical May 1968 events. As marchers argued against their
structuralist professors that structures don't take to the
streets, Lyotard came to emphasize the figural and aesthetic
dimensions of human existence--going against what he believed was
structuralism's adherence to intellectual discourse over the
libidinal, extra-linguistic and sensuous experience. This would result
in *Discourse, Figure* (1971). This put him at odds with the
dominant structuralist and post-structuralist emphasis on language,
and as the 1970s began and disappointment set in that May 1968 gave
rise to little in terms of substantive change, Lyotard, like others,
looked to aesthetics and sensuous relations for their revolutionary
potential. This led him to his strongest denunciation of Marxism yet
in *Libidinal Economy* (1973). As the 1970s progressed and
France moved from one technocratic government to the next, Lyotard
began to elaborate a critique of technoscience and its reductionist
account of existence in terms that also reflected
post-structuralism's attunement to difference. Ultimately, as he
argued in such works as *The Postmodern Condition* (1979),
*Just Gaming* (1979), and *The Differend* (1983), the
task--in light of the loss of modernity's metanarratives--was 
to account for the "differends" among different language
games, that is, irreducible ways in which peoples operating within
different milieu don't have access to some all-encompassing
order in which to have discussions over what is just, true, and so
forth. This emphasis on language games, derived from Ludwig
Wittgenstein's (1889-1951) later work, but also influenced
by such figures as Saul Kripke (1940- ), brought him within the
linguistic turn that he had earlier found to be a linguistic idealism.
Lyotard's writings, then, were always on the move and it would
be difficult to form a metanarrative or passkey that brings them all
under a common point of view or set of concerns. Nevertheless, while
he remained a man of his time--always responding and making
advances in the dominant schools of French thought through which he
lived--his work continues to speak to those influenced by those
fields, as well as new movements in Continental realisms, aesthetics,
and posthumanism.


## 3. Major Works


### 3.1 The Limits of Representation



Lyotard's writings of the early 1970s were, it's fair to
say, far less influential at the time than, say, the writings of
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) or Jacques Derrida
(1930-2004). Yet, like Julia Kristeva (1941-), who
developed in well-known articles leading to *The Revolution in
Poetic Language* (1974) the distinction between the semiotic (the
libidinal disruptiveness of bodily motility) and the symbolic (the
structured grammar whose extreme form is mathematics) that together
make language possible, Lyotard was interested in what escapes
discourse but yet needs it to exist, just as there is no pure semiotic
or symbolic language for Kristeva. In *Discourse, Figure*
(1971), Lyotard differentiates discourse, that is, the written text
investigated by semiotics and structuralism, and the figural, that is,
the visual, which he discusses through the phenomenology of
Merleau-Ponty. Lyotard's work was avowedly a shot across the bow
at structuralism, whether found in Lacan's reading of Sigmund
Freud (1856-1939) or Louis Althusser's (1918-1990)
structuralist Marxism. As he put it in a later interview, "I was
against this way of thinking", and for that reason the book was
"ignored at the time because it was explicitly against
structuralism" ("Resisting a Discourse of Mastery",
191). For Lyotard, the emphasis on the written text in structuralism
continues the Western tradition's emphasis on the intellectual
over the sensual. The figural is the disruptive force that is
irreducible to any systemic or linguistic approach to language. For
this reason, Lyotard valorizes the eye and its modes of seeing
figures--shadings of meanings--that cannot be reduced to a
single meaning or representation. The figural is what makes it
impossible to collapse language into pure signification, what Kristeva
would dub the symbolic, and this makes changes in language possible,
as seen in poetry and literature. Discourse and figure, however, are
not opposed but are co-implicated: texts always contain figures
(metaphors and the poetic in general) while visual milieu would be
chaotic without being ordered or structured discursively such that one
can perceptually make one's way about the world. In this way,
what is libidinal and sensual is not, as Lacan argued, structured like
a language, and Lyotard's writings testify to an attunement of
figural events that disrupt pre-given significations.



*Libidinal Economy*, published three years later, is one he
later denounced, but remains an important examination of
desire's place as the driver of the political while also
critiquing political and linguistic models of representation. The book
is very much a reflection of its era: Deleuze and Felix
Guattari's (1930-1992) *Anti-Oedipus* had come out
in 1972, arguing against Freudian accounts of repression while
offering an immanentist ontology whereby all events had to be
accounted for without reference to an outside or be confused with the
representations made of them. Lyotard follows Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900) in arguing that there is no objective science or
forms of knowledge that are not based in a desire or what Nietzsche
called a will for power, a point that Lyotard will make by looking at
the desire or libido behind the so-called scientific works of the
later Marx. *Libidinal Economy* is not an easy read, not least
since it does not wish to set itself up as merely another
philosophical theory hiding its own desires, with a truth easily
representable to others (*Libidinal*, 244). While Freud largely
discussed the libido at the individual level as a form of energy
circulating within the body and necessitating societal laws that led
to the formation of an internal superego keeping these energies in
check, Lyotard greatly extends the idea of the libido to think of
political economy as really a libidinal economy. In sum, he looks to
any stable formations within society as libidinal fields, whether we
are discussing linguistics, economics, or architecture. For
Lyotard, Freud's notion of the pleasure principle (Eros)
provides for this stabilizing effect of the other side of our drives,
namely the death drive (Thanatos), which seeks out intensities,
whether high or low, that destabilize institutions. These
transformations occur through certain techniques
(*dispositifs*, a term important in Foucault's work of
the time) that guide these energies and which are themselves almost
precarious formations of energies themselves: the body, works of art,
financial systems, texts, theoretical systems, and so forth. The
mutations caused by the libidinal economy are events. The libido
itself, its energetics, is never representable or containable within
any given system; all desires are dissimulated in these institutions,
and they are never presentable as they are in themselves. This is
quite similar to what Deleuze and Guattari discuss in terms of
organisms and and the body without organs in *Anti-Oedipus* two
years earlier, and both texts are often read as encouraging these
flows of energy, that is, the creation of the highest intensities,
over forms of organization that tamp down these events. For this
reason, both books will be critiqued as being irresponsibly anarchist.
For Lyotard, structures and institutions tend to totalize and exploit
intensities for their own good, and thus lay claim to all proper
interpretations of these intensities. But where Deleuze and Guattari
differentiate fascistic and liberating forms of desire, Lyotard argues
it is impossible to do so. Hence, for example, he will say that
capitalism is a liberating form of libidinal economy, since it
overthrows all manner of institutions in the name of the accumulation
of more and more money. Against Marx, he argues that our innate
desires are not alienated in capitalism, but rather that capitalism is
another means for the death drive to demolish those entities in its
way, such as when capitalist expansion undoes traditional values and
previous forms of economics. And just as in capitalism, where it
matters not what goods are in circulation as long as there is an
accumulation of capital, desires are neutral as to their locale.
Indeed, later in interviews he will argue for at least passing through
capitalism for those facing economic hardship.
"Capitalism", he will say in 1995, "is the only
solution" for the unemployed and dispossessed, and there is
"no competition" to capitalism for doing so
("Resisting a Discourse of Mastery", 182). Only once one
has a job, food, and housing, he goes on, can "real resistance
appear".



In any event, as Lyotard puts it, there is "not good or bad
intensities, then, but intensity or its decompression"
(*Libidinal*, 42). But this leaves, then, open a question that
haunts other similar projects of the time: if each intensity is not to
be thought outside of itself in terms of some representation or
measure, then what ethics is available when all intensities are only
to be thought in terms of their inherent efficacy? From what place, then,
can one deem one set of intensities or libido economy
"bad" over and against another? If all can and, it seems
in Lyotard's text, should come undone, then are we merely
positing a nihilism?


### 3.2 Justice in light of the Postmodern Condition



As the 1970s progressed, Lyotard moved towards considerations of
justice that could discern among different regimes of intensities,
but only once we acknowledge the changes in the era in which we live.
*The Postmodern Condition* begins by defining the postmodern as
"incredulity towards metanarratives", which is fitting
given that it is a report on knowledge in the contemporary age.
Lyotard means that modernist considerations of education as slowly
developing and emancipating human beings in terms of a common project
where all forms of knowledge ultimately cohere has fallen away and
that we are left merely with "little" or regional
narratives at odds with one another. He writes:



> 
> 
> I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates
> itself with reference to a metadiscourse ... making an explicit
> appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the
> hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working
> subject, or the creation of wealth ... I define postmodern as
> incredulity toward metanarratives. (*Postmodern Condition*,
> xxiii-xxiv)
> 
> 
> 



This is the overarching theme of the book, which also takes up the
crisis of legitimation in the sciences, which often must use
extra-scientific narratives to attempt to place themselves above other
kinds of narration (the arts, novels, philosophy, and so forth) as the
final arbiter of truth, and hence is one of the last metanarratives of
modernity. The problem, Lyotard argues, is that the sciences face two
crises: one of representation, that is, that it cannot be held naively
that its models present to human subjects an accurate view of the
objective world, instead of paradigms in which only certain views of
the world fit and which, within a few years, can be completely
overturned. Like any other particular kind of knowledge, e.g., a
religious or philosophical text, science is unable to move to
transcend its particular modes of discourse in order to claim anything
beyond its own sphere of competence and the rules by which its
language game is played. The second crisis is that science and other
forms of knowledge are being put to the "technological" or
"operativity" criterion (*Postmodern Condition*,
xxv). In this way, the gaining of scientific knowledge is not an end
in itself, in but is in service ultimately to economic motives that
will make certain processes more efficient and others redundant.



The narrative of *The Postmodern Condition* moves along two
temporal periods, one being modernity and its adherence to certain
metanarratives or means of organizing society's chaotic mix of
different language games, the other being the computerization of
knowledge that occurred from the 1950s forward. This would become what
is now called the "information" or "knowledge"
economy, and Lyotard is one of those political thinkers who recognized a changeover
from state-centered forms of liberalism to the neo-liberal,
laissez-faire deregulation of economies just before the Reagan and
Thatcher victories in the United States and United Kingdom. This
computerization of knowledge has not just sped up how knowledge is
transferred, but what we think knowledge is, especially as the
sciences are put almost wholly in service of supplying patents and
know-how for corporations. Lyotard avers that the old model of the
learning of knowledge as a means for making citizens and free agents
of individuals is falling away as knowledge is exteriorized from any
particular individual knowers, and what is considered knowledge will
only be that which can be translated into computerizable language.
"We can predict that anything in the constituted body of
knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be
abandoned", he writes, "and that the direction of new
research will be dictated by the possibility" (*Postmodern
Condition*, 4). Where before nation-states scrambled in
competition for resources, what is now at stake are
"informational commodit[ies]", small packets of
information to be gained and traded under conditions where maximal
efficiency is given absolute privilege (*Postmodern Condition*,
5). Universities, then, will soon give up their roles in providing
training (what the Germans call *Bildung*), instead preparing
their students for becoming managers and creating these packets of
information. No doubt, Lyotard was not the only one to see these
changes coming, but his prescience is notable nonetheless. At the same
time, since multinational corporations are best suited to commodify
information at vast scales, the nation-state will lose its central
political place and indeed purposely abdicate its role in managing
national economies. This reduction of knowledge to that which is
easily translatable and understandable, of course, is what drives
globalization, and the leading economies, as Lyotard notes, will not
be those engaged in manufacturing traditional commodities but instead
those created and utilized through modern computing. 



> 
> 
> Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to
> productive power is already, and will continue to be, a
> major--perhaps the major--stake in the worldwide competition
> for power. (*Postmodern Condition*, 5) 
> 
> 
> 



One need only see the decimation of the U.S.'s rust belt
communities and the outsized economic and political role of Silicon
Valley and the banking sectors in London and New York as proof of
Lyotard's claims. But these changes have another effect as well:
these centers adjudicate what knowledge is, and one need only witness
often fruitless attempts by humanities departments to prove themselves
valuable to employers in the digital economy as evidence of this.



Lyotard offers that the postmodern, as he sees it, ought to look for
what is irreducible to commodification, that which is unpresentable
within the "realism" of today (*Postmodern
Condition*, 73-9). That which is taken to be real and most
natural is the formation of knowledge in terms understandable by
capitalist economics and its modes of efficiency. Lyotard, then,
argues for forms of avant-gardism that seek what is unpresentable in
the present. Books by James Joyce (1882-1941), no doubt, can be treated like a commodity like any other, but
open up onto a plurality of meanings. One could read Joyce's
*Ulysses* (1922) in the service of having dinner party patter,
but such postmodern works ultimately evade any simple meaning to pass
along in such idle chatter. Here is how Lyotard famously defines the
postmodern more positively than being merely a disbelief in
metanarratives:



> 
> 
> The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the
> unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the
> solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it
> possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable;
> that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them
> but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. A
> postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the
> text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by
> pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a
> determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text.
> (*Postmodern Condition*, 81)
> 
> 
> 



In sum, while there are a heterogeneity of language games through which
we pass, artists, writers, and philosophers make moves within those
language games--say those said to govern what a novel
is--that disrupt and open those language games to what
"will have been", as he puts it. That is, they open up new
ways of thinking that are unpresentable in current language games.
"Terror", as he understands it, is "a fantasy to
seize reality", that is to colonize or totalize all other
language games and their future possibilities under the regime of one
language game (e.g., the technocratic language game of efficiency
[*Postmodern Condition*, 67]). On this flip side of this terror
are those that are "witnesses to the unpresentable", who
wish to "activate the difference" beyond and between the
plurality of language games that make up postmodern societies
(*Postmodern Condition*, 82).



Published the same year as *The Postmodern Condition*,
Lyotard's *Just Gaming* (*Au juste*) is short, but
nevertheless deserves its place among a canon of important
20th-century texts on justice, along with his *The Differend*.
After *Libidinal Economy*, through a series of shorter works,
Lyotard argued that we live again in pagan societies with many gods to
be worshipped. By this he means that we live among and through a
variety of language games (science, art, politics, and so on)
(*Just Gaming*, 36). His main argument, though, is that
"we judge without criteria" (*Just Gaming*, 14),
that is, there are no ontological or theoretical foundations for our
ethical and political claims for justice (*Just Gaming*, 44).
In this way, he radicalizes David Hume's (1711-1776) claim
that one cannot derive an "ought" from an
"is". Just because there is a certain set of circumstances
that we can denotate does not prescribe for us what to do in light of
those conditions. Lyotard's answers in this set of interviews to
his interlocutor, Jean-Loup Thebaud, the editor of the French
journal *L'esprit*, attempt to thread a tricky political
needle: he recognizes that in postmodernity, there is no
metanarrative, no onto-theology, as Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
would call it, that can ground prescriptive statements. Yet, leaving
behind any foundation for prescriptive statements does not leave us
unable to speak to what is just and unjust. For Lyotard, following
Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), we are nothing but the receivers
of obligations. For Levinas, that meant that ethics was first
philosophy and we were always passive to the Other who came before us.
But Lyotard argues, though, that ethics cannot be first philosophy,
but is but one language game among others. And yet it is not
*nothing*, since we are pulled into the pragmatics and practice
of this particular language game that calls on us to make judgments.
What is unjust, Lyotard avers,



> 
> 
> occur[s] if the pragmatics of obligation, that is, the possibility of
> continuing to play the game of the just, were excluded. That is what
> is unjust. Not the opposite of the just, but that which prohibits that
> the question of the just and the unjust be, and remain, raised. Thus,
> obviously, all terror, annihilation, massacre, etc., or their threat,
> are, by definition, unjust. (*Just Gaming*, 66-7)
> 
> 
> 



In this way, there can be prescriptives after the "death of
God", as Nietzsche called it, and the era of paganism that arose
in its place (*Just Gaming*, 36). What is unjust is the violent
silencing of those raising claims to justice and disallowing them from
making prescriptive claims, such as those colonized and left unheard
by hegemonic powers.



For Lyotard, there is "no knowledge in the matter of
ethics", nor is there a theoretical truth to adhere to in
politics. Rather, politics is a matter of a diversity of opinions, as
the non-Platonic Greeks believed, and is about nothing but this
plurality of opinions. The ability to judge is a "power to
invent criteria", that is, create new rules not recognized by
the dominant modes of thinking politics. This claim brings
Lyotard's thinking of the political close to Hannah
Arendt's thinking of action and her notion of "thinking
without banisters" after modernity's loss of authority.
Politics, she believed, became ideological at best and totalitarian at
worst if wedded to notions of truth, such as involved in the
metanarratives of Marxist economic theory and its inexorable laws of
history, or the racist theories of Nazism. The task, for Lyotard, is
to see that questions of justice and prescriptive language games are
not simply about obeying laws. Rather, the task is to develop an
attunement to the plurality of opinions and language games. "We
have to judge case by case", he avers, pointing to Aristotelian
*phronesis* or practical wisdom as a model, but without an
overarching community telos as in Aristotle's (384-422
BCE) *Nichomachean Ethics* (*Just Gaming*, 47). Even
such seemingly universal prescriptions, such as "thou shall not
kill", are anything but, since exceptions are invariably made
concerning those lives that are to be taken in terms of the death
penalty or in war. The point, then, is not that Lyotard's
"pagan" ethics and politics leads to irresponsibility, but
the opposite. If it were just a matter of having a sure knowledge or
absolute set of laws to follow, then politics would be pre-programmed
and there would be no judgment worthy of the name.


### 3.3 *The Differend*



Shortly after completing *Libidinal Economy*, Lyotard began
nine years of efforts crafting his masterwork, *The Differend*
(1983). The book begins with a "Reading Dossier" that sets
out clearly the question, theses, context, addressee, and so forth of
the work in separate paragraphs. The context, he argues, is the
linguistic turn in philosophy, and his avowed method is to engage
political disputes on the model of linguistic affairs
(*Differend*, xiii). The book itself contains 264 numbered
paragraphs, building on arguments he had been making in the years
leading up to the work. The major change is that Lyotard no longer
uses the term "language games", which led some readers to
think that subjects could be outside these games as players. Lyotard
is clear that subjects are only such in the way that they move and are
produced by moves within different language games. The
"object", of *The Differend* will be
"phrases", which are indubitable since "to doubt
that one phrases is still to phrase", he argues, since even
"one's silence makes a phrase" (*Differend*,
11).



Despite this linguistic model, phrases may be extralinguistic,
including the very gestures, shadings, and libidinal energetics he had
discussed in his earlier writings. Anything, then, can be a phrase in
Lyotard's understanding. For every phrase, there is a regimen
within which it exists, the possible significations of that phrase,
the referent of the phrase, the one from whom the phrase arrives, and
the addressee, the one to whom the phrase is addressed. Within each
phrase regimen, there is a certain play, since there may be
ambiguities along each aspect above. Any reader of Twitter knows the
problem: is this meant as irony? In the form of a question? Who is
being addressed and why? Only with continual phrases, linked to the
initial phrase, does the initial ambiguity become clearer, but of
course, with these newer phrases, further ambiguities may take place,
since they face the same problems as the initial phrase. Nevertheless
there are rules followed within phrase regimens such that certain
phrases are allowable while others are not. Lyotard writes:



> 
> 
> There are a number of phrase regimens: knowing, describing,
> recounting, questioning, showing, ordering. etc. Phrases from
> heterogeneous regimens cannot be translated from one into the other.
> They can be linked one onto the other in accordance with an end fixed
> by the a genre of discourse ...Genres of discourse supply rules
> for linking together heterogeneous phrases, rules that are proper for
> attaining certain goals: to know, to teach, to be just, to seduce, to
> justify, to evaluate, to rouse emotion, to oversee.
> (*Differend*, xii).
> 
> 
> 



This notion of linkages is important. Links follow the rules of the
particular regimen or genre, while linking different phrases together
is "the problem of politics" (*Differend*, xiii).
Linking phrases, he says, is necessary but contingent in how it is
done (*Differend*, 29). Linkages among phrases occur within
genres, and these links are successful when the goals of the discourse
are met: one seduces another, a question is met with an answer, or an
economic exchange is performed. Yet these rules only apply within
specific genres and there are no rules for how to make links between
the different genres themselves. Lyotard argues that within genres, we
cannot help but make linkages, and the hope is to escape the problem
of what Lyotard calls a differend, where one move makes a link from
within one discourse in other to colonize, that is, silence, another.
Thus, though we cannot do anything other than make linkages among
phrases and create new events, hegemonic discourses or grand
narratives often want to pre-program how those links are to be made
and thus control all future phrases or events (*Differend*,
80).



This is not to say that links within regimens are not without
conflict: within the regimen of parliamentary democracy, within courts
of law, within art criticism, there are always forms of
"litigation" where one takes the rules within that genre
and apply them to a particular case and arguments ensue. For example,
to use the court example from which Lyotard borrows his term, in court
one may use rules of evidence, case law, and so forth both in
defending and prosecuting a certain defendant, all of which remains
within the regimen of criminal law, and even if there are
"damages"--one loses--one has at least been
given one's "rights" within that phrase regimen.
This is not the case where there is a differend
(*differend*):



> 
> 
> As distinguished from a litigation, a differend would be a case of
> conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be resolved for
> lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both of the arguments. One
> side's legitimacy does not imply the other's lack of legitimacy.
> However, applying a single rule of judgement to both in order to
> settle their differend as though it were merely a litigation would
> wrong (at least) one of them (and both of them if neither side admits
> this rule). (*Differend*, xi)
> 
> 
> 



Lyotard offers a number of examples of differends: the relation of
colonizer and the colonized or between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat, but he opens *The Differend* with the case of the
French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, who claimed that the only
testimony that he would accept would be that of someone who had
actually been through the gas chambers. This, of course, sets off a
differend since to have seen the gas chambers in operation would be to
have been its victim, and thus silences all other genres, the various
linkages of communication within the genre of history, for example,
that would testify to the Shoah. One set of phrases is absolutely
incommunicable with the other. But this does not mean that there is an
"equivalence" between the discourse of the denier and the
discourses of historians and survivors alike. Lyotard's response
to this problem is complicated. He argues, not always persuasively,
that the Nazis were in many ways successful in destroying the means by
which historians adduce historical events: they not only killed their
victims and destroyed their bodies, but also the paperwork and
buildings that would be evidence of their crimes. "The
result", he writes, "is that one cannot adduce numerical
proof of the massacre and that a historian pleading for the trial's
revision will be able to object at great length that the crime has not
been established in its quantity" (*Differend*, 56). But
the task of justice, he claims, is not to let the Nazis or their
modern apologists claim a relativism of different discourses. Lyotard
argues that Auschwitz offers something that is unpresentable in the
presentation of history itself: an inverted sublime, a horror so
infinite that a "silence" is "imposed on
knowledge", though it does "not impose the silence of
forgetting" (*Differend*, 56). Indeed, he says, it
imposes a sentiment, if not an obligation: 



> 
> 
> The silence that surrounds the phrase, Auschwitz was the extermination
> camp is not a state of mind, is the sign that something remains to be
> phrased which is not. (*Differend*, 57) 
> 
> 
> 



In other words, the Shoah leaves us silent before its void, since it
does not belong to any previous political phrase regimen or means for
representing it. To represent it is to misrepresent it, and hence any
regime is going to leave this powerful silence always on the edge of
any discourse about it. From his early work on phenomenology through
*Discourse, Figure*, *Libidinal Economy*, and *The
Postmodern Condition*, Lyotard argued that events occur always in
the face of what is not presentable to a phenomenology, discourse,
language game, or phrase regimen. An event, if it occurs, is not
simply unforseeable within any of these, but in fact explodes our
ability to represent them within any language game or phrase regimen.
The Shoah is one such event.



The political import of differends is easy to see: Israelis and
Palestinians are not "litigating" a
"political" impasse, but have completely different phrase
regimens within which situations are interpreted and understood, and
they are completely irreconcilable. There is no link to be found
between the genre of discourse of the Apartheid South Africa and those
who were silenced and violently suffered under white hegemony. There
is, in these cases, no possibility for litigation, since one side has
no right to claim justice within the dominant language of the
political regime. This is what Lyotard had in earlier works called
"terror" and in *The Differend* calls a wrong:



> 
> 
> This is what a wrong would be: a damage accompanied by the lose of the
> means to prove the damage. This is the case if the victim is deprived
> of life, or all of his or her liberties, or of the freedom to make his
> or her ideas or opinions public, or simply the right to testify to the
> damage... In all of these cases, to the privation constituted by
> the damage there is added the impossibility of bringing it to the
> knowledge of others. (*Differend*, 5)
> 
> 
> 



This should not be taken to mean that linkages cannot eventually be
made, that justice cannot be done in spite of a differend. But new
phrases regimens will need to be invented, new gestures or ways of
existing together will have to be found, to get around this
incommensurability. In fact, the cause of justice means that one
phrase regimen (e.g., that of the Apartheid government) will need to
be rooted out in order for its hegemony to end. For Lyotard, then, the
politics of the differend does not call for valuing different
discourses equally or one recognizing another, since, of course,
conflict occurs precisely where neither side finds meaning in the
phrase regimen of the other. Lyotard thus does not model the different
phrase regimens as a marketplace of ideas, since the existence of one
phrase regimen may mean the violent silencing of another.



This is what gives us the ability to name the unjust. The plurality of
phrase regimens is a fact, and what is unjust or wrong would be
precisely using one phrase regimen to silence that of others, to
introduce a localized narrative as a metanarrative that would put all
others in their place and render them mute and unseen. The postmodern
obligation, then, as we saw at the end of *The Postmodern
Condition*, is, yes, to deny "reality", but only as
that reality tends to be defined by hegemonic discourses, not the
plenitude of plural ways of being in the world.


### 3.4 The Inhuman and the Event



Returning to themes in *The Postmodern Condition*, 1988's
*The Inhuman* returns to the problems of consumer capitalism.
This set of essays, most first given as lectures, are remarkable in
their literary and philosophical quality, with each indirectly, as the
subtitle suggests, taking up the problem of temporality, that is, our
openness to the unphraseable events given in a future worthy of the
name. Like other French thinkers of his day, Lyotard was a
thoroughgoing critic of humanism and its pretension to define and thus
limit what the human was to be. *The Inhuman* begins by
dissociating two forms that the "inhuman" has taken in
postmodernity: on the one hand, there is the dehumanizing inhumanism
of contemporary capitalism and its reduction of the human to modes of
efficiency and the needs of the technocratic order, specifically
through the ideology of "development". Under this rubric,
what is dubbed the human is constrained to become more like machines
in their functioning, or indeed that the machines we have built will
replace us in terms of the thinking we thought integral to the human
being. The opening essay, "Can Thought Go on without a
Body?" takes this up as the ultimate dream of technoscience,
arguing, in a dialogue between a "he" and a
"she", that "the sole serious question to face
humanity today" is the fact that in 4.5 billion years, the sun
will burn out and take all of human thought, including the entire
archive that human beings ever existed, with it (*Inhuman*, 9).
Techno-science, the "he" claims, has its telos in escaping
this fate, which "he" calls a "pure event",
one that, in the terms of *The Differend*, could never be put
into a phrase since no one would be there to think it. "All the
events and disasters we're familiar with and try to think
of", "he" writes, "will end up as no more than
pale simulacra" (*Inhuman*, 11). While hyperbolic,
Lyotard's surmise is that technoscience is driven by a need to
conquer our being-towards-death and indeed, the possibility of the
ultimate finitude of any living-on of any memory or history of
humanity marked by the coming solar catastrophe. Digital technologies
offer the hope of a becoming-inhuman of thought, of thought going on
without a body, one that "she" offers would have to
transcend "the differend of gender" and corporeal
existence (*Inhuman*, 22-3). "She" argues
that suffering and pain can only exist within a body, and thus any
impetus to resistance to the literal programming of phrase regimens
(computer programming being the most purified form of what Lyotard had
called discourse in *Discourse, Figure*) would disappear. This
surmise is no longer hyperbolic: there are myriad research programs in
Silicon Valley and elsewhere for performing precisely what Lyotard
suggests, namely making thought go on without a body, though whether
one could call this thought in the full sense is precisely why Lyotard
calls this the "sole question" facing humanity, given that
it goes to what we mean by the word human.



Against this notion of the inhuman, akin to what Lyotard years earlier
had called the figural, is the inventiveness of another form of the
inhuman, what would get us beyond the human of humanism and its grand
narratives. This event is one that Lyotard links to the youth of the
child, since it has ever present possibilities that are nevertheless
not presentable or speakable within the phrase regimens of the
present, and thus provides a site of resistance to the dominant modes
of "reality". "Being prepared to receive what
thought is not prepared to think", he writes, "is what
deserves the name of thinking" (*Inhuman*, 73). This form
of the inhuman, against those who would think of Lyotard as a
celebrant of the 1960s death of man and the end of humanism, stands as
a testament to the inventiveness of the human and its irreducibility
to the machinic--to the point where it can transcend what we
thought the human was to be. As in *Discourse, Figure*, it is
not that one form of the inhuman exists without the other: the
technical and the artistic are not easily separable, and the arts
survive using techniques and known grammars in order to coming into
being. This is why Lyotard argues that the postmodern, despite
suggestions otherwise in *The Postmodern Condition*, is not a
"period" that comes after the modern. On his view, the
postmodern is that which exists within the modern itself.



In any case, computerization seeks the repetition of what exists now
in modes of efficiency, while the child in the human is open to
possibilities of the future, the events to come that cannot be
programmed or pre-figured. To attempt the latter, Lyotard claims
throughout his later works, is an attempt to control and therefore
escape time:



> 
> 
> [I]t must never be forgotten that if thinking indeed consists in
> receiving the event, it follows that no-one can claim to think without
> being *ipso facto* in a position of resistance to the
> procedures for controlling time. To think is to question everything,
> including thought, and question, and the process. To question requires
> that something happen that reason has not yet known. In thinking, one
> accepts the occurrence for what it is: "not yet"
> determined. (*Inhuman*, 74)
> 
> 
> 



In the *Inhuman*, Lyotard thinks the event not through the
phrase "What is happening", which presumes that all one
has to do is await a form of information, as one does when watching
television news. Rather the event arrives, as suggested above, through
a questioning, specifically the question "is it happening"
("*arrive-t-il*?"), which opens up the possibility
that "nothing might happen" (*Inhuman*, 92). This
is the terror and pleasure found in Immanuel Kant's
(1724-1804) account of the sublime in *The Critique of
Judgment* (1790), wherein one experiences a feeling that explodes
one's capacities for imagination and causes both pleasure and
displeasure at once (*Inhuman*, 85). This, for Lyotard, is at
the heart of all creation, which comes with the 



> 
> 
> misery that the painter faces with a plastic surface, of the musician
> with the acoustic surface, the misery the thinker faces with a desert
> of thought, and so on. (*Inhuman*, 91)
> 
> 
> 



Barnett Newman's (1905-1970) paintings, which often are
merely monochromatic with single, straight "zips" or lines
traversing them, is a paradigm of this. Newman's paintings offer
the "postmodern sublime", for Lyotard. Everything in
Newman's paintings arrives in an instant, yet what arrives is
what Lyotard calls the postmodern: the unpresentable in presentation
itself. The paintings have no allusions, no modernist story to them.
To their surfaces one can only ask "is it happening?" Any
answer to the question fails since it would be attempting to represent
what is not offered in the painting itself. In this way, the
postmodern artist is modernist in the sense of seeking out what is
new, not according to pre-established phrase regimens, but by
exploring means for finding what cannot be articulated within
*any* phrase regimens. Lyotard's essays on Newman have
had an indelible impact on aesthetics and understanding what has been
underway in so-called postmodern art. When spectators complain that
postmodern artists do not present anything to be understood or that
their works withstand interpretation, Lyotard's claim is that
this is precisely the point: to stand against being recuperated within
dominant modes of thinking. This is the ultimate argument that art is
for art's sake. Art need not provide a political message,
represent reality properly, or morally guide us. Rather postmodern art
would be that taking place of a self-enclosed event that withstands
interpretation and is irreducible, as art, to any use value.


## 4. The Future of Lyotard



Lyotard's writings have been seen as paradigmatic of the
excesses of "high theory" in the 1970s and 1980s. His
account of language games and refusal to allow any to have a grip on
reality is supposed by his critics to have helped usher in a
"post-fact" world. Yet Lyotard's claims, as he well
knew, were not far from the anti-realisms of those in Anglo-American
philosophy influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, such as Michael Dummett
(1925-2011), who at the time Lyotard was writing argued that
claims to reality were merely moves within a given conceptual scheme
and there was no test external to these schemes for corresponding that
scheme to an external reality. Though this led Dummett to an
anti-realist position on time, following J. M. E. McTaggart
(1866-1925), Lyotard's thinking of phrase regimens and
their limits were meant to testify, as *The Inhuman* makes
clear, to human finitude and the unassailable coming of the future and
the simplicity of events. The future, as such, is not something that
can be predicted from the present, since this would only be a present
imagined into the future. Lyotard, especially in *The Postmodern
Condition*, assailed realisms, but always from the point of view
that these "realisms" want to pre-program and thus
disallow the coming of events. In this way, from the beginning of his
career to its end, Lyotard never argued that all was socially
constructed, that all language games had equal validity, or that we
are locked within the prison house of language. Rather, all of his
works attempt to testify to that which escapes language, though we
never stop attempting to articulate this excess. This leads to a
dizzying array of differences among and between phrase regimens, and
Lyotard's work was to testify to the fact of these differences
and the injustices of differends where these differences are silenced.
The postmodern, then, bears witness not to the fact that there are no
facts, but rather that those claiming a passkey to reality merely want
to make a claim for the hegemony of one phrase regimen (e.g., the
sciences or techno-capitalism) over all others.