Lyotard's work is characterized by a persistent opposition to universals, métarécits (meta-narratives), and generality. He is fiercely critical of many of the "universalist" claims of the Enlightenment, and several of his works serve to undermine the fundamental principles that generate these broad claims.
In his writings of the early 1970s, Lyotard rejects what he regards as theological underpinnings of both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud: "In Freud, it is Judaical, critical sombre (forgetful of the political); in Marx it is catholic. Hegelian, reconciliatory (...) in the one and in the other the relationship of the economic with meaning is blocked in the category of representation (...) Here a politics, there a therapeutics, in both cases a laical theology, on top of the arbitrariness and the roaming of forces".[33] Consequently, he rejected Theodor W. Adorno's negative dialectics because he viewed them as seeking a "therapeutic resolution in the framework of a religion, here the religion of history."[34] In Lyotard's "libidinal economics" he aimed at "discovering and describing different social modes of investment of libidinal intensities".[35]
Academic legacy
Throughout his academic career Jean-François Lyotard has contributed to the magazines L'Âge nouveau, Les Temps modernes, Socialisme ou barbarie, Cahiers de philosophie, Esprit, Revue d'esthétique, Musique en jeu, L'Art vivant, Semiotexte, October, Art Press International, Critique, Flash Art, Art Forum, Po&sie, among others.
Discourse, Figure (1971)
Submitted as his Doctorat d'Etat (Higher State Doctorate), this complex work was not available in English until 2011.[36] It is unusual in form and contents, covering aspects of aesthetics (Merleau-Ponty), linguistics (Benveniste, Lacan), psychoanalysis (Freud), poetry (Michel Butor, Stéphane Mallarmé), and painting (Italian Quattrocento; Paul Cézanne, Paul Klee; Jackson Pollock). The focus shifts from phenomenology to an engagement with psychoanalysis, in order to make the form of the book work differently to the usual expectations for an academic text of the time and to disorientate the reader.[37] Its reception has been delayed in the Anglophone world, missing the importance Lyotard attributed to it, considering it one of his three 'real books'[38] and the principal reference for his discussion of the 'figural' and its tri-part presentation (figure-image; figure-form; figure-matrix).
Aesthetics
Lyotard's thesis, published under the title Discours, Figure (1971), focused on aesthetics. Lyotard devoted himself a lot to aesthetic issues, in a way that sought to break with the Hegelian perspective, in which art had to think of itself as a materialization of the mind. He believed it was "more a tool to expose often unseen tensions, shifts, and complications in philosophical thinking and its relations with society--a way of helping it depart from doxa without the assurances of higher knowledge or even a sensus communis."[39] Lyotard's thought on modern and contemporary art focused on a few artists who allowed him to emphasize the flagship issues of French thought after the Second World War, particularly those of conceptual mastery of the artist as an author: Paul Cézanne and Wassily Kandinsky as well as Bracha L. Ettinger, Albert Ayme, Daniel Buren, Marcel Duchamp, Valerio Adami, Jacques Monory, Shusaku Arakawa, Ruth Francken, Sam Francis, Barnett Newman, Joseph Kosuth, Karel Appel, René Guiffrey, Manuel Casimiro and Gianfranco Baruchello.[40]
Libidinal Economy (1974)
In one of Lyotard's most famous books, Libidinal Economy, he offers a critique of Marx's idea of "false consciousness" and claims that the 19th-century working class enjoyed being a part of the industrialization process. Lyotard claims that this was due to libidinal energy—the term "libidinal" coming from the term libido, used in psychoanalysis to refer to the desires of a deeper consciousness. Libidinal Economy has been called an achievement in attempting to live with the rejection of all religious and moral principles through an undermining of the structures associated with it.[41] Structures conceal libidinal intensities while intense feelings and desires stave off set structures. However, there also can be no intensities or desires without structures, because there would be no dream of escaping the repressive structures if they do not exist. "Libidinal energy comes from this disruptive intervention of external events within structures that seek order and self-containment."[42] This was the first of Lyotard's writings that had really criticized a Marxist view. It achieved great success, but was also the last of Lyotard's writings on this particular topic where he really opposed the views of Marx.
The Postmodern Condition (1979)
Lyotard is a skeptic of modern cultural thought. According to his 1979 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, the impact of the postmodern condition was to provoke skepticism about universalizing theories. Lyotard argues that people have outgrown their needs for metanarratives (French: métarécits), likely due to the advancement of techniques and technologies since World War II and redeployment of advanced liberal capitalism (i.e., neoliberalism). He argues against the possibility of justifying the narratives that bring together disciplines and social practices, such as science and culture; according to James Williams, for Lyotard "the narratives we tell to justify a single set of laws and stakes are inherently unjust."[42] Lyotard further claims "even under fascism, politics is a matter of opinions and hence values."[43] A loss of faith in metanarratives has an effect on how people view science, art, and literature. Little narratives have now become the appropriate way for explaining social transformations and political problems. Lyotard argues that this is the driving force behind postmodern science. As metanarratives fade, science suffers a loss of faith in its search for truth, and therefore must find other ways of legitimating its efforts. Connected to this scientific legitimacy is the growing dominance for information machines. Lyotard argues that one day, in order for knowledge to be considered useful, it will have to be converted into computerized data. Years later, this led him into writing his book The Inhuman, published in 1988, in which he illustrates a world where technology has taken over.[44]
The collapse of the "grand narrative" and "language-games"
Most famously, in La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) (1979), he proposes what he calls an extreme simplification of the "postmodern" as an 'incredulity towards meta-narratives'.[45] These meta-narratives—sometimes 'grand narratives'—are grand, large-scale theories and philosophies of the world, such as the progress of history, the knowability of everything by science, and the possibility of absolute freedom. Lyotard argues that people have ceased to believe that narratives of this kind are adequate to represent and contain human multiplicity. He points out that no one seemed to agree on what, if anything, was real and everyone had their own perspective and story.[46] People have become alert to difference, diversity, the incompatibility of human aspirations, beliefs, and desires, and for that reason postmodernity is characterized by an abundance of micronarratives.[47] For this concept, Lyotard draws from the notion of "language-games" found in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Lyotard notes that it is based on the mapping of society according to the concept of the language games.[48]
In Lyotard's works, the term "language games", sometimes also called "phrase regimens", denotes the multiplicity of communities of meaning, the innumerable and incommensurable separate systems in which meanings are produced and rules for their circulation are created.[49] This involves, for example, an incredulity towards the metanarrative of human emancipation.
That is, the story of how the human race has set itself free. That brings together the language game of science, the language game of human historical conflicts, and the language game of human qualities into the overall justification of the steady development of the human race in terms of wealth and moral well-being.
According to this metanarrative, the justification of science is related to wealth and education. The development of history is seen as steady progress towards civilization or moral well-being. The language game of human passions, qualities and faults (c.f. character flaws (narratives)), is seen as steadily shifting in favor of qualities and away from faults as science and historical developments help to conquer faults in favor of qualities. The point is that any event ought to be able to be understood in terms of the justifications of this metanarrative; anything that happens can be understood and judged according to the discourse of human emancipation. For example, for any new social, political or scientific revolution, people could ask themselves the question, "Is this revolution a step towards the greater well-being of the mass of human beings?" It should always be possible to answer this question in terms of the rules of justification of the metanarrative of human emancipation.[50]
This becomes more crucial in Au juste: Conversations (Just Gaming) (1979) and Le Différend (The Differend) (1983), which develop a postmodern theory of justice. It might appear that the atomization of human beings implied by the notion of the micronarrative and the language game suggests a collapse of ethics. It has often been thought that universality is a condition for something to be a properly ethical statement: "thou shalt not steal" is an ethical statement in a way that "thou shalt not steal from Margaret" is not. The latter is too particular to be an ethical statement (what's so special about Margaret?); it is only ethical if it rests on a universal statement ("thou shalt not steal from anyone"). But universals are impermissible in a world that has lost faith in metanarratives, and so it would seem that ethics is impossible. Justice and injustice can only be terms within language games, and the universality of ethics is out of the window. Lyotard argues that notions of justice and injustice do in fact remain in postmodernism. The new definition of injustice is indeed to use the language rules from one "phrase regimen" and apply them to another. Ethical behavior is about remaining alert precisely to the threat of this injustice, about paying attention to things in their particularity and not enclosing them within abstract conceptuality. One must bear witness to the "differend". In a differend, there is a conflict between two parties that cannot be solved in a just manner. However, the act of being able to bridge the two and understand the claims of both parties, is the first step towards finding a solution.
"I would like to call a differend the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim. If the addressor, the addressee, and the sense of the testimony are neutralized, everything takes place as if there were no damages. A case of differend between two parties takes place when the regulation of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom."[51]
In more than one book, Lyotard promoted what he called a new paganism. Plato, in Book II of the Republic, condemns pagans for their shape-shifting and deceitful gods, antithetical to universal truth. Lyotard prefers a mirror image of Plato's critique, vindicating the pagans as Plato sees them. A new paganism would revolt against a Greek masculinist, such as that of Plato. The revolt would be led by women, for woman is antirational and anti-philosophical (at least as Plato understands what it is to be philosophical). Woman, as "the little girl", is "the antonym of the adult male questioner" and would serve as a release from the mental illness evident in Platonic philosophy, in Judaism and in the American, French and Russian revolutions.[52]
The Differend (1983)
In The Differend, based on Immanuel Kant's views on the separation of Understanding, Judgment, and Reason, Lyotard identifies the moment in which language fails as the differend, and explains it as follows: "...the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be… the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication, learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom)".[53] Lyotard undermines the common view that the meanings of phrases can be determined by what they refer to (the referent). The meaning of a phrase—an event (something happens)--cannot be fixed by appealing to reality (what actually happened). Lyotard develops this view of language by defining "reality" in an original way, as a complex of possible senses attached to a referent through a name. The correct sense of a phrase cannot be determined by a reference to reality, since the referent itself does not fix sense, and reality itself is defined as the complex of competing senses attached to a referent. Therefore, the phrase event remains indeterminate.
Lyotard uses the example of Auschwitz and the revisionist historian Robert Faurisson’s demands for proof of the Holocaust to show how the differend operates as a double bind. Faurisson argued that "the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jewish people was a hoax and a swindle, rather than a historical fact" and that "he was one of the courageous few willing to expose this wicked conspiracy".[54] Faurisson will only accept proof of the existence of gas chambers from eyewitnesses who were themselves victims of the gas chambers. However, any such eyewitnesses are dead and are not able to testify. Either there were no gas chambers, in which case there would be no eyewitnesses to produce evidence, or there were gas chambers, in which case there would still be no eyewitnesses to produce evidence, because they would be dead. Since Faurisson will accept no evidence for the existence of gas chambers, except the testimony of actual victims, he will conclude from both possibilities (gas chambers existed and gas chambers did not exist) that gas chambers did not exist. This presents a double bind. There are two alternatives, either there were gas chambers or there were not, which lead to the same conclusion: there were no gas chambers (and no final solution).[55] The case is a differend because the harm done to the victims cannot be presented in the standard of judgment upheld by Faurisson.
The sublime
Lyotard was a frequent writer on aesthetic matters. He was, despite his reputation as a postmodernist, a great promoter of modernist art. Lyotard saw postmodernism as a latent tendency within thought throughout time and not a narrowly limited historical period. He favored the startling and perplexing works of the high modernist avant-garde. In them he found a demonstration of the limits of human conceptuality, a valuable lesson for anyone too imbued with Enlightenment confidence. Lyotard has written extensively also on many contemporary artists of his choice: Valerio Adami, Daniel Buren, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Monory, Ruth Francken, Shusaku Arakawa, Bracha Ettinger, Sam Francis, Karel Appel, Barnett Newman, René Guiffrey, Gianfranco Baruchello, and Albert Ayme as well as on earlier artists, notably Paul Cézanne and Paul Klee.[56]
He developed these themes in particular by discussing the sublime. The "sublime" is a term in aesthetics whose fortunes revived under postmodernism after a century or more of neglect. It refers to the experience of pleasurable anxiety that people experience when confronting wild and threatening sights like, for example, a massive craggy mountain, black against the sky, looming terrifyingly. A sublime is the conjunction of two opposed feelings, which makes it harder to see the injustice of it, or a solution to it.
Lyotard found particularly interesting the explanation of the sublime offered by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urtheilskraft, more exactly Critique of the Power of Judgment). In this book, Kant explains this mixture of anxiety and pleasure in the following terms: there are two kinds of "sublime" experience. In the "mathematically" sublime, an object strikes the mind in such a way that people find themselves unable to take it in as a whole. More precisely, they experience a clash between their reason (which tells them that all objects are finite) and the imagination (the aspect of the mind that governs perception, and which sees an object incalculably larger than themselves, and feels infinite). In the "dynamically" sublime, the mind recoils at an object so immeasurably more powerful than the individual, whose weight, force, scale could crush a person without the remotest hope of being able to resist it. (Kant stresses that if a person is in actual danger, their feeling of anxiety is very different from that of a sublime feeling. The sublime is an aesthetic experience, not a practical feeling of personal danger.) This explains the feeling of anxiety.
What is deeply unsettling about the mathematically sublime is that the mental faculties that present visual perceptions to the mind are inadequate to the concept corresponding to it; in other words, what people are able to make themselves see cannot fully match up to what they know is there. They know it is a mountain but they cannot take the whole thing into their perception. Human sensibility is incapable of coping with such sights, but reason can assert the finitude of the presentation. With the dynamically sublime, the sense of physical danger should prompt an awareness that humans are not just physical material beings, but moral and (in Kant's terms) noumenal beings as well. The body may be dwarfed by its power but reason need not be. This explains, in both cases, why the sublime is an experience of pleasure as well as pain.
Lyotard is fascinated by this admission, from one of the philosophical architects of the Enlightenment, that the mind cannot always organize the world rationally. Some objects are simply incapable of being brought neatly under concepts. For Lyotard, in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, but drawing on his argument in The Differend, this is a good thing. Such generalities as "concepts" fail to pay proper attention to the particularity of things. What happens in the sublime is a crisis where a person realizes the inadequacy of the imagination and reason to each other. What people are witnessing, says Lyotard, is actually the differend; the straining of the mind at the edges of itself and at the edges of its conceptuality.
Les Immatériaux (1985)
In 1985, Lyotard co-curated the exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Centre de Création Industrielle at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, together with the design theorist and curator Thierry Chaput.[57] At that point, Les Immatériaux was the largest exhibition held at the Centre Georges Pompidou. The exhibition was framed in a pre-1989 context that predicted globalization to be a melancholy foreshadowing of contemporary art's shifting function in the era of increasing transnational exchange, and as a turning point in a history of exhibits in the aftermath of what was formerly known as aesthetics.[58]
John Rajchman says this about the exhibition: "We might imagine Les Immatériaux as an extravagant staging of a peculiar moment in the role of information in the history of aesthetics after so-called ‘modernism’, yet before the ‘contemporary’ configuration of biennials that was already taking shape in the 1990s, within or against which the question of a new ‘history of exhibition’ now itself arises."[58] In 2023 a display about the exhibition was held at the Centre Georges Pompidou, including examples of some of the works included, a selection of films shown at the original accompanying ciné immatériaux programme, and a virtual re-creation of the exhibition featuring remastered sound from the original exhibition sound track.[59]
The Inhuman (1988)
In his book, The Inhuman, Lyotard explores the philosophy of Kant, Heidegger, Adorno, and Derrida, as well as the works of modernist and postmodernist artists like Cézanne, Debussy, and Boulez, in a wide-ranging debate. Time and memory, the sublime and the avant-garde, and the link between aesthetics and politics are all topics Lyotard addresses in the book. In his study he analyzes the close but problematic ties between modernity, development, and humanity, as well as the shift to postmodernity. The job of literature, philosophy, and the arts, according to Lyotard, is to give witness to and explain this arduous shift.[60]
Lyotard rejected classical humanism mainly because he paradoxically assumes that the humane is something that every person has inherently from birth but can only be realized through education. Lyotard essentially asks if humanity is so inherent to all humans, can it only be gained by undergoing education? By using the concept of the inhuman, Lyotard described all those things that humanism has excluded from its definition of man.
He developed a science fiction thought experiment that would take place in 4.5 billion years, at the time of the explosion of the sun. Should the human species put itself in the position to live on without Earth, and if so what would then remain of "humanity"? Everything that is of importance for the determination of what is "human" would fall away if the human species began living an extra-planetary existence. Lyotard's opinion on this remained divided: on the one hand, he criticized the dehumanizing effects of modern technology that can already be observed today; on the other hand, he saw in them the chance to open up a space of possibilities, since they do not fix the human being to one image.
Readings in Infancy (1991)
First published by Galilée, Paris, in 1991 the volume appeared in full English translation in 2023 (Bloomsbury) edited by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford.[61] This is a collection of essays on works by key figures from literature, politics and psychoanalysis: James Joyce; Franz Kafka; Hannah Arendt; Jean-Paul Sartre; Paul Valéry; Sigmund Freud are the vehicles for a meditation on the speechless infans of infancy (enfance). Read together, these chapters form an investigation into the area of research which preoccupied Lyotard throughout the last two decades of his life, named here as infantia, the infancy of thought: that which resists development, whether human, capitalist or technological.[62] As Lyotard writes in the chapter 'Voices: Freud': "Writing has a debt of affect which it despairs of ever being able to pay off."[63]
"Mainmise"
Lyotard was impressed by the importance of childhood in human life,[64] which he saw as providing the opportunity of creativity, as opposed to the settled hubris of maturity.[65] In "Mainmise" (1992),[66] however, he also explored the hold of childhood experience on the individual through the (Roman) concept of mancipium, an authoritative right of possession.[65] Because parental influences affect the new-born before it has the linguistic skill even to articulate them, let alone oppose them, Lyotard considered that "We are born from others but also to others, given over defenseless to them. Subject to their mancipium."[67] The essay "Mainmise" was collected in the 1993 publication D'un trait d'union (The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity, 1999)[68] together with 'On a Hyphen' and responses and correspondence with Eberhard Gruber. In France it was also collected in the posthumously published collection "Misère de la philosophie" (The Poverty of Philosophy, no English translation available) edited by Dolorès Lyotard.[69]
