In The Differend, Lyotard subjects to scrutiny- from the particular perspective of his notion of 'differend' - the turn of all Western philosophies toward language; the decline of metaphysics; the present intellectual retreat of Marxism; the hopes raised and mostly dashed, by theory; and the growing political despair. Taking his point of departure in an analysis of what Auschwitz meant philosophically, Lyotard attempts to sketch out modes of thought for our present.

This paper relates to Lyotard's philosophy of a différend. The paper has a dual purpose. The first is to explain what is meant by a différend and also a petit différend. The intention here is to preserve both the intrinsic validity and ethico-political value of the concept in cases where its legitimacy might easily be denied. This feeds into the second and main purpose of the paper, which is to testify to a petit différend in quality of care, so that (...) care may be taken in how the term ‘quality of care’ is actually used. It is here that the implications of a petit différend in quality of care are opened up from the perspective of cared-for and professional carers, respectively. It will be shown that the idea of quality of care is open to multiple interpretations, and therefore to disputes that judgement cannot resolve to the satisfaction of all parties. (shrink)

In The Differend, Lyotard subjects to scrutiny- from the particular perspective of his notion of 'differend' - the turn of all Western philosophies toward language; the decline of metaphysics; the present intellectual retreat of Marxism; the hopes raised and mostly dashed, by theory; and the growing political despair. Taking his point of departure in an analysis of what Auschwitz meant philosophically, Lyotard attempts to sketch out modes of thought for our present.

This article uses Ronald Dworkin's argument for the unity of value to explore the redemptive core of modern legal order. Dworkin establishes a formal unity: all legal claims reside within a linked framework of moral justification. However, Jean-Francois Lyotard's concept of the differend exposes a lingering gap. Arguments within a moral universe do inevitably converge, but such unity is only possible due to the formative violence enactedbysuch orders. Dworkin hopes to provide the definitive statement against moral subjectivity, but in (...) its purest form, he proves precisely the opposite. The lesson to draw from Dworkin's work is that ‘justice’ is ultimately only the means by which political orders categorize and thereby sustain their own formative acts of exclusion under the guise of offering their redemption. (shrink)

L’examen du différend entre Descartes et Malebranche sur la connaissance que l’esprit a de lui-même sera l’occasion d’éclaircir la doctrine de l’esprit qui s’élabore dans les Méditations, la complexité de celle-ci ayant suscité et continuant de susciter de nombreux malentendus qu’on essaiera, en l’analysant dans toutes ses articulations, de dissiper. Une telle analyse, qui pourra paraître austère en sa technicité, n’intéresse cependant pas exclusivement l’historien de la philosophie, elle intéresse plus largement tout philosophe soucieux de se comprendre lui-même comme l’esprit (...) qu’il est, c’est-à-dire en sa constitutive liberté. (shrink)

The Holocaust serves as a foundational critical resource in postwar philosophy. Interventions into the logic of its exemplarity tend to treat exemplarity as a matter of archival selection that ignores earlier histories of genocide and slavery. A recent example is Alexander Weheliye’s critique of Giorgio Agamben, which seeks to restitute racial slavery as a theoretically significant moment of biological precarity. In a continuation of this logic, this essay introduces the history of Indian Ocean slavery, which precedes transatlantic slavery but is (...) comparatively lesser known. In doing so, I suggest that complaints against archival selection do not go far enough, for they do not address the problem of a kind of event whose very nature is to destroy its own archive. Reading Jean-François Lyotard’s differend as a critique of the modern genre-supremacy of historiography, I argue that the very ground of historical examples demonstrates the regressive nature of exemplarity itself. (shrink)

In this paper I begin by suggesting that Immanuel Kant’s argument for the impermissibility of treating others with contempt seems to be subject to a paradox very similar to the well known paradox of forgiveness first described by Aurel Kolnai. Specifically, either the object of the judgment of contempt is not really contemptible, in which case the prohibition on treating him with contempt is superfluous, or else the person truly is contemptible, in which case the prohibition seems unjustifiable, reducing to (...) a mere condonation of wrongdoing. My goal in the paper is to show that this paradox is only apparent. Making use of the philosophy of phrases that Jean-François Lyotard develops in The Differend—emphasizing especially the ideas of phrase-event, presentation, situation, addressor, and addressee—I argue that the Kantian prohibition on treating others with contempt is rationally defensible, even in cases in which we believe the object of the judgment of contempt truly is contemptible. (shrink)

Kant describes a conflict among the different theories of knowledge. A productive conflict whose emergence is the origin of a renewal: it awakens the spirit and it leads it to think critically. Philosophy becomes critique, Kant says, when it is not focused on the doctrines and on their demands, but on the relationship between general rules (the “sense”) that coordinates all the faculties – and their particular expression, that is to say the specific cases. Similarly operates the judge, that, in (...) court, has to invent (ausdenken) the rule capable of corresponding to the single case: a judge that, in order to decide (jus dicere) and utter the decision, tries to compensate the absence of adequate legal rules and often decides without the adapt general rule. The problem of the différend does not concern, thus, anthropology. It concerns language. Exemplary cases provide analoga of the sensitive data and are devices that allow the dialectic between different systems of value by connecting their core meaning, the proper names involved and what Kant defines the Darstellung. Nevertheless, against this background, a change of paradigm becomes necessary – a change that entails the break with hegelian philosophy of law and with a thought built on mediation, that is to say with the kantian Zusammenstimmung. It is not possible, nor desirable, to substitute the battle field with the court and to subordinate the individual interests to the general logic of argumentation, because the synthesis of the different voices might imply totalitarianism and the end of the différend might correspond to the beginning of terror. (shrink)

This paper examines the philosophy of Jean-Francois Lyotard in relation to the analytic philosophy of deep disagreement. It argues not just that his work has relevance for this debate, but that it offers a challenge to the ‘epistemic paradigm’ present in its academic literature, represented by the two most prominent sets of theories within it – the ‘fundamental epistemic principle’ and ‘hinge epistemology’ views, arguably most strongly represented by Michael Lynch and Duncan Pritchard, respectively. Focussing on Lyotard’s text ‘The (...) class='Hi'>Differend’, I show how its conceptual framework and philosophy of language locates the cause of deep disagreement not in the epistemic realm, but in things which do not fully submit to epistemic evaluation: the radically incomplete and open nature of language, and our increasingly politically pluralistic world full of incommensurable differences that do not always admit of rational resolution. Lyotard’s work calls for us to conceptualize deep disagreements as problems of politics, not epistemology, and to find new ways of dealing with disagreements that do not force a solution on them (which often comes at the cost of one party being wronged, or worse) and to create new ways of speaking so that our collective conceptual resources can be increased to better deal with specific cases of dispute. Lyotard’s relevance for the philosophy of deep disagreement is also further discussed with references to Miranda Fricker’s work on ‘epistemic injustice’, which Lyotard, in a different vocabulary, is also concerned with and analyses in ‘The Differend’. (shrink)

Dans l’introduction l’article présente, basé sur l’oeuvre de Michael Devitt, les positions ontologiques opposantes, réalisme et constructivisme. L ’un insiste que la nature du monde soit indépendante de notre appareil conceptuel, du langage ou des théories scientifiques, tandis que l’autre affirme qu’elle en soit dépendante. L a portion centrale de l’article essaie de montrer que le différend entre réalisme et constructivisme est insoluble, au moyen d’une expérience de pensée suivi par la réfutation des arguments des constructivistes et des réalistes les (...) plus importants. L es vues de Hilary Putnam sont pareillement brièvement examinées et rejetées. En conclusion on soutient, se référant partiellement aux arguments de Carnap, que le différend ne peut pas être résolu, que c’est une antinomie à la Kant, et que être un réaliste ou un constructiviste est par conséquent une question de décision. En course de l’article une vue est aussi exprimée sur la nature de la philosophie. (shrink)

For Lyotard, “Auschwitz” is named only as the terrible sign of a differend. However, this paper argues that the dissymmetrical address alluded to in a 1993 lecture given by Lyotard for Amnesty, “The Other’s Rights,” makes possible an alternative legacy found in the very formation of civil politics which might itself “rephrase” this differend otherwise, transforming what may be termed “distress” into “rights” without recourse to the type of contractuality that would risk both repressing and compounding a “wrong” (...) by seeking to litigate it. (shrink)

Lyotard's notion of the differend can be analysed as a philosophical theory of radical disputes, that is, disputes with no possible resolution other than the silencing of one of the parties. The concept is explicitly meant to shed light on ethical, historical and political debates, while literature and psychoanalysis are strikingly absent from this theory. However, the concept of the differend is crucial to Lyotard's own discussions of literature and art. Developing from a reading of some of his (...) texts on literature and art and on psychoanalysis, this essay shows how the concept of the differend operates in Lyotard's understanding and appreciation of literature and art, in order to then ask how the differend can help us think issues of ‘modernity’, ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ in terms other than those of literary history, and can help us think experimental writings and artistic practices of the twentieth century in terms other than those of provocation or scandal. (shrink)

Kafka’s The Trial describes how K slowly loses his familiar language. He does speak a language but his language becomes monologic towards others and the language of others becomes monologic towards K. There seems to be no other person who, in a private and professional life, can respond to K’s words and gestures in a manner which K can understand. The others embody their own meanings into K’s words. Such meanings only possess value within the discourses of self-styled legal experts (...) and officials who act in K’s name. The officials and experts assume that their own meanings are authoritative. K fails to gain access to their meanings. The question posed by Husserl’s phenomenology of language is ‘why?’ Conklin argues that K’s experiences seem not unlike Lyotard’s sense of a different or ‘untranslatable gap’. K remains on the fringe or outside what the experts take as an authoritative language. As a consequence, K’s experiential body slowly dies. This death paradoxically occurs at the same moments that the experts believe that they are addressing ‘K’s case’. Conklin explains the paradox by retrieving Husserl’s sense of a meaning-conferring act and the failure of K’s meaning-conferring acts from being fulfilled in the language of the legal experts. (shrink)

To apply oneself to Derrida's comprehension of “law,” to probe the connections between Derrida and law, raises a seemingly insurmountable challenge for anyone wishing to elucidate what the conjunction masks as it brings not‐together the inscription of a proper noun in the French language and that of a noun in the English language. To be sure, one cannot speak of a history, but only of histories. Derrida acknowledged that the word “law” can point to significance as it issues “from morality, (...) from legality or from politics, even from nature”. Derrida's lesson in the dismantling of positivism's hegemonic distortions is powerful. The first manifestation of Derrida's positivism pertains to his distinction between law and justice. (shrink)

The article examines Patrick Modiano's much commented upon semi-autobiographical historiographic metafiction Dora Bruder [The Search Warrant] (1997) through the lens of two interconnected theoretical concepts: the "differend", coined by Jean-François Lyotard to designate a situation where a plaintiff is divested of linguistic and legal means to claim her damage, and the "material witness", as Susan Schuppli has dubbed an object capable of testifying to past violence. I argue that, in the face of the evidential deficit that proceeds from the (...) destruction of the Jewish diaspora of Paris during the Holocaust and from France's post-war memory politics in relation to the Occupation and Deportation, Modiano relies on the French capital's topography and architecture for information about Dora, her parents, and her community. Moreover, like Schuppli, he invests Parisian addresses with juridical significance so that they can become witnesses in the case he builds against wartime and post-war French authorities with a view to countering the differend to which Dora and her likes have been sentenced. (shrink)

This original study examines Jean-François Lyotard's philosophical concept of the differend and details its unexplored implications for literature. it provides a new framework with which to understand the discourse itself, from its Homeric beginnings to postmodern works by authors such as Michael Ondaatje and Jonathan Safran Foer.

By challenging the state and corporate prerogatives to distinguish between “good” and “bad” development, social movements by and in support of inhabitants of Rosia Montana (Transylvania) are subverting prevailing perceptions about Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)’s liberal path of development illustrating its injustice in several ways that will be detailed in this article under the heading “inhibitions of political economy” or Balkanism. The significance of the “Save Rosia Montana” movement for post-communism is that it invites post-communist subjects to reflect and (...) revise their perception about issues such as communism, capitalism and development and to raise questions of global significance about the fragile edifice of justice within the neo-liberal capitalist economy. However, r esistance to injustice (and implicitly affirmations of other senses of justice) is an ambiguous discursive practice through which Rosieni make sense as well as partake their sense of Rosia Montana. The movement brings about a public dispute which may be compared with a differend : (in Lyotard’s words), a conflict that cannot be confined to the rules of “cognitive phrases,” of truth and falsehood. This article argues that while post-communist events of “subjectification” are unstable and thus, are to be viewed aesthetically, this same ambiguous multiplication of political subjectivity may facilitate the creation of social spaces for imagining alternative possibilities of development. (shrink)

L’article met à jour un désaccord très peu connu entre les PP. Gaston Fessard (1897-1978) et Henri de Lubac (1896-1991), à propos du discernement à poser sur le communisme et le progressisme chrétien entre 1945 et 1950. Après avoir dégagé les deux périodes qui marquent l’histoire de ce différend – publication de France, prends garde de perdre ta liberté (1945-1946) aux éditions du Témoignage chrétien (I) ; conférence du P. de Lubac sur « La conception de l’homme » aux Semaines (...) Sociales de juillet 1947 (II) – l’auteur analyse les raisons du désaccord, en pointant notamment le fait que le P. Fessard avait développé une véritable méthode de discernement des événements et des idéologies, là où le P. de Lubac ne disposait pas d’instrument équivalent (III). (shrink)

This essay attempts a paradigmatic comparison between the fourfold worldview of Hua-yen Buddhism and the postmodern philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard. Employing a tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces as a structural underpinning of these two philosophies, the essay illuminates the liberating nature of Hua-yen Buddhism and postmodern thought together with the shadow of skepticism involved in endorsing a vision for a poly-lingual existence. Despite human beings' desire for a totalitarian vision hidden in every aspect of our discourse, Hua-yen Buddhism and (...) postmodern thought demand us to envision the world of the 'inconceivable' in which the diversity of existence raises its own voice beyond the regulating force of our society. (shrink)