The French philosopher Lyotard has become internationally famous for his work on post-modernity. In The Postmodern Condition (1979) he showed how the identification of knowledge with representation, characteristic of modern societies, reduces the variety of actions we perform in language to denotation. Language then becomes a set of statements that can be treated as things, as commodities in capitalist societies. For Lyotard, rational knowledge is no longer the basis for critique, nor does it hold out the possibility of emancipation, as the modern thinkers of the Enlightenment had promised. Auschwitz, he has said (Lyotard 1986), is the metaphor of modernity. Knowledge is a western narrative of terror, in so far as it aims at silencing the other possible stories by presenting itself as the only legitimate, true account of events (Lyotard 1979; 1986).
Born in Versailles on 10 August 1924, Lyotard studied philosophy with Ferdinand Alquié, Maurice de Gandillac and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His first book was an introduction to phenomenology, and phenomenology remains a significant influence in all Lyotard’s work. He accepts and develops the phenomenological idea that the Cartesian cogito, the reflective I, is an embodied, particular subject in a temporal ‘situation’. Knowledge and truth are human, relative to a certain context, and derive from a lived world of experiences that are never fully comprehended. At the time of La Phénoménologie (1954), Lyotard was still trying to overcome what he saw as the major failure of phenomenology, namely its political ambiguities. The conclusion of the book was a militant appeal to recast phenomenology as a Marxist philosophy.
Nevertheless, Lyotard’s relationship with Marxism was ambivalent. From 1956 to 1963 Lyotard contributed to the journal Socialisme and Barbaric, a publication well known for its trenchant, though still Marxist, critique of the USSR and the French Communist Party, and, in later writings (Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud, 1973) he began to argue that Marxist claims to possess a universal truth is not an alternative to ideology, to illusion, but a tool for domination.
For a while Lyotard celebrated instinctual desire as an alternative to reason, a position that makes Des dispositifs pulsionnels (1973) and Economic libidinale (1974) uncomfortable reading. It was only when he came to characterize judgement as a faculty of reason distinct from knowledge, that his critique of modernity, initially called ‘paganism’, and then ‘post-modernity’, gained its distinctive tone (Au Juste, Lyotard and Thébaud 1979).
Post-modernity does not speak ‘in the name of the people or for our emancipation. Politics is not a science; it is not the representation of the true nature of beings or the true will of the people. Politics is an arena where judgements must be made, without recourse to absolute criteria, universal theories, or ideal consensus. Lyotard’s understanding of politics as the art of making judgements is an attempt to do justice to the heterogeneity and incommensurability of perspectives, and a challenge to the characteristic modern certainty that there are sure and reliable solutions to political problems (L’Inhumain, 1988).
Lyotard’s writings on art and language are aspects of his concern with rhetorics, that is, with the expression of ideas and feelings that escape rational discourse. Art experiments with the possibility of representation, sometimes inventing new modes of representation (modernism), and sometimes presenting the unpresentable, showing what cannot be said (post-modernism) (Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, 1986). Language does not simply denote a world of objects; rather, in language we perform a variety of actions, what Wittgenstein called ‘language games’. Lyotard has stressed the agonistic dimension of these games and recognized the irreconcilable nature of what he calls ‘phrases’ in language (Le Différend, 1983).
It is still unclear whether in his critique of modernity Lyotard does indeed overcome relativism. His approach to language and human action as incommensurable, contextual games seems, inevitably, to lead to relativism. His refusal of the universal claims of grand theories as narratives that attempt to legitimize particular pespectives leaves him within the limits of his own small narrative. Given this framework, Lyotard’s achievement is his demand to think anew what justice could mean when no longer associated with a theory of knowledge. This move brings the issues of ethics and politics back on to the post-modernist agenda.
Emilia Steuerman
Brunel University
References
Lyotard, J.F. (1954) La Phénoménologie, Paris.
——(1973) Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud, Paris.
——(1973) Des dispositifs pulsionnels, Paris.
——(1974) Economic libidinale, Paris.
——(1979) La Condition postmoderne, Paris. 1979. (The Postmodern Condition, Minneapolis, MN, 1983.)
——(1983) Le Différend, Paris. (The Different, Minneapolis, MN, 1988.)
——(1986) Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, Paris. (The Postmodern Explained, Minneapolis, MN 1992.)
——(1988) L’Inhumain, Paris. (The Inhuman, Cambridge, UK, 1991.)
Lyotard, J.F. and Thébaud, J.L. (1979) Au Juste, Paris. (Just Gaming, Minneapolis, MN, 1985.)
Further reading
Benjamin, A. (ed.) (1992) Judging Lyotard, London.
Lyotard, J.F. (ed.) (1985) La Faculté de Juger, Paris.
