Jean-François Lyotard

The noble aim of sociologists to "tell the truth" has sometimes involved ignoble assumptions about human beings. In this major discussion of truth in the social science, Ross Abbinnett traces the debate on truth from the "objectifying powers" of Kant through more than 200 years of critique and reformulation to the unraveling of truth by Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida. Truth and Social Science gives students an exciting and accessible guide to the main sociological treatments of truth and can also be (...) read as an account of the collapse of modernity and the rise of new forms of thought, which treat difference and ambivalence as positive values. The book will be of interest to students of sociology, social theory, and philosophy. (shrink)

The thesis is an attempt to develop a speculative (Hegelian) critique of the ethical and political questions raised by Jean-Francois Lyotard's book The Differend. I have argued that these questions are dependent upon the reading of Kant's three Critiques, and his political essays, which Lyotard develops in The Differend's four `notices' on Kant, and that it is this reading which opens up his concept of difference (`heterogeneity') to the possibility of a speculative critique. Chapter one comprises an examination of Lyotard's (...) attempt to establish speculative thinking's dependence upon a metaphysical idea of the self as the possibility of ethical sublation. I have argued that Lyotard's appropriation of Adorno's idea of "Auschwitz" as blocking dialectical sublation, fails to recognize the speculative significance of the concrete conditions which produced the historical emergence of Nazism. The following three chapters are concerned to develop the argument that Lyotard's misrepresentation of the spirituality of Hegel's philosophy, conditions his reading of the critical philosophy as disclosing the possibility of a spontaneous (ethical) judgement of difference. Chapter two argues that Lyotard's claim to show critical subjectivity to be a `litigation' of self-conscious faculties, fails to recognize the actual lack of unity which characterizes Kant's `transcendental unity of apperception'. The exclusion of `otherness', which Lyotard claims is disclosed and suppressed in Kant's notion of cognitive experience, actually necessitates concrete selfrecognition. In chapter three, Lyotard's attempt to abstract an ethical `obligation without conditions' from Kant's critical morality is interrogated. I have argued that the aporias constituted through the spontaneity of practical reason, are reinforced through Lyotard's concept of `ethical time'. The final chapter develops a speculative approach to the notions of ethics and politics which Lyotard abstracts from the Third Critique. I have argued that the notion of an `unpredetermined' judgement which Lyotard articulates in the final sections of The Differend, constitutes a subjective `culture' which is ultimately non-ethical and apolitical. (shrink)

Globalization is regarded as a process or a project or a process/project which is most rapidly developing. Globalization, in case of occurrence, will put its impacts on all dimensions of human life including knowledge and practice. Particularly, its impact on epistemology and education would be remarkable. Given that the appearance and development of informational revolution is the most important background for globalization, the first challenge of globalization relates to the nature of knowledge. According to the information revolution, the most important (...) characteristic of knowledge is to be sought in this equation: knowledge = information. This involves reducing different facets of knowledge to quantitative information which leads to knowledge legitimacy crisis. In addition, having a communicational dimension, knowledge will be qualified by means of the shape and characteristics of community in the era of globalization. The viewpoint of virtual community calls us from another side to rethink on knowledge as well as on the problem of identity because in the consequence of virtual community, virtual identity of pupils is being claimed which involves indentity fragmentation. To deal with these challenges, education needs: a) to resist the reduction of knowledge to information and equate knowledge with wisdom rather than information; b) to extend imaginative and creative procedures; c) to develope interdisciplinary studies as an important way of extending imagination; and finally, d) to provide relationship between virtual and real communities of the pupils. (shrink)

Sublime experience robs criticism of its object. The sublime is ineffable, indeterminate, unavailable to cognition. This is the case for performance as for literary criticism. Yet, for Lyotard, the sublime presents possibilities for aesthetic criticism to discuss ethics, which is of increasing importance to postmodern critical theory across disciplines, including performance studies, rhetorical theory and communication. ;This dissertation examines the sublime as an aesthetic category in Lyotard's philosophy, and presents the ironies, in language and in form, which develop from sublime (...) experience as it leads toward ethical pronouncements in Wordsworth's The Prelude . Research was undertaken for three reasons: firstly, to redirect deconstructionist critical insights toward a more productive understanding of the purpose of rhetoric; secondly, to offer a new critical perspective on a text in which the sublime figures as the superordinate experience; and, thirdly, to seek an understanding of sublime experience from the perspective of the performance of literature. ;Chapter One surveys three strands of aesthetic criticism that figure in the body of the dissertation: deconstructionist criticism of Romanticism and Wordsworth, which has recently sought an ethical axis to present to its detractors; performance-related criticism, both past and present, that has privileged the ethical value of performing literature; and, the contemporary philosophy of Lyotard, overtly ethical in content. Chapter Two details Lyotard's writing in aesthetics, concentrating on his deployment of the sublime. Chapter Three focuses on the ironies that envelop Wordsworth's design and execution of The Prelude. Chapter Four reconfigures Wordsworth's representation of sublime experience as another figural gesture of irony, particularly in two representations of sublime experience in Book I. Wordsworth's encounter with the Solitary Traveller in Book IV is the principal focus of Chapter Five; the chapter argues that Wordsworth's ethical undertaking is another failure, suggesting that Wordsworth's representations of sublime experience parallel his failures elsewhere in the work. ;Chapter Six concludes that within Wordsworth's ironic failure resides also an ethical success, but one for which criticism depends on Lyotard's recasting of the aesthetic sublime. Sublime experience is then forwarded as analogous to the ethical approach to Otherness effected by interpreters of literary and non-literary texts. (shrink)

This article addresses Jacques Derrida's consideration of Judaism relating it to a need to understand international institutions and the notion of the universal in a new way. It also discusses Lyotard's and Hegel's accounts of Judaism.

Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of _The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference_ is its (...) engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh _The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference_ is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory. (shrink)

Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of _The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference_ is its (...) engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh _The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference_ is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory. (shrink)

Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is its (...) engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory. (shrink)

Colour plays a fundamental role in the philosophical treatments of painting. Colour while it is an essential part of the work of art cannot be divorced from the account of painting within which it is articulated. This paper begins with a discussion of the role of colour in Schelling's conception of art. Nonetheless its primary concern is to develop a critical encounter with Jean-François Lyotard's analysis of the Dutch painter Karel Appel. The limits of Lyotard's writings on painting, which this (...) paper will attribute in part to Lyotard's ‘empiricism’, becomes most apparent in his treatment of colour. (shrink)

The work of Jean-Francois Lyotard signals the return of judgement to the centre of philosophical concerns. This collection of papers is the first devoted to his work and provides an estimation and critique of his writings, and included Lyotard's important essay on _Sensus Communis_.

Jean-Francois Lyotard was one of the founding members of the College Internationale de philosophie. Ha has taught at Vincennes, Saint Denis and is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Irvine. Several of his books have appeared in English, notable The Postmodern Condition, Just Gaming and The Dirrerend. The Lyotard Reader is a collection of Jean-Francois Lyotard's most important and significant papers to date. While they are all written from within philosophy, they seek to address subjects as (...) wide-ranging as film, painting, psychoanalysis, Judaism and politics. The originality of Lyotard's work means that it can not be readily situated within any one philosophical tradition. Instead he returns philosophy itself to debates across a range of areas and, in so doing, redefines the philosophical enterprise. A number of chapters in The Lyotard Reader appear for the first time in English. This is the most comprehensive collection available of Lyotard's work, work has profoundly influenced debates on the Enlightenment, on modernity, on postmodernity, on the transmission f information, on literary theory and on philosophy. (shrink)

By illuminating the striking affinity between the most innovative aspects of postmodern thought and religious mystical discourse, Shadow of Spirit challenges the long established assumption that western thought is committed to nihilism. This collection of essays by internationally recognized scholars explores the implications of the fascination with the "sacred," "divine" or "infinite" which characterizes much contemporary thought. It shows how these concerns have surfaced in the work of Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Kristeva, Irigaray and others. Examining the connection between this postmodern (...) "turn" and the current search for a new discourse of ethics and politics, it also stresses the contribution made by feminist thought to this unexpected intellectual direction. (shrink)

"But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, ... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness,".

In the contemporary anthropological discourse, the general subjects of temporality and aesthetics, as form of cognition, turn out to be the neuralgic points through which the question of the human existence is considered in many approaches to human being (cognitive, ethical, on-tological or theological). In the philosophical system of the French post-modern thinker Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) these two issues are deeply interlaced leading to new and original solutions of the above-mentioned question. The aim of the contribution is to reconstruct the (...) interconnection between temporality and aesthetics in the thought of this philosopher showing Lyotard’s aesthetic structures of temporality as a central contribution to the post-modern subjectivity theory. (shrink)

This paper is a response to one published in the June 1997 edition of the BJES (Cole, Hill & Rikowski, 1997) which criticises the author's claims about the utility of postmodern analysis for studies in education (Blake, 1997).

In an attempt to clarify our present-day postmodern context and to ascertain the critical consciousness of our time, I study a number of main lines of thought in the work of the postmodernist thinkers Wolfgang Welsch, Jean-François Lyotard and Richard Rorty. Afterwards, I elaborate on the position of Jürgen Habermas in the postmodern debate. In the second section I present a schematic overview of this postmodern panorama, pointing out the main similarities and differences of the theorists under consideration. A critical (...) discussion of and with these authors, in the third section, yields the model of the “open narrative” as a possible form of contemporary critical consciousness. This model will help me to recontextualize the Christian narrative in our postmodern context. In the conclusion I shed some light upon this recontextualization. (shrink)

This book presents a timely reconfiguration of the relations between art, philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. Through connection with a range of contemporary social and philosophical issues and movements, this collection of essays highlights the imperative of sensorial aesthetics. The book focuses on the radical philosophical approach to aesthetics enabled by the works of Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. From these philosophers an older meaning of aesthetic has been recalled. Before it indicated primarily the theory of art and beauty, “aesthetic” referred (...) to the sensibility, the capacity to receive sensations. In summoning this “sensorial” meaning of aesthetics in their respective works, Lyotard, Deleuze, and other recent thinkers turn the philosophical theory of aesthetics away from the dominance of cognitivist and reception theories, and towards a thinking of aesthetics through considerations of the movements of matter, affect, and sensation. (shrink)