Jean-Francois Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates 9781350081307, 9781350081314, 9781350081345, 9781350081321

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
1 ‘Publish or perish!’: An introduction to the interviews and
debates by Kiff Bamford
2 Slowly, tenderly by Philippe Bonnefis, Emory University, 1998
3 Letter to Jean-François Lyotard from Gilles Deleuze undated (c. 1975–6)
4 On theory: An interview with Brigitte Devismes, VH 101, 1970
5 ‘Doing away with the illusion of politics’ with Gilbert Lascault,
La Quinzaine littéraire, 1972
6 Remarks on Jean-François Lyotard by Gilles Deleuze, ‘A Short Review
of Discourse, Figure’, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1972
7 ‘The “intensities” are what imports, not the meaning’
with Christian Descamps, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1975
8 Concerning the Vincennes Psychoanalysis Department Joint letter
by Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze, Les Temps modernes, 1975
9 A ‘Barbarian’ speaks about socialism with Bernard-Henri Lévy,
Le Nouvel Observateur, 1976
10 ‘Incommensurable narrations’ with Patrick de Haas,
Art Press International, 1977
11 Will Vincennes survive? with Christian Descamps, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1980
12 Debate on ‘Discussions, or: Phrasing “after Auschwitz”’ with Jacques
Derrida; Sarah Kofman; Maurice De Gandillac; Jean-Luc Nancy et al.
Les fins de l’homme: À partir du travail de Jacques Derrida, 1980
13 ‘In reading your work …’ with Georges Van Den Abbeele; including the
short text ‘Decor’ by Jean-François Lyotard, Diacritics, 1984
14 Philosophy: The case for the defence with Jacques Derrida, Le Monde, 1984
15 Les Immatériaux: ‘A staging’ with Jacques Saur and Philippe Bidaine,
CNAC Magazine, 1985
16 Les Immatériaux: A conversation with Bernard Blistène, Flash Art, 1985
17 Chrysalide’s little narratives with Élie Théofilakis, Modernes et Après?
‘Les Immatériaux’, 1985
18 Otherwise than knowing Debate with Emmanuel Levinas at the Centre
Sèvres, Autrement que Savoir, Paris, 1986
19 The Enlightenment, the sublime: Philosophy and aesthetics
with Willem van Reijen and Dick Veerman, 1987, Les Cahiers de Philosophie
20 Lyotard and Vidal-Naquet talking about the Algerian war still
with Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Interview by Antoine de Gaudemar, Libération, 1989
21 Before the Law, after the Law with Elisabeth Weber, 1991. From
Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber, 2004
22 ‘What is just?’ (Ou Justesse) with Richard Kearney, 1994. From States of
Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers on the European Mind, 1995
23 Responding questions with Eberhard Gruber, 1995. From The Hyphen:
Between Judaism and Christianity, 1999
24 ‘The real extreme’ with Gérald Sfez, Rue Descartes, 1995
25 ‘La Vie de Malraux (Malraux’s life) must be read as a
collection of legends’ with Philippe Bonnefis, Magazine littéraire, 1996
Notes
Bibliography
Select general bibliography
Index

Citation preview

JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Libidinal Economy, Jean-Francois Lyotard Lyotard and the ‘figural’ in Performance, Art and Writing, Kiff Bamford Happiness, Alain Badiou Pornographic Age, Alain Badiou

JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD: THE INTERVIEWS AND DEBATES

Edited by Kiff Bamford

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Kiff Bamford, 2020 Kiff Bamford has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. English Language translation © Roger McKeon, Kiff Bamford, and Georges Van Den Abbeele For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Charlotte Daniels All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-8130-7 PB: 978-1-3500-8131-4 ePDF: 978-1-3500-8134-5 ePUB: 978-1-3500-8132-1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgementsvii 1

‘Publish or perish!’: An introduction to the interviews and debates  by Kiff Bamford

2

Slowly, tenderly  by Philippe Bonnefis, Emory University, 1998

13

3

Letter to Jean-François Lyotard from Gilles Deleuze  undated (c. 1975–6)

15

4

On theory: An interview  with Brigitte Devismes, VH 101, 1970

17

5

‘Doing away with the illusion of politics’  with Gilbert Lascault, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1972

29

6

Remarks on Jean-François Lyotard  by Gilles Deleuze, ‘A Short Review of Discourse, Figure’, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1972

33

7

‘The “intensities” are what imports, not the meaning’  with Christian Descamps, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1975

35

8

Concerning the Vincennes Psychoanalysis Department  Joint letter by Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze, Les Temps modernes, 1975

39

9

A ‘Barbarian’ speaks about socialism  with Bernard-Henri Lévy, Le Nouvel Observateur, 1976

41

1

10 ‘Incommensurable narrations’  with Patrick de Haas, Art Press International, 1977

45

11 Will Vincennes survive?  with Christian Descamps, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1980

49

12 Debate on ‘Discussions, or: Phrasing “after Auschwitz”’  with Jacques Derrida; Sarah Kofman; Maurice De Gandillac; Jean-Luc Nancy et al. Les fins de l’homme: À partir du travail de Jacques Derrida, 1980

53

13 ‘In reading your work …’  with Georges Van Den Abbeele; including the short text ‘Decor’ by Jean-François Lyotard, Diacritics, 1984

59

Contents

14 Philosophy: The case for the defence  with Jacques Derrida, Le Monde, 1984

67

15 Les Immatériaux: ‘A staging’  with Jacques Saur and Philippe Bidaine, CNAC Magazine, 1985

71

16 Les Immatériaux: A conversation  with Bernard Blistène, Flash Art, 1985

77

17 Chrysalide’s little narratives  with Élie Théofilakis, Modernes et Après? ‘Les Immatériaux’, 1985

87

18 Otherwise than knowing  Debate with Emmanuel Levinas at the Centre Sèvres, Autrement que Savoir, Paris, 1986

95

19 The Enlightenment, the sublime: Philosophy and aesthetics  with Willem van Reijen and Dick Veerman, 1987, Les Cahiers de Philosophie

105

20 Lyotard and Vidal-Naquet talking about the Algerian war still  with Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Interview by Antoine de Gaudemar, Libération, 1989 129 21 Before the Law, after the Law  with Elisabeth Weber, 1991. From Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber, 2004

135

22 ‘What is just?’ (Ou Justesse)  with Richard Kearney, 1994. From States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers on the European Mind, 1995

149

23 Responding questions  with Eberhard Gruber, 1995. From The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity, 1999

159

24 ‘The real extreme’  with Gérald Sfez, Rue Descartes, 1995

169

25 ‘La Vie de Malraux (Malraux’s life) must be read as a collection of legends’  with Philippe Bonnefis, Magazine littéraire, 1996

173

Notes179 Bibliography192 Select general bibliography 195 Index197

vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Mme Dolorès Lyotard for her support of this publication and permission to include material from the Lyotard estate. I would also extend thanks to all the authors and translators who have supported this project, giving permissions and encouragement, in particular Georges Van Den Abbeele for revising and extending his existing translation. Also to Roger McKeon who has not only made new translations of thirteen of these documents and extended his own existing translation, but also offered help, guidance and critical dialogue throughout the process. Financial support is gratefully acknowledged from the British Academy, for research costs, and from Bloomsbury Academic and the School of Art, Architecture and Design at Leeds Beckett University for permission costs. The editor and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to include the material collected here. All efforts have been made to trace copyright holders. In the event of errors or omissions, please notify the publisher in writing of any corrections that will need to be incorporated in future editions of this book. ‘Slowly, tenderly’ by Philippe Bonnefis, Emory University, 1998 – reprinted in English translation with permission from the family of Philippe Bonnefis. ‘Letter to Jean-François Lyotard from Gilles Deleuze’, undated (c. 1975–6) – reprinted with permission from Aliocha Wald Lasowski, who first published the letter in Europe no. 949, May 2008. ‘On Theory: An interview’ with Brigitte Devismes, VH 101, no. 2, Summer 1970 – reprinted with permission from Sylvère Lotringer and Hedi El Kholti at Semiotext(e) who first published the interview in English translation in Driftworks, ed. Roger McKeon (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984). ‘Doing Away with the Illusion of Politics’ with Gilbert Lascault, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1–15 May 1972 – reprinted in English translation with permission from Dolorès Lyotard. ‘Remarks on Jean-François Lyotard’ by Gilles Deleuze, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1–15 May 1972 – reprinted with permission from Sylvère Lotringer and Hedi El Kholti at Semiotext(e) who first published the piece in English translation in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–74 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004). ‘The “Intensities” Are What Imports, Not the Meaning’ with Christian Descamps, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1–15 January 1975 – reprinted in English translation with permission from Dolorès Lyotard. ‘Concerning the Vincennes Psychoanalysis Department’, originally appeared as ‘À propos le Département de psychanalyse de Vincennes’ in Les Temps modernes, no. 342, January 1975. English translation © 1993 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.

Acknowledgements

‘A “Barbarian” Speaks about Socialism’ with Bernard-Henri Levy, Le Nouvel Observateur, 16 January 1976 – reprinted in English translation with permission from Dolorès Lyotard. ‘Incommensurable Narrations’ with Patrick de Haas, Art Press International, no. 13, December 1977 – reprinted in English translation with permission from Dolorès Lyotard. ‘Will Vincennes Survive?’ with Christian Descamps, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1–15 April 1980 – reprinted in English translation with permission from Dolorès Lyotard. Debate on ‘Discussions, or: Phrasing “after Auschwitz”’ with Jacques Derrida; JeanLuc Nancy; Jacob Rogozinski et al. – reprinted by permission of the Centre for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who published part of this in English translation in ‘Working Paper’, no. 2, Fall 1986; additional material has been translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele with permission from Éditions Galilée, who printed the original French-language edition: Les fins de l’homme: À partir du travail de Jacques Derrida (Galilée: Paris, 1981). ‘In reading your work …’ with Georges Van Den Abbeele; including the short text ‘Decor’ by Jean-François Lyotard, originally published as: Georges Van Den Abbeele. ‘Interview: Jean-François Lyotard’, Diacritics, vol. 14, no. 3 (1984), 15–21. © Cornell University. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. ‘Philosophy: The Case for the Defence’ with Jacques Derrida, Le Monde, 1984 – reprinted in English translation with permission from Dolorès Lyotard and Pierre Alféri. ‘Les Immatériaux: “A Staging”’ with Jacques Saur and Philippe Bidaine, CNAC Magazine, March 1985 – reprinted in English translation with permission from Dolorès Lyotard. ‘Les Immatériaux: A Conversation’ with Bernard Blistène, Flash Art, no. 121 (1985), 32–39 – Reprinted with permission from Flash Art. ‘Chrysalide’s Little Narratives’ with Élie Théofilakis, from Modernes et Après? ‘Les Immatériaux’ (Autrement: Paris, 1985) – reprinted in English translation with permission from Dolorès Lyotard. ‘Otherwise than knowing’ Debate with Emmanuel Levinas at the Centre Sèvres, ‘Autrement que Savoir’, extract from Logique de Levinas, ed. Paul Audi © Éditions Verdier, 2015, reprinted in English translation with permission. ‘The Enlightenment, the Sublime: Philosophy and Aesthetics’ with Willem van Reijen and Dick Veerman, 1987, Les Cahiers de Philosophie; English translation: Willem van Reijen and Dick Veerman, ‘An Interview with Jean-François Lyotard’, trans. Roy Boyne, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 5, no. 2–3 (1988), 277–309. © 1988 by Sage. Reprinted by permission of Sage. ‘Lyotard and Vidal-Naquet Talking about the Algerian War Still’ with Pierre VidalNaquet, Interview by Antoine de Gaudemar, Libération, 9 November 1989 – reprinted in English translation with permission from Antoine de Gaudemar at Libération. ‘Before the Law, After the Law’ with Elisabeth Weber, 1991, Originally published in English in Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber, © 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr University. Original German publication © 1994 by viii

Acknowledgements

Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag. All rights reserved. ‘What Is Just?’ (Ou Justesse) with Richard Kearney, 1994, from States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers on the European Mind – reprinted with permission from Richard Kearney. ‘Responding Questions’ Interview with Eberhard Gruber, 1995, from The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999) – reprinted with permission from Eberhard Gruber and Prometheus Books. ‘The Real Extreme’ with Gérald Sfez, Rue Descartes, no. 12–13, May 1995 – reprinted in English translation with permission from Gérald Sfez. ‘La Vie de Malraux (Malraux’s life)’ must be read as a collection of legends’ with Philippe Bonnefis, Magazine littéraire, no. 347, October 1996. Reprinted in Signés Malraux: André Malraux et la question biographique, ed. Martine Boyer-Weinmann and Jean-Louis Jeannelle (Paris: Garnier, 2015), 241–252 – reprinted in English translation with permission from Éditions Garnier.

ix

x

CHAPTER 1 ‘PUBLISH OR PERISH!’: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE INTERVIEWS AND DEBATES

by Kiff Bamford

‘Publish or perish!’, this ironic rallying cry penned by Jean-François Lyotard (1924– 98) thirty years ago, will ring true for many today, not least academics.1 The ceaseless demand to produce, disseminate and create ‘impact’ is not limited to those beholden to the system of academic observation and evaluation, however. The pressure to assert an individual identity through publication on social media is at least as great: acts in which users are perhaps more willingly complicit. Yet there is an important sense in which this declaration is delivered with a wry smile, perhaps the equivalent of a winking face emoji or an accompanying meme of a playful cat. Lyotard, it seems, was always good-natured in combat even when delivering the most virulent of critiques, or when playing with an interlocutor’s ideas and assertions. Yet he is also deadly serious: One writes because one does not know what one would want to say, to try and find out. But today’s slogan is: Publish or perish! If you are not public, you disappear; if you are not exposed as much as possible, you don’t exist. Your no-man’s land is interesting only if expressed and communicated. Heavy pressures are put on silence, to give birth to its expression.2 For Lyotard, philosophizing is an ongoing act, a mode of constant re-evaluation, deliberately not arriving at a final word or theoretical position. Too often what is required by the media is something neatly packaged, easily reducible to multiple formats and speedy distribution: Lyotard’s work resists this simplistic push for uniformity, for univocality. It is in this spirit that the present collection is set before you as a diverse range of narratives drawn from varied sources, sometimes playful, often illuminating, but rarely giving the neatly packaged philosophical maxim you might long for. This introduction will present the rationale for its existence, the choices and exclusions made, and give some contextual background to both the material and the lines of thought to which they attest. When researching for the short critical biography of Lyotard’s life and work, JeanFrançois Lyotard: Critical Lives (Reaktion, 2017), I came across many sources which were either out of print, hard to find or untranslated. This included a good number of interviews and debates which helped to re-orientate my reading of Lyotard’s work and give a clearer idea of the complex contexts in which he was working. A selection of those is printed here but it is by no means exhaustive – the definite article of the title suggested by the publishers

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

is one I accept only as temporary, not definitive: ‘The interviews and debates’ (i.e. the only one for now, at least). For those readers less familiar with Lyotard’s life and work it may be useful to give a brief outline, and it is into this timeline that information about some of the interviews and debates collected will be inserted, with a necessary detour to explain some of the missing content. Lyotard was born in 1924 in Versailles on the outskirts of Paris to a lower-middle-class family. His education followed a traditional academic path to the point where he applied unsuccessfully to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, and instead continued his study of philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1950 he was posted to teach philosophy in Algeria, then a French département; at that point he was married with one child and had finally achieved the competitive agrégation, necessary to teach philosophy in the final year of lycée and at university. This is where the traditional career path stalls; he continued to teach, moving from Algeria to mainland France (La Flèche, Sarthe) in 1952, now with two daughters, and eventually back to Paris in 1959. In itself this geographical path is not unusual, in particular the eventual return to the capital, which exerted a dominance over the philosophical and wider cultural life of France. Lyotard’s engagement with the traditional institutions of academic philosophy came late, however, delayed by more than a decade of intense political activism, in particular with the group Socialisme ou Barbarie, more details of which will be given below. Although Lyotard had written a short book on phenomenology in 1954, an introduction that has remained in print in French for more than six decades, his first ‘real’ book of philosophy was published in 1971. Titled Discourse, Figure this was Lyotard’s thesis for the higher doctorate, the doctorat d’État which he presented for examination before a jury which included his contemporaries the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (b. 1925) and the experimental writer Michel Butor (b. 1926). In May 1972 the fortnightly literary review La Quinzaine littéraire responded to the publication of Discourse, Figure with a short interview with the author, included here (Ch. 5), accompanied by an illustration of Paul Klee’s Fragmenta Veneris, showing an abstracted depiction of limbs: a fragmented or dismembered body. This image appears as one of several plates included in Discourse, Figure – though what is odd is that Lyotard correctly reproduces the image in portrait format whereas La Quinzaine littéraire makes the hackneyed mistake, sometimes jokingly applied to modern art, of reproducing it the ‘wrong way round’. Had it been Lyotard’s version which rotated the canvas, it might have been more understandable: Discourse, Figure plays frequently with notions of rotation, reversal and reorientation in relation to perspectival representation and Freudian workings of desire. Whichever way round it is shown, Klee’s image is analogous with Lyotard’s description of the book as given in the interview: on the one hand ‘broken apart and in a somewhat inconsistent state; indefinitely referencing outside itself ’ whilst also setting up a ‘field of concepts’.3 In the same issue of La Quinzaine littéraire is a short untitled review of the book by Deleuze (Ch. 6) whose Anti-Oedipus, the desire-fuelled revolution written with Félix Guattari, had just been launched in March 1972. Deleuze affirms the beauty of the book’s performance as a ‘critique of the signifier’, undoing the presumptions of signification, breaking open a Saussurean system to the hidden figural energies within discourse: ‘And Lyotard does not even say all this, he shows it, he makes us see it, he makes it visible and 2

Introduction

mobile.’4 Without doubt the construction and organization of the book, together with its detailed self-reflexive investigation into the roles of its component parts – the title of one section is ‘The Line and The Letter’ – show its refusal of the oppositional thinking on which conventions of signification had become based, and also the limitations of Jacques Derrida’s overly textual approach to deconstruction. Lyotard had worked on these complex reflections on the work and workings of Freud, Frege, Hegel, Husserl, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and linguists such as Benveniste and Jakobson, whilst teaching at Nanterre during the tumultuous period of the events of 1968. It was out of the crucible of 1967–9 that these names became something other than a sum of their parts in Lyotard’s work with a decidedly revolutionary approach to the material. As Deleuze makes apparent in his review, it is the visual and the textual which dance together in Lyotard’s writing, imbricated as they are in one another; consequently the roles of artists and artworks are integral to its workings. This fascination with the revolutionary potential of art to thought is clearly evidenced in the earliest interview reprinted in this collection (Ch. 4), undertaken for the second issue of VH 101, a magazine focused on art, culture and theory. The interview, by Brigitte Devismes, editorial assistant and former student of Lyotard’s at Nanterre, is accompanied by two photomontages by Lyotard. Whilst not worthy of any particular artistic comment, what these images demonstrate is Lyotard’s practical involvement in the material with which he was engaged, an involvement that extended to an interest in experimental film during the same period, including the creation of short films on 16mm and the influential essay ‘Acinema’ (1973).5 Both this interview from 1970 and the later essay on film were included in the two collections Lyotard published in 1973: Des dispositifs pulsionnels and Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud, the latter including a more situated series of evidential reflections on the political situation in France in the aftermath of 1968, though still mobile and refusing any form of systemization. In editing the present collection an attempt has been made to represent the span of Lyotard’s philosophical life: from the time of Discourse, Figure, published when Lyotard was aged forty-seven, to Signed Malraux, his late book on André Malraux, published in 1996; Lyotard’s untimely death from leukaemia came eighteen months later in April 1998, at age seventy-three. The nature of the material available varies greatly, however, becoming much more extensive in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of his growing international reputation. As a consequence, the selection made from the 1970s draws by necessity on a diverse range of publications and situations, giving a sometime fragmentary impression if read in sequence. To lessen the potential disorientation created by rapid shifts and changes between sources in these sections, the introductory information provided in the original publications has been retained, where applicable, and footnotes added to give further context. Lyotard writing a joint letter with Gilles Deleuze to the journal Les Temps modernes in protest at the undue influence of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the workings of the philosophy department at the University of Paris-VIII in 1975, for example, will need some explanation for many readers (see Chapter 8). In fact, Lyotard and Deleuze were close colleagues in the philosophy department of Paris-VIII, both at Vincennes (1970–80) and after its move to Saint-Denis (see Chapter 11), until 3

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

they both retired from the French University system in 1987. Lyotard continued to teach internationally, including part-time positions in the United States; his final academic home at Emory University, Atlanta, is represented here by the eulogy voiced by his colleague, the writer Philippe Bonnefis (Ch. 2) with whom he discussed his book on Malraux (Ch. 25): ‘Malraux was to have been for me a way to access politics through the mourning of politics.’6 What has been retained is a chronological ordering of the main texts; whilst this might seem to run against Lyotard’s refusal of linear – in particular implicitly progressive – narratives, it seemed unnecessary to further disrupt the complex interweaving of events, recollections, reconsiderations and rebuttals which make up many of the documents. The most significant omission, however, is any significant testimony to Lyotard’s participation in the intense political debates which pre-date 1968, Discourse, Figure or the collections of 1973. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Lyotard was an active member of the far-left political group ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ (‘Socialism or Barbarity’, a phrase attributed to the Marxist theorist and activist Rosa Luxemburg, though the group is known usually as Socialism or Barbarism). Still little known in the anglophone world, except among some left-wing political activists and Marxist researchers, Socialisme ou Barbarie (S. ou B.) was led principally by the émigré Greek political thinker Cornelius Castoriadis. The group and its journal of the same name were founded by Castoriadis and the philosopher Claude Lefort in 1949 as a breakaway from the Trotskyist Fourth International and led through several reorientations of its political position in relation to interpretations of Marxism and autogestion (worker’s self-management). Disagreement was common, with resulting fractures and the departure of many, including Lefort in 1958 and Lyotard in 1964, before its eventual demise: the fortieth and final issue of the journal appeared in 1965 and a final typescript circulaire (circular) delivered to readers and subscribers in 1967. Lyotard’s involvement with S. ou B. began in 1952, following his return to mainland France after two years teaching in Constantine, Algeria. He owed his political militancy to his time there, a result of both his experiences of the quasi-colonial situation and the crucial political friendship with Pierre Souyri. Lyotard and Souyri became members of S. ou B. in 1954, together with their respective partners Andrée-May and Mireille, and Lyotard began writing on the developing situation in Algeria, writing twelve articles for the journal between 1956 and 1963. When the group splintered, however, he and Souyri both joined the breakaway group, named Pouvoir ouvrier (Workers’ power), with whom Lyotard remained until 1966. In the 1994 interview with Richard Kearney (see Chapter 22), Lyotard describes how S. ou B.’s ‘main objects of critique were dogmatic Marxism, Stalinist politics, the class structure of “Soviet” society, the inconsistencies of the Trotskyist position and post-war capitalism’.7 For over a decade Lyotard was engrossed in the debates that fuelled S. ou B. and its practical activities which included ‘co-operating with workers, wage-earners and students with a view to creating self-management groups’.8 It was an experience that inflected all his subsequent work. The importance of this cannot be overstated and must be reiterated here in order to counteract the lack of consideration common in anglophone scholarship; it might be reasonable to say that this involvement in militant politics is an essential part of what makes Lyotard different from his contemporaries. 4

Introduction

Fellow S. ou B. member Daniel Blanchard, writing in the French edition of the S. ou B. anthology, reflects on the ways in which this isolated militant group differed from the large organizations of the left at the time: repeatedly attacking the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union to which the French Communist Party and unions paid obedience.9 He also warns against the ways in which claims for its importance are now being built retroactively, particularly in France, with the risk of misrepresenting its marginal position in the 1950s and 1960s: the group had ‘remained invisible, or nearly so, and yet now, once dead, it has become mythical’.10 I am arguing for the importance of Lyotard’s experiences with the group and the centrality of debate to its existence. However, I am not seeking to contribute to Blanchard’s worries about the myth-making of S. ou B., but rather wish to emphasize the background against which Lyotard’s later philosophical writings need to be understood. The emphasis on collectivist approaches should also be noted. All articles written for the journal were debated and edited collectively, despite being published under individual names, albeit for the most part pseudonyms. What remains, however, is a significant shift in Lyotard’s position. Sometimes it is mistakenly characterized as an abandonment of politics or even a turn against the values of the left, but it remains an unavoidable, historically informed change in his thinking. It is the refusal to continue to believe that grand historical or political claims can be made. It is the aspect of his work that has been most reductively recounted through the aphoristic summary, quoted in isolation from The Postmodern Condition (1979) – ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’. It is a quotation that should be rendered in context: ‘Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it.’11 Lyotard is here defining his use of the term ‘postmodern’ for the purposes of this short ‘report on knowledge’: the book’s subtitle, itself an abbreviation of the title as commissioned by the president of the council of universities of the provincial government of Quebec: Report on the problems of knowledge in the most developed industrial societies.12 A publication which, rather surprisingly, became a best-seller (in academic terms) and launched Lyotard’s international recognition to a previously unanticipated level. For our purposes here, however, it is worth noting that the claim regarding the attitude towards so-called metanarratives (métarécits), alternatively translated as grand narratives or overarching stories, is not necessarily stating Lyotard’s own position but is rather part of his observations on the state of knowledge in technologically advanced societies, at the time of writing in 1979. And yet, in these interviews the reader will find that this is also the explanation given by Lyotard as regards his turn from Marxism in an ideological sense. A turn away from the belief in the alternative propagated by S. ou B. and its support of workers’ self-determination, and in spite of the positive response he had to the events of May 1968, positive in marked contrast to the French Communist Party or its theoretical adherents, including Louis Althusser, or the Maoists whose support in France far outnumbered the autogestionists of the S. ou B. group. Although there is no single interview that directly addresses these issues, it is one of the most significant threads which can be followed throughout the collection and I will highlight one particular route through the material here. In addition to reflective 5

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

comments in the later interviews, as indicated in the above quotations from the interview with Richard Beardsworth, Lyotard is directly questioned on the legacy of his political militancy in two short interviews from 1976 (Ch. 9) and 1977 (Ch. 10) and in a 1989 interview with historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, published in the French daily Libération (Ch. 20). In January 1976 the weekly newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur published Lyotard’s elliptical responses to the deliberate provocations of Bernard-Henri Lévy; twenty-four years his junior Lévy was soon to declare himself one of the ‘nouveaux philosophes’ (New Philosophers). Decidedly anti-Marxist, anti-1968, he courted media attention and made frequent denunciations of the older generation of philosophers: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was singled out in his poignantly titled publication of 1977 La Barbarie à visage humain (Barbarism with a Human Face). Deleuze made his views on Lévy clear in an interview from the same year: in response to the question ‘What do you think of the “nouveaux-philosophes”?’ he replied ‘nothing (rien), I believe their thought is worthless (nulle)’.13 For his part Lyotard gently mocked their simplistic positions as a ‘marketing operation’ in his short book of 1977, Instructions païennes (Lessons in Paganism). Through a device often used in his essays, Lyotard constructs an imagined narrative in which he poses and answers his own questions: ‘Are you by any chance in agreement with the anti-Marxist ravings of that handful of new men known as philosophers?’14 It is a clever means by which to distance himself, whilst simultaneously accepting aspects of their provocations for his own debate; it is hard not to hear echoes of the Lévy interview in this imagined, or re-imagined pagan scenario. ‘Paganism’ is the name Lyotard gave to his concerns in the 1970s, which he would later term the ‘postmodern’. Both share a distrust for the single-minded, authoritarian positions which dominated modern philosophy and politics. Following the Sophists and Cynics of ancient Greece, the pagan laughs, or farts, in the face of the master. In Le Nouvel Observateur Lyotard ruminates on the public’s problematic desire for unity, and the consequential silencing enacted by such demands: ‘On the left we try to make room for these “demands”; but making demands erases what is important: singularities asserted for themselves.’ J.-F. L. – […] the scandal of singularities is being erased. One turns a blind eye to what suggests itself, the delineation of an immense patchwork, made up of a multitude of minorities and no majority. B.-H. L. – Very distressing, especially for minds trained in the principles of class struggle. J.-F. L. – What is important in the class struggle is that by which it is the struggle of minoritarians, the small, opposite those who, in one form or another, have granted themselves a privilege of universality: the state, the boss, the trade union […] It shows then that there is no unity of an alleged social organization, no universality of an alleged body of doctrine; and thus takes part in the action of decadence, it makes one incredulous towards any representation of the little guy.15

6

Introduction

I have quoted Lyotard’s response at length in order to show the extent to which one can consider this period after 1968 as a working through of the same problems that had confronted Lyotard during his time with S. ou B. How can a voice be given to those without power, without their becoming an exclusionary, doctrinally bound force in themselves? When covering the struggle for Algerian independence in the pages of the journal S. ou B., Lyotard witnessed how what began as the ‘decay of French imperialism’ in North Africa was revealed rather to be evidence of the further dominance of capitalism, the decisive force in the social and economic destiny of the country.16 As the possibility of a politically independent Algeria emerged in the late 1950s Lyotard detailed how the selfserving strategy adopted by the French Communist Party was to maintain an Algeria within the sphere of economic and social dominance of France, as the best means by which to bolster the small branch of the French Communist Party in Algeria.17 It is through such experiences, continually observing the sacrifice of the minoritarian to the privileged position of the universal, that Lyotard identifies the roots of his own political scepticism.18 Whilst his break from militancy can be dated to the mid-1960s, his drift had begun much earlier as part of this same militant involvement: ‘for me the drift had begun at the start of the 1950s when I embarked on the ship of those fools who edited the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie and the newspaper Pouvoir Ouvrier, and were wrecked or called to port in 64–66 after some fifteen years of deep-sea navigation.’19 The context for Lyotard’s most specific discussion of his militant involvement is the dialogue which appeared in Libération in 1989 (Ch. 20), prompted by the publication by Galilée of Lyotard’s writings on Algeria from 1956 to 1963 and the reissue of VidalNaquet’s account of L’Affaire Audin, the torture and death of Maurice Audin at the hands of the French state.20 In addition, this interview not only deals with the activities of S. ou B. but is also one of the few documents in which Lyotard discusses his practical support for those fighting for Algerian liberation, specifically the FLN (Front de libération nationale) via the Curiel network. Previously untranslated, this frank exchange between Lyotard and Vidal-Naquet clearly identifies and articulates their different approaches to the conflict. Vidal-Naquet operated as a public intellectual, holding the French government to account over their use of torture, whilst Lyotard’s concern was focused more on the struggle of the Algerian resistance and how its complexities exceeded those of class, failed to draw on ‘internationalist solidarity’ and presented the personal dilemma of how to respond to requests from the FLN for practical support. The consequences of Lyotard’s decision, which was not officially supported by S. ou B., left him in a position he describes as ‘deeply isolated’; in the interview he asks how their two approaches to the same event, under the same name – ‘Algeria, 1954–62’ – are possible. He is alluding here to the article ‘The Name of Algeria’, written in 1989 as a retrospective analysis of the collected texts on Algeria from S. ou B., which functions both as an introduction to the Galilée collection La Guerre des Algériens, whilst also highlighting the existence of an ‘intractable’ difference between different discourses, the focus of his most explicitly political of philosophical books, The Differend (1983). A summation of many of the concerns which had preoccupied Lyotard’s thoughts for more than a decade, The Differend covers a significant range of questions relating to 7

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

judgement, ethics, discourse and the role of the phrase (sentence or phrase, including nonlinguistic ways of signifying) in determining the limits of dialogue through the pragmatics of linking. The unspoken presence in the interview between Lyotard and Vidal-Naquet is the role that Lyotard makes Vidal-Naquet perform in The Differend’s opening case. In his investigation of different regimes of discourse and the aims by which their constituent phrases are guided, Lyotard opens with the ‘negationist’ claims of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurrison, as quoted by Vidal-Naquet in Un Eichmann de Papier (A Paper Eichmann). However, rather than refuting Faurrison’s denial according to evidence as Vidal-Naquet had already done, Lyotard draws attention to the means by which Faurrison establishes the genre of discourse within which he intends to engage, that is, not one which permits evidence-based verification. ‘The historian need not strive to convince Faurisson if Faurisson is “playing” another genre of discourse, one in which conviction, or, the obtainment of a consensus over a defined reality, is not at stake. Should the historian persist along this path, he will end up in the position of victim.’21 To be subjected to a wrong, in a case such as this, is what is at stake in the strongest example of a ‘differend’: competing claims from incompatible genres of discourse cannot be resolved through litigation, and consequently phrases are silenced. It is how the silencing of such phrases, which cannot be voiced within the dominant genre of discourse, might be acknowledged that is the principal line of philosophical investigation throughout The Differend. The most extensive interviews included in this collection function both to introduce and to question the philosophical underpinnings of Lyotard’s best-known work, including The Differend, without reducing them to a simplistic summary (Chs. 13 and 19). The approach taken by interviewers Willem van Reijen and Dick Veerman is notable: through the inclusion of detailed provocations (coups didactiques) they are able to include extended quotations, which give the reader access to the material under discussion. This is particularly helpful in relation to The Differend which is composed, in the main, of short paragraphs – in the style of Wittgenstein’s numbered sections – interspersed with more detailed ‘Notices’. Already a distillation of longer philosophical arguments, The Differend is difficult to summarize, hence the importance of the strategy used in this interview which was the result of several exchanges by tape, phone and letter and meetings in Utrecht and Paris.22 The thoroughness of such preparation prior to the publication of interviews is evident in much of the related archive material. An informal letter that accompanies another letter intended for possible publication – part of the extraordinary exchange between Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber – provided one of the strangely reassuring encounters I had in the Lyotard archive at the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet. The letters were written and sent in July 1993, when the proofs for Un Trait d’Union (1993, Quebec) were being prepared. This collaboration between Lyotard and Gruber consists of four elements: Lyotard’s two essays examining the relation between Jewish and Christian thought – proposing that the union signified by the hyphen (trait d’union) in the term ‘Judeo-Christian’ elides a deeper differend, embodied by the figure of Shaoul of Tarsus/ Paul the Apostle – Gruber’s response ‘un trait, ce n’est pas tout’ (‘a trait is not all there is to it’), and a letter written by Lyotard in reply to Gruber. Gruber chose to write his further 8

Introduction

response in the form of a long letter when the proofs were being corrected; clarifying in the accompanying note that it was not intended for (this) publication he also airs the possibility of further exchange or an interview. The result, titled ‘corresponding questions’, is included here (Ch. 23); it was added, together with Gruber’s letter, when the book was issued in English as The Hyphen: between Judaism and Christianity (1999). I am detailing this story to demonstrate the extent to which the process of debate and exchange furthered Lyotard’s thought. For example, the 1979 publication Au Juste (translated in 1985 as Just Gaming) is effectively a long-form interview, prompted by Jean-Loup Thébaud, which reveals the growing importance of Kant’s Critique of Judgement for Lyotard. In another way the 1986 collection The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–85 adopts the pretence that the ten short essays are letters, addressed to the children of friends and colleagues. It is prefaced by ‘The Editors’ who, writing on 25 December 1985, detail the objections the author had to their proposal to publish: The main reason he put forward was the naivete of these texts addressed to children; that, if they were published, their deceptive, pedagogical clarity would do nothing to lift the quality of a controversy which was already confused enough. And, he added, he was far too far from being clear about the question himself to venture a pronouncement on a hazy intuition.23 In contrast to the carefully prepared interviews made for publication in books and journals, the speed with which mainstream, mass media operates means that the interview with Derrida, which appears here in the form it was printed in Le Monde, should be regarded as a summary (Ch. 14). First broadcast on radio France Culture as a forty-five-minute programme at prime-time, 7.15 pm on the evening of Saturday 27 October 1984, it was the task of presenter Thomas Ferenczi to transcribe and edit the weekly broadcast to fit an allotted space on the page of Le Monde’s Monday edition. The extent of the editing that was necessary is clear when comparing it to the broadcast, but also remarkable is the intelligence with which it is handled, and sometimes summarized.24 This is but a mild note of warning, the inclusion of the interview can be easily justified as there are very few recorded exchanges between Lyotard and Derrida despite the fact that their working lives overlapped in several places, particularly in the 1980s: the founding of the Collège International de Philosophie and the experimental exhibition, Les Immatériaux, both feature in their conversation. The format of the radio broadcast – ‘Exchange of the baton’ – is such that it is Derrida asking questions of Lyotard (who will in turn ask questions of another guest in the following episode), ranging from The Differend, to a discussion of philosophy ‘as a specific way of approaching problems, irreducible to any other’ and the extent to which this might carry over to the exhibition Les Immatériaux, which Lyotard co-curated at the Pompidou Centre in 1985.25 Further details of the exhibition, its philosophical motivations and unusual dramaturgical arrangements, are described in three related interviews (Chs. 15, 16 and 17), but Derrida’s curiosity has a particular focus. Derrida was one of twenty-six 9

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

artists, philosophers, scientists and writers who participated in a digital writing project as part of the preparation for the exhibition; from September to December 1984 the invitees welcomed a networked computer terminal into their homes. Their task was to give short definitions in response to a list of fifty words, selected by Lyotard because of their association with the exhibition’s themes: the ‘immaterials’ and the effect of new technologies on materials, on human activities – eating, sleeping, interacting, creating, communicating – and the body, with the opportunity to see the entries and responses of others. Developed from an idea by Lyotard’s co-curator Thierry Chaput, the results were made accessible in the exhibition, via the French telephone network’s Minitel system, and a printed catalogue Épreuves d’écriture (Writing proofs). Five years after the exhibition Lyotard collected some of Derrida’s contributions and responded to them under the headings of new terms: Déjouer (to frustrate, foil); Encore (again, more); Toi (You); Deuil (Mourning), collectively titled ‘Translator’s Notes’ they were published in a traditional paper journal.26 After Lyotard’s death Derrida responds again, playing off Lyotard’s phrase ‘Il n’y aura pas de deuil’ (There will be no mourning), speaking first at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, and again at Emory University, Atlanta.27 The role of Derrida as interlocutor is evidenced in one other section of this collection, not an interview but a debate which followed Lyotard’s presentation at the conference on Derrida’s work, held at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1980. It may seem odd to include the debate without the paper under discussion, but the themes are recognizable from their later manifestation in The Differend, and the whole presentation is included in The Lyotard Reader, edited by Andrew Benjamin, under the title ‘Discussions, or: Phrasing “after Auschwitz”’.28 What is different is that the translator, George Van Den Abbeele – who also translated The Differend and questioned Lyotard for the interview that follows (Ch. 13) – has revised the translation, reinserting material that was omitted from The Lyotard Reader but included in Lyotard’s summary of the debate as published in the lengthy conference proceedings, Les fins de l’homme: À partir du travail de Jacques Derrida (The Ends of Man: On the Work of Jacques Derrida). What the restored parts of the debate add are voices in addition to those of Derrida – Sarah Kofman, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacob Rogozinski, among others – and the debate brings out some key questions which become central to the development of The Differend and wider political questions. Some of these were discussed with Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe the following year at the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political, to which Lyotard presented a paper on Kant’s political-historical texts, and later in Lyotard’s Heidegger and ‘the jews’ (1988), in which the approach of Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida, to Heidegger, is addressed. The complexity of these responses to philosophy ‘after Auschwitz’ is discussed by Lyotard in the interview with Elizabeth Weber (Ch. 21), which highlights the role of the forgotten in its many guises – the ‘inhuman’, the infans and its role in Jewish thought. Lyotard ends with a sobering observation: ‘I am wary of those who are nostalgic for politics as tragedy.’29 It is hoped that this collection will serve as a passage to other texts: including the books from which some of these interviews and debates have been taken; it is in tribute to the work of scholars in the field that I have been able to borrow elements from their 10

Introduction

work, reprint older texts and, thanks to the insightful translations of Roger McKeon, make them available in English. One last, particular example is the debate with Levinas (Ch. 18), taken from Logique de Levinas (2015), in which Paul Audi collects the essays on Levinas, written by Lyotard between 1977 and 1996, together with the exchanges that took place at a debate in 1986. Not only does this selection highlight the importance of Levinas to Lyotard’s thought, but also his particular use or reading of the work: ‘a reading that he often holds against me’, says Lyotard.30 A resistance, of which I feel Lyotard approved.

11

12

CHAPTER 2 SLOWLY, TENDERLY

by Philippe Bonnefis, Emory University, 1998 Translated by Roger McKeon

Slowly, tenderly, on behalf of your friends, your students (on the other side of the Atlantic, they were often one and the same), I am addressing you, dear Jean-François, head buzzing with their recommendations not to omit, above all, to recall how much what they appreciated in you was, yes … modesty, the blush, said one. Elegance, no doubt, but the real one, the elegance that conceals itself. A whole style. And, for instance, the grace, almost feline, of your entrances, the way you would elude presence, withdrawing without disappearing completely. It was that your word drew the means of the seduction it exerted upon them not solely from its reserve, from the orison tone that their perpetual commerce with death impressed on all of your conversations, but from its resistance to adulation. It was that your word discouraged the desire in them to imitate it, and that it had renounced, by establishing its reign, the expedient usage. But it was laughter as well. Your laughter. Muted and always questioning. The voice, finally … If voice can be said also of this background noise that thought adds to thought when it speaks to itself, and the kind of humming that it sounded, of the sonorous territory that this outlined, bit by bit – something tender, something precarious and grave at the same time, and that affectionately between them they called whisper. A word, consequently (is it not a breath, rather?) which does not bear upon quite the same areas of sensitivity, nor goes seeking within us the same responses as murmur. Should we say susurration? And then, delicately designate these ghosts that without ever being able to utter them your voice met, this voice broken by the silence you played as a virtuoso. Frustrating the avidity of the audience. Such, now and forever, of an almost mute gravity, is the voice, which, from out there, softly, beckons us. Philippe Bonnefis Saturday, 25 April 1998 Paris

14

CHAPTER 3 LETTER TO JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD FROM GILLES DELEUZE

undated (c. 1975–6) Translated by Roger McKeon

Dear Jean-François, I’m in no shape to write, and there’s nothing I can do for L’Arc. Alas for me. Your text on the false problem of an alternative is truly beautiful. It being your only copy, I’m sending it back to you. One thing that continues to puzzle me is that the more we have thoughts that can be combined or connected, the more irritating a difference sometimes arises that I can’t even pinpoint. It’s like our relationship: the better I love you, the less I get it, but what? I speak for myself, only for myself. How curious. I have not yet readapted to French life and still live over two nights. To you both, my best wishes and friendship, Gilles

This undated letter is likely to be from 1975 to 1976. Deleuze refers to a special issue of the journal L’Arc which was published in 1976; it included the text by Lyotard ‘Sur la force des faibles’ (On the Strength of the Weak), to which Deleuze makes reference. The essay was also included in the 1977 collection Rudiments païens; for an English translation, see ‘On the Strength of the Weak’, in Toward the Postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993), 62–72. The jet-lag Deleuze alludes to in the letter followed his return from the United States where he and Lyotard attended the Schizo-Culture conference in New York, 13–16 November 1975, before Deleuze travelled on to California with Jean-Jacques Lebel, Claire Parnet and Félix Guattari. – Ed.

16

CHAPTER 4 ON THEORY: AN INTERVIEW

with Brigitte Devismes, VH 101, 1970 Translated by Roger McKeon

Brigitte Devismes – For you, who are working on the theory of figure, what is it like to do theoretical research today? Jean-François Lyotard – Well, your question really puzzles me, for the word ‘theoretical’ covers an almost limitless number of fields. The answer might require delimiting the field I am currently exploring; at any rate, what I am interested in, even if this isn’t the correct approach, is the fact that, politically, we have no theory, although important segments of a theory could take their inspiration from what is happening in ‘what is commonly referred to as the “arts”’. Maybe this is what I could elaborate on. There are three things I would like to say, in fact. The first one concerns political theory, and I choose this ‘example’ because it seems to me that the function of theory is not only to understand, but also to criticize, that is, to call in question and overturn a reality, social relationships, the relationships of human beings with things and other human beings, which are clearly intolerable. And as far as I am concerned, that is the dimension of politics. It isn’t only the assumption of power, it must consist in the overturning of a mystified or alienated reality. Marxism, which was all the same an effective theory, has obviously been useful in this regard, but in the situation we know today, and have known for at least a decade, in fact, traditional Marxism isn’t wholly satisfactory as a theory. B. D. – Hasn’t Althusser done important work in that respect? J.-F. L. – Althusser’s contribution is important, indeed, but I am not sure he is on the right track, although different aspects of his work are undoubtedly relevant. He has attempted to extract from Marxism a theory that would be in a properly theoretical relation with the field of social experience. A relation which would no longer be dialectical, within which the order of experience and that of discourse would be entirely separated. In which regard I believe he is right, for it is true that a theory is not in a dialectical relation with the field it applies to. And anything having to do with a process, a genesis, a passage from the objective to the subjective, in the Hegelian sense, must in effect be rejected as a religious-like mystification, a reconciliation phantasy. This, I don’t intend to explain, but it is now obvious to me that what is left of Hegelian dialectics in the traditional Marxist approach makes it into a kind of religion. Where Althusser should not be followed, however, where something obviously breaks down, is where he suddenly stops and reserves the political dimension for the Party – the ‘Communist’ party. What incites him to do so, in fact, is that he considers this dimension as belonging to an ideological order, in which the problem raised is not that of truth, but of efficiency. I believe something is

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

false in this global configuration of the relation between theory and practice as elaborated by Althusser. False because the critical dimension of theory has disappeared. What is at stake is not only a conceptual type of critique, it is a practical one. B. D. – And what you tax him with, if I am not mistaken, is failing to conceptualize the alienation within which he is currently working, and to criticize it. J.-F. L. – Exactly. When he eliminates alienation as a concept that doesn’t belong in the system, he is right, but when he says that there is no room for alienation in Marxist theory, he is wrong. As such, the concept obviously doesn’t belong to the system which allows us to understand what capitalism is. There is no room for alienation at that level, it is not a concept relating to the order of the reproduction of capital, but a fact which belongs to the realm of social experience, in other words the order that Marx called ‘representations and perceptions’, and it is extremely important, precisely because, in this order, it points to the possibility of a theory, of a true universality. One must understand that alienation is the experiencing of a false, abstract universality. It consists, for example, in the fact that anything can be exchanged for anything else, through the mediation of money. Or the fact that the relation between the worker and his work is an indifferent relation, in Marx’s words. Any worker can do any work, permutations change nothing, which is what reveals alienation. On a broader level, if we already have the concepts of the system, it can be said that alienation is a reversal of true relationships; but that in itself is another matter … At the experiential level, at any rate, alienation can be characterized as the experiencing of an abstract universality, the universal being cut off from concrete situations. Money, for example, is an abstract universal; that is, it can be exchanged for any object and in a proportion entirely independent from the use of the objects for which it is exchanged. Likewise, the relation of the salaried worker with what he does is an abstract universal relation: he mediatizes the materials and the machinery, but this mediation is external to him, it is a false mediation: in fact, labour-power is but a transitory incarnation of capital, which is why the encounter of the worker and his work becomes a random one. All these themes are most explicit in Marx. I think that to be very important because it is what begins to indicate the possibility of a theory. I consider it extremely important that these phenomena – which are most explicitly described by Marx – be taken into consideration, for without them, the possibility of a theory would never arise, whereas in precapitalist societies the abstract universality I just mentioned didn’t exist: when it began to appear in the mercantile sector, its scope was limited to very small segments of society and, more importantly still, it didn’t affect the worker himself, who wasn’t salaried. In today’s capitalist society, this abstraction tends to spread to all activities. B. D. – How do you link alienation and this possibility of theorizing? I might even ask how you conciliate them. J.-F. L. – The question is not that of a conciliation. Let us say that if there aren’t in the realm of social experience, on the very level at which the theorist finds himself, if there aren’t in the brain which is attempting to conceptualize this experience, inasmuch as this brain belongs to experience – that is in the most immediate field, in the phenomenal 18

On Theory: An Interview

field where social relationships are located – if there aren’t indices that point to the possibility of a universality, of a systematic understanding of things, indices that function negatively in sum, which are like holes in this experience, holes through which one is going to see, or attempt to see, at least, what organizes this lacunary experience which is that of capitalist society with its alienation … then there is no possibility of a theory. I am not saying that theory becomes necessary. If the actual conditions of experience didn’t already contain – in a negative way – the index of a universality, there is no reason why this universality could be constructed as a system. Which is why (and it is entirely Marxist to say so) Marxism is not possible before capitalism, as Marx himself has shown in the 1857 introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that Althusser likes to quote so much, but in my opinion misinterprets. B. D. – How do you define this theory made possible by universality? J.-F. L. – I give it the strictly formal meaning any modern logician would and understand it as the constitution of a set of terms and of the operative relations and laws which will allow the elements of this set to enter into different combinations. It is undeniable that, in this sense, Marx did construct the theory of capitalism by defining the general formula for capital, by elaborating, for example, the concept of the organic composition and the transformational law of this composition. Such is the meaning I give to the word theory here. But I also want to stress that the problems currently encountered in all developed countries pertain to an appendix of this theory that Marx never really theorized, something he always assumed, rather, and that one might rightfully believe to be a residue of Hegelian dialectics, namely that starting from this system within which a labour-power functions as one of the moments in the realization of capital, one tends to take an awakening of the proletariat for granted. Perhaps I am expressing myself abstractly … To put it otherwise, Marx, in my opinion, offers both a theory and a hypothesis concerning class struggle; now, the latter cannot be deducted from the former – it has nothing to do with the theoretical field: it belongs to social experience. It is true that social experience involves class struggle, conflicts between employers and workers and, in a broader perspective, between managers and implementers, but it cannot legitimately be inferred from the laws established in the theoretical order that this struggle leads to socialism. Class struggles belong to the phenomenological order. B. D. – The problem today is to dissociate the two orders, to show where theory and practice stand, because talking about theoretical practice isn’t sufficient, neither is saying that theory is impossible in the absence of a practice and vice versa … J.-F. L. – Indeed, this is what has begun to emerge somewhat awkwardly, but to emerge nonetheless, in Althusser’s works, that is, the recognition that there is a theoretical order, which is that of the general formula for capital, of the origin of surplus-value and of the fate of capitalism on the one hand, and the practice of class struggle on the other, the existence of which cannot be denied in the order of what Marx called ‘perceptions and representations’, the acknowledgement, moreover, that the two orders are no longer connected. The reasons we had to believe, let us say that the revolutionaries had 19

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

to believe, fifty years ago, in the proletariat as the privileged locus of crises and social critique, well, these reasons have lost their cogency. One cannot say that the proletariat is this locus in any of the developed countries; it just isn’t true. B. D. – Then, where is this locus? Could it be with the students? J.-F. L. – I don’t know if there is a locus. One cannot say that there is a privileged spot where society becomes aware of itself, or criticizes itself, without reverting back to Hegel. This would mean that the order of theory, for example the law of the organic composition of capital, is in a continuous relation with the order of social experience, the phenomenological order, and that it promotes the progress of awareness and critique in the latter, for instance. I don’t believe in this continuity … It seems to me that the relation between the order of theory and that of class struggle has nothing to do with what can be said about it from within a Hegelian perspective. It can only be defined negatively. The only thing we can say is that, as it develops, the capitalist system invests activities which had formerly been unaffected by it, for example teaching and studying; alienation thus makes its appearance and takes over in such sectors. This is also true as far as ‘art’ goes … What I mean is that the experiencing of alienation extends way beyond the proletariat and that it is therefore perfectly understandable that fractions of society which cannot be said to be exploited in the strict sense of the term – the student body being one of these – quite seriously challenge society. All that can be said, and this is to state it negatively, is this: as long as the exploited themselves – that is labour-power as the source of surplusvalue – don’t refuse to keep on being merchandises in the system, the system can last on … as long, at any rate, as its intrinsic contradictions allow it to hold out. And at least one of these exists, but it does not necessarily lead to a revolution. This is what should be said; this is how the problem is now posed. B. D. – What is this intrinsic contradiction? J.-F. L. – Marx puts it very clearly … There is only one, actually, being that the system appraises all values in terms of working time and that it strives, through its own dynamic, to reduce working time to a minimum. The pursuit of profit aims at this reduction. Nonetheless, the whole accountancy of value is based on working time. One of the effects is that the system cannot give everyone work and that it tends to give out less and less. B. D. – Isn’t surplus-value itself another contradiction in the system? J.-F. L. – This raises another problem. If surplus-value can be reinvested, the system grows; its growth means that goods, activities, objects which were not capitalistically invested are going to be. That is the general process. The question is to know whether a time will come when surplus-value can no longer be reinvested. Of course, there are overcapitalization crises, but experience has shown that, until now, different safety-valves – waging wars, sending things to the moon, perhaps … – have always been found. There is one problem, however, for which there is no safety-valve, namely that merchandise can be produced today with ten times, a hundred times, in some cases even a thousand times less labourpower than a hundred years ago, and that is a very serious problem. 20

On Theory: An Interview

B. D. – Yes, but more and more things are being produced … J.-F. L. – That are not given away … So, if folks have no work, they won’t be able to buy them. That is what is happening in the Third World as is only too obvious. In this sense, it is true that Third World populations are today’s industrial reserve. At the risk of being considered incoherent, I will now deal with my second point: what the practice of ‘art’ or the crisis in the ‘arts’ can teach us. B. D. – You mentioned earlier that the arts were now invested by the system and my intention was precisely to ask you what this entails for the artist. J.-F. L. – I would prefer not to answer your question because I am not competent in this regard. I believe that those we call ‘artists’ are the first ones to realize the fact and they know more about it than I do … I can describe the fantastic way in which teaching has been invested by the system over the last fifteen years; but as far as the so-called artistic activity goes, I believe someone like Raysse would be in a better position to elaborate than I am.1 What I did mean to dwell on is that, as Otto Hahn has written, political critique and ‘art’ criticism are traditionally kept completely separate. Politicos consider artists as jesters; that is, they share the bourgeois point of view on the artist. And artists ignore politicos in general. Now, what strikes me is that we are witnessing both an enormous crisis in the ‘arts’, on account of which the word ‘art’ has practically been relinquished and, in my view, just as serious a political crisis. (The re-constitution of micro-groups of a traditional type changes this crisis in no way, it only masks and manifests it). It seems to me that it is precisely on account of the short- or long-term relinquishment, of the necessary relinquishment of Marxist dialectics considered as a religious-like ideology, that practices which are much more closely related to the activity of the ‘artist’ than they are to political activities in the traditional sense began to develop as soon as May 1968 in France and may have been adopted even earlier by the German SDS.2 I believe that what is important in this ‘artistic’ practice – I put the word in quotation marks because I don’t think art can be all that easily defined and because I do think this artistic function is currently becoming impossible – what is important is that the impossibility of this function proceeds from the same reasons as those on account of which a certain political ideology can no longer be pursued. B. D. – When would you say this crisis dates from? J.-F. L. – I would say it began at the turn of the century, when, between 1880 and 1920, a whole series of things which signified a complete mutation of the ‘specialist’s’ relation to forms began to appear. The function of the artist, from then on, is no longer so much to produce good forms, new good forms, but on the contrary to deconstruct them systematically and to accelerate their obsolescence. And this indefinitely, by attacking these good forms on all levels. As far as the musical code is concerned, for example, the old scale is dropped and dodecaphony invented; or the note as the music is made with noises. The same can be done with the medium in plastic arts, for example Heizer digging holes in Nevada.3

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J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

B. D. – Buren criticizes this aspect of the process.4 He points out that doing things in the desert is no solution and that the problem is to bring them to the city, where the best neon production risks being outshined by the electric sign on the corner drugstore … J.-F. L. – Yes, I believe he is completely right. But it is interesting all the same, from an experimental point of view, because an attempt is made to deconstruct the traditional space of sculpture and to invert it; what Heizer produces is a sunk carving on the earth itself. Maybe this is why he has to work in the countryside … because he starts from this primary hypothesis. So, in spite of the fact that the social effect is nil, it is an interesting attempt, one example of a deconstruction among thousands of others, Surrealism having been a mere episode from this point of view, nothing more … Only from this point of view though, I insist, and in spite of my great interest in the Surrealists. B. D. – What is positive is thus deconstruction? J.-F. L. – I don’t know whether it is positive; I would rather call it negative, but it is what I deem important. You cannot consider what has been happening in painting, music or sculpture for almost a century without having the feeling that the function of art has overturned. Art no longer fulfils the religious function it used to at all, for it did fulfil a religious function, it created good forms, a kind of myth, of ritual, of rhythm, which, at the end of the day, allowed people in a society to communicate other than through language, by participating in the same music, in the same substratum of meaning. B. D. – And to afford them another one, different from everyday life? J.-F. L. – Yes, and in general this would go on in churches. Everyday life was marked by speech, but the sacred was marked by form, which is to say by art. That has become impossible. Why? Because we are in a system that doesn’t give a rap about the sacred. B. D. – In other words, it has liquidated the sacred, hasn’t it? J.-F. L. – Yes, it has absolutely liquidated all of that because it is only interested in what can be sold. Thus, the artist himself tends to become part of the labour-power, etc. But what I believe to be most important is not so much the way the artist has reacted to his social position, but that in which he has reacted to the situation capitalism has created as for his activity: instead of continuing to produce unifying, reconciling forms, his activity has become a deconstructing one which is necessarily critical. And I would be tempted to say, in spite of my interest in politics, that the best, the most radical critical activity bears on the formal, the most directly plastic aspect of painting, photography or the film, and not so much on the signified, be it social or anything else, of the object it is concerned with. More specifically, I would say that Mallarmé’s work – in ‘A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance’, for instance – on the very space of the printed sheet, is an extremely important critical work insofar as it shows that the typographical space itself is one conquered on a plastic space, which resists it, which is suppressed by the space of discourse. And in ‘A Throw of the Dice’, precisely, this plastic space is suggested,

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On Theory: An Interview

restituted as the other of the discursive and textual space. They will surely say that this has no political impact whatsoever … but I am not sure they won’t be wrong. B. D. – What do these deconstructions contribute? Can they be politically annexed? Furthermore, aren’t the very terms ‘revolutionary art’ self-contradictory? J.-F. L. – Indeed they are, and detestable. Every time an attempt at revolutionary art was made it turned out to be a catastrophe, which is quite understandable since it meant that art yielded to the requirements of a political discourse and, consequently, lost all freedom to deconstruct. Such was the drama in Breton’s relation with the Communist party, which could just as well be the drama – or the buffoonery – in the relation of any of today’s artists with more than one micro-group. B. D. – But is deconstruction an action? J.-F. L. – Yes, that’s it. That’s the way you want to raise the question: does politics ultimately consist in producing organizations which could replace those currently in power, after having destroyed them, on the one hand, and, on the other, is what the artistic deconstruction produces an action? The two questions are linked. I believe it is absolutely obvious today, and has been for quite some time that, for one thing, the reconstitution of traditional political organizations, even if they present themselves as ultra-leftist, is bound to fail, for it settles precisely into the order of the social surface and they are ‘picked up’, to use common parlance, they perpetuate the type of activity the system has instituted as political, they are necessarily alienated, ineffective. The other thing is that all the deconstructions which could appear as aesthetic formalism, ‘avant-garde’ research, etc., actually make up the only type of activity that is effective, this because it is functionally – the word is very bad, ontologically would be better and more straightforward – located outside the system; and, by definition, its function is to deconstruct everything that belongs to order, to show that all this ‘order’ conceals something else, that it represses. B. D. – To show that this order is based on no justifiable authority? J.-F. L. – Yes. And this deconstructing activity is a truly radical critical activity for it does not deal with the signifieds of things, but with their plastic organization, their signifying organization. It shows that the problem is not so much that of knowing what a given discourse says, but rather how it is disposed. It shows that it is active on account of its very disposition, its configuration, and that the deconstruction of its disposition is going to reveal all of its mystifying content. B. D. – Should one make a distinction between the level on which art theoreticians see what this critique consists in, and that on which the artist works? In other words, does critique really proceed from within the arts? J.-F. L. – Perhaps a distinction should be made … but I believe that it is more and more difficult to be an ‘artist’ today, without adopting a critical position. We no longer live in a time where artists belonged to a studio, to a school, where the function of the forms to be 23

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

produced was not to cause events, as it is today, but on the contrary to play an integrative role. Take painting or ‘literature’, where it is now absolutely impossible to produce anything without reflecting on its critical function – that is considering carefully what is to be dealt with, in what type of space the written or pictorial signs are going to be produced, for instance. I believe ‘art’ to be more and more concerted. There is more and more anti-art in this sense. I imagine there will always be a difference between artists and theorists, but that is rather a good thing, for theorists have everything to learn from the artists, even if the latter won’t do what the former expect …; so much the better in fact, for theorists need to be practically criticized by works that disturb them. B. D. – Do the actions of the Movement of March 22 inspire the parallel you draw between deconstruction on the artistic level and political critique?5 J.-F. L. – Yes, I am indeed thinking of a type of action which closely resembles what they called ‘exemplary action’ at that time, which coincides with it in fact. The Movement had this idea, which wasn’t an idea …, yes, maybe it was after all …, which was surprising in itself, and according to which this deconstructing activity should be transferred into the places and institutions of everyday social practice. And it was then recognized that this had an extraordinarily revolutionary function, in the right sense of the term, I believe. The question was no longer of singing the praises of an organization, but of starting to criticize the system here and now, not at all in the signified of its discourse, but in the very deconstruction of its time and space. B. D. – Wasn’t this a model for the hook-up between theory and practice towards which political action should tend? J.-F. L. – Precisely, for it seems to me that what was taking place was a fulgurant junction, a flash of lightning between theory and practice – the most immediate practice and perhaps the most elaborated theory that we have known in the last forty years. And I believe that in so doing, the Movement was in some respects answering the problems of art. For the museum is also an institution, and as long as art remains within it, it is stuck. It must come out of the museum and suppress itself as art and as a leisurely activity directed to people who are exhausted by alienation. And its coming out would be a transgression. If you start building mobiles and variable volumes, digging trenches or covering advertising posters with colour in the middle of town, you are patently transgressing the order of the institution and exposing its repressive character. You are showing that the poster which was benignly inviting us to fantasize was but a pseudophantasy regulated by the system, and that whoever wants to depart from the rule is rejected. B. D. – Even those who understand what this type of action aims at often object that ‘you offer nothing to replace what you are destroying …’ What can you answer them? The argument is important because it blocks people … J.-F. L. – No, in my opinion the problem is unimportant and irrelevant: we are called on to produce the theses of a new school, and that is out of the question. That’s finished, it is 24

On Theory: An Interview

no longer possible. I believe demystification is an endless task. This is where the concept of a ‘permanent revolution’ can be given its true dimension. B. D. – Thus, the society to be hoped for is that in which one is perpetually carrying out a demystifying action and this demystification should not be based on the illusory assumption that a perfect society can be established where it would no longer be necessary? J.-F. L. – Absolutely. Such a state does not exist. Even if we managed to put an end to certain forms of exploitation and oppression, the deconstruction of what is written, taken for granted, what is connoted – habits, institutions, non-subverted phantasies – would be an interminable task. It is really striking that, as Raysse has noted, what was once part of the avant-garde always becomes part of the rear-guard and, as such, loses its disruptive power. That is the strength of the capitalist system, its capacity for repossessing anything and everything. In this sense, the ‘artists’ are pushed forward, they are literally chased out of the very deconstructed forms they produce, they are compelled to keep on finding something else. I believe their research knows no other drive. B. D. – Barthes says that we are currently in a period of self-destruction of writing. Is it conceivable that writing might go through a phase after which it could restore itself? J.-F. L. – Well, if that is what is happening, it means that we will be entering a new age of barbarity, that we will again have a dogmatics, a rhetoric, schools, an order, a religion … and in the current state of affairs, if we consider what that may mean politically, what it means, in my opinion, is a deeply bureaucratized social situation, with or without the political dictatorship of a party, a bureaucratic nightmare with its artistic ritual. In that case, things will close up and there will be instituted forms, and what it means is that barbarity will have taken over and that the revolution is not permanent. That we are done for. B. D. – Do you think that Tel Quel operates a radical ‘deconstruction’, or does something only resembling that … with no more weight than a lesser approach?6 They seem to think that they can show what writing is and write at a kind of level where writing would not be ideological … J.-F. L. – I prefer not to answer, out of honesty, because I don’t know Tel Quel’s writings well enough. I propose to read them carefully and will revert to that question when I am done. B. D. – Can you nevertheless situate them, in a fairly general way, in their position vis-àvis writing? In what the theory of writing must mean for them? J.-F. L. – Well … Although I haven’t read them, truly read them, on the basis of a few of the writings I do know and of a discussion I had at a convention with one of the members of their group, I can say this: I am struck by the fact that, to quote Barthes in one of his first books, Writing Degree Zero, which predates Tel Quel, there is a confusion in concepts between writing and style. Barthes distinguished writing as connoted style 25

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

and style as writing undone. This meant that upon the onset of what can be called a new writing, he recognized that there is a moment, which is that of style, when this writing is not yet done, where the style is not yet connoted, where, therefore, its critical or deconstructing function of the preceding writing fully exists – and I believe, by the way, that, as Barthes himself had it, this function of style relates directly to the ‘expression’ of the writer. I am well aware that the word is not fashionable, and I believe above all that this cry, this style, is not a mere expression of fantasies, a simple symptom; it implies a work of criticism starting from fantasies, but that is another problem. For the time being, we had better settle for the remark that one must always carefully dissociate what is writing and what is deconstruction. I believe the two to be in opposition. There is always a moment of deconstruction when either the painter, the writer, the musician or even the philosopher, and definitely the politician as well, criticizes the preceding writing in his particular sphere. And this criticism can only tear apart the periphery of the sphere; it is made, as it were, ‘before’ writing, it is not yet written, in the sense that it is not connoted, it does not yet belong to a system in which sense is stored in pairs of fixed oppositions. On the contrary, this is sense operating at full potential, not at all fullness of meaning. It has nothing to do with processes belonging to the linguistic order, but rather to the unconscious in the Freudian sense of the term. Obviously, when I say that, it only passes the buck, because it means that you also have to read Freud again and ask yourself whether this unconscious order is a linguistic order. B. D. – On this point, unlike Lacan, you think it isn’t? J.-F. L. – I think Freud always strove to carefully distinguish the primary process and the secondary process as non-linguistic and linguistic processes, respectively, in The Interpretation of Dreams or in the article on the unconscious. Wanting to confuse them is a great betrayal. Freud never ceases to give examples of what the process of deconstruction can be as a process that undermines an established order by using operators that are not of a linguistic type, that do not pertain to writing, but to an energetic which is that of desire. B. D. – So it is in Freud that you find the model for the concept of deconstruction that you used to talk about art? J.-F. L. – Yes, and that’s why I think that an aesthetic and a political practice can be made to converge. B. D. – Tel Quel, which takes the text written to be the essential, may necessarily distort the analysis of what artistic expression can be? They’re only working on the fallout from something? J.-F. L. – It seems to me, yes. Likewise, when Jacques Derrida speaks of the trace, and equally when he speaks of archi-writing, the mistake, I believe, consists in failing to dissociate what is letter and what is sign. It is obvious that the line does not function like the letter. For the letter is made up of a set of distinctive features, and if it can convey meaning, it is because, just like speech, it offers the receiver elements that are easily 26

On Theory: An Interview

recognizable, according to a binary logic. The same is not true of the line. I’m talking basics here, but that’s where we have to start over from. It cannot at all be said that the line traced by Klee’s pencil on a sheet of paper is loaded with sense effects in the same way as the letters he writes under that line, which simply say: Deadly jump, for instance. Absolutely not. B. D. – Works of art seduce the eye, we like them, etc. Why is it that they please us? J.-F. L. – I would be tempted to say that what pleases us now is what disconcerts us, and in this sense we are really in Freud’s ‘death drive’. What we are interested in is the dimension of otherness, alteration. There is a constant displacement and this displacement as such is what we are interested in, the fact that we are disconcerted, put out of time, caught on the wrong foot … Yes, the absence of a locus. Pontalis spoke of a Freudian utopia in the strong sense of the word. He meant that there was a non-locus. Well, what pleases us disconcerts us because it points to a non-locus.

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CHAPTER 5 ‘DOING AWAY WITH THE ILLUSION OF POLITICS’

with Gilbert Lascault, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1972 Translated by Kiff Bamford and Roger McKeon

Introduction Jean-François Lyotard, who teaches philosophy at the University of Vincennes, has just published Discourse, Figure with Klincksieck Publishing. His purpose is to fight the dominance of the discourse of readability within our culture. A reading of Freud allows him to identify what he terms the figural and desire. It seemed to be a good opportunity to ask J.-F. Lyotard to explain his work in an interview with G. Lascault. A libidinal book-object One part of this work sets up an underlying conceptual field while the other delivers a libidinal book-object, by which I mean a book analogous to the libidinal object in that it is never complete, closed in on itself, but is rather broken apart and in a somewhat inconsistent state; indefinitely referencing outside itself. As for the conceptual field, it is a real field of concepts, but it is not developed as a system, it is not the subject of a metalanguage. This field is just the ordered set of devices by which diverse references (Klee, Mallarmé, Hugues de Saint-Victor, Frege, Saussure, rebus puzzles, anamorphoses …) are worked through, critiqued. The fact that the work doesn’t contain a theory and, more importantly, that it is not really a thesis, is shown in its overt disorder, but above all in the gap maintained between a phenomenal order, where one can hear the silences, and the latent conceptual underpinning. The figural and the transgression of rules What seemed to me most important and totally missing in the linguistic type of approach (writing in the sense in which it is employed in French ideology today), with the exception of Benveniste’s, is precisely the space where resides that of which one speaks: the object of discourse is given in the form of a figure-image, of a representation if you like.1 It is present-absent at a distance to discourse which doesn’t belong to it, at a distance that I try to characterize as designation. And then, in a second moment, that which I call the figural, are the traces, within discourse itself this time, of an ‘order’ that is never graspable except as disorder. A discourse of signification, a discourse of communication, the function of which is precisely to convey elements of signification

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

intelligible to the interlocutor; this discourse nevertheless carries, always carries, figural elements that are not only imaginary representations, but also figure-forms, which, most often, as it happens, a strictly linguistic approach – structural or generative – cannot account for. In these forms I recognize the results, not of the operations making up the system of language, but of non-logical operations, in the sense that they transgress the rules governing the maintenance of invariant intervals between terms. Events, not a history I don’t know whether this book implies a history of the figural. There are events, that is all I can say. And what I would call events is in fact a kind of mutation of desire with regard to the position of its object. Mutation in the area assigned to figurality. In the Middle Ages, this thing, this non-sense, if you like, this thickness or this opacity was positioned and symbolized within the very discourse of Holy Scripture as its contents (the mystery) and its position (the Revelation). Therein it was, thus, as if in a myth, absent or even excluded from plastic representation (which was, on the contrary, perfectly written). With the Renaissance this thing was displaced. At the same time as discourse set itself up on an axiomatic model, expellingthe figural from the new physics and philosophy, at the same time the figural moved into painting as the space of representation. The object then gives itself as lost, and painting positions it as if it were behind a window pane. A transparency is both where the object gives itself and what puts it out of reach. And then another event has to do with what happens from the end of the nineteenth century. I don’t know whether we are still in it or not but that imports little as it is not the problem: the event belongs to another type of temporality than historicity. It is a new mutation, of desire as regards the object, and it corresponds precisely to the disappearance of representation, at least to its critique … Mallarmé, Butor figure such a critique …2 I find the concept of progress aberrant. It falls within a progressive, cumulative, dialectic, representation of history, which places all ‘becoming’ exclusively in the order of secondary temporality, in the sense in which Freud speaks of the secondary process. But those events I mentioned earlier are not essentially in the relation of succession for itself and of simultaneity in itself, for us (I take my cue here from the nomenclature of the Phenomenology of Spirit, but you could take Husserl’s), which is that of intelligible temporality … Primitivity is forever unattainable You should be wary of both Hegel and Rousseau. The risk of primitivism, of naturalism, call it Rousseauist if you will, I believe I avert because what is constantly implied in the position that I am trying to develop is precisely that primitivity is never attained: it is never given except negatively. You cannot put yourself in the place of the primary process, you cannot speak from its place and in its place, you can only pick up traces 30

‘Doing Away with the Illusion of Politics’

it leaves negatively, as disorder within the secondary process, within well-ordered discourse, or a good form; it can never be reached but from where we are when we speak and think, from a place which is that of secondarity. I even believe that to be where I am probably in most disagreement with certain modern interpretations of Freud, for or against Freud, in which one attempts to determine the nature, the logic, if you will, of the primary process, where one attempts to identify it with a logic of discourse for instance: such, I believe, is really simulated madness: it is the attempt to step through the looking glass. Theory doesn’t allow us to do so. Psychosis, perhaps, does … For a libidinal politics I am no aesthetician at all and a rather poor philosopher. Most of my time has been devoted, as everyone doesn’t know, … to political activities and the publications of activist cells.3 I have now moved on. But what that means is that my objective was to develop a theory of politics and a theory of history, and that is what still really interests me. What is striking is that I have been forced to abandon this project and to take an enormous detour, which, evidently, at the same time displaced the initial objective. What I am interested in, actually, with a certain number of concepts I have tried to elaborate along the way, is to return (as has been the case this past year in the work done at Vincennes) to practical critique and to the theory of practical critique: to see what a politics might be.4 If the capitalist system is understood as the prototype of a ‘bound system’ in the Freudian sense, a system in which the energies are seized and harnessed by a simple logic which is that of the value of exchange, then what could be the meaning of a political action within it? Isn’t it that a political action consists precisely in producing events in the system and to disrupt it, to deconstruct it; and how can these events be produced? What I am saying here is very insufficient and badly put: what I mean is that deconstruction such as can be found in art from the second great upheaval I mentioned earlier; at the end of the nineteenth century, this deconstruction, this critique, which can be found in the painting of Cézanne, for instance, can serve in certain respects as a model. In its precision and intensity, it allows you to see what could, what can be a political deconstruction and at the same time to critique a whole, completely illusory conception of politics, which is in fact politics as representation, that is, what is always at issue when one speaks of politics. What would be interesting, would be precisely to have done with this illusion of politics in the sense in which Freud talks about illusion (the illusion of religion). And politics is, I believe, an illusion of the same type. We have to try to re-establish, or rather establish, a politics that I would call a libidinal politics, which, when all is said and done, is the only one that is now going to count. Under the discourse = the figure; under the cobblestones = the beach.5

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CHAPTER 6 REMARKS ON JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD

by Gilles Deleuze, ‘A Short Review of Discourse, Figure’, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1972 Translation by Michael Taormina

Lyotard’s book is at once dispersed, flying off in every direction, and yet as self-contained as an egg. The text is both full of gaps and tight, both adrift and moored. Discourse, Figure: the figures, even the illustrations, are an integral part of the discourse; they slip into the discourse, while the discourse turns back on the operations that make figures possible. This book is built on two heterogeneous expanses that do not mirror one another, though they do assure a free circulation of writing energy (or desire?). An egg, a variable interior in the middle, on a mobile surface. A schizo-book, which through its complex technique, achieves the highest degree of clarity. Like every great book, difficult to write, but not difficult to read. The importance of this book is that it marks the first generalized critique of the signifier. It tackles this notion which for so long has exerted a kind of terrorism in literature, and has even contaminated art or our comprehension of art. Finally, a little fresh air in those musty spaces. The book shows how the signifier-signified relation is surpassed in two directions: (1) Towards the exterior, on the side of designation, by those figure-images, because it is not words that are signs, but they make signs with the objects they designate, whose identity they break open to discover a hidden content, another face which we will not be able to see, but which yet will make us ‘see’ the word (I am thinking of those beautiful pages on dance as designation, and the visibility of the word, the word as visible thing, as distinct from both its legibility and its audition); but the signifier-signified relation is again surpassed in another way. (2) Towards the interior of discourse, by a pure figural which upsets the coded gaps of the signifier, works its way into them, and there labours under the conditions of the identity of their elements (the pages on the dream work, which violates the order of speech and crumples the text, creating new unities that are not linguistic, like so many rebuses under hieroglyphics). Lyotard’s book on every page participates in an anti-dialectic that performs a total reversal of the figure-signifier relation. It is not the figures that depend on the signifier and its effects; on the contrary it is the signifying chain that depends on figural effects, creating variable configurations of images with non-figurative figures, causing lines to flow and breaking them according to singular points, crushing and twisting signifiers as well as signifieds. And Lyotard does not even say all this, he shows it, he makes us see it, he makes it visible and mobile: a destruction of identities that carries us off on a profound journey.

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CHAPTER 7 ‘THE “INTENSITIES” ARE WHAT IMPORTS, NOT THE MEANING’

with Christian Descamps, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1975 Translated by Roger McKeon

Introduction by La Quinzaine littéraire To base the raisons d’être of complex economic mechanisms on desire, to detect under social behaviours or theoretical positions a need for pleasuring (jouissance), to rediscover in the body of any discourse (including that of capital) the affirmation of libidinal intensities, such are some of the directions in which Jean-François Lyotard conducts an analysis that stands beyond both the philosophy of the subject and a certain materialism.1 What does ‘thinking’, the search for ‘meanings’ conceal according to him? First and foremost, multiplicities of affects. In the line of Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud, in that of the affirmations which intend to do without evidence of Discourse, Figure or Des dispositifs pulsionnels, Lyotard publishes a vehement, provocative book, which, paradoxically, solicits the reader’s adhesion while gleefully rubbing him (or her) the wrong way. A labyrinthine work whose thread must be grasped so as not to get lost in it, less immediately legible than Anti-Oedipus, but for the reading of which Bataille, Klossowski and, of course, Deleuze and Guattari have prepared us. It was written with the same concern to break the confinement of current philosophical, economic or psychoanalytical thought, which continues to operate by concepts. It is likely to provoke heated, perhaps even – which will reinforce the author’s positions – passionate discussions. Our collaborator Christian Descamps asked J.-F. Lyotard to lead us himself into the alleys of the labyrinth. Although this interview is intended to be an incentive to read, it will take on its full importance only in the eyes of those who have already immersed themselves in reading Libidinal Economy. Introduction by Christian Descamps Neither pornographic, nor theoretical, nor philosophical, nor economic but all this and much more, Lyotard’s work fascinates politics and politicizes passions. Breaking with any thought of the negative, it puts emotional intensity into play. Paradoxical thought, beautiful. Play with its red violence.

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

Interview Christian Descamps – Discourse, Figure signalled – in its end – your divorce from all phenomenology, Dispositifs pulsionnels opened up a dynamic of drives. What path has this new work travelled? Jean-François Lyotard – Travelling a path would imply that one is going somewhere, which is far from assured. I don’t place myself in a linear, cumulative story. I sketch a political economy that would be nothing other than a libidinal economy, meaning that affective man/economic man, individual/society are jettisoned. I’m trying to see if one can slip between dualism and monism. No longer feel like making a dualism – like Freud in his Metapsychology – escape also from monism which is always a point of view of totality. I wish I were a Spinozist, but that isn’t possible. Neither totality, nor lack, but Dissimulation and Dissimilation. C. D. – In Dispositifs the intensity lived by the marginalized still functions as a ‘good locus’. Here, no more good locus, no more good form. All semiology is capture, accountancy. If the performance is lukewarm, is any transcript always loss of the event? 2 Does this lukewarmness refer to the heat of the here and now? J.-F. L. – There is always a system of signs; there is no more free energy than wild societies or marginals. One can always construct a semiotic, a structure, but the event passes through these signs in a random manner.3 The intensities are what imports, not the ‘meaning’. As for the here and now, that is a trap that you set for me, a trap in which I was caught … The here and now retains a Hegelian time, a philosophy of existence. One privileges the unstable point but maintains a philosophy of the subject. What interests me is an affirmative pseudo-theory of libidinal time, without reference to a subjectivity, even empty. C. D. – It hards on, it invests, it pleasures, it plugs in everywhere, on the vulva of the prostitute, on the prole’s machine, on the desire named Marx, it functions everywhere in any order/disorder. Doesn’t Libidinal Economy manufacture a hyper-sophisticated pragmatic? Blowing up the boundary markers J.-F. L. – In pragmatic, there is pragma, the complementary of a theoretics, which doesn’t jibe here. Either you place me in the philosophical tradition that says: let’s do and as we do let’s see. But then a guide is maintained … The criticism that could be made of this book would consist in taxing it with quietism, not pragmatism … Where we live, things happen, everything is good and nothing is. Hatch a plot without a program, a plot of the intensities. Don’t look for anything else, make yourself a good energy conductor. Blow up the boundary markers that delimit the fields, the demarcations.

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‘The “Intensities” Are What Imports’

C. D. – Here, no more stepping back, no more space for criticism, Capital turns you on! If something else happens, is it but a rearrangement on the threshold of the Möbius strip of the body? J.-F. L. – There are lots of possible pleasurings within Capital according to the position one occupies there. But capitalist or bureaucratic pleasuring (that of mercantilist jealousy, that of totality reproduction) privileges, gives itself as truth, devalues all other modalities. In this sense, capital is still not good enough a conductor. C. D. – But wherefrom can one think that something’s wrong, if it’s still investing only positively? J.-F. L. – Still, there is Power. The whole book is against Power, against the predominance of a type of localization of intensity: you will get off as a capitalist, as a prole, as a hysteric … This fixation distribution is power, exclusion; it prevents the polymorphous perverse passage … Fight for laxity, for the destruction of barriers. C. D. – A libidinal policy is not to say: don’t get off like that, but get off on more space … J.-F. L. – A prole who gets off on repetitive work doesn’t want to be told: ‘How unhappy you are!’ This pleasuring is considered to be infamous, it is a question of recognizing the intensities of repetitive production, but also that the body of the dude caught in a network must be able to move, experience other pleasurings, change jobs. Not easy to come up with a policy beyond Good and Evil. C.D. – You say that criticizing the homosexual or the masochist is being a bastard of the moral order. But what about the sadist? J.-F. L. – Why not a policy built on ‘Yet Another Effort Frenchmen’, where Sade offers up institutions, bawdy houses.4 This is not a utopia. The Sadian – in the clinical sense – is also persecuted. It is only in so far as he occupies a position of power that he gets away with it, that he is sublimated, therefore repressed. C. D. – The prostitute says ‘Make use of me’ and what she means is that there is no me there, only her dislocation, but next to that, she inscribes a subject where she repossesses the economy, cashes in. Christ – that adolescent boy girl to speak like Boehme – is also in the position of a calculating prostitute.5 On the one hand ‘You make me die, it hurts’, but on the other there is something in it for everyone … Dependence and servitude J.-F. L. – The prostitute is dependence, but also servitude. The dependence that I restore in its greatness is that of the connection of pieces of body, of discourse, of intensity, which requires that the self be destroyed. In servitude she is caught in an economic power, in a trade, where she is a commodity and term of exchange in the client-prostitute-pimp trio. C. D. – The pimp inscribes pleasuring on the social body by monetizing intensity. 37

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

J.-F. L. – Prostitution is the underlying model of wage labour: client-worker-boss. C. D. – This model does honour to she whom you call the Little Marx, the Marx of revolt against alienation that you oppose to the Marx … J.-F. L. – Prosecutor, the one of Capital, the one who wants to understand, the one fascinated by capital. C. D. – The pimp transcribes pleasuring into accountancy intensities on the social body. For you, is there a social body? Isn’t May 68 one of the rare moments when this collective body began to exist again? J.-F. L. – When we speak of a social body, we mean the body such as the political or economic institution seeks to make it exist, that is, a unified body within a representative or a reproductive system. But neither exists permanently. We are in an ephemeral film where intensity comes to light, which comes together and breaks up again, unceasingly. May 68 was the irruption of intensity that won a great many pieces of the patchwork. They vibrated together, but quantities of pieces remained external and the corporising institutions recomposed the image of a body of power of performance. A performance always implies a scenographer, a capital owner. Politics is to destroy this scene as a monopoly of the representation of the social body. C. D. – You describe Chinese eroticism (from Van Gulik) as a combat, as an extraction of strength (male-female-Yin-Yang).6 What could also be read in it is the multiplication of force, the desire for immortality as much as that of child reproduction. J.-F. L. – The texts show this erotic as sacred pumping (male-female, or the other way around, they aren’t sexist). In Taoism one moves closer to the empty centre, in the Confucian version – openly bureaucratic – it is a question of fabricating beautiful children. The intensification, here, is energy capture, Chinese erotics is not a simple theft; one multiplies a production on the body of the partner to filch it from him/her afterwards. It’s the model of capital, you ravish after intensifying. It’s a theft with added value. The fact that energy capitalization takes place among the Taoists in a metaphysical universe changes nothing about the process. This proves at most that capital itself is metaphysical.

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CHAPTER 8 CONCERNING THE VINCENNES PSYCHOANALYSIS DEPARTMENT

Joint letter by Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze, Les Temps modernes, 1975 Translated by Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman

What has happened recently at the faculty of Vincennes in the psychoanalysis department is apparently quite simple: the firing of a certain number of part-time teachers for reasons of administrative and pedagogical reorganization. In an article in Le Monde, Roger-Pol Droit nevertheless asks if it is not a matter of a Vichy-style purge.1 The process of termination of employment, the choice of those fired, the handling of opposition and the immediate naming of replacements could indeed remind one, mutatis mutandis, of a Stalinist operation. Stalinism is not the monopoly of the communist parties; it has also occurred in leftist groups, and psychoanalytic associations have been no more immune to its influence. This would seem to be confirmed by the lack of resistance shown by those sacked and by their allies. They did not actively collaborate in their own trials, but one can imagine that a second wave of purges might bring things to this point. The question is not one of doctrine but of the organization of power. Those in charge of the psychoanalysis department, who carried out these sackings, declare in official texts that they are acting on the instructions of Dr Lacan. He is the one who inspires the new statutes; he is even the one to whom, if need be, candidacies will be submitted. He is the one who is calling for a return to order, in the name of a mysterious ‘matheme’ of psychoanalysis. It is the first time that a private person, whatever his competence may be, has arrogated to himself the right to intervene in a university to carry out, or to have carried out, a unilateral reorganization entailing dismissals and appointments of teaching personnel. Even if the whole psychoanalysis department were in agreement, the affair and the threat it conceals would remain the same. The Freudian School of Paris is not only a group that has a leader, it is a very centralized association that has a clientele, in every sense of the word. It is difficult to imagine how a university department could subordinate itself to an organization of this kind. What psychoanalysis presents as its knowledge is accompanied by a kind of intellectual and emotional terrorism that is suitable for breaking down resistances that are said to be unhealthy. It is already disturbing when this operation is carried out between

Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard, ‘À propos du département de psychanalyse à Vincennes’, Les Temps modernes, no. 342 (January 1975), 862–863.

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

psychoanalysts, or between psychoanalysts and patients, for a certified therapeutic goal. But it is much more disturbing when the same operation seeks to break down resistances of a completely different kind, in a teaching section that declares itself to have no intention of ‘looking after’ or ‘training’ psychoanalysts. A veritable unconscious blackmail is directed against opponents, under the prestige and in the presence of Dr Lacan, in order to impose his decisions without any possibility of discussion. (Take it or leave it, and if you leave it, ‘the disappearance of the department would be imperative, from the point of view of analytic theory as well as from that of the university …’ – disappearance decided on by whom? in whose name?). All terrorism is accompanied by purifications: unconscious washing does not seem any less terrible and authoritarian than brainwashing.

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CHAPTER 9 A ‘BARBARIAN’ SPEAKS ABOUT SOCIALISM

with Bernard-Henri Lévy, Le Nouvel Observateur, 1976 Translated by Roger McKeon

Introduction by Bernard-Henri Lévy He is the great helmsman of the new ship of fools. The guru of the ‘Vincennois’, of the lumpen-intelligentsia and of what remains of the ultra-left. The theorist of ‘drifts’, of ‘drives’, of ‘set-ups’. Baroque words to evoke a political project that parts ways with Marxism, tosses aside socialism and its procession of moralism, resentment and bad conscience. An original approach that believes in evacuating all the models bequeathed by what is called ‘workers’ movement’. The boss exploits the proletarian? Without doubt, but the proletarian also ‘enjoys’ his oppression. Should we criticize capital, condemn it, sue it? Better, according to Jean-François Lyotard, recognize its ‘intensities’, its ‘libidinal flows’ – Nietzsche would have said its ‘innocence’. Which doesn’t go, one guesses, without serious political risks, starting with that of perpetuating the established order. This year’s course (Paris-VIII Vincennes, Thursdays at 19h) should clarify things.1 Its theme is: ‘Research on a space, a time and a logic of ruses’. Concretely: the analysis of the notion of ‘balance of power’ based on the processes of sophistic discourse, Megaric logic and Thucydides’ history. On the horizon, the monumental ambition to constitute a political field that can at last escape the patterns and habits of the Platonic West. And on the way, a host of detailed studies, on Mao for example or on the Baader gang. Hence the questions that follow, in the margins of the course itself, and which are not, as we shall see, of those that are usually asked of philosophers. Political questions that silently punctuate the texts, even if they are not always explicitly raised. Roughly: is the old alternative still relevant, and isn’t there a risk of resurrecting barbarity in eliminating socialism? Interview Bernard-Henri Lévy – You were an activist with Socialisme ou Barbarie during the Algerian war.2 And now there are detractors who read your latest books as the catechisms of a new fascism. In concrete terms, where do you stand today in relation to Marxism and the socialist tradition in general? Jean-François Lyotard – I would like to put the problem in another perspective. A ‘thing’ of great importance is happening, which Marxism can no longer account for, and which is sufficient to displace the very problematics within which and upon which the

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

workers’ movement was built, developed and institutionalized. What is this mysterious ‘thing’? Nietzsche called it ‘decadence’. One might as well say ‘scepticism movement’. The fact is, at any rate, that it has an impact on the workers’ movement, the revolutionary movement, the politics of the left. There is no need to enumerate the reasons to doubt that have accumulated over decades. To doubt the consistency of a choice other than capitalism. The continuous reconstitution of criticisms and critical organizations comes about in reaction to this decadence: one wishes to oppose it with a locus of discourse, of action, which resists it. There is something desperate in this resistance; it is part of decadence, like the cure for disease. None of the alibis provided (socialism, communism, Trotskyism, Third Worldism, Maoism, etc.) are less compromised with power and terror than capitalism: a question of scale. B.-H. L. – The same opponents conclude: if there is no alternative, then long live capitalism! J.-F. L. – Great stupidity and petty infamy. The question in itself reaffirms the exclusive privilege of the alternative: either criticism or praise of capital. Its harsh simplicity, friendly or defamatory, covers and maintains the essential: no politics without Manichaeism, without a good and an evil. Marx was more astute when he showed the good of capital: its force of destruction. No need to be very astute to assess the wrongs caused by the various suitors to his succession, however well-intentioned (impossible to sum them up in one word). All these disputes (among others, those which take place in France between the Communist and the Socialist parties) interest no one but the militants. B.-H. L. – What do you think people are interested in? J.-F. L. – For example, the decadence of the value of the idea of unity, the emergence and actioning, everywhere in the world, of the idea of singularity. On the left, we try to make room for these ‘demands’; but making demands erases what is important: singularities asserted for themselves. Thus, in the ‘We want to be recognized’ of prostitutes, there is of course a typically categorial demand: ‘We want to be protected by law’. But there is something else, a scandal, which is the decadence of the idea of the female body, and therefore of the social ‘body’: ‘We want the pleasure of prostitution to be acknowledged.’3 What can the ‘Common Programme’, and even any revolutionary organization, whose purpose is always universalist and unifying, say and make of this pleasure?4 Crush it, turn it into a categorial demand, into part of a whole. The same is true of nationalitarian movements because one can never say: we are all Basques, etc.5 And this itself is very distressing for minds steeped in the Greek, bourgeois, socialist heritage of the citizen. Here again, the scandal of singularities is being erased. One turns a blind eye to what suggests itself, the delineation of an immense patchwork, made up of a multitude of minorities and no majority. B.-H. L. – Very distressing, especially for minds trained in the principles of class struggle. J.-F. L. – What is important in the class struggle is that by which it is the struggle of minoritarians, the small, opposite those who, in one form or another, have granted themselves a privilege of universality: the State, the boss, the trade union – as on Seguin 42

A ‘Barbarian’ Speaks about Socialism

Island, three years ago; the Party – as in Kronstadt, Budapest or Prague.6 It shows then that there is no unity of an alleged social organization, no universality of an alleged body of doctrine; and thus it takes part in the action of decadence, it makes one incredulous towards any representation of the little guy. B.-H. L. – A world in which ‘representation’ is no longer is a world where there are only ‘perspectives’. So, no more theory, no more political analysis. Finished, the opposition between science and ideology? J.-F. L. – It’s the same big deal again. What is called ‘perspective’ doesn’t have to do with truth or with error but with will. It is pointless to debate whether this or that discourse conforms with the ‘real’ social and political world or not, since ‘reality’ itself is drawn, elaborated from a perspective: reality for capitalism, reality for Marxism and there again another one. Discourses must therefore be taken not as instances of knowledge of objects but as actions or works that capture energy and distribute it. To imagine this, one has only to compare works of words with works of colour, or sound, or volume; one can then rid them of their denotative function and their universalist vocation. Such is the ‘will’: the power to impose this perspective, to give effect to disbeliefs and minorities. B.-H. L. – Once rid of its universalist vocation, the work of words would also be rid of its vocation to power. J.-F. L. – The madness of Western discourse, if we have to fight it, is that it intends to diversify in reality and that it must therefore expurgate the facts, that is to say destroy other perspectives: the dechristianising sans-culottes, misrepresented as Anglomonarchist spies by the Jacobins; the workers and sailors of Kronstadt, as white agents by the Bolsheviks; the Chinese students and intellectuals of the Hundred Flowers, as revisionist traitors by the Chinese Communist Party. Theory must continually rewrite reality so that it conforms to it. This rewriting is Terror, which is not an aberration that would affect an otherwise just cause: it is the necessary effect of all universalism, which must prove its conformity with reality, thus control the effects of its words and actions. This control is power. It is implicated in all militancy, on whatever scale it is taken; it entails the inevitable disappointment of revolutionaries’ hopes, the return of the State.

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CHAPTER 10 ‘INCOMMENSURABLE NARRATIONS’

with Patrick de Haas, Art Press International, 1977 Translated by Roger McKeon

Introduction by Patrick de Hass You think you can pin down Jean-François Lyotard, and there he is, reappearing differently, elsewhere. Tactics of escape, of metamorphosis, of ruse. Today the back roads he travels are simultaneously precise (work on the pragmatics of narratives) and trembling (artistic writing, écriture artiste). He has just published Instructions païennes (ed. Galilée), Rudiments païens (10/18), and the magnificent Récits tremblants (Galilée) hit the urban highways in the Western United States with Monory’s paintings.1 Interview Patrick de Hass – You argue that there is not only a forcefulness of the narrator and the narratee, but a forcefulness as well in being narrated. What is this forcefulness of the narrated? Jean-François Lyotard – It’s a serious question: what forcefulness can there be in standing on the side of what the discourse of the military, industrial, activist hierarchy calls execution. In an order, for example, the narratee must make the reference of the narrative he hears exist. He has to go and occupy the position of the narrated of this narrative. For Western thought the narrator pole is the privileged pole; strength, forcefulness, power are associated with the invention of new narratives: privilege of telling. Within this culture, there is however an opposition, of Judaic tradition, which on the contrary privileges the recipient pole of the message: what imports, as Levinas says very well, is to do before hearing. There is an order, and we do the thing before even having understood it, having been able to re-tell the thing, thus without having occupied the narrator position. You would find something comparable in the influence of Zen Buddhism on American art and thought, on Cage for example (praise of receptivity and not creativity). But what is valued more in Judaism is the narratee, or what Levinas calls passivity. The forcefulness (puissance) of the third pole (the narrated) is something else yet, even more difficult to think. There would be strength in finding oneself to be what others talk about and what others hear about. In general we understand that inside the selfcircuit which is the circuit of power: it is for example the movie star who has forcefulness only if she is spoken about. But we can imagine a dignity of the narrated that would have

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

nothing to do with this, that would be pure forcefulness and not at all power (pouvoir); that is, that would not be concerned (and such is the paradox) with what we tell and hear about ourselves. It is a relationship to discourse that is paradoxical since as nar- one is involved in a narrative circuit, but as -rated one is not: one does not speak of oneself, one is not oneself the listener of what is told. The position would be: it is said and heard something of what I do (or am), and it has no regard for me. Could it be stupidity? One would have to go and see Flaubert’s way, or rather Céline’s, or even better Guyotat’s in his remarkable book Prostitution. ‘Illegible’ book as they say: it is not a message produced by a narrator and intended for narratees; the embryos of discourses held are narrated material coming before narration. The it has no regard for me should also be related to the paradox of the actor. The paradox I am referring to is no different from the latter, which is one dimension of it. The rehabilitation of the narrated is very important; it emphasizes the common, ‘the people’. It says that they are not only the narrators of the stories that are theirs, but also their object, the material from which these are taken. The great error of self-management P. de H. – You were part of a group (‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’) that imagined, against capitalism, the response of workers’ self-management and councils. You no longer want it today since you are opposed to the ‘self-’ effect. J.-F. L. – There comes a time when the invention of a new type of narrative, or tactic in relation to a situation, is made collectively, even if it is of individual origin; yet the council cannot but disappear after the coup and thus has only an ephemeral existence. As for self-management, I believe it is a very big theoretical and practical mistake. It is a slogan that cannot enthuse people, intellectuals or workers. Why? Because it demands that each of us occupy simultaneously and unceasingly the three poles of the narrative pragmatic: the pole of the narrator (who invents the management that has to be ensured), the pole of the narratee (who listens to everything that all the others tell him about this story that has to be told, the managerial decision) and the pole of the narrated (who embodies the story told). Each one of us thus becomes a little Hegel having a discussion with other Hegels. We are being asked to internalize the values and models not only of work (that each be his own boss), but also those of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of History (that each be for himself both substance and subject). Councilist self-management is the great response in a phase of social upheaval, but from the moment when it comes to managing daily life, it is not true that everyone can take interest in the purchase of chickens and bread that any community requires. In May 68 the University of Nanterre claimed to be self-managed, but in fact it was some people who, because they felt more guilt than others, or had more taste for these matters, took over the management, and that is all to the good. In the councils, only delegates are involved in the purchase of chickens, and these delegates are temporary and revocable. You don’t want there to be institutional 46

‘Incommensurable Narrations’

barriers that would prevent people with a more developed superego than others from transforming their forcefulness into power? This revocability is not an institution, it is a factual situation. With the institutional barrier you create an apparatus whose function will be to prevent other apparatuses from taking power, but it will itself be endowed with fantastic power. P. de H. – In Duchamp’s Transformers you wish for the study of a politics of the incommensurable. How do the Instructions païennes (Lessons in Paganism) follow up on this question? Do you completely exclude the possibility that the arts could restore social linkages? J.-F. L. – The politics defined in Instructions païennes consists in multiplying the narratives, without granting any privilege to any one of them, that is, without any one of these narratives becoming the Narrative. Any narrative that claims to be the Narrative of all narratives, the metanarrative must be countered. The arts, but also the sciences, considered as invention activities, contribute to this politics of the incommensurable. The social bond exists directly and immediately from the moment one begins to say something, because one says it in response to other things; one is never a first locutor, but first a recipient and even someone who has been narrated by others even before speaking, if only by his family. That cannot be destroyed and should not be. But the narratives that are circulated according to this link should not be preserved either. What is worth existing is to insert oneself as a narrator, narratee or narrated in narratives that have not already been told as such. Incommensurability concerns not only the narratives themselves, but the pragmatics: that the designated narrated can become narrators (women), etc.

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CHAPTER 11 WILL VINCENNES SURVIVE?

with Christian Descamps, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1980 Translated by Roger McKeon

Introduction by Christian Descamps Vincennes will have been in the news. France-Soir-Hersant recently ran the headline ‘Vincennes, Rungis for drugs’.1 That being said, nothing really seems to prove that there is much more drug trafficking at Paris-VIII than elsewhere in Paris. And if there is a drug case, it doesn’t have as much to do with the University as it does with conventional common law. That’s not all, however: the illegal registration of foreign students – who had committed forgeries in order to be able to study – has also attracted a lot of attention. But who would think that among more than thirty thousand people problems of that kind would never arise? They had arisen, for that matter, and were settled by the academic authorities on a day-to-day basis without involving the public prosecutor. In short, these scandals really give too much satisfaction to the haters of Vincennes, who can’t see, beyond the turbulence of the post-68 years, the tremendous pedagogical and human experience that it represents. That is why, as an interim director has just been appointed, after the resignation of the board led by Mr Merlin, at a time when the elections are being prepared, we find it important to highlight what Vincennes is producing that is new, real, alive. A few names will testify to the riches of this university. In linguistics, Ruwet, Chevalier; history, Mossé, Flandrin, Rebérioux, Sorlin; cinema, Eyzikman, Narboni; literature, Cixous, Meschonnic, Janvier, Raillard, Finas, Dadoun, Gattegno; English, Dommergues; sociology, Terray, Castel, and previously Poulantzas; political economy, Béaud; political science, Vincent; geography, Lacoste; music, Charles; theatre, Veinstein; urban planning, Choay; mathematics, the team of Chevaley (Bourbaki) … I forget others, of course, and probably important ones. But I will not forget the journals: Révoltes logiques, Littérature and Hérodote. Among all these people, we have chosen to interview Jean-François Lyotard, who, along with Gilles Deleuze, François Châtelet and René Schérer, participates in the Philosophy Institute as he bets on a return to a living philosophy.

The Experimental University Centre of Vincennes was set up after the events of 1968; opening in 1969 it became part of the University of Paris system in 1971, as Université Paris-VIII. Lyotard taught in the philosophy department from 1970 to 1987. A retroactive agreement was signed in 1972, limiting the use of the site at Vincennes to ten years; as a result the University was forced to transfer to a new location in northern Paris (St-Denis) in 1980; within days of the move the old prefabricated campus was torn down and almost no physical trace now exists. See Université Paris 8 Vincennes: Le vent de Vincennes, dir. Katharina Bellan (France, 2005). – Ed.

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

Interview Christian Descamps – Don’t these drug and false inscriptions stories play into the hands of those who would like to sweep it all clean? Jean-François Lyotard – Yes, of course. But there are several kinds of them. On the one hand, the smear campaign, which found support in a public opinion that the ‘crisis’ opens to xenophobia, to the fear of youth, to all figures of insecurity. This allows the highest authorities to pursue a policy of ‘mutation’ in higher education. The aim would be to introduce an American model here: specialized universities, private funding, feepaying studies, university scholarships. What that amounts to is the abandonment of a higher education open – in principle – to all citizens, young or old. On the other hand, there is, of course, the question of transfer: some people here would like to transfer to Saint-Denis. Merlin opposed this, but the majority of board members, who come from the classical left, resigned when the drug problem arose. So there is now the risk of leaving for Saint-Denis in very poor conditions. Thus, ‘drugs’ will have obliged the neoliberal right and the traditional left, which will have its ‘popular university’. C. D. – Yet you remain opposed to the transfer to Saint-Denis? J.-F. L. – Yes, just like my entire department, I am against both the transfer and the standardization of Paris-VIII. In Saint-Denis, there are only about ten thousand places, while Vincennes hosts thirty thousand students. This would imply offloading a considerable number of students (foreigners, in part, because they are seldom in compliance with the abhorrent Bonnet-Stoléru laws), as well as non-tenured faculty.2 We operate with lecturers who still have no status. C. D. – It is said – probably too little – that Vincennes does original work. What does that consist in? J. F. L. – It depends on the departments, and I don’t know them all. For those I know, I would say this: the work essentially consists in giving shelter and responding to a very strong and frustrated need in our society, that of seeking and possibly finding in culture and knowledge the means to understand the personal and social experience of people, and to guide experimentations in their respective environments. For example, in the Philosophy Department, we practise non-progressivity (no curriculum), freedom of speech and shared responsibility with the students as to the orientation of research. Criticism of the principle according to which the acquisition of knowledge should be monitored allows us to undo the image of an unintelligible, specialized and out-of-touch philosophy. And far from lowering what is called the ‘level’, it raises it. Often, on a more or less naïve question, it is found necessary to ‘make a detour’ through this or that text by Spinoza, Aristotle, Joyce or Eisenstein or to study this or that linguistic or logical theory. C. D. – You write in Critique, about your teaching: ‘The concessions to what one feels is expected by the audience become rarer … One no longer reads to ransack authors, but to elude oneself. One seeks a deculturation in all directions, in science fictions,

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Will Vincennes Survive?

underground cinema, particular linguistics and logics, plastic and aural monsters, surprising banalities, oblique rereadings ….’3 In The Postmodern Condition you advocate philosophical experimentations. Do you find any in Vincennes? J.-F. L. – Vincennes is for me the place of the greatest intellectual tension. It is where I introduce people I know little about to what I am thinking and writing. The remarks you are quoting may mean this: it is a question of not ‘crushing’ what you are working on, of defending it by arguing against reductionism, awaiting of consensus and the ‘well known’. The rule of the discourse one holds there is that of differentiation. In this sense, what is being done is an experimentation, if not permanent, at least frequent on philosophical discourse. Those who believe that one has to say certain things in order to be accepted by the audience are gently eliminated by the new that is happening here. C. D. – You took part in the creation of the new Institut Polytechnique de Philosophie (Polytechnic Institute of Philosophy) of Paris-VIII. What do you expect from it? J.-F. L. – First of all, we wanted to prevent the non-recognition of our diplomas by the ministry from excluding students who are determined to work with us under the conditions I have just mentioned.4 They will thus be awarded a higher degree from the Institute, in light of which the university will grant them the right to apply for a doctorate. Our ambition is to ensure the recognition of these diplomas. First, de facto by potential employers, then de jure by the authorities of the University. Suffice to say that the conditions we have set for obtaining them are clearly defined. On the other hand, we claim that they are original. We require the researcher to submit a project stating an ‘object’ and a ‘subject’ of research. The object can be an inaccessible text, a film, a plastic or musical work, etc. The ‘subject’ consists of a writing set in an ‘articulable’ relationship with this object. You can thus see that our objective is to make philosophical work transit towards the works, not to keep it in the sole register of the discourse of generality or the history of thought, but to put it in contact with work in the most diverse fields. That is also why we have named this institution the Polytechnic Institute of Philosophy. I would like to point out that it belongs to the University of Paris-VIII Vincennes, which has warmly adopted its creation.

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CHAPTER 12 DEBATE ON ‘DISCUSSIONS, OR: PHRASING “AFTER AUSCHWITZ”’

with Jacques Derrida; Sarah Kofman; Maurice De Gandillac; Jean-Luc Nancy et al. Les fins de l’homme: À partir du travail de Jacques Derrida, 1980 Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele

The following remarks, transcribed by Jean-François Lyotard, are taken from the discussion that took place after the reading of ‘Discussions, or: Phrasing “after Auschwitz”’ at Cerisy.1 Françoise Clévenot recalled a seminar in 1968 when André Neher, referring to the same Adorno text, stated that Auschwitz must be thought of as a concept, but that this prescription could not be carried out because it runs up against a limit of thought and gives way instead to silence (of Hassidic inspiration). Jean-François Lyotard claims not to be familiar enough with Neher’s thought to be able to follow out the comparison; a reflection on Hassidism, especially in terms of its relation to Buber and Levinas, does appear to him to be essential in any case. Sarah Kofman noted that, in the camps, being called by one’s matriculation number already signified death through anonymity before death itself. The same went for working conditions: with neither goal nor respite, like Sisyphus, it was forbidden for Jews to respect the Sabbath: ‘My father, who was a rabbi, died at Auschwitz for having wanted to rest the day of the Sabbath.’ Maurice de Gandillac recalled that, all else being the same, ‘Indochinese’ soldiers formerly incorporated into the French army were designated by number. And Jacques Derrida, that ‘in Algeria, Arabs, who were not given civil status, were often named “SNP” in the army, that is: without patronymic [sans nom patronymique].’ Lyotard thinks that the use of matriculation numbers, generalized with the spread of systems (in Luhmann’s sense), implies in effect that a metalanguage is forged capable of transforming all the different phrases linked to names, and even to each name, into homogeneous bits of information. He sees here the basis for a philosophical strategy: to struggle for the incommensurability of phrases.2 Derrida says that he finds himself in agreement with the talk, that he does not want to ‘yield to this pathos’ (of agreement), that he seeks to ‘link on, no, not to link on, but to add phrases’. He wonders if ‘the question’ is not that of ‘the multiplicity of proper names’, if ‘the very grave stakes of what Lyotard has given to think’ are not ‘the fact that there are several proper names’. He wonders, first of all, about the ‘schema’ presupposed by

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Lyotard’s discourse centred upon Auschwitz; and he thinks he perceives that ‘in referring to this nameless name, in making a model of it, that discourse risks reconstituting a kind of centrality’, a we for this occasion, one which is certainly not that of speculative dialectics, but which is related to the unanimous privilege ‘we Western Europeans’ grant Auschwitz in ‘the combat or the question’ we oppose to speculative dialectics, to ‘a certain kind of Western reason, etc.’. The risk is that this we ‘would consign to oblivion or would brush aside (latéraliserait) proper names other than that of Auschwitz and which are just as abhorrent as it’, names which have names, and names which don’t. ‘And my worry,’ says Derrida, ‘is that a certain we reconstitutes itself in reference to what you have said so admirably about Auschwitz.’ Derrida then formulates ‘another worry’, which resembles the less dramatic or ‘more formal’ one he feels when he reads Levinas: ‘Despite all the indisputable things he says about the utterly-other (le tout-autre), about the hiatus, the relation to the utterly-other gives rise to linkings of phrases.’ This difficulty, Derrida calls in a text devoted to Levinas, ‘seriature’.3 By the same token, we have ‘to make links historically, politically, and ethically with the name, with that which absolutely refuses linkage’. Derrida asks: ‘If there is today an ethical or political question and if there is somewhere a One must, it must link up with a One must make links with Auschwitz … (Il faut enchaîner sur Auschwitz). Perhaps Auschwitz prescribes – and the other proper names of analogous tragedies (in their irreducible dispersion) prescribe – that we make links. It does not prescribe that we overcome the un-linkable, but rather: because it is unlinkable, we are enjoined to make links. I do not mean to say that one must make links in spite of the unlinkable; I mean to say that the unlinkable of Auschwitz prescribes that we make links.’ If Lyotard was able to move us, it is because the presupposition shared by all is that Auschwitz is intolerable and therefore that one must say and do something, so that it does not, for instance, start over again … Finally a couple of ‘ancillary’ words on difference. Refusing the nascent pathos of this subject, Derrida states: I would say with a smile that of course the word seems to imply some nostalgia. It is nonetheless an economical word that has a Zweideutigkeit (double meaning), upon which I do not wish to dwell but with which I can reckon (compter). One of the two senses can imply nostalgia, but the other does not imply nostalgia very much, if at all; I have explained myself on this point elsewhere. I do not say this in order to correct an interpretation – that would be absolutely ridiculous here – I say it in order to break with the kind of pathos of agreement in which I have been since a little while ago, and in order to try to understand, no matter how far this agreement may be pursued, what the difference of tone or affect is between what you say and what I would say. With regards to nostalgia, I said that I wanted to break with it, but I guard (and I assume this guardedness because that’s the way it is), I guard a nostalgia for nostalgia, and that is perhaps a sign that when I say, ‘Nostalgia would be better’, I continue to, etc. But you – and I was very sensitive to this again today, I have always been sensitive to this in reading you, but I was again even today when I have never felt myself closer to you – you have a style, a mode or 54

Debate on ‘Discussions, or: Phrasing …’

a tone of breaking with nostalgia (and with everything it brings or connotes) that is resolute, trenchant, wilful, etc., and I thought to myself that perhaps this, and only this, was what was fundamentally played out in this question. Lyotard recalls, first of all, that he was tempted to suggest, perhaps in ‘too resolute’ a fashion, that ‘every phrase, if it is apprehended as an occurrence in the strong sense of the term, can become a model’ (from German, Modell (mould), adds Maurice de Gandillac by way of clarification). In this sense there can be innumerable name-models, and Derrida is right to underscore this because there ensues a considerable shift in how one thinks about history. Then, to the objection of breaking too quickly with dialectics, Lyotard answers: ‘On the contrary, while working on this talk, I had the feeling of making an enormous effort to try not to break with dialectics.’ Whence the accent on the ‘One must make links’, presented as the sole necessity and sole enigma. He strove not to let this ‘One must’ slip into a philosophy of the will. But neither does he believe that it arises (relève) from ethics: ‘the “One must” is much dumber than that.’ One must make links after Auschwitz, but without a speculative result. As for the question about the we, he is inclined to think in the Hassidic tradition reported by Gog and Magog, in the sense of the impossibility for a community to conceive that: ‘We would merely be hostages of the “One must make links”’, ‘we are not in possession of its rule, we seek it, we make links in seeking it; it is thus the stakes but not the rule for the linkage.’ This we works, or has to work no matter where ‘to vary all the rules of linkage whatever they might be, in music, in painting, in film, in political economy’ in a way not unrelated to Derridean dissemination. This quest for the rule of linkage is a quest for the intelligible. Adorno speaks of the legible, Derrida of the illegible. This is a radical divergence, and yet ‘if we are the community of hostages of the “One must make links”, it is that we are learning to read, therefore that we do not know how to read, and that for us, to read is precisely to read the illegible.’ As for the question of nostalgia, Lyotard says to Derrida: ‘I will not intervene because, after all, you have turned it into an affair of idiosyncrasy.’ Derrida: ‘Something like that.’ Lyotard: ‘Then, I would be indiscreet if I were to intervene in your nostalgia just as you were indiscreet to intervene in my resoluteness’ (laughter). Derrida: ‘It was a little more than a comparison of idiosyncrasies … : in the resolute break with nostalgia, there is a psychoanalytic-Hegelian logic, a rigid relation, not very well regulated’ (laughter); ‘there is perhaps more nostalgia in you than in me’ (laughter). ‘This is the suspicion rooted in the question about style’ (laughter). Lyotard: ‘Do you have the right rule then?’ Derrida: ‘No.’ Lyotard observes that he did not speak about Heidegger, even though ontology is evidently implicated in the idea of a phrase game where what matters is that a phrase present the presentation entailed by it. This omission is not due to an excess of ‘resolution’; rather, it is that the interest of phrases (in the Kantian sense of the interest of reason) does not appear to him to be on the side of ontology. The notion of interest is a little narrow, but it introduces what is at stake in a justice or justness (justesse) where one did not expect to find it. Derrida observes that the relation to nostalgia is always badly regulated, and that ‘to dismiss it purely and simply’ is a case of a bad rule. Lyotard says 55

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he had hoped to evoke Derrida’s agreement by proposing a less nostalgic acceptation of difference (laughter), which he sees emerging in the development of his work. Derrida acknowledges this shift, but he repeats that ‘with you it is the face that breaks away from nostalgia’ that one especially sees. Barbara Johnson thinks that what is horrible in Auschwitz is not the Die, but the fact that it cannot be stated [pas énonçable], that ‘the act that was in the process of being accomplished could not be accounted for’ in a statement [énonciation], except a sadistic one. Derrida adds that this phrase in effect can only be stated within the context of reasonable legality (such as the verdict of a jury): at Auschwitz, no legitimation of the Die can be stated. Johnson thinks that the phrase of Auschwitz is ‘even more irrational, less reductive to logic’, less reassuring, than what Lyotard is proposing. The latter answers: (1) That he is not certain that as far as commandments go that the only ones that can be stated are those that are able to be legitimated. (2) That the issue is not about probing the intentions of a speaker but about recovering the impossibility of our being able to think Auschwitz. Die, I decree it, by its form alone, implies both the order and the impossibility of this order having any obligatory value since the addressee cannot say in return: I too, I decree it. It’s a constraint, though an administered, mediated one (whence the concentrational hierarchy). De Gandillac insists upon this difference between a statement properly called and the canonical phrase in the sense understood by Lyotard. Die, I decree it is not a ‘real’ order, but it is the phrase inscribed within the ‘Auschwitz’ system. Pronounced, for example, by a court of Inquisition, its value changes, since it can only have value once the assent of the condemned has been obtained. Jean-Luc Nancy: ‘There would then be a specific difference between Auschwitz and other apparently comparable situations.’ Now, Derrida and Lyotard seem to be in agreement that names other than Auschwitz, just as unlinkable, nonetheless command that they be linked upon. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe asks that one says what those other names are. Nancy sees the specificity of Auschwitz in that ‘the end of man is there a project unto itself, and not the attempt at some other project, which means: extermination, final solution’. Lyotard doubts that this project is exclusive to Nazism. It is Western, and Christian: the work of the Churches in the New World and in Africa, like that of Hegel on Judaism, is the destruction of man when judged to be unmediated. De Gandillac objects that within Christianity, as already within Platonism, notably in the Laws, this destruction is the terrible ransom of a reformative mediation. To which Lyotard retorts that in Christianity education rests upon a revelation, which is both what assures the mediation and is its contrary. It remains, affirms De Gandillac, that in both cases there is ‘a cultural will to modify nature fundamentally’, while at Auschwitz ‘man is not recuperable, there are only the non-recuperable ones’. Lyotard thinks that there is also a Nazi discourse of reform, and he concedes only that what distinguishes ‘Auschwitz’ is the absence of a discourse deriving destruction from a project of reform. As opposed to the Soviet camps, adds De Gandillac, where the latter does exist. But in effect wonders Lyotard, the question is perhaps that of the addressee. For Nazism, certain human beings cannot be reformed at all (the racial principle). The Die addressed to them is pure destruction; they cannot even hear the reform discourse, whose order may prevail, elsewhere. The addressee of 56

Debate on ‘Discussions, or: Phrasing …’

the reform cannot be the addressee of the order. There is no universal addressee. Nancy: ‘Should I consider your last remarks to be multiplying the models?’ Lyotard: ‘Yes, but subject to analysis.’ Jacob Rogozinski asks Lyotard the question of the law, and argues as follows: (1) ‘You said that Auschwitz was the place where the law failed’, that ‘for lack of a we to receive it, the death sentence does not engender obligated ones but victims’ that ‘the world of administrated death knows its rules, but not the law’: one can conclude that ‘to resist a project of total domination, the law is necessary’. (2) If such is the case, shouldn’t you modify your problematic of language games? You have presented the world of these games as a patchwork of laws, of customs, of rules with no metadiscourse, no law. But you yourself, in The Postmodern Condition, seem to mark a limit to this perspective, namely terror, the threat of being blocked from playing language games, ‘the installation of what may be disputed, what is unanswerable’. (3) ‘If the law is what allows resistance to terror, the indisputable, then the law should be the condition of possibility of language games, their quasi-transcendental condition [ … ]. The law, that is to say, a law above and beyond laws, a law that would exceed the plural rules of language games and whose very exercise these games would presuppose.’ The question is whether Lyotard would accept this kind of reference to the law, in particular with regards to his (increasingly insistent) request for justice. Lyotard: ‘You’ve just explained everything very well’, except ‘I would not use the expression: the law.’ It’s that we never have the law, but only rules. Ethically, just as It is necessary is not ethical, it is not You should. Necessity, not obligation. The question refers back to Kantian ethics. But precisely, as Levinas reproaches him, the imperative is empty because it is universalist, it is ineffectual in its form, it requires that the agent judge that the maxim of its will is such that (so dass, almost: as if) universality can be effectuated by it. The law is universality, but we are like the judge in Aristotle, we need prudence, which plays out in the retreat of universality. Justice is always possible, but without criteria, and its rule must be sought every time. Didier Cahen asserts that he is not so sure he understands what Lyotard means by phrase: is there a definition? Moreover, is he correct in understanding that Auschwitz for Lyotard was ‘the name of non-linkage’, the ‘name that cuts off the linking of phrases and in this case “something impossible to think”, something like “a moment of history”?’ Lyotard answers that there is no definition for phrase, because every effort in this sense leads to the concept of a well-formed ensemble; it should rather be said that definition is a family of phrases, and its exigency of being ‘well formed’ corresponds to the universe it presents, and which varies according to whether the definition is logical, grammatical, linguistic, analytic … As for the second point, Lyotard declares that the name of Auschwitz is in effect understood as what interrupts the speculative linkage. The question that is raised is: how to think the interruption of the speculative? Becoming indignant is a way of not thinking the interruption, of continuing the speculative. Another way out is indicated by Levinas, but it is not safe from reincorporation into the Hegelian machine, ‘in its place’, as Michel Bourgeois says. By leaning upon the Adornian idea of negative dialectics, that is, upon the nihilistic (sophistic?) vertigo of a if p, then non-p; if non-p, then p, with no result, Lyotard believes he has come to the heart of the question, without resolving it, speculatively or ethically in the Levinassian sense. He 57

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thinks he has thus reconnected with the spirit of Adorno’s ‘micrologies’, an aesthetic spirit to be sure, but because it is ‘on the side of art, honour is more or less safeguarded’. He ends: ‘That I wasn’t able to get there, would not surprise me’ (laughter). Michel Féher wonders whether in thinking Auschwitz as a remainder, as a negative ‘that cannot be mediated in the Hegelian sense’, Lyotard does not in the first part of his presentation remain beholden to the Hegelian horizon that is Adorno’s, and whether this remainder must not be thought under the category of ‘pure loss’, of an instantaneous violence, ‘because the instant is what is saturated and what remains of it, cannot be mediated’ (a category that in opposition to Bataille Libidinal Economy rejected, citing the example of the daksina). And in the second part of Lyotard’s presentation, Féher thinks he sees sketched out the possibility of a ‘partial result’. And in effect, ‘Auschwitz was not the fatal instant for us since we are speaking after Auschwitz, that it has become a name and a model, that there has not been a final implosion’. The partial result would be ‘for example what one finds in Levinas or Kant’, but that would require ‘some minimal belief of which we would perhaps no longer be capable; perhaps we are in the position of Shatov in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, who would like to believe and no longer can’. There would remain ‘the more pagan possibility of a game with plural rules, whose rule would be at stake, and would not be known before the game is played’. Still, Lyotard admits an overdetermining rule, the phrase (be it simply negative): One must link on. Now Féher wonders ‘whether the pagans who link on know that one must link on’, and even ‘whether the forgetting or the non-knowledge or the misprision of the One must link on is not consubstantial with the functioning of paganism’. In this case, we are not even capable of returning to a similar misprision. And for lack of a monotheistic belief and of pagan misprision, if there is only the affirmative violence of the instant, this is ‘perhaps because the following instant is what will be fatal’. Lyotard answers the first point by repeating that in effect to thematize Auschwitz as a non result arises [relève] from the speculative horizon, and that in principle the figure of the absolutely other can be digested in speculative discourse as a result ignorant of itself. As for the second point, on the issue of belief, who can say that the West is no longer capable of that? ‘What do we know about it, you and me? Whom can we ask to know whether we can have belief? Will we plunge into some kind of auscultation about the decadent West’s spirit? I don’t like that, that’s not how you rise to the level of thinking.’ The language game of belief, the phrase of belief, is not necessarily obsolete (after all, its rival, the phrase of well-being, seems a bit weak these days …). On the last point, that the pagans themselves do not know that they must link on, Lyotard marks his complete disagreement: ‘If there is anyone who knows that they must link on, that the rule remains to be found, that every phrase runs a tremendous risk, that one must be at once wise (knowing how to sniff things out) and bold, but not too much, that the only crime is that of not linking on, it would be them.’ He refers to the translation and publication by André-Marcel d’Ans of the Cashinahua narratives (Le dit des vrais hommes), where this last rule in particular is strongly marked. It’s for us, ‘the matriculated, exchangeable, interchangeable numbers, that the One must link on can weaken into the That’s your problem … And if we are here, it is perhaps only to reawaken the One must link on, nothing more.’ De Gandillac: ‘That could be the final word.’ 58

CHAPTER 13 ‘IN READING YOUR WORK …’

with Georges Van Den Abbeele; including the short text ‘Decor’ by Jean-François Lyotard, Diacritics, 1984 Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele

Georges Van Den Abbeele – In reading your work, one cannot help but be struck by its heterogeneity, its diversity, its relentless questioning of previously advanced categories. What one could call the protean or nomadic quality of your thought inevitably places its critic in the position of feeling already passed by, of being dépassé by your work, such that a potential point of disagreement may turn out no longer to be current in your thinking. The question raised then is that of the ‘responsibility’ of your writing. More pointedly, your long-held allegiance to avant-garde aesthetics (evidenced by numerous books and articles on contemporary art from Duchamp to Monory) makes your work open to the charge of seeking the new for its own sake.1 In the political sphere, the charge would be that of pursuing a liberalist pluralism, if not anarchism. Can you respond to this criticism by clarifying the underlying concerns of your intellectual project as a whole? Jean-François Lyotard – If the heterogeneity of ‘my’ work ‘goes right by’ [dépasse] the reader, it also ‘goes right by’ me, insofar as I am my first reader. However, I am also the supposed ‘author’ of ‘my’ work, and you ask about my responsibility in regard to it. Two defences are possible. The first is that we never publish anything except rough drafts. Even The Differend, which I spent nine years elaborating and writing, remains a sketch, whose master I have not been. And in this sense, I can without lying plead limited responsibility. That is to say: a reader cannot incorrectly locate in a piece of writing an aspect which, according to me, is not at all there. This is the matter for a litigation, perhaps for a différend. The second defence, compatible with the first, is that I accept – in fact I seek – heterogeneity. All thought conceals something of the unthought. We must then take it up, be it at the price of self-contradiction. The interests of that which is to be thought must unhesitatingly prevail over the concern to make a good impression, to construct one’s authorial identity. I here plead full and entire responsibility for the heterogeneity of the result. This result would be homogeneous if that which is to be thought presented itself as a unity and as a totality. But it happens, each time, now, like a singular event. Thinking only takes place by listening in attentively to the question: ‘is it happening that …?’ [arrive-t-il que …?]. Theory, stricto senso, forthwith assigns to the question the answer it holds in reserve. Philosophy tries to make the question resound. Theory is by principle outside of time; philosophy is immersed in the kairos. That philosophy, once transported into the political sphere, appears ‘liberal pluralist’ or ‘anarchist’ is quite

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possible. But politics is not a sphere; politics has to do with the way one phrase is linked to another; it is inscribed right onto being [à même l’être]. G. V. – One way to describe your recent work is as a project to analyse sociopolitical problems of justice in terms of a problematics of language. This project is founded upon your supposition that ‘the observable social linkage is made out of “moves” in language’.2 In what ways do you feel that this is an adequate (or useful) model of the relationship between language and society? And while an attentive reading of your work reveals that your concern is primarily with the contextual, pragmatic dimensions of language use, does not your use of linguistic terminology and of formulations like the above risk reducing the complexity of social phenomena to discourse, a reduction which in your early Discourse, Figure you denounce as endemic to Western metaphysics? How do you reconcile the language-game model of society with your manifest interest in alternative media and especially in the visual arts? J.-F. L. – First, the simplest of phrases presents a ‘universe’ that is a society of instances: addresser, addressee, referent, meaning (and I am leaving out the medium [support] of the phrase and its code). These instances are or are not ‘occupied’. But society and the explication of society always presuppose this elementary interaction at the heart of the language atom. This interaction is the social link. You can recount its foundation, deduce its economy from the purposiveness of interest, or of passion, etc. …: this link is presupposed in your act of recounting or deducing. It does not follow that you must not recount or deduce, but in doing so you are only making theory. Secondly, one cannot enclose oneself in language; for that to occur it would have to be a closed totality. It’s a linguist’s idea that there is this totality, because he makes it into his domain of reference, his thing. The philosopher asks how to link one phrase well to the next. He is not in possession of the right rule; he is looking for it. He must reflect and judge, as Kant says. And through this he relates to ‘language’ in the same way as the common person does: an infinite, or in any case an indefinite, number of phrases remains possible at each instant. Thirdly, ‘language’ has no exterior because it is not in space. But it can say space. It can say the body. It can say that the body ‘says’ something, that silence speaks. Idiolects can certainly be imagined: the language of the unconscious, the language of class, the language of nature … But in order to assert that language is involved, it is necessary to say what they say, and they cease therefore to be idiolects. The ‘exterior’ of language is the nothingness which slips between one phrase and the one which will link up with it. The exterior is imminence. But the latter is the intimacy of phrases among themselves. Fourthly, I did not try in Discourse, Figure to oppose language and image. I was suggesting that a (discursive) principle of readability and a (figural) principle of unreadability shared one in the other. The book is certainly not exempt from a nostalgia for some extralinguistic entity. I believe, however, that it is legitimate to establish congruences between the ‘discourse’ of back then and the ‘genre of discourse’ brought to bear in The Differend and between the ‘figure’ of the first book and the ‘is it happening that … ?’ of the last. All of which can in short answer the request for homogeneity. 60

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G. V. – Could you explain your use and subsequent abandonment of the term ‘language game’, which you borrow from Wittgenstein? What is gained in the move from the game model to one of ‘phrases’? J.-F. L. – The answer to this question is given in The Differend. Briefly: I have schooled myself in the Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations) in order to purge myself of the metaphysics of the subject (still present, in my opinion, in the Tractatus). Little in the way of thought, since Spinoza, the Sophists, Dōgen and Kant(!), has so… dispossessed me. Turning my culture into a desert made me fecund. Thereafter, it seemed to me that ‘language games’ implied players that made use of language like a toolbox, thus repeating the constant arrogance of Western anthropocentrism. ‘Phrases’ came to say that the so-called players were on the contrary situated by phrases in the universes those phrases present, ‘before’ any intention. Intention is itself a phrase, which doubles the phrase it inhabits, and which doubles or redoubles the addresser of that phrase. G. V. – In your recent work, you insist very much upon the incommensurability (or untranslatability) of different phrase universes, as if to maintain their integrity. In Just Gaming, for example, you argue extensively against the derivation of prescriptives from descriptives as metaphysical and dangerous.3 On the other hand, in ‘Introduction à une étude du politique selon Kant,’ you describe the critical act in terms of the seeking of ‘passages’ (Übergänge) between phrase universes.4 Could you explain your view of the critical act, and what you mean by these ‘passages’? What is the urgency that underlies your casting the task of the intellectual in this way? J.-F. L. – First of all, the word ‘passage’ – Übergänge – is found in the Introduction to Kant’s third Critique. It designates the very task that Kant assigns himself in that book, a task already set in the discussion of the Third Antinomy of Reason, in the first Critique. Having, like no one before him, aggravated the incommensurability between the cognitive law (descriptive) and the moral law (prescriptive), Kant seeks to reestablish ‘over the abyss’ a passage between the two domains. He believes this passage to be found in the aesthetic judgement and in the idea of a purposiveness of nature in man. My reading is then the following: he in fact finds a faculty of ‘passing’, that of the reflective judgement, the capacity to judge without criteria (already at work, in fact, although under various titles, in the two domains); but this faculty does not allow the re-establishment of a subject’s unity nor of a system’s architecture. This faculty is ‘solely’ critical, as Kant explains in the First Project for an Introduction to the third Critique; it comes and goes between domains that remain incommensurable. A Hegelian outcome to this dispersion (the word is in Kant’s Anthropology) is thus refuted in advance as a ‘transcendental appearance’. Secondly, I believe that the ruin of subject-systems (which in The Postmodern Condition I called ‘great narratives’), the liberal, the Marxist, the capitalist, the Christian, the speculative, reveals to us today once again this condition of thought (and thus of action) when it must reflect and judge without letting its course be inflected by a purposiveness (anthropological, cosmological or ontological) which would legitimate it.

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G. V. – In The Postmodern Condition, you speak of postmodernity as ‘ringing the deathknell of the era of the professor’.5 Given the diversity of your own teaching experience (at Nanterre in 1968, at Vincennes, with the Institut Polytechnique de Philosophie and with the Collège International de Philosophie), what do you feel to be the pedagogical responsibilities of those of us still engaged in ‘classical’ university teaching?6 What alternatives can you propose to the great Enlightenment narrative of education as emancipation? J.-F. L. – Whether it be in the ‘classical’ university or in the supplementary institutions to which you allude, the pedagogical task, once stripped of its trappings, that of the great narrative of emancipation, can be designated by a single word: an apprenticeship in resistance. Resistance against the academic genres of discourse to the extent that they block the listening [l’écoute] for the ‘is it happening that … ?’, against the great narratives themselves, against the way thought is treated in the new postmodern technologies insofar as they express the most recent application of capitalist rules to language, resistance against every object of thought which is given to be grasped through some ‘obvious’ delimitation, method or end. Pedagogical responsibility is not the responsibility to think, but to teach those to think who supposedly don’t know how. And there are no good criteria (the successful passing of examinations is not a good criterion). We created the Institut and the Collège to get away from ‘good criteria’. It does not follow that we have better criteria but that we make use of a space-time where the endurance of thinking can be tested without extrinsic obstacles (especially with regard to objects that are not part of the classic curriculum of philosophy). I touched upon this question in ‘Endurance and the Profession’.7 G. V. – Your work often seems guided by an impious use of other texts (this is not a criticism). One is even tempted to describe as ‘wild’ your use of terms from pragmatics, from the later Kant, from Levinas, etc. Can you justify this practice of intellectual bricolage in terms of a more general reading strategy? The diversity of styles and genres which you draw upon in your writing also testifies to an explicit attempt on your part to reject traditional forms of writing philosophy. Can you speak then to the pragmatic occupations of your discourse? J.-F. L. – First of all, I remain continually surprised by the surprise that my readings of works provoke in my readers. I can’t seem to make myself feel guilty for any disrespect though I ought to feel that way out of incongruousness. I must be a bad reader, not sensitive or ‘passive’ enough in the broader sense of the word, too wilful, ‘aggressive,’ not sufficiently espousing the supposed organic development of the other(?) in a rush to place it in the light of my own concerns. ‘Wild’ if you wish (but my concerns are cultivated); ‘impious’ certainly in the sense whereby Plato judges as impious the belief that the gods (here the works I read) are corruptible by petitions and gifts. Should I try to seduce what I read? (In any case, not ‘bricoleur’.) – Rather I would say: one writes because one hears a request [demande] and one answers it; I read Kant or Adorno or Aristotle not in order to detect the request they themselves tried to answer by writing, but in order to

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hear what they are requesting from me while I write or so that I write. It seems to me that Diderot proceeded in this manner. Secondly, as for the ‘traditional forms of writing philosophy’, I know of none. The proper of philosophy is not to have a proper genre. Tragedy, novel, tale, journal, dialogue, conversation, apology, report, theses, study, research, inquiry, essay, manual, treatise – all genres are good for it. This is because philosophical discourse is in quest of its rule and does not have it from the start. Philosophy borrows it from a genre, in order to insert into that genre the reflective judgement through which the genre’s rules are interrogated. And that suffices to turn the borrowed genre away from its generic purposiveness. G. V. – For some time now (at least since Libidinal Economy), you have denounced the ‘terrorism of theory’ in the name of the irreducibly particular, of the contextually specific. In Just Gaming, you are very careful to insist upon the possibility of justice and of making just judgements without, however, being willing to elaborate a theory of justice, which, if I understand you correctly, could not fail at some moment or other to be productive of specific injustices. I wonder, though, if theory can be so easily dispensed with. Is there not necessarily a theoretical (or speculative) moment in the very conceptualization of the particular? And if, as you also suggest, theory is merely one genre of discourse among others, is not the problem then less that of avoiding theory than of finding other ways to ‘phrase’ theory? J.-F. L. – Theory is in effect a genre, a tough genre. Modern logic has elaborated the rules for this genre: consistency, completeness, decidability of the system of axioms and independence of the axioms. I have no objection to formulate against this genre (genres are not subject to objection). And in this case, to the contrary. Theory is a remarkable elaboration of the linkings between phrases, and first of all of their formation into ‘wellformed expressions’ or propositions. It is not a question of ‘phrasing’ theory otherwise (you might as well phrase tragedy otherwise). It is only a question of determining the cases in which the theoretical genre engenders paralogisms (which the Sophists, Russell or Gödel did, each in his own way). One thus learns that these cases must not be accepted into theory such as it is, because they arise from another genre. It is necessary then to judge, outside of all genres, what existing or inexistent genre is suitable for phrasing these cases (which cease then to be paralogisms). Although an amateur, I have always been attracted by formalism. It proceeds to a kind of mine-clearing of the potencies of language. There exists not only the sapper’s light touch, but also an ironic and fearful respect for the imminence of the explosion. Terror through theory only begins when one also claims to axiomatize discourses that assume or even cultivate inconsistency, incompleteness or indecidability. Contemporary ‘French thought’ is often accused of irrationalism because it resists this extension. But it is this extension that is irrational. G. V. – Much of the difficulty in presenting your texts to an Anglo-American audience comes from their often admirable and very self-conscious grounding within the particular contexts in which they were written. Instructions païennes (Lessons in

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Paganism) is perhaps the most clearly marked of these texts.8 Do you not fear that the widespread distribution and translation of your writings, that is, of their abstraction from the particular times and places in which they were initially circulated, will allow for the most egregious attempts to apply your ideas in a uniform, universalizing manner? Is there not something illusory or nostalgic in the notion of a discourse rigorously situated in a particular context or scene of intervention? J.-F. L. – Every phrase links onto other phrases, be they explicit, presupposed or implicitly understood. None of them is the first phrase. If there is illusion and nostalgia, it is in the expectation (Cartesian, for example) of a first phrase, one without precedent (or a last one, without rejoinder). It is more conformable to this condition to render explicit the ‘context’ than to omit it. Universality is always a horizon to attain from the starting point of an immanent, singular situation. See Benjamin, the latter Adorno. This condition in effect generates difficulties when it is necessary not only to translate from one language into another, but to transfer from one ‘culture’ (a complex agglomerate of contexts) to another. Misapprehensions are inevitable, especially if one claims to ‘apply ideas’ thus elaborated from a singular situation. Ideas are not operators or categories, but horizons of thought. They are by no means applied. There would be much to say about their means of propagating themselves. In any case, I would rather be little read, if it is at least done in this spirit, than diffused like an article of intellectual commerce. A recent experience at Trinity College in Cambridge, England, reassures me moreover that if the resistances to propagation are multiplied at the institutional (university, editorial, journalistic) level, it is precisely on account of the fact that the intellectual ‘petit people’, young instructors, students, unregistered auditors, are working for the acclimatization of foreign ideas, and demand their propagation.9 There is something heroic in this will. I salute it here in your person as well as in the persons of all the young scholars who have resolved to propagate the singularity of my writings in the Germanophone, Italian, Brazilian, Hispanophone or Japanese worlds. G. V. – Your notion of the différend allows for subtle and complex analyses of the relation between politics and language in specific cases of oppression. In the United States today, the most widespread and vital strand of criticism that deals with the literature of an oppressed group or with the problems of an oppressed discourse is no doubt feminist criticism. Is there a specifically feminine différend, an unlitigatable ‘injustice’ done to women? In what ways might your work be of interest to (or at odds with) feminism? J.-F. L. – First of all, not all oppressions signal différends (they can involve litigations), and I do not think that every différend gives rise to oppression. Secondly, is there a feminine idiom untranslatable into the masculine idiom to the same extent that the tragic idiom does not translate into the elegiac nor the mathematic into the epic nor the speculative into the cognitive? If this is the question, the answer requires that we look into what we mean then by idiom. Freud certainly busied himself trying to delineate a feminine idiom irreducible to the masculine. But at the same time he insistently points out the bisexuality of men and women. Freud points it out. If an injustice has occurred in this

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affair, it is bisexuality that is the suffering party, as much for men as for women: an interdiction is passed forbidding the latter from assuming their virility, and the former from fulfilling their femininity. It would still be necessary, I repeat, to articulate what is meant by these entities. Are they anything other than modes in the musical sense? Men or women, we have the capacity for the major mode and the minor mode. It is in between them, in between these modes that incommensurability resides. Thirdly, after reflecting upon it for a moment. I can count many texts relative to the question man/woman from Discourse, Figure up to a text on Valerio Adami, ‘On dirait qu’une ligne …’ (1983), which is my most feminine text, I believe.10 G. V. – Your analysis of the proper name as a ‘quasi-deictic’ leads you to an understanding of the political in terms of a kind of generalized agonistics of the proper name. The stakes involved in what meanings can or cannot be attributed to a proper name, in how that name can or cannot occur in certain phrases, become very high. But then the philosophical stakes in knowing what constitutes a proper name become just as high. Are there not certain common nouns which are also at issue in différends? In other words, how is the proper name as contested in a différend to be distinguished from debate over the meaning and usage of any word or concept? J.-F. L. – Proper names have that property of attracting to themselves phrases belonging to different regimens and to heterogeneous genres of discourse: Caesar, for pity’s sake! Down with Caesar! Caesar was at that time consul. Was Caesar a great writer? Your Caesar annoys me. It is for this reason that the différend flourishes in and around proper names. A ‘debate’ over the meaning of a common noun is a genre strictly regulated by its end (the establishment of a definition) and by its procedures (dialogue). The difference between one and the other is that noted by Aristotle at the beginning of the Rhetoric, shall we say: the difference between School and political life, which deprives one of knowledge or litigation, at the podium, in court, or in the street, the agonistic places. Thank you for your questions. I have tried to answer them in the spirit of litigation, not of the différend. I add here a text (you will see that proper names are numerous in it) aimed at quickly charting the singular context of my work, and thus at reanimating the différend between the latter and the Anglo-American public. Decor My big sister puts her PCB review notebook under her arm and tells me to come hold her place at Maggi’s dairy store in an hour.11 She has seen that there is a waiting line; milk is being distributed without ration cards, one litre per person. We make balls of paper with dampened, old newspapers that we burn in the big stove in the dining room. The only heated room in the middle-class apartment. Ice flowers on the windowpanes of the rooms where it is -5oC. I come running back to get some money from my mother’s change purse; some guy is selling free-market ‘fish pâté’ under the Montparnasse bridge. It’s made of pulverized fish bones and skin. The purchase of a pair of shoes with soles of

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jointed wood is projected for three months away, mine are taking in water. We are called to the rue de Tournon. At the Senate entrance, a tank is firing from its machine gun. An old man wearing a tie falls down. He is carried up to his place, he is stretched out on the dining-room table. With a scalpel, his son-in-law opens the wound he has received close to his breast and removes the bullet from his heart. In the basement of the Medical School Faculty, a warm cadaver decapitated by an artillery shell. (In 68 at the same place, complete chaos.) I run along the walls of the Place de Rennes deserted at daybreak. In the empty window of a stationery store, Drieu la Rochelle’s Notes pour comprendre le siècle are put on sale. It’s open, I buy, I read at the Red Cross station in the Passage Saint André des Arts. An American soldier gives me a penknife with six blades. On the ChampsElysées, they are shooting at an enraptured De Gaulle who is walking down it singing the Te Deum to Our Lady. My father comes home, throws his thick briefcase stuffed with coupons and fabric samples on the table, and says to my mother: Fischbacher is closing shop, I no longer have my sales representative’s card. We wait in line at the soup kitchen at the other end of the Boulevard de Vaugirard. In the railway station of Sables d’Olonne, we distribute soup and help to old people evacuated from the Ardennes. The smell of piss, ether and bad coffee. At the exit to the community centre in Constantine, the CRS frisk our Algerian comrades, up against the wall with their hands in the air.12 They do not frisk me. She and I have decided to keep the child. I am out of work, my family does not like Jews, or secretaries or unwed mothers. We spend the night in the city hall of Antony to defend it from the paratroops come from Algiers. For a whole night we count the banknotes in suitcases transmitted by an Algerian and we stash them in a restricted cupboard at the Pasteur Institute. A stock of leaflets urging insubordination in my car trunk: the cop stops my car in front of his booth in the passageway: you are travelling in a forbidden direction. With a red flag and singing Ave Maria, we break into the administration building at Nanterre in order to be given access to the telephone. My father throws out his Doriotist son-in-law who has abandoned my sister, they come to blows, my father falls on the floor of the entryway.13 We cross into the forbidden zone on the footboards of the train, with neither ticket nor permit to circulate. Douy and I make ourselves some yellow stars and put them on because our two Jewish buddies are wearing them at the lycée. My boy scout troop marches past the statue of Joan of Arc, people applaud and chant: France for Frenchmen! I will continue on the occasion of the next crisis. That my American friends understand what they would be like if three or four times in their lifetime they had seen their president arrive from Canada after the occupation of the United States by Mexican soviets and walk down the Washington Mall in the midst of sniper bullets.

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CHAPTER 14 PHILOSOPHY: THE CASE FOR THE DEFENCE

with Jacques Derrida, Le Monde, 1984 Translated by Roger McKeon

Introduction Under the title ‘Exchange of the Baton’, Le Monde proposes each week on France-Culture a dialogue, moderated by Thomas Ferenczi, between two personalities engaged in the debates of ideas of our time. Each guest chooses, from one programme to another, his interlocutor: Jacques Derrida, who was interviewed by François George in the previous broadcast, now ‘exchanges the baton’ with Jean-François Lyotard. We present the main excerpts from this conversation. The conversation Jacques Derrida – Given the title of this programme, ‘Exchange of the Baton’, I am first tempted to recall that your latest book, The Differend, attempts to elucidate the concept of testimony. Since it is in any case artificial to speak of it without recalling the line of thought that led to it, I rush without further ado towards this sentence in the presentation of the book: ‘“My book of philosophy”, he says’.1 How do you uphold this firm and singular claim of the philosophical which, to my mind, differs from a multitude of other pleas for philosophy? According to you, philosophical discourse is characterized by the institutional indeterminacy of its recipient and the absence of pre-existing rules for its elaboration. You write: ‘Philosophical Reader – A philosophical one, that is, anybody’, or again: ‘Philosophers have never had instituted addressees, which is nothing new. […] Philosophical discourse has as its rule to discover its rule.’ Yet, hasn’t the addressee of philosophical discourse always been defined by institutions? As for the absence of predetermined rules, isn’t it precisely a regulative idea that has never been embodied in any philosophical fact? Jean-François Lyotard – Since I couldn’t put forth as my own the pretentious statement ‘My book of philosophy’, I ascribe it to someone else for purposes of distancing. Nevertheless, through this assuredly derisory possessive, I tried to translate two feelings. On the one hand, in my view it cancels all my previous works, simple, rather bad, sketches … J. D. – Admit that you are not the best judge … J.-F. L. – I am probably the worst … On the other hand, it is the result of patient work, of a maturation outside the tempo demanded by a radio broadcast, for instance. I waited

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more than ten years before writing it, I had to show endurance, overcome presumptions and failures. That’s what this possessive condenses. As for the claim to philosophy, it is twofold; intrinsic to the work, which attempts to restore philosophy in its independence from the human sciences. Indeed, in France – with few exceptions, including your own work – philosophy is often taken to be a simple elaboration based on concepts borrowed from the various human sciences. So I tried, probably for the first time as far as I was concerned, to think outside the unquestioned assumptions that constitute the unthinking material of the human sciences. In a context of questioning philosophical studies denounced as useless, this claim is offensive as well. At a time when philosophy no longer seems to matter any more than to the extent that it is a human science, I share, with J. Derrida, the wish to re-establish it not as an institution but as a specific way of approaching problems, irreducible to any other. Philosophy questions, in addition to its own, the very presuppositions of any work – be it artistic, technical, political … The failure of its teaching, apart from what is perfectly regulated in it, such as the history of philosophy, logic, or epistemology, is to be related to the general decline of metaphysics, unanimously acknowledged, and not to any particular responsibility. My project is by no means to restore it to its metaphysical status as it has been instituted in educational institutions for a century and a half; it is to measure the extent of its diaspora and to find it in the very fields from which it is being excluded. T. Ferenczi. – The starting point of your analyses in The Differend is the controversy over the existence of gas chambers … J.-F. L. – That polemic may indeed introduce to my questioning the concept of testimony. Those who meant to deny the existence of the gas chambers paradoxically intended to produce witnesses, whereas the very nature of the Nazi operation was to eliminate traces and witnesses forever. This example clearly shows that the fundamental question today is not so much that of the presentation of the witness as that of the elaboration of the conditions for the production of evidence. If the witness is unable to provide them, his testimony will not be admissible. I have tried to infer from this frequent type of situation the existence of heterogeneous orders of speech. A poet cannot testify in the order of rhetoric or science … J. D. – Still on the subject of The Differend, how can one articulate without contradiction an essential indeterminacy of the addressee (at least in its institutional form since the nature of the message undoubtedly determines it already) and the requirement of his or her competence? J.-F. L. – I will invoke my two experiences as a writer and teacher. The message, in fact, inevitably determines the addressee: thus many painters have read Discourse, Figure, in spite of the fact that is said to be difficult. At Paris-VIII (Vincennes), we refused the organization of a university course in philosophy, which we considered to be incompatible with the very logic of this discipline, where one is immediately placed in the middle of the most difficult questions. 68

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J. D. – The same applies to the Collège International de Philosophie (International College of Philosophy), but, in these institutions, the addressee is determined nonetheless, let us not fool ourselves. J.-F. L. – Not really. At Paris-VIII, advanced students, novices, foreigners and people already involved in the most diverse professions rubbed shoulders in the same course. J. D. – Another concept plays an organizing role in The Differend; it is that of phrase, to which you lend an unlimited extension. You write: ‘French Aïe, Italian Eh, American Whoops are phrases. A wink, a shrugging of the shoulder, a tapping of the foot, a fleeting blush, or an attack of tachycardia can be phrases. – And the wagging of a dog’s tail, the perked ears of a cat? – And a squall to the West rising upon the horizon of the sea?’ If we subscribe to this meaning, which withdraws the word phrase from any discursive definition, how do you articulate it with the conventional sense of the term to which it must inevitably remain attached? J.-F. L. – I could refer to the etymology, since the Greek phrasein points to non-linguistic ways of signifying. In itself – but is this meaning ever attestable? – Anything can phrase that opens, be it even for a moment, a kind of universe and carries with it senses to be determined. I chose a linguistic concept because it is difficult for us, who customarily ‘make use of ’ language, to access these openings of compact, polysemic and even polypragmatic universes, without resorting to it. J. D. – Do you not appeal here to values such as openness, demonstration, presentation? J.-F. L. – I try to distinguish, but it is impossible, between the fact of happening and what it is that happens. The event as it happens is always anticipated in an interpretation that conceals the presentation itself. J. D. – The exhibition (the word might not be appropriate) that you are currently preparing at Beaubourg on the theme of Les Immatériaux (The Immaterials) is not unrelated to some of your concerns in The Differend.2 You characterize its conception as philosophical also, do you not? Mutations brought about by new technologies affect our relationship with matter. You will come to question, beyond the concept of material, a whole related network of oppositions as material/spiritual, material/personal … T. Ferenczi. – The material would transform into immaterial (immatériau)? J. D. – Not exactly, no; immaterial designates an absolutely other structure of the traditional spirit/matter opposition. What then does the memory of the traditional meaning mean in the very word that designates the old concept of matter? J.-F. L. – With regard to this exhibition, I would first like to stress that the philosophical character of its conception cannot be expected to extend to its implementation, necessarily inscribed in a given time and space. What interests me in this adventure is to relinquish the traditional medium that the book is … J. D. – Which can be related to your comment, in The Differend again: ‘So, in the next century there will be no more books. […]’ 69

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J.-F. L. – That was a summary and provocative statement. But, as I suggested earlier, I consider it interesting for the philosopher to mind what is supposed to be none of his business … The purpose of this exhibition is not to take stock of new technologies – which now preclude any encyclopaedic knowledge – nor to explain their processes. It will only attempt to awaken at the same time as it will reveal a specific sensitivity to postmodernity, the existence of which we postulate. This new sensitivity is still secret and is probably unaware of itself. It has noticeable effects nonetheless. I am thinking, for example, of the success of new forms of images such as video clips. Adorno, had he not been slightly conservative in the matter, would certainly have looked into such a phenomenon. As far as the implementation is concerned, we (the immaterials team) try to escape, as far as possible, and it is not easy, the traditional constraints of an exhibition that come right out of modernity. We try to innovate in the layout and spatial grid, the presence of language, the role of sound … T. Ferenczi. – Could you clarify the concept of immaterial? J.-F. L. – The exhibition is organized around two ‘philosophical’ themes. The development of the arts, sciences and technology continues unabated; the idea of progress still guides many of the countless and admirable works of our time. Nevertheless, what legitimacy is today’s development based on when we know that it does not emancipate humanity, as the Enlightenment had hoped, and that it even generates specific enslavements? That is the question I would simply like to arouse or revive. As for the term immatériau (immaterial), it is a rather risky neologism … It refers only to the disappearance, nowadays consumed in all fields, of the material considered as an object opposed to a subject. The analyses of scientists on matter show that it is but a state of energy, that is, a complex of elements themselves elusive obeying strictly local determinisms. They point in the same direction as the attempts of contemporary artists, those for example who resort to new techniques: video-discs, laser, computer graphics. The direct use of light in the form of neons, lasers, etc., replaces the impasto with which one sought to produce an equivalent of natural light evoking a sunset on the Seine … This growing interpretation of matter and spirit, also illustrated by the use of language machines, has shifted the classic problem of the union of soul and body. J. D. – In connection with this non-exhibition, you have also organized an original writing experience. A list of fifty words was submitted to some thirty people – writers, philosophers, artists, scientists, etc. – for brief comment.3 Each text is stored on a central memory. Each person can then, thanks to a personal word processing machine connected to this memory, compare his or her text to the others, modify it, enrich it. Given the intellectual’s traditional relationship to books and writing, this is an unequivocal provocation … J.-F. L. – I would like to stress that I am not the author of this remarkable project: it had already been developed by the team when I took charge of the exhibition. The experience seems particularly interesting to me because it modifies all the times of writing: the time of inspiration, of rereading, the time of accessing one’s own text, that of consulting other texts. It is in this sense, I believe, that it should be analysed. 70

CHAPTER 15

LES IMMATÉRIAUX: ‘A STAGING’

with Jacques Saur and Philippe Bidaine, CNAC Magazine, 1985 Translated by Roger McKeon

Introduction by CNAC Magazine (Centre National d’Art Contemporain) Imagine if we told you the cruelty, the beauty, the momentum, the unexpected of what happens to us … For more than two years, a team of scientists, philosophers and writers, led by JeanFrançois Lyotard and Thierry Chaput, has been reflecting on the evolution of our world and of our brains. The result: an exhibition of a unique kind. Interview CNAC Magazine – Les Immatériaux is first and foremost an event whose ambition is to take stock of man and the world today. Jean-François Lyotard – Take stock? If you mean: totalling up all the information, that’s an old encyclopaedic ambition. It no longer makes sense in our time. Scientists share their communications by e-mail; they avoid printing delays. The state of knowledge is constantly changing. It’s impressive. There are what American sociologists call ‘secret colleges’; monthly meetings of high-level scientists who exchange information. Their knowledge is not encyclopaedic. They take stock of the present state of things in their field, without formalities. C. M. – So what is the ‘state of things’ covered by Les Immatériaux? J.-F. L. – Precisely, it is not a cover in the sense of information, it is rather a staging, not for informational but for artistic purposes. The visitor must be brought into the dramaturgy of postmodernity. No story, no heroes but a maze of ‘sites’ in which the visitor will be seized ‘by the ears’: texts and music correlated with the different areas sensitize the public to what it already senses, to the questions it already asks itself … Thus one goes from the body – which embodies the ‘certainty’ that there is something present here and now – to language. We well know today that, whatever the approach, medicine, biology, biogenetics, dietetics, habitat, the body is analysed into a certain number of elements, of fine constants … in short dematerialized. To look at the body through a

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scanner is to see it digitized, to read it written in a certain language. Access to the body is less direct, more mediatized. C. M. – Why this relationship established, from the outset in the exhibition, between the body and the theatre? J.-F. L. – When we tried to illustrate, for instance, what had become of clothing, food or housing, we encountered resistances. People continue to wear cotton, which is more pleasant than nylon; in habitat, the idea of the enjoyment of the domestic space still prevails; same attitude with regard to food: synthetic foods are most often only simulacra attempting to reproduce what our body prefers … In short, the body resists the dematerialized approach. Theatre is the art that fundamentally privileges the presence of the body. There is no theatre without the actor’s body, without that of the spectator (video theatre is not really theatre, it’s video). We eventually realized that Beckett and Artaud are the playwrights who have most confronted the question of the non-body in the theatre. We therefore decided to present this large site of the ‘non-body’, which can no longer be about performance. So, with Beckett’s director Jean-Claude Fall, we selected invented situations inspired by the author’s plays, plays where the body practically vanishes, where it is reduced to a spot of light on a mouth, for instance, where the characters are in the shadows and appear in the light only when they speak. Characters subject to the rule of language and not of bodily presence. On our request, Fall designed five dioramas showing strange stage plays, small movements that don’t let us grasp what is moving, unexpected variations in lighting. C. M. – Why this question of the ‘non-body’? J.-F. L.– Let’s take a simple example. We now know, and astrophysics teaches us, that stars have lifespans, that they are kinds of immense laboratories that by burning produce elements that were not given at first. It seems that cosmic matter originally consists of hydrogen and helium; the other products are born from atomic transmutations, which take place in the stars. This is the case with the sun, whose life expectancy is estimated to be 10 billion years. It is now at 4.6 billion. There will come a time when it will implode, and then life will become impossible on earth. This means that humanity is now counting down its lifetime, and must prepare for its exodus. It has begun to do so, to give itself the means to exode (although it doesn’t yet have anywhere to go …). And there, the question of the body comes up again. The human body must be able to withstand living conditions other than those on the earth and then the problem of the resistance of the body or the non-body will arise for real. C. M. – From the body we go to the angel … J.-F. L. – The angel. What we are dealing with here is an old question raised in a contemporary way, transsexuation. We show that it is now surgically possible to switch from one sex to the other, but we also want to make people aware that this is an old desire. It makes us somewhat uneasy to belong mentally, socially, to the sex that is in fact ours.

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Our psyche, our sexuality, in the sense Freud understands it, does not conform all that well with our biological sex. There are, in this divergence, some kinds of fundamental misfortunes. Antiquity had created the marvellous form of the hermaphrodite as an imaginary repair. We show how transsexuation falls within this old dream, but also how, paradoxically, the sex change it provides repeats the initial misfortune, since it aligns biological sex with the unconscious or social demand to obtain this monster: a homogeneous sexuality … As if there could only be one sex in the psyche, while there are always two. C. M. – From the angel we go to the ‘sung body’, that is to say the video-clip. J.-F. L. – It is a new, popular, artistically interesting genre, born from the research work of advertisers. What interests us is that the singer’s body is decomposed according to the rhythm of the melody and that it is not recognized in its unicity, as a beautiful material to be seen, but incessantly broken, cut up in video operations. Visitors will be able to trigger specific operations, work on the singer’s body. C. M. – The public plays a part in the exhibition. It is invited to play an unusual chess game, for example. J.-F. L. – Walking on a chessboard, the visitor suddenly finds himself under the beam of a projector depending on whether he passes over such or such other square. He does not understand what is happening to him until he receives the explanation of the phenomenon: he has intervened in a chess game played by two computers, and he was illuminated each time he existed as a piece positioned at a given stage of the game. The game obeys two kinds of rules: those of the chess game itself, and those of its progression, the rules of strategy, of a conflict perhaps similar to that in which matter and antimatter are engaged in the cosmos. We do know that there are states of counting elements of matter that are not realized, and that nature (let us still call it by this old charming word!) has not exhausted all possibilities of existence. C. M. – Let’s talk food. Further down is the ‘hurried eater’ site. J.-F. L. – A somewhat nostalgic site. The ritual of the meal, in all cultures, regulated the devouring of the animal, vegetable environments, designated the taboo foods, those recommended … We were in the solemn affirmation of the social bond in front of nature. The festive meal as a form of recognition of the family is yet another case. It is clear that in current living and working conditions, this ritual tends to disappear. The social bond, and this is serious, is no longer acknowledged in this way, and there is a loneliness of the hurried eater … We are entering an era where, partly on account of technology, one wonders where the social link is going. We talk about information communication, that’s true, but probably not enough. We’re heading towards the conditions of singularity. One can regret this, but also realize that the phantasy of gatherings has passed. The gathering of professions, parties, provinces, nations … This togetherness is pulverizing, and the hurried eater is also about that.

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C. M. – In this multidisciplinary exhibition, how is contemporary art approached? J.-F. L. – The plastic arts sites deal with something essential in contemporary art: artists are now more interested in time than space. It is no longer a question of representing what is in space, but that there is something that cannot be represented. Paradox of contemporary arts. It’s very strange. When Kounellis fires up gas bottles, what does he mean? That the flame is his material. Can you think of more dematerialized material than a flame? It exists only in the moment. Adorno said: ‘The greatest of all the arts is that of Chinese pyrotechnists.’ The work that falls under nothing, and disappears without trace, with no possible museum. C. M. – You also illustrate the phenomenon of money dematerialization? J.-F. L. – That’s what it’s called in the banking world: the dematerialization of securities. We want to show two complementary things. On the one hand the fact that we are moving towards a fully magnetic currency, plastic-payment currency. It’s now possible to make ‘cash’ in picoseconds … All you’ll have to do is slip a card in a magnetic plug for credit and debit to be instantly registered, at the speed of the electron, on the electronic account. This leads to the elimination of the banking institution. This procedure was tested in Greece, successfully and … banned by the government on account of the unemployment it results in. On the other hand – this has to do with credit money, capital – we have come to realize that when we take a loan, the interest does not pay for the risk of the lender, but for time. By borrowing money, you bring forward operations that you would have undertaken only later, you save time. Credit money is time bought by the borrower. Rich people are rich not in money, but in time. Others have only real time, the time of life. When you receive a wage, you ensure a presence: you earn your salary in real time. That’s an archaism. And if one day payments have to be made in nonreal time, then the notion of salary will have to be reconsidered. C. M. – What about language? J.-F. L. – That’s the other end of the exhibit. You enter the labyrinth of language through texts from Borges’s ‘Library of Babel’. The universe is a huge library. Language machines have been grouped under different headings: machines of style, literary genre, memory, judgement, logic machines, novel machines – telematic novel –, also machines for capturing natural language, for example the voice trace and its immediate analysis indicating height and intensity. Some of these machines are interactive. There is also the rerun on Minitel of a writing experiment made during the event. But we were struck by the relative poverty of today’s language machines. Research tends to develop machines built on the binary system, ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Our language is infinitely more complex than this system, which covers only the poorest form of speech, the informational one: ‘What did you have, a boy or a girl?’ Fine, but in communication other parameters come into play: intonation, glance, context innuendo, etc. Sense is something else: ‘Eh, poor you, so you had a boy!’ The machine doesn’t know how to do that.

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C. M. – Where is the religious? Isn’t the soul the object of the wager in 1985? J.-F. L. – The religious is present in the introduction and present/absent in the conclusion of the exhibition: an actual Egyptian bas-relief shows a goddess offering the sign of life to King Nectanebo II in the entrance, and her ‘shaky’ image is projected by the exit. I don’t think there’s no soul left. On the contrary. There are certainly reactivations towards religiosity, which are rather, I’m afraid, reactions to an anguish … But there is another form of reactivation. If all the objects around us show that our universe is deeply materialistic, it is not so in the sense of the nineteenth century or the critique of consumer society. We ‘materialize’ the soul, but by means of machines that dematerialize material substances. And especially astrophysics, biogenetics, armament technologies, the use of communication satellites, but also the management of work or school, ask us questions of law, legitimacy, ethical and political purpose whose answer calls for the most demanding spirituality. And this also: as we go on analysing things, there are more and more objects, be they minuscule; the more objects there are, the more choices are to be made, the more decisions to be taken, and one can no longer rely on others to decide (when I spoke about singularity earlier, that also is what I was referring to). That aspect of the soul which has to do with the responsibility for value: what we want and what we do not, that aspect which is perhaps essential, can only increase in importance with the increasing complexity of context. C. M. – What was your personal experience in developing this event? J.-F. L. – What’s a philosopher doing here? The learning experience. Learning how an exhibition is put together technically. A gaiety to start my life over by learning a trade I knew nothing about. And then, to say, ‘There is an idea about the evolution of the world. Can it be taken out of a book and transferred to another medium?’ It’s an old project that I had chosen as a theme for a seminar of the International College of Philosophy. What’s at stake? Can one philosophize for the general public without betraying thought? And trying to reach that audience knowing that one is not dealing with philosophers, but assuming that they are sensitive to the same questions as those philosophers are trying to address for their own part.

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CHAPTER 16

LES IMMATÉRIAUX: A CONVERSATION

with Bernard Blistène, Flash Art, 1985 Translator unknown

Jean-François Lyotard is organizing the exhibition Les Immatériaux, which will be held at Centre Pompidou in Paris in March. Bernard Blistène has asked the French philosopher about the concepts underlying the show.1 Bernard Blistène – Tell us about the exhibition you’re organizing. Jean-François Lyotard – The idea of ‘immaterials’ or ‘non-materials’ was a little bit different at first, since I’d been asked to do the exhibition under a different title. It was supposed to be called ‘Nouveaux Matériaux et Creation’ – New Materials and Creativity. But then I slightly shifted the subject by trying to give it a somewhat different range; I said to myself, ‘Creativity? What is that supposed to mean?’ And again, ‘What is “new” supposed to mean?’ Thinking about ‘materials’ today, I thought, ‘But what does that imply for an architect, or for an industrialist?’ I came to the conclusion that all of these words have undergone considerable shifts in meaning, and I thought that the question had to be approached from a different point of view. B. B. – But what can we say about the philosopher who decides that his job is to give us something to look at? J.-F. L. – Everybody knows that books are going through a period of crisis as instruments for the diffusion of ideas, and that this is a part of the general crisis of intellectual life today, here is what we could call a kind of democratic despotism that makes for the world we live in. And of course, there’s no question of maintaining the superiority of any kind of aristocratic power, but both of us know very well that the philosopher experiences a very grave problem with respect to the writing or recording of what he has to say, and there is a problem of the shortcomings of the philosopher with respect to the available modes of writing and recording, or of what I would call ‘inscription’. As far as I myself am concerned, my acceptance of the idea – to use the words with which you’ve stated it – of becoming ‘the philosopher who decides that his job is to give us something to look at’ is something very simple and not even particularly original. I accept myself as a philosopher, and it seems to me to be important for the philosopher to be able to record what he thinks through the use of instruments that don’t have to be restricted to the instrument of the book. It’s just that simple. New and different things are at stake today, even though they’re not totally new, and we have to try to understand the things that are being offered to us. It’s as though one were now to decide to restrict one’s interest in art to the question of the pleasure of the contemplation of the beautiful. Surely you’ll agree that it’s not that sort of thing that’s most important and pertinent. It’s as though we were to think about the romantic aesthetic of

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the sublime and then to back down from dealing with Duchamp. And I mention Duchamp because we know very well that his aesthetic had nothing to do with the sublime, that it leaves the sublime behind it, and so today we have to ask ourselves what’s now at stake in art. It’s a question of limits, and one finds such questions everywhere, including the field of the sciences. And are the scientists still concerned with talking about ‘the truth of the object’? Everything is different, now that the Anglo-Saxon epistemologists have begun to stress the idea of ‘nonfalsification’. Like philosophers in general, these people are now interested in questioning the transitional finalities of the work they do. And that has always been the distinguishing trait of philosophy, which is to say that philosophy has always investigated the rules of the field of philosophical thought, and never been able to define them. B. B. – Could we say that you’re attempting to establish a relationship between scientific and artistic modes of thought? J.-F. L. – Undoubtedly. The idea of artistic creation is a notion that comes from the aesthetics of romanticism, the aesthetics of the idea of genius. And I’m sure you’ll agree that the idea of the artist as ‘creator’ is, to say the least, of strictly limited utility in our world today. That’s no longer where we really are. We’re no longer concerned with the philosophy of subjective genius and all the ‘aura’ that goes along with it. With Duchamp, we already find ourselves in an area that has an aspect of bricolage, there’s that side where you think of him as an ‘inventeur du temps gratuit’ (‘inventor of free time’). B. B. – But wouldn’t you still think of the work of Duchamp as something relative rather than some kind of transhistorical value? J.-F. L. – Well, really both yes and no, since that’s the way it always is with art: it always has a value as an expression of its time, but there’s also a way in which it can always be perceived as lying outside of the time that produced it. There’s always something that turns art into a transhistorical truth, and that’s the part of art that I think of as ‘philosophical’. It’s within this part of art and through this part of art that it poses the question of what it has at stake. Art, after all, is a relatively modern notion. Even Greek tragedy couldn’t have been said to be art for the Greeks, it was still something else, and it’s clear that we have to wait at least until the close of the Middle Ages to discover the emergence of an art that isn’t simply an expression, for example, of metaphysics or religion, or political praise. What strikes me, if we can start out from Duchamp, is the way it can seem, from a certain point of view, to be difficult to be an artist if one isn’t a philosopher as well. I don’t mean that the artist will have to read Plato or Aristotle; I mean that he has to posit the question of what he has at stake, he has to ask himself about the nature of what he’s involved in doing. Precisely this question is the most interesting thing to be found in the works of art that are strongest today, it’s the thing in which these works are most interested. What’s at stake is something that’s extraordinarily serious, and it’s not at all a question of pleasure, and not even of the way the pleasure of the sublime is intermixed with pain; it’s a question instead of a relationship to time and space and sensibility, even though I don’t like to make use of that word. What I mean to say is that certain works have a structure that keeps them from being concerned with their existence as events; 78

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they do something entirely different as an attentive observer comes away with the feeling that their engagement with the senses, if any such engagement exists at all, is of far less importance than a primary interest in the most fundamental philosophical question of all: ‘Why does something happen rather than nothing?’ B. B. – And is that the point where we find a lack of differentiation between technological experimentation and the questions posed by art? J.-F. L. – Even the most modest tinkler with software has an attitude that’s somehow ‘artistic’ – an attitude of a kind of astonishment. And what that means is that metaphysics, as Adorno puts it, goes into crisis at much the same time as the rest of classical philosophy and that there’s a way in which it is going under as a result of a decline in the capacity it can have for the creation of wide-ranging global systems that include the great and final issues for which we feel a need. If there’s a decline of metaphysics, there’s also a decline of everything that people in general call philosophy. And this decline – which is something that Adorno grasped quite clearly – shows us the history of the diaspora of philosophy as it wanders through domains that can’t properly be defined as philosophical, even though the domain that can be properly defined as philosophical continues to exist. What this means is that metaphysics, as Adorno puts it, goes under, along with classical philosophy, even though certain people continue to practice it as though it weren’t in crisis at all. B. B. – Aside from your desire to investigate modalities of knowledge other than the book, it seems to me that the very concept of the exhibition you want to realize is concerned with an attempt to appeal to all of the most various human sciences and to reappropriate all of the various things that they’ve given us: linguistics, science, psychoanalysis, anthropology and so forth. J.-F. L. – That’s quite right. Our attempt, as you’ve put it, is to reappropriate a whole series of things and to try to see the problems they pose from a philosophical point of view; we’ll look at them within a context where they don’t begin by positing what the human sciences or liberal arts always begin by positing, which is to say the Human Being. It seems to me that these technologies are interesting, and at the same time troubling, to the extent that they force us to reconsider the position of the human being in relation to the Universe, in relationship to himself, in relationship to his traditional purposes, his recognized abilities, his identity. B. B. – Is this what you mean when you speak of ‘general interaction’? J.-F. L. – Yes, that’s what that means, and it will be one of the two major themes of the exhibition. It’s the first theme, and I see it as the basis of the entire discussion of the postmodern, which is a subject the French don’t yet know very well, since they’re always turned so completely in upon themselves. Even though the field of the postmodern is very very vast, and even though the word can sometimes be applied to things that are diametrically opposed to one another, it’s based fundamentally upon the perception of the existence of a modern era that dates from the time of the Enlightenment and that has now run its course; and this modern era was predicated on a notion of progress 79

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in knowledge, in the arts, in technology and in human freedom as well, all of which was thought of as leading to a truly emancipated society: a society emancipated from poverty, despotism and ignorance. But all of us can see that development continues to take place without leading to the realization of any of these dreams of emancipation. So, today, one no longer feels guilty about being ignorant. B. B. – You’ve remarked that ‘Each of us has the awareness of our condition of solitude, and an awareness, as well, both of being a “self ” and of knowing that this “self ” counts for so very little.’ J.-F. L. – Yes. And so what sort of legitimacy can be seen in this mode of development? It’s intended for this question to be somehow latent or implicit in a kind of grieving or a melancholy with respect to the modern era, a sense of disarray. And the exhibition hopes to reactivate this disarray rather than to appease it since there’s no longer any matter to be appeased. The exhibition also has another theme that tries to give legitimacy to this ‘monstrous neologism – the immaterials’: we make the point, obviously enough, that all of the progress that has been accomplished in the sciences, and perhaps in the arts as well, is strictly connected to an ever closer knowledge of what we generally call objects. (Which can also be a question of objects of thought.) And so analysis decomposes these objects and makes us perceive that, finally, they can only be considered to be objects at the level of a human point of view; at their constitutive or structural level, they are only a question of complex agglomerates of tiny packets of energy, or of particles that can’t possibly be grasped as such. Finally, there’s no such thing as matter, and the only thing that exists is energy; we no longer have any such thing as materials, in the old sense of the word that implied an object that offered resistance to any kind of project that attempted to alienate it from its primary finalities. B. B. – You’ve written more about painting than about any of the other forms of artistic expression. In terms of what you’ve just been saying, don’t you feel that the cinema today is more intimately concerned with the kinds of problems that interest you? J.-F. L. – I don’t really know. I adore films, and just about any kind of films. I was quite impressed by the latest film by Wim Wenders. But I don’t want to think of any art as more pertinent than any other, and I think that the great musical compositions are entirely astonishing in terms of what I’ve been talking about. B. B. – So you haven’t written very much about film? J.-F. L. – I’ve written a short text entitled L’acinéma (‘Acinema’) as well as another text on music which is entitled Plusieurs Silences (‘Several Silences’). But that’s all very modest, since I am very ignorant. B. B. – But what then has stimulated you to write about painting? J.-F. L. – Perhaps that’s because I once had some slight future in drawing, even though that future has since gone a little astray. Sometimes, though, I still draw, but only occasionally.

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B. B. – And that’s all? You’re not interested in working on something that shows an equivalence to your own particular field? J.-F. L. – No, I don’t think so. I simply think that line contains something that’s totally radical and somehow ontological. To trace a line onto a surface, any kind of line at all, is to produce the minimum of meaning that I was talking about a moment ago. One immediately finds oneself in the midst of the very poorest form of art. A simple scrawl of a pencil on a sheet of paper makes for one of the poorest arts, for one of the poorest forms of art. I find this poverty, which is almost mystical, to be something entirely original. In this sense, I feel closer to drawing than to colours. A simple mark with a pencil, and the sheet of paper splits apart, and something is as though directed somewhere else. What you have there is both the completest form of power and, at one and the same time, the completest form of dispossession. Because the person who is doing it doesn’t at all know what he’s doing. This poverty is something perfectly equivocal since it’s simultaneously both everything and nothing. B. B. – Your texts on ‘painting’ go from Adami to Buren, and from Monory to Arakawa.2 They seem to contain what I’d call the logic of discontinuity. Can you say something about the reasons that have prompted you to write about certain painters rather than others? And do you think of your essays on painting as fragments of a whole within your work as a writer? J.-F. L. – I’d answer quite simply that it has been something of a question of chance. I’m usually acquainted with the painters I decide to write about. I’ve worked along with them, and I’ve seen them at work, but then again there are obviously painters with whom I’m personally acquainted but whom I’d never want to write about. It’s not that I can give you an answer simply by saying it’s a matter of people I’ve happened to meet. And if you ask me if these essays are part of some single thing, and if this single thing is part of my reflections as a philosopher, I’d have to answer in much the same summary way and that for the moment I think of all these various short texts as the beginning of a kind of dossier that could lead to some substantial study not so much of art, but specifically of painting. Contemporary painting. And my goal would be to attempt to define the nature of a possible philosophy of art today. B. B. – You mean that you don’t at all exclude the idea of writing a theory of aesthetics? J.-F. L. – I don’t think it would be a question of a theory, and I don’t think it would be a question of aesthetics. I don’t think it could be a theory since I think of the idea or theory as belonging to the area of metaphysics, which we were saying is now in decline, and I don’t think of it as a question of aesthetics, since I don’t think that aesthetics corresponds to the time we presently live in. Aesthetics primarily appertains to a very precise moment in the commentary on art, which is to refer to the Age of Enlightenment and to what follows after it, so it’s a question of something in the order of two centuries ago. Basically, I’d be ready to maintain that there wasn’t any such thing as aesthetics up until the eighteenth century, and that up until that time there was only a series

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of poetics. Aesthetics actually corresponds to the philosophy of the sublime and to a theory of genius. B. B. – In the light of what you’re saying, do you think that Adorno could give an explanation of the title of his book? J.-F. L. – No, I don’t think he could. I think that his title … how can I put it? I think his title is bad but that his book is very good. And that’s precisely because it isn’t at all a theory and has nothing to do with aesthetics. This is the line of thought into which I’d like to situate this work, and I’d want it to be a kind of prolongation of what’s indicated in Adorno’s work. But, you know, whenever I reread Adorno, I always see that his approach is negative, and almost always cynical, which is the measure of the breadth of his despair. It’s the measure of the strength of the attachment still to be felt for modern aesthetics, the measure of a refusal to go into mourning for the final death of it. With Adorno we’re within the sphere of melancholy. You can’t forget the context in which that book was written. The most admirable parts of German art had been burned in public, and the most intelligent parts of literature and the arts had been persecuted. We no longer live under that kind of despotism, but today we can see we live under a kind of democratic despotism of the media, which is of course something very different. And so, even though there’s nothing that has to be forgotten, we have to attempt to work our way into the philosophy of contemporary art by completely disengaging ourselves from romantic aesthetics. And so this reflection on art begins for me with Discourse, Figure as a way of starting to palliate – or rather to supplant – the political thinking of the present day. Basically, the most essential question of all, for me, is the question we’ve just been talking about: ‘What do we do if we no longer have the prospect of emancipation? What sort of line of resistance can we have?’ When Zola took part in public affairs, he knew exactly what he was talking about, he was aware of his ‘prospects of emancipation’. The same thing was true for Voltaire, and for Fourier, who was also a political thinker, and it was still true for Sartre, even though Sartre was wrong. We intellectuals are no longer capable of any kind of real intervention. And so what is our line of resistance if it’s no longer a question of a prospect of emancipation? I think that it’s something that’s very closely connected to artistic activity, or philosophico-artistic activity. It’s something that has to be thoroughly explored by asking ourselves what’s happening at the level of time, space and the social community in contemporary art. That’s what I’ve been trying to explore by means of these various small texts that I write on art, and sometimes of music, when I feel sufficiently audacious. I’d like to write a commentary on Paris, Texas (Wenders, 1984) and say that it’s an Alice in the Big City (Wenders, 1974), which is not ‘poor art’ anymore. B. B. – Let’s go back to your exhibition Les Immatériaux and to the concept behind it. J.-F. L. – We arbitrarily and quite purposely created a kind of filter, since there were so many things to exhibit that our very first worry was about how to go about dealing with it all. There was never any pretence of doing some sort of universal exhibition. 82

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Universal exhibitions are no longer possible, and that’s more than just a question of budgeting. And so what were our criteria of selection? They were on three different levels. First of all, we wanted to exhibit things that inspire a feeling of incertitude: incertitude about the finalities of these developments and incertitude about the identity of the human individual in his condition of such improbably immateriality. That’s a criterion of selection that’s concerned with the philosophical stakes of the exhibition. Then we obviously had to give attention to the arrangement of the show in terms of time and space. And here we appealed to two principles: no fancy mouldings and no pedestals. We didn’t want still another re-evocation of a gallery or a salon, by which I mean an arrangement of rooms in a Royal Palace as designed by the king. We wanted to avoid this way of squarely defining things and we had to discover a more fluid and immaterial system for the organization of space. So, instead of walls, we’ll have a system of webbings that will be stretched from floor to ceiling, and the ways in which they’re lighted will permit us to vary the distances that the eye can cover and to modulate the indications that ought to be followed, but without being prescriptive, since many of the sites we’ll be building will be in the form of intersections that allow one then to go off in any number of directions. These webbings will be grey, and they’ll change in quality according to the ways in which they’re lighted, and that will also determine whether or not they are more or less opaque. Here again you can see that I’m still within the tradition of the modern. Something else that we’ve decided to realize for the exhibition is a system of portable radio guides. Each of the visitors will have a kind of Walkman, and even though they won’t have to tune into different stations, they’ll move from one broadcast to another as they walk through the exhibition space. The broadcasts will cover several sites at once. This is a way of permitting me to create a soundtrack of ‘commentaries’ that won’t even really be commentaries at all, and the textual element included in the visit to the show will be a considerably more forceful presence than it usually is; there will also be music and other sound effects. I’m particularly concerned with turning the exhibition itself into ‘a work of art’, and I imagine that that may cause some discomfort for Daniel Buren. B. B. – How do you mean? J.-F. L. – You’ll remember that he once had a complaint to make about one of the Documenta exhibitions, and he remarked, ‘What they’re exhibiting isn’t the works of art, but the exhibition itself.’ There’s a way in which that’s what we’ll be doing here, even though I’m not at all concerned with asking myself if I have the right to declare myself an artist. I simply feel that there are things that can be done at the level of the physical articulation of the exhibition, and we’ve decided to try to do them. Something else, for example, is that any art objects that may find a place next to the other elements of the exhibition will have to be compatible. We also intend to exclude works that are expressionist, neo-expressionist or ‘transavantgardist’. We intend to be quite ‘strict’ in our attempt to detect the existence of a postmodern sensibility, which isn’t at all the sort of thing to which the term is generally applied in the field of the arts.

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B. B. – Is there a postmodern formalism? J.-F. L. – That depends on what you mean by ‘formalism’. Personally, I’m not very deeply acquainted with the painting that’s now generally referred to as ‘postmodern’. I can only say that it strikes me rather unfavourably. These forms of painterly expression that one now sees returning, these transavantgardists, or let’s say neoexpressionists (which is what the Germans call it, and they’ve had quite a lot to do with it), seem to me to be a pure and simple forgetfulness of everything that people have been trying to do for over a century: they’ve lost all sense of what’s fundamentally at stake in painting. There’s a vague return to a concern with the enjoyment experienced by the viewer; they’ve abandoned the task of the artist as it might have been perceived by a Cézanne, a Duchamp or by any number of others, such as Klee, for instance. I see it all as an enormous involution. It’s possible that the way I diagnose things could be wrong, but … B. B. – How do you feel then about the attempt to rehabilitate ‘technique’ and ‘métier’ as primary values for the judgement of an artist? J.-F. L. – It would be a little paradoxical to reduce the history of a painting to a single problem of technique or supports. In any case, that’s far too little. Do you remember those extremely incisive texts by Diderot, like the one he called La petite technique not without a certain air of disdain. And if Chardin, for example, was far beyond his contemporaries even though they were technically his peers, one surely has to explain that in different terms from a phenomenological point of view. And look at Cézanne; he wasn’t exceptional from any technical point of view, and yet, all the same … But even though I’m not at all tempted to take these problems of technical mastery any too seriously, I’m in any case quite concerned with the aspect of technique when it comes to trying to understand the way it can affect a viewer and modify the course of his attempt to make use of his sensibility as the instrument of some kind of exploration. I imagine that someone from Flanders who made a trip to Venice in the sixteenth or seventeenth century must have been terribly shocked. But apart from that kind of consideration, we still have to realize that we’ve been witnessing a permanent process of reformation in the individual’s ability to see and then to love what he sees. But that’s not at all the situation to be found in the majority of the works that are being produced today. They don’t teach me anything. I say to myself, ‘I’ve already seen that, and I’ve already seen it done better.’ The overemphasis of the hand, the agitated drawing and all the rest of it, we already know that and we’ve already seen it. I’m not saying that it’s entirely without interest, I’m just saying that it’s without any interest to me. B. B. – You’ve built your exhibition around the root of the word that serves as its title: ‘Mat’. Why have you done that? J.-F. L. – We began to think about ‘Mat’, which is an old Indo-European radical. But now, of course, we know that that’s all a fiction since the Indo-Europeans never existed. In any case, however, we can say that it’s found in any number of languages, sometimes as a common root, and at other times as a borrowing. This root is an indication of

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‘taking measurement by hand’ and very quickly assumed the meaning of ‘building’ or ‘modelling’. And it’s from there that we get such words as ‘materials’, ‘matter’, ‘maternity’, ‘matrix’. That’s why we decided to make use of them as presuppositions in a way that’s somewhat reminiscent of ‘communications theory’. Now, perhaps you’ll know that the basic presupposition of the theories of communication is that every object is a message, that every message has a source, goes to a receiver, is inscribed upon a support in a code that makes it decipherable and therefore a message, and finally that it gives information about something. So there are five poles: from where, to where, how, by means of what and concerning what. We quite arbitrarily decided to deal with these poles in terms of the root, ‘Mat’. Where do we start from: the maternity of the message. What’s it about: the material. What’s it inscribed in: that’s its matrix since every code is a matrix that allows for permutations. What’s it concerned with: that’s the matter of the message, what it talks about, in the sense of what the English call the ‘Table of Elements’. And finally we have material, which is a question of reception, in the sense, for example, that one could say that the ear is material for the reception of a message. None of that is in any way new; it’s only a way of giving a structure to our work, only a way of being superselective about what we were already intending to do: we could deal with this object or that object to the extent that it now poses a particular question: ‘What is the maternity of the message today?’ ‘What has happened to their matter?’ And so on. And it didn’t matter what field was being considered – cuisine or painting or astrophysics. And we’ve turned these five poles into five individual sequences that will extend from the south to the north of the large gallery of the Centre Georges Pompidou. This means that the spectator who follows one of these poles along a straight line will remain within a sequence called ‘Matériaux’, ‘Matrice’, ‘Matière’, ‘Matériel’ or ‘Maternité’. I keep telling myself, in fact, that the entirety of the exhibition could be thought of as a sign that refers to a missing signified. And this missing signified is what I was just explaining, in the sense that it’s a question of the chagrin that surrounds the end of the modern age as well as the feeling of jubilation that’s connected with the appearance of something new. But it’s also, perhaps, a question of trying to underline something that concerns the identity of what we are and of the objects that surround us as it comes to expression through the material or the immaterial. B. B. – What, finally, is postmodernism? J.-F. L. – My work, in fact, is directed to finding out what it is, but I still don’t know. This is a discussion, really, that’s only just beginning. It’s the way it was for the Age of Enlightenment: the discussion will be abandoned before it ever reaches a conclusion.

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CHAPTER 17 CHRYSALIDE’S LITTLE NARRATIVES

with Élie Théofilakis, Modernes et Après? ‘Les Immatériaux’, 1985 Translated by Roger McKeon

Élie Théofilakis – ‘The time to philosophize has come (again)’, you wrote recently, and explained: ‘because the time to theorize has passed’. What you were pointing out is not so much that everything seems to be said – which is a tired old suspicious refrain – but that the human sciences have overconsumed theory – Marxism, linguistics, Freudism … – and that we have definitively consumed the modern project: to make man into an emancipated ‘subject’, and (reasonable) master of the world … So I would simply like to ask you: why this exhibition and why is a philosopher – Jean-François Lyotard, precisely – dealing with it today? Jean-François Lyotard – That is a falsely naïve question, for which there are answers on several levels. Philosophical activity is threatened, both in academic institutions and in publishing. Educational reforms have focused on professionalization – we all know that there is no philosophical profession – and it is to be feared that from now on philosophy will not be part of people’s intellectual training before the bachelor’s degree. Symmetrically, in publishing, there is a withdrawal from texts that were considered theoretical in the ’60s and ’70s, which targets philosophy more than the human sciences: philosophy, essentially reflexive, is not considered a science. But, simultaneously, there is the opposite: a demand for reflection, generally later than the age of study, when life, around professional activities, brings people to ask themselves questions (many auditors at the University of Paris-VIII or at the Collège Internationale de Philosophie). Moreover, if we look at what artists do – be it painters of old with their brushes, video artists with their video, people who make computer-generated images or musicians, or scientists – they are all confronted with problems that are not only technical, artistic or scientific, but that are truly reflective problems: what is matter, the cosmos, life and so on. The current dissemination of philosophical thought J.-F. L. – There is also daily life: I would say that at that level the very widespread problems, such as the death penalty, the status of convicts, inmates, the status of madness, life, copyright, the right to experiment (see the Ethics Commission) are philosophical problems.1 Philosophy thus finds itself simultaneously before the institutions that emerged from the Age of Enlightenment and stabilized in the form of teaching in secondary schools and higher education establishments that are in decline, are now out

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of place and in the face of a call coming from everywhere, from artistic activities, from daily life, from sciences, from technology. A philosopher like the one I am rather tends to think that he’d better deal a little bit with what’s going on outside institutions; that he needs to get out of the university. Such is the reason for my presence on Les Immatériaux (the immaterials) preparation team. E. T. – That’s true, there is a re-magnetization of philosophy, and people attend theoretical courses again, as though they wanted to afford themselves an extra bit of soul. But the attitude in the face of time is double: performance, because such is the general obligation, but also a desire to ‘waste time’. Now, if philosophy does not easily become this pastime, it is for yet another reason. There is a humanist tradition within our culture that leads to a misconception, if not a contempt, regarding a few ‘fundamental’ realities, such as our relationship with tools and machines yesterday, with technology today. And there is this decline today, because all of a sudden we realize that with the shifts of interest, the queen is naked. The nakedness of philosophy becomes disappointing. J.-F. L. – Yes, if you like. But rather than nakedness which is a good thing, I would say a kind of sclerosis of the teaching of philosophy in institutions. There are problems that are philosophical in nature and for which society, as it is, does not provide legitimacy, which is to say that there are no clear finalities in its unconscious: unemployment, overactivity of production, so-called sex problems, affect. E. T. – The pill, filiation … J.-F. L. – Yes, the problems of parental authority … Thus, an instituted, sclerotic philosophy, and a philosophy that is to be made or is being made, in a disseminated form, which ultimately corresponds to the removal of a number of ‘disciplinary’ barriers: the biologist today can no longer work without the computer scientist or mathematician, the physicist without the chemist. I’m not saying that he can’t work without the philosopher, because that’s not true, but he can’t spare himself the moment of reflection concerning the finality of what he does. That is the spirit in which I’m jumping on this exhibition’s bandwagon: to incorporate some philosophy into it. The cultural task of the present time E. T. – How can a philosopher who teaches or writes books curate an exhibition? At the cost of what metamorphoses? J.-F. L. – I have considerable problems with that. I am acting in the context of the exhibition as an intellectual and no longer as a philosopher. It is a cultural task parallel to that of teaching: it results from the assumption that people have a capacity that is not developed within the framework of teaching and that it must be developed. Our team is not interested in setting up an educational exhibition – in explaining the new technologies, for instance …, what it is after is an exhibition that is a work of art. The acquisition capacity of an audience is not what we are interested in, but rather its

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sensitivity, that is, an aesthetic feeling. We postulate, for what we have to say, a kind of respondent in the public, at the level, not of understanding, but of the ‘feeling’ to be awakened. As in teaching, this sensitivity can be awakened only by aiming a little bit above the commonly recognized sensitivity, that is, the only one the media use. We want to avoid identification: we seek to elicit a kind of destabilization of identity today. People should say, ‘What’s going on? Who are we? Who’s talking to us? What are we talking to each other about?’ … when we use all the products related to modern technology. E. T. – On the basis of what questions do you intend to arouse this destabilizing sensitivity? J.-F. L. – In fact, they could all be grouped under the title of legitimacy. For example: what authorizes a plastic artist to laminate a shirt and hang it on the wall with a small caption: this is a work of art? That is obviously a philosophical problem and a problem of legitimacy at the same time. E. T. – Doesn’t this temptation, or this attempt at legitimation, in the artistic field, among others, where almost all contemporary artists propose and confront, imply an agonistic of definitions? Every time, there is always one who scores a hit, who reforms the rules of the game … J.-F. L. – If not an agonistic, in any case a very wide variety of possible definitions. This means that a question is raised here which one probably doesn’t know how to answer exactly. Thus, all attempts to frame the work of art under an aesthetic of feeling, beauty or the sublime still rest a little too much on rules themselves shaken because they effectively presuppose a kind of universal subject and we are at this point asking ourselves the question of this subject which you evoked at the beginning. E. T. – And emotion, the ambit of so many artistic sensibilities? Is it sufficient to establish the artistic character of a proposal? J.-F. L. – No, it is not a sufficient condition of legitimacy in artistic matters. When terrorists arrive in the middle of the Olympics with their Berettas, they stir up a lot of emotion. But the irruption is a work of art only insofar as it is broadcast by the media and becomes a representation. We thus have here a definition – albeit a summary one – according to which emotion is no longer just the fear of getting shot, but also the jubilation of watching. E. T. – As is also the case of a composition totally, studiously, cerebral that excludes any emotion and imposes itself as a possible definition of the work of art. J.-F. L. – Absolutely. What we say about works of art is also profoundly true about the political situation. One could circumscribe the problem of political finality – private or public school, independence or not of Caledonia, problematics of Europe … – by saying: the choice today is between democracy and republic. The French republican tradition is based on a (magnificent) purely Rousseauist idea: the political sovereign is the people, that is to say the real population trained, by way of a drawn-out learning process – that of 89

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freedoms, of emancipation from prejudices, in matters of taste even – at the republican school. As it happens, however, this school is in deep crisis, having long since become democratic, precisely. It is no longer tuned to the idea of the people but on that of the population, that is, on the reality of reactions as they can be observed in the population. The media have had a lot to do with this: their rule of performativity obliges them to seek the best listening rate, that is, programmes that allow people to identify themselves and to look at themselves as if in a mirror. All the democratic, or demagogic pedagogy, which has been implemented in schools for twenty to forty years is of the same order. Thus, the republican ideal, that is, the ideal of emancipation, is in crisis. And that is also what we would like to make people feel in this exhibition. The political class today, regardless of allegiances, apart from surviving – that is defending the national economy in a terribly tense global market – offers no ideal to the population. Finally, can we continue to take the republic (or even this or that minister), as an ideal, believing that we still belong to the Age of Enlightenment? Or, which is no better, use the despotism of public opinion – that is a population manipulated by the media – and turn it towards national identification, ‘French above all!’ Is that a political objective? E. T. – All political tendencies mix the two objectives with different dosages: from ‘foreigners go home!’ to ‘down with American cultural imperialism’. Even the idea of self–management which seems to me the most horrible avatar … J.-F. L. – Yes, it is the extreme point of the Rousseauist ideal, of confusion between people and population … The general hypothesis of the exhibition is that there is a break with modern ideals. The postmodern rupture Nobody can yet define this postmodern rupture in a way that is not pitiful and eclectic (art commentaries, architecture …). We are convinced that it will last for decades. It is inevitable. The task before us is to try to provide a legitimacy for the day after tomorrow’s society. The exhibition wants to awaken this concern as well, because it can be sensed in people’s anxiety, even if they sometimes try to close off the question by formulating answers, when there are none. E. T. – In the meantime, there is a series of small legitimations that clash, get entangled and we can make some hypotheses: there is the legitimacy of Prisunic, of advertising – that of the market, if you will: buying, producing, consuming, all of that institutes someone, and nobody really knows how people, how we all juggle with that.2 And then, there is also the legitimacy of the Italian game: they have some good judges to settle their criminal and terrorist cases, which allows everyone to continue in a remarkable social sufficiency … J.-F. L. – I don’t think the market can be an ideal of society. That means: either complete domination of the world market – such is the path Japan is taking today, but it will not

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last; or else, simply, a good economic level, no unemployment, good purchasing power and so on. It is not an ideal of society. It’s the minimum for survival. The political class that presents this as an ideal cannot inspire much hope and that is what is happening today. E. T. – No, it is not an ideal of society and I ask myself more and more the question of the ideal of society as you say, and of the very idea of society. But that can fit into a battery of ‘social ideals’. As for politicians, I don’t really care that much. At a pinch – I have the impression that this too is demanded by people, almost as a social ideal – we just need them to be good and loyal managers. I believe we can be content with that, if only out of caution. J.-F. L. – Being a manager is all right, but 80 per cent of people are not, who are offered six to eight hours of work per day for a decent standard of living, full stop. How could there be any enthusiasm for this. They are not prepared to die for that. People used to die for the Republic. E. T. – People have not been ready to die for anything of that order for at least thirty years. J.-F. L. – That’s what the big deal is. E. T. – Not even for their wallets. They take it out, they give it up when they’re mugged. But I believe that the price of life, to put it this way, is no longer transvalorized: there are two real things within reach, as well as the resulting orders of reality: the present moment and the body. So we keep them and we look after them. We may juggle with them, but we won’t let go. Wouldn’t it be possible to imagine a life, a little like that, slidings of life, little daily giddinesses where the guys ensure and assume their life with TV, various and winter sports, travels … J.-F. L. – This gap, this vacuum you just described is actually the falling back on individuality. E. T. – No, it’s not just that. There is a self-regulation of gaps, each individual regulating his gaps without reference to political legitimacy. This is already being done: the pill, for instance, and this despite the contrary exhortations of Debré, Chirac and others. Referring to oneself might be tautological, but it is also a kind of contact almost without mediation with oneself … I would say a reconciliation of sorts. J.-F. L. – There is a gap between the possibilities a petty life offers and the enormous capacities of experimentation and their repercussions on the social stemming from Technoscience. People are very sensitive to that. To lead a dog’s life while others stroll around the cosmos, etc. E. T. – But that’s what I meant by self-regulation. It goes very far and, in my view, it’s already on its way in that direction. How can we keep everything blocked in an expanding world? We must reorganize, rebalance, they say, especially the younger ones. J.-F. L. – That regulation is an ideal. 91

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E. T. – Yes, but it draws on its own clarity. It doesn’t impose itself in a transcendental way, as a militant obligation, a guilt-freeing redemption, acquired from a long acquaintance with mainstream political theories in the way, let us say, of more or less forced convictions of a few years ago. J.-F. L. – We are dealing with the most complex thing in the world. Humanity has probably never been faced with a problem as complex as its self-regulation, with regard to its basic problems: life, death, birth, work, parity between poor and rich. E. T. – It is the major characteristic of postmodernity. J.-F. L. – That’s for sure. It’s the only thing we can say. A regulation of unparalleled complexity. E. T. – Together with a destabilizing obligation to reinterpret frequently and rapidly. J.-F. L. – For this regulation will have to be reworked every three years. E. T. – I wonder, given the challenge to all our cultural orders, to all our heritages, to all our stocks of experience, what we can still use from what has been achieved, conceived, admitted until now. And what an effort of constant inventive presence on all fronts of the human condition! J.-F. L. – We always keep leftovers. That’s why the poverty of what is called policizing politics is absolute. The most intelligent politicists are the first to admit that the real problems are not raised in political assemblies, where they are always oversimplified. Deeper reflection immediately interferes with real politics, that is, what we are going to do in the twenty-first century. In this very complex regulation that is required of us, man is no longer the measure. He must himself take himself into account as one of the elements of this extraordinarily complex structure in which he finds himself and at all levels: biological, familial, physical, etc. This situation, this condition should not be feared. The condition of postmoderns E. T. – It is a kind of exalting experimental condition but almost unbearable nonetheless: every moment we will also feel like blocking the wheel, sitting on an identity, stable situations. J.-F. L. – There will be searches for identification, searches for established meaning. Whereas what is required is rather the search for the search. We have lived since Cartesianism on a philosophy of the subject that was the measure and, today, there is its decline and the transition to a completely different type of thinking where the structures, the matrices of meaning are not established, or must constantly be restored. E. T. – I wonder if we are not moving, on the one hand, towards a kind of laboratory humanity, where all propositions are possible in genetics, in the arts, in the sciences,

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a kind of access to harmony through technoscience, technoculture and, on the other hand, towards a daily life teeming with blockages where people will retreat pettily, like you said. J.-F. L. – A laboratory humanity, that is, an experimenting humanity, would be the best crisis exit. E. T. – But for a very thin stratum, what is now called a super-elite. J.-F. L. – And yes, that is the question. In my head, getting people to this creation would be an ideal both political and cultural. There is a kind of appetite for this among the young and children. It would be our task to defend this ideal. E. T. – Yes, they punch away on their keyboards with a jubilant frenzy. We would be sorely mistaken if we said that this digitality is an alienation. J.-F. L. – And at the same time it so happens that the body is the region of resistance to certain heavy tendencies of postmodernity: it resists at the level of the aesthetic perception but also of its habitat, etc. Will there be a cleavage between what pertains to the body and will hardly be modifiable and then the rest? I have no idea. E. T. – I maintain that we are at the dawn of our senses. If the environment changes, our metabolic relationships, our bodily matrix will change as well. J.-F. L. – Probably, you can say either. It is certain that an astronaut in weightlessness already has a dematerialized body in relation to our spatial, physical categories … And since one day we will have no choice but to emigrate from the Earth … E. T. – And now, after the experience of the immaterials, how would you define the postmodern condition? J.-F. L. – I’ll maintain this idea of a slow and heavy change, as long as modernity; and this particularity of technologies to create, in an autonomous way, new material materials, new matrices from their achievements and not according to the needs of people. And I’ll insist, precisely, on the fact that this development seeks its legitimacy …

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CHAPTER 18 OTHERWISE THAN KNOWING

Debate with Emmanuel Levinas at the Centre Sèvres, Autrement que Savoir, Paris, 1986 Translated by Roger McKeon

First debate1 […] Jean-François Lyotard – I would like to make two points. Actually, these are more like questions I ask myself, not only about Petitdemange’s submission, but obviously about Emmanuel Levinas’s work, and in particular about what he just said. The first of these questions deals with childhood as Petitdemange has thematized it, the second with the relationship between ethics and ontology. On the first point, I perceive a kind of hesitation, perhaps a tension – it may be good, I don’t know, I’m curious. This hesitation concerns the status of childhood as you described it. It might well have to do with something quite fundamental in Levinas’s thought. You first presented it as an autonomous moment – the moment of autonomy, in a way – the moment of the enjoyment of the self and of its world, something that has to be wakened, to be awakened. Hence the need, obviously, for the locus that is the school; and also for pedagogical violence. And on another note – I believe that both themes are found in the work – you have shown on the contrary that passivity comes first, and that, as a consequence, the presence of the other in his absence is already inscribed at the heart of the self. In which case, the moment of autonomy doesn’t exist. There has never been one, because heteronomy, a somewhat barbaric word to express what I mean, but you understand me – is constitutive, and in this sense there is no moment of self-enjoyment. This second aspect is very present in Emmanuel Levinas’s work: it is, for example, the theme in the Four Talmudic Readings of ‘doing before hearing’; an assertion that shows that there is a radical priority of the call, and that the act of hearing, on the contrary, is the moment of the assignation of meaning, with all the danger that entails. So I would rather say – but perhaps I dream: childhood would instead be the ‘moment’ of the fissure, the trace of the call, and very often, on the contrary, what is called maturity would be characterized by the dread of identification. I put that forward as a hypothesis. In any case, this relationship should not be seen chronologically, but rather as a perpetual tension between the two statutes; in my reading of Levinas, a reading that he often holds against me, I would see a tension between a biblical tradition, for which the call is constitutive, and a phenomenological tradition that still owes much to the problem of the constitution of the self from an ego, be it transcendental.

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My second question concerns the relationship between ethics and ontology. Levinas has just recalled his deep concern with the ontological theme, and I would simply like to note two points in your presentation: first, you insisted on the fact that the other is not questionable, and that it is on the contrary what calls into question; and at the same time, you speak of the awakening, in the hypothesis of a childhood always threatening: childhood understood as identification of the awakening within the same, of the awakening of the fissure if one can say so, as it is described even in the phenomenology of Husserl. There are very many texts by Husserl on this subject. It has been my understanding that this is essentially the alterity that haunts reason, and prevents the self from identifying with itself; an alterity that, in Husserl, is named time. I revert to these two points to question the relationship between ethics and ontology. That the other not be questionable but on the contrary be that from where answering should come from, that from where responsibility must be taken or assumed is something that Levinas’s other has in common with Heidegger’s being. Contrary to what Levinas says, it seems to me, ontology is not at all, at least not for someone like Heidegger, enclosure in the ontic, but it implies that one remain open and attentive to a call. And this call demands, not a simple answer, but a responsibility, in the sense that one must be able to keep the question open. That is the first thing. On the second point, now. When you make use, as you have done, of the mediation afforded by the phenomenology of time in Husserl, and of course already in Heidegger, the problem doesn’t seem to be, strictly speaking, ethical, even in the broad sense that Levinas has just specified, a fundamental sense; the problem is, if one can say so, anterior to the other in the sense of the other man: it is in the relationship of the self with time. Which is to say that it is in the elusiveness of the self to itself. The fissure would then have to be thought of, not as the presence of a transcendence in the sense in which Levinas has always thematized it, but in the sense that this transcendence is constitutive of the temporality of the self, as what prohibits its own identification. So my question is the following, and it is a question I ask Emmanuel Levinas. While rereading some of Heidegger’s texts recently, I was extremely struck by this: everything goes as if Heidegger were taking up a tradition of thought to which Emmanuel Levinas belongs, and which does indeed fall within ethics as you understand it, and as though he were trying to transfer this tradition of thought onto an ontology. As if he were putting being in the other’s place, thus giving it a very great scope, the scope that you wish to see recognized to the other, in a movement, if I may say so, of hogging, of abduction, of a thought Jewish at its source, and that he tries to translate into another idiom, under the title of a dejudaized, Greek ontology. It is certain, in any case, that in the relationship of thought or Dasein with being, there is also a violence in Heidegger! And I am not talking about the violence that you have always, and quite rightly, stigmatized in Heidegger’s thought, and in its political and other implications. My question, basically, is this: isn’t what you call the ethical encounter of the same model – not that you borrowed this model, which is biblical, from him, I would rather say the opposite –, isn’t this encounter of the same model as the disseizure [dessaisissement] of 96

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thought by being, in its withdrawal? And is this movement, in Heidegger, not something that comes, in the end, from what you call ethics, something that would be taken from it but disguised? And if so, shouldn’t your relationship with ontology be reconsidered? Emmanuel Levinas – I don’t think the notion of childhood can help me specify the fundamental differences touched on by Jean-François Lyotard: the distinction between the identity of autonomy, the ‘enjoyment of self ’, on the one hand, and, on the other, obedience, response to the call, passivity, heteronomy which, in the self, would be original. I have not made much use of the concept of childhood in my analyses. For me, the great initial scission takes place between existing in its conatus essendi ‘intrigued by its being’, still tensed over itself in the lived life of the human and human possibility – pure eventuality, certainly, but, from the outset, pure or holy eventuality – of dedicating oneself to the other or already sensing this devolution, from behind or in spite of the obstinacy of the conatus.2 On the one hand therefore, being – the event of being in the perseverance in being and, thus, in a prereflexive folding back of being upon being, already itself, already ipseity or original selfishness in existing, fold that the thematizing or objectivizing reflection of introspection presupposes, in itself and for itself in a grasp of being and, therefore, its per-ception, its com-prehension, its onto-logy; being in the perseverance of being –, being where what is always at stake, in man, is this very-being, connection where the knot of the pronoun is knotted and where being, coming back to itself, confesses, in the reflected verbs, the enjoyment of ‘its identity and of the world’ or, in the clash against the elusive, ‘that hurts’, his suffering. But here is, on the other hand, a new possibility in Inhuman, beyond ontology: awakening in man a non-in-difference towards the alterity of others, towards their transcendence in its elusive proximity. Beyond the dis-veil-ing of objects, others, as face, de-nude themselves from their forms of appearing or from their masks of person or citizen. Face, as mortality and weakness and misery, but also as disarmed authority, demanding or commanding, in he who brings closer, an immemorial responsibility, independent of any guilt, prior to any fault committed, responsibility a priori for the other to whom he who approaches it finds himself bound as unique and irreplaceable and, thus, defined or elected as self. As for Jean-François Lyotard’s second remark, concerning the resemblance between Jewish sources on responsibility for others – sources which I do not dispute without however proposing them under the authority of the verses – and the transposition which they would have received in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology where man is responsible for the meaning of being – I don’t exclude the likeness, but fear that it is only formal. I know that Heidegger’s followers dispute the importance that their master – our master – would have attached to the Hebrew Bible. I don’t even exclude here the opposite hypothesis: Heidegger’s influence on many formulations that – of itself – responsibilityfor-others is a priority in the transcendence of intelligibility, that the universality of the rational already supposes peace, face-to-face, proximity from unique to unique, that language – allegiance to the transcendent – carries all thought. Those are the two things I wanted to say to Lyotard. I care most about the first one. […]

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Second debate […] François Marty – A first debate had already begun when Jean-François Lyotard asked Emmanuel Levinas the question, and just then Emmanuel Levinas came up with something to do with love; it was suggested that there may be a call in Heidegger – call of being – and that in Levinas this call takes the form of responsibility towards others, and ultimately of love. Perhaps it would be good to reopen the question. Would JeanFrançois Lyotard like to take it up? J.-F. L. – I feel unable to take up anything. Maybe we can get there through the back door. I’m struck nonetheless by the answers you give to the questions concerning the authority of the Bible in your thinking, on the one hand, and to the proposals made by Jean-Luc Marion towards the theme of love such as you would illustrate it. On the first point, I will revert more harshly (I am in the habit of being brutal) to what I believe was contained in Alain David’s questions. You say: ‘No, it is not under the authority of the Bible that my thought places itself, but under the authority of phenomenology.’ I remember, for that matter, that one day, on the phone, you protested, saying: ‘But you make me a Jewish thinker!’ I was surprised because, indeed, that is what I believe you are, and I have to tell you that I truly mean it. Let me explain. Is what you think of as encountering the other, encountering others, and consider wondrous, is that not precisely the very relationship one has with Revelation? Is such an encounter not the very essence of Revelation? Is Revelation not necessarily inscribed in your thought, unlike in that of Husserl? He, who is a true phenomenologist, if I dare say so, that is to say someone for whom Revelation is not offered for recognition  – which is why, moreover, he is unable to elaborate the question of the other, as you know as well as I do, hence the fact that his ‘Fifth Meditation’ is a failure. I would say that, in a way, your whole thinking starts from the failure of the ‘Fifth Cartesian Meditation’, and the only way it can follow up on the ‘Fifth Cartesian Meditation’ is by producing this absolutely primordial relationship that is Revelation, that is, the encounter with the other and the disseizure of the self by such an encounter. So much so that here lies, I believe, a dimension of your thought that is indisputable, and I am always surprised and unhappy when, for a reason that is yours, you try to recuse it. I would add one more thing, tending towards a warning, this time – if I may? against the transcription of your idea of alterity in terms of love: it is that the face in your thought is precisely not phenomenal. It is non-phenomenal. Just like the face is not phenomenal in the Bible. That is, the other presents itself as a face that will always be missing, that will always call, that will always give rise to hermeneutics, to interpretations of all kinds, and in relation to which the dissymmetry is and will be absolute. I would add also: in relation to which love is not sufficient, is not enough. God, in this tradition, does not ask to be loved but to be obeyed, which is quite another thing; it is a responsibility. 98

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So, as you can see, I am troubled by the two answers you just gave. I don’t know if that ties in with Heidegger’s question. Not at first sight, but at second sight, probably yes. Because what is lacking in Heidegger is the Revelation, all the same. E. L. – If I have to answer, I will say that we are discussing punctuation: where do we place the period, where the comma? … What has to be discussed is the meaning of the word revelation – supernaturally communicated truth and therefore possibly refractory to proof? That is not how others concern me in thought. Insisting on their way of ‘looking at me’ which is not, from the outset, that of an object, of an individual – but from the outset an other I answer for – is from the outset beyond the theoretical – neither knowledge, nor belief! You say Husserl did not have the Revelation. I would say: he did not consider the way to others as original, and that is why he did not have the Revelation. This relationship to others is so extraordinary in the natural order of things, in the pure world of being and knowledge or the foundation of being and knowledge, that it can bring us back to the problem of Revelation in the religious sense of the term. I don’t identify the two, but I say that it brings me closer to the possibility of giving meaning to Revelation instead of attributing it to pure errors and abuses. As for the final question, it is a question of whether this reference to the Bible really distorts or does not distort phenomenology. You say: Husserl never got there. But in the second volume of Ideas, in the description of the constitution of others, there is a notion that has disappeared in the Cartesian Meditations: the fact of animating someone. Animating someone is a clean operation, which cannot be explained by analogy. Animating someone, lending a spirit to something else, appears as an approach belonging to the phenomenology of perception. Very strange, but the term disappears after the ‘Fifth Cartesian Meditation’. Pierre-Jean Labarrière – I slip a word between Jean-François Lyotard and Emmanuel Levinas; the question should be understood as being asked to both of them. My impression, in the dialogue you are engaged in, is this one; Jean-François Lyotard, in the relationship he detects between the encounter of others in its urgency, dramatic oftentimes and the idea of Revelation to which he thinks you are referring, senses in this idea of Revelation kind of a plus, at the level of an ideal content; a plus would diminish the radicality or the absoluteity of the encounter with others. I wonder if Emmanuel Levinas’s relationship is not the opposite of that, and if it is not of the astounding encounter with others that, in the second instance, the idea or the reality or the possibility of a Revelation finds meaning. The idea of Revelation would find meaning in the founding primarity of the encounter with others, and would by no means be an originating idea, subsisting in itself, likely to cancel out the dramatic side of the encounter with others. E. L. – Here comes the encounter with the other man, where – under the appearances or the mask that he gives himself or endures and that the thinking, reasoning: and negotiating self perceives, but persisting in his self-interest, the very exchange of which remains subject to equality and reciprocity in giving and taking – now in this encounter the face of others

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is stripped, the misery of the vulnerable, the oppressed and also the guilty, the contingent and the mortal, and behold, the self hitherto interested can answer for the other, as if it were called and elected to do so, and thus precisely self and unique. Did he not hear the word of God? There, God comes to the idea. He orders the self as self, as allegiance to others, in that order to love that love alone can give; love as a command to love calling into question the ancient opposition of love and order! Is all this phenomenology inspired by the Bible? I believe it to be free. But perhaps the reference to the face and to the out of kind uniqueness of the other man, starting from the man oppressed and persecuted by ‘others’, by fellow men, by individuals of the humankind, is a reminder of the ‘widow, the orphan, the stranger’ in biblical justice, magnificent and profound metaphor for alterity. J.-F. L. – Perhaps, indeed, can things be described that way. But I don’t really agree with what Pierre-Jean Labarrière is saying, because in my mind it is not a question of giving priority to one or the other. I am simply saying that when Emmanuel Levinas asserts, as he has just done, that this wonder of encountering the other is what brings me to think God, then I ask myself – and I fall back into my erring ways – I ask myself what you mean by God. Now, precisely, it seems to me that you are referring to the biblical God, that is, not the God of love who would ask for reciprocity, but on the contrary, the God who commands and who seizes me; a God who takes me in the second person, who obliges me to put myself in the second person position and not at all the first person’s. On this point, I have the feeling that there is a fundamental difference, because, precisely in this reading of disseizure, love doesn’t come first. What does is a disseizure, which places me in the second person position: you owe that – and one doesn’t know what, for that matter. Here, my reading is rather on the Kantian side, so to speak, the Kant of the second Critique. In other words, you can well take up the problem as a phenomenologist and show how the God can be thought starting from the relation with the other, but it is not just any God. It is a God of disseizure. E. L. – I allowed myself to think that between the God that Descartes saw in the idea of infinity and the man who conceives of it in his own way, who understands this word, the initial structure of the imperative gets organized. I’m not afraid of the imperative at all. The imperative can be distorted by human relationships, by human authority, by the fact that it is not the good that commands you. Perhaps what commands you is not from the outset what man bows down to. But we have spoken again today about how one can bow without being humiliated. Or obey without being a slave. I think that, from the formal point of view, obviously, when A commands B, B is a slave of A, but it is a question of knowing who is A. That is, what is the content of this formal relationship. It doesn’t resist some contents! It is from the quality of the imperative that the order can be recognized as an order of the good. It is from this eventuality that the voice that commands me must be heard. I obey the Bible, but I get on with it. I’m not an especially Jewish thinker for that. I’m a thinker, period. […] Pierre Colin – The debate between Jean-François Lyotard and Emmanuel Levinas interested me a lot, but above all it enlightened the biblical pole of Emmanuel Levinas’s

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thought. My question concerns the phenomenological pole. The idea I have in the back of my mind is that it is difficult to speak of ‘phenomenology’ when the experience described is that of the rupture of experience by the appearance of the face, which is, as J.-F. Lyotard remarked, ‘non-phenomenal’. Hence my question, which I address to Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-François Lyotard – can they tell me what would be, for one and for the other, the guarantor of the phenomenological authenticity of a phenomenology? E. L. – There are no assured rules like those of science here. Nor can we think that it has to be written in Husserl to be certain. But I think that, since Husserl, phenomenology has claimed to be true in fields that don’t carry the primal evidence of Husserlian descriptions relating to the perception of the object. I return to Heidegger, for whom I do indeed have much admiration as a phenomenologist. The description of feeling, for example, is a marvel of phenomenology, and it is not as simple and as apt to gather the agreement of all the listeners as the description of a thing around which one must turn while adding up the various silhouettes according to which it appears. Though this theory of the various silhouettes is also questionable. A phenomenology cannot be guaranteed in as obvious a way as mathematics. But phenomenology is more or less suggestive, and can be recognized even when it is not as simple as in the cases I have just mentioned. It is also an essentially unfinished thought inasmuch as it is renewable – modality perhaps original of essentially phenomenological intellectual life. P. C. – Rather than a rule or pre-established standards, you invoke, it seems to me, an a posteriori verification. It is by finding its audience that the phenomenological work would be received as such, that it would be recognized in its phenomenological value. E. L. – The Heideggerian phenomenology has convinced many Japanese. Here, really, one cannot invent criteria other than those of agreement and the possibility of specifying descriptions. J.-F. L. – There are many questions in the question asked. It is a difficult question. What you have in mind is the self-training capacity of phenomenology by itself, and that is a very considerable problem. One can say very roughly and very quickly that on this point the path that was followed, in any case initially, was basically the Cartesian path, that is, the resort to evidence. But as Husserl advances, and in particular with regard to research on others and on time – and it is not by chance that it is about these two realities – the notion of evidence fades, falters, and it seems to me that by the notions which Emmanuel Levinas himself has much emphasized, of passivity, of synthesis, for example (in particular in the description of perception, but also of course in taking up the analysis of the ‘experience’ of others), this faltering of phenomenology becomes quite clear, as does the need not to stick to an egological phenomenology in any case, even if the ego is transcendental. The question that remains open after Husserl is the following: what about the ego? Not only in its concept with others, but in its relationship with time, and probably even in its relationship with the object. Which opens up all the research of a non-egological phenomenology, the French version of which is Merleau-Ponty’s, for instance. I see in Emmanuel Levinas’s work something that belongs to this problematic, 101

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something that is centred on the problem of others, probably also on the problem of time – perhaps we should talk about time, in your work … It is precisely this attempt that I would describe as desperate – which is certainly not the right word – full of hope on the contrary, but it is often the same thing – to pursue phenomenological research on the problems where it has failed, and in particular on the problem of others. So much so that there is indeed a tension in the whole work of Emmanuel Levinas on this point. I question this work without wanting to subordinate it at all to Heidegger’s, but simply by saying: isn’t there in both works something that falls within the same questioning? I would say more than that: the same concern, in the very strong sense of that term. Concern that stems precisely from the impossibility of limiting oneself to phenomenological descriptions, and calls for the reintroduction of the dimension of alterity. Isn’t there the same thing in both works? Certainly it is called quite differently here and there, and it is not the same thing to name it: Being, or to name it: Other. The implications of this difference are considerable. But in any case, what is common, it seems to me, is that a phenomenology is felt in both cases as being unable to access heteronomy (ontological or ‘ethical’), because neither Being nor the Other can be ‘constituted’. As you suggested in your question, a term, for example, which is fundamental in any phenomenology, be it Hegel’s or Husserl’s, the term experience is precisely irrelevant here because, in a way, we have no experience of time in its destitutive dimension, so to speak, since it belongs to conscience never to be on its time, to always miss itself. And on the other hand, there are many of Levinas’s texts on this – I am thinking in particular of the Talmudic Readings – which warn us that the relationship with others is not strictly speaking ‘experimented’. It belongs on a level other than experimentation. When I invoke Heidegger, it is not at all to embarrass you or Heidegger! It is not to make a fuss either that I ask myself this question, because the Heidegger I’m thinking of is precisely not he of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), the phenomenologist Heidegger, it is rather the Heidegger of the latest works, where it is clear that the acknowledgement of an insufficiency of phenomenology is strongly established. That’s all I meant. E. L. – We are in complete agreement, I only talked about the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit. […] Jacques Colette – One question, it seems to me, remains unanswered: if we give up reflection, because it always comes after the fact, we are no longer Hegelian, and if we give up experience, we are no longer Husserlian. So what is philosophy in this situation? We can no longer be empiricists or idealists; such is undoubtedly our uncomfortable situation. Or is there not always a resurgence of reflection that knows it comes too late, and of experience that knows it will be short-circuited? J.-F. L. – I will answer what Emmanuel Levinas said earlier: not all thinking is knowing. That is very clear. And philosophy is not necessarily, and certainly not exclusively, a kind of discourse that deals with knowledge. That’s all one can answer. My admiration for Levinas’s thought comes from there: it stems from the fact that all of a sudden it discovers a field of ‘experience’, or of ‘reflection’, which is not an object of 102

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knowledge; but of which one can say something, although it can never be of knowledge. I agree that Derrida’s objections on this point were not very generous, let’s say. It is not because one comments on the ‘experience’ of others that one recoups it and introduces it into a discourse of knowledge, be it even Hegelian. It seems to me, on the contrary, that Levinas’s work has always been cautious to maintain that there is a word which has no legitimacy in itself, which expects its legitimacy to come from the other, precisely, which is a word required by the other, which addresses the other, which will or will not be heard, but which is due and which has no claim to knowledge. The idea of a foundation – I fully agree with what Marion said about this – the idea of an origin is completely excluded from this type of thought, and thus we are dealing with a ‘fundamental’ heterology that prohibits the possession of the thing spoken of knowledge-wise.3 I don’t see why philosophy shouldn’t have anything to do with this. It is because our head is full of an idea of philosophical knowledge that we forget that, an idea perhaps due to a certain Greek thought. […] E. L. – By evoking the possibility of a thought that is not knowledge, I wanted to affirm a spiritual, which above all – before any idea – is in the fact of being close to someone. Proximity, sociality itself, is ‘otherwise’ than the knowledge that expresses it. Otherwise than knowledge is not belief. What a thought that ‘valorizes’ what I call the face leads to is a spiritual life – a word that is much mistrusted – a life of human proximity. It is being together. Thus, to be with a stranger has got to be non-indifference. This sociality, this proximity, this being-close – is not at all a simple substitute for coincidence, let alone a belief replacing certainty. The famous wisdom of which philosophy is love – is it not this proximity? I too, like Lyotard, proscribe the word ‘experience’ in all that is interhuman relationships. This sociality is not an experience of the other; it is a proximity to the other. It is the love of the other, if you will, it is friendship with the other. It is the fact of not being indifferent to the death of the other. This can certainly be translated into convictions; being with others and thinking that for me their death, in importance or gravity, comes before mine. Perhaps it is very difficult to think in this way, but remaining indifferent is an impossibility, for holiness cannot be doubted. […]

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CHAPTER 19 THE ENLIGHTENMENT, THE SUBLIME: PHILOSOPHY AND AESTHETICS

with Willem van Reijen and Dick Veerman, 1987, Les Cahiers de Philosophie Translated by Roy Boyne

Willem van Reijen and Dick Veerman, Q. 1. – Monsieur Lyotard, as you have said several times, you now think that you have moved beyond the language-game approach of The Postmodern Condition; speaking of The Differend, you have said that this is ‘your book of philosophy’.1 Do you think that the polemic stirred up by your association with The Postmodern Condition has distracted attention from your other writings, and in particular from The Differend? Jean-François Lyotard – Has The Postmodern Condition effaced or occluded The Differend? The answer is yes. The former book effectively provoked a number of polemics. I did not expect that; nor was it what I was looking for. But, on reflection, it is understandable. I mean that, having been presented with the usage of this term, borrowed, as I explained, from American literary criticism and the crisis of modernism in the arts, especially architecture and painting, one might have expected that on that side at least there might be some reaction. The reason for this is that I take the term in a sense which is completely different from that which is generally accepted in these matters, from its designation as the end of modernism. I have said and will say again that ‘postmodern’ signifies not the end of modernism, but another relation to modernism. On the other hand, if we turn to the philosophers, The Postmodern Condition was received by them rather as a book which sought to put an end to philosophical reflection as it had been established by Enlightenment rationalism. But what is certain is that The Postmodern Condition is not a book of philosophy. It is rather a book which is very strongly marked by sociology, by a certain historicism, and by epistemology. These were the subjects which were imposed on me by the task of providing a report on the actual state of the sciences in the advanced countries. The philosophical basis of the report could not be elaborated there; and, besides, I explained that in my small introduction to the book. I think that the philosophical basis of The Postmodern Condition will be found, directly or indirectly, in The Differend. As to the latter book, I developed it at length, very slowly, starting on it immediately after the publication of Libidinal Economy (so it took me ten years), and resuming there the philosophical readings of the great tradition because these readings appeared to me to be indispensable. These readings only appear to a very limited extent in The Postmodern Condition. V. R. & V., Q. 2. – You ascribe to certain American and, especially, German philosophers a rationalist or consensualist terror.2 These philosophers, in their turn, reproach you

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for being irrationalist and for betraying the positive side – this hard-won baby did not have to be thrown out with the dirty bath-water – of the Enlightenment and the 1789 revolution. What do you think about these allegations of irrationalism, and of the stigmatization that accompanies them? J.-F. L. – I think that, in effect, a part of the attack against the position developed in The Postmodern Condition – my critics generally not having read the other works – bears the  marks of a summary and totalizing idea of reason. I would oppose them simply with the following principle (which seems to me much more rationalist than they think): there is no reason, only reasons. And here I can draw support from the example, from the model, if I may put it that way, of Kant. I can follow the line of Kantian thought, and also, to a very large extent, that of Wittgensteinian thought. Finding or trying to elaborate the rules which make the discourse of knowledge, for example, possible – rules which we know to be under a general regime where truth or falsehood is at stake – is not the same thing as trying to elaborate the rules of a discourse, for example ethics, whose regime is one where good or evil, justice or injustice are at stake; nor is it the same thing for the discourse of aesthetics whose field of play is defined by the question of beauty or ugliness (or, at least, lack of beauty). These rules are quite different. By ‘quite different’ I mean that the presuppositions which are necessary, which are accepted as prerequisites for successful participation in one field or another, their a priori conditions – by this I mean the a priori conditions of, let us call them, in a very wide sense, phrases (we could also call them acts of language, although this seems to me even more confusing than ‘phrase’) – are not the same. This is what Kant shows when he passes from the first to the second Critique. It is clear that reason in its, as Kant puts it, theoretic or theoretical usage is quite different from reason in its practical usage. It is not the same thing, on the one hand, conceptually to subsume the sensible given which is already preformed, or if you prefer, preschematized by the sensibility, which is to say by the imagination, as it is; and on the other hand, to hold oneself accountable to the demands of the moral law, that is to say, to be obliged, without interest, to allow this law to prescribe, in principle, those objects of interest which are defined as good, whether as phrases or acts – at the same time as, in actual fact, the definition of those acts or phrases as good remains, as you know, dependent on the reflexive judgement. And if one takes the example of aesthetics, one would have no difficulty in showing that the regime of phrases concerning beauty and non-beauty is again quite different for Kant, since it is here a question of, as he puts it, a state of mind, which is to say of a sentiment, an elementary form, one might say, of the reflexive judgement. As we think through this side of Kant’s thought (and it is also possible to find an analogue in the late work of Wittgenstein), it is easy to show that it is never a question of one massive and unique reason – that is nothing but an ideology. On the contrary, it is a question of plural rationalities, which are, at the least, respectively, theoretical, practical, aesthetic. They are profoundly heterogeneous, ‘autonomous’ as Kant says. The inability to think this is the hallmark of the great idealist rationalism of nineteenthcentury German thought, which presupposes without any explication that reason is the

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same in all cases. It is a sort of identitarianism which forms a pair with a totalitarianism of reason, and which, I think, is simultaneously erroneous and dangerous. Let me add two further things to this first reply. The first is that the rationalism of the Enlightenment and of the 1789 revolution was infinitely more subtle than my critics recognize. If I examine, for example, the thought of someone like Diderot, who in my view is probably the most eminent of French Enlightenment thinkers, perhaps more so than Rousseau, it is extremely evident that his ‘rationalism’ is infinitely complex. I cannot enlarge upon this here and now – it is one of the projects that I have always had in mind, and I do not know if the gods will grant me the time to pursue it properly. But my intention would be to show both the complexity of this rationalism and how it incorporates elements – that is to say those elements of rationality which do not subordinate their arguments to the end of consensus – which are totally excluded from the current American-German version. The other thing that I would wish to add, and we remain here on the same territory, is that today there is a generally recognized ‘crisis’ of what is called reason in the sciences. I am speaking of the hard sciences. The names Kuhn and Feyerabend come to mind in connection with the crisis. I am probably not in agreement with the whole scheme of thought of these celebrated epistemologists; but, since the middle of the nineteenth century, the question of what is rational in mathematics and the sciences of animate and inanimate nature is an open one. This question has such force that it even affects the nature, whether rational or non-rational, of space and time. What has been called the ‘foundation crisis’ is not something that can be neglected today to the pretended advantage of a consensus of arguments, when this consensus is precisely what is missing from the interior of the, let us say physical, sciences. And far from suppressing the possibility, contrary to what might be thought, this absence of the consensus has, on the contrary, only worked to allow a more rapid and more impressive development of the sciences. I am thinking, for example, of the discussion between Einstein, who was in a certain way a classical rationalist, a Leibnizian we might say, and the Danes, who showed themselves to be very adventurous in these matters, or, again, with Louis de Broglie. What conclusions can we draw, bearing in mind that I am not competent to go any further in this direction? I would say one thing, which is that the crisis of reason has been precisely the bath in which scientific reason has been immersed for a century, and this crisis, this continual interrogation of reason, is certainly the most rational thing around. In the deepest sense, it is there, in this ‘critical’ – in the two senses of the term – movement, that I would like to situate my thought. (Coup didactique, I) V. R. & V. – In your 1985 interview with Bernard Blistène, you accept the qualification that he makes of you as a philosopher who shows something.3 Since Discourse, Figure and the essays which surround that intricate book, you seem to appear as an aesthetician rather than a philosopher; you present something to the senses instead of trying to recover and

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articulate that which isn’t said in what you say. Three years ago, you yourself remarked on the continuity which exists from your first to your most recent writing,4 notably between the figural of Discourse, Figure and the ‘Arrive-t-il?’ (Is it happening?) which is introduced in The Differend. Your writings could be summed up by saying that they all bear witness to the monster of truth and of good which exists outside of discourse and its oppositional values, outside of our languages, whether denotative or axiological, and the criteria which define them, but that a refusal of articulation is achieved by a discursive skewing. This monstrosity – which is nothing other than being – has access to the discourse at the critical moment, which is to say at the moment that the discourse cannot manage to sustain and continue itself out of its own resources. Thus we have the ‘line’, the figure of Discourse, Figure: is it a place of intensity (a notion fundamental to Libidinal Economy) or a place within the discourse of ontico-ontological being (completely destroying it, which is to say crushing it under its enormous weight); thus we have the ‘Arrive-t-il?’ (Is it happening?): isn’t this the uncertain but inescapable moment which precedes the linking (up) of one phrase to another, and which is characterized by the anguishing embarrassment of choice with regard to the kind of discourse which will fix the regime of the phrase with which I am now confronted, and to which I must fasten myself? It is here that the possibility of articulating being is arrested, at the point which precedes its articulation and which is never itself articulated. And it is here that we discover that, at the most, we can bear witness for being, and for the revolution that it implies; to articulate it is to have lost it. Now, with his notion of the sublime, Kant tried to think within the world, as it were, what could not be presented there, in other words, what could not be recovered and therefore articulated and demonstrated. Kant’s mode of thought here is symbolic; it is a question of alluding to something unpresentable. In the text which clearly parodies the title of Kant’s piece on the Enlightenment – ‘Answer to the Question: What Is the Postmodern?’5 – you indicate that from the time of the Enlightenment two paths are open. The symbolic stress may be placed on the powerlessness of the faculty or presentation, and therefore on nostalgia for what is absent. It may, on the other hand, be placed on the power of the faculty of imaginative understanding, which results in a ‘growth of being’ accompanied by ‘jubilation’ – which is simultaneously an expression of delight and anguish – at the creative achievement of the imagination, at its invention of new ideas and symbolic presentations, which is to speak of, in your Kantian-Wittgensteinian idiom, ‘new rules of the game, pictural, artistic, or whatever’. These remarks betray the interest which you have maintained since the late seventies in the aesthetic reflections of the Critique of Judgement. If we restrict ourselves to the Kantian vocabulary – to which, in part, a brief remark in 1977,6 and the dialogues of Just Gaming7 mark your manifest passage for the first time – you must opt for the second path, and bear witness for the unthought, for the difference from what has been thought, for the other (should we write Other?) of thought. It will not be a question of dealing with what comes along in so far as it is articulable, but of giving sensible form to what is there before discursive thought. It will be as a witness for the ineffable (in a sense which may be neither nostalgic nor melancholic) nature of the ontological and essential ground of discourse. 108

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The writings of your ‘first period’ which run from Discourse, Figure to Libidinal Economy inclusively, provide parallel evidence. The ‘line’ in the former book and the ‘tensor’ in the latter relate to a point of arrival, an event (in the sense of ereignen), without which that which has arrived can never be presented, receding before its moment of demonstration.8 As in The Differend, you are not looking to recover this ontological thing, whatever it may be. In Discourse, Figure, you write with a feeling of regret which is different to the melancholia and nostalgia which defines the first Kantian path: ‘The present book is not that good book, for it still stakes out a position in signification; not being an artist’s book, deconstruction [which assumes the burden of ontological difference, D. V.] here does not operate directly, but is signified’.9 In Libidinal Economy, in a more radical, even ecstatic vein, it is said, straight away: ‘No need to do a critique of metaphysics … since such criticism presupposes and ceaselessly creates this very theatricality [of the representation which tries to recover the “thing” – D.V.]; rather be inside and forget it.’10 We would like to cite several passages from The Differend, which is at the centre of your ‘second period’, in order to show the analogy – non-melancholic but sensitive – between your first and most recent writings, in respect of which the common aim is defined as, following your formulation in ‘Sensus communis’, the un-doing of the mind.11 As to what remains unarticulated: 113. Could the presentation entailed by a phrase be called Being? But it is one presentation, or what in a phrase-case is the case. […] Not Being, but one being, one time, [un être, une fois]. 114. [T]he phrase that presents the presentation itself entails a presentation, which it does not present. Can we even say that this presentation slips away or is deferred? That would be to presuppose that it is the same for several phrases … 126. You qualify presentation, entailed by a phrase, as absolute. By qualifying it in this way, you are presenting it […]. This is why the absolute is not presentable. With the notion of the sublime […]. Kant will always get the better of Hegel. The Erhabene persists, not over and beyond, but right in the heart of the Aufgehobenen.12 As to the confusing force of the ontological difference which results from this: 136. To link is necessary, but a particular linkage is not. [...] 147. From one phrase regimen (descriptive, cognitive, prescriptive, evaluative, interrogative …) to another, a linkage cannot have pertinence. It is not pertinent to link onto Open the door with You have formulated a prescription, or with What a beautiful door!’ […] A genre of discourse determines what is at stake in linking phrases […] It may be opportune to link onto the chain in a nonpertinent way in order to achieve one or another of these effects. Teleology begins with genres of discourse …

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150. The wrong implied in the last judgement: After what I have said, there is nothing else to say. – But you are saying it! … 151. In simple terms, you never know what the Ereignis is. A phrase, in which idiom? In which regimen? The wrong is still in anticipating it, that is, in prohibiting it. J.-F. L. – I would like to make some observations on this coup didactique before passing to the next question. I admire its precision, and, if I may say, the svelteness of your argument. Overall, I find myself in agreement with what you say. I would simply like to make some points more precise. I really do not use, in the way you suggest, the word ‘revolution’ in the phrase ‘it is here that we discover that, at the most, we can bear witness for being, and for the revolution that it implies’. I do not see exactly what you understand by this word, but I will not discuss it now. A second observation is inspired by the following phrase: ‘Kant’s mode of thought here is symbolic; it is a question of alluding to something unpresentable.’ I know that I have often used this term; it appears in the title of text to which I have signed my name. But the title: ‘Presenting the Unpresentable’ was made up by the American revue, Artforum, it was not my title, and I could never have written it.13 ‘Unpresentable’ is a Kantian term, but I should like to make a comment, itself Kantian, about it. In the third Critique, Kant observed that it is always necessary to distinguish between two sorts of presentation, or exposition, as he put it. It is not only necessary to differentiate between two forms of exposition, but also between two forms of absence.14 Firstly, with regard to exposition, Kant says that it is important to see that there are two styles of exposition. One of them is argumentation, and he calls this the modus logicus, or simply the mode (or method), and this is, in the final analysis, a procedure of connection which employs the operations of rational logic. But there is, he says, another form of exposition, which he calls the modus estheticus or the ‘manner’. Kant says that presentation can proceed by focusing on manner, through an exposition centred on the form and not on the concept to be displayed. In this case, he explains, the unity to be exposed finds itself in the spatio-temporal organization of the exposition itself. This is the open gateway into the arts, whose modes of exposition, seen in this way, and while without doubt not at the same level as the philosophico-logical method, must in every case be taken into account when addressing the unpresentable. Turning now to the second distinction, which is also Kantian, but which does not seem to be properly attended to in your commentary. It is a question of the distinction between ideas of the imagination and ideas of reason. For example, when you speak of ‘the creative achievement of the imagination, of its invention of new ideas and symbolic presentations’, I think you cover over too quickly the distinction that I have in mind. The ideas of reason are truly indemonstrable – I use the Kantian term – in the sense that one cannot show the intuitions corresponding to them. We agree about this. But the ideas of the imagination are, on the contrary, inscribed in the presentation. They are suggested

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by the presentation itself, or they are immanent to it and are there for all that, and such is their mode of absence, inexplicable as Kant writes: they cannot be articulated logically (thus it is that we must return to the modus estheticus or ‘manner’). I think that this distinction is important because it makes us reconsider with more precision the very notion of the unpresentable. The way in which an idea of reason, say liberty or the absolute, is unpresentable is not the same as the ‘manner’ of an idea of the imagination, which is a sort of type or monogramme (these terms are equally Kantian), which, if it can be put this way, expresses itself in the arrangement of sensible materials through creative forms – it is not the same therefore as the ‘manner’ in which this idea is suggested in the work of art or in the natural landscape. You see that the unpresentable there is not to be taken in the sense of the ‘indemonstrable’, which is to say unshowable by reason, or at least unshowable by the intuition in accordance with reason, but that it is a question of the unpresentable as inexplicable in at least the sense that it cannot be rationally articulated. My third remark concerns the use you make of the notion of an ‘ontological and essential ground of discourse’. I should tie this to the critique of the usage of the term Grund in the very citations from The Differend that you have happily provided. Numbers 113 and 114, with some others, precisely distance themselves from the notion of a ground which would be ineffably the same, the unthought as a unity which thought could never attain. I think that it is important to keep one’s distance from such a notion of the unthought, whose being would be singular. We have no means of sustaining the thesis that its being is singular. Except that in naming being as such, we already, so to speak, employ the singular; and we forget that singularity denotes plurality, as I have explained in The Differend.15 I think that it is important, at least to distinguish between the usage which would precisely universalize the singular (or its definite article), the being, and a usage which is on the contrary singularizing: this being, this time. But I think that, above all, it would be preferable not to use the term being very much at all. In consequence, with regard to your ‘ontological and essential ground of discourse’, I would object at once that ‘ontological’ and ‘essential’ are not appropriate to qualify the term. The situation may be entirely contrary. Above all it is a question of withdrawing from the very possibility of an ontology. V. R. & V., Q. 3. – How do you establish today the relationship which exists between the positive sensibility of the authentic ontological force, at the heart of which you used to appeal to the ‘line’, and that which you call, in ‘Judiciousness in Dispute’, the ontological well-being of the second path of the sublime, which, to read you, is the properly Kantian result of the ‘critique of critique’?16 This question contains another, which, if you will permit us, we will add straight away. We refer here to your evidence for the other of discourse. This other is present but ineffable, absenting itself from the product of the discursive process. In an interview in 1970, entirely in the style of Discourse, Figure, you criticize the Derridean notions of ‘trace’ and ‘archi-writing’ for being unable to take any account of the positive presence

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of the other in relation to discourse.17 It seems to us that, for example, your comment on Kant’s critical aesthetic, which can be read in ‘Argument and Presentation: The Foundation Crisis’ – ‘critical aesthetics, at the same time as it forms part of the decline of metaphysics, opens or reopens the path to ontology’ – makes the same point.18 Of course, we do not forget that the point of departure of Discourse, Figure was linguistic (on page 6 of that book, we read, ‘one must begin from where one is, namely, from within words’); but given that the approach of your recent work puts the emphasis on ‘phrases’ rather than on ontology, and that because of this it has become more rigorously ‘discursive’, isn’t there a danger of your arriving at an ontology of absence such as you found in Derrida?19 J.-F. L. – I do not really understand the first part of this question, but would repeat the reservations which I have with regard to the usage of the term ‘ontological’, and would also refer to the two paths of the sublime with which I have been concerned for some years now, and, as you remind me, appear to me to stand in need of re-examination today. Let me pass rather to the last part of your question; it is a very good question, and raises difficult matters. To get straight to the point, the question concerns my relation to Derrida’s thought. You ask whether I run the risk of committing myself to the kind of ontology of absence that is found in Derrida. Obviously I must begin by explaining my reservations with regard to this ontology. I think that the notion of absence is itself deconstructed in and by Derrida’s thought; it is rendered undecidable there. That any being whatever may be absent, and this applies all the more strongly to being itself, is in my view an idea that is much too simple, for at least the absence of being is present, being presents itself in absentia, and if it is absent, this is in presentia (to the extent that these terms still retain some meaning in Derridean thought). If there is a variation between my thought and Derrida’s, it is expressed in the extension given to the idea of difference. It seems to me that Derrida brings difference into play over all genres, all phrases, all linkages, as I would put it – excuse me for employing a vocabulary which is mine rather than his; I do this to make myself understood to my questioners. To make difference cover everything, to show or exhibit the difference in all kinds of linkages, in all kinds of phrases, there is a risk (I speak of risk, which is also a courting of difference) of being accused of scepticism. In any event, I do not regard such accusations as well founded. It is not that it would be wrong, a priori, to be sceptical; there is no need to tremble before such an accusation. Rather it is necessary to examine if it is right to make that accusation: how well has it been argued? Here I will open a parenthesis which will recall an intervention which Derrida made – in an open letter, for he was absent – at the Collège Internationale de Philosophie on the occasion of a paper given by Karl-Otto Apel. Derrida was indignant, in any event he jibbed, against the lack of care in reading which characterized most of our critiques. Against this eagerness to locate us among such cases, to label us, to fix our place among those families of thought which are openly and mutually hostile, and which will therefore at once go on to the attack, all the evidence, once it is surveyed, shows that

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what is said is not at issue. It is fantasies which are attacked, not the texts themselves which ought to have been read. I close the parenthesis. To return to the question of my relationship to Derrida’s thought, I would say that the notion of difference mainly rests upon, it seems to me, an idea of time which comes from the transcendental deduction of the first Critique as it was deployed by Heidegger from his book on Kant to his essay on Husserl’s ‘Internal Time-consciousness’. This notion of time – which can be shown, following Heidegger, to come down to the place of the subject, a subject which, as Derrida has never failed to stress, is evidently never given in itself, but perpetually lacks and differs from itself – is assuredly the schema of all schemas, that is to say the form of all internal syntheses of the given. Now this form of the synthesis of the given is elaborated in the Critique of Theoretical Reason; it is subordinated to a language-game, let us say, in which truth and falsehood are at stake. If we examine the question of temporality in the second Critique, for example, that is to say ethical temporality, difficulties of quite another kind are immediately encountered; they concern the time of obligation. But in the third Critique, it is very clear that the minute examination of the syntheses at play in the aesthetic sensibility, in taste, without speaking of the Analytic of the sublime, bring us to the conclusion that temporality there is completely different again from the first Critique. Here it is not at all a matter of a self which is perpetually different from itself. Rather it is a question of something like a suspension of the kinds of temporal syntheses examined in the first Critique – I refer to three kinds of synthesis, those of apprehension, reproduction and recognition owing to the fact that in the aesthetic judgement it can be a question neither of recognition nor even of reproduction. I would add that apprehension itself is understood in a most rudimentary and minimal way, at least in the Analytic of the sublime, where the comprehension of the given seems like a request which is beyond the synthetic capacities of the imagination. And so one is led to ‘conceive’, for the beautiful as well as for the sublime (even though totally different in the two cases), an aesthetic temporality which would not at all be of the order of difference, which would defer not to the durchlaufen of the first Critique, but to a state of time which, in comparison with that of difference, would appear as a suspension or an ‘interdiction’, which would be in sum a sort of ‘interruption’ of difference itself. I would say one thing more, to try and make myself understood quickly (and badly as a result). This refers to what I have been able to write in recent works concerning the visual arts, especially painting (but sketched out earlier in regard to the cinema).20 It seems to me that precisely what is important in aesthetic time is what can be called ‘presence’. Not in the sense of the present, nor in the sense of what is there, but in that sense in which, on the contrary, the activity of the very minimal synthesis of the given into the very forms which are free (forms properly speaking, not merely schemas) is suspended. It would be a question of a kind of, let us say, spasm or stasis (it does not matter which word of that genre) which has a relation, I think, with a ‘direct’ access not to the meaning of the situation (which is the case with the forms), but to the material. One would be on this side of the synthetic activity by means of forms, in a relation with the great X, to use the Kantian term, with that enigmatic Mannigfaltigkeit, that diversity, 113

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that poikilon. – I have wondered for a long time why the material is always presented as a diversity, a mixture, but it is obviously on account of the obsession to safeguard the unifying activity of mind. In the ‘strongly’ aesthetic moments (but what does that mean? They are at the same time the weakest moments for mind seen as a power of synthesis), it would perhaps be a matter of a non-mediated relationship with the material, without even the most elementary synthetic activity. This is not so enigmatic. It is very clear that the usage made of colour, by someone like Barnett Newman, the great, post-war American painter (labelled an expressionist although one wonders why), or someone like your compatriot, Karel Appel (also a very great painter, although very different), shows that what is important to both is not the form within which colour is held captive, like a material which depended on its form to be made presentable, but very much to the contrary it is a question of material-colour having in itself a power to suspend the formative activity of mind. This sort of painting calls to mind what musicians call timbre. You know that when they speak of timbre, musicians happily use metaphors borrowed from the visual arts. We can speak of the colour or the chromatism of a sound – independent of the note or the duration or intensity of the sound – as it is produced by this or that instrument, even, I would say in general, by this or that impact, or percussion in the wide sense. One of the current aims of my work is to show that there is, I would not say an ontology, but a mode of relation to something which is very certain within the given, but which also transcends those very empty forms within which the given is habitually synthesized. It is there that I would find presence, in short, a kind of stupefaction or stupidity suspending the activity of mind. This ‘stupefaction’ should be understood in relation to what I have called elsewhere ‘obedience’ or ‘soul’ (the latter term being employed by Kant). Nevertheless, it remains the case that this presence, which cannot be a presence since truly the mind is absent from it, is not a theme which is compatible with Kant, except perhaps in certain passages of the text on the sublime. At least, the time of the sublime, of its presence, is neither accountable nor appreciable in terms of the apperceptive synthesis; the latter’s deferrals are not to be found there. (Coup didactique, II) V. R. & V. – In The Differend, No. 126, you criticize Kant’s melancholic presentation of totality. The force of his critique would result only in failure, as you say in arguing against Gérard Raulet. The critique would consist in the oscillation of judgements ‘on the dividing line between the genres’.21 Your ‘reply’ explains that there is a difference between the aesthetic of the sublime, in the sense of the first path which according to Kant is a mode of presentation of the existent, or in the case of the absolute totality, of being – and a postmodern sublime which allows being outside of being presented and unpresentable, indeed this is a being which never ceases producing more. Thus we find you often producing variations on the theme of the work of anamnesis in the modern plastic and visual arts. This process is taken, as you have explained, in ‘Note on the

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Meaning of “Post”’, in the sense of psychoanalytic therapy.22 The work of Cézanne, Picasso, Delaunay, Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Malevitch ‘and finally Duchamp’ would be like a ‘working through’ ‘perlaboration’ (durcharbeiten)’ which elaborates an ‘initial forgetting’.23 The phrase ‘and finally’ indicates a displacement. The movement of return, anagogic and anamorphic, the process of ‘ana-’, would pass; this seems to us to be your thesis, which concerns the work of a forgetfulness and of a destruction of the let us say, naive sensible, which operates to develop the forgotten presupposition in the naive work of forgetfulness. And, in fact, there will always be presuppositions, the least reflection will be a moving on and a moving from. This last point suggests that the work of reflection will never be finished; it is without doubt to say that the aesthetic withdraws from the sensible but always remains there. So Duchamp, on account of his reflexive work, would be closer to postmodern than to modern. This complex of ideas evokes a complex of questions. Firstly: Q. 4. – What is the relation between the two sublimes, that of the first path, which is modern and which moves naively to and from a sensible loss, and that of the second, postmodern, path which perlaborates the very work of perlaboration? And, since you suggest that there is a transition from one to the other, where is this located? J.-F. L. – First let me make a comment on your second coup didactique. The least that I can say is that what you make me think appears acceptable to me, and I am grateful for the numerous things that I have learnt from what is a beautiful and useful piece of elaboration. But your question troubles me. You tell me that there are two sorts of sublime, that of the first path which is a sublime in some way nostalgic about the impossibility of presentation, and that of the second path, a postmodern sublime, which consists simply in putting back into an endless play the presuppositions which are at work in all work. And next you tell me that the first path perlaborates naively a loss of the sensible. I would not say that the loss is one of sensibility, unless we give that phrase an almost British meaning; what is in question is perhaps a loss of meaning. It is above all the understanding that something gives us the material-sensible, and this something can never be reached. I am reminded here of what Bettina von Arnim wrote, in regard to Hölderlin, in a ‘letter’ in the Günderrode: ‘And we, we who have not been put to the test, will we ever see the day?’ ‘To see the day’ that would be precisely to have access to that ‘thing’ (a term that I prefer to ‘being’), that resonous, visual, timbrous, chromatic, nuanced, etc., matter. I use the phrase as a kind of inscription, although it is not my normal practice, in my What to Paint?24 When you ask me where the transition from one sublime to the other takes place, I wonder if I understand this ‘where’ properly, because it seems very clear to me (but perhaps I am mistaken) that what you are asking for is a sort of periodization of the passage from an aesthetic of the nostalgic sublime to an aesthetic of a joyful sublime. This is a direction I pointed towards in, for example, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ or ‘Answer to the Question: What Is the Postmodern?’25 However, I believe that I am always cautious as far as periodizing this passage is concerned. Rather I have shown, in 115

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several examples, even if I have never truly analysed any one of them, that examples of both forms of sublime can be found – in the writing (in the widest possible sense of the term), that is to say in the mode of inscription which, whatever its historical conditions and surface form, will always dictate what cannot be expressed – let us leave it at that – in no matter what epoch of the history of literature, or of art, or of ideas. Thus I do not think that, correctly speaking, periodization is possible. I would take for today, if you would like, not a transition but a sort of opposition between something like the Suprematism of Malevich and the ‘expressionism’ of Karel Appel. The former’s work would be seen in the sense of a rarefaction of presentation aimed at giving expression to the thing which cannot present itself; the latter’s on the contrary would be taken in a completely opposite sense of chromatic superabundance, and of a heedlessness, both voluntary and involuntary, of the form in which the colours are put together. In doing this, Appel tries to show moreover, but in a style which is, if I may say, rich (in reality this richness is also a poverty as the examination of both his works and their accompanying texts shows), the operation of a ‘thing’ which is completely different from Malevich’s ‘thing’. Secondly: Q. 5. – The sophisticated development of the artistic conditions which characterize the postmodern arts (as you define them) functions to explode established discursive and conceptual truths. In the rather more political context of ‘Judiciousness in Dispute’ you say: ‘The task of the critical watchman is clear: illusion must always be dissipated. Yet that task is also obscure: that very dissipation may be an illusion.’26 The Kantian idiom is here used, so to speak, against itself, against the a priori, and the rules that it seeks to establish. The facility, if such it is, which enables you to draw your disunifying and shattering conclusions is the faculty (a notion whose illusory unity you have criticized) of judgement.27 The question, then, is this: given that it is learnt in the preface to the Critique of Judgement that the faculty of judgement makes possible the way towards agreement (Zusammenstimmung), which, at bottom, is the unifying concordance between the first two Critiques and not the bursting apart of the well-defined fruits of critical thought, does not your readiness to fragment these products of critical thought constitute a betrayal of the faculty of judgement? J.-F. L. – I would like to make two observations. The first is a sort of parenthesis, although essential, which bears on Kant’s particular usage of the term faculty in the expression, ‘faculty of judgement’, but also certainly in that of ‘faculty of presentation’ and so on. You tell me that I have written in Enthusiasm that the very notion of a faculty introduces the illusion of a unity. You ask me if in engineering the fragmentation of thought I am not betraying the ‘faculty of judgement’ itself. My first observation bears on the notion of faculty, and my second on this question of fragmentation. I must unhappily be brief as far as the notion of faculty is concerned. It is a very large problem that I have tackled in a recent text entitled ‘The Interest of the Sublime’.28 The notion of faculty is that of the Aristotelian dynamis. It is a ‘power of mind’ as Kant puts it, especially in the second Critique. The mind has several powers which, as I have just 116

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said, respond to practical conditions, to the different functions according to which it is a question of judgements of truth or justice or beauty. What is awkward in the notion of faculty is that it is often taken as a metaphysics of power and action as may be found in Aristotle, or else in a weaker hypothesis, largely of Platonic origin, as part of a sort of metapsychology. The former connotation is often to be found in Kant’s work. It is on that that I have worked, with respect to the notion of interest, in the third Critique. There must be an interest for the faculty to actualize itself, and there must be an interest which the empirical mind has in actualizing the power of the said faculty. There is therefore a double interest which operates in one sense as in the other, and this does not go without saying. A form of economy is necessarily introduced with these notions of faculty and act. For ‘interest’ is an economic term, whether libidinal or not. This economy, for Kant, is ultimately a practical economy. And I think that the privilege that Kant accords to the practical resides just there. For to have some interest in an object is always to want it. A faculty ‘wants’ its own actualization. Each faculty is under the regime of a ‘metawill’, of a ‘drive’ towards actualization. This metaphysic of power and action is the direction taken by the third Critique. Prudently, this direction is only made subject to a hypothetical idea, for which, according to Kant, there is no demonstrable proof available within the sensible world. This hypothetical idea is the idea of nature. It is an extremely important idea. It is not a simple question of a nature outside the subject, but of a nature ‘within’ the subject. The third Critique cannot be understood unless one develops fully this hypothesis which belongs, I repeat, to a metaphysics of power and of the act, and to an economy of faculties. If, so far as the usage of the term ‘faculty’ is concerned, one wants to avoid the hypothesis of a metaphysic of nature which derives from Aristotle, a weaker hypothesis is taken. It is then a question of a sort of metaphysical psychology which will evidently have the merit of drawing nearer to what interests us under the name, for instance, of ‘language game’. But here still the question which arises is how, according to Plato (rather than Aristotle this time), the three instances of the Platonic mind or the three faculties of the Kantian mind can co-exist. You can see that this is very much a question of the unity of the subject rather than of the metaphysic of nature. In fact these two hypotheses, the natural metaphysic and the subjective metaphysic, are tightly interwoven in Kant, even though Aristotle and Plato are in profound divergence on the matter. Let me pass to the question of fragmentation. Does my work betray the faculty of judgement in advocating fragmentation? I am not the one who advocates this. It is the critical method itself which insists upon the differentiation between the regimes of judgement according to which it is a question of truth, or of beauty, or of the good. It is from this point that Kant finds himself confronted with the problem of reconstructing the subject as if the regimes of judgement were perfectly autonomous. What he finds, at the end of his diverse ‘deductions’, that is to say these legitimations of the demand that judgement be considered valid for the beautiful, for the good, or for the true, are principles which are heterogeneous with respect to each other. This is the whole of the problem of the constitution of the unity of the subject which is posed after that, and which Kant poses, in effect, in the preface to the third Critique. Kant tries to resolve this 117

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problem by the third Critique itself, by opening a possible passage between reason in its theoretical usage and reason in its practical usage. As you know, he has the greatest difficulty in succeeding in this. For finally the passage itself cannot be traced, it is open only by virtue of a general hypothesis of a natural finality, of nature as pursuing, both within human beings and outside of them, the supreme end of the development of its powers of liberty which have a ‘primacy’ over that of the power of knowledge. All this amounts to the fact that the question which you ask me is much more embarrassing for Kant than it is for me. For, as far as I am concerned, I am in the situation of thought today, and this is marked, shall we say, by the critique of the subject. This critique does not mean that we can dispense with the subject. It does mean that in every way that we relate to the notion of the subject, we carry the Kantian and Wittgensteinian heritage with us, and that we cannot continue to think under the general regime of the cogito. The evidence for the ‘I think’ is for us as scarce as it could possibly be. This is a point of severe disagreement with Karl-Otto Apel, and perhaps with the whole of phenomenology. I would add that Heidegger’s conclusions in the Kantbuch do not allow us to think ourselves free of the crisis of the critique of the subject in contemporary thought. For, once again, these considerations only relate to the evanescence, if I may put it like this, of the knowing subject in the time of knowing. We have to deal with a crisis of the subject which is much more serious. It concerns the unification of the heterogeneous or autonomous regimes of judgement, that is to say the regimes of different phrases. Can we think without the subject? There again it is necessary to add something, which is that even the considerable contribution that psychoanalysis, especially in its Lacanian form, has been able to contribute to the elaboration of this question does not seem to us philosophers to be sufficient (I say ‘us’ because I believe that I am far from alone in thinking this). This also arises in so far as, in one way or another, but principally in (re)introducing the capitalized Other (le grand A, l’Autre), Lacanian thought reconnects with a certain idea of the unity of ‘sense’. Obviously, I am well aware that it is a unity of sense of the singular unconscious, and that this sense remains a problem concerning the communicability of the different unconsciences governed by the grands A which are in principle heterogeneous each from the others. Nevertheless, the properly theoretical aspect of Lacanian thought (at the beginning, at least) seems to me to resort more to a very profound and very subtle renewal of Platonic thought as a way of taking serious consideration of the crisis of the subject after Kant. Thirdly, a little more complex: Q. 6. – It is in answering the question of what is at stake in modern art and the postmodern arts that it seems to you opportune to parody ‘An answer to the question: “What is enlightenment?”’ We know that the bearing of this famous Kantian text is upon the political; it is counted, and you do not contest this in any way, among Kant’s historico-political texts. It does not treat aesthetic or artistic issues. It could be said that he speaks about religion when speaking of the political class, but that would make the general view mistaken.29 The actual choice of subject matter is arbitrary in comparison with the essentially political nature of Kant’s concerns. He writes: ‘I have portrayed 118

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matters of religion as the focal point of enlightenment, i.e. of man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. This is firstly because our rulers have no interest in assuming the role of guardians over their subjects so far as the arts and sciences are concerned, and secondly, because religious immaturity is the most pernicious and dishonourable variety of all.’30 The religious issue only obscures the fact that the text is essentially political. Therefore, since you parody the title of Kant’s text, and since your own text aims at providing a critique of the political thought of Habermas, that defender of the Enlightenment tradition, what is it that makes your aesthetic reflections political? It seems to us that there are two sub-questions here: - First, in what way is the aesthetic political? - Second, does the transformation of the aesthetic, about which you have spoken, have implications with respect to the form of politics that we could tentatively call ‘postmodern’, or has a kind of reversal taken place whereby the ‘political’ has become ‘aesthetic’? It will be useful to cast our minds back in this connection. About the political, understood here as that consideration of creativity which has been at the core of modern philosophical reflection, you said in an interview with Gilbert Lascaut, from 1972: ‘What is striking, is that I have been forced to abandon this project [the task of constructing a theory of history] and to take an enormous detour [the reference here is to the aesthetics of Discourse, Figure – D. V.], which, evidently, at the same time displaced the initial objective.’ And it is certainly in reasserting the bond with your active political past that you follow on to say: ‘What I am interested in, actually, with a certain number of concepts I have tried to elaborate along the way, is to return […] to practical critique and to the theory of practical critique: to see what a politics might be.’31 In the 1985 interview with Blistène, you evince the same objective throughout. How do we make a politics when we are confronted with politics which manifestly (Stalin, the Prague Spring, Solidarity), do not work?32 – There are your reasons for leaving the critical Marxism of Socialisme ou Barbarie, first of all, and then leaving Pouvoir ouvrier, and, at the same time, always the same question: ‘What do we do if we no longer have the prospect of emancipation? What sort of line of resistance can we have?’33 Aesthetics or politics, that is to say: does philosophy bring something into view, or is it reflection? Or, perhaps, this dichotomy is obsolete? J.-F. L. – If you will allow me, I will take these questions together. I will reply as to how the aesthetic is political. Aesthetics in the Western tradition has always been political in the sense that politics has always been aesthetic. I would refer you to an unpublished thesis by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, titled La Fiction du politique (The Fiction of Politics), which is a totally remarkable consideration of aesthetics and politics in the work of Heidegger.34 To speed things up, and I make my apologies to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe for this, the essential point can be put very briefly (not that briefly, for I do not wish what I say to falsify what I mean); what he shows very clearly is that at least since Plato, all politics has obeyed a politics of fashioning. You know that the Greeks called that to plattein, and that the Sophists made a word-play on Platon and plattein. It is a question of fashioning and refashioning the city of fashion to make it appropriate to a metaphysical paradigm which would be precisely that of the good arrangement of the three instances, 119

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the logos, the thumos and the eputhimetikon, so that they will be accurately mirrored in the copy constituted by the well-fashioned city. This idea of having to fashion the human community is fundamentally an aesthetic idea. It is a question of making a work. And this is clearly what Jean-Luc Nancy presupposes when he writes of an inoperative community.35 What he seeks to show is that we are kept in check by this traditional connotation of the political to the aesthetics of the work. I am well aware that Plato has not reigned supreme right up to the present day without opposition. But I think it can be shown that even after or during the Enlightenment, where however great a rupture with Platonism Kant shows to have occurred, it is possible to continue to think of fashioning with eyes fixed on a metaphysical paradigm already constituted in the heaven of ideas, it is a question of fashioning in accordance with what Kant calls an idea of reason, that is to say a concept, but one which is not presented in the intuition. One finds oneself therefore in the familiar paradox of modern societies (which more than one, Léo Strauss in particular, has exposed and denounced), which is that a community moulded on an idea which has no reference mark in the sensible world (the idea of liberty is such an idea), that is to say an idea which cannot be demonstrated (in the sense used just now), an ideal of political design, whether it is the work of the left or of the right, will always remain contestable with regard to its legitimacy. To the extent that, in the case of Platonism, the model is in principle present in everyone’s mind, and therefore all can judge whether the political organization of the city conforms to it or not, and to the extent that, after the Enlightenment (if one does not take account of the re-establishment of a certain Platonism which is clearly inscribed in Hegel, and even in Nietzsche), the idea of liberty is ex hypothesi singularly unavailable to any possible sensible intuition, then, to that extent, political fashioning will always be suspect. It is as a result of this that modern politics constructs itself as suspicion and conflict interior to the community. This conflict may assume exorbitant proportions, even to the point of civil war. It is too easy to show that all modern wars differ from classical wars in that the former are always civil wars, whether internal or external, that is to say that they are wars over the legitimacy of one form or another of the political modelling of human communities. You see that we come back here to the problem of nature, which can clearly be found in what are called natural rights, in the fundamental freedoms which prescribe the limits of social fabrication. It can be seen that ultimately the legitimacy of the resistance to Nazism was located just there, to the extent that the ‘natural order’ invoked by Nazism did not seem to respect (this is the least that can be said) these rights. But these rights are only the minima whose violation takes us into the very heart of suspicion. I mean that if one abandons the observation of these rights, one is in a certain way absolutely condemnable, obviously evil, but on the other hand respect for rights does not guarantee that the political fabrication will properly correspond to it. It is not enough then to observe these rights in order to say that a good political order has been constructed. We have to deal here with an entire problematic which, in a certain sense, remains ‘aesthetic’. This no longer refers to the aesthetic of the beautiful as defined by Plato, but rather to an aesthetic of the sublime, rational in the sense that it is a question of shaping 120

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human communities according to an idea of reason, which is however not presentable. Does it follow that there is a reversal of the relation between politics and aesthetics? I do not think so. I would simply say this (with respect to the last part of your question): that it is necessary to distinguish between what is aesthetical and what is political, and what would be interesting is not pursuing the idea of fabrication with an obsessive regard for developing the aesthetic aspect under the heading of the political work, but developing the dissociation between what is at stake in the aesthetic and the political, in the way that I have already indicated but also (please excuse the comparison) as already indicated by Kant and Wittgenstein. This is a work of critique and of critique alone. For why must the social or human (an unimportant distinction for the moment) community not only be good but beautiful? And how would the fact that it was beautiful guarantee that it was good? I am well aware that Greek tradition had it that the kalos kagathos was at once beautiful and good, and that Kant admitted an analogy between the beautiful, as a symbol, and the good. But Kant explained also that, even though the analogy is possible, nevertheless nothing authorizes the conclusion that the analogy is a substitute for a rational deduction. ‘If beautiful, then good’ cannot be said. There is a sort of privilege of the aesthetic over the political in the tradition which has in effect come down to us from Greece. This primacy seems to me to stand in need of being broken, and I think that this is the moment. Briefly, I would say that politics in itself is not a rule-bound enterprise, that it is much more complex than a genre. It is that, as I tried to show at the end of The Differend, politics combines discursive genres (but also phrase-regimes) which are totally heterogeneous. Within the political there are interrogative genres and affirmative or assertive genres; there are questions which imply descriptions and questions which imply prescriptions; there is the aesthetic and poetic use of discourse in parliamentary rhetoric, or in the equivalent politics of publicity like propaganda. And certainly the use of reflective judgement must be added to this, when people ask themselves how they should vote, or what should be done in a particular situation, when the question cannot be disposed of under the rule of a single judgement. Politics is not a free-standing genre of discourse; it is a profoundly unstable combination (although it may be relatively stabilized in the countries we call democratic) because it is subject to the instability of the ‘polygon of forces’ in which different discursive genres are combined. It can be said that the situation today is characterized by the fact that these genres concern areas, ‘objects’, which are more and more numerous. In a certain sense, everything has become political, as we used to say although it is a bad expression. Rather it is politics which has become invested in territories and in relation to objects which formerly were held to be outside of it. I am thinking here particularly about problems like those of health or those of destruction, although the latter may be more classically associated with the political; but they are assuming such proportions in contemporary physics and chemistry, that it is evidently science itself which has become a political affair. All we refer to as the ‘cultural’ has acquired a hegemony in the combination of different genres which constitutes politics; and the ‘cultural’ is not the aesthetic. 121

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To get right to the heart of it, what I want to point to again is that, having admitted this plurality of genres articulated together in politics today, an essential philosophical task will be to refuse the aesthetic its two thousand year-old privilege, which in one sense was given its ‘final’ particularly disquieting expression by Nazism. This is nothing other than the complete aestheticization of the political. It would be desirable to rethink the political rather than set out from the disquieting appeal to ‘doing good’, in other words, we should rather begin from the Kant of the second Critique or from the thought of Levinas. That would allow at least – I do not say that this hypothesis can take us very far, I am not qualified to see so far – the avoidance of the understanding of politics in terms of fabrication and fashioning. Q. 7. – In Just Gaming (sixth day) you say that the problem of injustice has caused you to reconsider the libidinal-figural philosophy of Discourse, Figure and, more especially, the theorizing of intensities of Libidinal Economy.36 The Differend is the most wide-sweeping result of this reconsideration. What exactly is the problem and how does The Differend remedy it? J.-F. L. – This is a simple enough question. In Libidinal Economy, the aim was the elimination of the game of good/evil in favour of that of intensities. The only criterion taken into account was the event itself. Now the event cannot be a criterion because it never stops retreating, because it is never there. Expressed in the terms of the philosophy of desire or of energy (I would rather say energetics) the event is construed as intensity. The few readers of Libidinal Economy (you know that the book was very badly received) were shocked by this position, and this is not the worst that was said about the book. I think these readers did not appreciate the aspect of despair in the book, a desperation which appeared clear to me when I reread it (I do not usually reread my books, but I am obliged to when precise questions are put to me about them, as was the case recently with David Carroll in the United States). It is a book of desperation. It cannot be understood, or supported, except from the basis of the crisis I was going through at the time, and I was not alone (otherwise the book would have had no public interest at all). The crisis pertains to the ending of all the attempts to moralize politics which were incarnated in Marxism. The source of The Postmodern Condition, of the theme that is referred to as the crisis or the end of the great metanarratives, is found in Discourse, Figure (you have been perceptive in speaking of the nostalgic tone of that book). It is a theme which seeks to find affirmative expression in Libidinal Economy (under the obvious influence of Nietzsche, and of a certain Freud). This position has since led me towards, mutatis mutandis, Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew. It is certain that there is no rationalism, understood in Habermas’s sense, which does not pass through that terrible moment or nihilism or complete scepticism. Libidinal Economy represented for me that moment, or rather the return of that moment for I believed I had already passed through it and rid myself of it. It was, on the historico-social scale, perhaps even ontological. The Differend remedies the shortcomings of Libidinal Economy; it is an attempt to try and say the same things, but without unloading problems so important as justice. On the one hand in The Differend what is specifically at stake is the re-establishment of justice

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under the form of the ethical (in the part which is entitled ‘Obligation’), on the other hand, in the total scheme of the book, The Differend re-establishes what is at stake in justice as Just Gaming had summarily but not – even though I now see that the arguments were full of doubts and objections – falsely indicated. In The Differend, it is said that there is an inevitable difficulty with respect to the possibilities of enchaining arising out of each phrase, out of each event by means of other phrases, because only a single phrase is possible at any one time (and therefore the others are for the moment different and not ‘actualized’). In spite of the ineluctable nature of this problem, the demand remains. Properly speaking, the demand is not moral – I think that I examined moral exigency in the section entitled ‘obligation’ – when I now speak of an exigency which hangs over the whole of the book, it is to respect as much as possible the has-it-happened-yet. It is that thing that the event is even before signification, before connotation, its quiddity whether determined or determinable. This determination is precisely the linking (enchaînement) which will be made out of it, which will say it and, therefore, make it. As to a politics of justice, you tell me that this interest in the event reduces political philosophy to almost nothing, to an ontological attitude, and that this is because of respecting or listening for the ‘Is it happening?’ (Arrive-t-il?). My response is that it is not so simple. I want to say at least two things. First, it is probable that now and for the foreseeable future we, as philosophers, as much as we may be concerned by politics (and inevitably we are so concerned), are no longer in a position to say publicly: ‘Here is what you must do’. I developed this theme particularly in the Tombeau de l’intellectuel [Tomb of the Intellectual] which, all the same, did not mean following Maurice Blanchot’s idea that the intellectual is dead and must be buried.37 You know that ‘tombeau’ is also a term which, in French, designates a literary or musical genre, a sort of memorial movement. The ‘tombeau’ of the intellectual is also the memorial of the intellectual. So we are in memoriam. This is not to say that there are no longer any intellectuals, but that today’s intellectuals, philosophers in so far as they are concerned by politics and by questions of community, are no longer able to take up obvious and pellucid positions; they cannot speak in the name of an ‘unquestionable’ universality as, for example, Zola or Sartre were able to. Sartre was the limit of this because he is clearly mistaken in the positions he defends. But why has this period ended? It is because the modern intellectual was an Enlightenment figure, and all intellectuals, no matter what side they were on (except, of course, the Nazis) found their legitimacy, the legitimacy of the public speech through which they designated the just cause and made themselves its spokespersons, in the grand metanarrative of emancipation. It was possible to disagree about how to proceed, about how to work towards emancipation. But always the intellectuals had the authority of this kind of speaking in common, and it was founded on the general idea of a history developing towards its ‘natural’ end, which was the emancipation of humanity from poverty, ignorance, prejudice and the absence of enjoyment. Now we do not have the resource of the emancipatory metanarrative(s). What we have left is the minimum required for, what I call, a politics of resistance. What does resistance mean? What are the points of resistance? They are, on the other hand, the points about which I just spoke with regard to the respect for natural rights, in other 123

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words those liberties which are said to be elementary (and our clear duty there is to intervene when they are at stake), but on the other hand there is a resistance that is perhaps more secret and more specific, at the same time moreover as being more pertinent to the contemporary political condition which, as we have just been saying, is invested in the field of culture as well. I am talking about resistance in and through writing as, in the sense just outlined, inscription which attends to the uninscribable. The real political task today, at least in so far as it is also concerned with the cultural (and we should surely not forget, even though we may maintain a prudent silence on the subject which is nevertheless very important, at least in so far as it is also ‘just simply’ capital), is to carry forward the resistance that writing offers to established thought, to what has already been done, to what everyone thinks, to what is well-known, to what is widely recognized, to what is ‘readable’, to everything which can change its form and make itself acceptable to opinion in general. The latter, you understand, always works with what is taken for granted and with what is forgotten as such for it grants no place to anamnesis. It is prejudiced. ‘Culture’ consists, as ‘activity’ and ‘animation’, in introducing all that into the order of writing, in the wide sense, into literature, painting, architecture and so on. The name most often given to this is ‘postmodernism’. I think that we have to resist. In the section of The Postmodern Explained, entitled ‘Gloss on Resistance’, I cited the very important example – Claude Lefort has also developed this – of Winston in Orwell’s 1984. The line of resistance there is traced by the writing of the journal, and by the anamnesis that this writing demands of Winston in those circumstances. This example is a kind of model. I can take as well the artists and writers whom I hold to be (and you understand why I value them so much), in their various ways, models of resistance (they may hate to be so described but that is quite another problem). Perhaps they lock themselves away, apart from everyone, unknown to the general public; I would say that in one sense that does not matter, for they do not owe this resistance to the community directly but to thought. Whether it is in a century or in six months that the community realizes the necessity of what they have done is another question. Their essential task is above all to write, to paint and so on, and to do this here and now in response (and responsibility) to that question: what is writing, painting? Q. 8. – The special issue of Critique, entitled ‘La traversée de l’Atlantique’ contains texts from yourself and Richard Rorty, and amounts to a ‘discussion’ between you.38 In spite of the profound differences that you note between you, you do not appear to disapprove too much of what he has to say since you describe his exposition as ‘excellent’. However, it seems to us that there is a radical difference between your conclusions and those drawn by Rorty in the ‘end of Philosophy’.39 He thinks that we can and must abandon philosophy, and that amounts to turning away from that source of philosophy to which you have always remained faithful, that source being the question, the questioning of everything, even the question itself. It seems to us that you continue to do philosophy, but radically. A quick indication of this would be your conversation with Derrida on ‘France-Culture’ printed in Le Monde under the title of ‘Plaidoyer pour la métaphysique’ [‘Metaphysics: the case for the defence’].40 From this perspective, is your description of

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Rorty’s thought as ‘excellent’ an acceptance of his ultimately non-philosophical point of view, with all the machinery of ‘enlightened’ bourgeois North American values which are uncritically accepted there, realizing that it is precisely in this latter respect that Rorty’s thought looks ill when faced with your continually questioning and honestly philosophical refusal of emancipatory thought? J.-F. L. – You are referring to the discussion which we had at Johns Hopkins some two and a half years ago. You suggest that I was very generous in describing Rorty’s presentation as excellent, and you have the feeling that there is, on the contrary, a radical divergence between his thought and mine. If I described his discourse in this way, it is because it was an excellent exposition of his thesis. It is a homage that should be paid to an interlocutor, whether an adversary or not, in recognition that everything has been made understandable. Now, such was the case with Richard Rorty (without taking any account of my sympathy for the man himself). As to the divergence between our tendencies, I agree with you that this is radical. In support of your interpretation, you cite the publication in Le Monde of a radio interview between Derrida and myself. The title – ‘Metaphysics: the Case for the Defence’– was given to it by the newspaper. I would not have chosen it. I certainly do not think that it might be time for a return to metaphysics as has been suggested by some of my young French colleagues. I would have preferred that the title referred to the defence of philosophy, because no one knows exactly what that marvellous term means (if it is only a discursive genre in pursuit of its own rule, there can be no certainty in regard to its pronouncements; it does not have the dominion over itself to be assured that what is said provides an effective plea for its own defence). Let us go back to my relation with Rorty. There is something very powerful, but sophisticated, in his rhetoric. He says, ‘we should drop all foundationalism, as it is put in the United States; it is without interest since it is indecidable. Only one thing is decidable, that is whether we do or do not speak together’. Conversation becomes the absolute safeguard of the rationalist heritage. It is absolute because it is so minimal that it is totally incontestable. It is not even a question of ‘opening a dialogue’, taking that term in its highest sense, of pursuing a hermeneutic of the kind elaborated by Ricoeur, Gadamer or Buber. No, it is simple conversation, the fact that we talk to each other. This is a pragmatist minimalism which can distinguish itself by recovering the essential heritage of the Enlightenment in so far as it truly concerns the ‘practice’ of democracy. It demands that instead of killing, or putting in prison, or effacing, or eliminating in whatever way, or using those critical methods which rely on exclusion, one listens to the other and constitutes the other through speech as an interlocutor. Rorty’s thesis of generalized interlocution can avail itself of a rationalism, which I would say is neither bourgeois North American, as you suggest, nor anaemic, but of a rationalism conscious of that which comprises what is absolutely discussable, which rationalism is not itself discussable, since it is both it and what makes it possible. This is the clear opposition between Rorty and Karl-Otto Apel or even with Habermas. The only true problem is whether discussion can take place. It is not a question of looking for the foundation behind, at the source, underneath or at the root of what is said; but it is a matter of

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what lies ahead of conversation, in a future which can only be that of interlocution. All conversation, even if it results in the greatest dissension (which was the case at the time of my public discussion with Rorty at Baltimore), nevertheless attests to the work of interlocution. This is where Rorty’s sophistication lies: even if we do not agree, this disagreement implies that there is still an accord over the necessity of talking to each other. There is, if you will, a pragmatic Mitsein which in Rorty’s view is the only essential thing to preserve, all the attempts to arrive at a semantic consensus being doomed to failure or at least always subordinated to this pragmatic Mitsein. It is what Rorty calls ‘solidarity’.41 This is a powerful thesis. That said, it is also an ‘imperialist’ thesis, as I objected to him. The notion of an interlocution, as a passage or circulation of speech in the first person – from I to you, and from you to I – firstly does not guarantee that the I and you must make a We (and moreover Rorty comes up against a difficult problem with the enigma of the We). Secondly, and above all, it is not certain and it seems to me even very improbable that this pragmatic relationship of interlocution may be constitutive of our relations with language. I am prepared to argue the thesis that, in the case of ethical obligation for example, there is no interlocution. If I follow the way in which Kant or Levinas have analysed obligation, what strikes me is that being obliged is a relation with the law, a law which does not above all focus on the I, but rather on the you: ‘You will do this’, ‘You must act in such and such a way’, ‘You will listen to me’, ‘You must listen’ (I revive these terms which are those of Kant, of Levinas, of the Jewish tradition). Are others implicated by conversational address through my relation to the law? Neither for Kant, nor for Levinas. According to Levinas, this is because the relationship is one of hostage-taking and not at all one of interchange. The Other takes me hostage, and hostage-taking, as I understand it, is neither exactly conversational nor a matter of interlocution. It is violence. There is violence exercised by the law over its subject. In Kant’s case, it is said that the maxim of my action must be able to be extended to the entire human (reasonable-practical) community. And it is the case that this is what Kant tells us that the law demands. ‘Act in such a way that’ or ‘Act as if the maxim of your will could be established as the principle of a universal law’, as a law valid for the totality of reasonable, practical, finite beings that we are. But it is up to me to judge, in the solitude of my (dis) seizure by the law, that my intention of doing or that my judgement (which comes to the same thing) is in effect universalizable. If we now take the case of the critique of aesthetic judgement, it can be seen that the aesthetic judgement, ‘This is beautiful’, is singular, and, even if it contains a pretension to universality, that is to communicability (and it is in order to found this that Kant elaborates the notion of a sensus communis, and for no other reason), it still is the case that aesthetic judgement is equally exempt from the dominion of conversation. Even if my taste for a work or for a landscape leads me to discuss it with others (taking that last term in the sense, this time, of an empirical group), it is no less true that any assent that I can obtain from them has nothing to do with the validity of my aesthetic judgement. For the conditions of validity of this judgement are transcendental, and are clearly not subject to the opinions of any others whatsoever. The communicability, and even, to speak rigorously, the communion of aesthetic sentiments, cannot be obtained de facto, empirically, and much less by means of conversation. At this point conversation 126

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encounters the antinomy of The Faculty of Judgement, which is that there must certainly be some promise of universality, which creates the need for argumentation, but, at the same time, aesthetic judgement does not proceed through concepts, it cannot be validated by argumentative consensus. That does not mean that we do not talk to each other; we certainly do. But the question is whether such conversation is constitutive of aesthetic judgement, of taste. Universality is a condition of this only as a promise. In putting forward the principle of interlocution, Rorty carries – and this is neither a shortcoming nor an error, I would say rather an ‘illusion’, and not only his today – the pragmatic relation to a transcendental level. It is as if the I/you relationship marked by the exchangeability of letters between persons or empirical individuals were a transcendental condition of philosophy, of history, of progress, of Enlightenment, in short of those things that he is concerned with (and I am certainly not scornful of them). But to accord oneself the privilege of the pragmatic, even under the most minimal form given by interlocution, even under the cloak of the greatest modesty (simple ‘solidarity’), is finally to get the essential on the cheap. Although it might seem otherwise, his position does not really pose the question of the other as such. It is as if the thought about constitution (let us say, so as not to go too far, in the sense of it elaborated by Husserl in his Cartesian Meditations) had not run aground on the problem of the constitution of others. Now, it is clear that it did come to grief, and we know very well why. It is because the other in its empiricity, in its pretended ‘presence’ as the interlocutor with whom I can exchange speech, does not constitute a transcendental figure in the strict sense of the term. The transcendental figures are the ‘either/ors’, either the true or the false, either the just or the injust, either the beautiful or the not-beautiful, but not either the other or the not other. Let me note besides something which seems to me quite fascinating, which is that Kant always refers to others, in a more or less explicit way (less so in the first Critique, more so in the second and third), in the constitution of universality. Thus while it arises in a response to the question of the what-is-otherwise, it is not an answer, only a reference to them. The empirical other(s) is not a transcendental figure. Now Rorty treats other(s) as not only the single transcendental figure, since either solidarity or the invalidity of philosophy, and since if solidarity then the other(s) as interlocutor, but also takes it to be the case that the question thereby posed is already resolved: ‘we’ talk to each other. I think that on this point the divergence between our positions is profound. I think moreover that it would be interesting to see if a Critique of Altruistic Reason could be written. This would be essential because what we would confront at this point, whether under the form of Apel’s foundationalism, or of Habermas’s communicationalism, or of Rorty’s non-foundationalist and strictly interlocutory pragmatics, is finally the acceptance without examination (I would rather say, if you will allow it, without anamnesis) of the idea of others as the principal figure of contemporary thought. Now, whether others can be properly spoken of as a figure is problematic, as would be its ‘constitution’; and whether it might be the principal figure, I very much doubt. Paris and Utrecht, April 1987.

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CHAPTER 20 LYOTARD AND VIDAL-NAQUET TALKING ABOUT THE ALGERIAN WAR STILL

with Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Interview by Antoine de Gaudemar, Libération, 1989 Translated by Roger McKeon

Introduction by Libération One was a Marxist, the other a Dreyfusard. The reasons that prompted philosopher and historian to take sides in the Algerian war were not the same. Today, they reissue their texts and assess their current relevance for Libération. Interview Pierre Vidal-Naquet – About a year ago, I had the feeling that we had to talk to others than those who had listened to us – or not listened to us, for that matter – at the time, and that this third of a century that had passed since then had become a sort of abyss: so we had to talk. But I could not do what you did, namely republish these texts unchanged, with nothing more than a preface, a very beautiful one though, by Mohammed Ramdani: I was on more shifting grounds, in less depth on the theoretical level … Jean-François Lyotard – The request to republish my old texts came from students and researchers who could no longer find them.1 I didn’t want to retouch them in any way, just reframe their content and method. P. V.-N. – I had decided at first to republish them as they stood. I took the whole lot to Jerôme Lindon. He told me: we can’t publish this stuff as is. I then went to François Gèze with just a few explanatory notes.2 He and Lindon discussed whether they couldn’t divide things up between them, and Lindon said: I’ll keep the Audin affair.3 I then remembered that I had been able to consult the archives of the Department of Justice and find out what had become of it in the meanders of the political and judicial administration. Since Lindon was forcing me to make a book, I made another book from the first, which still allowed me to establish how the dismissal in the Audin case had been planned almost a year before the end of the war, and under a minister, Edmond Michelet, whom they want to make a saint of today. J.-F. L. – There is a very large disparity between us. Your books, L’Affaire Audin (The Audin Affair) or Face à la raison d’État (Facing the Reason of State), remain topical.4 They fall within the defence of human rights movement, which is and will remain current, I believe, for

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quite some time. They therefore deserved to be updated so that they resonate in the present context. The Algerian war, on the other hand, is over, and I have republished these texts as a testimony of something past. There is no question of continuing today in the same terms, according to the same socio-historical categories, the search for what interested me in the Algerian war, what I call this force of resistance that exceeds human societies, the intractable. P. V.-N. – Second difference: your texts were written within the framework of a very precise doctrine, that of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group. My purpose was different: as early as the Audin affair, it was to seek scandal, to install it in the public square, so to speak. J.-F. L. – You were acting as an intellectual in the most noble sense of the term, in the tradition of Voltaire, Zola and Jaurès, whom you quote as your model. That function required a ‘J’accuse!’ You belonged, at least at the beginning of the Algerian war, to this group of resistance fighters that you classify as Dreyfusards. In Face à la raison d’État, you determine three groups: Dreyfusard, Bolshevik and Third Worldist. As for me, Algeria allowed me to avoid the mistakes of most of my contemporaries, I count three: vague reformism, pious Stalinism and futile leftism. This is pretty much in line with your ranking. From where I stood, you were a vague reformer. Those you call Bolsheviks were pious Stalinists to me. The Third Worldists, with the Trotskyist variations, were futile leftists. My ranking is, say, militant. P. V.-N. – I demolish mine after having established it. Each one of us partook of all three sets I defined. J.-F. L. – Except for the Dreyfusards, of whom you were. P. V.-N. – Except that the Audin affair couldn’t be the Dreyfus affair. On the one hand because Audin was no stranger to the Algerian war, and on the other because the colonized is violent, he is no innocent. J.-F. L. – He’s also a victim. And he also suffers from a denial of justice. P. V.-N. – Yes. But isolating the Audin affair, as it was done at the beginning, was obviously a somewhat dangerous game. J.-F. L. – Face à la raison d’État presents you as a French historian in the Algerian war. La Guerre des Algériens presents me rather as an internationalist fighter, not particularly French. People who read our books will feel that we are not talking about the same thing. P. V.-N. – That’s right. I realized how French I was, and the extent to which I didn’t measure the depth of what you call the differend. That said, I listened to the news of the signing of the Évian Accords with an Algerian.5 J.-F. L. – You did not measure it, but you calculated its effects on a certain idea of the Republic: you are almost always in the function of a historian – I say almost, because there will be an exception that I would like to remind you –, of someone who is a witness and who testifies against denials of justice committed in the name of a Republic that professes justice. You then have relationships with people in the State apparatus, especially in the Fourth Republic, which can very well be explained in the case of someone who wants to testify. 130

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P. V.-N. – I have relationships with people in the State apparatus who have been excluded from it or who have betrayed it. I was looking for traitors. J.-F. L. – You need these traitors because they are reliable witnesses. They are traitors only to the reason of State. I, however, was deeply isolated, not only as a member of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, but perhaps even as an individual. The only people I met at that time were – aside from nationalist activists, in Constantine between 1950 and 1952 – Algerians from the FLN [Front de libération nationale/National Liberation Front] at the time of the support network. I belonged to the group led by Curiel, whom I met only once.6 You were turned towards France, I towards the Algerians. As you say in Face à la raison d’État, what was essential for you was a battle against torture. P. V.-N. – Without belonging to a support network proper, I wasn’t completely foreign to that world. As for the battle against torture, it was a political battle. J.-F. L. – Of a certain politics. That which falls in line with a history polarized by republican ideals. P. V.-N. – Not only. The use of torture is, on the part of the State, a political weapon. J.-F. L. – Yes. In my texts, there is almost nothing about torture … P. V.-N. – An allusion, here or there, but as something so well known that it is not worth talking about. J.-F. L. – I essentially turned towards the Algerian war, in terms of analysis of power rather than in terms of republican ethics, that’s for sure. How is it working inside the FLN, what are the power relations between the different elements at play in the Algerian resistance? If I say little about torture, it is not only because it was already very well known thanks to your work, but also because, as a radical militant that I was, a State, by hypothesis and by construction, should not hesitate to use all means. To restore a French Algeria, it would obviously use all means. In other words, torture wasn’t for me a theoretical scandal, even if, obviously, as a human being, all of this was absolutely unbearable to me. P. V.-N. – I was a Dreyfusard, that is understood, nonetheless, like many others, I found those to be closest in the people of Socialisme ou Barbarie. I had completely absurd hopes for Algeria, whereas you very quickly discerned the advent of a bureaucracy, as early as 1958–9. You spoke of a bureaucratic embryo; that was the right word. Yet what strikes me in your texts is the absence of politics. They are Marxist analyses, and the weakness of Marxist analysis is that it doesn’t know what to do with politics. At some point, you wonder what is going to happen: will economic power be returned to the settlers and political power to the nationalists? Now, it is obvious that as soon as the nationalists would gain political power, the economic power of the settlers would ipso facto disappear! Paradoxically, one of the few things you hadn’t foreseen was the evacuation of Algeria by the settlers. Neither had I, by the way. J.-F. L. – One couldn’t foresee, at least not before 1961, what the dominant line would finally be. After all, the possibility of conciliation could not be ruled out. As for the

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problem of politics in Marxism, it isn’t as simple as you say. But this war of the Algerians forced me to revise my early Marxism: I had joined the Socialisme ou Barbarie group as a young Marxist, so very hard and very economist, it shows very well in the first article. That war forced me to reconsider the question of classes, notably in the text entitled ‘The social content of the Algerian struggle’: it was not possible to continue thinking of the Algerian resistance simply in terms of classes. The movement involved all Algerian classes: sometimes the peasantry was in the lead, sometimes the cities’ youth. The resistance was, as we used to say with a certain distrust in the Marxist vocabulary of the time, ‘all classes included’ [Toutes classes confondues]. P. V.-N. – There is nevertheless a paradox in your analyses of the time, which on the whole strike by their lucidity … You said that the answer to the question about what de Gaulle would do would finally reside in the class struggle in France. However, the class struggle in France manifested itself very little. It was zero. And you keep repeating that the working class did not intervene massively in the Algerian war. J.-F. L. – I say it from 1960, which corresponds to a discussion in the group about what we then called modern capitalism, based on the fact that there was no internationalist solidarity of the French working class. The idea of a depoliticization was thus on the agenda. But this depoliticization was much more than depoliticization, it took me several years to understand that. The difficulty was to realize that there was perhaps no longer an alternative to capitalist domination. P. V.-N. – Yes, barbarity! [Si, la barbarie!] J.-F. L. – Barbarity was the complete domination of capitalism. For me as for Castoriadis, Lefort and all of us, it was too early to break with a whole reading of history based on the essential principle that there was a possible alternative to capitalism.7 It was only when I finally left the Pouvoir ouvrier (Workers’ Power) group, after the split between Socialisme ou Barbarie and Pouvoir ouvrier, that I said to myself: we have to start all over again, the intractable passes elsewhere. P. V.-N. – There is a point on which our analyses converged, namely that a totalitarian State had been sketched out in French Algeria. Neither of us used that word for anything. We didn’t talk about fascism in France, neither under Mollet, nor under de Gaulle, but you wrote that a fascism had been installed in Algeria in 1958, with even aspects of permanent counter-revolution. J.-F. L. – When Massu was made prefect of Algiers. P. V.-N. – Without a doubt. This totalitarian State was indeed entering into a political contradiction with what we had in Metropolitan France, and there was indeed a political problem to resolve. J.-F. L. – On the other hand, the group has always refused to characterise de Gaulle’s accession to power as a sign of totalitarianism, whereas that was in fact the cry of the entire left at the time. 132

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P. V.-N. – Not all of it, since there were, besides this group, Edgar Morin, the journals Arguments and Le 14 juillet, and Serge Mallet in Les Temps modernes. Everybody didn’t write just anything all the same! J.-F. L. – The false alarm calls usually came from the Stalinists or Trotskyists … I said that I saw an exception with regard to the historian’s function. It is in ‘Un Eichmann de papier’ (A Paper Eichmann), one of your most beautiful texts in which you convey a kind of despair as to the possibility of continuing to fulfil this intellectual function. There was a melancholy in this text that is surprising, and that disappeared in your two prefaces. I even had the feeling that in your current texts, in relation to the Algerian war, there is a kind of confirmation that this position must always be occupied … P. V.-N. – Yes, but without illusions. J.-F. L. – But I never spoke of illusions. Resistance to the reason of State is not an illusion. If we adopt the point of view of the value of justice in a republican ethic, it is clear that resistance to the reason of State must be assumed in a permanent way. But in your ‘Eichmann de papier’, you wonder if it can be taken up at all when you encounter people as double minded as the revisionists. There came a time when they did manage to shake your confidence … P. V.-N. – They still do. On that point, I have nothing to take back, and I thought I had made that clear. The final text of the new version of L’Affaire Audin, which is called Chronique d’un déni de justice (Chronicle of a Denial of Justice), is above all a testimony of powerlessness. J.-F. L. – I read it rather as the chronicle of the interminable character of this role of testimony, that is to say that things never end because you will always encounter people, in particular in the State apparatus, who will shut you up. P. V.-N. – I should have called it ‘Chronicle of a failure’! J.-F. L – No, I wouldn’t say failure either, because you will always continue anyway. But this melancholy is only the melancholy of men who have gotten older, who know that their task will not be brought to completion for having once testified to a denial of Justice. Who know that the denial continues, and that it infiltrates almost permanently into the functioning of State apparatuses, even under the name of Republic and Justice. While in ‘Eichmann de papier’ you said with a kind of desperation: ‘But what’s the point of testifying, after all’ The awareness of the infinity of a task is one thing, and the awareness of its absolute uselessness is another. P. V.-N. – I do not perceive this difference as major. It’s a kind of fundamental melancholy. J.-F. L – You didn’t feel it at the time of Audin, though! P. V.-N. – I didn’t feel it at all, I was hoping to win! That was my illusion. J.-F. L. – You’ve won a lot. P. V.-N. – I didn’t get what I wanted, namely the trial of Lieutenant Charbonnier. 133

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J.-F. L. – Of course. There was no revision of his case in the strict sense. But it was enough to enlighten French opinion though. There remains a problem that must interest the historian in you: how, about the same name finally, which is called Algeria, 1954–62, are two approaches as different as ours possible. It’s pretty impressive all the same. P. V.-N. – They may be less different than you say. From 1960, in fact, I was much more interested in Algerians than in 1957–8. I met quite a few in Caen or elsewhere, and I even took part in some way in the mythology of the Algerian revolution. That said, I also wanted to include in this book an analysis of 1962 that I can’t reread today without blushing a little. I put it in to show how one could be mistaken in interpreting Algeria in French republican and socialist terms. Having said that, I don’t get the impression that the word ‘Islam’ appears very often in your own book. J.-F. L. – A little bit. Mandated by the group, I had begun working very seriously on the history of Islam! From the origins to the present day. I intend to go on. I knew for two years, and very closely at that, Constantine, a city that was really an Algerian city, with a French minority. I was in direct contact with communist activists, Algerian trade unionists, agricultural workers, and also, through my students, militants of the MTLD (Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques/Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties). I could see that Algerians were not all that Muslim. Or, as was said in other Islamic countries, that they were bad Muslims. This kind of reactionary recourse to the Islamic tradition had something deeply artificial against the reality of Algerian culture, which was in fact extraordinarily difficult to approach in its singularity. P. V.-N. – Yes, but you probably didn’t suspect any more than I did that Ben Bella would arrive in Tunis shouting ‘We are Arabs, Arabs, Arabs!’, and that he was going to try to build up his power on that. J.-F. L. – I didn’t think so: I thought it was absolutely true for Boumedienne and the staff, but not for Ben Bella. Ben Bella was very francized. But he knew very well that if he didn’t shout that, the army would drop him and he wouldn’t last three days. P. V.-N. – You were one of the few to understand what the function of this army of Boumedienne would be in independent Algeria. One last question: how did you react and how do you interpret today the Algerian uprising of October 1988, which ends my book? J.-F. L. – I agree with your analysis. Deep down, I wasn’t surprised. I think that the weight of this apparatus, which had become – I don’t know if it’ll remain so – it’s making an effort to readapt, but will it succeed? – corrupt and almost useless given the country’s evolution, incapable of offering it a horizon, was necessarily unbearable, not least in small things. P. V.-N. – This bureaucracy, which was embryonic in 1960, never managed to fully develop between 1962 and 1988. J.-F. L. – In fact it has no ideology, it cannot hold a consistent discourse. It would have to be either outright Marxist or frankly Islamic, well, ‘Arab’ in the contemporary sense of the term. But such is not the case and it almost looks like the Turkish bureaucracy at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 134

CHAPTER 21 BEFORE THE LAW, AFTER THE LAW

with Elisabeth Weber, 1991. From Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber, 2004 Translated by Rachel Bowlby

Elisabeth Weber – In your book Heidegger and ‘the jews’, you try to analyse what you call a paradox, even a scandal, and you describe it as follows: This thought (Heidegger’s), a thought so devoted to remembering that a forgetting (of Being) takes place in all thought, in all art, in all ‘representation’ of the world, how could it possibly have ignored the thought of ‘the jews’, which in a certain sense, thinks, tries to think, nothing but that very fact? How could this thought forget and ignore ‘the jews’ to the point of suppressing and foreclosing to the very end the horrifying (and inane) attempt at exterminating, at making us forget forever what, in Europe, reminds us, ever since the beginning, that ‘there is’ the Forgotten?1 For some time, you have been trying to think through this figure of the Forgotten under various names: the infans, the event, the state of being hostage, to name just those ones. If the thinking of ‘the jews’ reminds us that there is something Forgotten, it also at the same time introduces the law and a thinking of the law, a law of which, in a text on Kafka, you say that it is inscribed ‘on the body that does not belong to it … This inscription must suppress the body as savagery outside the law’.2 In other words, the law wants to make us forget life before the law: that is precisely what the alliance consists in. What, for you, is the relationship between the Forgotten to which the thinking of ‘the jews’ would testify, and the law? The ‘first touch that touched me when I wasn’t there’ and which, for that reason, is absolutely forgotten – can’t it be a sound, can’t it be an appeal?3 Jean-François Lyotard – Perhaps it is better not to make the Kafka text and my commentary on it the point of reference. Kafka’s relation to the law cannot be considered as paradigmatic. It’s a relationship that’s itself extremely warped – off-course, I was going to say. There are singularities in the way that the law is present in Kafka and particularly in The Penal Colony. The extreme force and intensity with which the question of the body is posed, as well as the necessity for the law to come and, if one can put it this way, recover the body, reinscribe itself, by means of the needles of the machine, in the very body of the condemned man, who is condemned a priori – the guilt is original, it leaves no doubt, writes Kafka – all these things make this hardly an orthodox ‘reading’ of the law. It is true, however, that in Jewish tradition there are a great many prescriptions applying to bodies, and that the concern to purify it, the concern for lustration, occupy an important place that engenders

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numerous rules. If we retain this fact of the necessity that the law be inscribed on the body (perhaps not as Kafka says, but certainly as the Pentateuch says), we have to balance it with another thing, the question of death, which I found very striking when I worked on Paul of Tarsus, Shaul. Having succeeded in bringing about his anti-rabbinic revolution, he of course asks himself what should be done in relation to the bodily prescriptions, such as alimentary ones, all the bodily prescriptions required by Hebraic tradition. On this point, Paul’s position is fairly liberal: you should respect customs, not cause scandal. Which doesn’t prevent him from being a very active militant. But it is striking to see the importance given by the message of the Christian Paul to the question of death since death has been accentuated, highlighted, by Christ’s passion. The death of the body immediately acquires an importance in the doctrine that it doesn’t have in the Hebraic tradition. It’s an essential part of the Christian revolution in relation to Jewish tradition, this stress on death as the moment of possible remission, the event of a transfiguration of bad, sinning flesh, into forgiven flesh. Now this valourization doesn’t exist in the Jewish tradition, it seems to me, because it does not know the mystery of the Incarnation. In Jewish tradition, you would say that there is no separation between the body and the soul. It has to be St. Paul who decrees that there is a separation and that the body is bad, sinning, that the soul lets itself be seduced by the body and so on. Everything Christians have learned and have taught us on this subject comes from him and is a break with traditional Jewish thought. Which all amounts to saying that the question of the body’s relationship to the law is difficult to situate, and that you can’t just follow Kafka’s Colony. There are some texts by Levinas on this which are invaluable.4 You ask whether it is possible to consider this first touch of the law as an appeal and not simply as the cruel incision that Kafka describes. I would say, obviously! And I would even say that this appeal touches and changes the body. From having heard the appeal, Abram will become Abraham, his name will be changed. But also his body: he is ninetynine, and he will have a son. And he will be required to sacrifice his son and that means that Abraham’s ear hears an appeal, a horrible one, but he will try to respond to it. Same thing for Moses. Moses’ miraculous capacity belongs to the same tradition. There is a listening, there is an alliance, it transfigures the body, it makes it possible for Moses’ body to produce effects that are not natural. Having said that, I understand your question more as an objection to my reading of Kafka’s text. This reading says that there is first of all the body and that this body is immediately guilty (this is really the Christian tradition, but as you know Kafka is penetrated by that). This guilt is, so to speak, ontological, it is constitutive, so that the law always comes in second place, to try to sanction or blot out this wrongdoing. But your question suggests that perhaps the appeal of the law is anterior even to the body’s guilt. Is that it? E. W. – Yes. If on the one hand the thinking of ‘the jews’ touches on the forgotten above all, if the forgotten – which for you, reading Kafka, would be the guilt – is at the heart of this thinking and, on the other hand, you also have a meditation on the law at the heart of this same thinking, then what is the relation between the two?

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J.-F. L. – You are quite right to ask this question. Heidegger and ‘the jews’ was a first attempt – rapid, written too fast, impatient (for which I have been much reproached); the text on Kafka was written more patiently, but obviously under the law of Kafka himself, if I can put it like that. As a result, this text should be read with caution. But it is true that in what I thought at the time, there is a sort of confusion to do with what is forgotten. Is it the infans, is it that touch which is represented as one of guilt and misfortune in Kafka or which is represented for instance in Freud (who is also a Jewish thinker) as seduction? Seduction means that there is a very ancient guilt that will be forgotten, that will give rise to strange emotional events which will remain unassignable. Is it to do with this touch of scandal, or is it first of all to do with the appeal of the law? In other words with the fact that in Jewish tradition – this time the strictest, the most ordinary and accepted – the people hasten to forget the voice that has been addressed to it – an address that forces alliance – and to return to its golden calf. I would say that you can’t have one without the other – and that is where the formulations I gave are not clear enough. First of all, it is very naive to want to date each of the two things, the moment of the guilt and the moment of the law. For there is only guilt because there is the law, otherwise there is pure and simple innocence, and this is the Adamic state. Both occur together, and to the extent that the Freudian problematic of unconscious affect belongs to this sphere of reflection – and I think it does – to want to date the moment of seduction and then the moment when the infant accedes to the law or, let’s say, to the signifier, is very anthropological. Because that would mean you were supporting the idea of a temporal succession, a diachrony of these different touches, which can be indispensable in analytic practice, but obviously can’t be so for thought. The idea of a temporal succession is instead quite alien to a real comprehension of the law and the guilt. I think the two moments have to be taken into account together, indissociable from one another. E. W. – Gershom Scholem tells the story of a ‘touch’, definitely not a ‘first’ one, but that happens to a ‘people, an old communal apparatus already equipped, it is assumed, with the defence mechanisms and the controls of flow, economic and linguistic, without which it would not be a people’.5 The story recounted by Scholem concerns the discussion around the question of knowing what, at the time of the Revelation of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, was really heard by the people of Israel. Some say they all heard the divine voice uttering the Ten Commandments. For others, they only heard the first two commandments: ‘I am the Eternal thy God’, and ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’. The power of this experience exceeded the capacities of the people and only Moses heard the eight following commandments. According to Rabbi Mendel de Rymanóv, however, the people of Israel heard nothing more than the aleph at the beginning of the first word of the First Commandment, Anochi, ‘I’. In Hebrew this aleph is just the inaudible consonant that precedes the vowel at the start of a word (like the spiritus lenis in Greek): so it’s the source of all articulate sound. To hear the aleph is to hear nothing, but at the same time, the aleph constitutes the passage to all audible, articulated language: the aleph is the spiritual root of all the other letters of the alphabet.6 So the aleph could be called the quod of language.

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You have analysed this ‘quod’ on many occasions, the ‘qu’il arrive’, ‘that it happens’.7 If there is a hostage-taking by a first touch, then there is also a hostage-taking by a voice, as you write of ‘this simple people … taken hostage by a voice that does not tell it anything, save that it (this voice) is, and that all representation and naming of it are forbidden, and that it, this people, only has to listen to its tone, to be obedient to a timbre’.8 Might not the thinking of ‘the jews’ be exceptional from the fact that the too much of the first touch is recognized as the too much of language – the too much, in other words something outside the law? J.-F. L. – What do you mean by the ‘too much of language’? Is it language which is too much, is it language which is excessive in itself? E. W. – It is language that exceeds, that exceeds itself. Like that aleph which is nothing and which already asks too much of the people. And which, as an inaudible sound, contains all articulated language. J.-F. L. – It doesn’t contain it, it heralds it! I would see this aleph in the same way as the famous Rabbi Mendel de Rymanóv. Or rather, if I can put it like this, I would understand it, this almost inaudible aleph, as just what seems to me characteristic of the Jewish tradition, of its thought. Something is, I wouldn’t say said, but heralded, and I think the aleph is a herald because what it is is the breath of the beginning that one doesn’t hear: in one way, the people has heard nothing, except that something had been heralded. So perhaps it has heard the aleph as a heralding, but the aleph as a phenomenon is not heard. There will be a writing, not a voice. But there too, we should start again to examine what we understand by voice. There won’t be a voice, in the good, plain sense of an oral utterance. I wonder what Moses might have heard. Who wrote the Tablets? There too, there are various stories! Some say, it was God himself and he handed them to Moses fully written; and others that it was Moses who wrote them to dictation. Never mind which, it is certain that the law will be written and that is very important and very new. The law will be written, so there will be letters to bear witness to the aleph – in other words, to a heralding. A heralding whose timbre was strongly imperious. But the timbre won’t be in the writing itself, and there will be dreadful difficulties for centuries and even millennia of the Jewish tradition in managing to voice the text, not only the Commandments, but the whole Torah.9 An oral tradition will come to double the written tradition. And God knows what difficulties that will present. This people will have forgotten its language after the centuries of exile in Babylon. So the Torah will have to be voiced in another language, which will be Aramaic, and so on. The position of the voice means that the ontological status of what Christians call the Old Testament, in other words the Torah itself and the books appended to it, is utterly different from that of the New Testament, the Gospels and Epistles. The Gospels and Epistles are reports written from speeches voiced by someone who said he was the God incarnate, a God become human. There is no problem of the voice in the Christian tradition, but a charming simplicity that casts no doubts on elocution. Whereas in Jewish reason there is a vast suspicion as to what has spoken. Has he or it even spoken, since all that was heard was the inaudible aleph? So here is a people equipped, in fact, with written prescriptions, but no less equipped with a host of little, ordinary, and unlikely stories, of 138

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goatherds, shepherds, sheep, dromedaries, exchanges of women, thefts of land, exoduses, conflicts with the great empires, continual battles – and the people is going to have to hear the voice amid this disorder, hear the timbre of the eternal in the temporal, and ‘invent’ what it has to do to be just amid this tempest of unpredictable circumstances that is called history. I think history in the sense of historicity begins with this aleph and with the fact that it isn’t audible, that it doesn’t clearly say what should be done. There is a historicity that begins with the obligation each time, step by step, to find where the law is, decide what has to be done. For that hasn’t been said! It has been written, but this writing always gives rise to different readings: the Talmud. I would understand the aleph as that absolutely impalpable touch we were speaking of just now. But I can’t say that it’s a ‘too much’, a too much in language … E. W. – My question was whether this inaudible aleph could be put alongside the first touch because that would introduce a slight difference from your text on Kafka. J.-F. L. – Yes, you are right. That would be the Hebraic tradition. But I think it doesn’t apply to Kafka’s text. Kafka’s text is basically … I was going to say pagan, pagan-Christian, pagan in the sense that Christianity has kept something essential of paganism. With the exception of revelation, which there is certainly no question of ignoring, Christianity keeps alive the notion of sacrifice that belongs to Near-Eastern paganism. I’m well aware that there are sacrifices in Jewish tradition, but they are sacrifices of purification in the context of particular rites. The amazing thing is this: basically what you have is an address, an address in the American sense of the word, and which is an inaudible breath. This breath is practically a death-rattle, a little hum, it can be a feeble groan, a thin wailing, this is the way I hear it. God is lamenting, he is lamenting about this people that does nothing but stupid things … Where is the crime? It lies in the fact that no one hears. What is being said will not have been heard … So people will always be caught red-handed for not having understood, for not having been intelligent in the sense of the one who hears, in the sense of an understanding. So the Covenant is both absolutely inescapable, irrevocable – because to revoke you have to have the voice and here we are on the side of the voice – and it creates guilt immediately, since it is not and cannot be heard in the right way. There is something cruel in the problem of vocalization. I’m not the first to say it, all the interpreters know it. Square letters do after all have to be vocalized. People only succeeded in doing it in the eighth century – AD! Almost two millennia of hesitation to standardize the oral reading of the Torah. Standardization has in no way put a stop to the multivocity of the message. E. W. – You show how Western humanism could only be constituted at the price of, and, at the same time, thanks to, a certain Forgotten. Jews, on the other hand, ‘testify that this misery, this enslavement to that which remains unfinished, is constitutive of the spirit’, and that ‘thought harbours a lack it does not even lack’. It is precisely this feeling of a lack that would be ‘the secret of thought’ that the Final Solution sought to exterminate.10 This feeling of a lack which is not even lacking, and which is at the heart of thought, this feeling whose heralding of lack we prefer to forget – would it be an explanation of Sartre’s statement, cited by Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Richard Marienstras, to the effect that we can certainly do without Jews, but we can do even better without people?11 139

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J.-F. L. – Yes, but there is something that I find disturbing in Sartre’s statement, which is that it’s serious to say that Jews are simply the paradigm of humanity. If we can do without Jews, we will also be able to do without people … E. W. – He says we will be better able to do without people … J.-F. L. – Meaning what? First, that Jews are people and that this notion of a diffuse feeling of lack that sets thought in motion only testifies, with the Jews, to a universal condition that defines humanity. Allow me to resist this philosophical humanism. It is to forget singularity once again. E. W. – I understood this sentence more in an ironic mode – we could better do without people than Jews! At the heart of Western thought, there is a lack that is not perceived as lack, but which is nonetheless at the heart of this thought, and Jewish thought testifies in a very distinctive way to this lack. To wish to eliminate this lack (that is how you describe the National-Socialist programme) would imply the elimination of the Jews but, by the same token, the elimination of the innermost element of thought. J.-F. L. – Yes, certainly that is what is at issue in this sinister ‘joke’. All the same, what Sartre or the philosopher won’t explain is why it is the Jews who have been seized and besieged. Why did the Nazis attack the Jews in such an exceptional way? It’s something Sartre cannot conceive of, or that he can only conceive of. Someone deeply Sartrian and wholly admirable, like Robert Antelme, does in fact say that it was the species that was the issue in the camps, the species as Antelme admirably describes it in the process of discovering itself in the camps.12 That’s one thing. But why the Jews? And why extermination? It’s not just the labour camp where people are worked to death. This is not at all to underestimate either the altogether admirable testimony or conduct of a Resistance writer like Antelme. But there is something else that isn’t his concern. We would have to go back to Jewish history, the text of that history. Hannah Arendt says some powerful things about it in ‘The Hidden Tradition’.13 This lack that is so unbearable that it is always ready to get itself forgotten, what is it, basically? A lack of legitimacy, a lack of foundation. The Jewish tradition in Europe cannot forget the unfounded. There are two ways of forgetting for Jews, for those who have ‘got’ the aleph, who haven’t really understood and who know that they will always be bad Jews. There are two ways: to shut yourself up in tradition, with all that implies about conformity and convention; or else to assimilate. Arendt observes that Jews are always in the process of hesitating between these two sides, tempted not to let tradition go but also to leave it behind, to make their lives not just liveable, but actually open to what emerges in Europe at that point (I’m speaking about the period that begins at the end of the seventeenth century and lasts until the twentieth) as a movement towards liberty and emancipation. This to and fro between emancipation and the observation of tradition shows the extent to which this lack remains present: a chasm, an in-between. It’s not a bridge but rather an abyss between two mistakes or two faults: to melt into modern civilization, or to become attached to the letter of tradition as though it were providing the rules for one particular ethnic custom among others. And this is a bit what has happened for the American Jewish community (as Harold Bloom shows in 140

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an excellent study of American Jews).14 The United States is made up of minorities, it’s a patchwork. There’s the Irish tradition, the Italian one, the Indian, the Chicano, the Asiatic, and then the Jewish tradition … It’s one way of disappearing! On the other hand, the old Jewish families of Germany, France and England were deeply integrated, but they were completely destabilized and returned to their difference when fascism and Nazism came to power. They hardly still thought of themselves as Jewish. In France, the definition a Jewish man gave of himself was: I am a French citizen of Israelite faith. After Auschwitz, this ‘solution’ became impossible. So there has been a reverse movement towards an emphasis on the faith, particularly with the arrival in France of Sephardic Jews, but even this return doesn’t work, can’t work. For the tradition is to be without tradition, in the strong sense, since it obliges Jews always to ‘invent’ what the Law says. This tradition does not declare the Law, it transmits the duty of listening to it without understanding it. Sartre speaks of ‘people’, and forgets that the other people are Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, agnostics and that their relationship to the law cannot be compared to the Jewish lack of foundation. E. W. – You have written of the Nazi attempt: It would really be a question of eliminating an ‘other’ thought, intimate and strange, not destined authentically to being the guardian of Being, but owed with regard to a Law, to which it is hostage. One might expect that such a hypothesis dis-installs the position of philosopher … that it might lead him to suspect that the West is perhaps inhabited, unknowingly, by a guest, that it holds something hostage that is neither ‘Western’ nor ‘its’ hostage, but rather the hostage of something of which it is itself hostage. A thought … [t]hat has never told anything but stories of unpayable debt, transmitted little narratives, droll and disastrous, telling of the insolvency of the debtor soul. This, you continue, is what Nazism ‘tried to definitively forget: the debt … it […] tried to unchain the soul from this obligation, to tear up the note of credit, to render it debt-free forever’.15 Nowadays would the only real philosophers be this sort – dis-installed, trying to discern the ‘foreclosure that is constitutive of Western thought’?16 That would completely turn upside down the conception of the philosophical task. To pick up a passage from one of your most recent books, the philosopher would become the one who worries about the ‘Thing’, and who as such, like the self, is ‘always naked as regards birth and death and thus as regards difference, sexual or ontological’.17 Does the Greek philosopher (in Heidegger’s sense) have the means for this? J.-F. L. – Heidegger and ‘the jews’, which you quote, points out that if the philosopher is simply Greek, he or she does not have the means of this anxiety. He can certainly ask the question about ontological difference, but I think that when he calls it ‘ontological’, then he does indeed presume that the question is that of being, he sets it in place. Which then corresponds to the Greek tradition, pre-Socratic and Aristotelian. But as to an 141

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irredeemable debt, it’s obvious that that doesn’t belong to Greek thought. The philosopher to be dis-installed is the one who, after Heidegger, has spoken about Stellen, Gestell, like my friend Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe – the one who continues to think that what is essential in tradition and thought for the West comes from Greece and has no other source.18 It’s a failure in thought, it’s also a historical mistake, I would even say a historiographical one, because there is at least one other powerful and no less obvious tradition in the West, which is the Christian one, and that powerful and obvious Christian tradition itself derives from a revolution made within an even more ancient one, which is Jewish. Now this most ancient thought was present in the West  – present, meaning observable, historically visible. It is true that it has been subject to hundreds of abominations since it infiltrated the West with Islam, but that curse is also visible. There is something there that I can’t understand. Why do people shut their eyes to this, and especially when they are trying to deconstruct metaphysics? It is the case that the majority of elaborations of Western philosophical thought derive more or less closely from Christianity at least as much, if not more, than from Greek thought. They have borrowed many elements from it – but from a version of Greek thought that was ‘usable’ for Christian thought, compatible, fitting in with it, very Latinized generally. The real father of Western metaphysics is St. Paul. He went and got from the Greeks what he needed to articulate his revolution. He’s the one who reinvents the pneuma – in other words who begins the theory of spirit well before Descartes and Augustine, and quite differently. We can see what might be the relationship between St. Paul and Malebranche, even between St. Paul and Leibniz! Not to mention St. Paul and Lenin! He’s a Lenin, that St. Paul! A crazy and admirable thinker. But how is it possible to deconstruct metaphysics without recognizing that besides the vast body of thought called Western metaphysics – born of the complex assimilation of the pagan, Greek tradition to the tradition of the Christian revelation, so that the question of God is asked as that of the name of being – another tradition of thought persisted? Even to say that there is being and that there is nothing that can be said about it still ultimately belongs not just to a certain pre-Socratic ontology, but to a current of the Christian tradition, that of mysticism. It’s a very long tradition, dangerous, disturbing, readily heretical. But how can we not recognize that there was also this little trickle of voice and thought continuing to say: Listen, to be or not to be, that is not the question. What the question is, is: What has been asked of us? What can one do to be just with regard to this breath of which we are the guardians? We have been blown away! – in every sense.19 I should add that I don’t think this recognition means the end of philosophy. What is more, the West has always reflected on its end, has always thought of itself as an end – that is intrinsic to it. Plato was already the end. That’s not the problem. But I think that the theme of the breath, the aleph as appeal, instead marks a leap in the thought of what we call the West. It was much in need of it. E. W. – You characterize the work of writing, whether literature, poetry, painting, or music, as a recollection or anamnesis, both impossible and inevitable, ‘of the harm done to the soul by its unpreparedness, and that leaves it a child’. There is no good way to be hostage to this unrepresentable, but one can be nothing else; consequently, ‘the witness is always a bad witness, a traitor. But in the end, he or she does testify’.20 The same 142

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structure holds for Jewishness: ‘Every Jew is a bad “jew”, a bad witness to what cannot be represented, just like all texts fail to reinscribe what has not been inscribed.’21 Perhaps you know Marina Tsvétayeva’s phrase, quoted by Paul Celan; ‘All poets are Jews.’22 Would you say that all writers, according to your definition of writing, are Jews? J.-F. L. – With quotation marks, yes, I would say that, but with the proviso of the quotation marks. I think there is something absolutely fundamental here, and I’m not saying anything original there, because this work was started a long time ago. Think of Blanchot, Levinas or Derrida. Recently I was rereading Proust. I’m going to quote you an extraordinary bit of text. Listen: Do not forget: books are the work of solitude and the children of silence. The children of silence must have nothing in common with the children of speech, the thoughts born from the desire to say something, from a rebuke, an opinion, in other words an obscure idea. Do not forget: the matter of our books, the substance of our sentences must be immaterial, not taken just as it comes from reality, but our sentences themselves and the episodes too must be made of the transparent substance of our best minutes, when we are outside reality and the present. It is from those consolidated [cimentées] drops of light that the style and the story of a book are made.23 He knew what it was to write. Our best minutes … He knows it is going to be necessary to cimenter, cement, bind together, entering into representation, and that by entering into representation you’re going to fall back into speech. But all the same, the book as child of silence has nothing in common with the child of speech. And a book is not written from desiring to say something. It’s an admirable observation. There are opinions, rebukes – these exist, but don’t make books. It may bear the name book, but it isn’t book. A book is a child of silence. That’s one way, much more ‘elegant’ than mine, of speaking of this anamnesis – both impossible, because it is forced into words and representations, and absolutely inevitable. I think I have invented nothing. I think one could find wholly comparable sentences in the most unlikely writers, saying the same things quite differently. I’m thinking, for instance, of someone like Diderot, taken to be a great pagan, crazy, a libertine, et cetera, but if you carefully reread Rameau’s Nephew or The Paradox of the Actor or even Jacques the Fatalist, after all a very Jewish narrative in one way, full of little stories that contradict each other, that are crazy, that come to a halt – if you reread Diderot in that light, you will see that basically nothing else interests him but to succeed in making books of silence, that render homage to the Thing. That Diderot at least – I know he has other faces. But even the materialism of D’Alembert’s Dream is immaterial in the highest degree, as Proust would say. E. W. – You sometimes speak of painting as of a genre of writing. In a text on Barnett Baruch Newman, you describe the picture as a messenger. It seems to me close to what you have just said about silence: ‘The message (the painting) is the messenger; it “says”, 143

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“Here I am”; in other words, “I am yours” or “Be mine.” …, Or … “Listen to me.”’24 This is also the response of numerous biblical figures to God’s call. In another text, you write: ‘Every writing worthy of its name wrestles with the Angel and, at best, comes out limping.’25 This wrestling with the Angel changes the one who was engaged in it, even changing his name. Wrestling like this will have dislocated Jacob’s hip (Jacob will become Israel) – in other words, as you say of the event, it will have opened ‘a wound in the sensibility. You know this because it has since reopened and will reopen again, marking out the rhythm of a secret and perhaps unnoticed temporality. This wound ushered you into an unknown world, but without ever making it known to you’.26 Would you say that in spite of its claim to make known all possible worlds, philosophical interrogation also originates in a wound of sensitivity like this? J.-F. L. – I think so, yes. For painters, at least for Barnett Baruch Newman, the case is clear, because he gave a clear account of it. He wrote some quite admirable texts. (I have meant for a long time to get them published in French … The French know nothing about them, but they are there in English.) He was very well versed in all that. He was more or less pious himself, in the Jewish tradition, and he read the texts on the sublime. He was well aware of what he was doing. He is probably the one who knew all that best, perhaps even better than Rothko, who was from the same tradition. But one can cite names that belong less directly to this tradition of thought. At the moment I’m working on Sam Francis, who wasn’t born into this tradition.27 His canvases arise from his love of impressionism and fauvism, of light and colour, then they throw the principle off course. They are canvases for Proust, apparently, the Proust of the Jeunes filles.28 But I assure you that it is impossible to understand what is happening when you look at these canvases if you don’t attend to the fact that this marvellous event, this visual seduction, the splendour of the colours, is upheld by the knowledge that there is nothing. And that it is to this night that homage must be given. To give homage to colours is to pay the debt to the nothing from which they come. There is something there that is a constant for all great visual artists. It’s not a question of the period. It marks out a secret temporality that has nothing to do with the history of art. I have the greatest respect for art historians. They are such erudite, scholarly people, capable of pursuing a motif for three centuries across an unbelievable quantity of individual paintings. It’s a very important and very useful kind of work. But what is at issue in this corpus, and makes it enigmatic, is obviously something else, that you can find just as much in Piero della Francesca as in Barnett Newman. As for philosophers, it is certain that philosophy wouldn’t even get started without the wound. Kierkegaard speaks of his spine in the flesh. This is an instance that supports my idea, you will say. But there are wounds in Descartes: dreams are wounds, and the great Deceiver. Pascal’s wound stares you in the face. And even in Hegel the wound is exhibited in his early text on scepticism, a text of grief, where it is said that you can’t philosophize if you haven’t been through the experience of nihilism. A grief that Hegel shares with Hölderlin and Schelling. The hurt is there for philosophers, too, a secret grief that makes their greatness, their determination. But also, to the extent that they are philosophers according to the tradition of consolatio, they try to scar it over. Hegel says that the wounds of the spirit always become scars. It is essential to the spirit to be consoled. For Hegel that is called dialectics, use of the sophistry of paradoxes for rational 144

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ends, and so on. But the wound we are speaking of, more of the soul than the spirit, bleeds all the time and certainly asks to be tended, but also not to be tended – to be respected, like the aleph. It is the paradox, the oxymoron of writing itself. E. W. – At the beginning of your book The Differend, you write: In writing this book, the A. [author] had the feeling that his sole addressee was the Is it happening? [Arrive-t-il?] It is to it that the phrases which happen call forth. And, of course, he will never know whether or not the phrases happen to arrive at their destination, and by hypothesis, he must not know it. He knows only that this ignorance is the ultimate resistance that the event can oppose to the accountable or countable [comptable] use of time.29 This book takes as its point of departure the differend between ‘revisionists’ like Faurisson and the survivors of the Nazi extermination camps. It engages strongly in this affair, the stakes of which are nothing less than memory. Could you explain the sentence that says that the sole addressee of the book was the Is it happening? J.-F. L. – When I said that this book was only dealing with the Is it happening?, I was thinking primarily of the camps, of Auschwitz. That is where the book begins. For Auschwitz pre-eminently belongs to the order of the event. It is the question: Is it happening? First of all, we never finish establishing that it did happen [c’est arrivé] and it’s over that having happened that these pathetic revisionists have been expending all their efforts, in an effort to demonstrate that it was not possible to establish it (which is an absolute counter-truth in terms of historical science). But above all, secondly, Auschwitz is the event because we don’t succeed [arrive] in establishing its meaning. Therein lies the difficulty. We don’t know how to think extermination. It is that which resists thought, par excellence. The ‘explanations’ that can be given of it, be they economic, political or ideological, provide absolute no reason. You have the impression here of having to do with the event, with all the monstrosity of what occurs without reason. Something that is there, but doesn’t succeed [arrive] in being there because it cannot be integrated into a network of themes and arguments; it isn’t open to question, doesn’t supply matter for discussion. In this sense – and please don’t let what I am saying be taken the wrong way – there is in Auschwitz something reminiscent of the aleph. Something has touched, we don’t know what that means, we don’t know what that asks of us, we know that that always asks of us, and that thus it is never forgotten. But as we don’t know what, it gets forgotten, we don’t know how to remember it. There is a frightening debt, we won’t manage to pay it off. E. W. – In The Inhuman (1988), you write that we don’t pay off the ‘debt to childhood. But it is enough not to forget it in order to resist it and, perhaps, not to be unjust. It is the task of writing, thinking, literature, arts, to venture to bear witness to it’.30 A few years before (in 1983), you were assigning this task of bearing witness to politics as well, even if this was in the attenuated mode of a ‘perhaps’. I quote from The Differend: ‘What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them.’31 145

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This hope, however faint it was, in relation to politics – do you still have it? And if it was linked to the statement in the same book that ‘Marxism has not come to an end, as the feeling of the differend’, as ‘silent feeling that signals a differend [and that] remains to be listened to’, is there still today, would you say, a political idiom for the ‘suffering due to capital’ which for Marx is suffering tout court?32 J.-F. L. – The ‘perhaps’ is very important. Indeed, probably I wouldn’t still say it now. But you have to make qualifications. Some time ago, I had written some texts on the socalled end of Marxism (again a rather short-hand thing), at least as instituted doctrine and regime.33 The reflections put forward in these texts have turned out to be right. I say that without boasting; it was predictable, comprehensible, it wasn’t a case of divination. How it happened, no one could predict. I remember a discussion with Claude Lefort, he was saying to me: for the most part, we weren’t wrong, but we hadn’t foreseen the way that Stalinist totalitarianism collapsed.34 In other words that it was dismantled from within, and not by a massive revolt. However that may be, it happened that a certain type of politics – with which I was associated as a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, in other words a critical group that was not Trotskyite, I want to be clear about that, because there’s always confusion, critical not just of Stalinism and Trotskyism, but also critical of capitalism – that that type of politics is over. That way of existing of the differend is over with. The real question now is to know where the differend or differends that necessarily involve and shake up every society are going on. Nicole Loraux, for instance, categorizes them under the concept of stasis as the division, the separation that perpetually threatens a human community, especially one that is democratically organized.35 For a democracy leaves a lot of room for conflicts. In contemporary societies there is a vast surplus of conflicts, perhaps more overwhelmingly than ever, but they don’t look at all the same as they used to. It wasn’t too long ago that these conflicts essentially centred on the position of workers, and they appeared to be bearers of an alternative to the capitalist organization. There was another possible form of life that was the program and the promise of the Communist Manifesto. For a good century and a half people lived and acted with this idea of a general alternative to the organization of the system, of capital. Today things are quite different. All these ‘small’ conflicts – which are not so small as all that – about women, education, all these extremely important questions, like that of knowing who is a citizen, who isn’t; who is a foreigner, who isn’t; what an immigrant is; and so on; all these population movements in the world that create a sociopolitical universe that is deeply unbalanced, fascinating and impassioned, dangerous – how can they be ignored? They supply the proof that societies are always marked by a differend, and that we shouldn’t calmly rely on capitalism’s expanding cycles of reproduction. Capitalism is certainly maintaining its health very well across all these conflicts. It has always created crises and been threatened by its own crises, it has always lived and progressed through crises. There is certainly no reason to panic because there is ‘a crisis’– it’s at least the fifth crisis I’ve seen in my life. At any rate, ‘the crisis’ will never again be as far-reaching and deepseated as the one at the end of the 1920s that finished in 1950. I don’t want to, and I can’t engage politically in contemporary conflicts to the same extent that I was able to engage

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in the Marxist differend, for a very simple reason: we now know (even ‘the left’ knows it, in spite of itself) that there is no universal alternative to capitalism, and that these conflicts will have to be regulated from within the capitalist system. As a result their dimension as differend is much less strong than their ‘litigious’ dimension.36 Litigations can be extremely violent: wars like that of ex-Yugoslavia, like the Gulf War. They are very important indeed, and obviously our duty as citizens, as just citizens if possible, is to take a position. I’m not even speaking of intellectuals, because I think there are no more intellectuals in Voltaire’s, Zola’s or even Sartre’s sense. (Sartre, moreover, is in my opinion the worst of all, not by chance, because it’s not his fault if he was too late.) No one any longer expects intellectuals to lend justice their voice as Voltaire, Michelet, Hugo or Zola could, when the world was still in the general frame of emancipation. Nowadays we are no longer living in this kind of frame. We are living in one of development and growth, and really the problems are always problems of the sharing of growth. That’s true of Germany, it’s what matters broadly speaking for feminism – not the only thing, but broadly speaking – it’s obviously what matters for the immigration question, as for education, and of course for all the poor countries. The sharing of growth always means the integration of the underprivileged into the cycle of capitalist development. That is why these conflicts are litigations, even if something of a quite different order may be operating beneath their surface. Which is clearly the case for feminism, particularly. So we do have to intervene there as citizens. (Which I did do, with others, for instance during the Gulf War, causing a small scandal. It’s not considered good taste on the left to intervene to say that there has to be a war, even if there must be, in every sense.)37 We have to take up positions to defend those whom we consider to be the ones oppressed and under attack. But these interventions take place within the framework of the system, not with the idea of destroying it, only of making it less unjust. I don’t like the arrogance, the pretentiousness, the air of false tragedy in the issues involving contemporary ‘minoritarians’. I’m quite happy to take up a position, but please don’t say to me: it’s that or death! That’s not true. When the workers were involved in the Paris Commune, it really was that or death. Who is ready to die for politics nowadays? Muslim fundamentalists … But their motivation isn’t political in the Western sense, it’s a religion that teaches that it is holy to die in war. In what is called the developed world, no one any longer feels the obligation to die for a political cause. Especially not out of solidarity. For a living Marxism, class solidarity was the sign that a struggle, even a distant one, even one about making demands for a particular group, was understood by all the exploited as an appeal for their emancipation. That is no longer the case. This is the sense in which I would no longer say that politics is ‘perhaps’ a means of testifying to a radical wrong. And that’s better! Because for two centuries it was thought that it was, from the French Revolution to Nazism, and these were two centuries of massacres. Without precedent in history. I am wary of those who are nostalgic for politics as tragedy. Irvine, California 18 October 1991

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CHAPTER 22

‘WHAT IS JUST?’ (OU JUSTESSE)

with Richard Kearney, 1994. From States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers on the European Mind, 1995 Translated by Richard Kearney

Richard Kearney – Today you are seen as the first philosopher of the ‘postmodern’ condition. Yet one of your earliest works was entitled La phénoménologie (1954) [Phenomenology]. How would you describe the development of your own thinking – from phenomenology to postmodernism? Is there a continuity between the two? Jean-François Lyotard – La phénoménologie was a homage to the thought of Merleau-Ponty: a meditation on the body, on sensible experience and therefore – in contradistinction to Hegel, Husserl, Sartre – on the ‘aesthetic’ dimension which unfolds beneath the phenomena of consciousness. I was also reading at this time what was available of Heidegger’s work. The little book on phenomenology was motivated by a concern to address the absence in Marxism of any genuine thinking about ideology. I felt it was important to establish how the possibility, and success, of the revolution depended on the ‘consciousness’ that workers could and should have of their situation and desire. The work done by both Tran-Duc-Thao and Claude Lefort in this direction was very useful. I was then a committed member of the Socialisme ou Barbarie project (from 1952 to 1966), whose main objects of critique were dogmatic Marxism, Stalinist politics, the class structure of ‘Soviet’ society, the inconsistencies of the Trotskyist position and post-war capitalism (quite the opposite of ‘late’ or declining capitalism). Our practical activities included cooperating with workers, wage-earners and students with a view to establishing self-management groups. I left this project in 1966 when I realized that the basis of both our practice and theory was lacking – the alternative figure of the proletariat (Marx’s ‘spectre’) as a labouring-class conscious of its goals. I only began to formulate the idea of the ‘postmodern’ in the late 1970s, after a long detour. The term, purposefully ambiguous, was borrowed from American criticism and Ihab Hassan. I used it to ‘name’ the transformation of bourgeois capitalism and its contradictions into a global ‘system’ ruling, for better or worse, its imbalances (including those in the ‘ideological’ field, henceforth entitled ‘cultural’) with the help of growth due to technoscientific means. Several things were becoming clear: that a new dominant class – the managers – was replacing the private owners without capital, that the work force was no longer of the nineteenth-century kind, that the redistribution of surplus-value was done in a completely different way, and that a structural level of unemployment was emerging even though we were still in a period of full employment. In these changing circumstances, it was necessary to review radically the nature of history and politics.

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

R. K. – Given the multiple definitions of ‘postmodernism’ which circulate in contemporary debate, do you believe your initial formulations of this term – in The Postmodern Condition and The Postmodern Explained – have been misinterpreted or altered? Could you describe the basic meaning of ‘postmodern’ as something more than a historical ‘period’? J.-F. L. – There have been many misunderstandings indeed, including my own. The notion of periodization is one of them – a typically ‘modern’ mania. The essential features of the postmodern as it manifests itself today seem to me numerous. They include the generalization of the constraint of exchangeability (the old ‘exchange value’ of Marx) which traditionally weighs on the objects and ‘services’ of capitalism, and its extension to include hitherto unexploited objects and activities: opinions, feelings, cultural pleasures, leisure, disease and death, sexuality and so on. (Totalitarian systems took the lead here in a terrifying fashion and the message was heard and duly corrected.) One might also mention the constraint of ‘complexification’ with respect to the relations of work, consummation and communication, whose effect is to ‘optimize’ the performance of the system; the concomitant collapse of traditional values (labour, dis-interested knowledge, virtue, the sense of life-debt) – the crisis of education in all the developed countries is a direct witness to this collapse. Then there are the current phenomena of latent nihilism (in Nietzsche’s ‘passive’ sense) and ‘discontent’ (in Freud’s sense), not to mention chronic anxiety due to absence of symbols – which camouflage themselves as individualism, cynicism, the cult of play, the almost compulsory sense of celebratory conviviality, the obsession with participation and interaction, the return to roots. This ‘postmodern’ situation discloses nothing new. On the contrary, in the name of the fulfilment of liberties, the Western willto-knowledge (and by extension doubt) and will-to-power (and by extension mastery) has ‘secreted’ (secrète) nihilism from its beginnings: death of the gods, death of God, death of Man. The ‘system’ functions simply as a very improbable type of organization – the living organism, and subsequently the human being and the brain already functioned in this way – which draws the energy it needs in the energetic chaos which formerly went by the name of nature or cosmos (the immense fall-out from an enigmatic explosion … ). But in response to your question, I would situate the ‘basic meaning’ of the postmodern above all in the way the Western will discovers the ‘nothingness’ (néant) of its objects and projects, thereby finding itself inhabited by something which it neither comprehends nor masters. Some ‘thing’ crypted in itself, which resists us. Its name is irrelevant. It is ‘unnameable’ because too rapidly named. R. K. – How then can we say anything about it? What evidence do we have of its existence? How does ‘it’ show itself? J.-F. L. – All the thinkers, writers and artists of the West, including the great ‘rationalists’, stumbled upon this ‘thing’, sought to name it, realized its inexpungeability, and recognized that no odyssey, no Grand Narrative could contain it. R. K. – This brings us, of course, to your famous critique of the ‘grand narratives’ of the Western tradition (Marxism, Judeo-Christianity, Enlightenment rationalism, etc.). 150

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But is it possible, or even desirable, to do away with every kind of narrative model? Is there a way in which des petits récits [little narratives] might serve an ethical-political task? Is the commitment to a pluralistic paradigm of little narratives compatible, for example, with a basic defence of a charter of universal rights? What I’m really asking is: is it possible to avoid relativism in order to save what is best in the Enlightenment fidelity to shared human values that are non-culture specific? In short, is it possible to reconcile your defence of the singularity of the event with a certain minimal universality of rights and duties – that is, of justice? J.-F. L. – I protest, first, against the expression ‘Judeo-Christian’. The hyphen signals the annexation of the Torah to the Good News of the Incarnation. This is a traditional usage, I know. But it is nevertheless unjust in the strongest sense of the term; and after the Shoah, it represents an insult to the ‘people’ who were victims of extermination (when one recalls the role of Vatican politics at the time). That said, I do not know whether the defence of universal valid human rights is ‘compatible’, as you say, with a proper attention to the event in its opacity (as mentioned above in relation to ‘the thing’). To tell the truth, this question of compatibility doesn’t really bother me, being neither Leibnizean nor Hegelian. On the one hand, it is evident that rights must be defended by every citizen against the ‘cynical’ effects of the efficiency demands of the system, and on the other hand, we are indebted to the ‘thing’ irremediably. Why seek to reconcile these? That kind of fraternization is always to be feared. R. K. – Why? Can you give me an example? J.-F. L. – A notorious example: Heidegger, the author of Sein und Zeit, construing the politics of Mein Kampf as pretext for the manifestation of Dasein’s dread. R. K. – Are you saying that we cannot use ‘little narratives’ in the cause of universal rights? J.-F. L. – I am saying that it would be futile to consider using des petits récits. Always and everywhere, in Tibet, the Amazon or Livry-Gargan, they use us to tell themselves. They mock illusions of grandeur. The kitchens and stables of Shakespeare laugh at the tragedies of court, just as in Rabelais the bad boys mock the knowing and the powerful. What is little is almost invariably comic. To laugh is to acknowledge that the thing is unsayable – that its tragic dramatization is pure vanity. Beckett is funny in this way also. But that doesn’t make up a humanist party. R. K. – Does your departure from the Enlightenment and Marxist projects necessarily condemn you to ‘neo-conservatism’ as Habermas and others claim? How do you now consider the political positions you adopted during the Socialisme ou Barbarie period? J.-F. L. – It is logical to accuse ‘postmodernism’ (a term I never use to describe my work) of neo-conservatism if one holds to the modern project. Reciprocally, the modernist obstinacy could be taxed with ‘archeo-progressivism’ … I never used these kinds of terms to differentiate myself from Habermas and his disciples. This rhetoric of political tribunals had some sense when conflicts of thought were immediately transcribable 151

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into public tragedy: one was obliged to solemnly denounce the Enemy in the adversary. Habermas has obviously mistaken his epoch. I never viewed his discourse ethics as an ideology of the enemy. R. K. – How would you identify the ethical and political motivation implicit in the arguments of The Postmodern Condition, and subsequent works such as The Inhuman? What are the implications of Apollinaire’s claim that artists and intellectuals nowadays should make themselves ‘inhuman’? Does this mean that postmodernism is incompatible with ‘humanism’? J.-F. L. – I only use the term ‘postmodernism’, let me repeat, as a label of convenience for a certain movement or school (in literary criticism, in architecture). I personally prefer the expressions ‘the postmodern’ and ‘postmodernity’. I quote Apollinaire’s phrase – from the Peintres Cubistes [The Cubist Painters] and which applies to cubism as a whole – because it states that the inhuman in us is the unknown thing (la chose méconnue), the only genuine resource of art, of literature and of meditation. Les Essais, L’Éloge de la folie, Le Neveu de Rameau: humanism has always been inhumanism.1 R. K. – I’m interested in the political implications of this position, particularly as outlined in your Political Writings. Could you elaborate on the distinction between ‘specific intellectual’ and ‘organic intellectual’ in this work? Does the intellectual still have a role to play in the project of emancipation? And what critical function, if any, remains for the philosopher once one has declared the death of the ‘modern idea of a universal subject of knowledge’? Must the postmodern intellectual limit him/herself, as you suggest, to the ‘resolution of questions posed to a citizen of a particular country at a particular moment’2? J.-F. L. – The organic intellectual has a role to play in countries more or less relegated to the margins of development. Here his work is itself the proof of both his emancipation and his belonging, and the basic problem confronting these countries is emancipation without betrayal of local culture. (One would have to locate the phenomenon of fundamentalism here and its strategy of assassination.) In the privileged developed countries, by contrast – and one knows how scandalously exclusive this privilege can be – great prosecution witnesses like Voltaire, Zola, Gramsci, Horkheimer, Russell, no longer seem to play a role. Formerly emancipation was under threat in Europe itself, with absolutism and totalitarianism, and the work of these already famous figures was in itself a demand for liberties. Today we face a different scenario, where critical works are rarely read, sparsely distributed except when the media latch onto them and serve them to a consumer public hungry for cultural commodities. In fact, the person who speaks for liberties on radio or television doesn’t need to possess an ‘oeuvre’; it is sufficient that his/her eloquence and ‘presence’ on the platform are better (more effective and credible) than those of other media professionals or even than other thinkers, writers or artists. The only exceptions here are the scientists, and that by reason of the fact that the system idolizes techno-scientific performances. R. K. – You speak in Tomb of the Intellectual of a ‘new responsibility’ which renders intellectuals impossible – a ‘responsibility to distinguish intelligence from the paranoia that gave rise to “modernity”’?3 What do you mean by this ‘paranoia’? And how are we 152

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to differentiate between the new responsibility of postmodern ‘intelligence’ and the irresponsibility of irrationalism? J.-F. L. – Some rationalism is the paranoia of discourse: I will say everything, know everything, possess everything, be everything. Nothing will escape the concept. On the other hand, literature must plead guilty because it is authorized by nothing, as Georges Bataille said (following Kafka). The ‘thing’ that demands writing or art has no right to demand it. This ‘irresponsibility’ is the greatest responsibility, that of remaining attentive to an Other, who is neither an interlocutor nor a party to contractual closure. It is essential to guard over this ‘secret existence’, as Nina Berberova called it, to protect it against the indiscretion of the system which wants to see and know everything, have an answer for everything, exchange everything.4 We need to reread Orwell. R. K. – What are the implications of your postmodern idea of ‘inhumanity’ for our understanding of the ‘social bond’? Do you think traditional concepts of nation, state and civil society are adequate to the analysis of these implications? Have universalist notions of social progress been altered by the transition to postmodernity? J.-F. L. – The implosion of the big totalitarian regimes engendered by the modern dream provokes a nostalgia for ‘natural’ communities, defined by blood, land, language, custom. Fidelity to the demos takes priority here over respect for the republican ideal. The latter is nonetheless the only veneer of legitimacy for the system to require all countries in the world to remain open to the free circulation of goods, ‘services’ and communications. It is in fact essential for the Republic to become universal. In its name, the ‘market’ is permitted to assume world proportions. That is why, today, the privilege of sovereignty which nation states enjoyed for several centuries (at most) appears an obstacle to the furtherance of development in every domain: multinational transactions, immigrant populations, international security … It may even be the case, despite appearances, that the unification of Europe is more easily achievable through the federation of ‘natural communities’ (‘regions’ like Bavaria, Scotland, Flanders, Catalonia, etc.) than through sovereign states – with all the risks attendant upon the dominance of the demos in each of these communities. R. K. – This scenario would seem to support your suggestion that the ‘modern’ category of ‘universal thinker’ will be replaced by the ‘symptomatologist’ who responds to singular phenomena of irreducible difference (le différend). But would this not imply the end of philosophy as an academic discipline? What do you believe is the function now of philosophy and the university generally? J.-F. L. – Philosophy, we should remember, has only recently – 1811, Berlin – been recognized as an academic discipline. The ancients and the medievals didn’t teach philosophy, they taught how to philosophize. It was a question of ‘learning’ rather than ‘teaching’. To learn to find one’s way in thinking, as Kant put it. Or to borrow Wittgenstein’s formula – ‘I no longer know where I am’ is the basic position of philosophical questioning. To philosophize is not to produce useful servants of the community, as Kant well knew, which is why philosophy faculties never have the same prestige as faculties of medicine, law,

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economics (not to mention the exact sciences). The philosopher always has a fundamental difficulty in presenting himself as an expert. This is not a recent phenomenon; in fact, it goes back to Socrates’ struggle with the ‘experts’. One could tolerate the presence (inexpensive) in pedagogical institutions of an inexpert discipline for as long as this aimed at forming ‘enlightened citizens’, capable of coping with complex or unprecedented conjunctures. The contemporary system aims at forming the experts it requires. The capacity to meditate is not much use to it. Even less so when the system has managed to produce more sophisticated automatons than digital computers. A considerable part of the academic discipline of philosophy is already geared to research (direct or indirect) into ‘artificial’ languages. And an inevitable consequence of this is that those who continue to think about the unexploitable ‘thing’ find themselves half inside the institution, half out. I think, I hope, that philosophy will manage to limp along like this for a long time, in spite of its growing loss of credibility (which also affords some prestige). R. K. – Much of your work has focused on the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Why has the notion of the ‘sublime’, particularly as enunciated by Kant in the third Critique, come to occupy such a pivotal position in your thinking on this relationship? J.-F. L. – What, from Kant to Adorno, has often been called the ‘aesthetic’ is that region where rational thinking encounters something in itself which violently resists it: this is ‘creation’, the way of making that is art, the sentiment of the absolute. Kant elaborates on the latter in his Analytic of the Sublime. I believe we find there a form of recollection (anamnesis conducted in ‘critical’ terms) of the relation of all thought – meditative, literary, pictural, musical – to the unknown thing which inhabits such thought. This relation is necessarily one of a différend internal to thought, at once capable and incapable of the absolute – ‘sentiment of spirit’, not of nature, like the taste of the beautiful. Kant repeats the words: Widerstreit, Widerstand, Unangemessenheit, differend, resistance, incommensurability. The same terms used by Van Gogh, Joyce, Schoenberg, Kierkegaard or Beckett (I cite at random) to signify the ordeal undergone by thought when it opens itself to desire for the absolute. One could even say that such thought engenders ‘symptoms’. This is so for most of us, for whom the desire is no less pressing than for the writers and artists cited. But the enigma of the ‘aesthetic’ is that they make of this angoisse [anguish] a work. R. K. – Given your readings of Kant, Heidegger, Adorno and Derrida, would you be inclined to the view that the thinker/symptomatologist should take his/her lead more from art and literature than from the more traditional discourses of epistemology and ontology? J.-F. L. – I think so. But I also believe that if there is an ontology – perhaps negative – it would be found on the side of art and literature. Why? Because on that side, being (or nothing) is not situated or posited on principle as reference to cognitive discourse. It is not projected, or ejected, onto the place assigned to that about which one intends to speak, as in the case of the most serious epistemology. On the contrary, it is approached in a ‘poetically concrete’ fashion, experienced and settled like something immediate to be resolved, something present but not presented. Which word here, which colour there, 154

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which sound or melodic form? How can we know? It is not a matter of knowledge. Being (or nothing) doesn’t wait at the door you identify. It lives in you already waiting for whatever idiom you offer it to reside in momentarily. R. K. – When you contrast ‘reading’ to ‘theory’ (or interpretation) do you believe this better enables us to engage in aesthetic and ethical judgement? If we abandon ‘meaning’ out of fidelity to the irreducible singularity of the event, are we not eliminating the very basis of a judgement that could be shared by others in a socially committed way? How is your position compatible with solidarity – or what Hannah Arendt referred to (again in relation to Kant) as ‘representative thinking’, which she believes is an indispensable tool for ethical judgement? J.-F. L. – ‘Theory’ is a system of propositions formulated in explicitly defined terms according to a determined syntax. These propositions are supposed to explain all the phenomena which emerge in the field of reference to which the theory applies. (I am not discussing here the serious objections levelled against this axiomatic model by intuitionism or by the theorem of non-closure of discursive systems.) No aesthetic or ethical judgement could ever satisfy the terms of this system. It is often a ‘passionate’ business, often ‘accomplishing’ an unconscious desire, as Freud said. And it is always dangerous. The task is to render such judgement ‘pure’, free of interest, free of ends (conceptualized or not), free of all that subordinates it to something other than the appreciation of the just and the beautiful. It is at the price of such ascesis that judgement of this kind can claim to be shared with others. Everyone tries to argue, for or against, but in truth, one can only rely on the capacity of others to carry out for themselves the same kind of ascesis or ‘destitution’ (‘dénuement’). Arendt unscrupulously transfers Kant’s aesthetic category of sensus communis to the order of sociality and interpersonal solidarity, as if it were some kind of ‘shared feeling’. But in Kant the sensus communis is laboriously deduced, in the name of a transcendental affinity between diverse faculties of thought, on the basis of the ‘experience’ of a happiness which an ‘object’ can unexpectedly procure. Moreover, Arendt seems to ignore the case – for me even more significant – where thinking profits not from its affinity but its disaffinity or dissent (dissentiment) from itself; this is the case of the sublime, which also demands to be shared by all. As regards ethical decisions, if it had to authorize itself by invoking theories of Goodness or Justice, it would forfeit its ethical character forthwith. Why? Because it would lose all responsibility for what it decides submitting itself to the authority of theory. Decisions are ethical precisely when they are not authorized by a system (intelligible or otherwise), when they take upon themselves the responsibility for their ‘authority’. An SS torturer is not ignoble because Hitler’s ‘theory’ was false, but because he refuses his own responsibility and believes himself justified by obedience. Arendt refers to this as the ‘banality of evil’ – the banalization of responsibility by ‘necessity’. Necessity here is poverty, but it is also theory which is the poverty of morality. R. K. – If existing politics is defined as a totalitarian model of Grand Narratives, is it ever possible to move from an ethics of the differend back to a politics of communal action? Do you think that hermeneutics, structuralism and critical theory are necessarily

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condemned to totalizing paradigms of Grand Narrative? Is there a dialogue possible between these philosophical methods and your own? J.-F. L. – Such a dialogue is always possible. But the trust one places in dialogue is a hermeneutic prejudice. Can you imagine Antonin Artaud dialoguing with Bill Clinton? Dialogue is an ordinary passion. The true – the rapport with the Real (with the thing) – escapes dialogue. My philosophical colleagues haven’t read Freud. If they had, they’d have at least learnt that dialogue is shot through with unconscious demands, fed on unruly transfers and counter-transfers. And they would have learned that a controlled transfer, which is the most difficult of all in relation to the other, has nothing to do with ‘dialogue’. That said, there is nothing against a politics of common action, and we should lend ourselves to it. As long as we attribute to it a healthy (salubre) rather than salvific (salutaire) value. It is the minimum commitment to safeguarding elementary rights of humanity as it is. R. K. – Do your claims for the ‘irrepresentable’ and ‘incommensurable’ not confine you to an endlessly ‘deconstructive’ practice and thus prevent you from advancing to a rationally coherent model of the just and the good? How would you situate your own thinking here vis-à-vis Derrida or Levinas? J.-F. L. – I repeat: there is no ‘rationally coherent model’ of justice and injustice. Such a model is the dream of the system, which someone like Rawls proposes to realize innocently(?). Look at history, at least it has the force of nihilism: abortion, divorce, homosexuality, corporal punishment (guilt itself), child education, old age, death of course, but also birth, hospital care and hospitality, war and murder, the body and competition (the first Olympic Games and Atlanta 1996). The Yes and the No have managed to accommodate each of these situations one by one, and they’ve always managed to rationalize them. Have my colleagues ever heard that ‘rationality’ is related to ‘rationalization’? This can lead to scepticism. And to this I would oppose the difficult anamnesis which decision demands: ‘in my soul and my unconscious’ … As for those who think, along with Spinoza and Hegel, that there is no room for judgement, I don’t think they realize that God (including the Natura naturans) is dead. This is something Levinas clearly signals: the risk undertaken in understanding the Other (l’Autre) in the other (autrui). That isn’t an everyday occurrence like the transactions of the Wall Street Stock Exchange which a good Rawlsian reads in his evening newspaper. Finally, as regards ‘deconstructive’ thought, which I respect and which is also the thought of the undecidable, it has problems of necessity with decision and judgement (Urteil). This is as it should be; and I have reason to think it is concerned by this. R. K. – Is the politics of the differend inevitably a politics of rhetorical dispute without finality – without solution or resolution? Paralogism and paradox as the last word? Anarchism as the last stance? Dissidence as the last cry? J.-F. L. – There is no ‘politics of the differend’. Definitely not. The differend can only give rise to a terrible melancholy, a practice of meditation, a poetics. R. K. – Can a postmodern politics do anything more than problematize the political as an order of representation (the function of the political in the West since Plato) from the 156

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inside? Is there any alternative, in your view, to the prevailing system of commodification and exchange other than a defeatist internal critique which exposes our incarceration in the labyrinth but offers no paths leading beyond it? J.-F. L. – I honestly don’t think there is anything ‘beyond’ the system. There is something ‘beneath’ it, the ‘thing’ which Freud called infantile. Any work derived from it will itself be made into ‘cultural merchandise’: mistaken, misappropriated, méprisé as of no importance. Its quality as a work – wrestling with the absolute – will perhaps be acknowledged one day by a reader, listener or spectator. R. K. – And the charge of ‘defeatism’? J.-F. L. – ‘Defeatism’, as you understand it, has always been the fact of the serious, le fait du sérieux. Every true thought knows itself to be defeated. Aristotle’s episteme knew itself to be incapable before the pollakis that Being opposes to it. The same goes for Platonic idealism before the chora. Relieved of doctrinaire ornament, Western thought has always been a resistance. Resistance is the way of the defeated who does not acknowledge defeat. But the claim to triumph – in the Roman sense – is the worst kind of folly. The ‘beyond’ does not allow itself to be approached without burning you up (vous foudroyer). There is nothing ‘romantic’ in this: it is ‘realist’ if anything, the relation to the res, the thing. That is why it is so severe and so humble to ‘learn to philosophize’ or to paint, to make music or a film. The apprenticeship is without end and without solution. One can make some progress, but how could one ever be satisfied? There is no defeatism in this recurrent disappointment, except for those who hold to the fantasy of full accomplishment which the system exhibits: you shall be fulfilled. R. K. – Finally, if the politics of the differend offers no project of forward advance, would you claim that your notion of the Immemorial (as that which is irrepresentable to memory yet will not be forgotten) provides us with a critical task of anamnesis, as you call it, motivating a resistant reading of our culture? Is there a certain postmodern strategy of looking back without representation, a strategy which might offer more effective potential for change than the Enlightenment obsession with future progress? J.-F. L. – This last question would appear generous. But the alternative backward/ forward is, in fact, extremely miserly with regard to temporality. It reduces the latter to the opposition of before and after. By the term ‘immemorial’, I try to express another time, where what is past maintains the presence of the past, where the forgotten remains unforgettable precisely because it is forgotten. This is what I mean by anamnesis as opposed to memory. In the time set out by concept and will, the project is only the ‘projection’ of present consequences on the future (as in ‘futurology’). This kind of projection forbids the event; it prepares, preconceives, controls it in advance. This is the time of the Pentagon, the FBI, Security, the time of Empire. By contrast, what I call anamnesis is the opposite of genealogy, understood as a return to ‘origins’ (always projected backward). Anamnesis works over the remains that are still there, present, hidden near to us. And with regard to what is not yet there, the still to come (l’à-venir),

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it is not a matter of the future as such (which shares the Latin root, fuit, meaning it has been) but that which is still awaited with incertitude: hoped for, feared, surprising, in any case unexpected. It will come; but the question is: what will come? One can’t really talk therefore of a ‘postmodern strategy’. If there is an enemy (the obscure primitiveness of the thing, indifferent perhaps, a power both threatening and cherished), that enemy is inside each one of us. The labour of ‘working through’ is to find the idiom that is least inappropriate to it. One is guided here only by an obscure sentiment of rightness (justesse). But one is never satisfied with the idiom chosen and, more often than not, the other (autrui) doesn’t understand anything. You only have to read the letters of Van Gogh, Artaud or Kafka, Augustine’s Confessions or Montaigne’s Essays, the life of Angelo de Foligno or the studies of Henry James – you see how the ‘postmodern’ is not confined to a single period – to witness the kind of resistance they encountered. One must not traduce, in the sense of translate (traduit), what in itself remains ciphered (crypté). Instead of making the ciphered common currency, we must try to do justice to its insignificance. That is what is right. That is justesse. Atlanta, Georgia, 1994

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CHAPTER 23 RESPONDING QUESTIONS

with Eberhard Gruber, 1995. From The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity, 1999 Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas

Eberhard Gruber – In your recent volume Postmodern Fables, which consists of fifteen notes on – and against – postmodern aesthetization, there is a passage concerning all those who participate in an activity similar to ours: you say there that ‘the majority of interviews, discussions, dialogues, roundtables, debates, colloquia for which our world has such an appetite. They serve to assure us that we are indeed “on the same wavelength” and that it’s going to be OK’.1 Such a process never ceases to ‘confirm what is well known’, that is, what the speakers assume, presuppose, or already know more or less clearly. A true ‘dialogue’ would, therefore, be pushed or would have to be pushed to a somewhat paradoxical extreme: neither a conversation for two nor a directed communication. For any position of a preconceived knowledge that is to be confirmed or applied by one or many interlocutors would go against dialogue, which would touch upon the singularity of what makes for an event. Without wishing to question the genre of the ‘interlocution or interview’ in terms of the possibility of an ‘event for two’ (?), one can, at least, note the following: in ‘interlocuting’, something resists, remains ‘in the way’ (dia), ‘across’ the throat or tongue, a remainder, precisely, that is unpronounceable, that bars the way [voie] (and the voice [voix]) to conversation and to directed calculations. Neither an exchange of words, therefore, nor a mere flux of words: there is some unnameable, some unrepresentable, to put it in Lyotardian terms. In acknowledging such an interference that keeps at a distance what one means to say from what one says and what one designates from the designation itself, I suggest leaving here, as a sign of the displacement that has been irremediably undergone, a blank. And yet! The scope of the argument against the communicational practice of the ‘interlocution’ turns out to be limited: the critique concerns only ‘most’ interlocutions, not all. Moreover, the argument is developed in a chapter written entirely in the form of a dialogue between ‘She’ and ‘He’. Should we infer from this that the only justification for ‘interlocuting’ (with someone) arises out of incomprehension? Or, more precisely, out of certain incomprehensions between ‘She’ and ‘He’, on the one hand, and what is incomprehensible for everyone, on the other? And let me add (since the choice of feminine and masculine voices is not innocent): How are we to understand this intertwining of ‘sexual difference’ (which makes the dialogue between human beings irreducible and therefore constitutive), ‘incomprehensions’ (which appear to be intermittent as long as there are at least two

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who are linked by sexual difference), and what is ‘incomprehensible’ (which marks a limit that cannot be surpassed)? How does this intertwining get articulated? (You see that I am asking about the status of our dialogue: Is it politically correct or not?2 Has this ‘interlocution’ gotten off to a bad start because we are on the same [sexual] side, not different enough to have an ‘interlocution’ that would yield results worthy of interest?) Or is it perhaps that sexual difference is less important in an interlocution than listening? Jean-François Lyotard – Are you offering me a new deal? No, it would be nasty and inexact to use such a term to describe your attempt to elaborate the Between of Judaism and Christianity. I thank you for this. But I am not budging; I am afraid I do not quite see what is at stake here, and I am going to have to reiterate my reservations. That men and women as such should experience certain difficulties in getting along or understanding one another is rather obvious. The Freudian tradition attributes such difficulties to the way in which men and women are situated in relationship to the law and its imaginary figures. Neither the entry into nor the ‘exit’ from Oedipus follows the same course in girls and boys. The object ‘mother’, for instance, is not under an interdiction for the former as it is for the latter; death and birth are ‘positioned’ differently for one and the other, and so on. And it has been suggested that even the presence to oneself and the ‘composition’ of mind and body, the presence of one to the other, would not be the same. So many problems, frustrations, jealousies are thus inflicted upon free exchange, not to mention those that result from unconscious singularities. Whether I am a male or a female speaker, I believe that I am speaking in my own name; something else ‘speaks’ in my place. I do not know what it ‘says’: neither the meaning of this ‘voice’, nor to whom it is addressed. When a man speaks to a woman, to whom or to what does he address himself in the other sex? And when a woman speaks to a man? By placing the two sexes in a situation of interlocution, as I have done on several occasions, I simply wish to recall that the two sexes are struck with a certain respective and reciprocal but non-commutable deafness, while the interlocution has for its goal the desire, or rather the request, to be freed from this separation, to touch the other and to be touched by the other. There is something ‘sexual’, in the Freudian sense of the term, in being under an interdiction and pushed to transgress it [franchir]. The consensus that is presupposed and sometimes obtained through dialogue never brings about this ‘openness’ [franchise] or this tact. Sexual difference is not resolved through argumentation; it escapes the order of the concept, like the ontological difference. It is felt, like a divorce that is always refused, in the experience of poetry (Heidegger) or love, in the limit experience (Bataille). E. G. – If I understand this notion of a ‘remainder’ that makes a dialogue or interlocution [entre-tien] vibrate (that makes it vibrant, alive?), then we would be dealing with an element (in the broad sense of the term) that is two-sided: to be deciphered and undecipherable. Can one not then read, just beneath the surface, a friction between two philosophical projects that are distinct from one another, that refer to one another? Your major work The Differend concerns, above all, the problem of discursive linking. Does it also, clandestinely, announce a complementary project that addresses indiscursivity, 160

Responding Questions

inarticulation, the undecipherable? In short, a project that addresses the phrase that, unfailingly, lacks? Or, even more dizzyingly, that addresses the non-phrase that lacks? J.-F. L. – The Differend concerns among other things the linking of phrases. Or linkage itself. It is said to be discursive when it is guided by the rules of a particular genre of discourse. What still have to be examined are the linkages that are not guided by such rules. Or, what is probably the same thing, phrases that are ‘poorly articulated’ (laughter, tears, gestures: the meaning of the Greek phrazein), phrases that are difficult to link up discursively, to decipher, to ‘interpret’: opaque phrases, risky enigmas. E. G. – Such a two-sided project appears to me to be inscribed in the logic of a thought that refers to and is oriented by such notions as ‘sublime’ and ‘differend’. If this is the case, must one not question the dividing or partitioning line (so to speak) between these two projects, that is to say, between ‘discursive linking’ and ‘insurmountable indiscursivity’? Is there a between-two [entre-deux]? Is it ‘other’ than that/those which it links and separates? Is there, in this sense, a (modal) trace deposited in the decipherable that would authorize the conjunction ‘and’ in the turn of phrase ‘the between-two links and separates’? Or are we faced here with an undecidable question, since the interrogation is the very infraction of that of which it claims to be the condition, namely an affirmative response, and since one can never be sure about doubt? J.-F. L. – If I call these phrases ‘unarticulated’ or the linkages to which they give rise ‘risky’, it is of course because the unlinked is thought on the basis of the linked, the unarticulated on the basis of articulation. I will not speak here of a ‘between-two’. The ‘and’ that separates and unites the two modes, articulated and unarticulated, can be specified only case by case, as in sexual difference. For example, a laugh (unarticulated phrase) may come to disrupt the discursive linkage of articulated phrases (according to the polarizations addressor/ addressee and signification/reference) – and this disruption acts as a fortuitous disorder, as a symptom, as a sign (in the Kantian sense) of another voice coming to interfere in the dialogue and so on. And the discourse might attempt to find for this laugh (as I have just tried to sketch out) a defining signification, thereby putting it into a position of reference – which is already another case of relation between the articulated and the unarticulated. E. G. – You obviously see what I am up to! The question of the ‘between-two’ is indeed incisive for the two philosophical projects indicated, since it aims at what exceeds. (‘To phrase’ and ‘not to phrase’ seem to concern the avoidance and the return of the multiple, that is to say, intermittence). But this question concerns to an even greater degree The Hyphen, since it locates the very place where you indicate, in an exemplary fashion, a conflict between ‘Jew’ and ‘Christian’ that the expression ‘Judeo-Christian’ makes one forget. I am interested, first of all, in the theme of the debate: in a recent article by Robert Maggiori it is said that certain ‘fragments [éclats] of Lyotard’s work … seem strange’, for example ‘On a Hyphen’ [Un trait d’union], and that this work nonetheless constitutes a whole that has something to say no matter where the reader enters into it.3 How is one to evaluate this qualification ‘strange’, which is linked to an interest in the Talmud, the Bible? Is there a differend, a detour, indeed a rupture, in the evolution of your thought? 161

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I myself would argue for a sort of continuity insofar as the critique of the imperial theme is here once again pursued under the rubric of the theocratic. The cleavage between the Christian and Jewish traditions seems to be played out again on the political level, as you say, between ‘a strategy of conquest’ incarnated in the civitas Dei and the interdiction of this theme according to the Hebraic tradition.4 J.-F. L. – It is not up to me (or anyone else) to remedy this strangeness experienced or signalled by Robert Maggiori (it might in fact be ‘familiar’, like Unheimlichkeit). For I think, as you say, that ‘On a Hyphen’ pursues a ‘Jewish’ theme that has been of concern to me for several decades, from ‘Figure Forclosed’ (1968), to ‘Jewish Oedipus’ (1970), to ‘On a Figure of Discourse’ (1972), right up to Heidegger and ‘the jews’ (1988), and beyond.5 But I do not think that this theme is essentially political, neither in this present book nor elsewhere. E. G. – As for the structuring of The Hyphen, it seems to me useful to indicate in passing two possible readings of the key term so as to be better able to discern the internal displacement that you enact and the stakes of the whole. Two readings, therefore: one would go in the direction of the trait d’union, or ‘hyphen’, that is, in the direction of the ‘between-two’; the other would go in the opposite direction. The effect of the first reading would thus be to confirm everything that is of the order (and under the order) of the ‘Between’ that unites what is separate (just as the ‘hyphen’ does with respect to words), as well as what it promises, namely the duality of its supports (which form the ‘Between’) and their respective iterativity (which forms each support by means of a series of interruptions and assured ‘returns’). The other reading of the ‘hyphen’ would be opposed to this, being of the order of the irrelational and the indifferential (since these two terms make explicit, through negation, what the ‘between-two’ summarily indicates: relation-difference). Formulated in this way, it is clear that what is at stake in our discussion is not situated at the level of a disjunction where one reading of the ‘hyphen’ (‘between-two’, ‘Between’) would come to the fore to the detriment of its counter-reading (the ‘irrelational’, the ‘indifferential’: ‘One’, ‘Without-Between’) or vice versa – so as to reveal an imperial strategy. What is at stake, rather, is this: (a) to what extent must we read between the disjunctive readings and (b) to what extent must we ‘read’ beyond this limit? This is where our discussion, it seems to me, weighs somewhat differently: you attribute to me the first position (a), all the while assuming that I read beyond the limit of the between-two (b). You are thus led to situate me on the side of the post-Pauline tradition, on the side of the Greco-Christian, Neoplatonic, speculative, Western tradition with its ‘metaphysical lock’.6 And you oppose to this, under the name ‘jew’, the figure of a radical incompletion: against the ‘Western accomplishment’, against the ‘surpassing’ [dépassement] and opening of a ‘passage’ (which is incarnated, for the Christian, in Christ).7 J.-F. L. – I am trying to follow you. First of all, as for the ‘between’ such as you develop it, the union–separation involved in the duality of the terms and in their respective iterativity seems to me insufficient for marking the trait between Jew and Christian. For this trait can then be assimilated to the inclusive disjunction, which assumes that the two terms are different

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but not heterogeneous and so would allow themselves to be included in the same whole. Which is not the case. Next, to understand this trait (of union) in terms of an absence of relation runs contrary to the historical facts, and Paul bears witness to this. There is in truth, here and there, a voice-that-promises. But the inscription of this voice in the evangelical testament is completely different than its inscription in the Pentateuch. And this is not simply because of the mystery of the Incarnation (the belief that the Lord speaks in the flesh and has himself undergone its trials), but, more secretly, because of an ontological mutation in the relationship between the visible and the audible. Such heterogeneity in the mode of promising gives rise, it seems to me, to a differend – no matter how much ‘goodwill’ might be shown on one side or the other to bring it back to the level of a difference. I recall Levinas, whom one can hardly accuse of anti-Christian fanaticism, responding to a Catholic prelate who had asked: You are our fathers, that’s clear, but what do you really believe in? (meaning: what do you believe in that is not part of our own faith?) Your Eminence, we do not believe, we have a Book. As it is written, the voice of the Saint, blessed though he may be, inspires more questioning (and the anxiety of questioning) than confidence. And so I fear that your proposition is repeating the gesture of speculative philosophy. But writing, be it Jewish or (to a lesser extent) Christian, is not part of a ‘philosophical project’, as you say later on. E. G. – But is there not the possibility of reading differently? For example, what you call ‘jew/s’ is linked to a certain regimen whose phrases are marked by a listening to the Lord wherein neither this divine ‘addressor’ nor the meaning of ‘what God means’ are identified; what you call ‘jew/s’ is also linked to the distinction between speech and designation, a distinction devoid of any political (Zionism), religious (Judaism), philosophical (Hebraic thought), or existential status (the jew/s – since non-Jews, insofar as they are of ‘this nonpeople of survivors, Jews and non-Jews’, of the Shoah, are counted among ‘the jews’).8 What comes out of this is a certain raising up [exhaussement] of the discursive in relation to the real (in the broad sense of the term). If we allow this raising up because it is the necessary step back [recul] constitutive of every (evaluation of) discursivity, must we not also consider the return to the real, the retreat or withdrawal of the gesture that has just taken place (‘the raising up’), so as not to become lost in abstraction? A return not to an identical, substantial, indeed sensible real, but a ‘return’ nonetheless, according to an inevitable displacement. ‘Return’ and ‘renewal’ are conjoined in the multiple that is implied by every ‘differend’, every ‘sublime’. Neither one nor the other is by itself. The important thing here is not, it seems to me, the alternative between the ‘already-there’ (‘Christian’) of the displacement and the ‘is it happening?’ (‘Jew’): what is important is, rather, that the two taken separately are insufficient because they break the rule of the multiple (appeared–appearing). In other words, ‘there is some unsublatable’; but must it make us forget that we raise ourselves up facing it?9 Can we escape (the affection of) the anima minima? There is some unnameable: but must one not take into account the fact that we cannot avoid trying to name it (‘to phrase: the unnameable’)? There is some unrepresentable: but is it insignificant that I just provisionally re/presented it in this way (and that you understand what ‘this means’)?

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In short, an order of re-mittance seems to appear that acts like a cushion or bank [bande] (as in billiards, for example) in the service of the game.10 Is not the incompletion maintained, in this sense, only differently? And if this is so, doesn’t one move forward (displace ‘oneself ’) by following two sides: one bank dis-appearing, the other appearing, along with that or those brought back into the game? (And the hyphens here signal neither a disappearing nor an appearing that would be to the detriment of one or the other, but an intermittent, iterative dis-tance.) My thesis would thus be that to read beyond the ‘Between’ (see a and b, above) would be to put one’s trust in the modality of the real that allows one, it seems, to induce its ‘dis-cursivity’, that is, the median way between ‘phrasing’ and the ‘undecipherable’, between ‘linkage’ and ‘catastrophe’. Or is it necessary to condense this entire problematic even further inasmuch as it is played out only on the field of intermittence? Calculable, at bottom (= ‘Christian’ awaiting)? Radically incalculable (= ‘Jewish’ anxiety)? J.-F. L. – I do not quite understand what you are calling ‘discursive raising up’ in relationship to reality. One cannot say that the voice that prescribes listening is part of discourse, at least not in the sense of logos. It causes a rift in the classical (and modern) tradition of the linking of arguments. The voice that orders – ‘Love’ – also interrupts the order of reasons. The content of this imperative is certainly paradoxical, for love is not something that can be prescribed. But at least Christian law is supported by a meaning, while ‘Listen’ aims at an attitude of the one who is addressed rather than some signification. What must be done, thought, and so forth thus remains to be invented (I am not talking about the meticulous arrangements regulating the use of bodies). The Christian already, at once admirable and paradoxical, amounts to this: you must love the Christic commandment in order to actualize the love it prescribes. Judaic incompletion has to do with the fact that you are never sure you are really listening to the voice. This voice is declared inaudible because there is always a remainder of meaning that has not been heard, the sod, the secret. Moreover, it is extremely important to distinguish between the iterative infinite (the ‘remittance’, as you say), which is implicated in the linking of phrases, and the qualitative infinite, to which the event of the voice bears witness. In a certain Christianism, this event is ‘put back into play’ as a sort of future due date or date of redemption in the chronological time of discursive iterativity, and signs of this can be seen beginning already at the end of the first century AD. The fusion of the Christian promise with the religion of the empire at the beginning of the fourth century confirms this fall of divine alterity into historical alteration. With the exception of Tertullian, the Christian thinkers of that time accommodate Roman power, its law, its political sovereignty and its armies, not only out of cautiousness but because God must have willed this power, even if persecutory, and this will must be loved. It is up to the Christians to turn this will to the benefit of the divine city. And under Constantine, the union of the promise of the remission of sins with the pagan civic religion follows the principle of history, in the modern sense of the term, namely the ordering of time along the lines of a spiritual and material eschatology. Modern revolutions repeat the gesture of revelation: here, now, a new life begins whose end is redemption (or emancipation, 164

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or some acquittal … ). Whether this recurrence of the gesture in chronological time is what you call intermittence, I do not know. But it seems that you are conceding me the essential when you note that this intermittence is ‘calculable’ within Christian awaiting but not within Jewish anxiety. E. G. – Two questions appear, in this context, unavoidable. The first has to do with your claim that the hyphen between ‘Jew’ and ‘Christian’ is displaced (ideological). Is there, then, not a sort of supplement that figures the ‘return of the real’ and that concerns the ‘Jew’, a ‘supplement’ that would allow one to say that the ‘bank’ is to the ‘putting into play’ what the ‘Jew’ is to the ‘Christian’? If this supplement is denied, how are we to define the difference between ‘duality’ and ‘duelity’, which marks, in the ‘duel’– in the dual/duel – an excess? To ask such a question is, however, to introduce two different uses of the word ‘Jew’. The first would define ‘Jew’ without supplement, that is, without the rejection of the tautological (the irrelational, the indifferential), without playing, therefore, the game of the ‘between-two’. The other would define ‘Jew’ with supplement, that is, with the rejection of the tautological. It could be said that the second ‘Jew’ takes over [prend la relève] for the first by distinguishing the symbolic ‘Jew’ from the pre-symbolic ‘Jew’ (who insists on the tautological by making its metaphoricity be forgotten). Is there not here some friction between the two philosophical projects? The first having to do with the unexchangeable, indiscursivity and the undecipherable, the second with discursive linking? And, inversely, for the ‘Christian’, the one without supplement would be the imperial one, while the one with supplement would reject such a will to dominate. And would not this ‘Judeo-Christian’ (who would not dominate his ‘Jewish brother’: Mt. 25: 40, 45) be able to ‘get along with’ or ‘understand’ [s’entendre] that other ‘Christian-Jew’ in whom ‘Jew’ is crossed with ‘Jew’?11 The ‘getting along together’ or ‘understanding’ would be, I think you understand, different on each side, for the distancing is, each time, internal: from the (tautological, irrelational-indiferential) ‘Jew’ to the ‘Jew’ (who puts himself into play through rejection); from the (dominating) ‘Christian’ to the (nonhierarchical) ‘Christian’. Would we not have here the beginning of a syn-thesis that would no longer sin, as you reproach the traditional ‘Judeo-Christian’ of having done, through the will to substitution in the service of domination? J.-F. L. – I concede to you that the Christian can avoid finding a supplement for himself on the Jewish side, so that we then have the Empire, the Church, the latent antisemitism of the West. Or, on the contrary, he can try to get along with the Jew in a fraternal way (though this fraternity might be suspect). But I do not understand how the incarnation of the voice in the person of Jesus can supplement the Jew’s relationship with this voice. The incarnation destroys this relation. Paul is the first to say so. E. G. – As mentioned earlier, a second form of inquiry concerning the question of the appearing seems to me necessary. Your critique of Hölderlin’s line (‘Das Glänzen der Natur ist höheres Erscheinen’: ‘The radiance of nature exalts the appearance’) could not be clearer: to trust in the visible is, today, to forget the Shoah.12 Yet this line, which is particularly difficult to translate, literally says that nature, insofar as it ‘shines’ (Glänzen), is a superior ‘appearing’ (Erscheinen: substantive-infinitive). What is luminous is thus 165

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implicitly divided into ‘luminosity’ and ‘shining’. Shining is sparkling, a luminosity that shines while integrating its interruptions. Were we to transpose this internal scission, the visible would then not be united – a unity – in itself. ‘Shining’ is to ‘luminosity’ what the ‘mode’ is to the ‘thing’ and what the exalted confirmation of the visible is to the visible itself. The ‘visible’ is in itself dis-tanced: between ‘shining’ and, in order to mark the extreme, abyssal horror. The ‘mode’ of the luminous is not the luminous itself. Can it thus be said that Auschwitz (as the collective name for horror) no longer has an equivalent in the order of the visible in general? That Auschwitz is the forgetting of what in the visible could and should be ‘sparkling’? The Shoah – the place where the spark of the luminous, of the visible, is extinguished through human fault? Does not the question of the ‘appearing’ get played out in the interstices of the appearing where the horror of this ‘Night’ ‘gets’ decided?13 From where does this ‘Night’ appear? Or else, from where is this ‘Night’ made to appear? If the appearing (and the possible repetition) of Auschwitz is linked to human responsibility (something of which I am deeply convinced), then we have to ask ourselves about how to avoid a future and still possible Auschwitz. And this avoidance might refer to the internal scission of the visible, of the luminous. Everything that can be made to appear is not worthy of the day, but it is necessary that ‘this’ be commemorated – and imperatively so: to commemorate Auschwitz as the inversion of the (sparkling) visible, as the Medusa of modernity. Or should we characterize as apologetic this internal scission of the visible, of the luminous? Is there a crossing-out ‘before’ every appearing, one that would thus be insurmountable? A ‘crossing-out’ giving (onto) nothing? Is one unpardonably responsible? J.-F. L. – Seen in the light of paganism or of a Christianism in love with creation (I am thinking, for example, of Hugh of Saint Victor, or Claudel), the reading of the Shoah that you offer might be accepted: the extermination conceals that which is sparkling within the visible. But in principle, the sensible, if plunged into the night by art, would have to be able to re-emerge from this immersion in non-being with the radiance of beauty. If there is a Hebraic Glänzen, however, it is that of the invisible. The dark and sparkling fire marks the ‘presence’ of the voice in advance of Moses’ people or during the ritual sacrifice. This fire does not cause nature to sparkle; it incinerates it. The ovens of the extermination are in no way sacrificial, and the Shoah is not a holocaust because what burns there is not some good (some possession) to be given up to the Lord, but the very listening to his law, the faculty of giving oneself up to the secret commandment. Auschwitz does not lend itself to commemoration. There can be no Er-innerung when the Innere of the ear has been destroyed. It is not the ‘presence’ of the voice that must be honoured; it is more appropriate to meditate upon its disappearance in the abandonment of a dark night. E. G. – Let us leave here, then, a blank, a silence … … and return, once more, to the apostle Paul (and/then to the blank of the beginning). Our discussion echoes a critical tradition that assigns Paul the role of a zealot serving an imperial cause. You are presently working on Jacob Taubes, who, in The Political

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Theology of Paul, develops an astonishing counter-reading of the apostle. Paul is there shown to be fanatical, to be sure, but he also appears as an eschatological revolutionary whose negative theology, as political critique, takes aim at every imperial aspiration, be it Caesarism or theocracy, by making reference to a cursed Messiah (Christ) and to the divine curse (whose undoing is symbolized by Yom Kippur).14 Is it possible that the image of Paul will be repositioned as a result of this reading? J.-F. L. – It is true that the Letters of Paul speak in many places of the intractable violence within every theocracy, whether imperial or not, as Taubes emphasizes. In other places, they also reveal the ‘cautiousness’ of which I spoke, which is a lot more than cautiousness. Is it a sign of respect for creation, including pagan Rome, or, on the contrary, a resolute indifference with regard to every community that is not a community of love? Is not a ‘theological politics’ always nourished by the impossible combination of a strategy and a cry? Paris, January 1995

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CHAPTER 24 ‘THE REAL EXTREME’

with Gérald Sfez, Rue Descartes, 1995 Translated by Roger McKeon

Gérald Sfez – 1. Today we are still talking about consensus building. We are opposed, of course, to the tacit and artificial consensus (the mute union sealed around shameful affects), the search for a rational consensus that could be found without a priori, through debate and by approximation, by the reconciliation of our judgements, provided that we master the tumult of passions. You, for your part, introduced the notion of differend as a major concept. In a politics that would stay tuned to the differend, to the incommensurability of voices and to what remains to be said, how should we think about the role of political passions? 2. To move beyond the disorder of passions, politics has put its trust in self-interest or moral obligation. Rousseau, Kant and many others, while clearly differentiating the levels, tried to speak simultaneously in both languages. They were, in this field, the bilinguals of reason. What do you think we should hope for today from these two resources of reason, calculating reason and obliging reason, and their link? 3. In the search for the right tone in politics, what values should be assigned to feelings such as indignation or admiration, feelings close to the cry, and which stand at the limit of any politics recognizing everything that finds its proper expression in the statement of human rights? How can we talk about the legitimacy of this limit to the politics of human rights? How do these feelings relate to political passions, and, if a passionate accent is to be credited, what is it that allows us to distinguish between a warped sense and a right sense of the inhuman? Passions are both vital and very worrisome: they can refer to the expression of the heterogeneity of affects or, on the contrary, to regimentation and the fixed idea, to democratic life or to the flare-up of a nationalist and exclusive fantasy. Nietzsche had developed a pass (un passe) with his distinction between active and reactive. What about you? Do you have a pass? 4. In a society like ours, a performance society where passions are either neutralized or mobilized and re-appropriated, how can we think the tying and untying of passions and politics? 5. In your writings, you have often spoken of political feelings such as sorrow or enthusiasm, experienced in the auditorium or by the spectators of historical events, and of their role in the possibility of attesting to what signals to history, according to a regulatory thought of finality, on the brink of Kantian philosophy, and, so to speak, beyond (hors) finality, around Adorno’s reflection. Today, events are taking place, as in the former Yugoslavia and in the countries of the East, which plunge us into the night and make us despair of the world and of ourselves, and others, more tenuous, which

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make us hope, as with the recognition between Israel and the PLO. Do you think that, in either case, something is happening like an event in political affectivity, and that upon this zeal between interest and feeling, in disagreement as in agreement, from our own reactions or their absence, we can decipher signs of history or, on the contrary, the beginning of the radio silence of any history? Jean-François Lyotard – Maybe distinguish between the scene of passions and the obscene of sufferance (le pâtir). The latter found a scenography in tragedy. It had owned the mysteries, mystography. Elsewhere the paraphernalia of masks, the protocols for crossing the sanctum, the ritual trance. And the skiagraphy that accomplishes the fetishes of desire in shadows on the wall. Everywhere an abundance of graphs to free us from the helpless sufferance. Liber is the god of this pass. What suffers in us asks for libations. The Roman liberalia celebrated the admission of the patient, the child, to virility. The vir is granted the right to dispose of the furor. But of that, no one disposes. It passes all legitimate uses, even in the imperial palace. It exposes itself in passionate scenes, investigations, intrigues, murders, rapes, incest, captations and diversions: the story is an endless libation. Politics: the tragedy of the ‘libertines’, slaves of sufferance, who believe they have been freed or are being freed from it. But passionate, sufferance is not. Neither amorous love nor aggressive hate. First comes sufferance, hardships. Then they merge, overlap, the black horse and the white horse, Satan and God. Sufferance, for its part, stands off stage; simple test of a deficit that passions play on stage to get rid of it. Concupiscence, jealousy, anger, idolatry, it is always the same complaint that prompts their role, the prompt of a single terror: to have to suffer from the unknown, to be liable, to be estranged. Fortunate or unfortunate, subject to fortune. On the political and domestic scene, the vir exercises the virtù, which is only sufferance made up as passion and this wanted passion, acts. By ‘off stage’, there is nothing fundamental to be understood, it is the shadow pushed back by the stage light. In this shadow suffering lurks, waiting for the comedy to end. But it doesn’t end, and neither does suffering. We think we have passions. It is the lure of politics, its tragic comedy. Cries, laughter, rattles, sobs, threats, the tumult represents itself in history with such intensity that no one doubts that the actors are possessed. The actors, as for them, seek to play these passions well, to make them play on the people, to have them shared. But fiction itself is fictional. We can play the passions well, we don’t play the passibility. The abandonment is real. So real that it only asks to be delivered from itself. Nothing stands so unsteady as the ordeal of sufferance. Nothing is readier to disavow itself. Passions, revelations happen to reap the withdrawal of dazed sufferance and enrol it in some plot. Blazing nights, noons of insolation reveal to sufferance its reason, the name of the enemy and the name of the friend, impassion it. At last comes the time for decisions. Always grave; we go for broke, gamble everything against everything. The passionate political scene is distributed according to these oppositions, it is Manichean, extremist. In any order, in the Pascalian sense, whether it be: Alexander extremist of power, Jesus of charity …

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But the sufferance they experience is not extremist, it is extreme. Unopposed. I like this text: Real extremes cannot be mediated precisely because they are real extremes […]. North and South are the opposite determinations of a single essence […] Real extremes cannot be mediated, they are both poles, similarly, both the male and female sex belong to one species [genre] […]. The true, real extremes would be a pole as opposed to a non-pole, a human as opposed to a non-human sex.1 Marx in 1843 confronted with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Brazen rather than confronted, seeking to break the binary passional principle of the intrigue. Real sounds here like what escapes oppositions, symbolic or imaginary, and is therefore not in opposition with them. Passions are polarized, sexualized and politicized extremes; sufferance is a real extreme. The extreme of what? Of nothing. We suffer from nothing, from an unknown night, of which we know nothing. In extremis rebus. The res again. It keeps you out of breath, it gives and takes it away without warning. We know nothing of it except that it holds us. Which is exactly sufferance. Whatever the scene: that of power, charity or intellect. They are all political, in the higher sense of the word: existence gambles its limit here. Conception as well is subject to this sufferance and gives rise to passion. Passions of intelligence abound in history. I’ll elect that Arab’s name – was it Al-Kwazarimi? – who pushed or played so far the wish to calculate that it made him conceive the sifr, that is (from ital. zefiro), the zero. With this figure, passion found the notion of that threshold it is, a number that is not a number, a being-here that is already nothing more than being, which is to say, nothing. A breath. The role of passions in politics? If they are human, scenographers, polarized, zoographed to the point of rhetoric, this role is obvious, it is that of all heroes. Ambition, envy and jealousy, hatred and love, melancholy, hope, everything works, all that makes a character, the conqueror, the skilful, the manager, the revolted, easily transcribable on the domestic scene (father, uncle, son, etc.). But rather than a role played by passions in politics, it is what is called politics which is, by constitution, enlisted by passions. The question today would be: Does the sufferance, ultrasonic, infrared and ultraviolet, still command the political ‘enchantment’ and its nightmares, its polyphony, its cacophony, its chromatism? ‘Command’ being said without any intention, by the way. This is the case, it seems to me, only as much as the political falls under the sacred: existences sacrificed, by themselves or by others (friendly and unfriendly), to obtain justice, and perhaps remission, from the tumult of history. In our country, everyone knew that the last sacred monster in politics was de Gaulle. (Of a knowledge that owed nothing to partisan assent.) There is no need to go around the world or roam current history. The political is a boulevard theatre where passions are enrolled, coded, spectres of themselves. Politics here is that made in the rich men’s club chairs. You sit in on the G7 sessions only with 171

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a clean shave and a smile on your face. Raising hell is not an option. They kill and die en masse out there, really, in real lives, horribly. The horror is all the greater as it seems that the sufferance exposes itself in its raw state. The serene spirits that we are cannot perceive these killings as anything other than the symptoms of a disease, the effects of an epidemic of convulsive fever. We try to treat those unfortunates ‘humanely’. Serious business is in the hands of federal bank managers who have no passion, even for money. For the rest, the world political agency is the Red Cross and Médecins sans frontières [Doctors without Borders]. The wretched are patients, not passionates, in our eyes. Would they be in their own eyes, we doubt that the holy faith consists mainly in slaughtering journalists and nuns. Is it necessary, then, to have a ‘pass’ to discern good and bad passions? It is true that the reactives are often bad (but the resistances … ?) It does not follow that the good are active. Where is the therapist who can make the departure between the two? Nietzsche discriminated on the basis of a metaphysics of will, considered as the artist’s sufferance. The criterion could be sufficient to eliminate the cynicism of power or the illusion of hopes: Bismarck, the socialists. But the names of history, the great artists in community, were never judged without hesitation by the philosopher with a hammer. Obsolete metaphysics. To found, that is to say, to legitimize, even as an artist, who needs it now? One needs to calculate, without passion, and with nothing but income as a pass. Employment, foreign trade, indicators suffice. We are a large spacecraft on autopilot. The dashboard makes it possible to correct reported faults thanks to feedback circuits, themselves corrigible. We’ll have to blast off when Earth drops us. Politics is one of the correction circuits of the system. Passions are opportunities for dysfunction. Computers are a better deal than we are, they’re impassive. The sacrificial deployments, holocausts perhaps, genocides surely, to which the withdrawal of the Empires gives rise in abandoned areas, reveal the violence of sufferance. But what of this in the aseptic politics of rich countries? A diffuse anxiety, which does not find its scene on the public theatre. Where passes the extreme real?

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CHAPTER 25

‘LA VIE DE MALRAUX (MALRAUX’S LIFE) MUST BE READ AS A COLLECTION OF LEGENDS’

with Philippe Bonnefis, Magazine littéraire, 1996 Translated by Roger McKeon

Philippe Bonnefis – Jean-François Lyotard, reader of Malraux. Rather surprising? No? Jean-François Lyotard – Indeed, this book could not have been foreseen. Let’s just let it look like an accident. It doesn’t exclude an affinity, on the contrary. As a young man, before and during the war, I was impressed by the author of The Human Condition, Man’s Hope, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg. Malraux was the name of a writing and a thought in which the problem of belief arose with severity. As I came out of a long spiritual crisis, it seemed clear to me that ‘the question’ was indeed Malraux’s: How, once the great objects of belief, God and man had fallen (in 1945, one could no longer be humanist), how to live and think with such mourning? Malraux was obsessed with this question. He was it, and only it. And he remained it to the end. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, I was a high school student, not very politicized, reflecting about writing rather, reading poets, while the massacre raged nearby. I was to become a very committed politicist a few years later. But ‘the question’ remained open, in spite of convictions. Malraux was to have been for me a way to access politics through the mourning of politics. P. B. – But why is it that this underground watercourse resurfaces precisely at the beginning of the 1990s? Just when Malraux seems to be readable again? J.-F. L. – The question calls for a double answer. One by recourse to the socio-political, literary, theoretical context: let us say, to make it short, that at the turn of the 1980s, the discredit that had fallen upon the novel as a form declines. Narrative works, some of them classic, find their way to publication. It is permitted to read novels, to reread them. But what should be invoked above all is a temporality completely different from that of circumstances. That which interested Malraux so much: the works appear, disappear, reappear according to mysterious rhythms. They are called up or banished by the needs of current creation, which are unpredictable. One should ask oneself about those recent works with which Malraux can strangely ‘rhyme’ or be tuned to, and which Malraux … P. B. – I understand Malraux, but why a ‘Life of Malraux’? A Trojan horse in the biographical fortress? J.-F. L. – Is it a Trojan horse hiding within biography, is it biography that breaks into the antibiographer par excellence that Malraux is? I succumbed to a perhaps cavalier pleasure: to challenge what is foolishness in the ordinary biographical project, which

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consists in seeking in life the reason for the work. If there is a Trojan horse, it was Malraux who introduced it. Rather than banning biography, he changed the game by making his life a work. A raw event has no value whatsoever for him, it doesn’t even exist, as long as it is not signed, assumed, staged. Then it becomes ‘poetic fact’, and Malraux’s life can and must be read as a collection of legends. My reading followed this thread. So it had to be written in a relationship to language that was ‘novel like’. The book is not novelized, it is not historical either, but its writing is literary, if the word means anything; and for the philosopher that I am, that meaning is of a very ancient temptation long withstood. P. B. – On the subject of biography, Sartre declared: A culture must always place itself from bottom to top and not consider as do the bourgeois, people halfway up from the stomach; they see the hands, the shoulders, the face, and it is on those that biographies are written. In reality, a biography should be written from the bottom, from the feet, from the legs that support, from the sex, in short first from the other half of the body.1 Does your ‘hypobiography’, as you call it, have anything to do with the Sartrian project? J.-F. L. – The principle formulated by Sartre is, as always, of good dialectic, inspired by bad conscience: the true point of view is that of the most disadvantaged. Assuming that to be so, who says that this point of view is obtained by a simple reversal, like from head to toe? Who says that sex and feet, however disadvantaged they may appear in the bourgeois project, are not secretly in control of the most privileged? P. B. – The most disadvantaged in your view would be called the body inasmuch as it is destined to be left to vermin, destined to the earth. The book begins with the pit, the grave. J.-F. L. – Is that disadvantaged? Malraux has the sense of an underside, the phobia of a ditch swarming with vermin waiting for us. We will be devoured and the vermin will perpetuate itself. Now, this terror gives rise to an ontology of the underground Rehash (Redite), hear mute, because it is cosmological as well. And it is from this tenebrous representation of life that the ‘question’ can be asked in truth, the question of creation or wonder. P. B. – So, ‘hypobiography’ because the book relates to that life underneath? J.-F. L. – Because it’s basically a hypothetical biography. P. B. – The bios that is in ‘biography’, you lead us to read it as the bios that is in ‘biology’: life reduced to the body, as an equivalence that goes without saying. J.-F. L. – This body has the terrible advantage over the mind of having to face experiences that the mind does not even know how to think, death and sex. All right then, consider the two great aspects of repetition: corruption and rebirth. The body, which you say is biological, is first of all for Malraux this body ‘destined’. Destiny, for him, is nothing else but death and reproduction. 174

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P. B. – But this destiny does not make a story, the flesh has a story, not this body. Now, whether we like it or not, a biography is a story to be told. What kind of a story can this biography possibly tell? J.-F. L. – There are the events that scroll by in ‘the flow of things’, as Malraux says, prisoners of the succession that repeats itself, of the dead life of the Rehash And then what happens can suddenly take on an intensity, a peculiar presence, as if a sign appeared in the middle of the monotonous flow of appearances. I say appearance because the strange mutation is always staggering and precarious if we are to believe Malraux. And also because, as in the visionary spasm, it upsets the body. So this is what remains to be told: within the ordinary historical succession, this strange ‘history of signs’, which has no order and is not successive. That’s why I made use of ellipses, of starred sequence montages in the linear diachrony. Ellipses that short-circuit temporal factuality, at the same time as they negotiate with it to tell stories. P. B. – Precisely: ‘Everything from Malraux, right to the very end, will bear a cubist signature’, you write.2 Adding that ‘he needed what was dry, hard, cubical […] he wanted easy, nonsensical life to come crashing down against the hard bone of some discipline’.3 There is, beautifully defined, a lifestyle. Even more so, the style of a mounted work, as you show it, in elliptical scenarios. But the style as well, it seems to me, of Malraux’s biography that you propose to us. Cubist itself, in more than one respect. Product, at any rate, of this elliptical violence, which does not so much bring together facts (which happens, but is not, I believe, decisive), as it confronts every time the fact, either, in the best of cases, to the power that exceeds it and that Malraux calls ‘a present beyond’; or, but then in the worst case, to the bestial Rehash that belittles, you say, the most beautiful scenes to the rank of ‘a tiny intrigue fomented out of the illusion that one is an I-who-lives.’ J.-F. L. – The cutting edge of this alternative is what has sustained the radicality of cubism from the beginning. From his first published article, ‘Les Origines de la poésie cubiste’ (The origins of cubist poetry), young Malraux expresses his admiration for the work of Max Jacob, Reverdy and Cendrars, because it frees up an imagination more real than reality, through controlled processes of distanciation. The Russian and German cinemas of the 1930s exerted an intense attraction for him because of the syncopation of shots or sequences by which the narrative emancipates itself from realistic imitation. And Malraux will find similar virtues in what he conceives of as journalism. I could go on but I would have to quote all the texts of literary and art criticism from beginning to end. The ellipse, more than a stylistic figure, is a generic name for the ‘means’ that the pen, camera, brush or chisel use to free the present beyond in the event datum. For lack of this discipline, writing will only flatter the subjective illusion. I will add that we should extend this uncompromising rule to actions: Malraux’s politics is cubist, his adventures and his wars are. ‘Farfelu’ (daffy), a truculent word to signify the harsh discipline that the imagination must exert on viscous reality. Lastly, you are right to stress that in any case, the wonder of the work or relapse to the Rehash, the result of the work does not belong to the worker but to a power that exceeds him. It will be ‘once again, again’ or ‘as never before’ … And the difference is not easy to discern. 175

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P. B. – With regard to the Rehash, I should like to make two points. The first relates to the way you assimilate its drivel to the song of the larvae. Should it open its mouth, insects come out, not words. It speaks the language of ants, of millipedes … My question is obviously not about the assimilation itself but about the hierarchical redistribution of Malraux’s works, which is its logical consequence – The Royal Way here taking precedence over them all. Texts as commented on as The Human Condition, Man’s Hope and Le Miroir des limbes (The Mirror of Limbo) slide into the background. As if the Asian jungle, that wilderness swarming with vermin, that Urwald (primeval forest), offered the whole work something, for you, like its primal scene … ? J.-F. L. – It is impossible to understand what is at stake in Malraux’s life or Malraux’s work if one makes the raid in the Khmer forest into a whimsical adventure. Malraux goes to Banteay Srei to seek the evidence of his desire, seized on the extreme of his ambivalence. There he finds horror under the species of swarming death, and there he finds proof of the present beyond in the form of a sacred statuary, treasure of transcendence lingering for centuries in the midst of vermin. Now, it is this raid that provides the substance of The Royal Way. The novel is arguably even more pessimistic than the Indochinese affair was: Perken’s project, or his temptation, to leave his mark in the forest, to leave a scar in history – which is of a politicist as much and more than of an adventurer – this project fails, as the initial fiasco at the Somali brothel anticipated. That said, I will not go so far as to give the Khmer novel precedence over all the other works. Rather than a singular privilege, The Royal Way shares, with many other works, that which the East holds in Malraux’s geography: in the Orient, the real of reality, its most powerful imaginary, lets itself be seen and thought. Chinese, Indochinese, Indian and Muslim, they have for Malraux, in some way, a virtue unknown to Europe, to know how to think the Rehash, to make work of it and wisdom, without concealing it by endeavours of the will. P. B. – But the Rehash, to return to it again, the value of this motif of the Rehash can it change? And, for instance, is it possible to imagine that it can take positive forms? Is this not even what we absolutely must imagine, when we are told that a politician like de Gaulle ultimately does nothing more than reflect in acts the long sequence of his metamorphoses (Clovis, Charles VII, Jeanne la Lorraine, Richelieu, Colbert, the Emperor, the great Carnot and Clemenceau)? when we are invited to consider the elephant as ‘the wisest of animals’ under the pretext that it is the only one that remembers its past lives; when we see an ancient work of art coming out of limbo, awakened by a current work? J.-F. L. – It is, in almost no case that you quote, pure Rehash: it takes an ‘awakening’ in fact to use the Buddhist term. The Appeal of 18 June is this awakening, just like a Picasso drawing wakes up a Cycladic figurine. As for the elephant, it is a model of this Eastern wisdom that we have just spoken about, who doesn’t even need a decision to recall to itself the metamorphosis: the impossible dream of the Westerner. One must beware of this word metamorphosis that Malraux uses in two almost opposite ways as if to derail his reader. The Rehash (Redite) metamorphoses the given forms, but it invents nothing. Thus at the beginning of the Mirror of Limbo the earth metamorphoses itself, but as

176

‘La Vie de Malraux (Malraux’s Life)’

insects do, without creating anything. There is in Malraux the black impression that the quantity of forms available in nature is finite, which is why the metamorphosis of works which is that of the gods, and which is endless, turns to enigma, wonder and almost miracle, even if it is precarious. P. B. – On one side the wonder (Malraux, ‘dealer in wonders’), on the other, the beastliness (the body doomed to larvae). Either reality sucks, or we’re in the unreal. What remains is art. But art … is it the wonder rediscovered in spite of the beastliness ? J.-F. L. – Rather through the beastliness, driven to its limit. Think of Goya. But ‘art’ is too little to say. Malraux’s recurrent conviction is that childhood has a primary affinity with wonder. Picasso’s ‘little man’, of course, but also Corniglion-Molinier letting his plane drop in the midst of a hailstorm, his face lighting up like that of a child floating on cloud nine. The capacity of marvels is at the beginning, the very origin, even. Perhaps art consists only in respecting this capacity, only in listening to the wonder possible even in the beastliness, as the pilot’s example shows. Much more yet, nothing beats the worst beastliness to experience the quality of wonder. That’s why we sign really only in black blood. P. B. – Yes, the Khmer dancer as an apparition. Since the mass graves of ‘14 the dancers dance only at the edge of the pits. And you suppose that childhood itself always goes through this already: your first chapter puts a young child on the edge of an open grave. An ‘opening’, in the musical sense. J.-F. L. – Maybe. Invented at my own risk. You know, the only way to be faithful to creation, is to invent, would one be only an amateur. The scene of the child by the pit does indeed function like a musical opening, but its rule operates in a recurrent way throughout the Malraux life-work that I have tried to read, to write, as an art lover. Same ‘initiating’ and musical stave when the escaped prisoner crosses the demarcation line in ‘41, and all this, these episodes, given to the limbo that invents them in truth. P. B. – What is certain, on the other hand, is this conversion which your book mysteriously makes us witness, this metamorphosis of the baneful mother, she who is in league with death, into a mother of marvels, an invisible mother who in art is a source of presences, ‘who can grant life to works over the death that pervades the centuries’, and whose countersignature the artist, by signing, seeks to obtain. So that there would be two mothers, the bad one and the good one. But two mothers or two figures of the one and only mother? J.-F. L. – According to my reading, without hesitation, two aspects of a single maternal figure. Obstinately banished as a whole. But clearly more present under her maleficent mask. I took it upon myself to give the benefactress her part. Her fragrance rises up here and there, in the manner of a slip of the tongue as in this sentence fallen one doesn’t know wherefrom in the middle of a passage from the Mirror of Limbo: ‘Mothers do not haunt only the dark’. They are not only the cruel Moirai. A small ‘non-professional’ census would suffice to ascertain that maternal love models the lasting attachment a 177

J.-F. Lyotard: Interviews and Debates

work can elicit. I may have exaggerated the importance of the Donatrix, if one must stick to the letter of the texts. But I’m sure I wasn’t mistaken. The importance that the book gives to Malraux’s relations with the few women he loved should be developed and justified here. I don’t mean to lift the slightest ‘little secret’ (I evoke nothing that isn’t already public), but to make one understand how his relationship with the ‘sexual’, in the profound sense of an uncontrollable alterity, puts his cubist resolution to the test. What beastliness indeed, is the need to love … ! P. B. – The same ambiguity, throughout the whole book, works the question of the Active passive signature, in turn. One signs, one is signed. Offering here, and withdrawal there. Made to slice, cut short or, on the contrary, seek contact. To say nothing of all the cases, which I will not list, all the situations in which one finds oneself, as if by miracle, relieved of this obligation to sign; either that desire, as in Asia, espouses what negates it; or that the will, of some (think of Mao, Gandhi, de Gaulle), ‘gives the repetition of the same an appearance that eludes it’. But, exemptions included, for they are to be included (see the cat who signs without signing – but signs), that makes for a total of many signatures. Let’s say rather a singularly illegible signature. Tangled like initials. Like Malraux’s very name, which is, if I read you correctly, only the geometric point of all those signatures. J.-F. L. – Geometric point, you are too good: that implies a stable space, identical for all the figures connected to it. But if you consider that signing by name entails filiation, then thing get complicated. For it is said of both the Russian Revolution and the Gaullist renovation that one does not inherit them by simple succession but only insofar as your works raise you to their height. To be the son is nothing. Inheritance demands metamorphosis. One inherits Rembrandt if one is Picasso. If, precisely, one has metamorphosed space (and light, etc.). If the artist has accepted to sink into the distress of no longer repeating the master’s signature, to no longer know how to sign. Any true signature brings together several crossed out signatures. It is made of erasures and surcharges and for this reason it is difficult to decipher. Yet it is the essential. For it is not the living individual named Malraux who gives his signature its existence, but the signed work which may circumvent for a time the name and oblivion of the Rehash. What signs under this name is not Mr André Malraux but a metamorphic community, so to speak. Exactly what Malraux, at a later age, calls a ‘block’. The ‘Michelet block’, for instance, that he happened upon during the 1940s war, when he came into contact with the abandoned and imprisoned people. Michelet is the one who had already signed this people, de Gaulle will sign it in his turn, and Malraux counter-signs it by writing The Walnut Trees of Altenburg. The blocks overlap: Barrès and Maurras in the Michetde-Gaulle block, Chateaubriand in the Malraux-Michelet block. Such is the strange topology of the precarious register of works. These blocks, we never end recarving them; these signatures, we never finish deciphering them.

178

NOTES

Chapter 1 1 Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 120. ‘Publish or perish!’ is in English in the French text, an essay dedicated to Gilles Deleuze, titled ‘Ligne générale’ [The General Line]. 2

Ibid. translation modified.

3

In this volume, Chapter 5 [p. 29].

4

In this volume, Chapter 6 [p. 33].

5

For more details of Lyotard’s writings on film and experiments in the media, see Acinemas: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Film, ed. Graham Jones and Ashley Woodward (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

6

In this volume, Chapter 25 [p. 173].

7

In this volume, Chapter 22 [p. 149].

8 Ibid. 9

Cornelius Castoriadis et al., Socialisme ou Barbarie Anthologie (La Bussière, France: Acratie, 2007).

10 Cornelius Castoriadis et al., A Socialisme ou Barbarie Anthology, trans. Anon (London: Eris, 2018), viii. 11 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv. 12 Lyotard, Rapport sur les problèms du savoir dans les sociétés industrielles les plus développées (Quebec City: Conseil des universités, 1979). 13 Gilles Deleuze, ‘À propos des nouveaux philosophes et d’un problème plus général’, Supplément de Minuit, no. 24, May 1977, reprinted in Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–95, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), 139. Translation modified. 14 Lyotard, ‘Lessons in Paganism’, trans. David Macey, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 123. 15 In this volume, Chapter 9 [p. 41]. 16 Lyotard, ‘The Situation in North Africa’ (1956), in Jean-François Lyotard: Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 171. 17 Lyotard, ‘A New Phase in the Algerian Question’ (1957), in Lyotard, Jean-François Lyotard: Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 187–188.

Notes 18 Another response to such scepticism is Libidinal Economy (1974), the subject of the short interview in Chapter 7. For Lyotard’s remarks on Libidinal Economy as representing a moment of ‘nihilism or complete scepticism’ see Chapter 19 [p. 105] in this volume. 19 Lyotard, Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1973), 11, my translation. This reflection comes in ‘Dérives’, dated October 1972, one of the sections of Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud which made it into English only in a truncated form. 20 Maurice Audin was an Algerian mathematician and non-combatant supporter of the FLN, whose arrest in 1957 was followed by his disappearance; the cover-up of his torture and death at the hands of the French state was revealed in subsequent widely publicized trials. In 2018, President Emmanuel Macron finally apologized to the family of Audin, the first public admittance of the use of torture and summary executions during the war. 21 Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 19. 22 Personal communication with Dick Veerman, 8 March 2019. 23 Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–85, trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (London: Turnaround, 1992), 6. The drafts for this collection, including the ‘editors’ preface’, are housed in the Lyotard archive: JFL 43–1. 24 The broadcast is accessible via sites of L’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, ID-PHD98024863. 25 In this volume, Chapter 14 [p. 67]. 26 First published in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, no. 2 (1990). 27 Jacques Derrida, ‘Lyotard and Us’, in Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard, ed. Claire Nouvet, Zrinka Stahuljak and Kent Still (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007) 1–26. 28 Lyotard, The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 360–392. 29 In this volume, Chapter 21 [p. 135]. 30 In this volume, Chapter 18 [p. 95].

Chapter 4 1

Martial Raysse (b. 1936) is an artist and a founder member of the group Nouveaux Réalistes, founded in 1960. – Ed.

2

SDS or Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund (Socialist German Student Union) refers to the German Student Movement, in particular the protests in West Germany in the late 1960s. – Ed.

3

Michael Heizer (b. 1944) is an artist best known for site-specific works such as Double Negative, an earthwork located in the Mojave desert, Nevada. Completed in 1970, this example of land art consists of two straight trenches, each measuring 9 m wide, 15 m deep, 457 m long, which straddle a natural canyon. – Ed.

4

The critique by artist Daniel Buren (b. 1938) can be found in the essay ‘Critical Limits’ (1970), trans. Laurent Sauerwein, in Daniel Buren, 5 Texts (London: John Weber Gallery, 1973), 48: ‘But it is no longer a matter of applying paint to canvas as if it were extracted from the landscape. The conquest is now made directly on nature itself. One flees the city to propagate one’s disease across the countryside.’ – Ed.

180

Notes 5

The Movement began on 22 March 1968 at the University of Nanterre, near Paris; led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Danny le Rouge), an anarchistic sociology student, it was instrumental in bringing about the May 68 ‘revolution’ in France. – Trans.

6

The literary journal Tel Quel, published in Paris between 1960 and 1982, was associated with avant-garde approaches, including an initial support for the nouveau roman; it carried articles by many leading theorists including Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and its founding co-editor Philipe Sollers. The political position of the Tel Quel committee moved from supporting the French Communist Party in the late 1960s towards a Maoist line of cultural and political thinking in the early to mid-1970s. Lyotard’s response to the question highlights his separation from this particular milieu at this time. – Ed.

Chapter 5 1

Émile Benveniste (1902–76), French linguist and semiotician. – Ed.

2

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), poet. Michel Butor (1926–2016), writer. Lyotard pays attention to examples of their work in Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). – Ed.

3

The reference here is to Lyotard’s involvement in the anti-authoritarian, militant marxist groups Socialisme ou Barbarie and Pouvoir ouvrier, between 1952 and 1966, and their eponymous publications. See Chapter 1 in this volume [pp. 1–12]. – Ed.

4

The Experimental University Centre of Vincennes, later University of Paris-VIII Vincennes, where Lyotard taught from 1970 to 1987. – Ed.

5

«Sous les pavés la plage !» was a metaphoric slogan of the 1968 protesters: cobblestones ripped out of the streets of Paris to be thrown at the police forces rest on a bed of sand. – Trans.

Chapter 7 1

Unlike most translators of J.-F. Lyotard, I am not convinced that keeping jouissance in French is the best option, and I am not comfortable with it. Be it admitted, then, that ‘pleasuring’ has the same meaning. Just one more convention among so many others. – Trans.

2

In English in the original. – Trans.

3

In English in the original. – Trans.

4

The reference is to the political pamphlet ‘Français, encore un effort, si vous voulez être républicains’ by the Marquis de Sade, which features in his 1795 book La philosophie dans le boudoir (Philosophy in the Bedroom). – Ed.

5

Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), Jacob Boehme in English: Lutheran theologian, mystic and philosopher. – Ed.

6

Robert van Gulik (1910–1967) published ‘Sexual Life in Ancient China’ (English, 1961; French, 1971), introducing many aspects of traditional Chinese sexual discourse to the West. – Ed.

Chapter 8 1

At the start of the academic year 1974–5, Jacques Lacan’s son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, became the head of the department of psychoanalysis at Vincennes; as a result 181

Notes Lacan became unofficially involved in restructuring the department. Early in November Lacan was approached officially and asked to teach by Claude Frioux, the president of the university; unable to commit, Lacan proposed that Miller should act as his representative to re-orient the department. Objections were raised by some staff members and the affair was disclosed to Le Monde by journalist Roger-Pol Droit. One of the famous casualties of the ‘reorganization’ was Luce Irigaray, whose proposed module for the 1974 course was rejected by the committee appointed by Lacan. See Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). As it was part of the philosophy department, there was no clinical training or certification of psychoanalysis at Vincennes. – Ed.

Chapter 9 1

The information given in parentheses here is a footnote in the original; it is inserted in the body of the text to highlight the fact that courses at Vincennes were open to the public, and for this reason were often scheduled outside traditional working hours. – Ed.

2

Lyotard was a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie from 1954 to 1964, during which time he wrote on the Algerian struggle for independence for the group’s eponymous journal. Many of these writings are collected in Lyotard, Political Writings. See Chapters 1 and 20 in this volume. – Ed.

3

Issues surrounding prostitution in France were brought to the fore in June 1975 when sex workers occupied Saint-Nizier church in Lyon, in protest against increased fines, police harassment and lack of action on recent murder cases; a strike and further occupations took place in other French cities, before police intervention. – Ed.

4

The 1972 ‘Common Programme’, a platform for a united left electoral alliance, centred on a series of radical reforms, including extensive nationalizations, welfare state expansion, and the strengthening of union rights. It reflected the growing reform ambitions of the French left during the 1970s. – Trans.

5

The term ‘Nationalitarian’ was introduced by Anouar Abdel-Malek to identify struggles of resistance against imperial powers: see La Dialectique Sociale (Paris: Seuil, 1972). – Ed.

6

Seguin Island refers to the Billancourt Renault Factory where a strike by 377 immigrant workers, demanding equal pay for equal work, closed the 7000-strong factory from March to April 1973. The initial settlement negotiated and publicized by the Trade Unions was rejected by the striking workers. – Ed.

Chapter 10 1

182

Published in French in 1977, these books do not exist as independent translations in English: Instructions païennes can be found in The Lyotard Reader as ‘Lessons in Paganism’; several essays from Rudiments païens appear in Toward the Postmodern; Récits tremblants [Trembling narratives], which was devised with the artist Jacques Monory, does not exist in English translation. – Ed.

Notes

Chapter 11 1

Rungis is best known as the location of the largest wholesale food market in the world, which serves the Paris metropolitan area and beyond. – Trans.

2

The Bonnet-Stoléru laws, named after the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of State for Immigration Workers, respectively, refer to strict controls on entry and residency rights of immigrant workers, including a scheme to forcibly repatriate workers and their families (1978–81). – Ed.

3

The reference is to the essay ‘L’endurance et la profession’, published in the journal Critique, no. 369 (1978), translated as ‘Endurance and the Profession’ in Political Writings.

4

The Philosophy Department at Vincennes had its right to confer nationally recognized degrees removed by Olivier Guichard, Minister for Education, in 1970; see Kiff Bamford, Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Lives (London: Reaktion, 2017), 95–103. – Ed.

Chapter 12 1

This paper is a transcript of the discussion that followed the lecture given by Lyotard in 1980 on the occasion of the colloquium, ‘Les fins de l’homme: À partir du travail de Jacques Derrida’, Cerisy-la-Salle. The proceedings of the colloquium were published under the same title and edited by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (Paris: Galilée, 1981). The text of the discussion can be found on pp. 310–315. – Trans. Lyotard’s lecture ‘Discussions, or: Phrasing “after Auschwitz”’ is available in English translation in The Lyotard Reader, where it appears together with an edited version of the notes from this debate, 360–392. – Ed.

2

In keeping with my translation of The Differend I will translate the French word phrase by its English cognate rather than by the semantically more correct sentence. English phrase like French phrase can be used without appreciable semantic difference either as a noun or as a verb, whereas to sentence is a verb used only in a juridical sense, as when one speaks of ‘sentencing someone to death’. The explicit content of this essay would seem to make even a neologistic use of the verb, to sentence, undesirable and possibly dangerous. Phrase, on the other hand, is a term of very wide extension and encompasses utterances at various levels between word and sentence. – Trans.

3

Jacques Derrida, ‘En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici’, in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, ed. François Laruelle (Paris: Jean-Michel Place Éditeur, 1980), 21–60; ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’, trans. Ruben Berezdivin, in Re-reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi (London: Athlone, 1991). – Trans.

Chapter 13 1

For the range of Lyotard’s writings on contemporary artists, including Marcel Duchamp and Jacques Monory mentioned here, see Lyotard, Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists, 7 volumes (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009–13). – Ed.

2 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 11. 3

Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Luc Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985).

183

Notes 4

Lyotard, ‘Introduction à une étude du politique selon Kant’ in Rejouer le Politique, ed. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 1981); a version of this is incorporated into Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). – Ed.

5 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 53; translation modified. 6

For a discussion of Lyotard’s approach to university education, see Chapter 11 in this volume. – Ed.

7 Lyotard, Political Writings, 70–76. 8

Lyotard, ‘Lessons in Paganism’ in The Lyotard Reader.

9

In March 1984 Lyotard presented ‘Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ at Trinity College, Cambridge, where the support of junior faculty and students was notable. – Ed.

10 ‘It’s as if a line …,’ trans. Mary Lydon, Contemporary Literature, vol. 29, no. 3 (1988), 61–80. 11 PCB: Student shorthand for the first year of medical school with its emphasis on physics, chemistry and biology, whence the initials. – Trans. 12 CRS: Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, a special reserve police under the jurisdiction of the French Minister of the Interior. The reference is to the Algerian struggle for liberation. – Trans. 13 Doriotist refers to someone sympathetic to the ideas of Jacques Doriot, the founder of the ultra-nationalist Parti populaire français and co-founder of the fascist Légion des volontaires français, a militia which fought with the German Army during the Second World War. – Ed.

Chapter 14 1

This description is printed on the back cover of the French edition: Le Différend (Paris: Minuit, 1983). – Ed.

2

Les Immatériaux: exhibition co-curated by Lyotard and Thierry Chaput at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1985; for further details see Chapters 15–17 in this volume. – Ed.

3

The results of this experiment were displayed as part of the exhibition, made accessible offsite via the Minitel network and published as part of the catalogue to the exhibition under the title: Épreuves d’écriture (Writing Proofs). – Ed.

Chapter 16 1

At the time of this interview Bernard Blistène (b. 1955) was a young curator with the Musée national d’art moderne (MNAM), based at the Centre Georges Pompidou, whose role included liaising with the exhibition team regarding contemporary art exhibits from the collection; he became Director of the MNAM in 2013. – Ed.

2

The work of these particular artists is cited here by Blistène to illustrate the range of approaches to painting about which Lyotard has written: from the conceptual work of Daniel Buren to the lyrically representational paintings and drawings of Valerio Adami, the hyperrealism of Jacques Monory to the post-Duchampian approach of Shusaku Arakawa. See Lyotard, Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists. – Ed.

184

Notes

Chapter 17 1

The Comité Consultatif National d’Éthique was created by order of the French Government in 1983 to advise on bioethical issues. – Ed.

2

Prisunic was a French chain of low-price department stores. In 1968 a mail-order catalogue was launched, marketing interior decoration schemes including furniture and art by wellknown names, alongside the slogan: ‘100 % PRISUNIC, Art included.’ – Ed.

Chapter 18 1

These two debates took place following the presentations of Guy Petitdemange (‘Philosophy and violence’) and Jacques Rolland (‘A logic of ambiguity’), the full texts of which were included in the publication Autrement que Savoir: Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Osiris, 1988). The present edited versions of the debates are as they appear in Lyotard, Logique de Levinas, ed. Paul Audi (Paris: Verdier, 2015). – Ed.

2

Conatus essendi whose obstinacy to be perhaps only prolongs, in all modalities of life, the nucleation and atomic confinement of matter, ‘being as being’. Forgive me for this metaphorical bridging. (Note by E. L.)

3

It is not by chance that the reader finds, apart from this allusion, no comment of mine concerning the observations made by Jean-Luc Marion on love. He would have led us, I thought, a little too far from Levinas’ work. Simply this: my silence was not consent. (J.-F. L. retrospective note).

Chapter 19 1

‘Judiciousness in Dispute, or Kant after Marx’, trans. Cecile Lindsay in The Lyotard Reader, 351; Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 31, 35. The description ‘“Mon livre de philosophie,” dit-il’ [‘My book of philosophy’, he says] is printed on the back cover of the Le Différend (Paris: Minuit, 1983). – Ed.

2

‘A Svelte Appendix to the Postmodern Question’, Political Writings, 26.

3

See Chapter 16 in this volume.

4

See Chapter 13 in this volume [p. 59].

5 Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 9–25. 6

‘Pagan Instructions’ in The Lyotard Reader, 133.

7

Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming.

8

See Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper Row, 1972), 19. ‘What determines both, time and Being, in their own, that is, in their belonging together, we shall call: Ereignis, the event of appropriation. Ereignis will be translated as Appropriation or event of Appropriation. One should bear in mind, however, that “event” is not simply an occurrence, but that which makes any occurrence possible.’ – Trans.

9 Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 13. 10 Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Continuum, 2004), 3. 11 ‘Sensus Communis’, in Judging Lyotard, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1992), 1–25.

185

Notes 12 The Differend, it is recommended that the reader consult the cited paragraphs in full; the extracts presented here are taken from the English translation by Georges Van den Abbeele. – Ed. 13 ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime’, Artforum, vol. 20 (April 1982). 14 Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question “What Is Enlightenment”’, in Kant: Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nesbit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 19, para 57, note 1. 15 The Differend, xi–xii. 16 ‘Judiciousness in Dispute’, in The Lyotard Reader; it is worth noting the title in French: ‘Judicieux dans le différend’, 324–359. – Ed. 17 See Chapter 4 in this volume [p. 17]. 18 ‘Argument and Presentation: The Foundation Crisis’, trans. Chris Turner, Cultural Politics, vol. 9, no. 2 (2013), 117–143; this citation, 126. 19 Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 6. 20 ‘Acinema’, in The Lyotard Reader; see also Lyotard, What to Paint? Adami, Arakawa, Buren, trans. Antony Hudek (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012), 169–180. 21 Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 83. 22 Lyotard, ‘Note on the Meaning of “Post”’, in The Postmodern Explained, 87–93. 23 Ibid., 80. 24 Lyotard, What to Paint? 25 Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 89–107, also in The Lyotard Reader, 196–211; ‘Answer to the Question: What Is the Postmodern?’ in Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 9–25. 26 ‘Judiciousness in Dispute’, in The Lyotard Reader, 356. 27 Lyotard, Enthusiasm. 28 ‘The Interest of the Sublime’, in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 109–132. 29 Kant, ‘An answer to the question’, 57: ‘But should not a society of clergymen, for example an ecclesiastical synod or a venerable presbytery (as the Dutch call it), be entitled to commit itself by oath to a certain unalterable set of doctrines, in order to secure for all time a constant guardianship over each of its members and through them over the people?’ – V.R. and V. 30 Ibid. 31 See Chapter 5 in this volume, p. 31. 32 For these names, which take place again and again, see Lyotard, ‘Lessons in Paganism’ and ‘Judiciousness in Dispute’, The Lyotard Reader, vol. 126, 355–357, also Lyotard, The Differend, §257. 33 See Chapter 16 in this volume, p. 82. 34 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 35 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 36 Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 90. 37 The essays which comprise the short book of essays Tombeau de l’intellectuel et autres papiers (Paris: Galilée, 1984) are incorporated into Lyotard, Political Writings, Chapters 1–7. – Ed. 186

Notes 38 Critique, no. 456 (1985). 39 See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 40 See Chapter 14 in this volume. 41 Richard Rorty, ‘Solidarity or Objectivity’, in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21–34.

Chapter 20 1 Lyotard, La Guerre des Algériens: Ecrits 1956–63 (Paris: Galilée, 1989): a collection of Lyotard’s essays written for the political journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, many of which appear in English translation in Lyotard, Political Writings. 2

Jérôme Lindon (1925–2001) directed the publishing house Éditions de Minuit from 1948 until his death; François Gèze (b. 1948) was director of Éditions La Découverte from 1982 to 2014. – Ed.

3

The Audin affair refers to the arrest and disappearance of Maurice Audin – communist, anti-colonialist and mathematics lecturer at the University of Algiers – during the Algerian war in June 1957. Pierre Vidal-Naquet was among those who investigated the affair, establishing Audin Committees which revealed evidence of torture and murder, in which senior French officials were shown to be complicit. The publicity surrounding the affair, including Vidal-Naquet’s pamphlet: L’Affaire Audin, published in May 1958 by Éditions de Minuit, exposed the illegal tactics being used by the French state; the expanded book L’Affaire Audin (1959–1978) was published in 1989. – Ed.

4

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Face à la raison d’État: Un historien dans la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1989).

5

The Évian Accords, signed on 18 March 1962, agreed a ceasefire and prepared the groundwork for a transition to Algerian independence. – Ed.

6

Henri Curiel was an Egyptian militant communist, who organized support for the Algerian cause on the French mainland. See Bamford, Jean-François Lyotard, 54–56. – Ed.

7

Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort formed the group Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1948, having left the Trotskyism of the Fourth International in 1946. Lefort left the group in 1958; the break-away of Pouvoir ouvrier occurred in 1964; Lyotard left this group in 1966. See Lyotard, ‘A Memorial for Marxism’ (1982), trans. Cecile Lindsay, in Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 45–75. – Ed.

Chapter 21 1 Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’ (1988), trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 4. 2

Lyotard, ‘Prescription’, trans. Christopher Fynsk, in Toward the Postmodern, 179; translation modified.

3 Ibid. 4

For instance, ‘Intentionnalité et métaphysique’ [Intentionality and Metaphysics], and ‘Intentionnalité et sensibilité’ [Intentionality and Sensitivity], in Emmanuel Levinas, En

187

Notes découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger [Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger] (Paris: Vrin, 4th edn., 1987), 137–162. – J.-F. L. 5

See Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, 21; translation modified. – Trans.

6

See Gershom Scholem, The Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Shocken Books, 1965), 30.

7

For instance in Lyotard, The Inhuman, 82. – E. W.

8 Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, 21. 9

Lyotard invents the word voiser, from the noun voix (voice) to suggest the disjunction between the written and the oral. English has available the existing verb ‘voice’, so the point is not made so graphically. – Trans.

10 Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, 27. 11 See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les Juifs, la mémoire et la present, vol. I (Paris: La Découverte, 1981), 25, translated as The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present, by David Ames Curtis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 192; and Richard Marienstras, Être un peuple en diaspora [Being a People in Diaspora] (Paris: Maspero, 1975), 60. – E. W. 12 Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). 13 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 67–90. 14 Harold Bloom, ‘The Pragmatics of Contemporary Jewish Culture’, in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. John Rajchman and Cornel West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 108–126. 15 Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, 83–84. 16 Ibid., 56. 17 Lyotard, Lectures d’enfance, 79. 18 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of Politics, Trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 19 Nous avons été soufflés. The verb souffler, to breathe on, has a number of different meanings, including (theatrical) prompting, whispering or breathing the words to be said, blowing out (a flame), and inspiring. ‘Étre soufflé’, continuing the ‘souffle’ [breath] of the previous sentence, means to be breathed or blown on in both literal and metaphorical senses. It can also mean to be blown away, flabbergasted. – Trans. 20 Lyotard, Lectures d’enfance, 47, 34, 62. 21 Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, 81. 22 Quoted by Paul Celan as epigraph to ‘Und mit dem Buch aus Tarussa’ [And with Tarussa’s Book], Die Niemandsrose [Nobody’s Rose] (1963). – E. W. 23 Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve [Against Sainte-Beuve] (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 303. The word cimentée is omitted in this edition, since its legibility is equivocal, according to the editors. But it does figure in an edition of 1954, in which, however, the two instances of ‘Do not forget’ are missing. Marcel Proust, ‘Contre Saint-Beuve’, in On Art and Literature, trans. Sylvia Townsend Warner (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 272, translation modified. – J.-F. L. 24 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 81. 25 Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, 34.

188

Notes 26 Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 91. 27 Lyotard, Sam Francis: Lessons of Darkness – Like the Paintings of a Blind Man, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010). 28 ‘À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur’ is the second volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. In the translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Remembrance of Things Past, it is titled Within a Budding Grove (New York: Random House, 1981). 29 Lyotard, The Differend, xvi. 30 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 7. 31 Lyotard, The Differend, 13. 32 Ibid., 171. 33 See, for instance, Lyotard, ‘Afterword: A Memorial for Marxism’ in Peregrinations. 34 Claude Lefort was, with Cornelius Castoriadis, editor of the journal Socialisme ou barbarie (1948–66), which regularly published contributions by Lyotard. See, for instance, Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); L’invention démocratique: Les Limites de la domination totalitaire [The Democratic Invention: The Limits of Totalitarian Domination] (Paris: Fayard, 1981). – E. W. 35 Nicole Loraux, ‘Le lien et la division’ [The Tie and the Division], Cahier du Collège International de Philosophie, no. 4 (November 1987): 101ff; and ‘L’oubli dans la cité’ [Forgetting in the City-state] in Le Temps de la réflexion, no. 1 (1980), 213–242. Stasis is the Greek word for internal warfare, ‘the division turned into tearing apart’ of the city-state. – E. W. 36 On the difference between ‘litigation’; and ‘differend’, see The Differend, 9: ‘The plaintiff lodges his or her complaint before the tribunal, the accused argues in such a way as to show the inanity of the accusation. Litigation takes place. I would like to call a differend [différend] the case when the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim. […] 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.’ – E. W. 37 Il le faut implies at once lack, necessity and moral obligation. – Trans.

Chapter 22 1 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 2; The Postmodern Explained, 21; Postmodern Fables, 206; the titles referred to are Michel de Montaigne, Essays (1580); Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly (1509); Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew (1761–2; published 1805). 2

Lyotard, ‘Tomb of the Intellectual’, in Political Writings, 3–7.

3 Lyotard, Political Writings, 7. 4

Nina Berberova (1901–93) chronicled the lives of Russian émigrés in Paris after the revolution. The cited phrase come from The Revolt, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: HarperCollins, 1989) and discussed in Lyotard, ‘The General Line’ in Postmodern Fables, 115–122. – Ed.

189

Notes

Chapter 23 1

Lyotard, ‘Interesting?’ in Postmodern Fables, 61; translation modified.

2

In English in the original. – Trans.

3

Robert Maggiori, ‘Lyotard en déplacement’, Libération, no. 4006 (7 April 1994), 28. Note – trait d’union is the French term for the punctuation mark, a hyphen; Un trait d’union is the title of the French version of the book resulting from the collaboration and correspondence between Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber, published in 1993 by Éditions le Griffon d’Argile, Quebec, which does not include the later interview ‘Responding Questions’ reprinted here from the English version: Jean-François Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber, The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999). – Ed.

4

See Lyotard and Gruber, The Hyphen, 25, 30.

5

‘Figure Foreclosed’ was written in 1968, but not published until 1984, the English translation is included in The Lyotard Reader, 69–110; ‘Jewish Oedipus’ is included in English translation in Driftworks, 35–55 and Toward the Postmodern, 27–40; ‘On a Figure of Discourse’ is included in English translation in Toward the Postmodern, pp. 12–26.

6

See Lyotard and Gruber, The Hyphen, 57ff.

7

Ibid., 58.

8 Lyotard, The Differend, 106; Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, 3ff and 93–94. 9

Lyotard and Gruber, The Hyphen, 58.

10 In Heidegger and ‘the jews’, 60, there is a little dialogue between children taken from Elie Wiesel’s book Night (Night, Dawn, The Accident: Three Tales [New York: Hill & Wang, 1972], p. 15) where one asks, ‘But why do you pray to God, when you know that God’s answers remain incomprehensible?’ And the other says in return, ‘So that God will give me the strength to ask him the right questions’. This is the ‘bank’ effect [L’effet ‘bande’]: to situate or place oneself in relationship to the displacement. – E. G. 11 See Lyotard and Gruber, The Hyphen, 31. 12 Ibid., 56. 13 Ibid., 56. 14 Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

Chapter 24 1

190

Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State (1843)’, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1992), 155–156. See Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 132–136, the section titled ‘Nonhuman Sex’, note that the reference to ‘real extremes’ is hidden in the English translation of Discourse, Figure, where the translation of Marx used gives ‘Wirkliche Extreme’ as ‘Actual extremes’, following the translation of Annette and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) – Ed.

Notes

Chapter 25 1

Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Interview by Michel Sicard’, in Obliques, no. 18/19 (1979), 11.

2

Jean-François Lyotard, Signed Malraux, trans. Robert Harvey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 36.

3

Ibid., 43.

191

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Jean-François Lyotard La Phénoménologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954. Translated as Phenomenology by Brian Beakley, New York: State University of New York Press, 1991. Discours, figure, Paris: Klincksieck, 1971. Translated as Discourse, Figure by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ‘Sur La Théorie’ with Brigitte Devismes VH 101, no. 2, Summer 1970, 54–65. Reprinted in Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1973. Partially translated by Roger McKeon in Driftworks, ed. Roger McKeon, New York: Semiotext(e), 1984. ‘En finir avec l’illusion de la politique’ with Gilbert Lascault, La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 140, 1–15 May 1972, 18–19. ‘Jean-François Lyotard: Discours, figure’ by Gilles Deleuze, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1–15 May 1972, 1972. Translated by Michael Taormina in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–74, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1973. Partially translated in Driftworks, ed. Roger McKeon, New York: Semiotext(e), 1984. Des dispositifs pulsionnels, Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1973. Économie Libidinale, Paris: Galilée, 1974. Translated as Libidinal Economy by Iain Hamilton Grant, London: Continuum, 2004. ‘Jean-François Lyotard: “L’important, ce sont les ‘intensités’, pas le sens”’ with Christian Descamps, La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 201, 1–15 January 1975, 5–6. ‘À propos du département de psychanalyse à Vincennes’, in Les Temps modernes, no. 342 (January 1975). Translated as ‘Concerning the Vincennes Psychoanalysis Department’ by Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman in Political Writings, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, 68–9. ‘Un barbare parle du socialisme’ with Bernard-Henri Levy, Le Nouvel Observateur, 16 January 1976, 52–53. ‘Lyotard’, L’Arc, no. 64, 1976. Republished as Jean-François Lyotard, Paris: Éditions Inculte, 2009. ‘Narrations Incommensurables’ with Patrick de Haas, Art Press International, no. 13, December 1977, 19. Instructions païennes, Paris: Galilée, 1977. Translated as ‘Lessons in Paganism’ by David Macey in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, Blackwell: Oxford, 1989. Rudiments païens: genre dissertif, Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1977. Partially translated in Toward the Postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993. Les Transformateurs Duchamp, Paris: Galilée, 1977. Translated as ‘Duchamp’s Transformers’ by Ian Macleod, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010. Récits tremblants, with Jacques Monory, Paris: Galilée, 1977. Au Juste, with Jean-Loup Thébaud. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1979. Translated as Just Gaming by Wlad Godzich, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Rapport sur les problems du savoir dans les sociétés industrielles les plus développées, Quebec City: Conseil des universités, 1979.

Bibliography La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979. Translated as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ‘Vincennes survivra-t-elle?’ with Christian Descamps, La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 322, 1–15 April 1980, 20. ‘Introduction à une étude du politique selon Kant’, in Rejouer le Politique, ed. Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris: Galilée, 1981, 91–134. ‘Discussions, ou: Phraser “après Auschwitz”’, in Les fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida, ed. Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Paris: Galilée, 1981, 283–315. Translated as ‘Discussions, or Phrasing “after Auschwitz”’ by Georges Van Den Abbeele in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, Blackwell: Oxford, 1989, 360–392. ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime’, Artforum, vol. 20, no. 8 (April 1982), 64–69. ‘Pierre Souyri: Le marxisme qui n’a pas fini’, Esprit, vol. 61, no. 1 (January 1982). Translated as ‘A Memorial for Marxism’ by Cecile Lindsay in Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Le Différend, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983. Translated as The Differend: Phrases in Dispute by Georges Van Den Abbeele, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Tombeau de l’intellectuel et autres papiers, Paris: Galilée, 1984. Translated by Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman in Political Writings, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Driftworks, ed. Roger McKeon, New York: Semiotext(e), 1984. ‘Interview: Jean-François Lyotard’ with Georges Van Den Abbeele. Diacritics, vol. 14, no. 3 (1984). ‘Plaidoyer pour la métaphysique: “Passage du témoin” de Jacques Derrida à Jean-François Lyotard’ with Jacques Derrida, Le Monde [Aujourd‘hui], 12366, 28–29 October 1984. ‘Discussion entre Jean-François Lyotard et Richard Rorty’ with Richard Rorty, Critique, vol. 41, no. 456 (1985), 581–584. ‘Les Immatériaux: A Conversation’ with Bernard Blistène, Flash Art, no. 121, 1985, 32–39. ‘Les Immatériaux: “A Staging”’ with Jacques Saur and Philippe Bidaine, CNAC Magazine, March 1985, 13–16. ‘Les petits récits de Chrysalide’ with Élie Théofilakis, in Modernes et Après: Les Immatériaux, ed. Élie Théofilakis, Paris: Autrement, 1985, 4–14. Épreuves d’écriture (with Thierry Chaput, Chantal Noël et al.), Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985. Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants: Correspondance 1982–1985, Paris: Galilée, 1986. Translated as The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–85, trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas et al., London: Turnaround, 1992. L’enthusiasme, La critique kantienne de l’histoire, Paris: Galilée, 1986. Translated as Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History by Georges Van Den Abbeele, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Que Peindre? Adami, Arakawa, Buren, Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1987. Translated as What to Paint? Adami, Arakawa, Buren by Antony Hudek, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012. ‘Sensus Communis’, Le Cahier (Collège international de philosophie), no. 3 (1987). Translated as ‘Sensus Communis’ by Geoffrey Bennington and Marian Hobson in Judging Lyotard, ed. Andrew Benjamin, London: Routledge, 1992. Heidegger et “les juifs,” Paris: Galilée, 1988. Translated as Heidegger and ‘the jews’ by Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. ‘Jean-François Lyotard: Réécrire la modernité’, Les Cahiers de Philosophie, no. 5 (Spring 1988). ‘Autrement que Savoir: Emmanuel Levinas’ with Guy Petitdemange and Jacques Rolland at the Centre Sèvres, Paris: Éditions Osiris, 1988; extract reprinted in Logique de Levinas, ed. Paul Audi, Paris: Éditions Verdier, 2015.

193

Bibliography ‘Les lumières, le sublime’, with Willem van Reijen and Dick Veerman, 1987, Les Cahiers de Philosophie, no. 5 (Spring 1988), 63–98. Translated as ‘An Interview with Jean-François Lyotard’ by Roy Boyne, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 5, no. 2–3, 1988, 277–309. L’inhumain: Causeries sur le temps, Paris: Galilée, 1988. Translated as The Inhuman: Reflections on Time by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. ‘L’intérêt du sublime’, in Du Sublime, ed. Jean-François Courtine et al., Paris: Belin, 1988. Translated as ‘The Interest of the Sublime’ by Jeffrey S. Librett in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993, 109–132. ‘Argumentation and Presentation: The Foundation Crisis’ [1989], trans. Chris Turner, Cultural Politics, vol. 9, no. 2 (2013), 117–143. La Guerre des Algériens: Ecrits 1956–63, Paris: Galilée, 1989. The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. ‘Lyotard et Vidal-Naquet: parler encore de la guerre d’Algérie’ with Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Interview by Antoine de Gaudemar, Libération, 9 November 1989, 30–31. ‘Notes du Traducteur’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, vol. 180, no. 2 (1990), 285–292. Translated as ‘Translator’s Notes’ by Roland-François Lack, Plí: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, no. 6 (Summer 1997), 51–57. ‘Before the Law, after the Law’ with Elisabeth Weber, 1991, in Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber, trans. Rachel Bowlby, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 104–121. Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Toward the Postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993. Moralités postmodernes, Paris: Galilée, 1993. Translated as Postmodern Fables by Georges Van Den Abbeele, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Un trait d’union. with Eberhard Gruber, Saint-Foy, Québec: Éditions le Griffon d’Argile, 1993. ‘What Is Just?’ (Ou Justesse) with Richard Kearney, 1994, in Richard Kearney, States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers on the European Mind, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. ‘L’extrême réel’ with Gérald Sfez, Rue Descartes, no. 12–13 (May 1995), 200–204. Signé Malraux, Paris: Grasset, 1996. Translated as Signed, Malraux by Robert Harvey, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. ‘La Vie de Malraux doit être lue comme recueil de légendes’ with Philippe Bonnefis, Magazine littéraire, no. 347 (October 1996), 26–28, 30. Reprinted in Signés Malraux: André Malraux et la question biographique ed. Martine Boyer-Weinmann and Jean-Louis Jeannelle, Paris: Garnier, 2015. The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity, with Eberhard Gruber. trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999. Sam Francis: Lessons of Darkness – Like the Paintings of a Blind Man, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010. Logique de Levinas, ed. Paul Audi, Paris: Verdier, 2015.

194

SELECT GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Antelme, Robert, The Human Race, translated by Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Arendt, Hannah, ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman, New York: Grove Press, 1978, 67–90. Bamford, Kiff, Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Lives, London: Reaktion, 2017. Bloom, Harold, ‘The Pragmatics of Contemporary Jewish Culture’, in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. John Rajchman and Cornel West, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, 108–128. Buren, Daniel, ‘Critical Limits (1970)’, translated by Laurent Sauerwein, in 5 Texts, ed. Daniel Buren, London: John Weber Gallery, 1973. Castoriadis, Cornelius et al., Socialisme ou Barbarie: Anthologie, La Bussière, France: Acratie, 2007. Translated as Socialisme ou Barbarie: An Anthology, trans. Anon, London: Eris, 2018. Deleuze, Gilles, Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–74, translated by Michael Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. Deleuze, Gilles, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–95, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), 2007. Deleuze, Gilles, ‘Lettre à Jean-François Lyotard’, (c. 1975–6) Europe, no. 949, May 2008, 264. Derrida, Jacques, ‘Épreuves d’Écriture’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, vol. 180, no. 2, 1990, 269–284. Translated as ‘Writing Proofs’ by Roland-François Lack, Plí: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, no. 6, Summer 1997, 37–50. Derrida, Jacques, ‘Lyotard and Us’, translated by Boris Belay, in Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard, ed. Claire Nouvet, Zrinka Stahuljak and Kent Still, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Heidegger, Martin, On Time and Being, translated by Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper Row, 1972. Jones, Graham and Woodward, Ashley, eds. Acinemas: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Film, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Kant, Immanuel, ‘An Answer to the Question “What Is Enlightenment?”’, in Kant: Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbit, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, 54–60. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, translated by Chris Turner, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Lefort, Claude, Democracy and Political Theory, translated by David Macey, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Marx, Karl, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State (1843)’, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, London: Penguin, 1992, 57–198. Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Inoperative Community, translated by Peter Connor et al., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Rorty, Richard, ‘Solidarity or Objectivity’, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 21–34. Roudinesco, Elisabeth, Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Select General Bibliography Taubes, Jacob, The Political Theology of Paul, translated by Dana Hollander, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, Face à la raison d’État : Un historien dans la guerre d’Algérie, Paris: La Découverte, 1989. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, L’Affair Audin (1959–1978), Paris : Les Éditiones de Minuit, 1989. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, ‘Un Eichmann de papier’ 1980, in Les assassins de la mémoire, Paris: La Découverte, 2005. Translated as Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust by Jeffrey Mehlman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, Les Juifs, la mémoire et le présent, vol. I, Paris: La Découverte, 1981. Translated as The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present by David Ames Curtis, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

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INDEX

Adorno, Theodor 53, 55, 58, 62, 64, 169 Aesthetic Theory 70, 74, 82, 154 aesthetics 59, 78, 81–2, 106 and politics 112, 119–21, 154 affect 35, 54, 88, 163, 169 unconscious affect 137 Algeria 2, 4, 53 Algerian War 7, 41, 66, 129–34, 181 n.2 Audin, Maurice 180 n.20 Audin Affair, the 7, 129–30, 133, 187 FLN (Front de libération nationale) 7, 131 Althusser, Louis 5, 17–19 anamnesis 114, 124, 127, 142–3, 156–7 and Kant 154 Apel, Karl-Otto 112, 118, 125, 127 Appel, Karel 114, 116 Aristotle 50, 57, 62, 78, 157 Aristotelian dynamis 116–17 Aristotelian Rhetoric 65 Arendt, Hannah 140, 155 arrive-t-il? [Is it happening?] 59, 108, 123, 138, 145, 163 art arts, the 17, 21–4, 27, 45, 47, 70 See also Lyotard, Les Immateriaux in Lyotard’s work 3, 31, 33, 113, 118, 124, 144, 152–4 See also Lyotard, Discourse, Figure See also aesthetics Augustine 142, 158 Auschwitz 53–8, 141, 145, 166 Beckett, Samuel 72, 151, 154 Buren, Daniel 22, 81, 83, 180 n.4, 184 n.2 capitalism 22, 42–3, 132, 146–7, 149–50 and Marxism 18–19 and Socialisme ou Barbarie 4, 7, 46, 146 Castoriadis, Cornelius 4, 132, 187 n.7 See also Socialisme ou Barbarie Cézanne, Paul 31, 84, 115 childhood 95–7, 145 See also inhuman infans 10, 135, 137 crisis ‘foundation’ crisis 107 See Postmodern political 21, 66, 90, 107, 112, 146 in the arts and humanities 21, 72, 79, 105 of the subject 118

Christianity 56, 139, 142, 160 Christian 8, 61, 136, 138–9, 142 See also Judaism, ‘Judeo-Christian’ revelation 30, 56, 98–9, 139, 142, 164, 170 class struggle 6–7, 19–20, 42, 132, 147 Deleuze, Gilles 2–3, 6, 15, 33, 39–40, 49, 179 n.1 and Guattari, Félix 2, 6, 35 democracy 89–90, 125, 146, 169 Derrida, Jacques 9–10, 53–6, 67–70, 143, 181 n.6, 183 n.1 Lyotard on Derrida’s thought 3, 103, 112–13, 124–5, 154, 156 desire desire ‘for the absolute’ 154 figural, the and desire 29–30, 33 freudian 2, 26, 155 in Libidinal Economy 35–6, 38, 122 development 80, 93, 107, 147, 152–3 See also system, the Diderot, Denis 63, 84, 107, 122, 143 Differend, The 8, 59, 64–5, 130, 145–7, 154, 163 See also Lyotard The Differend, See also phrases Duchamp, Marcel 59, 78, 84, 115, 183 n.1 Enlightenment, the 79, 81, 85, 87, 90, 106–7 and Kant 108, 118–20 narrative of 62, 70, 127, 150, 157 Ereigneis / Event 109, 110 185 n.8 See also arrive-t-il? of being 97 event in the system 30–1, 36 as intensity 122 in Malraux 174 singular event 59, 69, 123, 145, 151, 155, 159, 164 unassimilable 135, 144–5, 157 See also Auschwitz, See also ‘the jews’ Faurisson 8, 145 feeling See also Kant, sensus communis aesthetic 79, 83, 89, 101 as lack 139–40 of the differend 146 feminine 64–5, 159 feminism 64, 147 forgetting 115, 134, 140, 166 See also anamnesis

Index forgotten, the 10, 124, 135–40, 145, 157 figural, the 2, 29–30, 33, 60, 108, 122 See also Lyotard, Discourse, Figure FLN See Algeria French Communist Party 5, 7, 17, 23, 42, 181 n.6 Freud, Sigmund 3, 29–31, 36, 73, 122, 155–7 death drive 27 and Lacan 26 unconscious affect / infans 137, 157 working through / Durcharbeitung 7, 115, 158 Gandillac, Maurice de 53, 55–6, 58 Habermas, Jürgen 119, 122, 125, 127, 151–2 Hegel, Georg. W.F. 3, 20, 30, 56, 109, 149, 156 dialectics 17,19, 58, 61, 145 philosophy 46, 55, 57, 102–3, 120, 144, 171 time 36 Heidegger, Martin 55, 96–102, 113, 118–19, 149, 151, 154, 160 Husserl, Edmund 3, 30, 98–9, 101–2, 127, 149 Time 96, 113 infancy See childhood, infans inhuman 10, 97, 152–3, 169 See also Lyotard, Inhuman, The intensities 36–8, 41, 122 Jews, the 53, 66, 139–41, 143, 163 ‘the jews’ 135–6, 138, 163 Jewish thought 8, 10, 96–8, 100, 140, 142–3 Jewish tradition 126, 135–7, 140–2, 144, 162 Judaism 45, 56, 160, 163 ‘Judeo-Christian’ 8, 150–1, 161, 165 judgement 7, 63, 84, 110, 114, 117–18, 169 aesthetic / reflexive 61, 63, 113, 106, 121, 126–7 ethical 155–6 justice 57, 60, 117, 147, 151, 155–6, 171 injustice 63–4, 122, 130, 156 stakes of 55, 60, 63, 106, 123 Kafka, Franz 135–9, 153, 158 Kant, Immanuel Critique of Judgement 9, 61, 108, 110, 116–18, 127, 154 See also judgement, aesthetic/ reflexive modus estheticus / ‘Manner’ 110–11 sensus communis 109, 126, 155 Klee, Paul 2, 27, 29, 84, 115 Lacan, Jacques 3, 26, 39–40, 118, 181 n.1 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 10, 56, 119, 142 law, the 57, 61, 126, 135–41, 160, 164, 166 Lefort, Claude 4, 124, 132, 146, 149, 187 n.7 Levinas, Emmanuel 11, 53–4, 57–8, 122, 136, 143, 156, 163

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debate with 95–103 obligation 126 See also obligation passivity 45, 95, 97, 101 libidinal 29, 31, 35, 36–7, 117, 122 Lyotard, Jean-François ‘Answer to the Question: What Is the Postmodern?’ 108, 115 Differend, The 7–10, 59–60, 67–9, 105–14, 121–3, 145, 160–1 Discourse, Figure 2–4, 29–31, 33, 35–6, 60, 65, 68, 82, 107–9, 119, 122 Heidegger and ‘the jews’ 10, 135, 137, 141, 161 Hyphen, The 8–9, 159–167, 190 n.3 Inhuman, The 145, 152 Just Gaming 9, 61, 63, 108, 122–3 Les Immatériaux [exhibition] 9, 69–70, 71–5, 77–85, 87–93, 184 n.2 Lessons in Paganism 6, 47, 63–4 Libidinal Economy 35–8, 58, 63, 105, 108–9, 122 Political Writings / La Guerre de Algériens 7, 130, 132, 152, 182 n.2, 187 n.1 Postmodern Condition, The 5, 51, 57, 61–2, 105–6, 122, 150, 152 Postmodern Explained, The 9, 124, 150, 180 n.23 Postmodern Fables 159, 179 n.1 Signed, Malraux 3, 173–8 What to Paint? 115 Mallarmé, Stéphane 22, 29–30, 181 n.2 Malraux, André 3–4, 173–8 Marx, Karl 18–20, 36, 38, 42, 146, 149–50, 171 Marxism 17, 19, 41, 43, 122, 146–7 and grand narratives 87, 119, 150 and Socialisme ou Barbarie 4–5, 119, 147, 149, 187 n.7 May 1968 3, 5, 21, 49, 62, 181 n.5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 3, 101, 149 memory See anamnesis, forgetting Monory, Jacques 45, 59, 81, 182 n.1 Nancy, Jean-Luc 10, 56–7, 120 narrative little narratives (petits récits) 151 metanarrative / grand narrative 5, 123, 150, 155–6 Newman, Barnett 114, 143–4 Nietzsche, Friedrich 41–2, 120, 122, 150, 169, 172 nihilism 122, 144, 150, 156 nostalgia 54–6, 60, 64, 108–9, 153 obligation 57, 123, 126, 139, 147 See also justice, stakes of ontology 55, 95–7, 111–14, 142, 154, 174 Being 112, 115, 155, 157 Heideger, Levinas and Being 96–9, 102–3, 135, 185 n.2 Lyotard and Being 108–11, 163, 171

Index non-being 166 ontological 23, 61, 81, 122–3, 136, 138 ontological difference 141, 160 paganism 6, 58, 139, 142–3, 166 Phenomenology 2, 36, 96, 98–102, 118, 149 Philosophy approach to 59, 68, 78–9, 88, 102–3, 123, 154 subject of 62–3, 69, 79, 87–8 phrases See also Differend, The and ethics 54–6, 58 genres of 121 and Kant 166 linking of 63–4, 69, 123, 164 philosophy of 8, 53, 57, 60–1, 112, 145 and proper names 65 regimes of phrases 109–10, 118 unarticulated 108, 161 platonism 56, 117–20, 157 Pouvoir ouvrier 4, 119, 132, 187 n.7 Pouvoir Ouvrier (publication) 7 postmodern 6, 79, 83–4, 90, 105, 114–16, 118–19, 156–8 postmodernity 62, 70–1, 92–3, 152–3 postmodernism 85, 124, 149, 150–2 psychoanalysis 39–40, 79, 118 See also Freud

sexual difference 141, 159–61 Shoah, 151, 163, 165–6 signification 2–3, 29, 109, 123, 161, 164 Socialisme ou Barbarie 2, 4. 7, 146, 149 and Algeria 130–2 and Marxism 41–2 politics after 46, 119, 151 Sophists 6, 61, 63, 119 Sublime 120 differend 161, 163 Kant 108–9, 113, 154 limitations of 89, 155 Lyotard 111–12, 114–16 Newman, Barnett 144 romantic aesthetic of 77–8, 82 system, the 79, 150–7, 172 See also capitalism, See also development technology 70, 73, 80, 88, 89 ‘thing’, the 30, 109, 115–16, 123, 141, 150–2, 154, 156–8, 166

Rorty, Richard 124–7

Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 6–8, 129–34, 139, 187 n.3, 188 n.11 Vincennes / University of Paris VIII 3, 29, 31, 41, 49–51, 68–9, 87, 183 n.4 Psychoanalysis department 39–40, 182 n.2 voice, the 13, 100, 137–9, 142, 159–61, 163–6

Sartre, Jean-Paul 123, 139–41, 147, 149, 174

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 8, 61, 106, 108, 118, 121, 153

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