SOURCE: “The Differends of Man,” in Diacritics, Vol. 19, Nos. 3-4, Fall-Winter, 1989, pp. 63-75.

In the following essay, Ronell discusses the meanings of the term “différend” as Lyotard applies it to connections and disconnections made in the exchange of language and “phrases.”

1.

Lyotard has observed that Nazism, when it was “over,” was let down like a rabid dog but never as such refuted. To be sure, a number of persuasive assertions have been made, analyses have been attempted, and an indisputable sense of justice has seemed to reinstall itself. Still, these do not provide philosophical proof or a rigorous guarantee of the intelligibility of the Nazi disaster. In fact, the recourse to the sublime, to modalities of the unthinkable and uncontrolled, suggest to us that Nazism continues to place us before what Walter Benjamin has called Denkfaulheit: a failure or falling off of thinking, a kind of lethargy...