Lyotard : Philosophy, Politics and the Sublime 9781134720309, 9780415919586

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LYOTARD

Editor Hugh J. Silverman Associate Editors James R. Watson Forrest Williams Wilhelm S. Wurzer Corresponding Editors Gary E. Aylesworth James Barry, Jr. James P. Clarke James Hatley Brian Seitz Managing Editors Norman Bussiere Michael Sanders Assistant Editor Adrian Johnston Bibliographer Helene Volat

Advisory Board David B. Allison Hazel Barnes Robert Bernasconi Edward S. Casey Jacques Derrida M. C. Dillon Thomas R. Flynn Michel Haar Irene E. Harvey Patrick A. Heelan Dominique Janicaud Dalia Judovitz John Llewelyn J. N. Mohanty Graeme Nicholson Tony O’Connor Adriaan Peperzak William J. Richardson John Sallis Charles E. Scott Jacques Taminiaux Gianni Vattimo Bernhard Waldenfels Stephen H. Watson David Wood

CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY VIII

LYOTARD Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime

Edited with an Introduction by Hugh J. Silverman

First Published in Great Britain 2002 by Routledge Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2002 by Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-415-91958-6 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-415-91959-3 (pbk) ISBN 978-0-203-76070-3 (eISBN)

Previously published and forthcoming volumes in the Continental Philosophy series Hugh J. Silverman, editor I.

Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty

II.

Derrida and Deconstruction

III.

Postmodernism— Philosophy and the Arts

IV.

Gadamer and Hermeneutics

V.

Questioning Foundations: Truth/Subjectivity/Culture

VI.

Cultural Semiosis: Tracing the Signifier

VII.

Philosophy and Desire

VIII.

Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime

IX.

Foucault’s Genealogies

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CONTENTS

ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED TEXTS

x

Introduction Hugh J. Silverman JEAN-FR A NgO IS LYOTARD— BETW EEN PO LITIC S AN D AESTHETICS

I.

1

(Ex)citing Philosophy

1. Jean-Francois Lyotard EMMA: BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

23

II. Conversations and Differends 2. Shaun Gallagher CONVERSATIONS IN POSTMODERN HERMENEUTICS 3. Fred Evans LYOTARD, BAKHTIN, AND RADICAL HETEROGENEITY 61 4. James Hadev LYOTARD, LEVINAS, AND THE PHRASING OF THE ETHICAL s / ii

75

49

CONTENTS

5. Gary E. Aylesworth LYOTARD, GADAMER, AND THE RELATION BETWEEN ETHICS AND AESTHETICS 84 6. Michael Naas LYOTARD, NANCY, AND THE MYTH OF INTERRUPTION

10(

7. Erik Vogt LYOTARD, FRANK, AND THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING 113

III. After Politics 8. Debra B. Bergoffen INTERRUPTING LYOTARD: WHITHER THE WE? 9. James R. Watson LYOTARD, HEIDEGGER, AND “ THE JEWS”

127 140

10. Thomas R. Flynn LYOTARD AND HISTORY WITHOUT WITNESSES 11. Stephen David Ross LYOTARD AND “THE FORGOTTEN”

151

164

IV Before Aesthetics 12. Richard Brons POSTMODERN THINKING OF TRANSCENDENCE 13. Serge Trottein LYOTARD: BEFORE AND AFTER THE SUBLIME 14. Wilhelm S. Wurzer LYOTARD, KANT, AND THE IN-FINITE

201

15. Wayne Froman THE SUSPENSE 213 16. Hugh J. Silverman LYOTARD AND THE EVENTS OF THE POSTMODERN SUBLIME 222 viii

179 192

CONTENTS

Notes 231 Helene Volat

Bibliography 259

Contributors 281

About the Editor 287

ix

ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED TEXTS

AK

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1972).

AT

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (New York: Routledge, 1984).

BA

James R. Watson, Between Auschwitz and Tradition: Postmodern Reflections on the Task of Thinking (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993).

BN

Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman (New York: Abrams, 1978).

BNS

Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. J. R O’Neill, with text notes and commentary by M. McNickle, and an introduction by R. Shiff (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).

BR

Arinin Zweite, The Blue Rider (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1989).

BT

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).

BW

Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

Cl

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965).

C3

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).

CFP

Jean-Frangois Lyotard, “Interview with Florian Rotzer” in Conversations with French Philosophers, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995).

CWE

Richard Rorty, “Cosmopolitanism without Emancipation: A Response to

x

ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED TEXTS

Jean-Frangois Lyotard,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). D

Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

DD

Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer, eds., Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989).

DI

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

DM

Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

DLR

uDiscussion entre Jean-Frangois Lyotard et Richard Rorty,” Critique 41, no. 456 (May 1985).

E

Jean-Frangois Lyotard, L’Enthousiasme: La Critique kantienne de Vhistoire (Paris: Galilee, 1986).

ED

“Levinas’s Ethical Discourse,” in Re-Reading Levinas, eds. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

EE

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Vielfalt Europas: Erbe und Zukunft” in Das Erbe Europas, 2d ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990).

EFT

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Concerning Empty and Ful-filled Time,” trans. R. Phillip O’Hara, in The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 8 (Winter 1970).

Eth

Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. William Hale White and rev. Amelia Hutchinson Stirling, ed. and int., James Gutman (New York: Hafner, 1949).

EY

Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992).

FH

Jean-Luc Nancy, “Finite History,” in The States of “Theory, ” ed. DavidCarroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

FJ

Wilhelm S. Wurzer, Filming and Judgment: Between Heidegger and Adorno (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990).

G

Genesis (Old Testament of the Bible).

G1

Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht: sexual difference, ontological difference,” in Research in Phenomenology, ed. John Sallis, XIII (1983).

xi

ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED TEXTS

G4

Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger’s Ear: Phitopolemology (Geschlecht IV) in Reading Heidegger; ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

GJW

Jacques Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of the Woman,” in Feminine Sexuality, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1985).

GV

Manfred Frank, Die Grenzen der Verstandigung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1988).

HAP

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger; Art and Politics, trans. G. Turner (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

HJ

Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews, ” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

I

Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

IC

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

IL

Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard (London: Routledge, 1991).

IM

Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959).

IR

Luce Irigaray, “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,” in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford, trans. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

ITC

Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964).

J&R

Steven Hendley, “Judgment and Rationality in Lyotard’s Discursive Archipelagos,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 33:2 (1991).

JG

Jean-Frangois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

JL

Andrew Benjamin, ed., Judging Lyotard (London: Routledge, 1992).

KP

Manfred Frank, “Kleiner (Tixbinger) Programmentwurf,” in Frankfurter Rundschau, March 5, 1988.

xii

ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED TEXTS

KR

Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

KU

Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, vol. 10 of Werkausgabe, ed. W. Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968).

L

Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).

LCP

Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).

LD

Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

LE

Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. I. H. Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

LR

Andrew Benjamin, ed., The Lyotard Reader (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

LT

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Lob der Theorie: Reden und Aufsatze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983).

M

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. T. Bottomore and D. Frisby (New York: Routledge, 1990).

MP

Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Moralites postmodemes. Paris: Galilee, 1993. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

MPL

Max Weber, The Intersection: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislar Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

OB

Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981).

OG

Jacques Derrida, uOusia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and T i m e in Margins of Philosophy, trans. (with additional notes) Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

OWL

Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

P

Aristotle, Physics, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gage, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R. McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941).

xiii

ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED TEXTS

PC

Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

PD

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984).

Per

Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

PMN

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

PWT

Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” in Hypatia 2/2 (Summer 1987).

RAS

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “What Is Practice?” in Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).

RB

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Intuition and Vividness,” trans. Dan Tate, in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bemasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

RH

John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

RP

David Carroll, “Rephrasing the Political with Kant and Lyotard: From Aesthetic to Political Judgments,” in Diacritics (Fall, 1984).

SE

Sigmund Freud, The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1966).

SF

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959).

SG

Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vem W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

SM

Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, foreword by Louise Turcotte (Boston: Beacon, 1992).

T&M

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., rev. trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989).

TIP

Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987).

xiv

ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED TEXTS

TP

Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Toward the Postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark Roberts (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1993).

UF

Ernest Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. J. Zipes and F. Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).

WAK

Immanuel Kant, Werke: Akademie-Textausgabe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968).

WH

Paul Veyne, Writing History, trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984).

WM

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundziige einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 4th edition (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1975).

WN

Manfred Frank, What Is Neostructuralism?, trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard Gray (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

WP

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).

xv

© Hugh J. Silverm an.

INTRODUCTION: JEAN-FRANGOIS LYOTARD— BETWEEN POLITICS AND AESTHETICS Hugh J. Silverman

I. The Unbelievable Sublime On September 11, 2001, two beautiful modem buildings in New York City came crashing down after two modem American airplanes were piloted directly into those exquisite symbols of one of the great aesthetic capitals of the world. Between the wonderful technologies that produced the World Trade Center— the Twin Towers, as they were commonly known— and the intricate advances that designed the two Boeing airplanes was the political: an ugly, excruciating politics, whose end is nothing less than the destruction and disintegration of the modern western world. Modem American achievements were turned into a weapon against itself. Calling it a “terrorist politics” is only part of the story, for this term describes merely the effects of the enterprise. This politics despises the achievements of modernity, progress, and technology as well as the aesthetic that accompanies it. Not just between the Twin Towers but also between the World Trade Center and the Boeing airplanes was the most unsettling and horrible hatred of the modern. And this hatred inserted itself between— and the insertion took place through the mechanism of persons who were willing to die to bring this juxtaposition into a collision. Jean-Frangois Lyotard was surely the most important thinker of the postmodern condition and its situatedness between politics and aesthetics. As were so many of us throughout the world, he would have been horrified at the events of September 11. And, like so many of us, he would have asked: “Is it happening?” We could not believe our own eyes as we saw this event again and again on television, and so many other eyewitnesses in New York City have described how they saw it happen through apartment windows and even from the streets. Thousands and thousands of people died that day—Americans and many others from elsewhere around the world died in just one day at the World Trade Center. It was unbelievable— “incredible,” people kept saying, “horrible,” a “tragedy of enormous magnitude.” Horror of horrors, this incredible event was quintessentially sublime. It had no place in everyday life. It interrupted the continuity of American experience. As many said, “it changed us in a way that we have never been changed before.” The sublimity of this event was the postmodern in the making, wedged between an aesthetic of beauty— after all, the Twin Towers were “beautiful”— and an aesthetic of horror and a politics of 1

LYOTARD: PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, AND THE SUBLIME

destruction— against civilians, against innocent people, against symbols of power and modem achievement, against Western cultures and values. The juxtaposition brought together two incompatible ideologies, two incompatible lifestyles, two incompatible sets of values, two incompatible sets of religious ideals clashing irreconcilably against each other. How could anyone in the modem Western world believe that nearly twenty men could calmly and quietly live in American and European societies and yet prepare themselves to board four different airplanes and drive them into the towering symbols of commercial, architectural, and political achievement? Americans believed that terrorism was somewhere else— not on their own soil. And how could these same Americans not understand the sense of achievement of those warriors in Afghanistan who succeeded (with American support) in routing the Soviet infidels from their homeland? How could they not understand what it meant to then find American aircraft attacking and killing their Moslem brethren in Iraq? How could they not understand the meaning of U.S. support for Israel against the disenfranchised Palestinians? And even worse, how could they not understand the offensiveness of American soldiers still planted a decade after the Gulf War in the land of the holy places of Mecca and Medina? Neither could really understand the other because the difference is a “differend” of radically profound proportions. Differends, according to Lyotard, occur when positions or outlooks— “phrasings,” as he called them— butt up against one another and render understanding from either side impossible. The one side cannot explain its position to the other side, and vice versa, for the positions are so radically incompatible that understanding is a misplaced category. The Gadamerian hermeneutic values of dialogue and discourse simply fail. The Habermasian notion of some transcendental “communicative competence” remains irrelevant, if not impossible. The differend installs itself, and so the task becomes one of identifying the differend itself, where it is, what it is, how it functions, what makes it operate, what underlies it, what gives it life. The difficulty in all this is that the differend is not anything, it is not an “it.” The differend is a difference, marked out by the juxtaposition of two or more alternatives. The modem wants to identify positions, to make them speak to each other, even to resolve, reconcile, overcome, and abolish the differences. A postmodern philosophy will need to remark on the differend and to seek to operate in terms of that differend, recognizing all the while that the differend cannot be removed. So what happens in the between—between suicide pilots bent on destroying American monuments (the Twin Towers, the Pentagon— symbols of Western economic success and military might) and those human beings who have been attacked and, for those still alive, who feel deeply that they have been trespassed against? This place of juxtaposition, this place of alterity, this place of interruption— this is what produces the sublime in politics, the aesthetic moment or experience which is neither beautiful nor ugly, but grotesque, enormous, awe-inspiring, beyond dimension, beyond belief (all characteristics of the modem sublime). As interruptions, as inscriptions of difference, the happening of the in-between is the event of the postmodern sublime. In this volume we have brought together some of the best philosophers who have something important to say about Lyotard’s politics, his aesthetics, and his philosophies. Although the essays were written before the events of Septem2

SILVERMAN

ber 11, 2001, nevertheless they address the kind of incompatibility that I have outlined here. This is not the first and surely not the last event of incomprehension turned to a radically sublime, impossible politics. We have attempted to provide a number of different aspects of Lyotard’s work in order to articulate just these very matchings of postmodern aesthetics and postmodern politics. The first part of this book contains an essay by Jean-Frangois Lyotard himself— an essay that he published in French and that he (while Visiting Professor at Stony Brook University) gave to me to publish for the first time in English in this volume of the Continental Philosophy series. Lyotard’s essay concerns Freud’s case of Emma (1894), the woman who, in adulthood, had a phobia and even became hysterical about entering shops alone. She did not remember that when she was eight years old, a storekeeper had apparently groped and touched her sexually. Then several years later she witnessed a store assistant laughing in the shop, but she did not make the connection between this second occurrence and the earlier— forgotten— event. This classic case of repression is read very differently by Lyotard. For Lyotard, the account of this deferred event is understood philosophically rather than psychoanalytically. Unlike Freud, Lyotard is unable to offer any curative or clinical aid. With Lyotard, emphasis is placed on the role of affectivity in the phrasing that permeates this repression and the role of the differend that lies between adulthood and childhood. A significant, double event in Emma’s childhood has affected her whole adult life and well-being. Think of the deferred action of the second airplane hitting the Twin Towers—just in time for the media to focus in on it. The question is: How is a philosopher to think enormous events that mark a difference, and how, although radically different, is the delay in the case of Emma also emblematic of events as large-scale and traumatic as those of September 11, 2001? The second part of the book focuses on Lyotard’s philosophy in relation to that of a number of his philosophical contemporaries. Shaun Gallagher sets up this dialogue— as he would want to see it— among Lyotard, Gadamer, and Habermas. He shows how they are similar and how different. The remaining five essays in this section focus on differends between Lyotard and a variety of other important figures in twentieth-century Continental thinking: Mikhail Bakhtin (Evans), Emmanuel Levinas (Hatley), Hans-Georg Gadamer (Aylesworth), JeanLuc Nancy (Naas), and Manfred Frank (Vogt). Part III raises the question of what comes “after politics,” after the political decisions are made, after political position-taking has been formulated, after wars have been undertaken, after the war is over— when what remains are forgotten, witnessless deaths, a We that occupies no place at all any more. And what does it mean to seek to understand politics in a context in which seeking after politics has a different meaning from that of the political events themselves? Bergoffen asks: Who is this We that is other than the one often invoked by nations, leaders, authorities, and revolutionaries, and what kind of phrasing is appropriate after Auschwitz? Watson wants to know who are “the jews” who are taken as the scapegoats, the objects of subjugation, the other. Flynn is concerned about what happens when there are no witnesses any more— such as in a holocaust. And Ross asks about “the forgotten”—who they are and what they can still do. The fourth and final part goes to a place “before aesthetics,” before the beau3

LYOTARD: PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, AND THE SUBLIME

tiful, before something is called “art,” before there are objects of aesthetic judgment, categories and criteria for what counts as art. Before aesthetics is the question of “transcendence” (Brons), the Kantian beautiful as somehow prior to the sublime (Trottein), the nature of capital and the “infinite” (Wurzer), the terrifying suspense that produces the sublime (Froman), and the postmodern events of unpresentability that mark our ongoing modem preoccupations (Silverman). All of these descriptions characterize the sublime, that which Lyotard explores outside the frame of what is officially called “aesthetics”— the philosophy of art and beauty. Before aesthetics is the place where the understanding of differends— such as that which whirled out and shattered so many lives on September 11, 2001— can take place. This volume concludes with a comprehensive bibliography of Lyotard’s publications (including posthumous works) and writings in English on Lyotard. Prepared by the Continental Philosophy series bibliographer Helene Volat, this bibliography will provide an excellent resource and reference for readers of Lyotard and of this volume.

II. Toward the Postmodern Sublime: The Essays Lyotard’s “Emma”— to which we have given the subtitle “Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis”— is extraordinary in that it captures in one place much of the originality of Lyotard’s whole philosophical enterprise. For Lyotard, this essay is an occasion to account for the ex-cit-ability of philosophy— how philosophy is exciting, but also how it comes out of (ex) and brings forth (ex) citations and citationality, and how philosophy can carry on its important work of articulating and understanding. Excitation is not just what happens when affect is stimulated, as in the case of Emma at the age of eight when touched genitally by the storekeeper, but it is also the postmodern interest in citation and what Lyotard calls “phrasing.” Lyotard is interested in “moments between.” A differend is the impossibility and incompatibility of two positions where what happens in between is incomprehensible to both sides. The event of the between is where the two sides or positions jam up against each other and are unable to gain access to the other side— a kind of affective or conceptual bar or barrier (une barre) between them. Emma has “forgotten” that this event took place when she was eight years old. She has no memory of the sexuality of the event; all she knows is that she has a fear of entering stores alone and that this fear affects her ability to deal with life in general. As I shall point out, the “forgotten” and “forgetting” will play an important role in many of the essays included in this volume. Here the forgetting characterizes a differend between Emma the adult and Emma the child. Lyotard even speculates that most likely Emma did not even understand the excitation of the childhood event as a sexual one— probably only the shopkeeper had that experience— hence the problem of addressing the self as “I” (the one touching) and “you” (the one touched) or vice versa, which Lyotard explores in the essay. Lyotard indicates the differend between even the meaning (phrasing) of the touching in childhood and in adulthood. Hence there is a good reason why Emma the child did not understand the event as sexual (and, therefore, Emma the adult did not even remember it). 4

SILVERMAN

Lyotard considers the role of “shocks” and “aftershocks” (Nachtraglichheiten), which are also temporal events of difference—Vorzeitigkeiten (moments before). Consider, for instance, the enormous shock of the September 11 events— the time before and the lingering effects (and affects) thereafter. Whether addressed to the case of Emma’s “hysterical aftershocks” or to the events of September 11, the phrasings are what count, according to Lyotard— so much so that he even proposes a “science of phrasing,” which he calls “phrasistics.” This work of philosophy, and in particular a postmodern philosophy, marks the places of affectivity— ex-citations. In “Emma,” the events that happen are either forgotten or blocked, or they occupy no space of thematization at all. Lyotard writes: “The affect as ‘effect’ of excitation is there, but not for anything other than itself. This constitutes, at the same time, both its irrefutability and its insufficiency as witness. The affect only ‘says’ one thing— that it is there— but is witness neither for, nor of, what is there. Neither when, nor where. Again, the affect only says that it is there if one pays attention to it.” And this description could also characterize the postmodern condition whereby the affect is unpresentable in that it is presented but not present. The differend is the mark of such an event of difference, as when alternative philosophical positions are opposed to one another. Part II ( “Conversations and Differends”) focuses on juxtapositions of Lyotardian positions with those of other major contemporary figures in European philosophy. And the first essay takes up the question of “conversation” among some of these figures. It raises the question as to whether it is possible to develop a conception of “conversation” that would function as a model for a postmodern hermeneutics. Shaun Gallagher approaches the question by exploring several conversations about “conversation,” the first one between Gadamer and Derrida (which brings the two philosophers into radical alterity and which tends to strip Gadamer’s conception of its Romantic and metaphysical presuppositions), a second one between Lyotard and Rorty (which shows the limitations of a “conversation of mankind”), and a third, hypothetical and heuristic conversation between Lyotard and Gadamer concerning the possibility of a postmodern hermeneutics. Such a postmodern model would claim neither universality nor adjudicative function for conversation, yet it would recognize the inevitability of a plurality of conversations and require what Gallagher calls an ethics of honorable participation. The subsequent essays in this section articulate more specific sets of differences and similarities between Lyotard and contemporary philosophers. In effect, they attempt to bring about the kind of “conversation” which Gallagher proposes. Or another way to see these discussions is to understand them as juxtapositions of alternative positions as they bring out points of commonality and events of difference. Fred Evans juxtaposes Lyotard’s notions of justice, language, and heterogeneity with the thinking of the early twentieth-century Russian linguist and literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin. Evans argues that Bakhtin’s theory of “sociolinguistic genres” and “dialogical heteroglossia” provides a means of securing what Lyotard’s theory of “phrases” and “the differend” strives for but cannot achieve: a radical philosophy of heterogeneity and an Idea of justice that favors multiplicity over unity, dissensus over consensus. Evans is convinced that Lyotard still operates with what Bakhtin regarded as a “creative interplay of 5

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voices” and, therefore, still within the frame of the metanarratives of unity, identity, and consensus that he endeavored to criticize. Evans argues for what he calls “the interplay of equally audible voices,” but the question remains whether such a condition is ever in fact realizable. Unlike the “creative interplay of equally audible voices,” differends are constituted whenever different positions speak against one another— equally or not. James Hatley traces Lyotard’s derivation of the ethical through his critique of subjectivity in The Differend. He then shows how Lyotard’s “phrasing” of the ethical ignores the implications of Levinas’s claim that the ethical subject is incarnated as a restlessness for the other, a sincerity, whose articulation is not unlike what Lyotard reserves for the sublime and the political. In Hatley’s account of the Levinasian response to Lyotard, incarnate subjectivity provides the possibility for two levels of ethics: the prepolitical and the political. In arguing for the prepolitical significance of ethics, a level that is characterized by intimacy and proximity, Hatley indicates how Levinas is nevertheless sympathetic to Lyotard’s reservations concerning an ethics based upon the autonomy of the subject. In Gary Aylesworth’s essay, as in the initial general proposal for a postmodern hermeneutics offered by Shaun Gallagher, Gadamer is brought into conversation with Lyotard, in this case by focusing on the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Aylesworth begins with a review of the Kantian background of the discussion, including Kant’s treatment of the moral law and the aesthetics of beauty and the sublime. He claims that Gadamer reinterprets Kant’s analysis of beauty by emphasizing productive imagination and artistic genius as a model for “identity formation,” which is the basis for his notion of ethics as dialogue. Gommunicability between thought and appearance then becomes the model for the process of dialogue between human interlocutors, and particularly the rhythmed temporality, or “play,” that dialogue presupposes. Aylesworth then shows that Lyotard develops Kant’s notion of the sublime, which is an aesthetic feeling that involves the moral law but which is distinct from “respect” for the law. Lyotard’s sublime is a receptivity to a heterogeneous plurality of Ideas, and suggests a kind of Levinasian ethics of responsibility toward the “other.” Nonetheless, Lyotard recognizes the sublime as the event of an affective shock, which makes an impact upon us but does not address us. Both aspects of the sublime, Aylesworth claims, come together as a differend that characterizes the moment of “linking” among linguistic phrases. Here, the ethical and the aesthetic are held together in mutual dissolution, which, paradoxically, preserves both. For Lyotard, then, the irreducible difference between the ethical and the aesthetic is the core of the sublime. This puts him directly at odds with Gadamer. Aylesworth concludes that Gadamer’s commitment to the aesthetics of beauty and to the ethics of dialogue position him well in regard to cases where human differences can be resolved by consensus and agreement. Indeed, we are obligated to engage in dialogue as an alternative to violence in concrete situations. However, Lyotard powerfully reveals the limits of dialogue, especially in his treatment of technology and capital, which are “inhuman” insofar as their imperatives (e.g., infinite exchange) are destructive of human interests. Hence not all differences that appeal to ethical judgment are resolvable hermeneutically. This account of Lyotard stands in contrast to the hope for a postmodern 6

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hermeneutics that Gallagher seeks after and demonstrates that Lyotard’s view comes closer to accomplishing the goals that Evans argues for. Michael Naas takes up the notion of “resistance” and compares the works of Jean-Frangois Lyotard and Jean-Luc Nancy. Lyotard speaks of a resistance to the hegemonic structures of the state and to the dehumanization of technology by means of a more “archaic” anxiety or “extreme resistance” that is itself “resistant to the formation of representations.” Nancy argues in various places that the name to be given to this resistance to representation is “community.” After reviewing Lyotard’s and Nancy’s parallel developments of this notion of resistance, Naas suggests that, by combining Lyotard’s insights concerning resistance in and to language with Nancy’s insights concerning the resistance of community, the emergence of a “literary communism” becomes evident in Nancy’s texts. Without the supplement of Lyotard’s discourse, Nancy’s texts risk reinforcing the hegemony of certain phrase regimens and concealing the resistance of and in language. With this supplement, which is called for by Nancy’s own conception of the partage of voices and genres, Nancy’s own texts become exemplary of the “literary communism” he advocates. The final essay in this section examines the German reception of Lyotard. Reading Lyotard’s philosophy in terms set by Manfred Frank (exemplary of a certain German reading), Erik Vogt demonstrates how the reception of French postmodernism in contemporary German thought involves a strategic misrepresentation of the postmodern. He indicates how Frank effectively reaffirms the “project of modernity” by appealing to a discourse of nationalism designed to keep pure and intact the philosophical borders between France and Germany. Vogt’s strategy is to offer a reading not of Lyotard but of Manfred Frank’s reading of Lyotard. By showing how Frank converts Lyotard’s “differends” into “communicative contradiction,” Vogt demonstrates how the differend is displayed once again in this case. Frank does not understand that the differend operates at a different level from that of dissent or consensus. Since Frank adopts the Habermasian appeal to rules of argumentative consensus-formation (with cognitive and universal communicative meaning) and then applies his own (Schleiermachian) hermeneutic system, he effectively denies the differend. Frank does not understand the difference between a litigation (with appeal to torts) and a differend. And he thereby runs the risk of once again inflicting a “tort” on the victims of Auschwitz. The differend between Jews and Nazis is not even noticed by an adherent of discursive ethics. Hence, Vogt writes: “For Auschwitz— and it is this abyss that Lyotard attempts to disclose— revealed that Jews and Nazis did not live in a ‘common world.’ The Jews were rather systematically deprived of the possibility of articulating themselves within or responding to the ‘common’ language system. The ‘individuality’ of their interpretation, as Frank would call it, was simply not heard, that is, it was appropriated by and subjected to the traditional matrix of Christianity. Thus the differend.” Vogt here performs the differend between Frank and Lyotard such that the abyss between them cannot really be understood from either side. Like the other essays in this section, Vogt demonstrates aspects of Lyotard’s work, and in particular his account of the further differend between the postmodern and the modern, by a juxtaposition with alternative philosophical positions active in continental philosophy today. 7

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Part III (“After Politics”) explicitly raises the question of the meaning of the political, and especially Lyotard’s treatment in Heidegger and “the jews. ” “After politics” is always-already “before” politics. The section begins with Debra Bergoffen’s insightful, probing, and haunting reading of Lyotard and the question of Auschwitz. She distinguishes between the “We”— which, for Lyotard, is tied to the question of the possibility of a universal history along with the project of modernity— and the “we”— a liberated, universal humanity. The question of the We is entangled with the horror of the Holocaust. And Auschwitz is the name of that question. Bergoffen names historical wounds of the twentieth century: Auschwitz, Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Paris-May 1968, and there is little doubt that she would add the terrifying event of the current century with a name like America-September 11, 2001 to that list. But Auschwitz is an interruption to that itinerary; it stands out and cannot be reduced to these other names for terror, loss, outrage. The event of Auschwitz cannot simply be “remembered,” for Lyotard warns that the “simple process of remembering” will only (says Bergoffen) perpetuate forgetfulness of the event. Bergoffen, however, is concerned that if “it is no longer possible for us to experience history as a grand narrative or redemption, the question of remembering is removed from the question of plot.” Bergoffen is concerned that Jews might just be dissolved into “jews,” or their particularity will at best be understood from the outside. The Jew will be identified then as the hostage. The loss of the We is, for Bergoffen, the proper place for the sublime of the postmodern interruption, for Auschwitz ruptures what other signs of sublimity leave intact. She points out that Auschwitz destroys the We of a prescriptive universe— a world of the beautiful, free death where one accepts the command to die as one’s own— and that, for Lyotard, what remains is a “new non-ethical We,” one that obliterates otherness. But Bergoffen worries that this might produce “another meaningful death: the death of the martyr.” (And this latter kind of death may indeed be what was to be meant by the suicides of the September 11 attackers, for they will not have been executed like Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma City bombing— the terrorist will have escaped the knife of the avengers, but the We must not allow them to become martyrs.) Bergoffen appeals to Zizek’s account where the “Jew” is the other that produces the We, raising the question of whether the “Jew” is necessary for the We of humanism and modernity. And, if so, then the postmodern instant will have been somewhere between the impossibility of “jews” as the We— of those who (following Abraham and Isaac) are “bom with a knife in their hearts”— and the unpresentability of Auschwitz. Where Bergoffen tries to make sense of Lyotard’s notion of the “jews” and the We, James Watson addresses the role of Heidegger in any attempt to think “after Auschwitz.” And the contrast in philosophical writing should also be noted. Watson’s style, allusive and scintillating, seeks to capture the dilemma of how to read Heidegger today without turning the reading into pure rejection and vilification. There is a sense of pain in having to understand how Heidegger sought after Gelassenheit (release, tranquility, letting-be) and along the way produced what Watson calls the “Gelassenheit effect.” Watson calls the Gelassenheit effect something like Plato’s “noble lie” : a story told to “redirect desire away from law toward a unity beyond law.” Watson, who has traveled to the camps of Nazi obsession, photographed them, and sought to understand them philosophically, has also devoted much of his philosophical research to the study of 8

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Heidegger. There is a tension present in Watson’s essay: how to understand Heidegger’s insistence on displacing the Forgotten (of Auschwitz) onto the stage of “(bad) representation” and his interest in responding to the Gall of Being. Watson suggests that Heidegger’s Spiegel (his mirror) results in a self-hatred that he projects upon the figure of die Juden (“jews”) — an account that approximates Sartre’s view of the anti-Semite. And, to make the dialectic work, there can be no real Christians if there are no real Jews. Since the Nazis failed to annihilate Jews without any trace, they in effect preserved Christianity. But, Watson states: “we ‘jews’ remain nothing but moments of what was and can never become present.” He then asks: “How then are we to (re)present ourselves for philosophical interrogation?” He further points out that when Lyotard links Heidegger (with his “turn to the supremacy of Being”) and “the jews,” he sets up a framework for sheltering the expression of thought from complicity with “totalitarian powers.” This means that, in-between Heidegger and the “jews,” neither side can totalize the other, neither can fully represent the other. He considers the case of Adorno, but finds that Adorno could not free his critique of fascism from Marxist or para-Marxist presuppositions and therefore could not get beyond the Marxist-fascist opposition. With Adorno, there remained no remainder in his “critique.” And yet, as Watson, with Lyotard, indicates, without remainders— without thought thinking against itself, thought thinking against the Gelassenheit effect— there will be no way to deal with “new eradication projects.” Would this not be at least one way, Watson asks, “the question of thought’s responsibility concerning the unthinkable injustice of Auschwitz [could] be posed philosophically after Auschwitz?” Thomas Flynn, whose recent work has focused on the relations between Sartre, Foucault, and the question of history, here focuses on the “sign” as the Begebenheit (the particular event) of history in our time. Flynn suggests that Lyotard, in his discussion of our experience of the fission of meaning through such “events” as Auschwitz, Budapest 1956, and Paris-May 1968, underscores the felt futility of our searching for a single meaning to “it all.” Like Watson, Flynn asks about what is possible “after Auschwitz,” but his question focuses on whether history, as we have traditionally known it, remains possible “after Auschwitz”— whether we are not shifting back and forth in a passage among insular locales of sense-making in an archipelago of meaning-games rather than climbing the mountain of totalizing knowledge toward a unifying vision and/or ideal emancipation (as Flynn would propose). He appeals to Lyotard’s notion of the differend as the designator of that relationship which is both identifying and othering, both past and future (i.e., “now”). By contrasting Lyotard’s account of “event” (and the differed as event) with that of Foucault, Flynn indicates both the fruitful ambiguity of Lyotard’s usage and the challenge to constitute a community of tolerance that might generate the witnesses that history requires. The final essay in Part Three links the “event” to the question of “the forgotten”— a theme which Lyotard already raised in his account of Emma and the forgotten event of her childhood sexuality that she did not know to be sexual. According to Stephen David Ross, Lyotard recalls “the forgotten” and “forgetting” by returning once again to “the sign of history,” under which Kant thinks events that can never be forgotten. Ross relates this remembering and forgetting to the heterogeneous reality that, following Lyotard, “comporte” (is composed 9

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of) a differend. Lyotard speaks of “lower-case-jews.” But something disappears in this “propriety” of language, namely, particular Jews and particular women. Two people actually meet face-to-face. Ross says that these are the subjects of injustice, examples of the domination of “man.” Tracing the question of “Daseins Geschlecht” in Derrida, Ross explores other occasions of forgetting, such as the forgetting of animals and the forgetting of images of multiple identities, not all of which fall under the regime of the human Geschlecht (race/gender). He cites Maria Lugones’s idea of “worldtraveling” as an instance of this sort of multiple identity-forgetting, but notes that this is nevertheless still within human, social, and cultural worlds. Ross’ response is to propose the possibility of traveling to natural worlds— natura naturata— filled with heterogeneous kinds, and thereby returning to a reality in which differends proliferate. The fourth (and final) part (“Before Aesthetics”) raises the question of the “before” (rather than the “after,” as in those aforementioned issues concerning forgetting and the forgotten). “Before” politics, “before” aesthetics, and even before the beautiful, here too there is a differend. The differend, then, is located between what is present and what went before, in the event of transcending whatever is transcended, and where the unpresentable is presented in a presentation itself, namely, the postmodern sublime. The first essay in this last part addresses the question of “transcendence,” a topic that in some quarters is understood as coming “before” any experience, before knowledge, before understanding. By tracing what Richard Brons calls “postmodern transcendence,” he argues that Lyotard’s critical philosophy is situated before and against the (modernist) thinking of the unpresentable that Kant, Heidegger, and Levinas offer. Lyotard’s position is neither within nor beyond epistemological, ontological, ethical, and aesthetic accounts of the unpresentable. Lyotard’s philosophy is an attempt to think postmodern transcendence as resistance to thinking/phrasing “before” it can represent itself to itself. Brons gives an account of the Kantian and Heideggerian attempts to characterize the “unpresentable” in terms of transcendent Ideas that transgress known and representable reality (Kant) and in terms of an original instance (Ereignis) that unfolds in reflecting or turning back to an unthought time when thinking had been interrupted and will be interrupted again in the face of what comes under different names: the unthinkable, the unpresentable, or Being (Sein in Heidegger). Both Kant and Heidegger, according to Brons, are ready to take transcendence as the source for thinking the unpresentable. In Kant and Heidegger, transcendence comes “before” thinking. For Lyotard, by contrast, the unpresentable sublime does not need to “mobilize judgment of conflict.” However, Brons wants to reaffirm the desirability of an ethical component in the thinking of the sublime and the unpresentable event. He invokes the notion of passibilite— not passivity but, rather, “taking responsibility” for the irredeemable injustice of the unpresentable as differend, as between discourses of representation. Brons wants to show how it should be possible to do justice to the unpresentable. To make this goal evident, he turns to Levinas, who is committed to the “ethical event.” The unpresentable otherness of the Other in Levinas precedes Kantian Ideas and Heideggerian transcendent ontological thinking. The feelings of love, obligation, and responsibility come before any conceptual or ontological determinations. And Lyotard’s phrase-affects 10

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articulate this “before” as an “event” and as ethical as well as sublime— for in moments of conflict, opposition, radical misunderstanding, the otherness of the Other is phrased as a “differend.” What Brons calls a “material” transcendence involves being responsible for our resistances, our differends— sublime and radically unpresentable as they may be. In “Lyotard: Before and After the Sublime,” Serge Trottein calls Lyotard’s whole philosophical enterprise “a critical philosophy of the postmodern.” He names it a “critical philosophy” because Lyotard often brings Kant into his frame. By borrowing Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment as purely reflective, Trottein notes, “Lyotard does not aestheticize the political, nor does he politicize the aesthetic, since the political and the aesthetic are both thought in terms of indeterminate judgments without criteria and therefore cannot legitimate each other. They are heterogeneous fields which it would be unjust to collapse into each other.” Lyotard’s return to the third Critique (the Critique of Judgment) is also a “forgetting” of the first two Critiques— where the conceptions of truth and moral law are put forth. Conceptions of truth (first Critique) and moral law (second Critique) involve a very restricted sense of “determinations”— causality implying a necessary relation to knowledge. Hence Lyotard “rejects the terrorism or imperialism of judgments of truth in favor of Ideas, assimilated to reflective, undetermined judgments, which appear as the only possible foundations of a postmodern politics and a postmodern aesthetics.” Hence Kantianism becomes the philosophy of the postmodern— on the condition that it be rid of any determination, that is, of any reference to truth. Modern art concerns the sublime inasmuch as it is about presenting something unpresentable. Classical art devoted itself to beautiful representations of nature. Before the sublime, there was the beautiful (i.e., premodemity). If the sublime is to be reserved for modernity, Trottein asks, what is there after the sublime? And because Lyotard defines the postmodern in terms of the sublime, would this mean that the postmodern is also postsublime? Trottein says “no,” because the postmodern does not come after modernity but is, rather, a part of it. So Trottein concludes that Lyotard is proposing to think from the perspective of the beautiful and not the other way around. The beautiful is regulated by an Idea of multiplicity and diversity. Hence, for Trottein, this aesthetics of matter, of the Thing always forgotten and unforgettable, is an aesthetics of the beautiful (and not of the sublime). Trottein writes: “Before and after the sublime, within the sublime, there remains the beautiful. Before and after the modern, within the modern, there remains the postmodern. Now, can or must there be a postmodern politics of the beautiful? The question remains open.” Subsequent essays in this volume will challenge this preference for the beautiful (the heterogenous, multiple, and diverse) as the site of postmodern events, but Trottein’s account is certainly provocative in thematizing the beautiful “before and after the sublime.” After all, the “beautiful” Twin Towers were there before the sublime events of September 11. Wilhelm Wurzer pursues this question of the sublime, and particularly as a rewriting of the Kantian aesthetic. Lyotard, Wurzer claims, is in search of “bodies writing their differences,” where the bodies are involved in a “political economy, that is, capital, carried even into the sphere of passions.” 1 In the present, electronic age, a new philosophical task arises, namely, how to think what Wurzer calls the Augenschein (the look, the glance, the gaze, the stare, 11

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the watching, the striking of what strikes the eye). To what extent can truths endure outside of Truth? In-between the political and the aesthetic (Marx and Nietzsche), Lyotard tells the story of a postmodern Augenschein. Wurzer’s essay focuses on this intimate connection between the aesthetic and the political, between art and capital. Aesthetic theory, Wurzer claims, seems to be the attempt by which the mind tries to rid itself of words, of the matter that they are, and finally of matter itself. However doomed to failure, as Lyotard writes: “One cannot get rid of the Thing. Always forgotten, it is unforgettable” (/, 143). Bringing philosophy and art into proximity, therefore, serves a double purpose: it frees philosophy from the arrogance of philosophers, namely metaphysics, and it sheds new light on how to resist the inhuman. So, by glancing at individual artworks, philosophy becomes more rigorous in uncovering how art desires to express truths about this world and its inhumanities. Unafraid to regard the inhuman, art does not avoid intensities or passions. Speaking through images, sounds, and words, it is not bound to representation. By means of audiovisual operations, art frequently reveals the nonvisual, the invisible, the silent. A painting does not consist simply in its material configurations but in viewpoints of Augenschein, in what strikes the eye. \ Having brought art and philosophy into proximity, what about the political and, in particular, political economy? “How should we judge?” Lyotard asks.“Often and intensely. Since it makes for a long life, we should judge a great deal. For the more we judge, the better we judge.” 2 What strikes the eye for it to judge is not some pagan god, but rather “capital.” Wurzer cites Lyotard: ‘^Capital makes us tell, listen to, and act out” our narratives (LR, 140). With the emergence of exchange in the form of commodity production, the sublime disappears. The sublime turns into capital— an intractable figurability— an imageless rewriting of modernity, a working through the possibilities of reflection/resistance. The sublime (rather than the beautiful) comes under the problematic of a complex electronic network of sending and receiving. Suddenly, the sublime turns into the in-human. As a “counterfeit sublime,” capital may bring about the forgetting of the inhuman. Its an-aesthetic agitates the mind, sends it ecstatic signals, but also makes it think. With regard to this in-human an-aesthetic, is it possible to resist capital as the new differend— the untraversable block between viewing and the viewed? Viewing capital from within the closure of desire, every political economy is libidinal. In his post-Marxian reading of capital, Lyotard is closer to Freud than to Heidegger. However, it is more likely that capital exceeds the dimension of desire, linked to what Heidegger names “the relation.” Beyond desire stands the relation of sendings in capital, counterfeit and/or sublime. Its essence is not desire but always-already its subversion. There is no instantiation, no intensity, no feeling in capital. It is always moving, slipping away, turning to new directions. In Kant, the sublime is an unbounded Geistesgejuhl— a spiritual feeling. But in the age of modem capital, the feeling vanishes and desire is converted into the multiplicity of truths— the play and network of presentations that happen in the interstices of capital at work. Is this what happened when the Twin Towers— the pillars of capitalist achievement, the Tower of Babel (not to a single language, but to a single global, multinational, economy)— came down? The capital that built and brought 12

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down the towering towers will not have been the sublime, and certainly not sublime feeling— the postmodern sublime happened in the event of the differend between the two, in the articulation of the networks, not in their objectification. There is a great deal of suspense to this story of September 11, this story of the aesthetic and the political marking out of differends that had been forgotten, that will continue to be forgotten, but that constitute the postmodern sublime— even before any aesthetic theory that might seek to objectify them. Wayne Froman’s essay focuses on the “suspense” that happens in the event of the sublime. When Edmund Burke speaks of the sublime, he appeals to a “terror”— but then to a “delight” of sublimity whereby the terror is “kept at bay.” As Froman puts it, reading Burke: “That nothing may follow is the first privation or suspense; that a pleasure follows from the pain is the second suspense.” These are the two moments in the Burkean sublime. By contrast, in modem avantgarde art, the sublime is “here and now,” there where the painting is— not before and not after. This contemporaneity is particularly evident in the work of a modem avant-garde artist such as Barnett Newman. Newman’s own essay “The Sublime Is Now” (1948) takes up this temporal understanding of the sublime. The suspense, then, in the modern will not precede a pleasure that will follow, constituting a second suspense. In the modem, the suspense is not divided. It is “now.” But the difference between the modem sublime and the postmodern sublime (as will become even more evident in the final essay) is that the “now” is an event that cannot become an object, that cannot be presented. And yet there is a presentation, there is a suspense— which Lyotard goes on to call a “differend.” What is particularly valuable in Wayne Froman’s incisive essay is the detailed reading of Newman’s concern with time, with the time that the picture itself is. Froman writes: “to the suspense of Burke’s terror the unrepresentable event gives a word, a color, a form, a line. This will be followed by no further word, color, form, or line.” The second suspense will not take place in the modem as it does in the early modern Burkean account because, for Newman, the sublime is now— here and now. And Froman then cites Lyotard’s essay “Newman: The Instant” from The Inhuman (1988) to clarify this singular (modem) suspense: “One feels that it is possible that soon nothing more will take place. What is sublime is the feeling that something will happen, despite everything, within this threatening void, that something will take ‘place’ and will announce that everything is not over. That place is mere ‘here,’ the most minimal occurrence” (I, 84). For Newman, this is a “sensation of time” in contrast to what Lyotard will want to articulate as “the present instant”— namely, “the postmodern sublime.” Froman gives a helpful overview of some theories of time— Kant, Husserl, Heidegger— in order to account for Newman’s “sensation of time.” And he offers a detailed reading of Newman’s own statements as he sought to produce in 1947 a “living form”— “an absolute of perfect sensation” (which would “destroy”— Newman’s word— the rectangle and what Froman describes as “the formal elements through which the European abstractionists sought to free themselves from an economy of beauty regulated by self-conscious sensibility”). “Destroying,” breaking with tradition, coming up with something “new,” that was the goal of the avant-garde artist. And hence in reaction to the “living form” came 13

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Newman’s “triangular format” (as in his Broken Obelisk) and his “zip paintings” (as in Vir Heroicus Sublimis). Froman gives an excellent detailed account of these “zip” paintings. The “zip,” he says, “was Newman’s name for the vertical, which could announce anything and everything that moved him or that provoked him to paint.” And the Twin Towers carried a form not unlike two Newman sculptures, such as Here I and Here I I —sculpted zips. Froman concludes with Lyotard’s account of the “immaterial materiality of avant-garde painting.” Froman notes that what accompanies this “unrepresentable event that gives a word, a line, a color, and a form (and brings a terror that there will be nothing that follows) is without a self.” As articulated in Libidinal Economy,3 the self is indissociable from the subject, and the subject had been shown by Marx to be a ruse of capital— and here is the link with Freud’s “primary processes.” Lyotard’s libidinal economy is derived from both Marx and Freud— which again returns us to Lyotard’s own extraordinary essay on Freud’s “Emma” that we have included with this volume. However, as Froman points out, Newman’s art is anything but selfless. And so Froman suggests that if there is indeed a differend here, it is with Lyotard. But this is exactly the point. For, as I develop in the final essay ( “Lyotard and the Events of the Postmodern Sublime”), Lyotard distinguishes his account of the sublime from the modem sublime that Newman offers, or even the Kantian sublime that precedes it. For Kant, the sublime is a feeling or sensation of pain or pleasure that takes place in an experience of something— something that could be beautiful or ugly, exquisite or terrifying, natural or cultural. The modem sublime, as offered by Newman, for instance, is a “now” that is the presentation of something that was previously not yet presented— namely, something “new.” The avant-garde artist seeks constantly to overcome what went before in order to produce something new, something never before presented. The postmodern sublime, however, is what Lyotard calls “the presentation of the unpresentable in presentation itself.” Here, the unpresentable is presented not as something presented, but, rather, as a presentation in which the unpresentable happens. Newman’s zips are not understood here as something new, but, instead, as a presentation of the unpresentable in a painting such as Vir Heroicus Sublimis. The zips are not constituted as objects in the painting; they are interruptions in the continuity of the large colored spaces.4 As interruptions, they are not objects as such— they are immaterial materialities. They happen as events rather than as objects in the painting. In this sense, the five zips in the painting are moments of the postmodern sublime. They are instances of the postmodern sublime. They take place, but they do not occupy any determinate space. They suspend (to return to Froman’s term) the spaces of the now and interrupt the time of the here. Hence the postmodern sublime is not “now” as it is in the modem sublime. The postmodern sublime, situated within the modem (as Trottein reminds us), can only happen in the modem, but as a zip in the networks and global capital of the modem. The postmodern sublime is the question of its event— “arrive-t-il?” (is it happening?)— that is Lyotard’s question. And this is the question— the postmodern question— that needs to be posed to philosophy today, but also to the events of September 11, 2001. The question is not “is it really happening?” but “is it happening?” What kind of “zip” or “interruption” or “break” do these events signal, name, call, mark? They mark “the modem.” But they are also 14

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entirely “unbelievable.” There is no place for their inscription, no way to textualize them, and yet these events did taken place. To the extent that the question “is it happening?” can still be raised, they will have to be dealt with as events that do not fit within the modem development of progress, advancement, improvement, success, achievement, future. The events of September 11 will not have a place in the modem— and yet they did take place. In this sense they will have been events of the postmodern sublime. However, as zips in the modem everyday, as suspense, as terror, as after politics and before aesthetics, as marks of a differend that remains incomprehensible to us as modems who need to build upon determinate answers, the question still remains open: “Is it happening?”

III. Remembering Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard On May 7, 1998 (less than a month after Jean-Frangois Lyotard died), the twenty-second annual conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature (IAPL) was held at the University of Califomia-Irvine, where Lyotard had been visiting professor on several occasions. Stephen Barker (as IAPL 1998 conference coordinator and professor at the School of the Arts at Irvine) and I (as IAPL executive director) quickly put together a special memorial symposium in memory of Lyotard. Speakers included Jacques Derrida, the major invited IAPL speaker that year and a longtime friend and colleague of Lyotard at Irvine. Derrida’s remarks were spoken, as he forewarned me, de coeur (rather than par ecrit). Elaborated versions of his remembrances of Lyotard can be found in The Work of Mourning, a recent volume edited and largely translated by Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault.5 The speakers at the Irvine event also included Mary Lydon, who was to have completed her translation of Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure.6 Sadly she subsequently also passed away just before the twenty-fifth annual IAPL conference in May 2001. Mary Lydon, professor of French at the University of Wisconsin, had also participated in the important gathering of the International Philosophical Seminar on Lyotard, held in the Italian Alps in the mid-1990s, where some of the essays included here were originally presented for the first time. The other speakers at the Irvine symposium also included David Carroll, professor of French at Irvine and a longtime colleague-collaborator with Lyotard, Dalia Judovitz, who studied with Lyotard when he taught at Johns Hopkins decades earlier and who brought Lyotard to Emory University as Woodruff Professor, Andrew Benjamin, professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick in England, and myself (as introducer and organizer of the symposium). What follows are the comments I delivered on the occasion of the Lyotard Memorial Symposium at the International Association for Philosophy and Literature conference in May 1998: There is no pleasure in marking the passing of a friend, and Jean-Frangois Lyotard, who died at the age of 73 on April 21,1998 in Paris from leukemia, was a friend to many of us. He was a friend in so many senses— intellectual, philosophical, personal— he was a person whose warm affect cannot be forgotten in his absence. He was a philosopher whose thinking has made it possible for us to understand the

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LYOTARD: PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, AND THE SUBLIME “postmodern.” He wrote about art so that we could see the “presentation of the unpresentable in presentation itself.” He was politically active— with Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis (whom we also lost this year)— opposing totalitarianism in its various forms. He would often comment that his leftist friends had to deal with the fact that he was bom in Versailles, not far from the seat of French monarchy for

several centuries. And although he wrote an important little Que sais-je? book on Phenomenology1in the early 1950s, he did not really return to university life until the later 1960s, when he completed his doctoral these d'etat—Discoursfigure (which appeared in 1971). Mikel Dufrenne, his official directeur de these, used to

say (when Lyotard defended his thesis at the age of 47) that Jean-Frangois “was perfectly capable of producing a thesis all on his own”— meaning that he did not really need a dissertation director to guide the important philosophical treatise that became Discourse, Figurel By then Lyotard had already moved on from the University of Paris X (Nanterre) to the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes), where he joined with Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Deguy, and many significant names of the century to create the new post-’68 university (now located at St. Denis) from which he officially retired in 1987. I first met Jean-Frangois Lyotard in 1971 or 1972, when Mikel Dufrenne invited him to speak to us at his seminar at Nanterre. Still to this day, I remember how he took a Renaissance painting of an Italian piazza and showed how it was more than a focal point that centered the painting— it was “desire passing through the figuration”— perpendicular to the scene— an example of libidinal economy. We met with him after the seminar and caught glimpses of his scintillating affectivity. In the 1970s, Lyotard set to work linking Marx and Freud into a libidinal economy. From there he rediscovered the “pagan” and concluded the decade with a book that has marked the culture of the latter quarter of this century: The Postmodern Condition (1979).8 His 1980s would be identified with the “differend”— a difficult concept because it would elude location while at the same time articulating disagreement. His notion of phrasing would even provide a way to operate with and deal with differences— political differences, aesthetic differences, personal differences. And he himself was struggling with these kinds of differences— struggling to understand them, hoping to live with them. In 1975, he came to the Schizo-Culture Conference held at Columbia University in New York City9— and what a gathering! I was just thirty years old and, as were others, I have been significantly marked by that experience. The cast of characters included Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, R. D. Laing, William Burroughs, Arthur Dan to, and on and on. Lyotard gave a magnificent lecture criticizing “the Magisterial Discourse”— the University Master Lecture— and he did it with such mastery! Years later, in The Postmodern Condition, he would oppose “Grand Narratives” and “Metanarratives” with similar vigor. Anyone who visited the Centre Pompidou (otherwise known as “Beaubourg”) in

the heart of Paris for the Les Immateriaux exhibit10 which he masterminded in 1985 will appreciate how wonderfully adept he was at making ideas concrete— so concrete that their immaterialities could even be identified. It was an unusual exhibit in its diversity and in its multiplicities— clips from the filmM. Klein (dealing with Second World Wartime experiences), hands-on computer games that did not lead anywhere, perfumes that could be scented but not touched. And then Kant— particularly in the third Critique, the Critique of Judgment— making sense of history, of painting, of the sublime (from Lyotard’s Enthousiasme11

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SILVERMAN of 1986 to the Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime12 in 1991). Gould we have distinguished the Kantian sublime from the modem sublime from the textual sublime without understanding the postmodern condition, without addressing the postmodern sublime— or should we just call it the Lyotardian sublime? In 1991, Jean-Frangois was invited to teach as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook. Working through the differend as well as the Kantian sublime, he charmed, animated, and challenged us all. During that period of three weeks, he and his first wife Andree lived in our house. I couldn’t help thinking that the differend was more than just political and aesthetic— and yet they both became very dear to us. I was only able to share in one third of the whisky-drinking, smoking, and philosophizing. I don’t think it unfair to say that we came to love JeanFrangois that spring of 1991— walking on the beaches of the south shore of Long Island— I have a beautiful picture that Jean-Frangois took of me with my son Christopher— and perhaps someday my own photos of Jean-Frangois— his wonderful smile shining through his craggy sharply featured extraordinary face— will reach a public forum.13 During that period, we worked out the design for the book that came to be published as Toward the Postmodern,14a project which I asked Robert Harvey and Mark Roberts to edit and translate for my Series in Philosophy and Literary Theory at Humanities Press (now Humanity Books). We sat in my Stony Brook office and decided how the essays— which had not yet appeared in English— would identify the three frames of his philosophy— from “the Libidinal” to “the Pagan” to what was supposed to be called “the Unwritable” but which he later proposed we change to “the Intractable.” All toward the postmodern. In subsequent years, much energy was spent producing his dialogue with Eberhard Gruber on “the hyphen” in the term “Judeo-Christian.” The book was translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas and published by Humanity Books (in the same series as Toward the Postmodern) under the title The Hyphen — Between Judaism and Christianity15— a formulation . . . a hyphen, a trace of the union (un trait d’union) which Jean-Frangois lived as well as phrased. As to his work of the past five years in which Jean-Frangois was Visiting Professor of French and Philosophy at Emory University— work that focused largely on Malraux (resulting in Signed, Malraux16 [published in 1996] and Soundproof Room: Malraux’sAntiAesthetics17 [published in 1998], both later translated by my Stony Brook colleague Robert Harvey for Minnesota and Stanford University Presses respectively) and more recently his work on Augustine’s Confessions, I shall leave to Dalia Judovitz, a longtime member of IAPL and its Executive Committee. David Carroll— about whom Jean-Frangois spoke so fondly when I visited with him in Paris in 1992— will comment upon his role as Visiting Professor of Humanities at the University of California-Irvine from 1987 to 1995. Andrew Benjamin, who edited both The Lyotard Reader for Blackwell and Judging Lyotard18 for Routledge, will comment on his own particular collaboration with Jean-Frangois. Mary Lydon, whose long-awaited English translation of Discourse, Figure will facilitate further study of Lyotard’s most exciting work in aesthetic theory, has also agreed to join us. And to Jacques Derrida, I am extremely grateful for his willingness to stay on at Irvine for an extra few days before returning to Paris. He will not only give the IAPL Invited Lecture but has also agreed to join us today to remember Jean-Frangois Lyotard. They overlapped here at Irvine as visiting professors for several years. Jean-Frangois spoke of Jacques with so much genuine admiration, friendship, and

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LYOTARD: PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, AND THE SUBLIME respect, and he, in turn, will speak today—“de coeur. ” My only regret is that Jacques Derrida has had so many adieux to give in recent years, and I am deeply affected by the call for him to give this one— in the name of Jean-Frangois Lyotard. Jean-Frangois Lyotard was a friend to so many of us here— those of us who knew him personally, those of us who knew him for his politics, those of us who knew him for his aesthetic theory, those of us who knew him for his philosophy, those of us who knew him for his writings on literature, art, and religion. And there is no doubt that we will continue to work with him, his splendid, perspicuous, brilliant, sometimes enigmatic, often probing, but always sublime thought will be with us— as a friend and figure of IAPL, as a marker of what needs to be thought into the next century. I will miss talking to Jean-Frangois on the phone, as I did only a short while ago to invite him to come once again to Stony Brook— I will miss his gravelly French voice, his wonderful, wry smile, his personable sense of humor, his intense interrogations of contemporary thought and culture, his affectivity which he practiced as well as theorized. Jean-Frangois, tu me manques— and we will miss you.

IV. Appreciations Those remarks were presented to a full house at the University of CalifomiaIrvine on May 7,1998; they still speak today. Many people have contributed substantially to the production of this eighth volume in the Routledge Continental Philosophy series. The greatest debt is to Jean-Frangois Lyotard himself, to whom this volume is dedicated in more senses than one. He permitted the English translation of his “Emma,” which we include here. Norah Martin provided the initial version to which Richard Brons lent his own understanding of Lyotard’s corpus, but the final version as published here was completed by Michael Sanders. Many of the essays included here were first presented at the International Philosophical Seminar, which takes place in the South Tyrol every summer and which I have had the pleasure of codirecting with Wilhelm Wurzer, who also serves as associate editor for the Continental Philosophy series. Several other papers were initially presented at meetings of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. All the contributions have been thoroughly reworked and rewritten for inclusion here. A great deal of shaping and structuring, not to speak of detailed editing, goes into the production of Continental Philosophy volumes such as this one. Norman Bussiere and Michael Sanders have been especially vigilant in contributing to this work. Each of them devoted many hours to making this volume a success. Their editorial skills are highly valued and greatly appreciated, and I am extremely grateful to both of them. Adrian Johnston, who joined the GP staff with this volume, has carefully read and provided detailed editorial suggestions on most of the essays included in this volume. He also adeptly and constructively reviewed this introduction as it came at the end of the long journey that the whole manuscript has followed. Each of the essays included here have been reviewed by outside referees who have evaluated and in some cases recommended substantial revisions that have improved the contributions to this volume. Helene Volat has once again provided us with an excellent bibliography to 18

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accompany this volume. We have followed the same format as in previous volumes in the series, and for this one, Helene has built upon a prior version of Lyotard’s work, which she provided for Toward the Postmodern. As I commented in my memorial remarks during the IAPL conference at Irvine, the photographs that are interspersed throughout this volume are the ones I took of Jean-Frangois Lyotard on the south shore beaches of Long Island one blustery day in the spring of 1991. I have saved them for this occasion and am pleased to share them at this time. I only hope that they will serve well to give the reader some sense of the delightful and warm affect that surrounded Jean-Frangois in all his endeavors. Volumes of this sort also need the support and encouragement of the editorial staff at Routledge. I have had the pleasure of working with many excellent Routledge editors since we began the Continental Philosophy project in the mid-1980s. Gayatri Patniak made it her business to move this volume along, and Damon Zucca has been great in expressing his interest and enthusiasm for this work. Without his particular goading, my many other obligations might have interceded as we neared the final stages of completion. Since he personally witnessed the events of September 11 from a rooftop, I hope that the recognition of the significance that marks that horrifying day will also be appreciated here. I would also like to express my thanks to all of those people at Routledge, including the guidance of Bill Germano, the philosophical excitement of Damian Treffs, and the support of the marketing director, Amy Lee, all of whom continue to make this Continental Philosophy series a wonderful success. Although she likes to keep her distance from the editorial production of these volumes, I am also indebted to Gertrude Postl, whose own philosophical acumen comes into play as these manuscripts take shape. And she was able to share in the extraordinary presence of Jean-Frangois in our home for the several weeks when he taught at Stony Brook in 1991. To my colleagues at Stony Brook, who have supported this work, my thanks are recorded here. Among them, Ed Casey, as Philosophy Department chair during the larger portion of this project, and now Kelly Oliver, the current chair, are owed my special note of appreciation. They have both made it possible for Michael Sanders and Adrian Johnston (before he completed his doctorate) to be supported by summer grants so that they could work on this project. And I am grateful to the Fulbright Commission and the University of Vienna for the opportunity to serve as Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at the University of Vienna in the spring of 2001. This period of teaching and research in a different context provided me with the necessary distance and time to move this volume along toward its completion. In the place of a conclusion, I would like to call the reader’s attention to the new Continental Philosophy Bibliography Project, which can be accessed on the Web at http://www.sunysb.edu/contphil. As a supplement to the summaries and tables of contents of past Continental Philosophy volumes, and with the editorial skills of Michael Sanders, we have begun a listing of new books in Continental Philosophy appearing each year and listed by topics, areas of philosophy, and figures. I hope that this information will not only draw special attention to the value of this Routledge series but also provide a context for further reading and ongoing inquiry into the importance of Continental Philosophy in the English-speaking world. 19

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PARTI (EX)CITING PHILOSOPHY

© Hugh J. Silverm an.

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Chapter 1

EMMA: BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS Jean-Frangois Lyotard

I. Nothings Excitatio, from citare, frequentative of ciere or cire— to set into motion, to arouse— and of ex— to bring forth (excitare sommo, to awaken). In Latin, the semantic field is energetically judicial: one cites in order to be recognized. One exits the city of one’s private darkness, and makes it appear in the light of the law. And behind the law, the hunt: a crouching animal is flushed out and thrown into the bright, finalized, human field of the chase. (I invoke here the origins of Roman Law, said to relate— according to Yan Thomas— to “natural possession” through capture.)1 According to the principle of modern science, excitation activates a specific, although dormant and invisible, field: that of electricity. A magnetic field is excited by placing a tension (a current, an “excitation”) on an electromagnetic inductor. Informed by his reading of Fechner, and under cover of this electromagnetism— accredited by physical science— Freud first came to use the term “excitation” while sketching his Project fo r a Scientific Psychology in 1895. Clearly, some forcing takes place in this excitation. A forcing, in Aristotelean terms, of the act so far as potential is concerned. The object cited must be excitable. This forcing is the occasion for the citability of the excitable. There one stumbles, it seems, in the pure tautology of the event: it happens. Yet, afterwards, one will say not so much that “it happens,” as that the occasion actualizes a potential field. Or, at least, that the potential field that it excites is what gives it its quid. The event only happens, but what happens is not just any occasion. It is determined by the field of excitability. It has its presupposition, a capacity or excitability, with regard to the law, to the chase, to magnetism. After the event, its predisposition is disclosed. Covering over a latency, Nachtraglichkeit refers back to Vorzeitigkeit.2 For example, in The Ego and the Id, Freud underscores the extent to which philosophers are incapable of conceiving “anything both unconscious and mental” (iSE, 19:216). This inability, or ineptitude, stems from the fact that “philosophers have never taken account of hypnosis, they have not concerned themselves with the interpreting of dreams” (SE, 19:217). As philosophers, they have no clinical practice. And if philosophers were to have one, they would not confine themselves to the citadel of consciousness and its philosophy. 23

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Philosophy, hidden behind a web of evidence that ensures its bright life, resists psychoanalysis. Analysis refers (cites) philosophy to a court of darkness that resists understanding and reason, the court of an inconsistent, yet persevering, anguish, one incurable to all consolatio. Yet this anguish, this contradictory affect, sorrow and pleasure, sorrow caused by pleasure, is without doubt the first spirit of philosophy— its excitatio— the recurrent occasion for the act of philosophizing. Philosophy knows it and has named it in its own ways: absolute skepticism, nihilism, the taedium vitae spirtus, the desperatio cogitandi. The field of philosophical excitability is stretched to the four comers of Nothing, named by Kant as follows: ens rationis, an empty concept without object; nihil privativum, an empty object of a concept; ens imaginarium, an empty intuition without concept; and the terrible fourth, an empty object without concept, nihil negativum, the Un-ding, the no-thing.3 After Lacan’s rereading of Freud, this no-thing, a nullity of object and of concept, is called the Thing. In this divergence concerning the name given to what preoccupies them lies the differend between philosophers and analysts. According to the latter, the unconscious knows nothing of negation (nihil negitativum); in the former, negation is the way of ignoring the unconscious, of speaking of it as ens rationis or nihil privativum. In this vein, any philosopher, as philosopher; will find it impossible to intervene in Freudian affairs without redressing them, changing their notion of negativity, i.e., distorting them. This is not to describe the diverse ways of amendment (such as Jungianism, for example) that the spirit of philosophy can and has inflicted upon the unconscious. The motive of excitation, to hold myself to that theme, induces the philosopher to suspect the dynamic and economic metaphor supporting this motive— to doubt the legitimacy of metapsychology as such. The philosopher is at least tempted to get rid of “transcendental appearances” and the metaphysical illusions perceived there. He tries to force this general physicality through the Gaudine yoke of the Critique. He examines the a priori conditions of possibility of an “unconscious judgment.” Such a law would be something like: act always as if the maxim of your will (desire) could never be known, shared, nor communicated . . . not even with yourself. And, for the philosopher, this parody immediately appears inconsistent. How could the “you” to which the law is directed supposedly address itself, or even have knowledge of this prescription, if it is not allowed to know and share any motive of its deeds? Yet certainly, this inconsistency, this simultaneity of an addressed being (addressee, “you”) and of a being not addressed (and thus beyond all addressing), is precisely what philosophy must persist in thinking if it wants to do justice to psychoanalysis and to its own melancholy. The effort to proceed to the a priori conditions of the thesis of the unconscious obliges the philosopher to presuppose a transcendental consistence to the inconsistence of primary processes. If philosophy claims to have stopped ignoring the unconscious, its reason has to have made reason apt to reason with the unreasonable. The stake is of the same order as that at which Heidegger aimed in The Principle of Reason. But if the rule alone is not enough to identify this “irrationality” with Diehtung (largely assimilable to what I call metaphor) as the only possibility of accessing the Id-side of the rational, then the game is much more serious (and will avoid the unworthy consequences that we know). Psychoanalysts know the 24

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title of this question: myth of the origin/origin of the myth, origin of the fantasy/fantasy of the origin, or in what they treat defacto in the usage made of literature as a witness to this Id-side. I am attempting here to maintain something of a philosophical claim: to speak in an intelligible fashion on the subject of the Id-side of the articulable, that is to say, of a Nihil, which is also what excites this very same claim. In the scope of this dispute, what follows arises. I speak here as a philosopher, with no (clinical) authority on the matter of excitation, but with the (philosophical) obstinacy “to set right” something of the Freudian lesson. On somewhat of a slippery slope, I have tried, for some fifteen years, to drown the thesis of the unconscious in the deluge of a general libidinal economy. This was pure metaphysics, and consequently parodical and strongly nihilistic, despite being clothed in a cheerfulness and an affirmativity adorned with the name of Nietzsche. Here, I went straight to the “drives.” Now, with the topic of excitation, I would like to tackle the Id-side once again, only now in a critical, if not Kantian, fashion. Kant’s thought remains dependent on presuppositions and on implications (on both, no doubt) still too strongly attached to subjectivist thought, i.e., to a philosophy of consciousness. When reading the later Wittgenstein on this topic, one remains struck by his recurrent observation that one does not need to know the rules of a language-game in order to master or play it. But one also worries about the very expression “play of language,” which does not clearly determine whether it is the speaker who plays the language or the language that plays the speaker (as one plays a piano). I have been led to this myself in The Differend,4 where this worry presents itself (rather than being conceptualized) under the name of phrase. The phrase resists doubt, and therefore nihilism and melancholy as well, much better than the uncertain Cogito. Whether one suspects that a phrase is there or not, it is still necessary to voice this suspicion. By the same token, I would admit that a silence could be a phrase. A slip, a lost act, etc. And an affect. Along these lines I sense a way to philosophically approach a matter proper to the psychoanalyst. Analysts deal only with phrases and eminently partake in their certainty. Indeed, the talking cure is a treatment through phrases, though one that comes at the price of stretching the sense of talk just as far as that of phrase. As much as I am informed, or am willing to be informed, by the Id-side to which I am singularly the host or hostage, I can presume that in this talking, the kind of phrase that guides the cure is the affect. The affect is a very curious kind of phrase, one Freud isolated from those classed under the general function of the Reprasentanz. Affective phrases function according to the regime of the Vorstellungsreprasentanz, of delegation by representation. First, they are referential only insofar as they are representations; they relate to an object, “thing,” or word, which is what they “speak of.” The measure of illusion and truth such phrases convey is played out in relation to this object (their grammatical subject), the represented, which is there for an other and is delegated. The measure mentioned takes shape insofar as it sketches, in the texture of associations, the other (or the others) of the object first exhibited. The progress from one point of the associative fabric to the other is, without doubt, interminable. The object phrased as the “sofa” (for example) is not the delegate of one other, but of several others. Truth is not located in the fabric. It is the fabric itself, i.e., the deferral. 25

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Thus two dimensions of substitution need to be carefully distinguished. I will not focus on this here, called (excited) as we are by the question of excitation. Only just one word: the representatives involved in representation by “things” or by words are substitutes insofar as they represent the pulsional energy which is invested, counterinvested, or neutralized in the figure or in the discourse. Furthermore, they may possibly even be substitutes for each other, in a tangle that dazzles philosophical understanding. The second sense relates to displacement and to condensation, but the first (which necessarily includes, in my opinion, the disposition for metaphoricity) is of an entirely different order. The “thing-phrase,” or word-phrase, is always substitutive, absolutely speaking, in that it happens in place of a “motion.” Not a thing for an other, a word for an other, but— be it word or thing— an articulated element of language (articulated in a skewed way, as in the rebus of a dream), a phrase which therefore presents itself in the place of a pulsional “investment.” The latter is supposed neither to obey nor disobey the rules of this language but to be so strange to it that one would not know, at first glance, to speak of the translation of the dynamic into the verbal. The motion delegates one or several representatives (Reprasentanz) in an order, a language, which implies reference (Vorstellung). Why must the pulsional not present itself in its own place, but be delegate to the phrases of an articulated language? Certainly it does not have an assignable place for itself. Speech is necessary in order to place it, for the pulsional does not speak for itself.

II. Phrases At issue, insofar as such repression commands the event of excitation, is the question of an original repression. The metapsychological hypothesis, the economic and dynamic metaphor (and, doubtless, the topical as well) that I will here call the physical metaphor, implies that the unconscious operates as an appearance that obeys the rules not of an articulated language but of a mechanics: forces, conflicts of forces, composition of forces, points of physical contact (that of the application of a force), transformation of potential into kinetic energy (discharged by “specific action”), works therefore (of dream, of mourning, of repression) as the expenditure of energy necessary to these mechanical operations, energy used in a differentiated system (bound), or free-moving (a reservoir where the aforesaid system draws the sustenance necessary to escape from entropy). In general, quantity is the only category pertinent to this mechanics. It explains the terms: quantum of affect, inversion in the contrary, reversal of the proper person. These terms all point out that the quality of the affect, its addressing or its “addressee” (the you, the ego), is not pertinent to the physics of force (logically speaking, the quality of yes or no, applicable here since it involves a question of feeling, of pleasure and pain). We will have to examine whether this quantity, taken as “object” of the general physics of spirit, is not what Kant called the empty concept without object, and the space-time where it works, an empty intuition without object. The rules Freud imagined for this mechanics underwent a change from 1895 to 1920. What Beyond the Pleasure Principle introduced with the two principles is more than just another mechanics. It is a biomechanics, where the system of 26

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forces (called “psychic apparatus” in 1895) certainly remains defined, in the final analysis, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Still, there remains an incertitude whether this system is driven with all speed to the probable, absolute zero of excitation (i.e., death)— which is, in principle, the case with isolated energetic systems— or whether such a course is retarded because the system is equipped with the capacity to draw from energy, in itself or elsewhere, that is still free. The latter amounts to a reconstitution of the thermal polarity of its sources (internal differentiation) because it then has some reserve of useful energy. Likewise, in the case of Maxwell’s demon, Brillouin’s theorem shows that in the long run the death of the system is inevitable because the selector dispenses too much energy in maintaining the work of its improbable differentiation. Freud attributed this capacity for selecting and differentiating to Eros. In any case, with Eros the adjustment (provisional, precisely the duration of a life) of the system does not tend to the zero degree, but to the optimum of the input (excitation) /output relationship (which is the pleasure of discharge), an optimum determined by the state of differentiation. I only invoke these well-known elements of the physical metaphor to emphasize that if the unconscious is structured, it cannot be so as a language, or, rather, that this language cannot be not articulated. Of course, by articulation I do not refer to what is meant by this term in linguistics (double articulation), in grammar (articulation of meaning by syntactic operators), or in logic (wellformed expressions and their combinations). And, certainly, I do not mean the great articulation of “symbolic/imaginary/real.” Not that this articulation is wrong (I will not discuss it here), but for a philosopher it is pure metaphysics (precisely the Platonism of Republic VI-VIII). It is also too immense— much like the cave or the plan of some top general— to help our little phrases infiltrate the no-man’s-land of forces. Instead, I try to impoverish; articulation is much less than this. What I call a phrase is, in the impossible immediacy of its occurrence (the phrase-token), the presentation of a universe, however tiny and disabled. “Universe” has several meanings simultaneously. A phrase presents multiple instances at once— quid, de quo, a quo, ad quod (respectively: a meaning, a referent, an addressor, and an addressee). This quadrangle (to recall Peirce’s analysis) is provisional, even when a certain instance does not take place in the universe presented by a phrase, i.e., when it is not marked in an occurring phrase. It nonetheless constitutes the articulation of which I speak. A phrase can lack two, three, even four instances (in comparison with Kant’s four Nothings, the phrase-silence can at least have four valences: silence with respect to the meaning, to the referent, etc.). Nonetheless, these valences are presupposed or preunderstood, since in each case it is necessary to link up with even this silent phrase, and this will be through one and/or the other of these valences. For the instances that articulate what the phrase presents in a universe are also the valences by which the molecular phrase finds its linkages to one or several others, either without a rule for linking— as in free association— or, on the contrary, in accordance with a certain rule (which, also, partly defines a genre of discourse). I cannot here develop this idea further, as I have done in The Differend. But what is missing there is precisely what is introduced here and what I am trying to philosophically supplement: the quid of the unconscious in terms of phrases? Philosophically this is not a question of theory. Either theory is mathematical, 27

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and, as Wittgenstein said of the world, has no regard for “the whole of what arrives,” or it is scientific, and, insofar as it formalizes to the greatest possible extent everything one thinks or believes will happen, has no more than a hypothetical value. Theory comes with the risk of having to change the hypothesis when something new arises. But as for our present topic, the unconscious is what happens precisely insofar as it escapes from theory. Moreover, it happens “in the phrases,” and therefore— even if unarticulated— as phrase. The universe of this phrase lacks one or all of the instances that the capacity to articulate (common sense, reason) awaits from this universe in order to link up with another phrase. To add that these “silences” do not occur in a regular fashion is useless. This is why theory, and mechanical theory to begin with, is in principle incapable of explaining them. Theory earns only the title of metaphor. And if the aforesaid were not the case, psychoanalysis would be a science. Thus it is an art. Psychoanalysis can be well aided, if not resolved, by theory, much as medicine, the art of care, is aided by genetics and biochemistry. Evidently, because one brings into consideration the singularity of “it happens,” the enterprise cannot be either theoretic or scientific. The patient and the analyst work on phrase-tofeens with phrase-tofeens as they arrive. In my opinion, this rule of immanence belonging to psychoanalytic technique has by itself, if one holds it to itself, its doublet ( “analogue” would be to say too little) in the Kantian rule of reflexive judgment. To judge is to link up without criteria (“synthesize,” to use Kant’s term), to regulate without a rule of regulation, to discriminate and to assemble by analogy. Jurisprudence when right (theory) is lacking. To philosophize is only this, an artistic condition or “technique.” It is why Kant, again, says “one only learns to philosophize,” and not philosophy itself. I suppose, equally, that one does not learn psychoanalysis but, rather, how to psychoanalyze. Nonetheless, the difference between the psychoanalyst and the philosopher persists. It is the clinic. The phrase-tokens making up the world of the former are those of the patient (and of the clinical situation itself). The tokens of the philosopher come from everyday life, certainly, as with “everybody,” and they come from books. And among these books are those of Freud, who reports the tokens of his patients. One can say that these two cases are “textual.” Yet this remark seems evasive to me. First, in the cure, the “text” is subsumed under a rule (technique) of nonregulated meaning (free association). Second, the text is subsumed under a rule of the deregulation of the addressee (transference: the analyst serves as the addressee for all the phrases of the patient; this is the point of determining to whom these phrases are addressed, of lifting the silence that weighs on the ad quod; the philosopher, reading everyday life and books, is well “addressed” by the phrases of his world but is never addressed as reader— in short, a philosophy of the philosophical “reader”). Third, the text is subsumed under the rule of real time (duration, frequency of sessions, length of analysis, and the indispensable “presence” as far as absenteeism is concerned, whereas the philosopher is a priori and at his best optional and unpaid, if one neglects constraints on the “use of time” by the teaching professor, who is by no means essential to philosophizing). As we know, the supposition of the physical metaphor is that these rules, taken together, have the function of exciting, of making appear before the tribunal of phrases, of letting be chased by these phrases something supposed to be 28

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hidden in the silence which is not a phrase, the silence of forces. This silence is no more articulated language than that silence which reigns in the galaxies. All of modem mechanics— modem because accompanied by the critique of a Nature that is finalized and would speak to us; mechanical because the remains of a physics without physis— speaks of what is silent on behalf of itself. The sense of the physical metaphor is to open a view, and only a view (by no means to lend an ear), to these mute movements. The phrase universe of the physicist is well structured, it makes sense (in many senses) of its polarities. But this world, which is nothing other than energy in transformation on a macro- or microcosmic scale, says nothing. Posed in this way, as the basis of the physical metaphorization of primary processes, the analytic task appears impossible to the philosopher. The enterprise is doomed to failure, since either the structure of the phrase-universe (signification, referentiality, addressing) is illegitimately inserted into the world (of forces) in order to retranslate the representing phrases, or else the substitutes, substituted into the representing phrases, would be the primary processes. In this case, one has filled in the abyss opened by the physical metaphor and dissolved in advance the persistent resistence of the unconscious. Or else one preserves this resistance intact, and no interpretation will be able to overcome the mechanical silence. One can only “let it speak” arbitrarily. I listen: axiomatically, as in modem mechanical explanations, which exclude the interpretation or the hearing of what arrives in its singularity. The anamnesis of unconscious “life” and the explanation of its symptoms (taking them as the effects of established rules of a definite makeup, which is psychoanalysis’s conflict with psychiatry) cannot be undertaken simultaneously. The alternative, I confess, is typically philosophical. It arranges all meaning on the side of consciousness or at least on that of articulated language. It isolates the physical as it isolates the world of the insane, of which only a science— externally, axiomatically— could render an account. Freud makes no mistake in responding to this objection as follows: if we altered the conscious processes by the cure, then we will have produced evidence that unconscious processes exist (SE, 19:215-1217; 7:266). According to good epistemology, this is evidently not true. We will have given evidence that the analytic relation has had some effect. And even if evidence that an unconscious exists were produced by the cure, the principle question would remain entirely unanswered: How is the transformation of mechanical silence through talking, and of silence in talking, possible? Once again, we are faced with a philosophical question and alternative, i.e., one established in a conceivable or at least representable order. And yet, here the philosopher must become alert— or the very point could be missed. There are representatives, says Freud, without representation, in the sense of substitutes that do not make themselves known as substitutes. “How then do you know they are substitutes?” the amused philosopher asks. The analyst responds: “because the affect, this representative without the mark of representing, this nondelegate that comes and goes, is guiding us, the analysant and myself, through our wanderings in the maze of associations.” A difficult point to grasp, as what gives no sign of its origin and permits no localization is precisely the key to the transference of memories. Durcharbeitung verses Erinnerung. And as far as memory is concerned, the philosopher seems to know only the latter. 29

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III. Moments As I have already stated, the question of the transformation of silence in phrases is tied up with that of original repression. I will examine this transformation here under the heading of time. The excitation we are concerned with has an “effect,” the affect, which appears paradoxical in regard to time. This is indicated by a Nachtrdglichkeit, the aftershock that accompanies, according to Freud’s Project, the proton pseudos— a double error of dating. When a philosopher announces a discourse on time, one can expect the worst. Let us disentangle things a bit. The aftershock simultaneously supposes and denies that the time called into question is physical or more precisely mechanical time, i.e., the “the movement of enumeration.” 5 Movement counts itself in time only with the aid of a measure, a movement standard. The standard itself is the relation between units of distance and units of constant time: so many units of time by units of distance or the reverse. One knows, Aristotle knew (P, 4:12), that this definition implies a petitio principii: the movement that counts time presupposes time. This account is a beautiful example of axiomatic physics, and is the “defect” common to all “definitions” used in mathematics and science. Such definitions are actually expressions of proper names which, being rigid, independent of circumstances, and reproducible, are sufficient to measure a variation. Clock time determines one of the variables affecting the givens of transformation (kinetic, for example). The aftershock requires a consideration of this time, since it presupposes that the event has been given, let’s say, at time T 2 , but that its “effect” (the affect) only at time T i or T0. The gap between T2 and T i or T o, even if it does not need to be measured exactly, still requires a clock or, at least, a calender time, i.e., Emma at the age of eight, at thirteen, and as an adult.6 But this aftershock also imposes a denial of chronological time: the affect issued from the shock at T 2 does not take place there, it does so at Ti. But at Ti the affect is neither recognized nor localized, but takes place as a new feeling, a fear. Then, in an always unexpected manner (and therefore, in the mode of a “once again”), the affect repeats itself, introduction and repetition together. This mode continues until T o, where Emma on the couch at last “consciously” (says Freud) feels it, i.e., locates the source (the stimulant) of the representative phrase at T2 and, thus, perhaps “liquidates” it. In order to accept the Freudian “reading” (and/or Emma’s), the denial of chronological time must reside in the necessity of imagining either 1) an “outfitting” of the affect without transformation, without removal or representative representation from T 2 to T0, despite the diachrony, or 2) its pure and simple birth at To owing to memorization in its proper sense (with a considerable deferral of impact, as if it were not the shock but the remembrance of the shock that would bring the shock). Freud hesitated before this decisive alternative. I will come back to this, as the knot to be unwound in the matter of excitation. But from either case, however, it follows that chronological time does not modify the affect. Whether remaining intact all along or awakening at the end (T o ) on the occasion of a representation (the remembrance of T 2 ), the affect should have arisen from the start in the “lived experience” it represents. This last observation already situates the problem in another temporality— one still close to clock time, but different, in that a philosophy of consciousness 30

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or a phenomenology is now required. If one returns to Husserl’s famous Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, one sees that, since memorization is taken into account, a bidimensional time is implied. As consciousness moves from T 2 to Ti, then to To on the horizontal line of the chronological succession of moments, these moments themselves are not inscribed on the vertical lines that “fall” from these moments, but only these moments as already passed, their images “seen” from the later moments.7 Each of these images changes as actual consciousness moves along the horizontal line. The Husserlian arrangement, like a thread or a network of lines, admits of several continuities that pose, or should pose, a problem for thinking actual (and therefore discontinuous) intentionality. First, coming from a physical clock foreign to conscious thought, there is the nonphenomenal continuum of the horizontal line. Next, there is the continuum of half-straight “verticals,” where past events persist in images of themselves. This is not merely a projection at ninety degrees from the first points, but the requisite for a memory that is not purely imaginary, e.g., something of T stays, and would be retained at T', T", etc. Husserl thought this requisite settled with the term Retention, illustrated by the vertical continuity. But this term creates, in its own turn, a problem for a philosophy of consciousness. It indicates that the “synthesis” of T with its images does not result from an intentional act of memory, but is “older” than, made “before,” it. Memory, therefore, has a matter; a store of remembrances arranged on successive screens, the vertical lines, as in the schema of the psychic appearance of the Traumdeutung (ITC, ch. VII). This does not belong to phenomenological time, which is supposed to be undiluted, discontinuous, and exempt from the influence of simultaneities or coalescences, nor to any intentional act. Finally, the intervention of a third continuum (the oblique lines) represents a “focus” oriented from “actual” intentionalities in the direction of their equally present intentional objects (but present only insofar as past). This third continuity simply falls under the principle that all consciousness is “consciousness of . . . ,” or that the intentional act is always referential. Whether correct or not, this principle excludes all mnemonic persistence that is not representative: T' and T" are images of T for a conscious vision. It also excludes the occasion in which T' or T" would either not be intentionally envisaged or not be reattachable to T, which it is supposed to represent. Thus there is here a double failure of representation, one both removed from vision and lacking the mark of its substitution. A feeling, for example— remarkable because of this double deficiency— could not serve as guide in the Husserlian network. It would not have a place there and therefore would have only no place. It would still be necessary to view the temporalities that are tied to the “faculty” of testing pleasure and pain as entirely on their own, as singular, in both senses of that word. The philosopher, after Kant, and especially if he or she takes an interest in the affect, must be persuaded that this power, or this susceptibility of the spirit, the soul, or the thought-body (the name doesn’t matter) to feeling good or bad, is inseparable from the faculty of knowing or of acting. The Critique of Judgment shows that the beautiful is a pure happiness of the soul, and the sublime a happiness mediated by suffering. Both are pure feelings. But even if Kant did not greatly elaborate this point, these simple and frustrated happinesses both develop, and develop themselves, in entirely specific temporalities different from those one comes to recall and differentiate 31

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between them. These temporalities owe their singularity to the purity of these aesthetic feelings, i.e., that they be removed from all cognitive or volitional interest. This point merits a separate analysis, one I believe of primary importance for the examination of the unconscious affect and of the aftershock. If one “lingers” at the beautiful and if the happiness it gives derives from its persistence, its “conservation,”8 and if the feeling of the sublime carries with it a sort of spasm or stasis of time (C3, §27-28), constituting its unhappy component, it would be useful to compare these temporalities of aesthetic pleasure with the persisting content and the content in amnesia (temporal stasis) that one finds in unconscious affect (mutatis mutandis, of course). With the idea of original repression, I return to Freud’s question to Husserl. An event (an excitation) occurs at T 2 . There is no representative trace of this event in the vertical series of T ' 2 , T ' 2 , etc. The psyche (of Emma at T 2 ) does not then have representations of the event. These images are not merely too confused or too pale, they are not at all. In the place of the vertical line, then, a blank— T 2 is forgotten straight away. It is not inscribed in the representative order. The same can also be said in mechanical language: the energy introduced by the excitation at T 2 is not and has not been tied up in representative formations, neither consciously nor unconsciously. Or, again: the psychic appearance has not had the means “to ward off the excitation.” It has been affected without the power to imagine this affectation, that is to say, in good Freudian doctrine, without the power to control and “liquidate” it. The psychic appearance does not have the power to drive the energy charge that is this affectation by some efferent ways towards its discharge. And, finally, according to the problematic of the Reprasentanz: this affect is how the excitation is present, i.e., as a cloud of energy not entirely fixed in psychic appearance but also not “free” either. The affect is present but not represented. By the same token, the affect is not subject to the representative substitutions of things and words that form the associative fabric analysis explores and that never cease appearing in the course of life’s history. So that, in escaping from representation, the “effect” of the excitation— the affect— escapes from temporality as well. At least, in so far as it is a quantity, since in terms of its quality (its sentimental meaning) and its addressing (addressor/addressee), the affect can repeatedly assume any number of meanings. Quality and address are still, or already, what takes over in the affect— even from afar, from its representatives, from articulated language, and from time. In order to understand the status of the affect, a difference (which I believe is “ontological”), such as that between Darstellung (presentation) and Vorstellung (representation), must be admitted. The affect as “effect” of excitation is there, but not for anything other than itself. This constitutes, at the same time, both its irrefutability and its insufficiency as witness. The affect only “says” one thing— that it is there— but is witness neither for nor of what is there. Neither when nor where. Again, the affect says only that it is there if one pays attention to it. This is what Freud means in qualifying the affect of the unconscious— an absurd epithet, he conceded— when it is applied to what can affect only a consciousness. Its status is not without relationship to the innere Empfindung, the feeling of aesthetic pleasure analyzed by Kant. This internal sensation is at the same time the witness and the thing of which it is the witness (C3, §9). It is what is sometimes called (in particular by Freud) the “lived,” though this is a very bad word, 32

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one that confuses everything. The affect is not lived. Its cloud colors representative life without reason. Most often this coloring is facile, and commonly neglected. If attention is given to the affect, if treatment is sought, it is because the affect’s “presence” for the patient is too intense and too recurrent. The analyst has no other motive for which “to work” this presence. With a delicacy both specific and severe, the analyst calls attention to the chromatics, an attention that floats on the water without prejudging the important from the anecdotal. As for time, the status of this nonrepresentative “present” is related to the modalities of its recurrence. I imagine that the affect of anguish, which is “present” each time Emma enters a store alone, “presents (itself)” each time for the first time with the force (I appeal to physics here) of “conviction” or of “viction,” with the suffocating energy of an event. This repetition by no means renders Emma (consciously) powerless. One should not confuse the connotation— if I can say (but can one say?)— of recurrence. Recurrence is a matter of affect, with its supposed representativity. If it re-presents (itself), it rightly represents nothing. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has carefully described this paradoxical trait of repetition: it must not be thought in terms of identity/alterity, but rather, from the point of view of time, of “initiation.” 9 One can very well know that a mute inhabitant has newly introduced itself into the home without knowing what it is, without knowing whether it is the same every time. Such is the condition of the conduit under hypnosis and of the hysterical attack. This “compulsion” (in terms of general physics, because its com— the Latin “with”— is said from the outside) is what Kant would call an apprehension without reproduction and without recognition (C l, 111-23). What repeats itself is the forgotten. What creates continuity is discontinuity. Freud emphasized that what is important in the affect is quantity and not quality or “address.” The yes and the no, the pleasure and the pain, and their “address” are not decisive. The one is of signification, the other of addressing, and as such they belong to articulated language, constructed of phrases that hold messages sent from someone to someone. What is important in the affect is the load it carries, how much it overloads the thought-body, the psychical appearance. (Kant said that this is its qualitative variety; much in the affect feels not so much sublime as “energetic.” Again, a physics.) By “overload” (a mechanical metaphor), one indicates the “presence” of a nonsignificant phrase (pleasure or pain?), neither destined (from whom to whom?), nor referenced (of what is it a question?), which happens suddenly in the course of the phrases. It creates a gap in the Husserlian schema of time and its representations. This gap, a “blank,” blinds mnemonic intentionality. Are all of these negative traits nonetheless sufficient to make a phrase? The phrase of affect “says” it is something, as Da, here and now, inasmuch as this something is nothing, not meaning, not referent, not address. (Here it would be necessary to elaborate the Kantian Nothings.) Since specific instances that articulate a universe are lacking, one can say only that the affect presents a universe. The something that it “presents” is its “presence” to itself, its beingthere-now. In its autonomy, the affect signifies an “internal feeling.” And in the absence of a universe articulated in accordance with these instances, which are also the valences necessary to link up the phrase with others, the affectphrase remains unlinked or, if one wishes, absolute. In particular, to capture the affect-phrase in reference (in representation) by any subsequent phrase 33

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appears difficult. And with respect to a memory of an affect-phrase, it is hard to imagine a remembered phrase that could reach back and chronologically locate the original phrase in either a phenomenological or clock temporality, both of which are equally unknown to it.

IV. Shocks My intention is not “to rewrite” the unconscious but only to make a small opening in the metaphysics of forces (from which my critical, and perhaps political, responsibility repels me, since one knows the unconscious is threatening in these times of “general mobilization” of energies). In speaking of the status of the affect-phrase (it will be necessary to write: of the “phrase-affect”), it is now appropriate to describe “original repression” without appeal to physical metaphor. The nature of the phrase-affect is equal to that of “repression.” As this “says” nothing, this consists in not repressing. An “excitation” occurs, and it remains in place. This stasis is the phrase-affect. This disposition, noticeable by the absence of “defense,” let us say, by a perfect susceptibility (ideally speaking), can “originally” say itself in that it is evidently tied to the unpreparedness of childhood (with the initial absence, as said, of articulated language). But if it persists always in this, then even the articulated phrase owes the real or supposed extent of its linguistic competence only to the affects. This disposition persists into adulthood as a susceptibility to “presence,” to a possibility both tempting and threatening, because one is precisely “without defense” before it. This ambivalent Hilflosigkeit justifies Freud’s frequently referring to anguish as an unconscious affect and his hesitation in deciding upon what status to give it. The status of an “original” susceptibility (in this sense of Hilflosigkeit) is what is at play in the affair of Emma. Remember that the version Freud gives in 1895 depends on the absence of two hypotheses formulated by Freud in 1905 and 1914 (infantile sexuality and primary narcissism). These two hypotheses equip the aftershock with a completely different “logic” (I would like to say with a phrasistics). The reading of the aftershock given in the Entwurf is brief. Emma, at eight years of age, is sexually “assaulted” in the store (T 2). She does not remember the assault and was not “affected” by it. Afterwards, a phobia— the fear of entering into a store alone— emerges. The scene with the shop assistant (Ti), which took place when she was twelve years old, is first invoked by Emma as the activator of this fear. Additional associations yield access to scene T2, whose recall is finally accompanied with a “sexuelle Entbindung” (sexual release). This last affect, Freud concludes, is the deferred response to the shop assistant. Memory, therefore, is what provoked the affect. This reading is justified in the following terms: The memory awakens [erweckt, now, at To] what it was evidently unable [to do] then, a sexual release [sexuelle Entbindung] which is transformed into anguish. (SE, 1:285)

“Was sie damals gewiss nicht konnte” (what it/she— sie— at the time clearly could not do). The German sie grammatically echoes die Erinnerung. But the echo is semantically inconsistent, since then the memory was not a 34

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memory. Rather she— sie—Emma— was then not capable of this “sexual discharge.” Again, it is necessary to presuppose that she then (T 2 ), who did not have an affect, is the same (always Emma) as the one who feels this release (transformed by anguish) on the couch (T o ). I will return to this question of Emma’s identity in the following section. That this is Freud’s thought is evident when he sumarizes his reading as follows: The sexual release is linked with the memory of the shop assistant. But this is completely remarkable, since it was not linked to the shop assistant when it was lived experience. Here is a case where a memory awakens [erweckt] an affect that it would not have awakened when it was actually experienced [als Erlebnis, same semantico-grammatical paradox as the preceding], because going through the

change of puberty [die Veranderung der Pubertdt] has rendered possible another understanding [ein anderes Verstandnis] of what one remembers. (SE, 1:286)

In short, apathy at eight years old; the capacity to suffer in puberty, i.e., with genital sexuality. This excitability is what makes memory a stimulant and, between times, a latency: memory is lost as a result of the affect it awakens. There are several reasons not to accept this reading, which locates the true source of susceptibility in the changes of puberty. One reason, and by no means the least, is found in the text itself. We learn that Emma, when she was eight years old (T 2 ), returns to the candy store a second time. She eventually gave up on the idea of returning there again because she blamed herself for having to act, in returning “as if she again wanted to provoke the shop assistant.” Freud’s comments here are a bit enigmatic: “Actually [tatsachlich], it is necessary to attribute a state of ‘oppressed bad conscience’ to this experience” (SE, 1:284). This lived experience (dies Erlebnis) seems to me to indicate the temptation or the quasi-temptation (the “as if”) of seducing and being seduced. Alone, in effect, she can endure bad conscience. That this sensation had been “lived” by the eight-year-old little girl, the text leaves no doubt. The localization of this “oppressive bad conscience” remains enigmatic. Does it happen when eight years old (T 2 ) or now ( T o )? Despite this uncertainty, when speaking of scene 2, one has to agree that Emma was greatly affected. The Erlebnis of the temptation of seduction makes it authentic— under the guise of candy, I suppose, but this of little importance. Emma would in no way suffer from apathy at this time, because the scene was forgotten, put to sleep. The question then becomes the following: Why, having been affected, has she forgotten that she was affected? To have forgotten is to say that she does not possess, through what follows and up to T0, any representation of scene 2 or of the excitation of which it consisted (the temptation). There are two possible responses to the question of this deficiency, both of which are found in the text. One invokes the repression that Freud will call secondary, i.e., the representatives of thing and of word that come to substitute for the representation of scene 2 up to the overshadowing. This would be the case with scene 1, that of Emma and the shop assistant. Freud enumerates the representative analogies with scene 2 (the store here and there, the employees and the merchant, the ones laughing and the other “smiling grimacingly,” clothes and dress, and, finally, Emma all alone in both cases). But 35

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in a “short discussion” that clearly appears as a judicial or historical sort of investigation, Freud convinces himself of the inconsistency of reading scene 1 as release. The elements that constitute it are incommensurable with the accompanying affect, the panicked fear and the phobia that supposedly results. This interpretation is guided by the meaning of the affect reassembled by the duo Emma-Freud in scene 2 (the text does not say which is the “author” of the discovery), where they identify the “source” of the affect, i.e., its initial stimulant. One should be able to separate this kind of response from the question of the forgotten, which invokes a secondary repression, i.e., the substitution of representatives for one another. But this forgetting, obtained by an analogical “slipping” of representations, consists of only a false memory, a representative paramnesia. It provides no account of the affective amnesia, i.e., of the apathy that interests Freud and on which his thesis of Nachtraglichkeit rests. Whatever the representations, the affect itself was initially missing and appears suddenly only at the end. Remember it. Here we are close to the second response. In effect, Freud sought to explain this initial apathy— according to him, the true source of Emma’s affective amnesia— in terms of a general latency in susceptibility before puberty: Again because it is not habitual, in the psychic life, a memory [Erinnerung] awakens [erweckt] an affect that it would not entail when it was a lived experience [als Erlebnis]. This is something still completely habitual when it is a question of sexual presentation [Jur die sexuelle Vorstellung ], precisely because the postponement of puberty [die Pubertdtsverzogerung] is a general character of the organization. In adolescence, each person has some memory traces [Erinnerungsspuren] which are only able to be understood [verstanden] with the entry onto the scene of proper sexual sensations [ Eigenempfindungen], and each person must therefore carry in himself the seed of hysteria. ( SE, 1:287).

This complement to the thesis of Naehtragliehkeit says both too much and too little. At least three observations emerge. First, the puberty explanation concerns only the appearance of “the sexual representation” or, what amounts to the same thing, the capacity of “understanding,” verstehen (which refers to the “anderes Verstandnis” of the shop assistant that Emma is supposedly furnished with in puberty). One will conclude that puberty, through these “proper sexual feelings,” does not bring another affectivity, and a fortiori, that it does not give birth to affectivity but only alters the capacity to represent it. But secondly, Freud contradicts himself. Some memory “traces” exist before the adolescent is ever in a state of “reading” them as he claims, that is to say, in the language of sexuality. Are these traces of representations (of Emma’s shop assistant) produced in some other, prepubescent, language? Or are they even the affects themselves? It seems that one must opt for this second interpretation. These traces are what must be read or presented; they do not derive from preceding representations. The adolescent does not reinterpret childhood representations. Rather, he interprets “sexually” what in childhood would have been presented in another language ( “romantic,” for example). In this case, these traces are affects. Puberty in no way creates them, as it creates only another “reading” of an affect already there. 36

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Finally, in generalizing the cause of Emma’s amnesia (I no longer dare to call it “affective”) by giving of an account of puberty’s delay, Freud only creates a new obstacle. Puberty is a general event, Emma’s case is not singular, and hysteria must be the most common thing in the world. This is an aporia lying in wait for all art, including psychoanalytic art, when it wants to make itself into a science: causal regularity crushes the singularity of a case. It would require finding a difference specific to the hysteria of some unique type of being (humanity) in which we all share and that is constituted by late puberty. I will move on to what Freud proposes in order to characterize this difference. Not only does this characterization reiterate and thus aggravate the contradiction Freud imposes on his thesis of initial apathy, but it returns us directly to the question of time: Experience teaches that to recognize in the hysterics of people that one knows for a

part that they are becoming sexually excitable [sexuell erregebar] in a premature way [vorzeitig, before term, before the time of the arrival of sexuality] thanks to a mechanical stimulation [Reizung, exactly: an irritation] or some feeling (masturbation) and which one can only admit, for another part, that their disposition [Anlage] consists in a premature sexual release [always the Sexualentbindung]. But starting with premature sexual release or more intense [starkere] premature sexual release, it is clear that this is equivalent. This “moment” [emphasis added] boils down to a quantitative factor. ( SE, 1:287)

I emphasize “moment” here in order to indicate the word’s ambiguity. It indicates not only a brief period of time, but a component in an ensemble of forces. By “reducing” the moment to a quantitative factor, Freud eliminates, or believes he has eliminated, the temporal connotation. In this way, the physical metaphor appears to recapture the high ground in extremis. Eventually, Freud himself invokes excitability or an “outburst” in his explanation of exceptional hysterical susceptibility, the trait of the sexual Vorzeitigkeit. This erasure without doubt derives from an insistence on the dynamic and economic metaphor, which haunts Freud at this time. But it testifies also to a remarkable uncertainty regarding what “sexuality” means in this text. Invoked in principle to explain the late appearance of the trouble afflicting Emma at the evocation of scene 2, and linked as such to puberty, the word “properly” designates genitality. But it also extends to a time “before” genitality, so that it would be necessary to grant the hysteric a sort of pregenital genitality. The philosopher is not the one to decide whether this immaturity is due to a “predisposition” or to a stimulation. But one can guess that the philosopher comes back to this question when trying to remove the uncertainty, not in order to teach the father of psychoanalysis (still young at the time, he had already placed on the philosophical table the bread of a temporality that even now we are not even close to digesting) a lesson, but so as to add precision to his own intuition that the affect can and must be thought as a phrase, without recourse to physical metaphor. Yet the obscurity of the 1895 text disappears easily enough if one admits that genitality provides the occasion for a memory, and that, far from creating the affect-phrase, is a modification (eine Veranderung) of a family of phrases. If the shopkeeper had fiddled with [geknijfen] the little Emma through her dress, “to the genital parts [in die Genitalien],” 37

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this only implies that Emma’s affectivity was genitally immature. Most likely, the man himself had felt a genital affect. The question then of the hysterical aftershock, and of what probably reaches far beyond this, is not the production of affect— absent beforehand— on the occasion of a remembered mnemonic representation. Rather, it is a matter of the late representation of a “pure” or ideal affect-phrase, whose singularity had previously been located according to a time when genital organization, dependent on that of “adult” articulated language, retroactively tried to assimilate it. This way of posing the question of the Nachtraglichkeit only provides an example of what Freud later elaborated concerning the subject of affectivity and childhood “sexuality” in the Three Essays and in On Narcissism: An Introduction. These texts provide an elaboration of the “sexual” that appears to result from certain traits that make it possible to augment what I have said regarding the “pure” phrase-affect. What I have said has concerned primarily time and linking. What Freud elaborated, even if in other terms, concerns the referentiality and polarization of the addressor/addressee relation, both of which, I have said, constitute the universe of a phrase if it is “articulated.” The childhood affect (or “sexual”) phrase is noticeable in that it is neither referential nor addressed and is articulated neither according to the axis of its object nor according to that of its addressing. In order to shorten this demonstration, I will combine these two negative properties by supposing that “addressing” and “referentiality” generally operate together. One establishes the identity of what one speaks (the referent) in order to have it admitted by the speaker; the other is required in order to establish the identity of an interlocution’s referent (in its “objective” meaning). But in terms of phrases, the latter is only possible if the entities (let us say: the proper names) which respectively occupy the positions of addressor ( “I”) and addressee ( “you”) in a phrase Pn can change their position during a phrase Pn+1. These are known features of philosophies of language and of theories of communication. They comprise the elementary conditions for a discourse of cognitive finality, but require many other constraints; they apply also to the title of sufficient conditions (in the hypothesis according to which you and I speak the same language) for a sort of discourse adults find as common as “discussion” or even “conversation.” To simplify even further, I would say that the phrase is articulated insofar as it distinguishes and distinctly places the three pronominal persons: the “first” two on the axis of the “addressing,” the third on that of “referentiality.” The hypothesis of a primary “narcissism” implies that affectivity is originally ignorant of the instance “I,” since this “narcissism” is, paradoxically, preegoistic. Freud already anticipates this, by the way, in the Entwurf, when he observes that, in order to avoid the disarray felt by the ego during a traumatic memory, it is necessary that “during the first release of displeasure [der ersten Unlustentbindung] the inhibition on the ego [die Ichhemmung] not be impaired, and that the process not unfold in the manner of a posthumous experience of a primary affect” (SE, 1:359). Which, adds Freud, is impossible by hypothesis, since “the very first traumas escape the ego altogether” (SE, 1:359). In truth, there is no ego already there to deal with the first shock, be it 38

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pleasure or pain. If the shock is a “proton psendos, ” this is not because it has sidestepped (at T 2 ) the defense of an inattentive “ego,” but because the “ego” (at T o ), wrongly thinking it has been deceived, afterwards misinterprets its own primal or precocious state. Since it is always simple “presence,” the affect at T 0 is not “posthumous”; the ego hallucinates the affect as a thing (or a nonthing) it believes to have buried. Just as the instance of the “I” lacked the childhood phrase-affect, the second person, that of the addressee, is foreign to it as well. What I suggest is that “presence”— which is this phrase (without signifying it)— is addressed to no one, neither as a question nor a reply. Here again I will content myself with a more or less lateral example in which Freud comes to our aid. In discussing Rank’s hypothesis of the traumatism of birth, Freud asserts that birth could not be the first shock, as Rank maintained, unless on this occasion the newborn suffered a loss of object (an argument discussable in itself). Yet the maternal womb (the placental fold) is not an object for the infant. This objection extends to the entire primary relation of an unweaned infant to the mother. This relation is neither that of addressor to addressee, nor the reverse. What one loosely calls the “body of the mother” is in no way a “you.” The “dual relation” Lacan defined is not that of a duo. To say that the body of the mother is grasped by the child as if it were its own is of no help in accounting for the “nothing” of the addressing of the childhood phrase-affect. Indeed, one can only speak of one’s own body insofar as an “I” pretends to assure its ownership and conservation. It would again be necessary to take up an exegesis of Fort-Da and of the Mirror under the heading of the constitution of the “you” and the “I” in the childhood phrase-affect. For the time being, I will only go so far as to say that the “pure” childhood phrase-affect itself cannot involve a demand. It cannot question the affect or the affect’s excitation, because it is the affect. A demand is an expectation of linking. And yet, as an affect of Hilflosigkeit, be it of pleasure or pain, this phrase does not spare a moment in linking itself to another phrase. Its sole time is now. Returning to the store, little Emma (if I suppose her “childhood” to be pure) did not ask for the excitation again. Let us say, after Freud, that her affect repeats (itself). But, as a (supposedly) pure presence at each occasion, the occasion is only an event which happens now, and this event is the phrase-affect itself. In saying this, I have already touched upon its initial lack of referentiality. We understand that the affect “speaks of” nothing. Here I move from the situation of the object, in the sense of an objectival relation (in effect, a demand placed on you to respond to me), to its situation of referential objectivity and therefore from its instantiation in the second person to its positioning in the third. These passages are all of the greatest importance and merit a detailed analysis. Freud offers examples in several texts, particularly in the Vemeinung. He formulates the result of these passages under the name “polymorphic perversity.” This name, a typically adult metaphor, signifies how every “object” provides an opportunity for the pleasure or displeasure of childhood (“pure”) phrase-affects. The object is ignored both as a referential objectivity and as an objectality of addressing (of which egoism is only a special case). As its name indicates, the turn that the occasion (the “fiddling about” of the 39

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storekeeper, for example) takes singularizes the case of the phrase-affect. The seduction, in the current sense, the one Freud initially gives, is not necessary. In chronological or phenomenological terms, a “constant” susceptibility or excitability is necessary. Seduction is necessary only when it is necessary that this excitability be excited.10

V. Untranslatable By itself, the childhood phrase-affect brings no guarantee of personal identity through time. As a stranger to physical or phenomenological diachrony, it rather imposes upon the supposed identity a denial that is at least always possible. If it belies the person, this is because the latter can be a lie in the face of the “presence” that is the phrase-affect. What is pseudos here is the articulation, which I reduce, for convenience, to the triple instantiation of the pronominal persons, when it applies itself to “presence.” The “excitation” is nothing but the affect, and if it is disturbing, that is because it dissipates (to what degree it does not matter) the triple disposition which is the guarantee of identity. Insofar as the adult state minimally determines itself predominately through an articulated phrase, and as articulation is indispensable to the linking of this phrase to another, the (physical) time of succession and the (phenomenological) temporality of the “ek-stases” past/present/future, which together form what one could call adult time, are dependent upon pronominal articulation (or its equivalent in other languages). This is why the phrase-affect (or “excitation”) occurs only as lost time. This dead time can be named (by anti-phrase?): reflection (in Kant’s sense); dream, amnesia, vague repetition (situated in adult time, the affect re-presents [itself] because it represents nothing); that intuitive night in which all cows are black; loss of control, of finality; the deflection of desire and of understanding; relinquishment, abandonment, childish behavior. These designations express the resistance of identity to the affect. The affect necessarily inscribes itself in an order of its own as the event of an expropriation. A case in point is the feeling of the beautiful or that of the sublime, which, in my approach, necessitates a “before” and an “after,” or in any case an “outside” of the articulated phrase. Emma suffers from a lack of confidence in articulated language, attributed by Freud to an “overload” of affect. The “lost times” happen “too” frequently in Emma’s diachrony, up to the point where she must ask who she is. Personal identity cannot constitute itself apart from the sole instance of the “I.” Descartes involuntarily gave this its best proof: “this proposition: I am, I exist is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it. . . . that is certain. But how often? Just when I think; for it might possibly be the case if I ceased entirely to think, that I should likewise cease altogether to exist.” 11 The ego cogito does not have the means to resist a pure interruption. Yet it believes it can resist the “evil genius,” the proton pseudos par excellence: “there is not then any doubt that I am if I am deceived.” Descartes introduces evidence of another person in the same way. At first treacherous (the evil genius), this person is transformed into a witness of pure good faith, namely God, but always in the same place. In both cases, the ego makes itself either the 40

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partner of another I, as a “you,” or its referential object, its third person. The hypothesis of the evil genius or the thesis of God presupposes the commutability of these positions with respect to personal instantiation, since there the witness is the speaker. One concludes that personal identity requires the synthesis of three pronominal persons in a single entity. Again, we are on the spinning wheel of linking. In a phrase Tn, this entity is in the position of “I”; in Tn+1, that of “he or “she” ; in Tn+2, that of “you.” It is necessary to prove that this is the same entity in the three phases. This is the case with Emma. She says “I” (to Freud) while she is associating; she is Freud’s addressee when he questions her or points something out to her; she is also the shopkeeper’s partner when he seduced her; and she is in the position of referent in the account Freud gives of the analysis. A word on this point. It would be interesting to distinguish this purely objectified third person— “she returns to the store”— from that of the improper third person— “No, she did not return to the store”— which is used freely in the indirect discourse of literature, where the “spoken” and the “speaking” are condensed into the same mark, be it the mark of referring or that of addressing. The result, interestingly enough, concerns an infringement of the principle of articulation. Certainly, this is somewhat confusing. Like the modesty of Flaubertian “realism” staging the other Emma, it seems analogous to the occurrence of an affect, oblivious to distinctions of the person. Literature, dedicated to writing what cannot write itself, requires all kinds of infringements of this sort. Henceforth, the faith that the psychoanalyst and, under another title, the philosopher, accords to the literary text is legitimized. The question of Emma’s identity through the scenes arises with particular acuteness. Although identity is usually the synthesis of personal instances in articulated phrases, this becomes complicated by the fact that Emma suffers serious interruptions in the continuity of her adulthood. She “forgets herself” in the phobic episodes. Freud records this “forgetting” under the rubric of alteration. By attributing it to puberty, he once again encounters the question of time— in this case, with respect to affective “prematurity.” What is gained in pushing back toward the beginning of the story, in the name of Vorzeitigkeit, the role of confusion affecting Emma’s identity? Before attempting to demonstrate this difficulty’s complexity, I wish to return quickly to the simpler question of identity in the articulated phrase that gathers an entity (now an addressor, now an addressee) under the same name. In saying “under the same name,” one has said almost everything. Emma is the same in all the instances of address and of reference presented by the adult phrases that concern her, simply because she always and everywhere names herself or is named “Emma.” I will not develop this point here, as it leads into the theory of the proper name as “rigid designator” which Kripke has proposed and which I have repeated and revised in The Differend.12 The proper name, that of “Emma,” has an identificatory value because it is placed in an identifiable way into a system of names: of the calendar, of the geographical map, of measures (which, as Kripke shows, are proper names) of time, of space, of weight, etc., systems of relationship. Each of these systems form a world of names where the exclusive localization of a name is always available because all the relations between the names of this world are always the same. Emma is the name of an entity 41

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locatable through names of places, dates, pronouns, and names of family, friends, even colors (eyes, hair), etc. In relating to this world, as implied in the naming of Emma, those who discuss the meaning of an entity (valued then as referent for their discussion)— i.e., those who discuss, as we do, what she, Emma, is— are certain that they are actually speaking of the same entity. But their agreement on the name given to the referent obviously does not guarantee that they attribute the same signification to it. One can even imagine that a rupture of signification, a strong “alteration” (to recapture the word with which Freud designates the episode of puberty), could require a change of name. The disturbance can disturb the name, as when Abram became Abraham just after Yahweh addressed him. Was it necessary for Emma to change her name after genitality addressed itself to her? As with many traditions, a woman’s adoption of her husband’s name speaks in favor of this hypothesis. However, the alteration at the age of puberty is not an event as was the voice that addressed Abraham. If a trauma in Emma’s life must be compared to the “shock” which hit Abraham, it could only be that of the assault in the boutique. I do not confuse God with the shopkeeper. But I say that the Law bursts into pagan affectivity with the same violence as sex (genitality) attacks childhood affectivity. The reason for this is simple. Like Abraham, the child Emma is affectable or susceptible. But, no more than he, she is “addressable.” Yahweh demands Abram listen to him, that is, to place himself in the position of the addressee of his voice, in the position of a “you.” I do not want, and no doubt would be unable, to pursue the parallel. But to me it seems to have been established that what breaks into Emma’s affective phase at the time of scene 2 is that the shopkeeper addressed himself to her as a “you [toi], a woman.” His gesture “says” : listen to the difference of the sexes, i.e., to genitality. He places the child all at once in the position of a “you” in an exchange she doesn’t understand, as well as in the position of a woman in a sexual division which she also doesn’t comprehend. One will say that she was not ignorant of these matters when she was eight years old. I admit this, although it is not essential to either the philosophical or psychoanalytic idea I pursue. Under the name of the shopkeeper, I accredit all “seductors” and “seductresses” (the mother included). For me, it is enough to accept that the “stimulant” is always an affective phrase of the adult type, one that conveys the articulation of a universe in persons and in sexed persons. In short, one should not confuse “to be affected,” with affectedness, and “to be addressed” with addressedness. A comparison derived from language, although deceptive, can at least give a measure of this difference. One can imagine that the child Emma speaks a given language (of pleasure and pain), and that the shopkeeper addressed her in a strange language, one unknown to her but of the same (affective) register. When we find ourselves in an analogous situation, as when a speaker addresses us in an unknown language, we do not feel that what is said to us is absurd. Rather, we postulate that his phrases in general are meaningful (since, as I have pointed out, the articulation of universes of phrases is a priori), but are devoid of sense for us because we do not know how to translate them into our language in an articulated way and respond with an appropriate linking. The speaker addresses us, but we are 42

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only affected by this “address” and not properly addressed. In this way, Emma would be affected by the phrase given in the gesture of the shopkeeper despite being unable to be “addressed” by him. Here the pedagogical import of the comparison, if held erroneously to its principle, ceases. To follow it further would suggest that the adult “language” of pleasure (and of pain) is translatable into that of the child and that Emma’s failure to understand is, as with a foreign language, only a matter of learning or of maturation (as is assumed, for example, in so-called “sexual education”). But such is not the case. One cannot speak of a childhood affective “language,” since the pure phrase-affect I invoked under the name of childhood is lacking the articulations indispensable to all translation. Again, I considered only the most elementary of these articulations, i.e., those of referentiality and the addressing. Lacking instances supported by these, one cannot see how an phrase-affect could be “translated” into an articulated phrase. Here, one can never find anything other than equivalents which are too univocal (as what just happened with my comparison). In truth, the silent “presence” of the affect, a sigh, demands of articulated language an endless series of stagings, novels, tragedies, epics, an accumulation and linking of articulated phrases which are contradictory, undecidable, very numerous, or, at least, very “fair.” In short, a “fortuitous” writing, one which relieves adult language of the impossible task of getting even with the “nothing” of childhood “affect.” Then again, the literary work (and the artistic work as well, although with materials other than words and therefore under other conditions) will not cease “rendering” this un-working which is “pure” affectivity. In this, it is not without similarity to the psychoanalytic undertaking. If one now turns to the assumed “adult” affect language, one finds it strangely composite. The reason for this obfuscates rationalism: “we have been children before being men.” But then, how separate is what apparently belongs to the young from what belongs to grown-ups? Sexuality, which I understand as an a priori partition between sexed “genres,” undoubtedly makes the difference. Not that childhood affectivity knows nothing of genitality, supposing that we may here speak of knowing. If I continue to imagine it to be pure, sexuality is not met here as the difference between two sexes but as an occasion offered to the event of an phrase-affect. The “polymorphic perversity” of childhood affectivity narrated by the adult is by no means held to make even an exceptional case of the genital zone. If one can distinguish the “stages” which would mark the evolution of this affectivity by the successive selection of this or that erogenous zone, it is certainly because the education that the adult imposes upon the child confronts the child’s vague excitability, one by one, with each of them. Orality and anality, without taking the rest into account, bear evidence that the disciplining of the body prescribed by the adult supplies the errant affectivity of the child with an abundance of occasions to be affected. In a vague sense, every educator is, in principle, a seducer. But not in the same sense as Emma’s shopkeeper, as he did not even go for genitality. To introduce the difference of the sexes is to compel, needless to say again, childhood affectivity to identify itself with one of the sexes, to refer to the other as an entity, namely as an object, that it cannot embody, and to 43

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finally address itself to that object as its intended partner. Whether it succeeds in assuming all this is another story. The installation of genitality (much more than its biological maturation) keeps pace with the articulation of the phraseaffect in a double polarity of referentiality (there is/there is not: a penis; the binary determination of the object can undoubtedly carry with it another property; only the “yes” or the “no” are important) and of the addressing ( “I” who does not have the penis, “you” who has it, and the one in order fo r the other). Genitality would not give rise to a very specific “shock” if it did not force affective childhood to assimilate, for better or worse, a set of axioms that are initially incomprehensible to it (here is the place of Freud’s “Verstandnis”). An object can be objectively distinguished in the position of referent (thanks to the opposition of either having one, or not having one) for the phrase-affect (from now on “adult”); “I” myself am likewise an object determinable by another; the other can be in a relationship of interlocution with me; and, finally, “it” must be for “me,” and “I” for “it,” the occasion— this time exclusively, and, let us say, authorized by normal circumstances— for the “production” of phrase-affects, which are from then on considered as “effects.” In the shopkeeper’s gesture towards Emma, all of this is “said.” And to this, Emma as a pure affectivity could neither listen nor respond. The shopkeeperaffect is addressed to Emma and referenced to her as we have just described, but the Emma-affectivity is aware of neither the addressing nor the reference. The shock which results from what can very well be called a differend henceforth remains at a standstill in Emma’s affectivity as an affect without representation. The shopkeeper, more hardened in articulation, possessed what is required to place the memory of the assault within a network of representations. His gesture— weakness or perversion— testifies that the adult, just as with the child, remains at the mercy of an unexpected occasion of “excitation.” The “phraseology” just read does not bring the psychoanalyst anything that he does not already know or that he can use. Its interest, if it has one, is philosophical. The “pure” affectivity that I have invoked is the nonphysical name of excitability. This is what is presupposed in the Freudian thesis of the Urverdrangung. Anthropologically speaking, it is bound up with childhood. Transcendentally (in the Kantian sense), it is nothing other than the faculty of pleasure and pain, “pure” because it is derived from no other faculty. In the “phrasistics” where I venture, it signals a susceptibility more “archaic” than all articulation and irreducible to it. “Presence,” the pure autonomy of the affect, does not translate itself in either presentation or representation. Between this affectivity and its articulation, the differend is ineluctable. One would be unable to absorb it in a dispute ( “Gome on, let’s be reasonable . . .”), and neither would one know how to escape it. On the contrary, the articulated adult phrase is always on the verge of awakening (exciter) susceptibility. This awakening creates a stasis in the course of articulations, one that reveals, in turn, an unpresentable “presence.” What excites is excited, the hunter hunted. In the perspective outlined here, the difference between the sexes is only shocking, it only strikes a blow, in a sense secondary to the differend between childhood and adult affect. The classical thesis is that the difference is constitutive of adult affective disorders. Of course, sexual difference carries an intrinsic aporia insofar as it is articulated as an adult phrase. The feminine is 44

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an object completely other than the masculine, and vice versa. And yet their alterity is supposed to give direction to their affective addressing. Their respective objectivity is supposed to command their reciprocal objectality. From what I have put forth, this aporia does not reside in the contradiction of alterity dedicated to complementarity. Rather, it resides in the untranslatability of childhood susceptibility into adult articulation. As for the rest, the difference of the sexes can transcend itself only insofar as one or the other of the two parties, or both, have recourse to this undifferentiated susceptibility. Adults can accept their children, after all, only in love. English translation by Michael Sanders (with Richard Brons and Norah Martin)

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PART II CONVERSATIONS AND DIFFERENDS

© Hugh J. Silverm an.

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Chapter 2

CONVERSATIONS IN POSTMODERN HERMENEUTICS Shaun Gallagher

Gadamer often characterizes interpretation as a conversation or dialogue, and he tells us that this is more than metaphor.1 In this regard his analysis is tied to certain Romantic conceptions concerning the universality of language, “linguistic heritage” (Angeborenheit der Sprache), and what von Humboldt called “the common denominator of human nature,” the universal and spiritual humanity that we all share.2 Gadamer’s view of conversation tends to ignore or repress its political nature, and this motivates various critiques of conversation conducted from critical, radical, and feminist perspectives. Within the context of these oppositions, however, I find something most interesting and promising— a distinctive set of qualifications introduced into the conversation about conversation by authors such as Lyotard. I want to identify and explore these qualifications, as well as suggest why they are both interesting and promising. Specifically, I want to ask whether there is a particular model of conversation that will work within the context of postmodern thought and social practice. My aim is to bring Gadamer and Lyotard together in a hypothetical conversation about conversation. In this task, I am helped by certain precedents: namely, by two previous conversations about conversation. The first and most famous one, between Gadamer and Derrida, helps to strip Gadamer’s conception of its Romantic and metaphysical presuppositions. The second conversation, between Lyotard and Rorty, helps us to see why the conception of the “conversation of mankind,” sometimes employed for postmodern purposes, is not a good model for postmetaphysical/ postmodern thought. A brief consideration of these earlier and real encounters will help in staging a hypothetical and heuristic conversation between Gadamer and Lyotard concerning the possibility of a postmodern hermeneutics.

I. The Conversation between Gadamer and Derrida (Paris, 1981) Derrida’s rejection of the hermeneutical project involves his opposition to a notion of conversation that promises an original experience of truth, being, or presence.3 To see the precise terms of this opposition, one needs only to con49

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trast Gadamer’s remarks about conversation— for instance, remarks about the originality and primacy of “the living present of conversation” (T&M, 368), about his own kinship with Plato’s critique of the written word (T&M, 368369), and about how in conversation one comes under the “influence of the truth” (T&M, 379)— with Derrida’s strategies— his deconstruction of phono/ logocentrism, the displacement of speech by arche-writing, his reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, and so forth. The contrast between Gadamer’s and Derrida’s rhetorical styles reflects a fundamental disagreement in interpretive approaches and in their respective understandings about the nature of language— language as a conversation (Gadamer) in contrast to language as an uncontrollable play of signifiers (Derrida). Derrida suspects the influence of Kantian metaphysics in the notion of “goodwill,” which Gadamer takes as the prerequisite of a productive conversation.4 For Gadamer, however, goodwill is tied to Platonic dialogue, and to concepts that depend more on Romantic claims about the universality of language and the sharing of a common humanity than on the Kantian will. Of course, these concepts are no less metaphysical and no less open to Derridian deconstruction. Philosophical hermeneutics, to the extent that it is conceived as seeking meaning, truth, or consensus, reflects a Romantic optimism or trust that truth will be found on the basis of a shared humanity. If, as Gadamer insists, participants in conversation require trust and goodwill in the effort to understand one another, Derrida wants to know what happens to trust and goodwill in cases of distorted communication which demand suspicion, as in the psychoanalytic situation. In opposition to hermeneutics in any traditional sense, Derrida proposes an “active interpretation, which substitutes an incessant deciphering for the disclosure of truth as a presentation of the thing itself in its presence.” 5 Lyotard stages a short version of this very conversation, and, anticipating a future conversation, aligns himself with Derrida: Derrida’s Question: How does the addressor know that the addressee correctly understands what he or she wants to say? Gadamer’s Answer: The addressor presupposes it. He or she believes that it is so. He or she believes that the addressee believes the same thing about the addressor. Etc. [A mutual trust, Gadamer would say]. Derrida’s Response: Here you are in the act of doing “human sciences,” of probing the meanings (vauloir-dire), the desires, the beliefs that you presuppose to be the property of these entities, human beings. . . . For questions of language, the pertinence of the ideas of Homo, of Homo Faber, of will, and of good will, which belong to other realms, appears not to raise any doubts!6 Gadamer’s response is in some respects a denial, in others, an apology, and in still others, a confession. He holds fast to hermeneutics but refuses to understand this as holding on to the metaphysics of presence (DD, 94-95), and would even associate his own work with certain aspects of Derrida’s mode of interpretation (DD, 96, 118). Still, with so much of Plato and Hegel lurking in the background, Gadamer understands why his philosophical hermeneutics might be construed within the framework of the metaphysics of presence and the language of metaphysics (DD, 98). He maintains, as he has from the very 50

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beginning of his philosophical career, the connection between hermeneutical conversation and Platonic dialectic, but suggests that the roots of hermeneutical conversation go back even further than the Socratic dialogue to the very rationality (the premetaphysical rationality) of anamnesis, which “is not only that of the individual soul but always that of ‘the spirit that would like to unite us’— we who are a conversation” (DD, 110). This idea, which is ancient, although undeniably Romantic and of the German nineteenth century, stands behind Gadamer’s contention that “to be in a conversation, means to be beyond oneself,” which in turn means “to think with the other” (DD, 110). Gadamer admits this— he confesses to being “in the neighborhood of the early Romantics” (DD, 118; see 120-22). He remains “deeply rooted . . . in the Romantic tradition of the humanities and its humanistic heritage” (DD, 24). Accordingly, conversation not only encompasses the “multiplicity of languages and linguistic families” represented in the biblical story of Babel, but holds out the promise of overcoming such differences (DD, 106). Clearly, any progress Gadamer might make in distancing himself from Romantic metaphysics would allow him to move closer to a postmetaphysical conception of conversation. And, to be fair to Gadamer, he does learn from his conversations. Derrida’s questions about goodwill remind him of his debate with Habermas. “This objection is one that Habermas had earlier raised against me when he argued that distorted understanding makes what I call mutual agreement mere appearance and even a form of manipulation” (DD, 97). Gadamer goes on to acknowledge the importance of Levinas in this regard: “One can learn from Levinas how serious this objection is . . .” (DD, 97). Thus Gadamer too considers this a serious objection, and in fact remarks: “Now Derrida would object by saying that understanding always turns into appropriation and so involves a covering up of otherness [by a Romantic oneness]. Levinas, too, values this argument highly, so it is definitely an observation that one cannot dismiss” (DD, 119).7 To give up Romantic benevolence and trust in conversation, however, might also entail giving up the notion of a fusion of horizons which reduces the other to the same. Gadamer is reluctant to give this up, but he does attempt to reformulate it so as to avoid the objections of Levinas and Derrida. In so doing, he moves, if slightly, in the direction of postmodernism. “When I speak in my own work of the necessity for the horizon of one person and the horizon of another to merge into one for any understanding between them to take place, I am not referring to an abiding and identifiable ‘oneness’ [Eines], but just to what takes place in conversation as it goes along” (DD, 119, translation modified). How far Gadamer moves toward a postmodern conception of conversation in this respect is, of course, open to interpretation. Of equal importance to such a move is the aporia that Gadamer tries to make clear to Derrida, an aporia that Derrida cannot move away from. Simply put, it involves the inevitability of conversation. In effect, Derrida is already in a conversation: “Derrida directs questions to me and therefore he must assume that I am willing to understand them” (DD, 55). Gadamer continues: “Surely this is not at all a kind of metaphysics, but the presupposition that any partner in a dialogue must assume, including Derrida, if he wants to pose questions to me” (DD, 56). Now whether this is “a kind of metaphysics” or not, what Gadamer points to is the inevitability of conversation, even for the critique of conversation.8 Even if Derrida provides some 51

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cause to suspect and move away from a certain concept of conversation, he can never escape the hermeneutics of conversation. He cannot help but work out his never-ending suspicions within a never-ending conversation. Deconstruction is not something that falls outside of this hermeneutical model. Even agonistic discourse follows hermeneutical principles insofar as it produces discursive meaning and requires a tradition to react against. Derrida’s deconstructive activity, no matter how radical or how postmetaphysical, or how antihermeneutical, is always played out in a conversational/hermeneutical situation. As Gadamer puts it, “the unavoidability of the hermeneutic standpoint is the theme of my confrontation with Derrida” (.DD, 125). As Gadamer would say, conversation is something that happens to us beyond our wanting or willing. This inevitability and unavoidability of conversation involves the universality of hermeneutical experience. Is it possible to think of this universality in a postmodern context? Gadamer offers us the following response, which for some interpreters seems too ambiguous and even impossible.9 The fact that conversation takes place wherever, whenever, and with whomever something comes to language— whether this is another person or a thing, a word, or a flame-signal. . . — constitutes the universality of the hermeneutical experience. The fact that this experience contains its own limits within itself is in no way inconsistent with its universality. Quite the contrary, the universality of the hermeneutical experience fits perfectly well with the factual limitedness of all human experience and with the limits governing our linguistic communication and possibility for expression. (DD, 95)

II. The Conversation between Rorty and Lyotard (Baltimore, 1984) We can expect no shortage of objections to introducing the notion of universality into postmodern contexts. The emphasis in postmodern hermeneutics is on the local, the particular. Postmodernism challenges universality wherever it finds it— from metanarratives to categorical imperatives, from performativity principles to Enlightenment politics. The universality of hermeneutics is only one more metanarrative: another impossible traditional prejudice, Romantic and metaphysical. Despite this protest, there is sometimes put forward in discussions of postmodernism a conception of conversation that retains an aspect of universality— namely, the “conversation of mankind.” It may seem odd that Richard Rorty, the pragmatic liberal, whether or not we would assign him the title of postmodern, retrieves his conception of conversation from a political conservative, Michael Oakeshott.10 And it may seem even odder that, in the wake of Derrida’s critique of conversation, John Gaputo should suggest that the conversation of mankind is precisely the medium necessary to translate Derrida’s radical deconstruction into the possibility of real political and moral liberation.11 This “conversation of mankind,” however, is not the same as that presented in Gadamer’s hermeneutical conception of conversation. The former is advertised as more open and liberating, less determined by constraining traditions than the latter.12 Thus it might be suggested 52

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that the conversation of mankind can operate as a better model for postmodern hermeneutics than Gadamer’s conservative notion of conversation. Certainly descriptions of the conversation of mankind paint the picture of a progressive, liberal, and open-ended scheme. Ideally, for Oakeshott, the conversation is composed of a plurality of voices, each with its own idiom and each being in relative emancipation from the others. This ideal conversation is prescribed, by Oakeshott (as well as by Rorty and Caputo), in opposition to exclusionary social practices. Oakeshott recognizes, however, the political reality: “An established monopoly will not only make it difficult for another voice to be heard, but it will also make it seem proper that it should not be heard: it is convicted in advance as irrelevant.” 13 In this regard the real event of conversation is hegemonic, and this remains a constant. Political practice, in its essence and regardless of which particular ideology it follows, operates as exclusionary. However, even granted this real situation, the model of the conversation of mankind argues that there is always room in the conversation for excluded voices; or, at least, there is room for a discourse that speaks about exclusion, an agonistic discourse that champions the excluded. Thus Rorty protests against any “attempts to close off conversation by proposals for universal commensuration through the hypostatization of some privileged set of descriptions” (PMN, 320).14 All of this looks pretty good. At the very least it appears liberal, progressive, with the greatest intentions of the broadest inclusion possible. But is it genuinely postmetaphysical or postmodern? From the perspective of Lyotard, the conversation of mankind is in some respects simply another metaphysical scheme that, despite the rhetoric of inclusion, necessarily operates in an exclusionary way. The conversation of mankind, or to be precise, the theory of the conversation of mankind, operates in the same way as a metanarrative. For a discourse to be a metanarrative it must claim to meet two conditions: 1) to cut across or encompass all local narratives (conversations, interpretations, language games, and so on)— if the discourse defines principles they must apply to all cases in its domain— it must have a universal scope; 2) it must be capable of adjudicating all differences— that is, it must be able to prescribe resolutions to conflicts (misunderstandings, misinterpretations). For example, Lyotard suggests that Plato’s theory of justice is a metanarrative because it claims both universality and adjudicative power.15 The conversation of mankind operates in this same way: it signifies the largest and most all-embracing of conversations and it prescribes that attainable solutions must be sought within the ongoing universal conversation. It prescribes against nonparticipation. The universality and adjudicative power of the conversation of mankind is clearly discernible in Rorty’s account. First, he understands conversation “as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood” (PMN, 389)— this is its universal, all-inclusive aspect. Second, Rorty regards the continuation of the conversation as a moral imperative (PMN, 389). As Caputo puts it, this is where “things get worked out,” e.g., where adjudication occurs. The hope for adjudication is nonexistent outside of the conversation. Of course, even within the postmodern condition we may have to coexist with metanarratives and metaphysical schemas— after all, we need something to be suspicious of and to find incredulous— and besides, such things are inescapable. But is it right to claim that the conversation of mankind is exclu53

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sionary? After all, for Oakeshott, the ideal is to have a conversation that is not hegemonic or hierarchical or exclusionary. Rorty and Gaputo clearly set up their reading of this model to include the incommensurability of abnormal discourse. There is a nice phrase in English that summarizes this: we can “agree to disagree.” This phrase implies, however, that the dissensus of incommensurability is included only on the basis of a prior consensus, from which dissent is not allowed. In the conversation of mankind, even the incommensurable must come under the rules of civility and inclusion— nonparticipation is not tolerated. Silence is always treated as a moment within the conversation rather than as a refusal to participate in it. Silence is voiced, and any protest to the conversation itself must be made within the conversation. This means that objections to the conversation that do not take the shape of the conversation itself are not included. Abnormal, paralogical, agonistic discourse, Rorty maintains, “is always parasitic upon normal discourse” (PMN, 365). So one can discover a new paradigm only by first knowing and conforming to the existing paradigm. “To attempt abnormal discourse de novo, without being able to recognize our own abnormality, is madness in the most literal and terrible sense” (PMN, 366).16 In terms of the conversation of mankind, incommensurability is defined only within the conversation, in an accepted vocabulary. If a group refuses to take up or is incapable of taking up that vocabulary, they are not agreeing to disagree. One can find numerous historical examples of such groups. In the recent past, members of Sinn Fein, a republican political group in Northern Ireland, refused to take their seats in the British Parliament when elected. Within the established parliamentary conversation, their refusal was interpreted as a simple protest directed at certain actions taken by parliament. Their intention, however, was to call into doubt the legitimacy of the parliamentary conversation itself with respect to the affairs of Northern Ireland.17Aboriginal coal miners in New Zealand refused to take up the terms of collective bargaining because in their view the legal processes of the industrialists— which in the West would represent civility and participation in a proper conversation— appeared to them as immoral. To join in the conversation, they would have to adopt a vocabulary and procedure that they object to and find abhorrent. So also, Native American tribes who did not have within their vocabulary the conceptions of property, legal ownership, purchase or sale were not genuine participants in the negotiations that resulted in the white man’s ownership of the forests and rivers.18 Nancy Fraser, within the context of discussing the dynamics of conversations between the sexes, not only cites empirical evidence to demonstrate the inequality of participants, but also indicates, in the case of legal considerations of marital rape, an instance not of refusal to enter into recognized discourse, but of the inability of the established terms of discourse to recognize a claim made by the victim.19 Carole Pateman indicates that “women find their speech . . . persistently and systematically invalidated in the crucial matter of consent, a matter that is fundamental to democracy. [But] if women’s words about consent are consistently reinterpreted, how can they participate in the debate. . . .”20 Fraser, following Pateman, suggests that “there is conceptual dissonance between femininity and the dialogical capacity” that seems central to the notion of a universal conversation. In these instances we have what Lyotard calls differends. Differends are 54

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excluded from the conversation of mankind precisely because there is no shared vocabulary in which they can be expressed, and civility cannot make up for this lack. The conversation of mankind, by its requirement of participation, reduces differends to litigations and deprivations to negations. As Lyotard phrases the objection, “to be able not to speak [= a negation] is not the same as not to be able to speak [= a deprivation]” (D, 14).21 The conversation of mankind fails as a model of postmodern hermeneutics not only because it operates as a metadiscourse and is thereby worthy of our incredulity, but because it hides exclusionary rules beneath a rhetoric of inclusion. The overarching conversation of mankind aspires to resolve all differends. But by requiring what is genuinely incommensurable (i.e., incommensurable with the conversation itself) to be voiced within the conversation, it denies it expression and helps to constitute it as a differend at the same time that it disguises it as a litigation. The very attempt to include something that cannot be included makes the conversation of mankind a terrorist conversation. This is one of the issues between Lyotard and Rorty in their own conversation in 1984. For Lyotard, the conversation of mankind forms part of the modem Enlightenment tradition in which a particular I or you is subsumed into a universal we.22 On Rorty’s view, as long as the subsumption is done by persuasion rather than by force, there is no terrorism involved.23 The conversation of mankind would avoid terrorism by giving all participants a “respectful hearing.” For Rorty, incommensurability is simply a “temporary inconvenience” that can be overcome by honing our translation abilities (CWE, 216). He sees nothing wrong with trying to replace differends with litigations (CWE, 217), a conversational process that is sometimes successful and sometimes not. Lyotard is quick to claim that a differend exists between Rorty and himself, a differend that Rorty would reduce to a mere litigation. Thus Lyotard responds: “My genre of discourse is tragic. His is conversational.”24 He also points out that the persuasion that Rorty advocates is not free of violence and is not the same as convincing someone. “Persuasion is a rhetorical operation, and the Greeks knew that this operation utilizes ruse, mental violence” (DLR, 582). It is a pragmatic activity that seeks to gain the trust of the interlocutor and that operates in an imperialist manner. Lyotard calls it a “conversational imperialism.” 25

Ill: A Hypothetical Conversation between Gadamer and Lyotard Does this critique of the conversation of mankind, taken together with the postmetaphysical critique of Gadamer’s model of hermeneutical conversation, leave us without a conception of conversation that could work in postmodern theory? Despite and even granting Derrida’s deconstruction of Gadamer’s concept of conversation, and despite and even granting the claim made for the hermeneutical universality of conversation, Gadamer’s hermeneutical model, with some modifications, can serve postmodern hermeneutics. It is not incommensurable with the incommensurability expressed by Lyotardian paralogy and the concept of the differend. The postmodern situation is nothing other than a paralogical multiplicity of conversations. The plural here is important. It qualifies the type of universality that we can 55

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claim for conversation, a universality quite different from that claimed by the conversation of mankind. The conversation of mankind would be a universal conversation based on a presupposed (meta)consensus— a contract, expressible in prescriptive terms, an agreement to disagree. In contrast, the universality claimed for the hermeneutical model of conversation involves neither a metaconsensus nor a method of adjudication. This model does not entail a metanarrative. Although it lays claim to universality, it does not claim adjudicative power. It is not prescribed as a solution to problems. The claim is not that we ought to converse, but that we cannot avoid conversing. We do not agree to participate in particular conversations, but find ourselves already cast (sometimes as unwilling participants) in one or many conversations that are organized (or disorganized) in paralogical fashion. Wherever we find ourselves, we are always in a hermeneutical situation, in a conversation, and more precisely, in one conversation among others. This universality has nothing to do with a universal conversation. As Gadamer indicates, the universality of hermeneutics is in no way inconsistent with the fact that a particular conversation contains its own limits within itself, but “fits perfectly well with the factual limitedness of all human experience and with the limits governing our linguistic communication and possibility for expression” (DD, 95). This claim is neither ambiguous nor impossible. The postmodern idea is not that one overarching conversation prevails. There is a plurality of conversations, some constituting relative differends in relation to others. Fusions may still happen between conversations, only not in the sense of unifying or reducing different conversations, but by creating new and different conversations linking one to another; or again, not in the sense of a fusion of horizons, but as a creation of new horizons. Paralogy is not prescribed, it already is the case, over and above our prescribing, as Gadamer might say. This model, like Lyotard’s own work in The Differend, goes beyond his considerations in The Postmodern Condition about language games and his prescription for paralogy. In the latter text, Lyotard had made paralogy an issue of justice, a program to be opposed to performativity. Thus Lyotard himself has been involved in a metanarrative, not only telling “the great narrative of the end of great narratives” (D, 182), but prescribing paralogy as a means of adjudication and legitimation. On a Gadamerian model, however, the case is already paralogy, that is, already a plurality of conversations. We find ourselves, over and above our wanting and willing, in a postmodern paralogical situation (the situation of Babel always-already in effect)— what Lyotard calls the “postmodern Babel.”26 Lyotard, however, clearly goes beyond Gadamer’s Romantic conception of bridging, by conversation, the multiplicity of languages represented by the Tower of Babel (DD, 106). The Differend conducts itself in the genre of a dialogue, even if it is one in which Lyotard is conversing with himself. Lyotard provides, among other things, a philosophical hermeneutics of phrasing that is not incommensurable with a philosophical hermneutics of conversation. According to this postmodern hermeneutics, a conversation is itself a particular genre of discourse. Yet some explanatory power is provided by taking conversation as a paradigmatic model of all genres. A phrase presents a universe, i.e., a situation in which an addressor, an addressee, a sense, and a referent are located. A conversation happens as a set of phrases come together (come to be “linked”). Dialogue, 56

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Lyotard says, “links an ostension (showing) or a definition (describing) onto a question; at stake in it is the two parties coming to an agreement about the sense of a referent” (D, xii). A differend exists where one is preempted from participating in a conversation by virtue of the fact that a would-be participant lacks or is divested of the means (the vocabulary, the referent) to converse. A differend exists when the conversation in question is conducted “in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom” (D, 12). But the heterogeneity involved in a differend does not close down the conversation so much as it defines its limits and suggests the possibility of a different conversation. In this case, there exists a postmodern fission rather than a Romantic fusion. Differends notwithstanding, conversation is inevitable because “there is no last phrase.” Thus injustice as well is inevitable because there is no conversation, no guaranteed fusion, that has the universal authority to adjudicate. The inevitability of conversational linkages causes unavoidable wrongs. Given (a) “the impossibility of avoiding conflicts” and (b) the absence of a universal conversation that could adjudicate them (i.e., given the inevitable partiality of the participants in any particular conversation, consensus always being a temporary thing), the problem Lyotard sets out to solve involves finding, not a way to get rid of the inevitable (Lyotard is not an idealist like Habermas), but a manner in which to participate in conversations honorably, that is, an “honorable postmodemity” (D, xiii). In attempting to link the conversations of Gadamer and Lyotard, one finds (a) agreements, (b) disagreements, (c) places where Lyotard rightly goes beyond the Gadamerian model, and (d) places where Gadamer could operate as a corrective to Lyotard. (a) Agreements. Both Gadamer and Lyotard agree to disagree with the traditional idea that man controls language and simply makes use of it for his own ends.27 Lyotard’s contention that addressor and addressee are instances presented by a phrase is quite consistent with Gadamer’s notion that the participants are carried along, conducted by the conversation. The participants are not independent of the conversation; “they are situated in the universe the phrase presents” (D, 18). Hermeneutical principles that apply universally to conversations also apply to phrasing. Gadamer and Lyotard would clearly agree that: 1. All conversation/phrasing is linguistic; 2. All conversation/phrasing is historically situated or local; 3. All conversation/phrasing is productive (of further phrases). Lyotard acknowledges the concept of a hermeneutical situation (JG, 43) and, like Gadamer, recognizes the effects of language upon the addressee and the transformative effects of traditions (JG, 33-34). These principles describe how phrasing/conversation happens, and they define the conditions of possibility and the limitations that one must take into account if and when one goes further and attempts to say how any particular phrasing/conversation ought to take place. (b) Disagreements. Lyotard, aligning himself with Derrida in this respect, would leave behind the metaphysical, Romantic concept of trust defended by Gadamer. As we have learned from that previous conversation, a postmodern 57

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hermeneutics would be one that is free from the Romantic conceptions of humanity and trust. For Lyotard, what Gadamer calls openness and participation in a conversation modeled on Socratic dialogue really involves a built-in inequality and represents an attempt to introduce controls over the effects of discourse (see JG, 4; 57). In contrast, for Gadamer, openness and participation mean allowing the movement of conversation to take place and moving the participants— in which case, as Lyotard himself proposes, the participants are dispossessed of their mastery (see JG, 7). Still, it seems clear that Lyotard would develop a model of dialogue different from the Socratic-Gadamerian one (see JG, 56-57). (c) Lyotard’s Advance. Without denying the possibility of progressive dialogue, Lyotard’s distrust of metalepsis indicates that in postmodern hermeneutics a fusion of horizons that would efface the differences between the self and the other must be displaced by a conception of linking. This conception not only includes the impossibility of complete fusion but also the possibility of an agonistic refusal to be fused. Metalepsis is the transformation of an observer left outside the conversation into a participant through his judgment about the conversation. When Socrates speaks with Thrasymachus, Plato intends the reader to enter into the same conversation. We enter into the conversation, Gadamer would contend, through the metalepsis by which we judge whether Socrates or Thrasymachus is right. For Gadamer, every time one reads Plato one enters into a conversation which is fused with the Socratic dialogue. Lyotard, in contrast, equates metalepsis with an absorption of the difference that exists between agonistics (debate) and dialogue, two incommensurable genres. For Lyotard, it is “never certain nor even probable that partners in a debate, even those taken as witness to a dialogue, convert themselves into partners in dialogue” (D, 26). Rather, we end up with more than one conversation, each structured in its own genre, with different participants and different senses. Despite Gadamer’s addiction to metalepsis, this paralogical result is not inconsistent with Gadamer’s own principle that we always understand differently. In so doing, however, we do not necessarily enter into the original conversation but quite frequently create a new one for ourselves. (d) Gadamer’s Corrective. Within this model of postmodern, paralogical conversations one must try to work out the notion of honorable participation, of an ethics of participation. But in the paralogical, conversational situation one has no universals; one has only conversational experience to fall back on. For some this is not enough because it offers no clear criteria for adjudicating between perspectives. Of course, this relativism is often what one worries about when confronted with postmodernism. Richard Bernstein, for example, worries about the lack of critical-justification criteria in Rorty’s conversation of mankind.28 Gaputo used to worry about the lack of any anchor within the conversation of mankind, and he complained that Rorty denied the hermeneutical situation, a complaint that could now be turned against his own radical conception of conversation.29 Rorty himself now uses the same complaint against Lyotard, and follows Habermas in worrying about Lyotard’s paralogy and its devaluation of consensus and communication.30 In this context, Gadamer can offer something to postmodernism that I find lacking in Lyotard. We must imagine that in their conversation they touch on the concept of Aristotelean phronesis. As might be expected, however, they 58

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each understand this concept differently. The difference is that for Gadamer, as for Aristotle, phronesis requires an educational backdrop of experience, whereas for Lyotard, phronesis operates in an entirely ad hoc manner and without background knowledge. In this sense, Lyotard denies that the paralogical situation is still a hermeneutical situation. For Lyotard, if phronesis is to be postmodern it must rely on nothing prior. Phronesis cannot depend upon education or on hexis, a habit of virtue, an ethos (see JG, 26). Although both Lyotard and Aristotle would agree that there is no theory or method that explicitly defines phronesis, that it is not a trained ability, they would disagree about its proper educational background. Phronesis, according to Aristotle, requires an education, a knowledge of particulars that comes from experience (Nicomaehean Ethics, 1141bl7; 1142al4). Virtue is also required, for the person who wants phronesis must develop the right habits, an ethos developed over time. This formation of the right ethos in experience is precisely what Lyotard denies. Clearly, without the ethos, without a backdrop of educational experience, what Lyotard calls “phronesis” is nothing more than what Aristotle would call “cleverness.” He ignores Aristotle’s clear contrast between these two concepts (see Nicomaehean Ethics, 1144a25ff), as well as Aristotle’s denial that “quickness of mind” is sufficient for the excellence in deliberation which is phronesis (1142b5-16). Lyotard in fact equates phronesis with speedy imagination, “the capacity to actualize the relevant data for solving a problem ‘here and now,’ and to organize that data into an efficient strategy” (PMC, 51), the ability to play the game with inventiveness, to play “master strokes” (JG, 61). In contrast, on the Gadamerian view, every situation, no matter how paralogical, is always a hermeneutical situation, informed (like it or not) by particular traditions. No matter which of the many conversations I find myself participating in, I never start ex nihilo. I always have something, some tradition, some background knowledge to fall back on in making my judgments. Still, this is different from Rorty’s claim about the requirement of a common vocabulary or idiom, although, to the extent that it may constitute something in common, it may explain those cases in which conversation works and a relative consensus is temporarily achieved. Still less does an educational backdrop constitute an already predetermined universal under which I simply locate the particular situation— phronesis works not from universals but from particulars. Phronesis works best in those cases where there are no rules, on the paralogical edge where new conversations are started. A sufficiently developed, hermeneutically informed conception of phronesis promises a good postmodern response to the questions of ethics and community. A conversation between Gadamer and Lyotard might start here, with this difference. And it is quite possible that the participants in such a conversation would be transformed by it. Gadamer: That I, as an individual, find myself always within a hermeneutical situation, a conversation, signifies that I am not alone. Even if I am only talking with myself, my language is something that I have inherited from others, and their words interrupt and make possible my conversation. Even if there exists no universally shared human nature as a basis for Romantic trust, within the hermeneutical situation there are still 59

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some shared aspects, a certain range of background knowledge, some limited common ground which enables the particular conversation to happen. Otherwise communication would be impossible. Neither the common ground nor the communication it makes possible will necessarily guarantee community, consensus, or a resolution of differends. We are not focused here on outcomes, a particular consensus to be reached, but on what is anterior to (as a condition of possibility for) conversation. This anterior common ground may only be the battlefield on which our conflicts can be fought. Isn’t the principle something like: no differends without a battlefield? Lyotard: You know yourself how even “the battlefield” is open to conflicting interpretations. This was a favorite example used by Ghladenius in his Enlightenment hermeneutics. Differends, however, are not fought out on the battlefield; they remain outside the circumference of the battlefield, unable to enter the conflict (the conversation) within. So we must define many small sites of battle, each of which might be called a community of difference, which is not presupposed but accomplished in and through particular conversations that remain dialogues without ultimate synthesis. Conversations, in such cases, always remain incomplete, imperfect. In them the we is always in question, always at stake, the consensus always local and temporary, the community always deferred. Perhaps, within these conversations, a trust which is quite different from good will is required; a trust that we are different and for that very reason require conversation to create a we. This is not a trust in a preexisting we, or a trust in the actual accomplishment of a we, but a trust in the promise and the inevitable deferral of a we, a not-yet we that will always remain not yet, defined by our differences. I have stated elsewhere; “the true we is never we, never stabilized in a name for we, always undone before being constituted, only identified in the non-identity between you . . . and me . . .” (LR, 377). Conversations only put we into question. Gadamer: So on that point, that is, precisely because we should not expect to reach unanimity, we put the concept of conversation back into question. Perhaps neither the presupposed we (the Romantic one) nor the resulting we (the Enlightenment one) actually exists, and yet conversation is possible. You and I can converse even across different languages and reach some understanding, even if this is not an abiding and identifiable oneness. We find ourselves positioned within the terms of this conversation, terms imposed on us by past conversations we have participated in. This is what makes us who we are, here, understanding things differently. Lyotard: Yes. I often find myself in conversations— with myself and with others. They are not impositions, necessarily. They may be gifts. You may like Cowper’s poem on this subject, although you may interpret it differently from me: . . . Conversation in it’s better part May be esteem’d a gift, and not an art, Yet much depends, as in the tiller’s toil, On culture, and the sowing of the soil.31 60

Chapter 3

LYOTARD, BAKHTIN, AND RADICAL HETEROGENEITY Fred Evans

Although our surroundings impress us with their diversity as well as their unity, Western philosophers have traditionally tended to favor Parmenidean unity over Heraclitian flux, identity over difference, and consensus over dissensus.1 Recently, however, a growing number of philosophers have suggested that this emphasis upon unity, identity, and consensus is nihilistic in the Nietzschean sense: things and events are reduced to the identity or direction imposed upon them by metanarratives; multiplicity is ordered and attenuated by unity; voices are muted by oracles. As a corrective to this nihilism of homogeneity, poststructuralists such as Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard have argued that the signs of the text upon which we reflect and the discursive positions of the linguistic community that we articulate are radically heterogeneous, that is, unmediated by any unifying totality intrinsic to them.2 Consistent with this paean in the name of difference, poststructuralists have also claimed that subjects are assigned their position, identity, and direction in accordance with certain language analogues (Derrida’s differance, Lyotard’s differend, and Foucault’s pouvoir/savoir) that assure the dispersal of these subjects and their reason into as many operations as there are varieties of discourse. Among the poststructuralists, Jean-Fran9 ois Lyotard provides the most explicit account of a linkage between radical heterogeneity and the notion of justice, a “justice of multiplicity.”3 A leading commentator on Lyotard’s work, David Carroll,4 has noted that the views on language and justice of the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin are very similar to those of Lyotard. Specifically, Carroll says that both Lyotard and Bakhtin share a common commitment to “critical strategies that indicate indirectly an Idea (or ‘fiction’) of heterogeneous humanity as the foundation of the social, an Idea that must be pursued in the name of justice, in the name of an obligation to others and alterity in general.” 5 Despite the similarities between Lyotard and Bakhtin, a critical examination of Bakhtin’s notion of “dialogized heteroglossia” suggests that it avoids some of the more successful criticisms leveled at Lyotard’s notion of the differend [differend] and its relation to justice. And when it is bolstered by what it points toward— the linguistic community as a “plurivocal body” and a hermeneutical as opposed to a merely formal version of radical heterogeneity— dialogized heteroglossia also provides an explanation of the oscillation between 61

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Parmenidean unity and Heraclitian flux in Western thought, and even suggests a sense in which Lyotard’s differend, despite its helpfulness in pointing philosophical and political thought in a new direction, is tainted with the same nihilism as the modernist homogeneity it opposes.6

I. Lyotard’s “Differend” Both Lyotard and Bakhtin center their philosophies around the notion of “event” rather than the more traditional notions of “substance” and “subject.” In Lyotard’s case, this event is the happening of a “phrase,”7 for example, a prescriptive, cognitive, evaluative, or interrogative sentence. Each phrase, moreover, is the presentation or calling forth of its universe and instances, that is, of its addressor, addressee, sense, and referent; and each phrase is itself constituted according to its “regimen,” the set of rules that determine its appropriate occurrence (D, 14; xii). Although Lyotard takes the “phrase” as the most basic element of the linguistic setting, he views this community of phrases as always involving a conflict between incommensurable “genres of discourse” (D, 136). These genres provide diverse phrases with common “stakes” or purposes, for example, the ethical purpose of a prescriptive genre, the explanatory stakes of a cognitive genre, or the playful aims of a game (.D, 84; 129). Although we believe that we want to persuade, to be upright, or to fulfill any other such intention, this is only because a genre of discourse “imposes its mode of linking onto ‘our’ phrase and onto ‘us’ ” (D, 136). We can only “be” as the instance of a phrase; our identity as subjects, like the identity of our referents and our addressees, is determined entirely within the genre of discourse that governs that phrase, establishing us as moralists, scientists, philosophers, bureaucrats, or any other subject role one may care to mention. Each genre also inclines the instances presented by a phrase, including the addressor, toward certain linkings, or at least steers them away from linkings that are not suitable with regard to the end pursued by the genre (D, 84). Because each phrase is put into play within a conflict between genres of discourse, and because the losing genre will necessarily be judged in terms of the rules and stakes of the genre that wins the conflict (D, 136), Lyotard says that the occurrence of a phrase (and hence its instances) always involves a differend: “ [A] differend [differend] would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments. . . . A wrong results from the fact that the rules of the genre of discourse by which one judges are not those of the judged genre or genres of discourse” (D, xi). As a key example of a differend, Lyotard cites what he takes to be the inherent conflict between prescriptive genres— for example, ethical and political judgments— and cognitive genres of discourse— for example, scientific judgments. Lyotard claims that there is an absolute abyss between these two genres. A cognitive phrase requires ostensive verification of its descriptions of the phrase’s referent (D, 41). In contrast, one cannot, Lyotard believes, appropriately derive prescriptions from descriptions of reality (D, 108), i.e., cannot conclude an “ought” from an “is.” In obligating us to their terms, moreover, prescriptions “befall” us rather than proceed from us, concern us as their 62

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addressees and never as their addressors. Lyotard holds that these events of obligation, on pain of losing their status as prescriptions, must take place without identifying the addressor of the prescriptive phrase and genre (D, 108; 110). Like Abraham, we are to have only a feeling, and no description, of the addressor who obligates us to what we may then choose to obey or defy. Lyotard is particularly eager to show that the chasm between the prescriptive and cognitive genres cannot be bridged by metanarratives, that is, by totalizing visions of the history or other aspects of the community of phrases. For example, Lyotard argues that the enthusiasm aroused by the Paris Commune cannot be interpreted as a “sign” of the political project of a real class, the proletariat, and of the organization of an actual party, the revolutionary vanguard. Instead, the proletariat and party indicated by this sign can be no more than idealizations, the objects of the Idea of emancipated working humanity, a regulative Idea of reason in the Kantian terminology that Lyotard adopts (D, 172). Such an Idea is subjectively conceivable but not objectively presentable, especially not in the ostensive manner required by cognitive genres for their verification (D, 5). Like the Kantian “sublime,” the conception of this Idea brings about simultaneously both despair and joy: despair in the face of our inability to make its referent, “emancipated humanity,” present as either an actuality or a clear guide on the levels of the sensibility and imagination; and joy in the recognition of the ability of our reason to transcend nature and history, indeed, “to exceed everything that can be presented” (D, 166). For Lyotard, therefore, the enthusiasm which befalls us upon hearing of the Paris Commune belongs either to the prescriptive genre or to a third genre, the “dialectic” in Kant’s terminology, but in no way, if we “remain responsible to thought” (D, 142), provides a bridge between prescriptive and cognitive genres, in no way establishes a cognitive basis for the prescription that the proletariat should overthrow class oppression in order to form universal humanity. Given his assurance that genres of discourse are incommensurable and that totalizing thought is a violation of this fundamental heterogeneity, Lyotard defines justice in terms of an obligation to honor or witness the differend, that is, to acknowledge the boundaries between genres and to find “idioms” that will safeguard the integrity of the genres that are wronged in their constant conflict with the other genres.8 Lyotard claims that his political prescription follows the regulative and indeterminate Idea of an “archipelago” or multiplicity of (at most analogically or symbolically related) genres, and is thus a “reflective judgment” in the Kantian sense of having no rule other than those it provides for itself (D, 134).9Because of its freedom from preestablished rules, Lyotard adds that political judgment properly belongs to no genre and hence is not itself a genre that contains all other genres.10 Although Lyotard uses Kant’s Critique of Judgment as the model for his notions of the regulative Idea of the archipelago and the reflective judgment that provides its own rules, he does not accept Kant’s view that a demand for systematic unity is built into reason11 and that reason then allows us analogically to bridge the realms of freedom and nature, of noumenal self and noumenal world, in the name of the Idea of an indeterminate but unifying totality. Lyotard does not accept, that is, the ability of reason to judge the two realms “as if” they formed a unity of experience.12 Replacing “genre” with the Kantian term “faculty,” Lyotard therefore says that judgment is “the faculty [of the milieu] which 63

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has enabled the territories and the realms to be delimited, which has established the authority of each genre on its island . . . thanks to the commerce or to the war it fosters between genres” (D, 131). This type of political judgment, then, allows delimiting and “as if”-validating “analogies” among the genres but prohibits the unifying bridges, hypothetical or otherwise, of which Kantians dream. It allows, for example, that the multiplicity of genres, an Idea of Reason appropriate for the dialectic genre, is like an archipelago of islands, an object appropriate for a cognitive genre (in Kantian terms, for sensibility and the understanding). But it does not allow that information from the cognitive genre can provide evidence that reality is in fact a multiplicity of genres. Nor does this reflective type of political judgment allow one to affirm Kant’s weaker position, that these “islands” or “faculties” point to a unifying supersensible substrate, to a final synthesis, as a (non-empirically verifiable) regulative Idea. But if totality is not presentable, could not its conception, regulative Idea, and its accompanying prescription go either way? Heterogeneity or homogeneity, archipelago or synthesis, “Be plural!” or “Be one!” And does not Lyotard’s preference for the first of each of these alternatives mean that his notion of an indeterminate judgment is not one that provides its own rules— that, in his case and contrary to what he says, it is determined from the beginning by the Idea of multiplicity and the imperative, “Be plural!” ? Would not such a judgment then undermine the very imperative of justice— to witness the differend and resist totalizing movements— that the genres are supposed to obey and that political judgments are supposed to preserve? If Lyotard should reply by saying that his description of phrases and their incommensurability provides evidence that the Idea of justice must be based on the Idea of the archipelago rather than on the Idea of synthetic unity, he would then violate that very incommensurability of genres for which he is arguing— he would be judging a dialectical genre and a prescriptive or ethical/political genre on the basis of cognitive genres and descriptive phrases (D, 135); he would be crossing the abyss between prescriptions and descriptions in more than a merely analogical manner. But if Lyotard does not base his dialectical Idea of multiplicity and his prescription of the differend on a cognitive genre, then we are left, on his own account, with two contesting and contradictory prescriptions, two different directions or Ideas for philosophy, multiplicity and unity, and no reason for choosing the one over the other. We escape the pernicious relativism that the affirmation of heterogeneity was intended to overcome— we replace the multiplicity of justices with the justice of multiplicity— only by opting for an arbitrary prescriptivism. In his treatment of Lyotard’s notion of judgment, Richard Beardsworth argues that Lyotard’s postulation of the Idea of the archipelago and the political reflective judgment guided by it are actually secondary simplifications of a more basic and prior judgment, a truly indeterminate and completely unpresentable form of reflective judgment. Beardsworth claims that Lyotard is at least tacitly committed to this more basic form of judgment when he states, as in the passage quoted above, that reflective judgment enables the “territories and realms [of the milieu] to be delimited thanks to the commerce or to the war it fosters between genres” (JL, 71). According to Beardsworth, this prior judgment first finds the rules of the genres “undecidably prescriptive and descriptive” (JL, 73), that is, undecidably legislated and discovered; it then “institutes” (rather than constitutes, like the 64

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understanding, or regulates, like reason) the genres according to the rules that it simultaneously describes and prescribes as “binding” and “bounding” the “islands” (genres) of the archipelago.13 Such instituting, however, can follow the route of either linking prescription and description, as Kant attempts to do on the basis of the Idea of an underlying unity, ultimately God, or of keeping them apart, of designating them a differend, as Lyotard finally deems necessary. Because Lyotard provides no reason for choosing one of these alternatives over the other, no reason for respecting rather than overcoming differends,14Beardsworth concludes that “a tension of unity and disunity running through the [genres],” organizes the field, and thereby allows “their heterogeneity to be either intensified analogically (a la Lyotard) or synthesized analogically (a la Kant)” (JL, 74).15 Perhaps one could claim that Lyotard is merely urging us to respect the differend between the Idea of the unity of genres and the Idea of the multiplicity of genres. Once we see that we can no longer appeal to the Idea of unity or to the Idea of multiplicity as the basis of our politics, we will seek only “local” or “micro” considerations and reasons for resolving our conflicts. But considerations and reasons on political issues are never purely “technical” or “neutral,” never merely “local” : inevitably, they appeal to and accentuate the conflict between values that in turn involve the notions of unity and plurality, for example, communal identity and goals on the one hand, and the rights and inviolability of the individual on the other. Locally, the owner of a factory or of any other unit of production or communication will have more reason to see his or her employees’ labor power as a commodity rather than as a vital part of their identity or humanity. Respect for an absolute differend between unity and multiplicity, then, would only amount to exchanging “the justice of multiplicity” for “the multiplicity of justices” that the former was intended to dispel, i.e., to exchanging the prescriptivism behind the justice of multiplicity for the pernicious form of relativism entailed by the multiplicity of justices. We would lose the advantage that Lyotard had hoped to gain for us: a view of radical heterogeneity that could address the political issue of justice and do so in the name of heterogeneity rather than totalitarian or leveling ideas. Hendley16 has argued that we should understand Lyotard as viewing each genre as the implicit prescription that one follow its rules or “pragmatics” for achieving the stakes at which the genre aims. Lyotard’s notions of political judgment and the differend therefore amount to the demand that these prescriptions be put up for discussion before we adopt any of them (J&R, 233). But such an admonition amounts to telling us something we already know— to deliberate the specifics of each case before judging— and is otherwise unhelpful for providing us with political direction. Hendley himself goes on to claim that the idea of a multiplicity of rationalities avoids both nihilistic and totalizing implications when it is based on “the Idea of a dialectic [between discursive positions] which knows no bounds” (J&R, 241). Because no case can ever fully determine the validity of a rule, dialogue can never be closed, and reason, to that degree, “transcends” any particular position; yet the articulation of a reason must always occur within one position or another, and to that degree rationality is always “immanent.” Thus one sets up an interminable and rational dialogue. To the degree that this dialogue, or “interplay of voices,” as I will call it below, is itself the major end of such a rational dialogue (and given the declared interminableness of rational dialogue, it’s difficult 65

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to see what other primary end it could have), Hendley’s reading of Lyotard approaches Bakhtin’s notion of “dialogized heteroglossia” and the idea of a “plurivocal body” that we will derive from it. The idea of a plurivocal body will provide the Lyotardian emphasis on radical heterogeneity with what it has denied itself: cognitive grounds for characterizing the linguistic community in terms of radical heterogeneity and a means for crossing the abyss that Lyotard sets up between prescriptive and descriptive phrases. But it will also direct us to affirm this heterogeneity as an interplay rather than a plurality of genres, and will thereby remain closer to the “tension of unity and disunity running through the [genres],” the “undecidable” starting point that Beardsworth correctly takes as the final, unacknowledged destination of Lyotard’s philosophy of the differend.

II. Bakhtin’s “Dialogized Heteroglossia” Whereas Lyotard provides only an arbitrary prescription with which to face the “tension of unity and disunity” running through the genres of the linguistic community, Bakhtin in effect interprets this tension in terms of “dialogized heteroglossia” and replaces Lyotard’s formal treatment of radical heterogeneity with a hermeneutical version of radical heterogeneity. In developing this notion of dialogized heteroglossia, Bakhtin sometimes speaks of the linguistic community in terms of a struggle among “social-linguistic points of view” or “speech genres” and at other times as a place of interpersonal dialogues. Part of our task will be to reconstruct the notion of dialogized heteroglossia in a way that reconciles this apparent opposition between language-centered and subjectcentered views of the linguistic community. This reconciliation will require that we understand the linguistic community as a “plurivocal body,” and this notion in turn will bring us closer to achieving the goal that both Lyotard and Bakhtin share— the establishment of a politics of justice on the basis of an irreducible and radical heterogeneity. 1. The Linguistic Community as Dialogized Heteroglossia On Bakhtin’s view, the fundamental event of the linguistic community is not a Lyotardian phrase but an ongoing struggle between monoglossic and heteroglossic tendencies within the linguistic community. He describes monoglossia as a centripetal movement toward “a unitary master language” that “gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization.” These discursive forces “develop in vital connection with . . . processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization.”17 In contrast, heteroglossia is a centrifugal movement toward the stratification of language into a plethora of regional, generational, social, professional, and other kinds of diversified dialects and discourses: Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio- ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth, all given a bodily form. These “languages” of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying “languages.” (DI, 291)

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In his Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics,18 Bakhtin utilizes the difference between Dostoyevsky’s and Tolstoy’s style of writing novels in order to provide a concrete illustration of these two tendencies. He argues that the characters in Dostoyevsky’s novels always take on a life of their own, one that goes beyond the stance of Dostoyevsky himself and the representative of the author’s voice in the text. Because of this heteroglossia, Dostoyevsky’s novels are genuine dialogues without closure. In Tolstoy’s novels, by contrast, the “authorial voice” dominates the text, and thus creative tension among the different characters is sacrificed for the emergence of the great idea (PD, 69-73). According to Bakhtin, the novel of the Dostoyevskian sort is also the reflection (and serves as an enhancement) of the polyglot cultures and elevated desire for democratic relationships that characterize modernity. Only the tradition of “Carnival,” its mixing and inverting of identities, rivals the novel as the hallmark of heteroglossic culture. This reference to the novel helps to emphasize another of Bakhtin’s central themes. The conflict between monoglossia and heteroglossia is embodied in the “dialogic nature of language,” that is, in the “struggle among sociolinguistic points of view” or, as he sometimes refers to them, “voices” (DI, 273).19 Because monoglossia is simply one of these heteroglot voices raised to the level of a “master language,” and heteroglossia is the proliferation of new speech genres and the continuation of the others in the face of this monoglossic tendency, Bakhtin sometimes utilizes the term “dialogized heteroglossia” 20 to characterize the linguistic community. At first glance, Bakhtin’s dialogized heteroglossia has much in common with Lyotard’s theory of phrases and genres. Both views equate language with a plurality of intersecting genres, each containing its own rules for determining its formation and employment, rather than with a common set of “neutral” or “universal” rules and meanings (DI, 293-294). Because Bakhtin emphasizes that the struggle among sociolinguistic genres is not an “an intra-language struggle between individual wills or logical contradictions” (DI, 273), he also appears to share Lyotard’s claim that subjects are “instances” of these sociolinguistic genres and do not exist separately from them.21 But Bakhtin’s notion of dialogized heteroglossia ceases to be Lyotardian when we consider that sociolinguistic genres are dialogical and that therefore subjects are instances of dialogues— of the struggle among sociolinguistic genres and between monoglossia and heteroglossia— rather than instances of phrases and genres. Whereas Lyotard views dialogue as one genre among others— one whose aim is “truth”22— Bakhtin holds that any utterance (including any Lyotardian phrase) is part of a dialogue and that the continuation of the interplay of voices, not truth, is the primary aim of dialogue23 Specifically, an utterance occurs simultaneously as a response to past utterances and as an anticipation of future ones.24 Understanding, therefore, is just as much the interlocutor’s rejoinder to an utterance as his or her reception of that utterance: Any true understanding is dialogic in nature. Understanding is to utterance as one line of a dialogue is to the next. Understanding strives to match the speaker’s word with a counter word. Only in understanding a word in a foreign tongue is the attempt made to match it with the “same” word in one’s own language. (MPL, 102; 41; and DI, 281-282; 293-294)

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According to Bakhtin’s dialogism, then, an utterance continually calls for a new edition of itself by the successive interlocutors that articulate it from their particular positions within the dialogue. Because it calls for ever more nuances of itself, the utterance organizes the exchange between the interlocutors and defers its own finalization until the end of the dialogue, of a dialogue, however, that is in principle interminable. This view of understanding as a spur for dialogue rather than as a mark of the dialogue’s completion is also reflected in Bakhtin’s depiction of “meaning.” According to Bakhtin, utterances have contextualized or concrete meanings— “themes”— within a dialogue. What we think of as the self-contained and repeatable significations found in dictionaries exist only as the “lower-limit” of linguistic meaning. Paradoxically, such meanings “mean nothing,” that is, “only possess potentiality, the possibility of having a meaning within a concrete theme” (MPL, 101-102). Once we agree that the meaning or identity of an utterance is always a theme, then we must acknowledge that utterances and their meanings never exist in the minds of speakers and hearers but between them, at their linguistic intersection. Bakhtin therefore compares meaning with “an electric spark that occurs only when two different terminals are hooked together.” Those who pass over themes in favor of the abstract notion of meaning “want, in effect, to turn on a light bulb after having switched off the current” (MPL, 103). The utterance, then, organizes the interlocutors around a theme, and the interlocutors develop the theme as it spurs them and the dialogue along. Bakhtin’s dialogical rendering of both understanding and meaning invites us to assess reason in a similar fashion. Rather than viewing reason as that which leads to the termination of a dialogue, to consensus, we must view it as the variety of practices or “moves” that keep a dialogical circuit open, that keep dialogue going as an end in itself as well as a means for achieving other possible but more temporary goals— practices that, in other words, maintain the linguistic community as dialogized heteroglossia. Within such dialogues, reason might operate just as legitimately to decompose or reveal destabilizing tensions within ostensively univocal doctrines (to “deconstruct” them) as to establish totalizing concepts or understandings. Contrary to both Lyotard’s and Plato’s view, then, dialogue is not just a means to truth; rather, truth, or the search for truth, is one means among others for the continuation of a dialogue.25 Bakhtin’s emphasis upon the primacy of dialogue is supported by our common experience: we always find ourselves in communication with others, even if the other person happens to be ourself in that “internal dialogue” called thinking or self-awareness. Moreover, Bakhtin’s insistence on the primacy of dialogue suggests that subjects are not, contrary to Lyotard’s view, limited to the role of instances of a phrase; rather, it suggests that subjects are intimately— perhaps “internally”— linked to one another across and despite their more immediate embeddedness within a particular sociolinguistic genre; that is, the struggle among sociolinguistic genres implies that subjects, from the beginning and no matter what the specific differences of their sociolinguistic genres, share the same community, a community of intersecting voices. 2. The Linguistic Community as a “Plurivocal Body ” Going beyond the letter of Bakhtin’s text, this community of voices or dialogized 68

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heteroglossia can perhaps best be described as a “plurivocal body.” Bakhtin’s claim that language is a struggle among sociolinguistic points of view rather than an intralanguage struggle among individual wills suggests that the incorporation of subjects in the linguistic community transforms these subjects into sociolinguistic genres and sociolinguistic genres into a dialogic interplay of Bakhtinian “voices,” that is, into the linguistic and nonlinguistic practices of bourgeoisie and proletariat, women and men, gays and straights, or any of the other sets of practices that are established through the occupancy of different but intersecting positions in the community (MPL, 90). This would reflect the experience of finding ourselves already speaking and acting within a set of practices that determine the trajectory of this activity, including the general parameters of our response to and anticipation of the other “voices” in the linguistic community. Although Bakhtin nowhere endorses this notion of the linguistic community as a plurivocal body, his nontraditional description of our relation to things and words certainly reinforces it. Rather than thinking of things as neutral objects, Bakhtin depicts them as occurring within the arena formed by the interplay of these voices, that is, as “entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents,” and as appearing to us “by the light’ of alien words that have already been spoken about them” (DI, 276). As for these words themselves, they too are never neutral; Bakhtin says that they exist in other people’s mouths, that they are overpopulated with other people’s intentions, and therefore must be tom from these anchorages and accentuated in terms of our discursive patterns, our own voices, if we wish to utter them and thereby maintain or enhance our audibility (DI, 293-294). Bakhtin’s emphasis on the conflicted identity of objects and words suggests two other aspects of the linguistic community as a plurivocal body. The first has to do with the identity of particular subjects and the second with the production of new voices in the community. Because each voice in the linguistic community is an actual or virtual response to and anticipation of all the others— because all the voices resound in one another— each subject articulates (at least virtually) the other possible and actual voices in the linguistic community. Each subject, then, has a plurivocal rather than a univocal identity, even if one of the subject’s sociolinguistic genres or voices is almost always more prominent than the rest. Moreover, this interconnectedness or intercommunicativity of subjects through the interrelationship of the community’s voices explains why we have a “sense” of the structure of the linguistic community as well as the ability to respond appropriately (usually) to our surroundings and each other (in the current jargon, why we are “cognitively competent”).26 In other words, this reconstruction of Bakhtin’s “dialogized heteroglossia” in terms of a plurivocal body provides us with what Lyotard’s “phraseology” did not permit: a cognitive (rather than merely “dialectical”— see above) basis for making claims about the structure of the linguistic community (for example, whether it is an interplay of radically heterogeneous voices, a Lyotardian multiplicity of voices, or voices subordinated to the Kantian oracle of reason).27 The second aspect of the linguistic community as a plurivocal body is more congenial to the spirit of both Lyotard’s and Bakhtin’s views. Bakhtin describes subjects and their intersection with one another as consisting in the “citation” or “accentuation” of elements in each others’ discourses. In citing one 69

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another, each subject raises the saliency of the practices or fragments of the other voices “contained” within its own, depending on which of these other voices is most relevant to the exchanges current in the community at the time. This increase in saliency disrupts the particular hierarchical arrangement of practices (linguistic and nonlinguistic) that constitutes the subject’s “identity” and his or her tendency to articulate one sociolinguistic genre more so than others. In other words, what we refer to as “hearing” brings about some degree of realignment in the set of utterances that make up the hearer’s (primary) voice or background practices. When this realignment is great enough, a new voice is produced. Because all the voices resound in one another, the production of this new voice means that the linguistic community goes through a metamorphosis and a possible increase in the number and kind of new and formerly marginalized voices to which the community is now open. Not only, therefore, is the linguistic community a body in dialogue with itself, but its communication is transformative of itself. The type of “citation” activity that constitutes this self-transformative communication is evident in the syncretism at the heart of most religions, the changes in art as it incorporates new techniques, the policies arrived at through political dialogue, and all the other instances of borrowing that metamorphose the borrower— ultimately in all “hearing,” no matter how hard one might try to plug up one’s ears.28 3. The Plurivocal Body and Nihilism This notion of the plurivocal body also allows us to explore further Bakhtin’s claim that the linguistic community is a struggle between monoglossia and heteroglossia. Once again, Bakhtin’s theoretical notions correspond well with our experience. Both individuals and communities tend to fluctuate between periods of seeking closure and periods of opening themselves up to diversity and experimentation. In either period, however, the historical tendency has been for communities to raise a particular sociolinguistic genre to the level of an oracle, that is, to the status of the voice of God, the true race, the superior gender, the perfect or most “realistic” economy, or any other univocal and nonrevisable dogma. The discourse of this oracle is then increasingly repeated throughout the community, raising the saliency of its practices and slogans within the voices of the other subjects, until it seems to come from everywhere and nowhere. Once the oracle has achieved this degree of universality, once it has become the “master language,” the other voices exist for it only as the contrast it needs to demarcate its identity and to justify its hegemony within the community. The other subjects resist this colonization of their voices but are forced to carry out the contest in terms more suitable to the oracle than to their own practices. New voices continually well up within the linguistic community, but the omnipresence of the community’s oracle limits their “audibility” and attenuates the emergence of new sociolinguistic genres and hence the community’s ongoing metamorphosis. Besides imposing oracles upon a heteroglot array of sociolinguistic genres, monoglossia may also be understood to provide the linguistic community with its diachronic or historical dimension, its “forward movement” toward a totalizing form of unity. In this forward movement, time is linearized, space geometrized, and subjects tend to interpret the “tension of unity and disunity running 70

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through the [genres]” in terms of a choice between the community’s “true unity” or “true plurality” rather than in terms of an irreducible interplay or creative tension among its voices.29 Because of this tendency, philosophical thought has traditionally been guided either by the Idea of a totalizing unity (a la Kant and the Parmenidean direction in Western thought) or the Idea of a multiplicity of incommensurable unities (a la Lyotard and the Heraclitian direction in Western thought). The closest that theoretical thought has come to representing the plurivocal body “prior” to its diachronization is in terms of a diacritical unity of the Saussurian sort— a unity that is established through the differences of its elements from each other (for example, “blue,” “red,” and the other colors of the spectrum are established at least in part by their differences from one another) rather than through a totalizing unity in which the elements of the whole are mediated by or subordinated to one of their members (for example, the State, the ruling class, or Hegel’s “Absolute Spirit”). But even this diacritical unity misses the sense in which the plurivocal body is an interplay of voices, each shot through, virtually or actually, by the others, and replaces the “tension of unity and disunity” running through the voices of the community with a formalized abstraction. Bakhtin says little about the “sources” of monoglossia and heteroglossia. The degree to which heteroglossic languages proliferate beyond our need to cope with our immediate surroundings suggests that such creations are not completely reducible to external causes. On the other hand, one might see monoglossia as the result of society’s need for enough unity to reproduce itself, that is, to provide the necessary government services, consumer goods, and other infrastructural exigencies required for the community’s survival (thus Bakhtin states that monoglossia “develop[s] in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization”— see above). Although reproduction, as well as the fortunes of class struggle, are undoubtedly part of the explanation for monoglossia, they do not seem to be sufficient by themselves. They do not explain the “irrationality” in history— the persistence of class- structured societies, the hatred and cynicism in regard to democracy, and the practices of genocide and “ethnic cleansing.” In order to account for this “irrationality,” we have to recall that dialogized heteroglossia consists in the members of the community hearing one another, that is, in the accentuation of each others’ discursive practices. While this interplay among voices is the principle by which the community produces new voices and diversifies the exchanges among its members, it also carries with it the threat that the members of the community might be overwhelmed by the many voices resounding in their own, by the very plurivocity that makes up their identity, and that the community itself might be transformed into the Babel of biblical lore. When this threat is exacerbated by challenges to identities that have become fetishized (due to the more immediate reasons of class struggle and custom as well as the deeper-lying reasons connected with the fear of Babel), the community converts the interplay of voices into the hegemony of oracles and the politics of exclusion. The community transforms the very principle of its life— the interplay and proliferation of voices— into the enemy of its life. These considerations suggest that the ultimate reason for the production of oracles in society is a “primordial anxiety” concerning the possibility of chaos. 71

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Even in periods otherwise relatively free of this anxiety, monoglossia persists in the codes or sociolinguistic genres that arose historically from this fear and that now guide our thinking and other cognitive activities, including our politics, and vicariously marginalize the practices that affirm and intensify the interplay and proliferation of voices in the linguistic community. In other words, the tradition of oracles and monoglossia is ultimately a form of what Nietzsche called “nihilism,” an expression of “ressentiment” against the conditions of our existence, against the interplay of voices that is at once both the life of the linguistic community— its plurivocal body— and that which threatens the community. This nihilism is therefore the final source of the production of oracles and of the conversion of “the tension of unity and disunity running through the genres of archipelago (through the voices of the linguistic community)” into the continual oscillation between Parmenidean unity and Heraclitian flux (between Kant’s Idea of unity and Lyotard’s Idea of multiplicity) in Western philosophy. In their emphasis upon radical heterogeneity, Lyotard’s “archipelago of genres” and Bakhtin’s “dialogized heteroglossia” are affirmations of the plurivocal body. But even they are attenuated by the tendency toward monoglossia. Lyotard’s differend accents the separateness or incommensurability of genres, thereby converting dialogized heteroglossia into “serialized heteroglossia” (a plurality of hermetically sealed voices, bridged at most by an abstract set of contractually based rights) and depriving us of a basis both for acknowledging the structure of the linguistic community as an interplay of voices and for championing a politics— a notion of justice— that affirms the interplay of voices rather than merely announcing their irreconcilable differences. Bakhtin’s emphasis on dialogue provides us with a basis both for accenting the interplay of voices and for a hermeneutical knowledge of the structure of the linguistic community. But even here the dominant codes of monoglossic thought leave Bakhtin oscillating between an emphasis upon autonomous forces of language (monoglossia and heteroglossia) and a focus on subjects in dialogue; they prevent him from articulating what his thoughts otherwise suggest, that the linguistic community is a plurivocal body, each voice echoing in all the others. 4. Dialogized Heteroglossia and Justice in the Linguistic Community Once we realize that the linguistic community is a plurivocal body and that the more extreme forms of monoglossia, of oracularization (in either its totalizing or pluralizing— serialized heteroglossia— form), are mere reactions to an only partially justified fear of intersecting voices, then a politics based on dialogized heteroglossia, to keep Bakhtin’s term, is possible. This politics seeks to realize a notion of justice that is guided by the political Idea of an “interplay of equally audible voices” rather than by the political Idea of unity a la Kant or the political Idea of multiplicity a la Lyotard. Although this equal audibility is an impossibility in real time— the voices would “drown each other out” if they all sounded at once— the Idea is founded on our knowledge of the linguistic community as a plurivocal body, an active tendency of that body (as opposed to the partially reactive or nihilistic nature of monoglossia), and can be approximated through practices that increase the audibility of voices in the community. In order to approximate the equal audibility of the voices in the linguistic 72

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community, we must lend ourselves to those critical and affirmative tendencies that promote the increased audibility of the voices in the community. The critical tendencies in the community (“critique”) consist in identifying the voices to which particular discursive practices belong, the dialogues of which they are a part, and whether they are supportive of monoglossia or dialogized heteroglossia—just as we have done, for instance, with Kant’s totalizing voice of reason and Lyotard’s notions of the “archipelago of genres” and the “differend.” To the degree that the critique of monoglossia frees other voices from the marginalization they have undergone and decreases the tendency to fetishize univocal identity, it serves as a practice that promotes the equal audibility of voices and hence the creation of new voices and the metamorphosis of the linguistic community. Clearly, however, this positive effect of critique must be augmented by the personal, institutional, and economic practices that also promote the interplay and proliferation of voices— of practices that in their very nature affirm the interplay and equal audibility of the voices in the community. Of these affirmative practices, some of the most important are those that have traditionally been associated with Marxism. Whereas Lyotard’s differend only ensures the incommensurability of the proletariat’s identification of “labor power” with “our essence” and liberal society’s equation of labor power with a “marketable commodity,” Bakhtin appears to view Marxist dialectics as an important “moment” in the dialogical interplay of the community.30 In a cryptic comment on dialectics, Bakhtin states that “ [dialectics was born of dialogue so as to return again to dialogue on a higher level (a dialogue of personalities) ” (SG, 162). By “personalities” Bakhtin does not mean individual consciousnesses but, as we have seen, subjects as instances of the sociolinguistic genres or voices involved in dialogized heteroglossia. In saying that “dialectics was born of dialogue,” therefore, Bakhtin appears to mean that class struggle is but one of the major dialogized conflicts (gender and race are others) at the center of the larger struggle between monoglossia and heteroglossia. Because the Marxist dialectic represents the triumph of a voice that has been marginalized and the effort to overthrow the centralizing ideology of capitalism, it also serves the broader ideal of dialogized heteroglossia, of an inclusive dialogism, and so “returns to dialogue.” This return is to a “higher level of dialogue,” however, because now the dialogue includes the no longer marginalized voice of the proletariat or, better, of the multivoiced group referred to as the proletariat. On the other hand, to the degree that the Marxist dialectic would institute a single voice or discourse, to the degree that it would limit the significant voices to those that represent class at the expense of those that represent race, gender, or lifestyle, to the degree that it would restrict our view of human nature to only its productive capacities and define nature solely in terms of those of its dimensions that we can master, to the degree, that is, that it achieves a totalizing effacement of difference and dictates a strict identity, Bakhtin’s dialogized heteroglossia presents itself as a challenge to Marxism. But in playing such a role, Bakhtin’s notion of dialogized heteroglossia— and our concept of the plurivocal body— would only be returning Marxism to what Marx, and his emphasis upon a “real life” that transcends and is served by communism,31 presumably intended all along. In general, the affirmation of the plurivocal community would promote democratization rather than class control of the means of production and communication (including the design and implementation of technologies).32 73

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Dialogized heteroglossia’s affirmation of itself also entails that the policymaking or “unifying” voice of the community must be willing to “hear” the other voices of the community and thereby increase its own vulnerability to revision and even replacement by other sociolinguistic genres in the community; that is, it must open itself to the heterogenic pressures surrounding it and surfacing with it in the diachronic movement that accompanies the reproduction of the community. But this affirmation of the interplay of voices does not fall prey to the pernicious form of relativism that haunts Lyotard’s notion of the differend, to the “multiplicity of justices,” any more than it does to the arbitrary prescription that was the final basis of Lyotard’s “justice of multiplicity.” Rather, the self-affirmation of dialogized heteroglossia, by that very affirmation, rules out as policy-making voices those discourses that work to suppress the interplay of voices. Racist, sexist, classist, and homophobic discourses, for example, place severe limits on the types of exchanges or hearing that can lead to the revision and possible transformation of one’s own position and the enrichment of the dialogical community. Although our own discourses carry within themselves their replies to these nihilistic positions— already “hear” or “cite” them— we are curtailed by our role in dialogized heteroglossia’s affirmation of itself from allowing these positions to formulate policy for the dialogical community, for a community whose Idea of justice is the interplay of equally audible voices. The self-affirmation of dialogized heteroglossia also implies that we, who have articulated dialogized heteroglossia in terms of the plurivocal body, must recognize that this articulation is always limited by the particular genre in which it is put forth and the particular historical dialogue in which it takes place— that it, and its maxim of justice, the interplay of equally audible voices, is a particular hermeneutical rendering of our tacit knowledge of the linguistic community. We must therefore be willing to revise and perhaps even to give up our own specific notion of “dialogized heteroglossia,” that is, our own voice. Because our voice is a particular hermeneutical reading of the plurivocal community, however, its transformation would occur in the name of its birthplace and hence in the name of the Idea of the interplay of equally audible voices. In this way, the notion of dialogized heteroglossia permits us to affirm a version of the dialogical community while still recognizing, in a partial return to Lyotard, that such affirmation can occur only within the constraints of a particular sociolinguistic genre. Once we accept this hermeneutical version of radical heterogeneity, dialogized heteroglossia, the task of critical thought must then be to undermine the oracles that come up against or even in the name of heterogeneity; that is, to identify and undermine the monoglossic tendency within the linguistic community. But this negative task, similar to Lyotard’s call for philosophy to “witness the differend” or to respect the incommensurability among genres, is in its Bakhtinian version the articulation, indeed, the performance, of the linguistic community’s self-affirmation of what it is, of what its interlocutors have always known it to be, even feared it to be: a creative interplay of voices. With this affirmation by the plurivocal body of itself, the regulative Idea of justice for the community can only be a continual call for a return to what is never fully presentable or achievable, dialogized heteroglossia’s maximum, the interplay of equally audible voices. 74

Chapter 4

LYOTARD, LEVINAS, AND THE PHRASING OF THE ETHICAL James Hatley

Introduction: Ethics Beyond the Subject Part and parcel of postmodern critiques of European humanism is that the field of ethics is inevitably reactionary, a recursion to a prepolitical mode of thought in a world that is constituted through and through politically. The postmodern critic has been particularly suspicious of ethics insofar as it is used to defend a notion of human beings as unified, autonomous “subjects.” Such a formulation is thought to be committed to arguing for an interior and individuated self characterized as a source of responsibility existing prior to and independent of the plays of persuasion and power comprising political life. One reserves for the self the possibility of its uncovering in itself a standard by which the self’s actions are to be justified. Given this account of ethics, it is not surprising that many postmodern thinkers treat the raising of ethics qua ethics as a diversionary tactic, an attempt to substitute a bourgeois obsession for an illusion of self-justification (promised in the recursion to the extrapolitical domain of one’s own subjectivity) for the more pressing matter of being confronted by the diversity of voices and idioms that constitute political life and in one manner or another discover and channel political power. One must be willing to acknowledge that the operation of power constitutes, in the words of Sandra Bartky, “the very subjectivity of the subject.” 1 Only because of the play of power can “certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals.”2 But instead of condemning ethics out of hand, one might also claim paradoxically that for the postmodern condition a la Lyotard and others, an ethics of the subject is only the pretence of an ethics and constitutes the repression of a more radical and uncanny notion of obligation. For Lyotard, underneath an obligation derived from the nature of one’s subjectivity lies one’s prior involvement in and dependence upon the political means by which one’s subjectivity and one’s experience of the world comes to be constituted in the first place. This involvement in a political “we” beyond oneself has already obligated one before one could claim to be an individuated subject. Thus one is no longer free to ignore the fragility and historicality of his or her constituted identity in order to remain indifferent to the very manner in which such an 75

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identity was given. Further, one is obliged to respond to those other narratives constituting other identities and to the claims they might make for a more just as well as a more playful or anarchical participation in the complex adjudications of power constituting political discourse. Thus, “we [the political community] are questioned about what we ought to become and what we ought to do to become it.”3 Lyotard notes that the introduction of the ought into the discourse by which a community adjudicates the various claims made in the diverse phrasings and genres characterizing the political allows the community “the will to refuse to do this, to prefer to do that, to hesitate” (Per, 35). In this hesitation is given the resistance of the community to a blind and arbitrary necessity, in which the community would simply determine the course of its actions by a reactive submitting to the most powerful and therefore, the most necessary political forces. With the introduction of obligation into political discourse, an alternative to what would have been necessary is given. Lyotard’s derivation of a political notion of ethical obligation, particularly as it occurs in his The Differend,4 is in turn obligated to a Levinasian rethinking or “rephrasing” of traditional notions of ethics. But for Levinas, the very subjectivity of the subject remains crucial in that rethinking. In Levinas, one encounters a postmodern critique of ethics that rejects the subject as being autonomous but still insists the subject is “singular” and “unique.” For Levinas, the ethical subject is articulated as an interiority that is without identity and always already exposed to the other. In Levinas’s words: “My very uniqueness lies in my responsibility for the other; nobody can relieve me of this, just as nobody can replace me at the moment of my death.”5 Levinas’s approach implies that only through a reconsideration of subjectivity can ethical obligation be given any significance. Yet what subjectivity amounts to is itself the subject of a radical critique. This essay traces out Lyotard’s own derivation of the ethical via his critique of subjectivity, particularly as this occurs in The Differend. In the last section, the analysis then shifts to how Lyotard’s “phrasing” of the ethical ignores the implications of Levinas’s claim that the ethical subject is incarnated as a restlessness for the other, a sincerity, whose articulation is not unlike what Lyotard reserves for the sublime and the political. In the Levinasian response to Lyotard, incarnate subjectivity provides the possibility for two levels of ethics: political and prepolitical. Yet in arguing for the prepolitical significance of ethics, a level that is characterized by intimacy and proximity, Levinas is still sympathetic to Lyotard’s own reservations about an ethics based upon the autonomy of the subject.

I. Lyotard’s Ethics of Victimization: The Differend The hesitation Lyotard speaks of, in which the politically necessary is questioned by the ethically obligatory, is not that hesitation that occurs as an autonomous subject, secure in his or her own freedom, expresses that freedom as the giving of a law to itself by itself that commands its own self-consistency. Rather, the hesitation comes about as the subject confronts the heterogenous structure of speaking, or better, of phrasing, in which the others who address 76

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oneself cannot be confidently subsumed under any knowable law that one can grasp as one’s own. Absorbed in a phrasing that demands its own law, one faces another phrasing that appears arbitrary, contradictory, and nonconsequential. Put in Lyotard’s words, one encounters a differend in which a conflict between two phrasings, two institutings of self, is rendered before a tribunal “in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not [and in principle cannot be] signified in that idiom” (D, 9). Thus the anxiety fueling Lyotard’s ethical hesitation is not that one might act in contradiction to one’s own self, but that precisely in speaking for one’s own self-consistency, one victimizes another whose phrasing of the good was not anticipated by one’s own phrasing. As David Carroll has pointed out: Lyotard argues that totalitarianism is precisely any principle or system that prevents victims . . . from testifying to the injustice they have experienced, and from testifying to it in their own idiom, which may not be, or most likely is not admissible according to the regulations used to determine historical reality or truth.6

In speaking of the victim, Lyotard is most interested in his or her rhetorical situation. For Lyotard, the decisive aspect of victimization is not that some person suffers a bodily or psychic harm, but that in so suffering he or she becomes deprived of the means to present the harm in the ongoing phrasing that constitutes the adjudication of political claims. Thus not only is harm suffered, but the ability to express that harm is also repressed. Victimization consists in being silenced in such a manner that even to speak of the silence meaningfully is itself not allowed. Thus the victim is caught in a maddening paradox: the more she or he is victimized, the greater is her or his inability to be judged a victim. How then can the victim ever be acknowledged? For Lyotard, this dilemma is resolved only by pointing out that it is without resolution, that it submits one to a silence that cannot be phrased. But accompanying this silence is a “feeling of pain” that summons those who use language “to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them” (D, 13). One must learn to phrase, to present the world, in a manner that was unanticipated and that puts into question the stability of one’s own sense of reference, of meaning, of justice. Subjected to the pain of what remains repressed, buried in a silence that cannot be stilled, those who speak no longer experience themselves as integrated subjects seeking to use language in order “to augment to their profit the quantity of information communicable through existing idioms” (D, 13). The emphasis upon language as a tool for communicating one’s thoughts, one’s interiority, is displaced by the suspicion one feels when one acknowledges the initial instability and incompleteness of the phrasing of any idiom. In the feeling of pain that is silence, one is insistently submitted to how “what remains to be phrased exceeds what [one] can presently phrase.” As a result, one “must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist” (D, 13). Because of the inability of one’s own idiom to present the harm of the other, one is in principle already a victimizer and so already responsible for instituting “new addressees, new addressors, new significations and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff 77

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[who, of course, is not yet even acknowledged as a plaintiff] to cease being a victim” (D, 13).

II. Feeling as Resistance Lyotard’s introduction of feeling as an initial mode of resistance, as a hesitation, allows that which cannot be spoken, the silence of the other’s victimization, to remain an issue for any phrasing that presents the necessity of its own version of the world. But what relationship does such a feeling have to those who feel it? This question is particularly important, since Lyotard’s initial position has been that any subject that arises in the development of one’s phrasing the world is an outcome of that phrasing. There is no subject prior to the political. Who, then, feels this feeling of pain in which the very capability of the political to adjudicate is put into question? The self that is the outcome of that adjudication could hardly be there where the adjudication has not yet begun. Lyotard plays with the idea in Peregrinations of an “it is felt that. . . ” in which an imagining “that is attached to no identity” makes “one cloud (or idiom) be ‘affected’ by another.” Such an “it is felt that. . . ” would be involved in an undirected, aesthetic imagining, an imagining that precedes the autonomous gesture of Kant’s “I think” and in which “what is at stake is the multiplication of the ways of gathering data in order to present new forms and enjoy them” (Per; 34). While the aesthetic feeling unleashed by the imagination is insufficient to account for the pain one feels in the victimization of the other, it establishes the priority of feeling over one’s own subjective identity. Feeling is that epiphenomenon that resists the ineluctable thematization of the world that is involved in diverse idioms. It speaks as an inability to speak, as a silence that cannot be thoroughly penetrated, in which the very notion of penetration has already gone astray. But even as it resists one’s phrasing of the world, imaginative feeling by itself is not sufficient to secure that ethical hesitation that would search out an idiom by which the victim might be allowed to speak. A purely imaginative feeling, insofar as it is guided by its “taste,” is too immersed in the affections. Taken alone, imaginative feeling allows for a consensus, a community, that “is in no way argumentative but is rather allusive and elusive” (Per, 38). Imaginative feeling, even if it precedes the subject, provides only the formal ghost of a consensus, a cloud of community, that is without sufficient appreciation for the pain its individuals might suffer in order to achieve that consensus. On the contrary, Lyotard argues in Peregrinations for an ethical feeling that is also presubjective. Such a feeling, in contradistinction to the aesthetic imagination’s preoccupation with pure pleasure, “deprives one of one’s own self-satisfaction” (Per, 36). Via Kant, Lyotard speaks of this feeling as one of Achtung or respect. It is characterized as a: “coercion, ‘ein Zwang,’ which brings suffering along with it in that it has no consideration for self-love, kindness toward the self, self-satisfaction or arrogance, and which thus does away with the presumptuousness of the self” (Per, 36). Lyotard points out that the shortcoming of aesthetic feeling is that it is oblivious to passions. But any individual subject is caught up in needs, expectations, values, motivations, and the like. Indeed, precisely to become a subject is to become open to that play of desire that seeks its own self-coincidence. 78

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Precisely this desire for self-coincidence needs to be resisted if the situation prior to one’s own subjectivity is to become important for one’s thinking. But even as ethical feeling resists the play of self-coincidence instituted within the empirical subject caught up in the passions of his or her existence, it too is insufficient to institute a community. To understand the reasons for this claim, one needs to consider how Achtung is a feeling that is apathetic and so, by its very articulation, paralyzes rather than empowers one’s judgment. Lyotard develops the implications of this paralysis as he considers the Levinasian account of obligation in The Differend. In Lyotard’s rephrasing of Levinas, obligation is that “event of feeling” transcending an act of cognition, in which the ego encounters an “other . . . from which the ego does not proceed” and which “befalls the ego” (D, 110). In submitting to that which does not proceed from itself, the ego finds itself receiving an absolute command to obey a law that cannot be experienced nor deduced but nevertheless obligates. As Lyotard puts it, “ethical obligation is the scandal of an I displaced onto the you instance” (D, 110), in which the you instance transcends the ego and so dispossesses the ego of itself. Precisely the movement of dispossession is what characterizes the apathetic nature of ethical pathos and results in the ego undergoing its obligation. Any attempt to make sense of this obligation, to phrase it again once one has received it, requires that the ego attempt to “understand what dispossesses it” (D, 110), i.e., to repossess as a subject in its own interiority what dispossessed it. To do this is to replace the other who commands one’s respect with one’s interpretation of her or him and so to undermine the very difference that one’s respect implies! Unlike the more typically Kantian interpretation of respect, Lyotard proceeds by way of Levinas to argue for the alterity rather than the autonomy of the other. The law to which one submits in ethical obligation is not a command for self consistency but a warning against violating what is inconsistent with oneself. Thus any attempt to make sense of the ethical inevitably leads to injustice, where one victimizes the other in the name of one’s own interiority, an interiority that is articulated as an interpretation of the other. Convinced of one’s own goodness, one ends up harming the other for his or her own good. For this reason, Lyotard argues that the feeling of respect is an impasse, obligated infinitely but incapable of understanding the content of that obligation. On the other hand, Lyotard argues that in the Kantian notion of the sublime one finds an “enthusiastic pathos” (D, 167), characterizable as a painful joy. Sublime feeling signals the entry of suffering into aesthetic feeling and so offers an alternative to the account of imaginative feeling offered earlier. In the “strange aesthetics” of the sublime, “what supports aesthetic feeling is no longer the free synthesis of forms by the imagination . . . but the failure to synthesize” (Per, 41). But this failure does not lead to the same sort of impasse as that found in ethical feeling. Instead, in sublime feeling one is confronted with a negative presentation of a guiding thread, what Lyotard terms “the infinity of the Idea,” within “the formlessness of such and such a situation.” Such an idea leaves one suspicious of any specific phrasing of justice and so committed to “detecting differends and in finding the (impossible) idiom for phrasing them” (D, 142). For example, the details of the French Revolution are filled with every sort 79

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of ethical outrage— murders, tortures, deceptions, betrayals— but in spite of these ethical outrages, which remain objectionable all the same, the onlooker finds him or herself enthused about the Idea of human freedom guiding the revolution. This enthusiasm is not a mindless approval but a myopic groping toward the significance of an event whose idiom is yet to be justly articulated. In the very event of the French Revolution, the understanding of who the victim really is and what he might have to say for him or herself has challenged those idioms of monarchy and unanimity that had characterized the phrasing of justice in Europe until that time. In this enthusiasm is uncovered an historical sign that “humankind is in progress toward the better” (D, 164). But the notion of progress is not to be determined by the measure of an increasing consensus characterizing political institutions but by an increasing dissensus. The infinity of the idea does not make itself felt in history as a positive accomplishment but as the articulating of the lesser evil. Thus, insofar as we become more suspicious, more uncomfortable about how we institute political justice, we are also more enthused, more inspired by the Idea’s infinity. Finding oneself in “dissensus,” one experiences one’s community as “a kind of agitation in place, one within the impasse of incommensurability” (D, 167) such that one “would have developed an ear so attuned to the Idea (which is nonetheless unpresentable) that [one] would feel its tension on the occasion of the most apparently impertinent facts” (D, 180). For Lyotard, sublime feeling leads inevitably to an ongoing and in principle interminable deliberation over the manner in which the phrasing of language is to proceed. Only in such a deliberation can the incommensurability between the various addressors of language and the worlds they narrate be honored. Only within the deliberative genre, a genre that is a “concatenation of genres” and so always in a hesitation as to which genre one should speak, can room be made in history for that ethical question/hesitation— What ought we to be? In David Carroll’s words, sublime feeling calls upon one “to present the unpresentable, to surpass what is possible for something else, to strive continually toward a justice that can never be guaranteed” (RP, 81).

III. A Levinasian Response: Incarnated Subjectivity and Restless Sincerity In Lyotard’s account of feeling and how it inevitably leads to a sublime hesitation, emphasis has been put upon how feeling, an “it is felt that. . . precedes the establishing of one’s own subjectivity, one’s own interiority. For Lyotard, feelings (at least one class of them) are given in the rhetorical situation, in discourse itself— or rather in the painful silences by which a given phrasing is exceeded in the possibilities it suggests and is troubled by the possibilities it has denied. Coming before the institution of the self, such feelings induce a hesitation in the cognitive activities that comprise any given person’s appropriation of the world for his or her own purposes. Before one’s own purposes there is a feeling, that is, there is an opening for a deliberation over purposes, over the teleological net by which a set of phrasings draws itself into consistency, into a self-predication. But even as Lyotard’s feelings precede the self, they also precede the body. 80

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For Lyotard, the body can be nothing other than another narrative, another appropriation of self that comes in the wake of one’s phrasing and is dependent upon that phrasing for its referentiality and its self-presentation. Lyotardian feelings are thus not only desubjectivized, they are also disembodied. The body cannot be given any sense until after one has given it a place within a narration. Lyotard argues in The Differend: The body “proper” is a name from the family of idiolects. It is further, the referent of sentences obeying diverse regimes. I’ve got a toothache: this is a descriptive, along with a co-presented demand: Get rid of it for me. The dentist makes of your pain a case which verifies a cognitive sentence. ( D, 83)

In Lessons in Paganism, Lyotard goes so far as to argue that the pain and death inflicted upon victims in a shelling is best interpreted as “an extra bit of persuasion administered to incredulous addressees by narrators determined to convince.”7 What these passages show is that for Lyotard the body is deictic, i.e., a name that can be pointed out but is otherwise empty of content until one places it within an idiom. Like the subject, the body is an unstable referent, a politically constituted reality, a rhetorical situation. But for Levinas, the body is not simply an object to which one refers, an excuse for yet another narrative. Nor is it, a la Merleau-Ponty, a power to act upon or to grasp the world encompassing it. For Levinas, the body is from the start an “incarnation,” a “sensibility”8 characterized in terms of an excessive passivity in which one finds oneself already “obsessed” by all the others beyond oneself before one could have been oneself as a consciousness of oneself. Levinas terms such an obsession of the self by others a “pain” that is “a pure deficit, an increase of debt in a subject that does not have a hold on itself” (OB, 55). For Levinas, “the subjectivity of the subject is precisely this non-recapture [of itself]” whose “adversity is assembled in corporeality” (OB, 55). In his characterization of the subjectivity of the subject as an incarnation, Levinas counters the Kantian notion that appealing to one’s embodied feelings immediately places one in the mode of merely interpreting the good of the other empathetically in terms of one’s own needs or desires. Paradoxically, the Levinasian body and its affectivity is from the start articulated as a resistance to an empathetic interpretation of the other’s pain in terms of one’s own plight, as if the vulnerability of one’s own body to exploitation could be the key to one’s approach to the other. As Levinas points out, “it is not because I am exploited that my exposure to the other is absolutely passive” (OB, 55). In the place of empathy, Levinas speaks of a “patience” in which “pain penetrates into the very heart of the for oneself” and leaves one “traumatized,” in “a non-repose in oneself, restlessness” (OB, 56). From Levinas’s perspective, empathetic identification attempts to make a comparison where none is possible— insofar as the other suffers, her or his suffering is precisely not one’s own. But in contradistinction to an empathetic identification with the other, one’s suffering of the other’s pain occurs when what becomes painful for oneself is not one’s own pain but that the pain of the other is not one’s own. In this suffering, I do not simply “undergo” the others pain but am plunged into “a surplus of passivity” in which the neighbor’s pain “strikes me [i.e., traumatized subjectivity] before striking me [i.e., conscious subjectivity]” (OB, 88)! 81

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For Levinas, to suffer a pain that is not one’s own leaves one in an unresolvable ambiguity— what one feels is precisely what one cannot feel. In such an undergoing or suffering, one is dispossessed of oneself even as one cannot let go of oneself. As Levinas puts it, one becomes caught up “in one’s skin,” i.e., “one recurs to oneself out of an irrecusable exigency of the other.” This recurrence, “far from thickening and tumefying the soul, oppresses it and contracts it and exposes its very exposedness . . . ” (OB, 109). In Levinas’s discussion of recurrence, one gains a more complete explanation of how one does not grasp oneself as one’s own but undergoes oneself as an obsession, i.e., as an “incarnated passivity,” whose identity is articulated in its “impossibility of evading the assignation of the other without blame” (OB, 109). For Levinas, the dispossession invoked in such a responsibility is so extreme that even when the pain of the other involves he or she who is one’s persecutor, one’s response to the other’s pain is not for oneself but for the other.9 Thus even the persecutor’s face, filled with hatred, becomes, in one’s obsession for it, “something pitiful,” i.e., a hatred for which one takes responsibility and against which one mounts a resistance that is not a power fighting another power but a revealing of the other to the other as vulnerable too, as embodied too (OB, 111). In his characterization of incarnated subjectivity, Levinas implicitly puts into question Lyotard’s dependency upon the deictic, upon being able to point, as the method by which all the others, the “referents” (in Lyotard’s terminology), are registered prior to a phrasing. For Levinas, the passivity of the body that suffers, i.e., the body that undergoes and is disrupted by the other, means that it eludes a priori any active pointing-out in which the suffering body would seek first to identify itself and so to control its own location, its own referentiality. Before the hands of this body could point either to itself or to anyone else, it has already found its hands opened in an offering to the other (OB, 56, 72). Precisely this sense of an incarnated suffering for the other is missing from Lyotard’s analysis of feeling. Lyotard, in translating Levinas’s account of how the other befalls the ego, leaves out the painstaking analyses of the first sections of both Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, in which Levinas insistently argues for a corporeal subjectivity defined as subjectum, a beingsubjected-to that is exterior in its orientation. In arguing for an incarnated subjectivity, Levinas provides a third alternative to the polarized opposition characterized above between postmodernist accounts of subjectivity, in which the self is politically constituted, and those traditionalist accounts in which the self is autonomous and prepolitical. As Fabio Ciromelli has pointed out, Levinas’s notion of subjectivity has in its very “heart” a heterological affection which is “a radical and anarchical reference to the other which in fact constitutes the very inwardness of the subject.”10 Thus, for Levinas, one’s subjectivity is an always-already-having-been-derived from the other— in Levinas’s words, “the other is in me and in the midst of my very identification” (OB, 125). Lyotard’s rather idiosyncratic translation of Levinasian obligation represses that bodily dimension of ethical feeling so essential in Levinas’s own analysis. In doing so, Lyotard’s rendition of Levinas loses that sense of the ethical vocation in which the “law” by which my respect of the other is commanded is only meaningful insofar as “it is rooted in the extreme particularity of my own personal response to transcendence” (ED, 91). The personal or, better, intimate aspect of one’s response to the other is left undeveloped by Lyotard. 82

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In neglecting the intimacy of ethical responsibility, Lyotard also overlooks that dimension of ethical feeling that Levinas terms sincerity, an ethical affectivity that is anything but “apathetic.” Levinas finds that the very impossibility of the ethical command, its resistance to one’s own comprehension, sustains in the subject ua restlessness for the other, a cellular irritability” that cannot be quieted (OB, 143). Rather than leaving the ethical subject paralyzed, in an impasse, sincerity commands the subject to make a “sign” to the other in which the dangers of one’s own preemptory judgment of the other are intimately acknowledged (OB, 143). Only beyond this sign, in which the uniqueness of my relationship with another is acknowledged, can there be any talk of taking up a judgment in relation to the other that is always first a judgment of oneself, i.e., of how one’s attempt to grasp the other through one’s imagination, through one’s empathy, is always open to yet another judgment of how one’s judgment of the other has failed to comprehend the other. “The more just I am, the more guilty I am.”11 Such an insight comes only to that subjectivity who, in returning to his or her self, finds that return a divesting of self. Thus one’s sincerity reveals that one is oneself as a conscience, i.e., as an insistent posing for oneself the impossibility of one’s judgment’s being an adequate response to the other.12 From Levinas’s viewpoint, political discourse is not separable from ethical discourse but presupposes it. Without ethical feeling, without the sincerity of one’s conscience, without the intimate nature of one’s ethical obligation to the other, the discourse by which political judgments proceed would remain too arbitrary and too impersonal. While Lyotard would not disagree that ethical feeling is a necessary supplement to political enthusiasm, his insistent deconstruction of subjectivity via the agonistic play of idioms in conjunction with the resulting emphasis upon a deliberative judgment characterized as the public litigation of idioms, leaves the issue of a subjective deliberation, what Levinas calls apology, insufficiently developed. Thus a more thorough discussion of ethical conscience, i.e., of the intimate and incarnate dimensions of one’s singular responsibility to the other, is needed. For instance, Levinas would resist thinking the issue of victimization simply in terms of a repression of the victim’s political voice or phrasings through institutional violence. As the discussion above of Levinas’s analysis of the relationship between persecutor and persecuted indicates, the other’s face contorted in hatred calls the persecuted to a unique and embodied responsibility for the persecutor. The scene of persecution is not one in which the persecuted is given permission to forget her or his particular and in some sense extrapolitical relation with the perpetrator, the violator. Further, insofar as one might find oneself in the role of the persecutor, one needs to consider how the possibility of one’s victimizing the other involves the denial not only of the other’s political voice but also of the other’s intimate and traumatic claim upon one’s body. For Levinas this latter denial, in which one lies to oneself in order to forget the priority of the other in the articulation of one’s own subjectivity, is the essential gesture of the totalitarian consciousness. For this reason, Levinas has spoken of national socialism as a “ruse of innocence.” 13 Only insofar as one’s subjectivity remains essential to describing one’s ethical relation to the other can the struggle of subjectivity to be sincere, i.e., to be true to its own obsession with the other, remain in focus. 83

Chapter 5

LYOTARD, GADAMER, AND THE RELATION RETWEEN ETHICS AND AESTHETICS Gary E. Aylesworth

I. Ethics and Aesthetics in Kant Recent debates over the relation of ethics to aesthetics refer (at least tacitly) to Kant’s separation of nature, art, and morality, and to the corresponding separation between the faculties of understanding, judgment, and reason. In the subsequent history of philosophy, each faculty has found champions who assert and defend its priority. For the present discussion, the question is whether practical reason or aesthetic judgment, or, correspondingly, morality or art, should be considered most fundamental. Kant himself asserts that “An interest can be ascribed to every faculty of mind,” and “every interest is ultimately practical.” 1 But historically, others have found in Kant reasons for preferring the aesthetic. Among contemporary philosophers, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jean-Frangois Lyotard both represent this line of thought, their many differences notwithstanding. For his part, Gadamer resists Kant’s notion of practical reason as a power of thought that is heterogeneous with the world of appearance. For Kant, practical reason is free and autonomous in two senses. First, as will, it is autonomous in legislating the moral law for itself. Second, in subjecting itself to the moral law, the will acts freely because the law neither has nor requires a justifying ground (WAK, V, 47). Moreover, while freely (unconditionally) acknowledging the bindingness of the law for itself, reason imposes lawfulness upon sensuous appearances, which are otherwise without meaning and value. The law, says Kant, “gives the sensible world . . . the form of an intelligible world,” or “the form of a supersensuous [einer iibersinnlichen] nature,” while leaving the mechanism of nature— its empirical conditions— intact ( WAK, V, 43). Reason is autonomous insofar as it remains uncontaminated by the sensuous, and that means it must hold itself apart, in its groundless fidelity to the law, while making itself a determining ground (a cause) for appearances. But Gadamer, following Hegel, insists that thought— including practical reason— is always bound up with appearances: to be fulfilled, it must not hold itself aloof but must present itself in the sensuous. Kant’s treatment of beauty in the Critique of Judgment, as a harmonious play of understanding and imagination, is therefore a more truthful exploration of this relationship, except that under84

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standing is a faculty limited to determining nature as a mechanism and is not, as such, relevant to ethics. Gadamer, on the other hand, takes ethics to be a matter of freely identifying with another person, and this can only take place through an aesthetic formation (based upon the experience of beauty), where thought and intuition are coparticipants. Freedom, in the aesthetic sense, means a spontaneous formation or intuition without a law, a power Kant recognizes as productive imagination. When it operates freely and in harmony with understanding, this power becomes artistic genius ( WAR, V, 316-317). In this respect Gadamer models ethics after art, which finds fulfillment not in legislation of or unconditioned subordination to a law, but in free presentation. Lyotard, on the other hand, stresses Kant’s remarks about reason as a faculty of Ideas. Freedom, for example, is an idea: it finds no fulfillment in intuitive presentation but is a necessary condition of the moral law, its ratio essendi ( WAR, V, 4). Freedom is always present to thought as the speculative ground of the law, i.e., the possibility of an unconditioned cause. Nevertheless, reason calls upon us to act freely in the realm of appearances, where nature otherwise acts only with causal necessity. To act freely requires the negation of all natural (mechanistic) inclinations, and this negation is “felt” as respect for the law. Respect is a sensuous feeling, but “not of an empirical origin” ( WAR, V, 74). It indicates a nonsensuous, heteronomous ground for action in the world of appearances and is the only feeling that is truly moral. Lyotard, however, stresses receptivity to Ideas of reason as a kind of suffering or undergoing on the part of imagination rather than the disposition to act. In this case, feeling is aesthetic because it arises when the imagination is overtaxed by Ideas that are more powerful than anything sensibility can present. Such is Kant’s description of the sublime. This feeling occurs when we are confronted by an overwhelming event or object in nature, where imagination is stretched beyond its limits, and the sensuous, in its formlessness, becomes a sign for our own “higher” calling. A feeling of displeasure arises from the failure of imagination to present an Idea adequately (such as absolute magnitude), but also a feeling of pleasure because it signifies our “supersensuous vocation”— to obey a law unconditionally ( WAR, V, 256). Thus the sublime always involves a moral Idea, as something absolute signified by a sensuous phenomenon. But Lyotard’s connection between the sublime and the ethical is not the same as Kant’s. Following Emmanuel Levinas, Lyotard characterizes the ethical as an exposure to a claim of an “other,” who is absolutely other and never identical to us. Therefore receptivity is more fundamental for ethics than the disposition to act. Moreover, the claim of the other is a command, or an “ought,” and so is heterogeneous with the world of sense— the “is.” Since the command is absolute, and since it cannot be fulfilled by sensibility, it has a status akin to that of a Kantian Idea. But unlike Kant, Lyotard suggests that we can be affected by the other through certain types of art, i.e., “formless” or avant-garde art, as well as through events in the world. This feeling is a sensuous receptivity to something “supersensuous,” it is sublime. Thus for Lyotard the sublime, and not respect, is the feeling associated with the ethical understood in a Levinasian sense. Gadamer and Lyotard therefore represent different poles of the aesthetic. Where Gadamer relies upon the beautiful as a model for an ethics based upon identity formation, Lyotard relies upon the sublime to suggest an ethics of responsibility to a nonidentical other. However, it would be too simple to suggest 85

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that Lyotard’s emphasis on the sublime is merely the reverse of Gadamer’s focus on the beautiful, as if the two stood in dialectical opposition. Such an opposition would not do justice to the complexity of their views. Nevertheless, for a careful comparison between them, their diverging treatments of Kant’s ethics and aesthetics provide a useful point of departure.

II. Gadamer and the Beautiful Gadamer’s commitment to the aesthetics of beauty, especially as it applies to ethics and politics, is exemplified in his hermeneutical reflections on the ancient Greek word “to k a l o n His most forceful exposition of the Greek notion of beauty is found, perhaps, in the book entitled In Praise of Theory (Lob der Theorie)? Here, he interprets beauty as the “object” of paideia, in the sense of an activity of play that is valued in itself, without reference to utility or external ends (LT, 18). As he states there, the beautiful encompasses nature, art, customs, and practices that are shared and, in being shared, “belong to everyone” (LT, 18). In typical hermeneutical fashion, he thus joins a cluster of meanings together into a totality under the aegis of a single word. In this way he also removes the aesthetics of beauty from its Kantian formulation as a play of subjective faculties, and replaces it with a classical, cosmological model that joins beauty to the experience of a real, historical community. The sense of community at work in Gadamer is, like all of his basic concepts, many-faceted. Its coherence relies on the notion of “identity formation,” in all of its various guises. The best way to read Gadamer, I believe, is to emphasize “formation” just as much as “identity.” Identity is thus not conceived as a complete presence or as a rule to be enforced, but as a task to be achieved spontaneously and imaginatively. Indeed, the activity of formation points directly to the role of the aesthetic and artistic creation in his concept of community. I propose to show that this is the case on many levels, including the ontological, the cosomological, the historical, the linguistic, the artistic, the ethical, and the political. Gadamer’s notion of the beautiful community is arguably modeled after the community of thought and appearance in classical theoriu. As he puts it in Truth and Method: uTheoria is true participation, not something active but something passive (pathos), namely being totally involved in what one sees.”3 While theory as participation is precritical and aesthetic in nature, it does not relinquish its evaluative function. On the contrary, Gadamer characterizes it as the highest fulfillment of our existence, an “increase” (Steigerung) of life (LT, 48-49). It makes possible “a life to which one can say ‘yes’ ” (LT, 50). This sense of fulfillment is not the result of adjudication among competing validity claims, a la Habermas, but a moment of shared presentation or feeling whose “yes” is not open to argumentative dispute. In this respect, the beautiful is related to the highest good. However, as Gadamer relates in Truth and Method, the good itself is purely intellectual (as we see in Plato) and does not appear. The beautiful, on the other hand, has visibility as part of its essential nature, and it reveals itself in the search for the good as the ultimate limit for thought. Beauty, says Gadamer, “is the mark of the good for the human soul” (T&M, 481). That is, the invisible good appears 86

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as the beautiful, for the beautiful sensuously presents the idea, the intelligible, as what ought to be. In this way, the light of appearance (the sun) is brought together with the light of intelligibility (mind, nous), joining sensuous intuition and intelligence in a single moment (T&M, 483). The community of thought and appearance is a joining of the visible and the invisible, where each participates in the other. The beautiful is this process of formation, or presentation, in which the identity of thought and appearance is experienced as the soul’s participation in what it sees. Identity formation, as process and participation, is essentially temporal, and its temporal nature is the ontological basis for Gadamer’s hermeneutical sense of community as it applies to cosmology, language, history, art, and politics. Temporality in this sense is not merely formal but metaphysical: a play in which the rhythms of the soul participate in cycles of the cosmos, and vice versa. Gadamer gives an extensive account of this in the essay entitled “Concerning Empty and Ful-filled Time.”4 Here he speaks of the organic temporality of the Aion, which is “the complete identity of life with itself, which fulfills the Present by the constant virtuality of its possibilities” (EFT 8, 349). The continuity of time is not dependent upon the identity of an ego, but upon the connectedness of life with itself. In this conception, time is a transition, “such that past and future are together” (EFT 8, 350). However, insofar as this movement is living, transition is marked by moments of caesura in which what came before is now “old” and what is present is “new.” The fulfillment of time is not an indifferent flux, but a leave-taking of the past and an opening toward the future. In Gadamer’s view, this is the meaning of ancient cosmology, where constellations become a chronological markers as they orbit above and below the horizon. The disappearance and reappearance of a constellation, says Gadamer, “is a kind of caesura from which a new cycle of celestial movement begins” (EFT 8, 349). This marking of epochs must therefore be included in the vitalist continuity of the cosmos as Aion. The aesthetic nature of time is inseparable from its motion: its transitions are moments of appearance and disappearance. In combination with the cycles of the celestial spheres, the living cosmos is thus conceived as the appearance and reappearance of the same, even in its epochal transitions. This is the meaning of its being as a living organism. Ancient theoria originally means a sense of wonder (thaumazein) at the infinite, self-generating appearances of nature in their sensuous immediacy. Nature is beautiful because the play of appearances presents only itself and renews itself in constant repetition. By practicing theoria, the soul participates in this process and experiences an intensification of life. Clearly, wonder at the self-presentation of nature does not begin as an intuition of the sensuously given, as modem thought would have it, but as participation in a formative process which presents itself. As Gadamer remarks, “By taking sensible givenness as its point of departure, modem thought has gone astray.”5 On Gadamer’s reading, the possibility of turning modern thought back toward ancient theoria is found in Kant. Specifically, it is found in the transformation of Kant’s theory of intuition, from the epistemological treatment in the Critique of Pure Reason to the aesthetic analyses in the Critique of Judgment. Where the First Critique characterizes intuition as the sensuous givenness of an independently existing object, the Third Critique takes intuition to be the work of imagination in its free productivity. The classical notion of beauty as 87

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self-presentation can thus be joined to the Kantian aesthetic of imagination, which is the power to intuit without a concept and therefore without an object. As Gadamer notes, this is also the power of artistic genius, or “the formative process of intuition together with the resulting formed intuition” (RB, 160161). Primary intuition is therefore Dichtung— the formation of a density, an aesthetic intensification, or a spontaneous self-presentation— what the Greeks called poiesis. In this sense, beauty is also truth in the sense of an unquestionable revelation— aletheia. It is not the presentation of an object or validity claim, but an experience (Erfahning), an “encounter with something that validates itself as truth” (Begegnung mit etwas, das sich als Wahrheit geltend macht) (WM, 463; T&M, 489— translation altered, emphasis added). Beauty is self-validating at a precritical level before we can judge it according to normative or conceptual criteria. Nevertheless, it is communicative as a joining together of appearance and its process of formation, a process that is cultural and historical by nature. For Gadamer, the community is aesthetically constituted, via productive imagination as a sensus communis, before there can be any question of justifying validity claims. Art, of course, is a concrete example of the alethic quality of beauty, and of the sensus communis as an active participation in the work. As Gadamer remarks in The Relevance of the Beautiful: “The identity of the work is not guaranteed by any classical or formalist criteria, but is secured by the way in which we take the construction of the work upon ourselves as a task” (RB, 28). The work is not simply an object on display, but the process of formation that produces it and which the object challenges us to repeat. Because this process is a revealing of truth, it is not reducible to a mere techne or method, but remains ontological; we ourselves are involved in the work insofar as we participate in its reconstruction. As Gadamer claims in Truth and Method, the same holds for our understanding of historical texts. Here, too, the task is one of reconstruction and integration (T&M, 164-169), which characterizes hermeneutics in general. However, when the event of truth is considered historically, it cannot be characterized in terms of sensuous presentation. Historically mediated truth is tradition, and, as Gadamer notes: “The mode of being of tradition is, of course, not sensible immediacy” (T&M, 463). The reconstruction of a text from the tradition does not occur as a moment of sensuous presentation so much as an intensification of conscious understanding. In this case the emphasis is more upon nous than aisthesis, or more upon thought than appearance. Thus the transition in Truth and Method from art to historical tradition to language expresses a certain hermeneutical necessity. While maintaining the community of thought and appearance, Gadamer arrives at language as the depth dimension of their identity. Language is not about appearances as such but about meaning, and meaning is never sensuously immediate or visible. It occurs through a mediation in thought, and constitutes a difference that relates thought to itself. The Hegelian nature of this relation is unmistakable, and at this juncture the living Aion of ancient cosmology looks more like spirit (Geist) as conceived by German idealism. However, Gadamer insists with Dilthey (and against Hegel) that the life of 88

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spirit does not culminate in speculative knowledge of the concept but in historical consciousness (T&M, 229). This means that consciousness is never absolute but remains historically finite and human, and that language mediates the relation of thought to itself, such that this relation never attains complete transparency or identity. Language assures that thought’s formation of an identity with itself will remain a task to be completed. Thus (contra Hegel) finite, human spirit can never pass over to infinite, absolute spirit. Insofar as the historicality of thought is limited by the historicality of language, the history of thought remains a tradition (Uberlieferung), a delivering over that can never be surpassed or overcome. As Gadamer declares: “Verbal form and traditionary content cannot be separated in the hermeneutical experience” (T&M, 441). Language is the primary bearer of tradition, e.g., through written texts. However, language also accomplishes a nonsensuous presentation of meaning, where the materiality and sensuousness of language gives way to an “inner” illumination. Even so, this illumination is never complete, because the meaningfulness of language is unpresentable in its totality. Thus hermeneutical experience is the experience of a “finite presentation (Darstellung) of an infinity of meaning,” which is also Gadamer’s definition of a world (T&M, 465; WM, 441). Language which discloses a world is a word (logos, verbum). In this sense, tradition does not occur as a sensuously immediate presence; it “speaks” to us from afar. We do not so much “see” it as “hear” it. In this way the favored modality of sensuous immediacy (the eye) gives way to the inner, spiritual immediacy of the ear. The tradition addresses us, says something to us, but its totality is concealed due to its historical distance. What addresses us is largely unsaid, but precisely this unsaid calls upon us to respond, calling us to a hermeneutical task: to reveal “a totality of meaning in all its relations” (T&M, 471). The spiritual immediacy of the word is a kind of nonsensuous intuition, and we participate in it by repeating the process of its formation. Linguistically mediated thought thus occurs as dialogue. As Gadamer insists, “Language fulfills itself and has its proper fulfillment only in the give and take of speaking, in which one word yields to another.”6 In this sense, historical meaning renews itself in repetition, just as constellations in the world of appearance disappear and reappear on the horizon. As in ancient theoria, the word joins human beings together via participation in the community of thought, which unfolds temporally as a dialogue. This dialogue extends the continuity and selfsameness of meaning from one moment to another, but also sustains the possibility of moving beyond the limitations of a particular interpretation. In this sense, the word brings with it the possibility of its own transition, such that inherited prejudices and blind spots might be overcome internally, without appeal to external critique. For Gadamer, this self-formation and re-formation of the word in dialogue is a model of freedom that he applies as a standard for practice in the social-political sense. This freedom is not the self-determination of a transcendental subject, as in Kant, but the formation of an intuition which, insofar as it is meaningful, is shared in by others. In this sense, Kant’s concept of productive imagination is truly practical and not “merely” aesthetic. It is the basis for any human community as such. Productive imagination is a faculty of concrete, historical 89

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human beings who are capable of understanding one another by participating in the formation of meaning and its presentation. It is not, therefore, a faculty belonging to a subject, but a genuine sensus communis that shapes a common intuition. This free play of imagination is set off against the rule-governed technologies that dominate the late-modern world, where human capacities are shaped into means for domination and control— not only over nature but over society as well.7 On Gadamer’s view, technological mediation is supplanting the hermeneutical, linguistic mediation of the world. The intuitive self-formation of human communities is giving way to an instrumental, adaptive rationality whose imperative is that of functional efficiency for its own sake (RAS, 73). This means a loss of freedom as adaptive rationality is developed at the expense of creativity; as meaning is controlled and efficiently administered rather than intensified in open dialogue. This incursion of technology into the worlddisclosing formations of language presents late modernity with a paradox. The technological globalization of Western culture entails ever more “immediate” encounters with non-Westem and non-European traditions, even as these begin to recede and recoil. Furthermore, the experience of difference and plurality within Western cultures is radically intensifying. The notion of a common tradition or a cultural consensus is put into question by a breakdown of historical continuity and social cohesion, fostered by a sense of incommensurability among alternative disclosures of meaning. In other words, we are living in a moment of caesura, where everything is becoming other than it was. For Gadamer the hermeneutical challenge is twofold: first to resist the incursion of technology into the world-disclosive function of language, and second to provide a genuine dialogue between cultures and individuals. He suggests that the European tradition still offers such possibilities, if we focus on its linguistic plurality as a model for understanding differences among human beings in general.8 In any case, argues Gadamer, the fact that human beings understand language and can learn any particular language already constitutes a common bond and provides a model for overcoming differences of a socialpolitical nature. As he says: “Is there at all an other that is not the other of ourselves? In any case, there is none who is another, who is also a human being” (EE, 29). The passage reflects two important aspects of Gadamer’s application of hermeneutics to social and political issues. First, it shows that he not only considers language from an ontological, world-disclosive standpoint, but also that he emphasizes linguistic understanding as a universal human capacity. It is anthropological as well as ontological. Second, it shows that he considers the crises of late modernity to be a matter of differences among human beings. The sense of otherness associated with these differences is always that of other human beings with whom we are called upon to participate in a dialogue. In addition, Gadamer characterizes modem technology as a practice whose antecedents are the ancient technai, especially those of an “adaptive” nature. Indeed, as he sees it, the crises posed by technology are the result of adaptive practices overwhelming other practices, such as political deliberation and artistic creation. As he remarks: “Here lies the greatest danger under which our civilization stands; the elevation of adaptive qualities to privileged status” (RAS, 73). The hermeneutic model of dialogue is therefore applicable to the 90

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crises of technology: the encroachment of technology into aesthetic and political life is a problem of human identity formation ( “The individual in society who feels dependent and helpless in the face of its technically mediated life forms becomes incapable of establishing an identity,” [RAS, 73]). Since identity formation is the task of hermeneutics in any and all situations, the answer to the crises of technology and our encounters with others is a matter of finding the right word. As Gadamer notes in a late essay, “Uber die Politische Inkompetenz der P h ilo s o p h ie hermeneutic practice is not an ethics in the sense of establishing normative rules.9 In a dialogue, finding the right word is a matter of spontaneity and imaginative freedom. The word never follows from a rule, but validates itself as true, and elicits an intensification of experience rather than a normative judgment. For this reason Gadamer declares hermeneutic philosophy to be “politically incompetent,” since it cannot supply a procedural standard according to which words must conform— as if identity formation were already formally achieved in thought (as in a Kantian Idea of Reason) instead of lying always before us as a task, in thought as well as in action. Mere procedure (contra Habermas) is not enough: the right word occurs as a free intuition, a binding formation that the Greeks honored with the name to kalon, which affirms itself in repetition and response. In a sense, Gadamer refuses what might be called the Kantian gambit of practical reason, where Kant asserts the “higher calling” of thought over appearance. This higher calling is indicative of thought’s autonomy, i.e., its capacity to legislate rules for itself which are not affirmed or limited by intuition. By insisting upon the aesthetic nature of all thought, Gadamer affirms its community with appearances and its inseparability from intuition or imagination. On this view, Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful and the concept of productive imagination hold the key to understanding reason in all of its functions: there is no separating the theoretical, the practical, and the aesthetic. But this also subjects Gadamer’s hermeneutics to certain difficulties. For one, all philosophical concerns are constrained by the notion of communicability, which is an important aspect of identity formation. This means the concept of “otherness” is strictly limited to the human other, who is always a possible partner in dialogue, and is therefore the “same” as we ourselves. Another difficulty stems from the vagueness of Gadamer’s connection between the identity of a word and self-identity, as when he asserts that all understanding of meaning is ultimately self-understanding (T&M, 260). This seems to be at odds with his treatment of meaning as aesthetic play, for he insists that “Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in play” (T&M, 102). Loss of self would seem, then, to be a condition of self-formation, a paradox that Gadamer does not adequately address. Yet another difficulty arises from his association of hermeneutical dialogue with Greek cosmology, for certainly no such cosmology has credence today. The notion that the universe is a living organism and is therefore communicable with human thought certainly plays no role in contemporary science and cannot serve as a model for contemporary theory. This makes Greek theoria a questionable alternative to the technological science of today, no matter how congenial it might be for a revival of praxis. Indeed, one wonders whether Gadamer has missed a difference between the present and the past that 91

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cannot simply be treated as “historical.” The possibility of such a difference is of great interest to Lyotard, and figures crucially in the discussion below.

III. Lyotard and the Sublime In his Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Lyotard carefully traces Kant’s treatment of the sublime as an aesthetic judgment, distinct from the feeling of respect accorded to the moral law.10 In addition, he develops a broader notion of the sublime based upon Kant’s political writings, especially his remarks on public “enthusiasm” for the French Revolution in “The Contest of the Faculties” ( WAR, VII, 85-86). As Lyotard reminds us, the Critique of Judgment states that “enthusiasm is sublime aesthetically,” because it is an unbridling of the imagination that takes us beyond the sensible to supersensible Ideas (WAR, V, 272-275). Because the public display of enthusiasm for the Revolution is contrary to the self-interest of the spectators, argues Kant, it is a sign of progress in the development of the moral faculty. But as a motivating passion, it is ethically condemned, since if it were to affect our disposition to act, our will would not be purely motivated by the law. Thus, for Kant, enthusiasm for the French Revolution may be uplifting as a sign (Begebenheit) of human progress (i.e., moral development), but is condemnable if it becomes a motive for joining the revolutionaries. For Lyotard, the important aspect of the sublime in this context is its association with public and historical events. Indeed, this is the focus of his book L ’Enthousiasme: La Critique kantienne de Vhistoire, where he suggests that certain events in our own time “would induce a new kind of sublime, even more paradoxical than that of enthusiasm.” 11 For Kant, the sublimity of enthusiasm for the French Revolution is awakened by the Idea of a final end for humanity. But the sublimity of our own time is awakened “by the Idea of diverse ends or even by Ideas of heterogeneous ends” (E, 108). In other words, there is a plurality, even a heterogeneity, among laws and rules that might serve as guides to conduct. Furthermore, there is no single event in which this plurality makes itself felt, but there is a plurality of events that become its “signs” : Auschwitz, Budapest 1956, May 1968, etc. What they all seem to have in common, paradoxically, is the negation of the sense of progress written about by Kant. This negation concerns not only the question of progressive development in history but also the concept of a universal subject whose emancipation would be the final end of that development. For Lyotard, the present age exhibits a breakdown of the concepts of “subject” and “final end” that are speculative bases, or Ideas, for Kant’s practical reason. As he has suggested since The Postmodern Condition, the dissolution of such concepts is signaled not only by certain historical events but also by more mundane occurrences, especially those involving computer technology and mediatized communication. These technologies affect sensibility, for we tend more and more to experience the world through their mediation. This means that technological syntheses are replacing or preempting functions that Kant had attributed to the subject, for example, the original grasping of the sensible manifold. Technological mediation undermines this notion of an original act of synthesis, particularly one ini92

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tiated by a transcendental subject. He suggests in Peregrinations that space and time, the forms of sensibility, are less and less “given” in pure intuition, and are more and more the result of calculation, e.g., the electronic media.12 In this respect, the forms of sensibility themselves are dissolving: they are giving way to a calculus of information. To account for this dissolution, Lyotard proposes to model it after certain functions of language: “Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse. And it is fair to say that for the last forty years the leading’ sciences and technologies have had to do with language.”13 There are two aspects of language, in particular, that Lyotard uses to characterize these developments: first, the pragmatic rules or genres according to which saying something is a move in a Wittgensteinian language-game, and second, what he calls “phrases”— irreducible, indefinable, linguistic gestures that destabilize all preestablished rules and leave open the question as to which game is being played. The former are of primary interest in earlier writings such as The Postmodern Condition and Just Gaming, while the latter are the focus of The Differend. By focusing on these aspects of language, which are, as it were, “surface” phenomena, Lyotard resists the presumption of a deep unity or essence that would make language graspable or presentable as such. “In short,” he says, “there is no such thing as language.” 14 Instead, language is the prime instance of a plurality that cannot be grasped as a totality and brought under the rule of law. This is so because the pragmatic rules of language are heterogeneous. Each languagegame is incommensurable with the others, e.g., a prescriptive command is different from a denotative utterance, since they follow different rules, have different stakes, and situate “senders” and “receivers” in different positions.15 Furthermore, by analogy with the aesthetic in Kant’s Third Critique, where judgment is a relation between heterogeneous faculties instead of the presentation of an object (WAK, V, 206), language is “aesthetic” in its heterogeneity of fundamental conditions for saying something. Specifically, language is sublime. Its formlessness signifies receptivity to what is unsayable, just as imagination is receptive to, but cannot present, an Idea in Kant. The ungraspable manifold of language gives us the feeling of something that surpasses anything language can say, and for Lyotard, following Levinas, this unsayable is connected with the ethical. It does not affect us as the moral law, which would be a unifying rule for the disposition to act, but as an openness to alterity and to responsibility toward the other. As Lyotard writes in VEnthousiasme, we sense in our time “the difference [Vecart] between the diverse families of phrases and their respective lawful presentations” (E, 108). In Just Gaming, the Idea suggested by this diversity is one of justice, in which the purity of each game is preserved (JG, 96). Justice would mean there can be no metagame, such as the one favored by the Western tradition— the cognitive— that will delegate to each subordinate genre its legitimate place within the whole. Instead, each game and each phrase will project its own set of relations to the others. Nor can there be a universal subject that remains identical in all the roles assigned to it by each set of rules or each phrase. The breakup of language as a totality thus entails the breakup of subjectivity as well. Lyotard characterizes the alterity among phrases and linguistic genres in 93

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terms of the differend, which he defines as “a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments.” 16 In other words, linguistic rules are rules of judgment: they determine whether certain phrases are allowed or not within the limits of a specific genre. But this raises the question of justice— a judgment that would settle differences among competing parties, or genres, once and for all. When it comes to language, however, no such judgment is possible. The only sense of justice that remains is a sense of responsibility toward the other, which means that judgment among competing language-games can never end; the possibility of an other genre, an other rule, must remain open. Lyotard explores this fundamental indeterminacy through the notion of “linking.” As he says in The Differend: “Genres of discourse supply rules for linking together heterogeneous phrases” (D, xii). A phrase is a minimal and irreducible gesture— “A phrase ‘happens’ ” (D, xii)— and its occurrence necessitates linkage with another, succeeding phrase. This linkage cannot fail to occur, for, as Lyotard declares: “There is no non-phrase. Silence is a phrase. There is no last phrase” (D, xii). The question is, how is linkage going to take place, and according to which rule? This question cannot be answered in advance, because the rule is given after linkage has already happened. The moment of linkage itself, or the happening of a phrase, occurs without a rule, and is not subject to lawful arbitration. Instead, it is a moment of the differend, signified by a feeling : “The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. . . . This state is signaled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling: ‘One cannot find the words,’ etc.” (D, 13). This is analogous to the Kantian sublime, since it involves the pain of never being able to phrase or present something absolute, while at the same time there is pleasure in being affected by it in the first place (D, 179). Moreover, the sublimity of linkage involves an ethical, or more accurately, political idea: the passage from one linguistic regime to another. “Politics,” says Lyotard, “is not at all a genre, it bears witness to the nothingness which opens up with each occurring phrase” (D, 141). Bearing witness to the other calls for a gesture that cannot be specified in advance, cannot operate according to a rule, and cannot be the identical repetition of a particular phrase. Is the other to whom we are responsible an other phrase or language game, or is it the unpresentable “now” of linkage between phrases? This question raises the issue as to whether we can characterize alterity per se in terms of the linking of phrases. For alterity means one thing as a matter of heterogeneity among linguistic phrases and genres, and it means another as what is not a linkage between phrases, not a difference among phrases, or between senders or receivers of phrases. It is one thing to talk about passage among linguistic genres, and another to talk about a passage between language and what is other than language. Gan language open to the nonlinguistic? That is, can we put into question the assertion “There is no non-phrase” ? Lyotard explores this possibility in his treatments of art and of sensibility in general, insofar as they do not “say” anything. Indeed, this is of primary concern in the pieces collected in The Inhuman and other later writings. As to sensibility, Lyotard diverges radically from Gadamer’s attempt to rehabilitate classical aisthesis and cosmology. Perhaps the most fundamental 94

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difference is elaborated in the essay “Anima minima,” published in Moralites postmodemes.17 Here, Lyotard discusses the sublime as an immaterial “presence” suggested by the matter (matiere) of art, insofar as all grandes oeuvres appeal to something unpresentable in sensible presentation (MP, 204). This is in keeping with his statement in “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” that the postmodern “would be that which, in the modem, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself” (PC, 81). In this respect, all great works are formless, that is, avant-garde. This becomes a model for sensibility per se, in contrast with traditional aesthetics. As exemplified in Gadamer, traditional aesthetics presupposes a harmony between thought and appearance. This concordance is signified by the spontaneous affectability of the soul in sensation. However, Lyotard counters that this affectability is not only the sign of a “connivance” between the soul and sensation, but it conceals an absolute dependence of the one upon the other. That is to say, “the soul only exists as affected” (L’anima n ’existe qu’affectee) (MP, 205). It remains dead, inanimee, unless affected by a sound, a color, a fragrance, etc. It does not affect itself, as in Dichtung or productive imagination, but is affected from outside (du “dehors”) by an other. To exist in this sense is “to be awakened from the nothingness of dissaffection by a sensible ‘something there’ ” (un la-bas sensible) (MP, 205). In other words, as an anima minima, the soul must be brought to life by an aistheton that tears it out of dormancy, and so it is anything but free and autonomous, as the traditional concept of subjectivity would have it. For Lyotard, this means aesthetics in general is analogous to the feeling of the sublime, especially when philosophy and the arts become interested in “detecting within sensation the ‘presence’ of what escapes sensation: a neutral, a grey, a blank that ‘inhabits’ the nuances of a sound, a chromatism or a voice” (MP, 206). Within the liveliness of sensation there is the an-aesthesia from which the soul emerges, and which threatens it with a loss of affect. Therefore, Lyotard remarks: “Art is the votive offering the soul makes to escape death, which is promised by the sensible, while celebrating within this very sensible what has tom the soul from nonexistence” (MP, 206). All great works, he argues, are aimed at this “double bind.” In this way, when sensibility is subjected to the ordeal (Vepreuve) of annihilation by avant-garde art, the “punctual affect” that is achieved has the sense of a return (MP, 211). It is, so to speak, a return of anesthesia into the present, from which the present has been awakened. But this return is not a recovery in the traditional sense of anamnesis, for there is literally nothing to be remembered: what returns is unnameable and immemorial— it is experienced only as a kind of shock. However, the shock of the insensible within the sensible is an intensification of the latter, and therefore an affirmation. This is the nature of the sublime according to Edmund Burke, and it occurs when art ceases to imitate beautiful models and begins to experiment with strange and shocking combinations in its materials. As Lyotard declares in “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” : “Shock is, par excellence, the evidence of (something) happening, rather than nothing, suspended privation.”18 It has the character of a material event. Lyotard develops this notion in several pieces included in The Inhuman. 95

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For him, it is an alterity that shatters the conjunction of thought and appearance that is the basis of traditional aesthetics and speculative cosmology (as exemplified in Gadamer’s reflections on the Aion). In the essay “Gan Thought Go On without a Body?” he raises the possibility of cosmic (not cosmological) death— that is, solar extinction: “Human death is included in the life of human mind. Solar death implies an irreparably exclusive disjunction between death and thought: if there is death, then there is no thought. . . . Pure event. Disaster . . . apres moi le deluge. The deluge of matter” (7, 11). Matter, then, is the possibility of a catastrophe which thought cannot survive— a cosmic but unthinkable event. Its materiality is not subsumable under aesthetic forms or ontological categories, nor does it bear meaning. In Lyotard’s words: “Matter asks no questions, expects no answers of us. It ignores us” (7, 11). Matter, then, is profoundly other— inhuman. Furthermore, since it does not address us, it cannot be the other that obligates. It is a pure occurrence, and, as Lyotard states in The Differend, “one is not held by an occurrence the same way one is held to an obligation” (D, 116). An occurrence is a phrase in abeyance (D, 116), whereas an obligation is a phrase sent by an other, where we are placed in the position of addressee even where the position of addressor remains vacant. In the arts, the material event happens as a nuance or timbre of colors and sounds, something independent of the form or composition within which it occurs. The chromatic quality of matter “owes nothing to the place it can take . . . in the intrication of sensory positions and intelligible meanings” (7, 151). Instead, nuance and timbre “are what differ and defer; what makes the difference between the note on the piano and the same note on the flute, and thus also what also defer the identification of the note” (7, 140). To be open to this difference, the mind must cease its activity of comparison under the aspect of form and identity. The difference is not graspable or conceivable, not recoverable or memorialized (not phrasable), but occurs simply as a “that there is” (7, 140). As Lyotard insists, it “does not offer itself to dialogue and dialectic” (7, 142), but is always received as an affective shock that has already occurred before thought can apprehend it. Lyotard follows Bergson in suggesting that mind differentiates itself from matter only as a capacity to “gather and conserve” (7, 40), where an innumerable multiplicity of shocks (energy) is condensed into an instant of conscious perception (7, 42). The mind, then, is a rhythm, a temporal asynchrony that arises out of the pure shocks of material energy. As Bergson says, if the mind were synchronized with the vibrations of matter, it would be coextensive with them and therefore would not perceive anything; there would be no conscious moment, only a “ ‘bare’ material point” (7, 43). For Lyotard, this undermines all humanistic interpretations of the relation between thought and appearance, such as the one put forward by Gadamer. Extrapolating from Bergson, he suggests that “the continuity between mind and matter . . . appears as a particular case of the transformation of frequencies into other frequencies” (7, 43). In other words, consciousness of appearances is a kind of techne, or technique. There exists, then, no natural consciousness in the traditional sense, but only a “technicity” that gathers the material point into a moment of perception. Indeed, the new computer technologies, with their symbolic languages, are extensions of the condensation and transformation of 96

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energy. Insofar as this shift of frequencies is not initiated by consciousness (itself the occurrence of such a shift), technology is an expansion of something other— a cosmic materiality that precedes and succeeds thought. The arts do the same when they experiment with new combinations of sensible materials, and make us feel that there is something unpresentable. In this respect, the human subject as “knower” or “creator” functions as a transformer, intensifying the complexity of the material universe (I, 45). Far from serving the pragmatic purpose of making an easier fit between the subject and its world, the complexification accomplished by the arts and sciences renders this relation unstable. It is the expression of a nonhuman power that “uses” us for its own expansion. This is how Lyotard suggests we interpret the function of capital in the contemporary world. As he says in “Time Today” : “Capital must be seen not only as a major figure of human history, but also as the effect, observable on earth, of a cosmic process of complexification” (J, 67). Indeed, it is sublime in its drive for infinite wealth and power. However, unlike great works art, where the material event occurs as an interruption of phrasing, capital insists upon the infinite extension of a particular type of phrasing: exchange. Exchange requires that the future be “as if” it were present, that is, an initial investment demands a return of commensurate and increasing value. That means the rule of linkage from one moment to another is fixed— the future must be predetermined as commensurable and exchangeable with the past and present. The present must not, therefore, be open to an indeterminable and contingent future. Instead, time is held in infinite reserve— the event, the sublime “now,” is neutralized (I, 66). According to Lyotard, capital thus imposes a cluster of prescriptives, all of which express the same obligation to save time: “communicate, save time and money, control and forestall the event, increase exchanges” (I, 69). In response, however, Lyotard proposes another obligation (the task of both philosophy and art)— to resist capital and bear witness to the “now” (/, 73-77). With the concept of resistance to capital, Lyotard rejoins his linkage with Kant. For the latter, the ethical in the sublime is a sensible resistance to natural inclinations and self-interest for the sake of an absolute Idea. But for Lyotard, sensibility itself has been complexified and de-aestheticized by capital, that is, by the technai of communication and exchange. Resistance to these forces for the sake of the absolute (i.e., the unconditioned) must therefore occur at the level of technique. Indeed, it must occur as an interruption of, and within, the technai of communication. As a technique, language is a kind of inscription, or “writing” (ecriture), in the special sense this term has acquired in French thought. “There is no culture,” says Lyotard, “which is not sustained by a technique. . . . A thing is cultural because it is exhibited, i.e., inscribed or ‘written’ ” (I, 148). Culture, then, is founded upon the technique of inscription, which, like the moment of perception, is a condensation of material frequencies into an asynchronic temporality. Thought, or the soul, arises out of this rhythm as a moment of consciousness “who” is addressed by something said. The possibility of obligation occurs here, when we are addressed by a saying we do not initiate, a saying that brings us to consciousness as “hearers” in the first place. However, there is something that escapes inscription, a materiality, analogous to that in sensation, that simply impacts upon us without a message. 97

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For Lyotard, this is the materiality of words insofar as they “sound” or “touch” before being ordered into the rhythmed patterns of thought. As he remarks, words are (in this sense) “the ‘un-will,’ the ‘non-sense’ of thought, its mass” (/, 142). Resistance to capital takes place in inscription when the materiality of words disrupts the functioning of exchange and communication. Here is where language, as saying or phrasing, is open to its other, and where moral obligation is brought together in its differend with aesthetic feeling. This would constitute a style of writing that resists communication and dialogue for the sake of an alterity between aesthetics and ethics themselves. As Lyotard states: “The sublime feeling is neither moral universality nor aesthetic universalization, but is, rather, the destruction of the one by the other in the violence of their differend” ( L, 239). The preservation of ethics and aesthetics in contemporary theory thus entails, paradoxically, their mutual destruction and dissolution. Lyotard’s writings are attempts to perform this maneuver via inscription— hence the formlessness of their styles and the multiplicity of their genres. They resist the identity and continuity associated with the beautiful, and in this respect they are analogous to avant-garde art. In a sense, Lyotard suggests that the intensification of the differend between ethics and aesthetics is itself a sign of moral progress, insofar as it contributes to an expansion of the moral faculties generally. In other words, inscription can be used to expand our receptivity to alterity and to obligation. It cannot, however, prescribe a particular ethical law or concept, nor can it “settle” differences among conflicting validity claims. In this regard, Lyotard’s version of theory is hardly applicable when we are called upon to make moral judgments in specific cases. His privileged mode of judgment is never determining but always reflective, never the application of a rule but always a passage among rules. Thus, instead of specifying an ethics per se, Lyotard speaks of the necessity of a certain “probity” in moving from one language game to another: “when operating within a specific genre of discourse, you must stay within the rules” (CFP, 75). Aside from the fact that this sounds like something Lyotard would forbid— a metaprescriptive— it presupposes that there are rules already existing for specific activities and contexts, and that their limits are fixed. However, this is inconsistent with his avant-gardism, which is aimed precisely at rendering preestablished rules unstable and uncertain, and valorizes experimentation with “new and unheard of combinations.” Lyotard does not adequately address the tension between these two tendencies in his own theory. Furthermore, in everyday practice, moral progress seems to be a matter of stretching preestablished rules to accommodate new cases and competing validity claims, rather than a “preservation of the differend,” which entails an enforcement of their heterogeneity and difference. In this respect, the aesthetics of beauty, which entails a continuous “free play” and communication between different faculties, may be more appropriate as a model for ethical conduct in concrete situations. Communication, negotiation, and dialogue are indeed the only alternatives to violence when conflicting interests and claims come to point in human affairs. The ability to stretch preexisting norms, to make rules elastic rather than rigid, is indispensable precisely in a world where multiplicity and heterogeneity among individuals and communities are intensifying. This would seem to be a serious limitation to Lyotard’s commit98

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ment to the sublime as a differend, a limitation for which Gadamer presents a credible alternative.

IV. Concluding Remarks Gadamer’s commitment to dialogue positions him well in respect to situations where human differences can be resolved by consensus. At the very least, we are obliged to engage in dialogue where such engagement will forestall imminent violence. However, whether successful dialogue requires an identity formation— as Gadamer insists— is problematical. Lyotard has offered a powerful critique of this approach, and of the violence done to the other when identity means “fulfillment” achieved by annihilating difference. (His most forceful statement along these lines is found in Heidegger and “the jews”.)19 The harmonious play of thought and intuition, occasioned by the beautiful, may become a dangerous model for politics if it means that whatever or whoever does not “play along” must be excluded. Furthermore, to the extent that technology and capital are mechanisms of a power that operates according to its own imperatives, and are not simply excesses of adaptive practices, Gadamerian hermeneutics only partially engages what challenges us today: the accelerating transformation of all relationships into exchange. If indeed this process is a transformation of material forces, a “technical” response— such as ecriture— may at least offer resistance, as well as openness, to a difference that is not dialogical or historical. Perhaps ethical dialogue would benefit from exposure to material timbres or nuances, that is, to signs of an alterity otherwise lost in the fulfillment of saying. This, too, appeals to our freedom to question and calls upon us to exercise our moral faculties.

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Chapter 6

LYOTARD, NANCY, AND THE MYTH OF INTERRUPTION Michael Naas

How do you resist it? Beginning, that is, with a phrase or sentence like this? For there is already good precedent for beginning a paper on the work of Jean-Frangois Lyotard with a sentence that poses a question at once to and about him, that at once addresses him and asks a question about him and his work. Jacques Derrida begins his essay “Prejuges: Devant la loi” with the phrase: “How do you judge— Jean-Frangois Lyotard?” (Comment juger— Jean-Frangois Lyotard?)1 But precedent aside, or rather, problematizing for a moment the notion of precedent, this opening phrase not only questions or questions after but implicitly refers to something beyond or before itself, to a pressure of the past or a tendency in thinking that exerts itself before the opening phrase. How do you resist it? This phrase might suggest, in a first moment: How do you resist beginning? Or else beginning in a way that already has a precedent, beginning in myth, for example, or in the thought of Jean-Frangois Lyotard, or else, to cite the very end of The Differend, in a phrase regimen that would already be “prejudicing the Arrive-t-il?,” the uIs it happening?” 2 Such questions lead us not only into the heart of the pragmatics of languagegames as they are articulated in the work of Lyotard but already into the aporias of politics and the community as they are developed in Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community and elsewhere.3 For how do you resist it— beginning, that is, by repeating the past, or else by making an origin of this resistance? And is there any difference between the resistance to beginnings and a beginning of resistance? “How do you resist it?” This phrase initially seems to reveal an equivocity of the sort that Lyotard analyzes in notice 137 of The Differend.4 It reveals that a phrase can present several different phrase universes, thereby having differing effects on the four speaking instances: addressor, addressee, sense, and referent. In a first moment, then, the phrase could be taken as an interrogative designed to elicit some instructions or lessons in resistance. And so the phrase might be linked like this: A. “How do you resist it?” B. “Well, I always begin by defining the problem.” Here the addressor addresses an addressee (the “you” of “How do you resist it?”) who is different from him as a referent that is known to both of them. For example, one might ask Jean-Frangois Lyo100

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tard: “How does one— how do you— resist the move to metanarrative or to a theoretical discourse in politics? How do you resist it when the form of your resistance— presumably the predetermination of what is to be resisted— would seem to borrow from the very resources it is trying to resist?” Or else one might ask Jean-Luc Nancy: “How do you resist certain forms of speaking about community when the form of the resistance— for example, a proposition or assertion concerning the absence that founds community— would seem to reinstate the determinable origin you are seeking to deny?” In these cases, the opening question would be asked in earnest of one who is presumably schooled in resistance or has some experience in the strategies of resistance. The question would be asked with the expectation of receiving some lessons or instructions in resistance. And so the phrase might lead to a theoretical discourse concerning resistance— what it is, how it operates, in what contexts or language-games, according to what phrase regimens— so as to develop strategies for resisting the power of the state, or of capitalism, or indeed of certain phrase regimens that would have some complicity with these. But the same phrase might also be linked in this way: “How do you resist it? I mean, the temptation is just so great.” In this case, the second person is essentially reduced to the first, as in “How do or can / resist it,” or else to a sort of universal subject, as in “How can anyone resist it?” The addressee is thus not expected to answer such a rhetorical question but merely to respond to what is little more than a remark— perhaps with something like: “You’re right, no one can resist it.” In this case, we might hear the phrase with what seems to be a more pagan or at least a more impious ear, as a sign of incredulity with regard to the very possibility of beginning anew, with regard to the possibility of beginning without some precedent, some past to which we are indebted and thus simply cannot resist. “How do you resist it?”— this phrase could be either the sign of capitulation, of giving in to this tendency or desire that one cannot resist, or else the mark of an acknowledged infidelity to all self-presenting beginnings, the recognition that we never begin without a certain resistance to the beginning— even if the resistance be nothing more than the phrase “How do you resist it?” And so the phrase might suggest that the overcoming of resistance must always be marked to insure that it not be forgotten, to insure that we never think that we can begin without resistance and thus without pain and pleasure, without repetition or remark, without certain rhetorical effects. In the above examples, the equivocity of the phrase “How do you resist it?” is seemingly effaced or at least reduced by what Lyotard calls linking or linkage (enchainement). A. “How do you resist it?” B. “Well, I always begin by defining the problem,” or else: “How do you resist it? I mean, the temptation is just so great that.. . . ” By determining what regimen the phrase is to be conducted into, linkage reduces the equivocity and institutes stability and peace. And yet, as Lyotard argues in The Differend, this peace is won only at the expense of a wrong being committed to other regimens and other genres. Since a phrase is always going to be linked in one way rather than another, and because linkage always proceeds with certain ends in view, some regimens are always going to be favored over others. For example, already right here, and already from the beginning, phrases are being linked in order to reconcile the differences between Lyotard and Nancy on the notion of resistance and to declare a truce 101

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between two heterogenous phrase regimens or genres by pointing out the necessity of linkage and thus the necessity of committing a wrong to all the other regimens or genres that have not been chosen for this “reconciliation.” We thus have a phrase— “How do you resist it?”— that can be linked in two heterogenous and seemingly incommensurable ways. In the first case, it is linked to the phrase— let’s call it P I— “Well, I always begin by defining the problem.” The phrase is thus linked with something like knowledge or instruction in view. But in the second case, it is linked to the phrase— let’s call it P2— “I mean, the temptation is just so great.” Here the phrase is linked not so much with the aim of gaining knowledge but of showing or remarking upon a certain desire or tension— perhaps even with the goal of showing that the phrase is itself the mark of this desire or tension. Whereas P I is a more or less direct interrogation that aims at eliciting some response, P2 is little more than a rhetorical remark or emotive expression. Between P I and P2, then, there is a heterogeneity due to the fact that the occurrence of language, its arrival, after the phrase “How do you resist it?” must be led in some direction, into some regimen, seduced into some genre.5 Depending upon the linkage, the addressor and the addressee change roles or positions, but what about the referent? What is the “it” of “How do you resist it?” Here are three possible responses. First, anything that the community must resist in order to keep open the space of community: for example, myth, propriation, power, the denial of death, etc. Second, anything that Lyotard or Nancy figures in as the beginning of community— for example, the sublime, death, the figure, forgetting, the clinamen, sexual difference, or perhaps even resistance itself. But a third response might be this: “How do you resist it?” In this case, the referent is the phrase itself. You will recall that I began this paper by linking my opening phrase— since I myself could not resist it, could not resist the necessity of linkage— to another concerning beginnings. I began: “How do you resist it? Beginning, that is, with a phrase or sentence like this?” In a sense, then, my opening line was, “How do you resist the phrase ‘how do you resist it’ ?” By doubling the phrase in this way, by folding it onto itself, it can now be heard in at least four different ways, that is, as a direct interrogation of the rhetorical phrase “How do you resist the rhetorical effects or marks of such a phrase?” as a direct interrogation of the direct phrase “How do you resist determined or direct interrogation?” as the rhetorical remarking of the direct phrase “How can anyone resist assertion, precision, determination, interrogation?” and as the rhetorical remarking of the rhetorical phrase “How can you resist the remarks of rhetoric, that is, how can you resist these very remarks?” Now while all this may sound like so much agonal wordplay, right here at what Lyotard might call the “linguistic turn,” I would like to pose some questions to Lyotard and Nancy on the notion of resistance. For without this linguistic turn, the problem of resistance in language risks being obscured by the resistance of language, and vice versa. Without this turn, all our beginnings and questionings of resistance would obscure the resistance of these very beginnings and questionings.6 The phrase “How do you resist it?” thus has the advantage of suggesting a relationship between the phrase and resistance, between the arrival of the phrase and the resistance to this arrival, between any beginning and the resistance to and of that beginning. The phrase happens or occurs, Lyotard might 102

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say, and how do you resist it— how do you resist it occurring without making another phrase occur, without adding to it? How do you resist betraying the Arrive-t-il? that accompanies each by adding to it? How do you resist “How do you resist it?” How do you resist the occurrence of “How do you resist it?” when the resistance is itself an occurrence— that is, both the inscription and the betrayal, both the arrival and the deferral, of “How do you resist it?” I began by suspending this phrase at the point of linkage in order not only to demonstrate the equivocity of the phrase but simply to show that it is— in Lyotard’s sense— a phrase, a phrase that can, and indeed must, be repeated, that is, cited, put into quotation marks, and linked in new contexts, in new regimens and according to new genres. By showing that the opening phrase can be linked by either PI or P2, we are able to reveal a certain tension— or, indeed, a certain resistance— between two phrase regimens, such that what “appears” is the resistance to and of “resistance itself.” By linking the phrase to either PI or P2, we are able to see how the opening phrase is, in a sense, retrospectively transformed, repeated as it will have been. And yet the marks of this repetition remain the marks of “resistance itself,” the remarks of a necessary citationality, a necessary reinscription and effacement of one phrase regimen by another. The above four reinscriptions or citations of the phrase “How do you resist it?” thus constitute the matrix for all the questions of this paper— those from Lyotard to Nancy, from Nancy to Lyotard, and from myself to both Lyotard and Nancy. These different permutations or possibilities will come to answer each other in unexpected ways, coming to frame and stand in for each other, none of them taking any more than a provisional precedence over the others, each of them changing the very nature of the language game in which they are involved. And this will be the task of writing— the task of a supplementary doubling that marks the originary event of the Arrive-t-il? Near the beginning of The Inhuman, Lyotard claims that the task of writing, thinking, and literature is to resist a certain technologization of the human, and thus a certain inhuman, by means not of a new humanism but another inhuman: What else remains as “politics” except resistance to this inhuman? And what else is left to resist with but the debt which every soul has contracted with the miserable and admirable indetermination from which it was bom and does not cease to be bom?— which is to say, with the other inhuman? This debt to childhood is one which we never pay off. 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.7

One does not resist the inhuman by means of the human but by another inhuman, just as one does not resist forgetting by means of memory but by means of another forgetting. Similarly, in Heidegger and “the jews, ” Lyotard speaks— as I have tried to suggest with my doubled phrase— of two resistances, one that would bear witness to the other only as its trembling double, as its alternating timber or deregulated tone. He speaks of: A more “archaic” anxiety, and one that is precisely resistant to the formation of representations. It is this, and only this, extreme resistance that can nourish the

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One resists, then, not by meeting the enemy head on, not by invoking memory in the face of forgetting, but by writing from or by means of another, more archaic resistance— one that resists representation and can thus be in no way regulated or controlled. One resists by means of a displacement, a countermove, a riposte rather than a reaction: one resists by shifting the language game of resistance. A riposte rather than a reaction— that is not, I would argue, a typical academic reaction, a typical mode of philosophical argumentation. Indeed, I myself had initially conceived of this part of the paper as a sort of confrontation or series of reactions, as a kind of three-round bout between Lyotard and Nancy. After sending the two thinkers into the ring to present their respective views on resistance, I would have scored them pretty much evenly as the bell for round one rang; in the second round I would have given a distinct edge to Nancy, feigning to go along with his critique of Lyotard’s use of the Kantian regulative Idea in order to make it look as if he were going to take the match— his view of community being more radical and extreme than Lyotard’s. But in the final round I would have had Lyotard come back from near-defeat to take Nancy to task for the way he claims to be more radical than Lyotard, for the very form of his objections, for the assertive mode in which he declares— as if by fiat and with little concern, it seems, for the dangers of his assertions— the extreme resistance of all community and all thinking about community. Yet I have tried to resist this pugilistic model of philosophical argumentation because, in spite of the analogy, it does not seem to conform to Lyotard’s notion of agonistics, being based too much in reaction and not enough in riposte, too much in innovation (a devastating critique of the regulative Idea) and not enough in invention. What concerns me here, then, is not so much the blows but the strategies, and thus not so much “what” Lyotard and Nancy claim resistance to be, nor even “how” they claim it to be, the style they use to make their claims, but, rather, the way in which something resists formation in both and resists not as some secret truth that might prove either Nancy or Lyotard the winner of this philosophical match but as “resistance itself,” as and on the very surface of language, as and on a surface that essentially is resistance. I have thus tried to resist the pugilistic model but have not, for all that, done away with it— for that would have been too much of a reaction. And so I have simply displaced it, so that if I give the edge to Lyotard in the end, it is only after the rules of the game and the criteria for judgment have themselves been changed; if I seem to declare him the winner, it will not be because his arguments are better, i.e., more just or true, but because for the moment and in this precise place he will have done a better job resisting the alternative between assertion and remark, between P I and P2, between speaking about resistance and resisting to speak in such a way, between Nancy and himself. In rapid, three-minute rounds, then, here goes round one. Both Lyotard in The Differend and Nancy in The Inoperative Community attempt to thematize a certain “resistance to myth and narrative.” According to both thinkers, Western societies have traditionally organized themselves around a central, founding myth or narrative that would posit as its origin and goal an absolute and trans104

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parent communion and identity. In and through such self-legitimating myths or narratives, societies define not only what things are to be sanctioned or censored but, even more important, what modes of discourse and organization, what ways of speaking, are to be included or excluded from the community. Both Lyotard’s agonal thought and Nancy’s literary communism aim to resist and interrupt the ecstatic communion that is sought in a founding myth or narrative. For both, the task is to open discourses based in myth and narrative, discourses that claim, in the words of Nancy, an immanent communion and a transparent, i.e., fully present communication, to a differend or incommensurability within communication itself; their aim is to help us lend an ear to the heterogeneity within language itself. The point is not, therefore, simply to empower those who are disempowered with their own founding myths and narratives but to rethink legitimacy itself, to resist the drive toward communion and communication, to resist power or pouvoir by means of the potential or puissance to speak. Near the end of The Differend, Lyotard writes: The resistance of communities banded around their names and their narratives is counted on to stand in the way of capital’s hegemony. This is a mistake. First of all, this resistance fosters this hegemony as much as it counters it. Then, it puts off the Idea of a cosmopolitical history and generates the fear of falling back onto legitimation through tradition, indeed onto legitimation through myth, even if that legitimation also gives shape to the resistances of peoples to their extermination. Proud struggles for independence end in young, reactionary States. ( D, 181)

Such resistance in and through narrative must itself be resisted, Lyotard seems to be saying, unless, as he suggests in Heidegger and “the jews,” it is nourished by an even more archaic and extreme resistance. Nourished, therefore, but also interrupted by this resistance, since this other resistance is an unrepresentable anxiety that aliments resistance with nothing more than an anxious trembling. Notice, then, the curious tension that is created between these two resistances and the phrase regimens in which they occur, between a “description” of this even more archaic resistance that resists representation or description and a tacit “prescription” not to resist by means of names and narratives. In The Inoperative Community, Nancy argues that community is itself this resistance to myth, this archaic and unrepresentable resistance that haunts society in the name of community. He writes: “Community is, in a sense, resistance itself: namely, the resistance to immanence . . . (resistance to the communion of everyone or to the exclusive passion of one or several: to all the forms and all the violences of subjectivity)” (IC, 35). But this is where things get interesting, because while in Lyotard one resistance comes to haunt the other, to nourish and interrupt it, resistance in Nancy seems simply to oppose myth and narrative; it would not nourish or interrupt itself, would not divide itself into two phrase regimens, into a descriptive and a prescriptive moment. If one were to grant this, it would be difficult to see how a politics of the inoperative community would not be, in the end, a politics of the resistance that always-already was, even if absent, even if unpresentable, and a politics of the myth, even if it were the interruption of myth. All this, unless the resistance to resistance were readable as a remark in the text of 105

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Nancy, unless he too stopped communicating and began trembling— unless he too stopped everything so that writing could begin. Round Two. Such a hypothesis concerning the myth of the interruption of myth is particularly perverse in light of Nancy’s repeated and emphatic claims to the contrary. In fact, in a footnote to The Inoperative Community, Nancy claims that it is not he but Lyotard who, in the end, risks returning to myth because his use of the Kantian regulative Idea to resist myth and narrative is haunted by a regulative or directive fiction. It is here that a drive toward rules or prescriptives, along with the possibility of progress, is seen by Nancy to haunt Lyotard’s analysis of community, thereby requiring or calling for a more radical interruption or suspension. Nancy writes: It is not only the idea of a “new mythology” that is at stake here, but the whole idea of a directive or regulative fiction. In this respect, the Kantian model of a “regulative Idea” is up to a point only a modem variation on the function of myth: it knows itself to be the fiction of a myth that will not come about but that gives a rule for thinking and acting... . Even Lyotard’s recent use of the regulative Idea (The

Differend), where it is explicitly distinguished from myth and set in opposition to it, does not seem to me to be determined precisely enough to escape this function completely. It is necessary to go so far as to think an interruption or a suspension of the Idea as such: what its fiction reveals has to be suspended, its figure incompleted. (IC, 162, n. 33; my emphasis)

But as I understand Lyotard, the regulative Idea does not “give a rule for thinking and acting,” only a type of analogical thinking that allows one to pass between phrase regimens. And it is precisely because the regulative Idea is not “determined precisely” that it avoids becoming a rule for thinking and acting. Indeed it is precisely the regulative Idea that opens the gap and provides the passage between description and prescription, knowledge and ethics, one resistance and the other. Lyotard writes in The Differend: If humanity were progressing toward the better, it would not be because “things are getting better” and because the reality of this betterment could be attested through procedures for establishing reality, but because humans would have become so cultivated and would have developed an ear so attuned to the Idea (which is nonetheless unpresentable) that they would feel its tension on the occasion of the most apparently impertinent, with regard to it, facts and that they would supply the very proof of progress by the sole fact of their susceptibility. This progress could therefore be compatible with the general feeling that “things are getting worse.” In its aggravation, the gap between Ideas and observable historical-political reality would bear witness not only against that reality but also in favor of those Ideas.

(D, 180)

It is impossible to do justice here to Lyotard’s rich and difficult rereading of Kant, but the above should at least indicate that Nancy’s critique is, as it stands, inadequate— but inadequate because it is itself perhaps too precisely determined. For what would it mean for Lyotard to determine the regulative Idea more precisely? Would it not, in the end, resort to declaring in a more emphatic way that the regulative Idea simply cannot be a rule or regulator of thought and action? What would it mean to interrupt the Idea as such, and 106

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what modalities of utterance would such radicality rely upon so as not to fall short of this interruption? I leave these questions open, since my intention here is not to defend Lyotard against Nancy on this particular point— one will recall that I have tried to resist the pugilistic model— but to emphasize the grounds for Nancy’s critique: precision, determination, a more emphatic and pronounced interruption. So let us turn now to Nancy’s seemingly more radical and uncompromising critique of myth in the name of the “interruption of myth.” Nancy begins The Inoperative Community by claiming that: “at every moment in its history”— but most especially in the modern period— “the Occident has given itself over to the nostalgia for a more archaic community that has disappeared, and to deploring a loss of familiarity, fraternity, and conviviality” {1C, 10).9 History, says Nancy, is founded on the notion of a lost community to be recovered or reconstituted. Be it the natural family, the Athenian city, the Roman Republic, or the first Christian community, there has always been in the Occident the nostalgia or “phantasm” (IC, 12) of immanence and intimacy, of an organic communion with one’s own essence or fusion into community. The pervasive modern claim is thus that the community has dissolved, and the invention of the individual— despite modern claims to the contrary— is the proof of this dissolution. Insofar as it is itself an immanence, an in-itself, an origin detached, the origin of its own death, the individual is the symmetrical double of the immanent lost community. In the modern era, the lost community is thus linked to a whole series of names, the Idea, History, the Individual, the State, Science, the Artwork, etc. The Inoperative Community is an attempt to rethink community without relying upon any of these. Now, the “phantasm” of the myth of the lost community consists not so much in thinking that an idyllic community once took place when it did not, but in thinking that community can ever take place. Society is never founded upon the ruins of a community that once took place, since the community is a “future” that is yet to come; it is that which comes to us— as question, as waiting, as event, as imperative— from within society. Community is thus not only the resistance to the fusion and immanence of myth but the resistance to any “taking place.” Even in the concentration camps, where the most violent attempt to annihilate community was made, there was resistance to this taking place— and, thus, community. Indeed resistance is nothing other than “the fact of being-in-common as such: without this resistance, we would never be in common very long, we would very quickly be ‘realized’ in a unique and total being” (IC, 20). Resistance is this clinamen or swerve between the individuals of a community that cannot be the object of a politics, ethics, or metaphysics. But how are we to understand or determine this resistance? Can we understand or determine it? Must we at least try? How do you resist it? Round three. In a first moment, resistance in both Lyotard and Nancy seems to be something like a force or potential, a puissance— albeit one that does not take place— that inhabits the individual and the community. In The Postmodern Condition, for example, one gets the impression that what resists the institution’s rigidification of language-games and limits the “inventivity of players” is nothing more than the “discursive potentials” ( puissance) of each of the players (PC, 17). This potential— this puissance— is understood according to the model of the battle or agon of a discussion between friends, where the 107

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discourse makes use of any available ammunition (questions, requests, assertions, narratives) and where “the rules allow and encourage the greatest possible flexibility of utterance.” Not only does discursive potential always inhabit institutional speech, but the potential for the friendly agon always inhabits the institution. But a reference to discussion among friends in order to justify the flexibility of institutions is unfortunate, since it suggests that the friendly conversation is to be taken as the very model of agonistics. This leaves one with the impression that the discursive potential— the inventivity— of the friendly conversation remains there in reserve in each of us, even as we exist within institutions, and that there is always the possibility of destabilizing or changing the institutions in which we live by inventing new language moves within them. Instead of trying to think what it would mean to have two resistances— as he does in The Inhuman and Heidegger and “the jews”— Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition seems to oppose a quasi-invincible puissance or potential to speak to the power that it resists. In other words, to the question “How do you resist it?” the answer would seem to be an unambiguous “with potential.” I refer to this passage in The Postmodern Condition not simply to criticize the model of friendly conversation— which I suspect Lyotard himself would repudiate, especially since The Differend, where he insists on the de-anthropologization of language-games— but to suggest another candidate for a model of agonistics, Nancy’s “literary communism.” This model has the advantage at least of distinguishing itself from traditional models of communication, even though it too is unable to resist the metaphorics of depth, potential, and reserve— of a certain authenticity at the heart of the inauthentic: It is because there is community— unworked [desoeuvree] always, and resisting at the heart of [au sein de\ every collectivity and in the heart of [au coeur de] every individual— and because myth is interrupted— suspended always, and divided by its own enunciation— that there exists the exigency of “literary communism.” (IC, 80)

It would seem that the literary resistance to the immanence of community is always-already there at the heart of the community, that it is always already there in the depths or at the center of community, not as the clinamen that does not take place, but as some force in reserve. I realize that this would seem to be a flagrant misreading of Nancy, who has explicitly and precisely determined this resistance as not taking place, and thus as incapable of being an object of nostalgia or even thought. And I realize that the themes of depth and of the “heart” are all rethought in Nancy’s work. But what is there in Nancy’s writing that would resist such a misreading? Right up to the final page of The Inoperative Community, Nancy writes of a “ ‘literary communist’ resistance that precedes us rather than our inventing it— that precedes us from the depths of community” (IC, 81). Resistance would seem to be that potential within us to resist immanence, and insofar as this potential is not annihilated there would be community. Like the notion of puissance in Lyotard, resistance would seem to be this potential to speak or narrate that always divides myth from itself, that always disrupts its self-identity. Nancy thus writes that it is “because myth is interrupted— suspended always, and divided by its own enunciation— that there exists the exigency of ‘literary communism’ ” (IC, 80). Myth conceals the community that 108

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lurks in the heart of every society not simply because no society can resist the idyllic image of some land or time once lost, but because myth promises the originary fusion of language and event, the autoexpression of nature itself. As Nancy says, “Myth is above all full, original speech, at times revealing, at times founding the intimate being of a community” (IC, 48). “ [Myth] is the speech and the language of the very things that manifest themselves . . . ” (IC, 0). Myth is the “transcendental autofiguration of nature and of humanity . . . ” and “Mythology is thereforefiguration proper. Such is its secret, and the secret of its myth— of its truth— for the whole of Western consciousness” (IC, 54). In such full speech, all phrase regimens would seem to coincide: the myth would thus be both description and prescription; it would describe the way things are while figuring the way they ought to be: it would reveal that things are or at least once were and might be again the way they ought to be, thereby eclipsing the gap between reality and ideas. But what about Nancy’s Inoperative Community? Does it leave a gap between reality and ideas, does it resist the conflation of description and prescription, or— in spite of what it says— does it promise their mythic fusion? On the one hand, there is community— for wherever there is resistance there is community; on the other hand, there is, says Nancy, the “exigency of ‘literary communism.’ ” But from where does this exigency come, with what voice does it speak, and how do we resist hearing it as the only way of remaining faithful to it? Nancy surely recognizes that it cannot be a question of simply dispelling myths as fictions, since the myth is more than a fiction and more than a foundation but a founding fiction or fictional foundation of a language that is undiffered and not in conflict with itself, a language that arrives, and arrives once and for all. Hence the presentation of myth coincides with the myth of presentation, this “phantasm” that haunts all language and thus cannot simply be dispelled. Nancy writes: If we suppose that “myth” designates, beyond the myths themselves, even beyond myth, something that cannot simply disappear, the stakes would then consist in myth’s passage to a limit and onto a limit where myth itself would be not so much suppressed as suspended or interrupted. (IC, 47)

But the question would then be “How do you resist it?”— myth, that is, or how do you interrupt it? In order to go to this limit where myth can be suspended, it seems that one would have to have an ear for hearing “How do you resist it?” as we tried to hear it above, that is, as giving rise to both PI and P2, taking part in two phrase regimens, one interrogative, transitive, and determinative, the other rhetorical, self-reflexive, and self-marking. One would have to hear in the question both the overcoming of resistance and its reinscription. For Nancy, resistance is the result of a communication that would precede the community, a communication without communication, an interruption of communication itself. And Nancy says as much— or even more: In the interruption of myth something makes itself heard, namely, what remains of myth when it is interrupted— and which is nothing if not the very voice of interruption, if we can say this. . . . A name has been given to this voice of interruption: literature. . . . (IC, 61-63; my emphasis)

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“The very voice of interruption itself, if we can say this.” How are we to understand this claim and this reserve? Since the interruption of myth is also the interruption of communication, how does one determine this other sort of communication that comes from the future to interrupt the communication of community? How are we to understand “literature”? And what of the relationship between resistance and interruption? Does the resistance to myth that is community prepare the way for the interruption of myth? Is resistance an a priori force that allows for the noncommunication/communication of interruption to make itself heard? How is this voice to be understood? [BJecause the interruption of myth does not make up a myth, the being-in-common of which I am speaking— and that many of us are trying to speak about, that is to say, to write— has nothing to do with the myth of communion through literature, nor with the myth of literary creation by the community.. . . Thus, once myth is interrupted, writing recounts our history to us again. But it is no longer a narrative— neither grand nor small— but rather an offering : a history is offered to us. (IC, 64, 69; my emphasis)

And so Nancy declares, makes assertions, concerning a history that would not be declared or asserted or recounted or described but offered. Why the change in modalities— or rather, why not also a change in phrase regimens? Gan one simply describe an offering? Would not such an offering be determined— and thus betrayed— by such a phrase as: “a history is offered to us” ? Would not such a phrase reveal that the offering has not been received or that the exigency demanded by the offering has been too quickly heeded and received, heeded and thus resisted in being declared? Nancy again writes: “Literary communism” indicates at least the following: that community, in its infinite resistance to everything that would bring it to completion . . . signifies an irrepressible political exigency, and that this exigency in its turn demands something of “literature,” the inscription of our infinite resistance. It defines neither a politics, nor a writing, for it refers, on the contrary, to that which resists any definition or program, be these political, aesthetic, or philosophical. But it cannot be accommodated within every “politics” or within every “writing.” It signals a bias in favor of the “literary communist” resistance that precedes us rather than our inventing it— that precedes us from the depths of community. (IC, 80-81)

But I wonder, without wishing— let me repeat— to critique, whether Nancy’s assertions and descriptions of an interrupted myth at the “origin” of community do not ultimately risk— in their very form— the institution of a new myth of interruption. This in spite of— indeed because of— Nancy’s repeated claims to have avoided such a myth. I wonder whether the repeated claims that the interruption of myth does not give way to a myth of interruption do not, in the end, reveal a certain anxiety on Nancy’s part that he cannot avoid the very thing he claims to be avoiding. The following is just one example of an assertion and then a definition that, it seems, assume the legitimacy of assertion and definition without resisting these phrase regimens by means of others. I cite and emphasize: 1 10

NAAS The community resists: in a sense, as I have said, it is resistance itself.. . . Is there a myth for this community of compearance? If myth is always a myth of the reunion and the communion of community,

there is not. . . . Does the unavowable have a

myth? By definition, it does not. The absence of avowal produces neither speech nor narrative. But if community is inseparable from myth, must there not be, according to a paradoxical law, a myth of the unavowable community? But this is impossible. Let me repeat [II faut le repeter]: the unavowable community, the withdrawal of communion or communitarian ecstasy, are revealed in the interruption of myth. And the interruption is not a myth. . . . there is no myth of the interruption of myth. ( IC, 58, 61; my emphasis)

Declared almost in a tone of frustration or agitation, emphatically uttered in any case, Nancy says, and I repeat, “But this is impossible. Let me repeat: the unavowable community . . . [is] revealed in the interruption of myth.” But what is the status of this phrase, and why is there the need for repetition? Is it because “You can only resist it”— myth, that is— by steadfastly denying it and asserting its interruption, repeatedly asserting that there is no myth in this interruption? If this were the case, would not the price one pays for resisting myth be the giving in to repetition— that is, that which both determines and disrupts assertion and determination in general? In other words, does not the resistance to myth betray the resistance of myth— its return as a determinate form of interruption? If so, then how are we to think or read this betrayal? How are we to read the offering and the exigency as they are betrayed— in both senses of this phrase— by the resistance of myth? One way, I would suggest, would be to read the phrase “il faut le repeter” not as a mere rhetorical mark of emphasis (like P2) but as an assertion (like P I) that the interruption of myth cannot be legislated or simply asserted but must be repeated— in writing. In this phrase, the pragmatics of writing betray their resistance to speech— to saying what one means without repetition or remainder. One must repeat it—il faut le repeter. While the translators of The Inoperative Community had to opt out for one phrase regimen rather than another— translating it as a rhetorical “Let me repeat” rather than the prescriptive “One must repeat it”— one might read this phrase, and this quite apart, perhaps, from Nancy’s intentions, as the place where Nancy begins to write— that is, to repeat, to receive, and to move between different phrase regimens. For one must repeat as a sign of the failure of all assertion, as a sign of the impossibility of all pure beginnings. The phrase il faut le repeter thus makes the assertion vulnerable, open to conflicting and heterogenous phrase regimens, to both PI and P2, open now not only to the assertive “How do you resist it? Well, I always begin by defining the problem,” but to the rhetorical “How do you resist it? I mean, the temptation is just so great.” One must repeat, one cannot resist repeating, and this repetition is the beginning of literary communism, if there is any, the beginning— because the beginning resists— of what we might call a literary agonistics, a literary offering that gives nothing more than the “originary” partage or sharing out of voices, phrases, regimens, and genres. Because of his emphasis on the event of the phrase, on the necessary agon between, or originary dissemination of, language regimens, Lyotard seems to be aware of the dangers of more precisely determining community or resistance— 111

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the danger, even in explicit denial, of substituting for a myth of identity a myth of interruption. One cannot, it seems, simply assert or claim resistance without at the same time undergoing some resistance to the seeming selflegitimacy of the assertion or the claim, without at the same time receiving, and perhaps in spite of oneself, the offering of resistance. Whether it be in PI or P2, the debt is never acquitted. One cannot simply repeat oneself and emphasize without unduly prejudicing the Arrive-t-il? of the repetition, and yet such repetition is the very chance of an offering. How, then, do you resist it? Well, let me repeat— since one must repeat, and thus resist, and thus be resisted— beginning, that is, with “How do you resist it?”

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Chapter 7

LYOTARD, FRANK, AND THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING Erik Vogt

The main concern of this essay will not consist in a reading of Lyotard but rather in a reading of a book on Lyotard written by one of Germany’s most influential contemporary philosophers, Manfred Frank. This rereading or restaging of a certain reading of Lyotard attempts to perform a double task: to repeat Frank’s reading of Lyotard, and to provide an answer to the questions: Why is Lyotard read in Germany? And how is he read there? Such a reading places these questions in the broader context of the relationship between French postmodernism and contemporary German critical theory. Frank’s The Limits of Understanding defines itself as an “intervention” in the “unreal” debate on consensus and dissent that should have taken place between Jean-Frangois Lyotard and Jurgen Habermas, but which in fact never happened.1 From the very outset, this attempt to establish hermeneutically a dialogue between Habermas and Lyotard— modernism and postmodernism— is marked by a decisive imbalance, by a more or less hidden indebtedness to a certain philosophical discourse. For it is Habermas’s communicative ethics that anchors Frank’s “speculative imagination” in the discursive territory that will regulate the scope, the extent, and the limit of his interpretation of The Differend.2 Frank’s hermeneutic approach to Lyotard’s The Differend opens by passing judgment on Lyotard’s reading of those philosophers that he again and again refers to as being precursors of a viable postmodernism— Kant and Wittgenstein. Frank’s claim that the Kantian references in Lyotard’s text are simply “philologically questionable” and that one can therefore disregard them for reasons of “text-economy” sets the tone for the discussion to come (GV, 36). In other words, already at the very outset, Frank considers it negligible even to attempt a reconstruction of Lyotard’s translation of Kant’s philosophical arguments into the language of sentences and genres of discourse. Instead of examining whether Kantian philosophy could be rewritten in Lyotard’s terms and thereby could prepare for the location of problems like Darstellung, Frank confines himself rather to quoting (for Lyotard, as Lyotard’s hermeneutic reader who knows the intentions of the author “Lyotard” better than the author himself) passages from different Kantian texts and eventually to dismissing Lyotard’s reading of Kant in general (GV, 66-72). Lyotard’s rereading of the late Wittgenstein is short-circuited in the same 1 13

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manner. According to Frank, Lyotard’s reading of Wittgenstein is more “plausible” than Habermas’s, since both Lyotard and Wittgenstein deny the possibility of relating a discourse aiming at validity claims to a final metalevel, the metalevel in regard to a cognitive-communicative consensus (GV, 44). As Frank zealously adds, by this metalevel of cognitive-communicative consensus Habermas means the most general structures or the universal conditions of communication, provided that communication aims at (mutual) understanding, that is, at the recognition of generalizable validity claims as inherent to communicative discourse. Universal pragmatics explicates the implicit conditions that have always-already been operative in every communicative cooperation. These pure types of understanding-oriented uses of speech-acts are constative, expressive, and regulative speech-acts; the validity claims associated with them are truth (of propositions), truthfulness (of the speaking subject), and fairness (of normative proposals). These validity claims are supplemented by the comprehensibility of speech-acts in accordance with the rules of generative grammar. This comprehensibility presents a special case insofar as it does not belong to those validity claims asserted in communication but rather to the conditions which render possible communication. In other words, successful agreement always presupposes the cooperation of all corresponding validity claims. However, Frank states that “Lyotard lacks the accuracy of such an analytic precision mechanic,” and further that he has not understood Wittgenstein properly (GV, 38). After having dismissed Lyotard’s “misreadings” of both Kantian and Wittgensteinian philosophy, Frank proceeds to investigate Lyotard’s “differend.” He interprets the differend along Habermasian lines as mere “communicative contradiction.” There can be no doubt that a total contradiction (Frank’s translation of Lyotard’s differend) is, as he puts it, “logically impossible.” As a result of his interpreting the differend as (total) contradiction, Frank has then to regret “that Lyotard does not bother to classify the different types of contradiction that intervene in the differend” (GV, 79). Frank thinks that The Differend is about “the contradictory nature of dialogues,” and he repeatedly calls the differend “communicative contradiction.” His argument concerning communicative contradictions may be correct. Nevertheless, Frank distorts Lyotard’s careful examinations, inflicting a “tort” on them, since they do not present the comparably insignificant communicative contradictions; they attempt rather to focus on the differend, which is located on a different level from mere dissent or consensus. Communicative conflicts in terms of contradictions can only reveal themselves at the level of the consensustheory, as Frank instructs the critic of consensus— Lyotard. Interpreting the differend as a form of contradiction, one has no difficulty in integrating harmoniously the differend into the consensus-theory, because a communicative contradiction can never be articulated without its opposite (understanding, arrived at in consensus). Otherwise, there would not only be “no meta-discursive criterion for resolving this conflict, but also no criterion for even stating this conflict” (GV, 77). The following two passages from The Differend testify to this very absence and lack of criteria or rules that Lyotard’s thinking is concerned with: “As distinguished from a litigation, a differend would be a case of conflict between two parties or more that cannot be equitably resolved for the lack of a rule of 1 14

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judgment applicable to both arguments” (D, xi). The differend is, Lyotard writes, mute— which is why it is so difficult to present the differend. To overcome a communicative contradiction is possible because one can rely on “a common language system” shared by the disputants, whereas in the case of the differend both parties do not share a common language (since they follow heterogeneous rules and belong to different “systems”), and one of the parties is done an injustice if the differend is decided in favor of the idiom (and its rules) of the other party. Why can this interpretation of the differend establish itself so easily? Why is this difference between communicative contradiction and differend so decisive? Frank performs Habermasian justice on Lyotard when he demands that Lyotard account for communicative contradiction not in terms of the radical differing and heterogeneity of genres of discourse but in terms of the rules of argumentative consensus-formation, thereby precisely denying the differend. He then applies his own (and Schleiermacher’s) hermeneutic system to Lyotard’s text in order to complain that Lyotard does not adhere to its standards. Frank’s hermeneutic of individuality— usually advertising itself as the last bulwark of the individual, the idiomatic, and the idiosyncratic3— is lacking in even the most general virtues of the ability of hermeneutics to render visible Lyotard’s “idiom” : it refuses even to make an effort to trace innovative inscription (Lyotard’s patient attempt to translate certain problems of traditional philosophy into his language of sentences) and to make evident how Lyotard’s text deconstructs philosophy by virtue of that continuous activity through which Lyotard’s language decomposes and recomposes the units of philosophy that are given to it. More crucial, however, Frank’s reductionist hermeneutics/ hermeneutics of reductionism does not even come close to directing attention in particular to those critical points, to those “inconsistencies” and “deviations” where an idiomatic view of the world would demand a creative reading, a “divination” that could accompany meiotieally the birth of Lyotard’s argumentation concerning an event determining the task of Lyotard’s thinking of the differend— the task of not forgetting Auschwitz, i.e, of not inflicting once again a “tort” on the victims of Auschwitz. Frank denies the existence of a genuine differend in the face of Auschwitz, and he reduces the differend to a mere communicative conflict or contradiction. And he concedes that “due to the individuality of interpretation, conflict is unavoidable” (GV, 75). However, this conflict can be overcome by making reference to a “common world” and may become resolvable inner-discursively (GV, 75). Frank expresses his dismay: “This point of view is completely neglected by Lyotard” (GV, 36). But Lyotard does so for good reasons. For Auschwitz— and it is this abyss that Lyotard attempts to disclose— revealed that Jews and Nazis did not live in a “common world.” The Jews were, rather, systematically deprived of the possibility of articulating themselves within or responding to the “common” language system. The “individuality” of their interpretation, as Frank would call it, was simply not heard, that is, it was appropriated by and subjected to the traditional matrix of Christianity. Thus the differend. It becomes obvious— first and foremost a propos Auschwitz— that Frank fails to recognize Lyotard’s crucial distinction between a litigation and a differend. Again, a litigation is a dispute that takes place according to a single and determinant rule of judgment. A differend, on the other hand, designates a dispute 115

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involving at least two radically heterogeneous or incommensurable regimes of sentences where no “metalinguistic” rule can be invoked to pass judgment, since that rule necessarily stems from one regime or another. In a litigation, the accuser and the accused speak, as it were, the “same language,” i.e., they recognize the same law, whereas the differend stages the clash of two completely heterogeneous idioms, of Wittgensteinian “languages/life-forms” without “language/Lebenswelt.” According to Lyotard, recourse to the counterfactual idea of successful communication— inherent in every dialogical conflict, as “Schleiermacher’s dialogical consensus-theory has already made clear”— is not only no longer viable after Auschwitz; it would cynically repeat the infliction of a wrong on the victims of Auschwitz (GV, 74). Frank, however, still intends to entrust his hermeneutic enterprise to the motivating force of the nexus of the philosophical tradition and even claims that this project “knows itself to be in solidarity with one of the profoundest impulses of critical theory and its hermeneutic salvation of the non-identical, of that which deviates from the universal: in short, the salvation of the individual” (WAT, 448). More than questionable, however, is whether Frank’s hermeneutic appeal regarding “individual existence” is actually in accordance with Adorno’s deeply antihermeneutic reasoning about the conditions of “damaged life” on Planet Auschwitz. Such a belated intervention would not only come too late, it would also cross over and continue the legacy of destruction. Jews were denied the possibility of participation in the general context of the kind of interpretation which, Frank writes, “could guarantee the unity and uniformity of discourse” (GV, 75). After siding once again with Habermas’s rather cynical position— that factual denial does not invalidate the claim that the Jews could have participated in this general context of meaning-production— he then asks polemically: “Would we really dream of denying the unity of a world-picture, mediated by language or the nexus of meaning founded on tradition?” (GV, 58). Yet the abyss named Auschwitz, having ruptured the nexus of tradition and meaning, does precisely this. Lyotard’s marking and remarking of this abyss, far from setting out to destroy grammar, as Frank suspects, bears Auschwitz in mind in order to do justice to those who were not given a voice in this homogenized world-picture. Frank laments that Lyotard no longer shows confidence in the nexus of tradition (as if this tradition— as Adorno demonstrated again and again— had not compromised itself) and even, when speaking of Auschwitz, blames Lyotard for cynicism in this “matter.” He dismisses Lyotard’s attempt to bear witness to the singularity of Auschwitz, stating that Lyotard, due to his nonrecognition of always possible reciprocal relations between subjects, has to resort to a mythical-religious language of obligation that repeats and theoretically affirms the annihilation of individuals by sealing the death of the paradigm of human dignity and subjectivity. The blindness of Frank’s interpretation, its malicious claim that Lyotard’s argument would lead to an agreement with Faurisson’s statements concerning the nondemonstrability of the gas chambers and to the elevation of the silencing of the subject to the position of a norm, exhibits how the “common” legal and linguistic system does mute victims injustice. The differend between Jews and Nazis is not even noticed by this adherent of discursive ethics.4 For the 116

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Jews in the gas chambers were victims of a double bind imposed by a representable law: to have seen a gas chamber work is to be dead, unable to speak of the wrong one has suffered. In other words, the Jews suffered a damage that they could not even prove. This deprivation of the freedom to make one’s ideas or opinions public, of the right to bear witness to damage, this impossibility of bringing it to the knowledge of others or a tribunal, Lyotard calls a “tort.” And even if the victim attempts to bear witness to the wrong suffered, that victim comes up against the following argumentation: either the damage you are complaining about has not happened, and your evidence is false; or else it has happened and, since you can bear witness to it, it is not a wrong you have suffered, but only a damage, and your evidence is false again (D, 5). Lyotard’s careful examination of the differend does not cover the mark of Auschwitz, but Frank’s annihilating appropriation of Auschwitz— as simply another illustration for the universality of the cleverness of hermeneutics— does. Frank does so in constructing a homogeneous discourse shared by executioner and victim. Such discourse accords hegemony to the cognitive genre through its demand for a representable law and by its insistence that justice can be justified and that the law can become the referent of description, an object of cognition. Claiming that Auschwitz is a communicatively representable “reality,” Frank’s hermeneutics of individuality lays down its arms and hands itself over to consensus-theory by suppressing the differend in the theater of representation, in the notion of the “real” : But the “real” is not the rule by which all phrases can be judged and the appropriateness of a linkage be determined. Rather, the “real” is always the effect of a certain genre of linkage, the cognitive genre. “Reality,” that is, is an effect of consensus about the state of the referent as an object of cognition.5

Habermas would certainly subscribe to this view, so long as the possibility of achieving a universal consensus by means of more effective communication were guaranteed. Lyotard, however, insists upon the fact that communicative consensus has become impossible, that a consensus as to the real is always wagered against the differend. Bill Readings summarizes Lyotard’s arguments against the possibility of communicative consensus by drawing attention to the concept of “names” in The Differend (IL, 119-120). To take names as “rigid designators,” marking singularities which are identifiable as the same referent throughout different phrase universes, seems to comply with the claim of the cognitive genre that the state of the referent can in principle be fixed by universal consensus. But, according to Lyotard: the single particular referent of the name cannot in principle be exhaustively fixed or identified because names are not by themselves designators of reality. They are rigid, but empty. And even a list of all meanings that may be attached to a name does not establish the reality of a referent, but rather defers it indefinitely. Moreover, names are the loci of the clash of different genres of linking: descriptive, prescriptive and so on. Names are thus both singular and multiple, identical and different. (IL, 120)

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Names are not designations of “reality” ; they rather mark “reality” as the locus of differends. As loci of indeterminacy, they evoke differends by gathering heterogeneous genres of phrases. And is not this very refutation of the theater of representation, a refutation that presupposes that the meaning of a name can only be identical with an ostensible referent, shared by Frank’s better insights in What Is Neostructuralism? and Das individuelle Allgemeine?6 Does he not articulate his critique of referentialism by demonstrating that each attempt at establishing univocal meaning is always-already subverted by “sense” and “style” and thus always-already open to heterogeneous interpretations which can never be reduced— synthetically or harmoniously— to the demands of communicative consensus? And do not Frank’s invocations of “sense” and “style,” of “individuality” and “singularity” repeat the Lyotardian point that interpretations/names are not determined by reality but are the loci of a struggle as to what the world can be? And when Lyotard speaks in the face of Auschwitz of an impossible phrase, of a “feeling” disrupting the real— a feeling that something is trying to be said that cannot be said because of its incommensurability with any phrase that offers a communicatively generated knowledge of Auschwitz— does this not indicate feeling’s proximity to Frank’s “sense”?7 In The Limits of Understanding, Frank claims mainly to be interested in “argumentation.” “One may seriously assume,” he writes in an allegedly cautious way, “that Lyotard’s choice of the expression ‘argumentation’ is not simply a slip, although this term is not listed in the index” ( GV, 59). Again, Frank simply assumes that the word “argumentation” can easily be translated into Habermasian language, that is, into a theory of communication. But is this ease of translation really to be assumed, especially for a hermeneutics that seeks to save whatever is nonconformist, whatever is nonidentical, and whatever is different by working for the differentiation and multiplication of meaning? Even after having presented his sleight of hand as matter of fact, Frank’s procedure takes its inexorable course by reducing Lyotard’s thinking of the differend to a sometimes helpful and useful tool for modifying the harmonious rhetoric of Habermas’s consensus-theory. And the master’s corrections are followed by the inevitable attack. Frank thinks that he can criticize Lyotard for “firstly discussing only the differend between argumentations and then, all of a sudden or intentionally, gliding from the genre of arguing into the generality of all genres of discourse, thereby extending the differend into all genres of discourse” (GV, 25). Since “argumentation” in Lyotard is not taken primarily in its cognitive and communicative meaning, Frank should at least be responsive to an employment of the word “argumentation” that differs from the Habermasian standard. He himself pleads for a nonorthodox conception of argumentation when he ascribes validity claims even to affective statements (GV, 25). “Concluding” that Habermas and Lyotard are using the “same” cognitive and communicative conception of argumentation, Frank then intends to intercede between these two opponents. Or, strictly speaking, he wants to refute both in the name of a quite idealistic hermeneutics that serves “the communicative discourse as the final meta-language” (GV, 69). Once this logical hegemony has been established, Frank can proceed with his easy dismissal of Lyotard’s enterprise for simply logical reasons, that is, by pointing out that his thought slips permanently into performative self118

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contradictions— the most frightening charge in the contemporary debate between French postmodernism and German critical theory (GV, 61). Of course, in the case of being convicted before the German tribunal in Frankfurt (or Tubingen), one is in danger of being expelled from the intellectual community. The Jews were victims, deprived of life, of all liberties, of all authority to bear witness, of all possibility to phrase the wrongs they suffered because their idiolect was not representable before the (Christian) law. Every attempt to render the law representable, to provide justice with a real referent, inevitably subsumes terror and victimization under a sacrificial logic. When Lyotard argues with such an attempt, he cannot be dismissed as simply caught up in a “performative self-contradiction.” For his argumentation is based not on ground of negligence, but rather on the ground of doing as little injustice as possible by bearing witness to the differend. Philosophy, as Lyotard understands it, does not comply with this obligation by making the differend operative but by testifying to it without representing it, by doing justice to a dispute between radically incommensurable idiolects by uneasily translating the differend while still respecting the heterogeneity of phrases. Whether Lyotard’s (and philosophy’s) thinking “succeeds” in idiomatizing the differend is a different question, but one to which Frank does not even attempt a response. The supposedly nonviolent hermeneutic philosopher, Frank— who does not even begin to embark on the entirely different “style” of Lyotard’s thinking (to say nothing of respecting its rules)— practices and repeats the very exclusion and silencing the existence of which he denies (and which Lyotard tries to present in his text) by seeking to turn his version of hermeneutic philosophy into the metalanguage that grounds all other language-games. In this sense, by understanding any language-game as in principle translatable into the hermeneutic-communicative system, all differends are turned into litigations between opposing philosophies, resolvable before the tribunal of German hermeneutic philosophy. Believing that Lyotard’s thinking has been once and for all detained in the iron cage of performative self-contradiction, Frank now throws off the mask of discretion and of allegedly (and hermeneutically) standing in for Lyotard. From now on, Lyotard is outlawed and dismissed as “irrational.” Frank even identifies Lyotard’s thinking of the differend with relativism, that is, with the kind of social Darwinism typical of early liberalist society— “postmodernism and anti-modernism are tarred with the same brush” (GV, 20). Even more, Frank seems to confuse Lyotard’s insistence on indeterminate judgments with a refusal to judge, with a pluralist insistence that all judgments are equally valid. But, as Bill Readings points out, “the absence of criteria in reflective judgment is not a commitment to relativism, in which anything goes. Justice is, again, not a representable law; it is an idea” (IL, 125). According to Lyotard, judgment, being necessary and indeterminate, is the linking of phrases in respect to the idea of justice. This idea is never literally representable, never reducible to a norm. In this sense, justice remains always in the future, yet to be determined. Frank should be responsive to Lyotard’s patient transcription of certain Kantian ideas. Has he not himself developed his transcription of aesthetic judgment into a theory of interpretation in respect to the Kantian “aesthetic idea” ? And does not the condition of Frank’s aesthetic judgment— to respect the indeterminacy of meaning by refusing to 119

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let the hegemony of the cognitive genre determine the search for the linkage that can testify to the “sense”— bear close resemblance to the condition of Lyotard’s just judgment: to raise the difference, to respect the indeterminacy of justice by refusing to let the hegemony of one genre of phrases occlude the crisis of judgment that linking demands?8 If Frank’s version of hermeneutics is supposed to be read as a political resistance to commodity-producing society (in terms of individuality), the more so can Lyotard’s politics of the differend be read, only no longer in terms of individuality but in terms of phrases. If capitalism can be rephrased as the hegemony of the economic genre, with its rule of exchange and of equivalence, then political resistance condenses into the evocation of the nonexchangeable, the differend present to the economic linking of phrases as exchangeable. Thus, when Frank considers (at least in The Limits of Understanding) “argumentation,” “interpretation,” and “communication” to be exchangeable, translatable into the general equivalent of a communicatively tamed understanding, is it not rather his inexplicable adoption of Habermasian discursive ethics that embraces the economy of capitalism? When Frank calls Lyotard’s standing in for the victim of Auschwitz cynical, does he not, since he thinks himself to be in possession of the “better argument,” display paradigmatically discursive ethics’ metalinguistic pretension to the domination and mastery of other languagegames, a pretension that repeats the hegemonic and imperialist claim of the capitalist system? And does he not repeat these claims when he denounces Lyotard for permitting himself to proceed from equal and just opportunities for all genres of discourse, although he cannot legitimize them sufficiently (that is, in a universalist, not relativist way) before the law? And what is Frank himself doing when, after having subjected Lyotard’s thinking of the differend to the requirements of hermeneutics, he accuses Lyotard of not complying with the standard of the hermeneutic debate? By reducing Lyotard’s arguments to Habermas’s theory of communicative argument that uses validity claims, and by thus toning down the differend between Habermas and Lyotard to a mere litigation between two opposing philosophemes, Frank lays the ground for his refutation of Lyotard’s careful tracing of the differend and for his siding with Habermas’s discursive ethics. However, his intervention is indeed a Geistergesprach. The promise of Frank’s interpretation, to contribute to the “clarification” of Lyotard’s argumentation, is not kept; rather its surreptitious communicative transparency, Frank’s tribute to Habermas, silences Lyotard’s voice and demonstrates the limits of (communicative) understanding in a way entirely unthought-of by Frank. Frank reproaches Lyotard’s theorization of the differend for committing a performative contradiction. With this, he seems to embrace the Habermasian reliance on the critical leverage of the performative contradiction argument and one of the dominant regulative ideals of universal pragmatics: the value of performative consistency. For Habermas, contradictions exist mainly on the level of intersubjective communication. He uses the term “contradiction’ in particular to indicate competing claims to the truth by actors in the society, claims whose validity can be discursively weighed. In his recent critique of postmodern readings of “contradiction,” Habermas states again and again that there can be meaningful discussion about “contradiction” only in the light of 120

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consistency requirements, which lose their authority or are at least subordinated to other demands— of an aesthetic nature, for example— if logic loses its conventional primacy over rhetoric. Habermas “acknowledges” the achievements of the postmodern critique of reason, provided that they sharpen the awareness for the aporias of subject-philosophy; at the same time he reproaches postmodernism and its reading of modernity in terms of a critique of reason with having adopted the paradoxical position of a rational critique of reason, that is, with having ignored the aporia of self-referentiality. In view of a totalizing critique of reason, not only is the rational gain of modernity squandered, but no longer is it possible to subordinate the standards of critique— which are taken into consideration by the critique of society— to rational control. And Habermas is not willing to give postmodernism permission to escape from the paradox of a self-referential critique of reason by questioning from the outset the premise of Habermasian discursive ethics, the formal-pragmatic difference of logic and rhetoric. Thus he wants to determine a valid and sufficient criterion of demarcation between logic and rhetoric in order to dispute the general competence of rhetoric for all texts and to undo the postmodern primacy of rhetoric over logic. Habermas’s strategy of rehabilitating logic and thereby restoring and preserving the difference between the philosophical and the literary genre is here of little interest. Of significance, however, is the fact that Frank, by repeating Habermas’s verdict on postmodernism, suppresses the considerable differences between his hermeneutics of individuality (which, in his earlier texts, insisted on necessary remainders of the incommunicable irreducible to communicative procedures, on the impossibility of ever-saturated contexts for interpretations and of transparent communication, on the necessity of rethinking interpretation in terms of the Kantian reflective judgment) and Habermas’s theory of communicative action: differences concerning the status of the subject, differences concerning the status of reflection-theory, differences concerning the impossibility of distinguishing once and for all between philosophy and literature, logic and rhetoric.9 In addition, Frank’s saeriftcium intellectus seems to have adopted in return the tone of the Habermasian critique of postmodernism, most vehemently advanced in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.10 The often-recognized tutelary character of the Habermasian intervention is indeed to be remarked. And Habermas’s taking issue with postmodern philosophy demonstrates how “communicative reason,” whatever its merits, immunizes itself in this dispute and limits the risks of possible involvement in a far-reaching, open-ended debate by setting up the discussion so that from the very outset only a few places for the incommensurable are kept open and the obligation for every communicative a priori is renounced. This framing not only allows Habermas to exempt himself from the called for interest in rendering possible mutual understanding, but the responsibility for this renunciation is, in a sleight of hand, even attributed to his opponents. In other words, since postmodernism does not commit itself to the discursive duties of philosophy and science, there is no need for the critique of postmodernism to adhere to them. Thus the severe tone, the permanent effort to dismiss postmodern philosophers as irrationalists, involves the putting forth of a violent discourse rendering the others unrecognizable. For if the others were still recognizable, they could 121

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attempt to claim a dialogue. Thus, in order to prevent this claim to dialogue that can always generate unforeseeable and uncontrollable openings, it is better to have the final say, safeguarded by an uninterrupted monologue sealed off from any possible intervention. Frank, whose early texts might be considered excellent and emphatic mediations between the German and French philosophical theory-traditions, seems— with Habermas on his shoulders— to have abandoned his former position as interested interlocutor of French postmodernism. Such an abandonment, as Hans-Dieter Gondek points out, is tinged by a remarkably nationalistic undertone: As soon as Frank comes to the point the individuals recede into the background and the nations come to the fore. For this reason, Frank characterizes the philosophical relations between Germany and France as national destinies, thereby applying to them the figure of a chiasmic inversion (the creator of which is, according to Frank, Derrida).11

Frank describes this chiasm in the following way: In its great striving after integration German philosophy had not seen what invaded its institutions with the force of the repressed: the German critique of metaphysics which had been discredited as irrational, conquered our French neighboring country and proved itself over there to be resistant to the ethics of hermeneutic interrogation— and to ethics in general. From there it has returned as the dark (and denied) bottom side of our own philosophical culture. In 1986, during the Rencontresfrancogermaniques in Paris, Derrida spoke of a chiasm having reciprocally inverted the German and the French tradition. French clarte and French rationalism emigrated to Germany, whereas the critique of logocentrism and of the subject-centered and violent tendency of metaphysics and scientism found a home in France.12

Due to the assertion of this clear-cut migration movement, all differentiation is made indifferent. Frank even stipulates a project common to both Klages and postmodern philosophy, thus employing the language of Apel and Habermas, as totaler Vemunfiverdacht. For postmodernism draws this conclusion “from the diagnosis of those destructive consequences initiated by the enlightened disenchantment of the world that the program of enlightenment with its centering of reason— Klages designated this logocentrism and postmodernism has followed in his steps— has discredited itself.” And the immediately following passage specifies the alleged identity between Klages and postmodernism: “Still, what instance does legitimate this judgment? For Klages and for the postmodernists it is certainly not again reason.”13 A reading of those different texts (of Klages and the postmodernists) that attempts to pass through the transformation marked by Auschwitz, thus taking back the philosophical tradition from its easy hermeneutic appropriations, could demonstrate their radically different language-games, their different “styles,” and their heterogeneous use of the word “logocentrism.” Frank’s strategy of decontextualization is based on the hidden universalist premise that one can compare such concepts as names, that one can infer a conceptual identity from the “sameness” of names, and that everything can be made equivalent. However, as 122

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Lyotard’s resistance to this universal equivalence— this foreclosing of the Western philosophical tradition rendering it immune to the differend— exhibits, the genre of discourse in which names and concepts are inscribed is crucial, and the postmodern inscription of concepts and names is always an inscription (of displacement, disruption, opening) in a specific, discursively safeguarded, but ultimately dogmatic employment of concepts. Here is Frank’s final argument with regard to postmodernism: At the bottom a dialogue between the two schools of thought (hermeneutics and neostructuralism) has not taken place; my work has essentially consisted in construing such a dialogue, which is tantamount to inventing it. On this occasion, I have made very different but above all disappointing experiences.14

And this time Frank sees himself as fully entitled to reiterate publicly— no longer hidden away in the footnotes to his academicophilosophical texts but presented in Germany’s most influential newspaper— the verdict of fascism: Here, French critique of logocentrism (represented above all by Derrida, Deleuze, and Lyotard) meets oddly with theoretical positions a la Klages, Spengler, Baeumler, who we justly call proto-fascists— for fascism also sought to overcome the lack of intersubjectively recognizable obligations by means of a theory of power. Sovereign is the one who commands over the state of emergency. The new French theories have been taken in by many of our students like a message of salvation. I consider this phenomenon dangerous; for it seems to me that by pretending to be open to the French-International the younger Germans are eagerly absorbing their own irrational tradition which seems to have purged itself of the national slag as it has been in French hands. (KP)

Postmodernism’s danger consists in its subversion of dogmatically or communicatively conceived consensus over the uniformity, universality, and transparency of philosophical language. Such a communicatively enforced universal consensus orders a fundamental and unproblematic translatability of philosophy’s stakes— and thus, in the hands of a master hermeneutician, also the translatability of philosophical discourses written in different languages. Although his early texts could be read as stand-ins for the opposite, Frank now no longer responds to the task of translation. He simply assumes the possibility of complete and transparent transmissions disturbed not even by Auschwitz. According to postmodernism and Adorno (whom Frank quotes whenever a barrier against postmodernism is to be established), something always resists translation and transmission, something idiomatic calling for crossings-over— a singularity that must be valued because it is linked to an ethics of respect for the other. Such an ethics— due to the domination of communicative ethics, with its allegedly unproblematic continuation of business as usual— the ears of administered German philosophy have been unable or unwilling to hear. In the face of the French threat, Frank is no longer willing to accept that all transcendental signifieds that could guarantee a conveyance of identical meaning from one idiom to the other were vaporized in the Nazi crematoria and the cultural institutions and discourses that today make up their legacy. Thus his rage against French postmodernism, which supplements his own philosophical 123

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tradition with a different identity testifying to the scars of its legacy of destruction. He wants to close this gap (and the border between France and Germany), to cover it over, by relapsing into pure nationalism. And for this very reason, postmodernism acquires a critical function in Frank’s misreading of Lyotard and, more generally, in most contemporary German philosophy: postmodernism re-marks the limits and the “rage of understanding”15inherent in the capacity of communicative ethics to expose itself to the abyss called Auschwitz as well as its prompt readiness to repress this discontinuity by appealing to the transcendental warrant of the hermeneutic circle. In this way, the postmodern differend succumbs again to the old nation-world fictions of a nonproblematic self-identity.

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PART III AFTER POLITICS

© Hugh J. Silverm an.

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Chapter 8

INTERRUPTING LYOTARD: WHITHER THE WE? Debra B. Bergoffen

I. Telling Stories, Linking Phrases Throughout a number of essays, Jean-Frangois Lyotard tracked the meaning of modernity in order to discern the marks of its end.1 These works insist that modernity, the idea of a single historical process moving toward the goal of a “we,” i.e., a liberated, universal humanity, has been shattered by specific historical events. They tell us that no longer is it possible to situate ourselves within the promise of this We. My question, “Whither the We?” interrogates Lyotard’s accounts of this shattering. It asks whether Lyotard has properly understood the whence of the We and whether, if this understanding is flawed, he can direct us to its whither. For Lyotard the question of the We is tied to the question of the possibility of a universal history. This possibility concerns the project of modernity. It engages the question of humanism and cannot avoid the question of Auschwitz and the Jews. Whether Lyotard situates Auschwitz at the beginning of the list of names that traumatize the modem premise or whether he sets it out on its own, Auschwitz is crucial. Seeing this raises questions: Why Auschwitz? Does it break the We because of its ultimate sadism, in which case Auschwitz is a matter of “jews” not Jews, or does it break the We because it is the intended site of the final solution of the Jewish question/problem? However we put it, the question of the We is entangled with the question of the Holocaust. We cannot, I think, answer the one question, Whither the We? without confronting the other: What was Auschwitz? When it comes to these questions, however, the question of Auschwitz, the Holocaust, and the Jews, Lyotard’s thought is marked with a troubling undecidability. On the one side we have the essays “The Universal History and Cultural Differences” and “The Sign of History.” Both link the issues of narrative, history, and the possibility of the We to the historical wounds of Auschwitz, Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, and Paris-May 1968. The “Discussions or Phrasing ‘After Auschwitz’ ” essay, however, is different. Here Auschwitz is set apart, particularized. Which shall it be? Is Auschwitz the event that shatters the We? Or is it the first of a parcel of events that puncture modernity’s grand liberation narrative? 127

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This undecidability regarding Auschwitz is repeated in Lyotard’s discussion of the Jews. In Heidegger and “the jews” the particularity of the Jews is simultaneously recognized and obliterated as Lyotard moves from Jews— uppercase proper noun— to “jews” lowercase general noun, enclosed in quotes. Thus, while Lyotard makes it clear that Auschwitz and the Jews (“jews”) are necessarily implicated in the question of the We, his undecidability concerning Auschwitz and the Jews ( “jews”) troubles his postmodern reflections. One way of getting at this trouble is to turn to a Jew and a story he tells about the Jews. The Jew is Eli Wiesel. The story, called “It Was Sufficient,” is familiar to Lyotard (HJ, 37, 47). Originally it went like this: When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening the Jews it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted. Later when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezrich had occasion for the same reason to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: “Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer.” And again the miracle would be accomplished. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more would go into the forest and say, “I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient.” And again the miracle occurred.

According to Wiesel, after Auschwitz, it is necessary to add a fourth part to the story: Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: “I am unable to light the fire, and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient.” And it was sufficient.

After Auschwitz, the story continues, but the means of telling it, having been progressively impoverished by centuries of trauma, are now nearly depleted. The tale is nearly overcome by its silences and gaps. Julia Kristeva might well be commenting on the way the course of this story reflects the ways traumatic events damage our perceptual and representational systems when she writes: From now on the difficulty in naming . .. opens . . . onto illogicality and silence. . .. The actuality of the Second World War brutalized consciousness through an outburst of death and madness that no barrier . . . seemed able to contain.. . . It was experienced as an inescapable emergency . . . invisible, nonrepresentable.2

And later she writes: As if overtaxed or destroyed by too powerful a breaker, our symbolic means find themselves hollowed out, nearly wiped out, paralyzed. On the edge of silence, the word “nothing” emerges, a discrete defense in the face of so much disorder.. .. Never has a cataclysm been more apocalyptically outrageous; never has representation been assumed by so few symbolic means. (DM, 223)

Echoing Wiesel’s story of incremental loss, Lyotard describes the modem and postmodern worlds as constituted by crises. The crisis of the modem world, he tells us, is that “there no longer remains anything but space and 128

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time.” The crisis of the postmodern world is that “we no longer even have space and time left.”3 These losses demand memorials. But Lyotard warns us that “a simple process of remembering” will only perpetuate forgetfulness of the event. More troubling still, the desire to discover the origin of the crisis, to uncover what has been/become hidden, will only perpetuate the crime. To avoid these dangers, remembering, according to Lyotard, must tread the path of the Freudian working through: the will to remember must give way to a suspension of will that allows the event to register (7, 29-30). If Lyotard is correct, if it is no longer possible for us to experience history as a grand narrative of redemption, then the question of remembering is removed from the question of plot. If events of history have made it impossible to tell a meaningful story, or if incorporating the events of history into a meaningful whole willfully negates their proper meaning, then the question of memory becomes other than a question of recollection. If Wiesel is correct, the question of memory cannot be a question of accuracy, but is rather a question of recalling the proper story, or what is left of it, at the crucial moment. Wiesel presents us with a modem narrative absent particulars. Lyotard gives us a postmodern reading of the particulars. Between the gaps that separate the modem storyteller from the postmodern reader lies the bond of Auschwitz and the question of sufficiency. Guided by the tension between them and the after-Auschwitz that binds them, we may say this: we are required to remember. We are incapable of adequately remembering, but our memory, with all its spaces and gaps, must somehow be sufficient. Guided in this way, I am pursued by the following question: What constitutes a sufficient memory of Auschwitz, that unintelligible event which we can barely name and dare not forget? Were I to take my lead from Lyotard, I would ask Wiesel to justify his legitimation of the narrative. Today, however, I take my lead from Wiesel and ask whether Lyotard’s memory is sufficient. Guided by my gut, I must say that it is not. Not because it refuses the story of redemption, but because it gives the Nazis their victory. Lyotard’s memory is not sufficient because it effects a speculative final solution. Jews are either dissolved into “jews” or, when their particularity is recognized, it is understood from the outside. The Jew is identified as the hostage. The situation of the concentration camp is used to define the position of the Jews wherever they are found. Auschwitz too is either dissolved in its particularity by being bundled with the events Berlin, Budapest, Czechoslovakia, and Paris or called on in its particularity to profit the postmodern cause. Lest you hear this as the emotional overreaction of a female hysteric and an oversensitive Jew, let me move from the language of the gut to the quieter discourse of philosophy. Let me put it this way: in seeking the rules of legitimacy, the philosopher after Auschwitz will also have to answer the question of sufficiency. Whether our memory of the Jews and of Auschwitz is sufficient will, I think, ground or unground the legitimacy of our rules of discourse regarding the We.

II. “Universal History and Cultural Differences” “Universal History and Cultural Differences” is, according to Lyotard, a nonphilosophical discussion of the question of the We. This nonphilosophical discussion, however, is not without interest to philosophers, for the essay is guided 129

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by a most philosophical question: “Can we continue today to organize the multitude of events that come to us from the world . .. by subsuming them beneath the idea of a universal history of humanity?” (LR, 314). The answer is quickly and unphilosophically given: “no.” With this “no,” the status of the We is problematized. According to Lyotard, the We was both the subject and object of the idea of universal history. As subject, the We willed and effected the movement toward the goal of liberation; as object, the We was the product of the promised emancipation. The “no” that subverts the possibility of the idea of a universal history is not the result of a chain of reasonings. It is a response to the impact of Auschwitz, Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, and ParisMay 1968. Events, not reasons, and the Real, not logic, mandate the “no.” We have destroyed the We. Our actions refute the grand narratives of emancipation. The event that for Nietzsche was still on its way, has, Lyotard tells us, arrived. Announcements are no longer necessary. The work of mourning has begun. Freud tells us: “Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person or to the loss of some abstraction . . . such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal.” 4 Lyotard tells us that we must work through the loss of the modem We, and warns us that there are two ways of mourning. One way is the tyranny of Nazism, where: “Terror is no longer exercised in the name of freedom but in the name of ‘our’ satisfaction . . . the satisfaction of a we which is definitely restricted to singularity” (LR, 316). Lyotard calls this mourning an “unthinking dismissal of the modern subject and its parodic or cynical repetition (tyranny)” (LR, 317). In calling us to mourning, Lyotard recalls us to Freud. In calling us to Freud, Lyotard recalls us to the distinction Freud makes between mourning and melancholia. He alerts us to the possibility that what he identifies as a form of unthinking mourning may actually not be mourning at all, but a case of melancholia, a refusal of mourning. What Lyotard designates as the second way of mourning, what we, following Freud, would call mourning proper, begins with the recognition that we are finite. Lyotard tells us: “it would be a way of working through the status of the we and the question of the subject” (LR, 317). Melancholia is to mourning as neurosis is to dreaming. Both represent a diseased acting out of the psyche’s distress. In mourning, the task is set: we must accept the loss of a loved object. The work of mourning engages us in doing what we do not wish to do: give up a libidinal position and accept a substitute object. In melancholia, we refuse to get on with the business of mourning. We refuse to give up the original libidinal position and refuse to accept a substitute object. The violence of melancholia is the voice of this refusal. In its melancholic aberration, the forces of mourning assume sadistic, manic, and aggressive forms that “behave like an open wound drawing to itself cathectic energy from all sides” (SF, 162-163). At the individual level, the melancholic refusal to get on with the work of substitution expresses itself aggressively. The subject takes revenge on itself for its loss by effecting a split. Instead of a single subject subjected to a loss, there comes into being a split subject: an avenging subject and a rejected subject. Instead of letting go of its lost object, the subject attacks that part of itself that it splits off from itself. At the national level, if we begin by recognizing what many use as an apologetic for the Third Reich, i.e., that Germany after World War I was a demoralized, depressed nation, we can begin to see the ways in which the Nazi terror duplicates the machinations of melancholia. The 130

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German nation splits itself in two. In place of a single We affected by loss, there is now a rejected we-object and an avenging we-subject. Germany’s highly assimilated Jewish community becomes its other, and the melancholic and manic machinery can go to work. The Nazi explanation, that the Holocaust is an effort to eradicate the disease of difference, may now be seen as a conscious rationalization for the unconscious work of melancholic self-destruction and melancholic mania. Kristeva explains this inversion of melancholia into crime and links individual psychology with political ideology in ways which are particularly insightful here. In responding to the question: How does sadness, depression, melancholia become criminal, she writes: The seesawing between self and other, the projection on the self of the hatred against the other and vice versa, the turning against the other of self-deprecation . .. [here] crime is a defense reaction against depression: murdering the other protects against suicide. (DM, 196)

Though these comments are contextually apolitical (they are intended as an analysis of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment), Kristeva does not intend them to be politically irrelevant. In describing the mechanisms by which manic terrorism is a defense against suffering, she writes: “manic defenses set up against suffering . . . are contemptible, as the . . . terrorism or torture so frequent in current events do not cease reminding us” (DM, 196). In helping us understand what is at stake in the loss of the We, this unphilosophical “Universal History” essay helps us situate the relationship between the Fascist and postmodern responses to this loss. The melancholic/manic Nazi will not see what the postmodern mourner must accept: that the lost We of universal history threatens the subject’s integrity. As nonmelancholic mourners of the We, the postmodernist must recognize the finitude and contingencies of our existence. The postmodernist must admit that our actions do not produce results that match our desired ends, that these ends were fantasies, and that the future is not within our control. Clear as it is in distinguishing mourning from melancholia, this essay evinces the workings of a troubling undecidability. On the face of it, everything is decided. Auschwitz is part of a parcel. It belongs with the other traumas of history— Berlin, Budapest, Czechoslovakia, and Paris. The Nazis, however, are singled out. No attempt is made to link them with the communists or the French government. Only the Nazis are identified as melancholic terrorists. The Nazis are particularized; Auschwitz is not. But Auschwitz cannot be decoupled from the Nazis. In singling out the Nazi as a unique type of mourner, Lyotard shows us something about Auschwitz that he does not seem to see: it resists parceling. Everything is not decided.

III. “The Sign of History” Lyotard’s “The Sign of History” essay briefly retells the story of his “Universal History.” Read as a companion piece to “Universal History,” it takes us from a nonphilosophical reflection to a philosophical one, and from Freud to Lacan. 131

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Again we are asked to bundle Auschwitz with Berlin, Budapest, Czechoslovakia, and Paris in May 1968. These names that puncture the We are, Lyotard tells us, names of wounds, fissures, shocks. In Lacan’s words, they are the names of the unnameable lack, names of the Real that disrupt the symbolic’s attempt to legitimate the idealized We that satisfies the unconscious desires of omnipotence. The role of the philosopher, Lyotard tells us, is to register the Real. The philosopher, he says, sees that he is dealing with “a sort offission affecting the great discourses of modernity” (LR, 394). Seeing this, the Philosopher rejects the role of the one who tries to restore confidence in these discourses: The philosopher. . . is willing to echo the shock associated with these names of history [and] thus discovers or rediscovers that, whatever the genre involved, philosophical discourse obeys a fundamental rule, namely that it must be in search of a rule.. . . The philosopher discovers or rediscovers that his discourse takes place only in order to find out how it has the right to take place. (LR, 394)

Most of the “Sign” essay is an extended reflection on Kant’s notion of enthusiasm, examining the meanings of this enthusiasm both as a response to the French Revolution and as a ground for Kant’s modem notion of the We of historical progress. More than an exegesis of Kant, however, “The Sign of History” is a lesson in mourning. Lyotard tells us that, according to Kant, the enthusiasm publicly revealed on the occasion of the French Revolution is “an extreme sublime feeling” (LR, 407). As a sublime feeling, it is a sign that indicates a free causality and: “counts as proof for the phrase affirming progress: since spectating mankind must already have made progress in culture to be able to feel this feeling or . . . to make this sign by its way of thinking the Revolution” (LR, 407). Kant tells us that phenomena, such as the French Revolution, that legitimate the phrase “there is progress” cannot be forgotten and cannot be predicted. As signs, they are not part of a historical series. Lyotard, like Kant, sees himself confronted by signs. He too identifies his response to these signs as sublime. His signs however are Auschwitz, Budapest, etc., and not the French Revolution. These signs, Lyotard tells us, require that we “introduce a new type of sublime, more paradoxical than that of enthusiasm” (LR, 409) They do not, however, require us to abandon the ideal of progress because: however negative the signs to which most of the proper names of our political his-

tory give rise, we should nevertheless have to judge them as if they proved that this history had moved on a step in its progress.. .. This step would consist in the fact that it is not only the Idea of a single purpose which would be pointed to in our feeling, but already the Idea that this purpose consists in the formation and free explo-

ration of Ideas in the plural, the Idea that this end is the beginning of the infinity of heterogeneousfinalities. Everything that fails to satisfy this fission of the single purpose, everything that presents itself as the realization of a single purpose . . . is felt not to be up to .. . not akin to . .. the infinite capacity of phrases given in the feeling aroused by this fission. (LR, 409)

Here is a clear case of substitutions: Lyotard for Kant; narratives of particular purposes for the narrative of universal history. The fission of the single pur132

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pose is recognized. The idea of progress is preserved. The sublime of enthusiasm is exchanged for the sublime of the more paradoxical unnamed X. This is no melancholia; this is the work of mourning. But is this mourning sufficient? Since this is a question of recording our feelings— of Kant’s feeling of enthusiasm, of Lyotard’s feeling of a more paradoxical unnamed X—perhaps it is appropriate to register mine: revulsion. This revulsion, Auschwitz, does not lead me to the “as if” of Kant’s Idea of history; it does not allow for Lyotard’s postmodern possibility. Revulsion destroys the mourner’s substitution. Indeed, given Lyotard’s description of the sublime— as a mixture of pleasure and pain, experienced when “confronted with objects that are too big according to their magnitude or too violent according to their power the mind experiences its own limitations” 5— I hesitate to attribute sublimity to Auschwitz. Surely it qualifies on the basis of the criteria of violence. But, a mixture of pleasure and pain is not the paradox of Auschwitz. Things have a way of getting more and more tangled. Why follow Kant here? Why knot the discourse of aesthetics with the languages of politics and ethics? What profit is there here for the question of the We? The profit seems marginal at best when Lyotard speaks of the sublime as the pleasure of the pain of the tension felt in our failure to represent the absolute (I, 126). This sadist position is not hospitable to the work of mourning. But this is not Lyotard’s only word on the sublime. In other places possibilities seem to open up, times when, instead of describing the sublime as a feeling of “almost neurotic . . . delight or negative pleasure” (1, 84), Lyotard speaks of the sublime as the anguished task of “alluding to an unrepresentable with nothing edifying about it, but which is inscribed in the infinity of the transformation of realities” (7, 128). Here we are getting closer to Auschwitz. Lyotard provides for a possible inscription of Auschwitz in the sublime when he describes the sublime as: “passibility to lack . . . the beautiful forms with their destination, our destiny ... are missing and the sublime includes this sort of pain due to the finitude of flesh, this ontological melancholy” (7, 118). Much depends on how we confront this ontological melancholy, on how we see it intersecting with the power of freedom that Lyotard insists is crucial to the experience of the sublime. After Auschwitz, this freedom cannot be figured according to Kant’s Enlightenment hopes even in Lyotard’s version. After Auschwitz, the freedom experienced as sublime is closer to the paradoxes of the excesses of Bataille. If the only signs confronting us were the signs of Berlin, Budapest, Czechoslovakia, and Paris in May 1968, Lyotard’s mourning would be sufficient. These signs can substitute for the French Revolution. All fissured the given in the name of freedom. Berlin, Budapest, Czechoslovakia, and Paris in May 1968 can be read as signs of the liberation of the plural from the domination of the one. They can substitute for the promise of universal emancipation. Auschwitz cannot. Auschwitz ruptures what these other signs leave intact. Its object is nothing other than the void of the Real which resists the work of mourning. Perhaps we are doomed to melancholia.

IV. “Phrasing After Auschwitz” “Phrasing after Auschwitz” seems to lead to this conclusion. Here Auschwitz stands alone. There is no talk of progress and no reference to substitutions. The 133

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question Lyotard puts is simple, stark: What era begins and ends with Auschwitz? His answer is precise, piercing. Auschwitz, he says, designates “an experience of language which brings speculative discourse to a halt. . . . It designates what has no name in speculation . . . and what for speculation remains anonymous” (LR, 364). “Anonymous,” a strange word. Surely there is nothing anonymous about Auschwitz. The name, the site, the victims, the murderers, they are concrete, specific, known. These specificities, however, are unusable. They cannot be put into speculative discourse, for speculation moves to results, and Auschwitz, Lyotard insists, produces no results. Auschwitz, he says, is “a nameless name ... because the requirement of a result is therein disappointed and driven to despair and because speculation does not succeed in deriving a profit from it” (LR, 364). No profit. They died in vain. That is the revulsion of Auschwitz. Following Lyotard’s requirement, we cannot, without violating the anonymity of Auschwitz, use the results from the Nazi experiments, use our indignation to demand reparations or justice, or use philosophy to announce “the beginning of the infinity of heterogeneous finalities” (LR, 409). Bundle Auschwitz up and it drops out. Stand Auschwitz on its own and new tensions surface: the tension between respecting its anonymity and getting on with the work of mourning; the tension of sufficiently recognizing what this name destroys in order to find a substitute object that is not a result. It depends on properly understanding what would count as a result. It depends on the substitute object not appearing to be preferable to the one lost. It depends on what to make of the relationship between the way in which the postmodern We is described in the bookend “Universal History” and “Sign” essays and the status of the We in the “Phrasing” essay. In the bookend essays, the postmodern We signals an end to the domination of the one and a flourishing of contesting pluralities. Here we seem to reap a profit. In the “Phrasing” essay, the postmodern We marks the end of commensurability between a two phrase universe. Here, Lyotard insists, no profit is made. In response to Derrida’s questions after the “Phrasing” essay, Lyotard explains that far from breaking with dialectics, he sees himself as confronting the necessity and enigma of “One must make links” in the formula “One must make links after Auschwitz, but without speculative results” (LR, 388). Taking speculative results to mean profit, we are back to the rule: No profit from Auschwitz. In recognizing our loss and making our substitutions, we cannot claim to have made a gain. The new object cannot present itself to us as preferable to the lost one. Its status as a necessary substitute must remain visible. It cannot be used to accommodate our nostalgia. Now it depends on correctly identifying what is lost. According to Lyotard, what was lost at Auschwitz and what we had before Auschwitz was the We of a prescriptive universe. This is the world of the beautiful, free death where one accepts the command to die as one’s own. Auschwitz destroys this We and leaves in its place a new, nonethical We. After Auschwitz we find ourselves in a two-phrase universe where the community of the one who commands is incommensurate with the community of the one taken hostage by the command (LR, 376-377). Properly marked, “Auschwitz is an abhorrent model for this incommensurability” (LR, 385). To note this mark is not to derive a speculative result from Auschwitz, for 134

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by a speculative result, Lyotard does not mean any result but a dialectical result, a result that obliterates otherness. In refusing the dialectical result, Lyotard refuses to perpetuate Hegel’s “anthropological murder” of the Jews (LR, 377). He will not repudiate the thought of the absolutely other. His nonspeculative result will perpetuate otherness. It will make the otherness of the Jews available to any/everyone consigned to or willing to become a part of the community of the hostage. The Jew as other becomes the otherness of the “jews.” Given Lyotard’s definition of profit, there is no profit in this transposition. But Lyotard’s definition hides the profit of his thinking. A peculiar profit perhaps, but a profit nonetheless. If the meaningful, beautiful death of the onephrase universe is foreclosed by Auschwitz, the two-phrase universe offers the possibility of another meaningful death: the death of the martyr.

V. Heidegger and “the jews” If we link the “Phrasing” essay with Heidegger and “the jews,” we begin to see what is happening. One of the points of Heidegger and “the jews” is to establish that though Jews are not necessarily “jews,” they are afflicted with the condition of being hostages, the defining condition of “jews” (HJ, 3). As Jews became a people by being “taken hostage by a voice that does not tell it anything save that it (this voice) is and that representations and naming of it are forbidden and that it, this people only needs to listen to its tone” anyone who resists the foundational thinking of the West may count themselves a “jew” (HJ, 21-22). If one becomes a Jew by being taken hostage by a voice that refuses the representations that ground foundational thinking, so the reasoning seems to go, then one can by resisting foundational thinking become a “jew.” As the Jew is held hostage to the voice, the “jew” is the hostage of the Real. The scandal of Auschwitz is not so much the scandal of otherness as it is the scandal of particularity. The modern, bureaucratized, technological antiSemitism of the Third Reich perpetuates the ancient anti-Semitic project of eradicating this particular instance of otherness, not the project of attacking otherness per se. The Gulag was aimed at the other. Auschwitz targeted the Jews. Lifted from its particularity, Auschwitz can be seen as the name of anonymity, incommensurability, otherness and “jews.” The victims of Auschwitz, as “jews,” may then be seen as part of the community of resistance to foundational thinking and may, as members of this incommensurable community, be granted a martyr’s death. And we as postmodern philosophers may also see ourselves as members of this same “jewish” community and we may, as members of this same resistance movement, console ourselves with the thought of a meaningful martyr’s death. There it is. The peculiar profit of Auschwitz. A meaningful death for all of us resisters. Closer to home, for Lyotard at least, there is the profit of being French. Heidegger and “the jews” makes it clear: “it was France that found itself in charge of thinking the immemorial” (HJ, 5). The French, or at least those French who are postmodernists, are today’s “jews.” As “jews,” they have no need to examine the relation between the Vichy government, the French, and Auschwitz. Lyotard’s insistence that no profit be made from Auschwitz places him in 135

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line with Kant, who also refused the utilitarian logic of the sacrifice. Kant, still in the presence of the We, argued against grounding the ethical in the common good. Lyotard, present to the dispersal of the humanist We, argues against the morality of resurrecting this We and its attendant, sacrificial, common cause. He seems to miss, however, the ways in which his willingness to collapse the distinction between Jews and “jews” initiates (perpetuates?) a sacrificial logic of its own. On Lyotard’s reading, Jews are given two choices. They may insist on their particularity, in which case they are corralled into being for and amongst themselves what they were at Auschwitz: hostages. Or they may accept their universal marginality, in which case they are absorbed into the category “jews.” Either choice effects a speculative Final Solution. The first allows the concentration camp to establish the meaning of Jewish identity. The second destroys the identity outright.

VI. Auschwitz, Jews, “jews,” “Jew” Working through the mark of Auschwitz requires at least two things: one, that we not forget the specificity of the Jews, and two, that we not forget the difference between the lived meaning of Judaism and its anti-Semitic parody. To understand Auschwitz we need to understand the particularity of Judaism and the peculiarities of anti-Semitism. As I see it, Lyotard misses the particularity of Judaism in two ways: one, by eliminating its singularity; two, by reducing the complexity of its singularity. In reducing the Jew to the hostage, he does not come near the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here we discover the difference between the two phrase universe of Auschwitz and the otherness of God for Judaism. This inattentiveness does not make Lyotard an anti-Semite. It does, however, allow him to avoid the question of anti-Semitism: Why this particular other? In its particularity, this question asks: Who is the Jew for the Christian? More abstractly, the question is: Who is the Jew for the We? To the first question, we might take a hint from Kristeva and see the Jew as the refused point of origin. We might see that the otherness of the Jew is, for the Christian West, analogous to the otherness of the mother, and that the refusal of the one is comparable to the refusal of the other. Beginning in this way, we might follow Kristeva— who links the Mother, the Thing, and mourning. We might explore the ways in which the National Socialism of the Third Reich is a manic perversion of the mourning for the lost origin that all speaking beings must work through. We might wonder if Western antiSemitism, acted out in the extreme of the Holocaust, speaks to the fear of being overwhelmed by the origin, the Mother, the Thing. The idea that the Jew functions for the anti-Semite as a representation of the Thing as Mother-origin is suggested by the ways in which the anti-Semite is drawn to the “mystery” of the Jew and repulsed by the “obscenity” of the Jew. On this account, anti-Semitism surfaces as one of the marks of the fragility of the hold of the symbolic on the human psyche (DM, 13-14, 41-42, 45-47,145,152,199). To begin to address the second question, Who is the Jew for the We? we might turn to the work of Slavoj Zizek. The “Jew” of anti-Semitism, according to Zizek, is an organizational device that produces an optical illusion of narrative continuity and consistence. With the positing of this “Jew” : 136

BERGOFFEN an ideological edifice gains consistency from organizing its heterogeneous “raw” material into a coherent narrative. The entity called “Jew” is a device enabling us to unify into a single large narrative the experiences of economic crisis, moral decadence, and loss of values, political frustration, and national humiliation, and so on.6

The “Jew,” in other words, is the other that produces the We. Without the “Jew” there is no grand narrative, only heterogeneous raw material. Is the “Jew,” then, necessary for the We of humanism and modernity? If Zizek does not go so far as to make the anti-Semite and the humanist blood relations, he does show us the way in which the “Jew” is the humanist temptation. If the “Jew” is the other that produces the We narrative, the logic of sacrifice guarantees its continuity. It assures us that there is an Other that grounds the community. It guarantees that the desire of the Other is known and satisfiable. The narrative community is thus indebted to two others: the hidden “Jew” other that threads it together and the omnipresent, recognized Other whose fulfilled desire guarantees its presence. These others are not unrelated. As the “Jew” other conceals the heterogeneity of the We, the logic of sacrifice “conceals the abyss of the [symbolized] Other’s desire, more precisely it conceals the Other’s lack, inconsistency, inexistence that transpires in this desire. Sacrifice is a guarantee that the Other exists: that the Other can be appeased by means of the sacrifice.”7 The “sacrificial logic of the Holocaust” is a psychoanalytic logic of inversion, desire, and negation (EY, 55). The “Jew” as the other who grounds the community is also the other who must be sacrificed to the desire of the Other. The “Jew” is the fantasy that a We is possible, that the abyss of desire can be converted into the specificity of the demand, and that “sacrifice pays” (EY, 74). Like all logic of the unconscious, sacrificial logic is paradoxical. Its paradox, Zizek tells us, is most clearly expressed in the anti-Semitic concept of the “Jew,” where: The Nazi has to sacrifice the Jew in order to maintain the illusion that it is only the “Jewish plot” which prevents the establishment... of society as a harmonious whole. [But] . .. what appears as the hindrance to society’s full identity with itself is actually its positive condition: by transposing onto the Jew the role of the foreign body which introduces into the social organism disintegration and antagonism the fantasy image of society qua consistent, harmonious whole is rendered possible. {EY, 89-90)

For the anti-Semite, then, the sacrifice pays, and the Holocaust is, in Lacan’s words, “a gift of reconciliation” (EY, 89-90). Psychoanalysis, Zizek tells us, refuses this gift. It resists the temptation of the sacrifice. Psychoanalysis insists on the distinction between demand and desire. It speaks of the Other as the lack that drives desire and ungrounds all its objects. The Other of psychoanalysis does not hold things together; it rips them apart. No sacrifice can appease this Other’s desire. Sacrificial logic and the We it claims to preserve find no place in the logic of psychoanalysis, which, like the logic of Judaism, is grounded somewhere else. Perhaps it is no accident that psychoanalysis was founded by a Jew. If psychoanalysis helps us understand the function of the “Jew” in the rite of sacrifice, it cannot, in its analyses of the workings of the unconsciousness, establish the ongoing link between the Other, the sacrificial victim, and the 137

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Jew. For this understanding we need to attend to the specificity of the Jew. By this attention Zizek discovers that for all its fantasy thinking, Western antiSemitism is not arbitrary in its choice of victims. The Jew, and not the antiSemite, first marks the Jew as other. Jews, by refusing the logic of sacrifice and grounding themselves in another logic, become for the communities of sacrifice a genuine threat. According to Zizek (following Rene Girard’s Job: The Victim of His People),8 the ethical revolution of Judaism is the revolution of Job, the subject who refuses the allocated role of the victim. The community insists on the logic of Job’s calamities. He must be guilty. He must be a legitimate victim. Job protests. He is not guilty. This sacrifice has no reason. He is a scapegoat without cause. Zizek does not see Judaism as justifying Job but as insisting that we hear him, for in hearing him we discover that the truth lies neither in the social perspective that demands the sacrifice nor in the protest of the victim’s perspective. Truth lies in the confrontation of these perspectives and their challenge to each other. Though looking at Judaism through Job is a looking from within, there is another story of sacrifice to be considered if we are concerned with understanding Judaism as posing a challenge to sacrificial logic: the story of Abraham and Isaac. Here too we are in the presence of the terror of the Real and the unfathomableness of the Other’s desire. Here, however, the sacrifice is refused rather than reversed. No victim protest stills the Other’s hand. Abraham does not question God. Isaac barely questions his father. Sarah is never consulted. We do not know what she would say. Less clear than Job regarding the proper response to the sacrificial demand, the story of Abraham and Isaac may be more clear than Job in challenging the logic of sacrifice. In Job, the sacrifice pays. God profits. In Abraham and Isaac, the asked for sacrifice cannot pay. No profit can come from the slaughter of Isaac. Without him the promise to make Israel a great nation comes undone. If it is more ambiguous than Job regarding the question of the victim and sacrifice, however, the story of Abraham and Isaac may more clearly mark the Jewish people. Haim Gouri, a contemporary Israeli poet, shows us this mark in his poem “Heritage” : The ram came last of all. And Abraham did not know that it came to answer the boy’s question—first of his strength when his day was on the wane. The old man raised his head. Seeing that it was no dream and that the angel stood there— the knife slipped from his hand. The boy, released from his bonds, saw his father’s back. Isaac, as the story goes, was not sacrificed. He lived for many years, saw what pleasure life had to offer; until his eyesight dimmed. 138

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But he bequeathed that hour to his offspring. They are bom with a knife in their hearts. The Holocaust demands that we work through the Jewish question. Whether it forces us to hear the victim’s protest, to confront the logic of sacrifice, or to remember that at Auschwitz they died in vain, this question will determine whether our memories of this event without profit are sufficient to set us on the course of mourning as we ask, Whither, to where, to what place, the We?

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Chapter 9

LYOTARD, HEIDEGGER, AND “THE JEWS” James R. Watson

Its seductive pull is practically instantaneous, even faster and better than a Polaroid on those memorial festive occasions when kin and kinsfolk gather together. Within the framing of the thirty-second delay from “point-and-shoot” to recognition, a reiteration of the indubitability of the cogito in the mirror of reflection prepares for the celebration of the quest for certainty about to be realized in a, so to speak, Cartesian flash— “Yes, that’s it!” Completion, Identity and Self-Representation recognized and firmly embraced by all participants. Huddled around the fetish, a sensus communis opens its doors to all properly prepared for the feast of communion. Afterwards, still giddy in the seductive flow of exchanging identicals, real and imagined, the sensus communis imperceptibly fades into the time and space of writing its memoirs, a dimensionality different from the fixed time in which accounts are settled “for good.” Still, almost always still, the books are put in order, even when good arrangements compose differing accounts. Spawned by the fetish, the emerging class of auditors reiterates the closed loop. “Hear, O Hear Ye, One and All,” et cetera. The time of the accountants comes to extinguish the time of writing. Unless, that is, the fetish effect is deranged or confounded, utterly mixed by something alien to the sensus communis. Alas, Babylon, the sensus multitudo and its “Balal effect” 1on all good orders. The moment of truth has its bad memories. And the righteous pursue not the truth but its bad memories. Yet, without bad memories, the fetish itself has no appeal. Had the warriors-tumed-philosophers succeeded in eradicating truth’s bad memories, modem production would be what Baudrillard thinks it is— a pure simulacrum.2Without the Balal effect, the city of man would have already become the city of G-d. For those with ears to hear after Auschwitz: “Only a God can save us now.” The Seinsfrage was always-already in every dream of redemption, in all the private moments of the faithful of the sensus communis. “Yes, that it!” announces the moment of truth and its recognition, accompanied by the happy ringing-in and ringing-with the eradication of noisy opaque texts and de-ranging thoughts. There is something unforgettable about this effect, something that demands a sharing of its seduction, a duplication, or more precisely, a certain duplicity. For philosophers, it is what I would like to call, in memory of Heidegger, the “Gelassenheit effect,” but also to recall the 140

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bad memory of releasement from the enigmatic character of the phenomenal world. Auschwitz means the end of bad memories for the sensus communis. For Heidegger, Gelassenheit names the appropriation of human being in Being’s own event— the truth of Being— such that human being is released to its own essence.3 Thus appropriated, confused, inauthentic life is given neither subjective nor pragmatic ontic measure but released instead (in)to the appropriation of Being and human being. True (i.e., measureless) measure is the accomplishment of Gelassenheit. For those of us with only a worldly measured measure, Gelassenheit can be experienced only as a vicarious (inauthentic) effect. Worldly we are, but not without histories and the coercions of a Christianized and internalized cultural apparatus in various yet hardly secularized impulses. Heidegger’s writings are not without effect; they have a voice heard before, when we were young. This familiar, sometimes gentle, but always persistent and indelible tonality gives certain texts “ihre Wirkung in die Feme. ”4 To think with Heidegger— andenken— is a trip, a return to the days when our mothers were just beginning to give up on us as possible objects of fulfillment, to the days when we began, unwillingly and unknowingly, our subjection to the law of the Father. The seduction of Heidegger’s Ereignis and Gelassenheit texts has to do with how they “retrieve” desire before its worldly subjection. The shift from confused, inauthentic absorption and subjection to law in everyday life, to “Yes, that’s it,” is sudden, discontinuous, with the extricating feel of conversion. Desiring this desire of the primordial unity of thought and Being, we who are about to be converted are warned that philosophy became literature in its metaphysical retreat/expulsion from Being’s disclosure. Suddenly, however, the womb of Being opens for the few called to “essential thinking.” The production of the Gelassenheit effect is the desired outcome of writings about philosophers of higher rank by philosophers who believe they also belong to this higher order. Such writings portend mediations between difficult texts and readers of lesser abilities in and through explanations that unravel for the latter the complexity of the former, thus providing a representational stage for simpler reenactments and recognitions. Scholarly mediations, in this sense, are representations that take hold of audiences that have been taught to believe in and through the naturalized referentiality of certain word-images made easy by master mediators. For those outside the circle of revelation, the Gelassenheit effect arrives in derivative form as a kind of seduction into the apparent essentiality staged by such mediations. The derivative Gelassenheit effect is a product of what Plato called the noble lie.5 The power of the mythos is the power to redirect desire away from law toward a unity beyond law. The firmer one’s grasp of this transcendence, the more one is subject to the tyrannical rule of the apprehending codes ruling it. Supposedly coming from beyond, the future, this redirecting of desire is regressive and in flight from actual conditions of unfreedom. The law says we should honor our mothers and fathers and not commit murder. Intervening at a decisive juncture in the formation of desire, the law belies primordial unities. Is it possible, then, to turn a lawbreaker’s dissimulating Kehre into “after the disclosures” lapses of silence and nonthought? Such, it seems, is the reconstructive effort of Lyotard’s Heidegger et “lesjuifs” (Heidegger and uthe jews”) It is as if there were at least one revelation coming from the neighborhood of Auschwitz and the silence of Heidegger’s (non)thought. For 141

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all of their criticisms and caveats, Lyotard’s reconstructive stagings dramatize the persistent theme that “we” (jews) cannot go on after Auschwitz without “great” thinkers. The instantiation of this theme, together with its Gelassenheit effect, redoubles Heidegger’s political “mistakes” at the same time that it seductively contradicts Lyotard’s prohibition of forgetting the Forgotten. The stagings of Heidegger et “lesjuifs” generate a figuration— Heidegger and jews— that links two factually contradictory references, approaching thus what Berel Lang has called the distinctive Nazi figure of speech— “the figurative lie.”6 Did Heidegger set the stage for this scandalous appropriation? For 1935 was not the first time Heidegger separated and opposed his thinking from that of Jews, but it was perhaps one of the more popular arenas of such a staging. Heidegger repeatedly told us that philosophy is only for the few against the many, the “dogs and donkeys,” whose idle chatter and forgetfulness fail to maintain the order of rank and domination implicit in Being.7 He also made it quite clear that American-speakers belong to the order of the many who cannot but fail to misinterpret the true significance of the pre-Socratic fragments. Fortunately for us philosophical simpletons, Heidegger’s 1935 lectures on metaphysics set up a representational stage for rescuing these fragments from all too common misapprehensions.

I. The Representational Stage of Heidegger’s “Appropriations” 1935: the great thinker on stage, apparently self-directed, reading his text “An Introduction to Philosophy.”

With the ease of a veritable virtuoso, Heidegger shows us that Heraclitus is saying the same as Parmenides: “Being and Thinking are the Same.” Retrieving Heraclitus’ fragments from their desecration by the many— the lower primates— how captivating a performance! Until, that is, Heidegger moves, almost effortlessly, from his masterful retrieval of the fragments and their true significance to a discussion of the notion of logos in the New Testament. Heidegger tells us that this notion is of the: Jewish philosophy of religion developed by Philo, whose doctrine of creation attributes to the logos the function of mesites, the mediator. How so? Because in the Greek

translation of the Old Testament (Septuagint) logos signifies the word, and what is more, the “word” in the definite meaning of command and commandment; hoi deka logoi signifies keryx, the angelos, the herald, the messenger, who hands down commands and commandments; logos tou staurou is the word of the cross. The proclamation of the cross is Christ himself; he is the logos of redemption, of eternal life,

logos zoes. A whole world separates all this from Heraclitus. ( IM , 133-134)

At this point, for some of us, the representational spell is broken. “No, that’s not it!” If a whole world separates the Septuagint notion of logos from that of Heraclitus and Parmenides, why does Heidegger, who otherwise seems to have a meticulous sense of essential differences and samenesses, fail to discuss the separation that existed and still exists between Judaism and the Septuagint? For the few of us who have now fallen out of the representational staging of these lectures, a kind of unintentional Brechtean Umfanktionierung has occurred. 142

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Instead of the great thinker on stage, we see a setup, a transformation of the means of production, by a reactionary intellectual led by forces he does not understand or even recognize as directing his performance. In the usual Christian way of using Jews to its own advantage, Heidegger has bypassed Philo’s tradition by positioning him at the center of the decline from the great Greek beginning. In one paragraph, Philo the Jew becomes one of Heidegger’s major pivots for the declension of Being. Heidegger, we should note here, will never mention Philo again. But it is not the last time he will remain silent about dead Jews. In a few words his perhaps unintended message became clear: assimilate and be blamed or remain unassimilated and accept whatever may be to come in the wake of the rebirth of German idealism.

II. The Stage of Anti-Representation Afterwards: the captivated audience, the “That’s it” crowd departs for dinner. The others, the “That’s not it!” minority group retires to a small coffeehouse. The first eat well while the second become increasingly apprehensive about big appetites after such a performance.

Compared with the majority eating well and drinking deeply of the truth of Being, the minority group is less homogeneous— a motley crew. Among the latter, however, are those who will discover, in 1935, their state-sponsored affiliation with the Jew who prepared the way for the (Gentile, New Church) Christian message of redemption. Despite their denials of Heidegger’s (and the State’s) links, they find themselves duplicitously implicated in texts whose true significance they cannot grasp. Jews can be read but they themselves cannot read what they have written. Among these “semiterates,” 8 there are “jews” lacking a “J” as the result of a precisely focused State. Juden found themselves the object of a dis-missal which would begin as a state-sponsored and organized process of de-missing (humbling), de-mitting (sending away), and then, in 1941, de-mising (terminating). In 1935, “J u d e n not “l e s j u i f s were marked and under way. The state has powerful identification procedures and equally powerful complementary devices of identificational recruitment. The Oedipal state signifies with recruited subjects standing in for it—Deleuze and Guattari call this “Oedipal triangulation.” 9 Authorized signifying subjects are thus representational products of a power speaking in and through them. Heidegger never understood this about “himself.” He never understood that “Jeder Mensch steht unter seiner Himmelskugel” (Every human being stands beneath his own dome of heaven).10 Heidegger’s discourse on Oedipalized Being will differ from Freud’s discourse in that Heidegger’s will never undergo the mutation of passing through the enigmatic oscillation of its representations. Instead, with each and every turn of his thought and return to the text, the figured-figuring Heidegger will, again and again, appeal to the place of the unsignifiable, the facelessness and limit of all representation and theory.11 Heidegger will always recover, always represent, name, and mark the proper. And he will continue these recoveries/appropriations even after the disclosures of the death camps. When Heidegger represents what every representation must miss, he does so 143

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as an Oedipal representative of a state that will refuse recognition to those bearing testimony to the Forgotten. Heidegger stands in for Jnden by the illusionary power of displacing the Forgotten onto the stage of (bad) representation. Yes, that’s it!

III. Writing the Same on the Academic Stage Heidegger’s 1935 account of Germany’s failure to remain strong enough for German idealism connects that weakness with the confluence of Jewish philosophy of religion, Latin translations of key Greek philosophical expressions, Germany’s precarious central position surrounded by dangerous neighbors, and the insidious effects of a Christianized school philosophy. Aiming at a retrieval of the early Greek experience of Being (phusis/logos), Heidegger reintegrates the same Christianized philosophy he holds partially responsible for Germany’s present weakness. Is there at work in Heidegger’s thought, then, a cultural apparatus which he failed both to recognize and to acknowledge? Did Heidegger understand that when we write, we are writing with instruments that have been writing us much longer than we have been writing? The return to metaphysical/representational thinking under freshly restored sensory codes of recognizability is not unusual, then, even for those few who hold the rank of philosopher. Already, in 1935, the “looking glass” [der Spiegel] is reflecting the persona of self-hatred pointing at and projected upon the crudely crafted figure of the Juden. It is a looking-glass realism that detests what it sees, turning instead to the more compelling telephonic call of conscience and its orders. How strange, then, that the man who taught us that representational thinking was not yet sufficiently radical should bypass Jews whenever ontic looking glasses and other noiseless transmission devices were offered for the task of promoting his essential thinking. Or does fundamental thought transform these devices when it uses them using it for its “own” radical retrievals of what was previously and necessarily left unsaid? If thinking and Being are the same, and if Being is always the Being of beings, must not the writing of the experience of Being signify the home of Being homelessly in the self-withdrawing draw of that writing? Or can the retrieval of essentials be written appropriately— at least properly for those who fit into this privatized dwelling called essential language? Does writing appropriate or disperse language— the house of Being? Or both, such that the preservation of the home of Being requires guardians who write differently from those casting aspersions on what is essential? The difficulties of Heidegger’s writings are not apart from the difficulties of his political involvements. Nor are his difficulties apart from ours when we read him and write about his in ours. Heidegger’s involvements are also ours, albeit differently configured and configuring. If fascism and Nazism, and Auschwitz in particular, expressed, in Rubinstein’s words, “some of the most significant political, moral, religious and demographic tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century,” 12 we must ask if the silence of great philosophers in the wake of this unprecedented violence also expresses something equally significant about that style of thinking called philosophy. The dif144

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ficult question, therefore, concerns not only what is expressed, but who is capable of offering a response. Gan the question of thought’s responsibility concerning the unthinkable injustice of Auschwitz be posed philosophically after Auschwitz? Is philosophy, the art of radical questioning, today hostage to a questioning so radical it can no longer position itself outside the abyss of the questioning itself? And might the impossibility of this self-positioning transcendence be what can only remain of philosophy after Auschwitz? Clearly this failure is not the same thing as that silence which refuses to enter the abyss of thinking/questioning. What, then, is der Fall of philosophy today, sixty years “after” the creation of Planet Auschwitz? Is a philosophy of phrases the only possibility of not falling into (transcendental) illusion after Auschwitz? And even if this is the case, “the incessant interdiction of possible phrases, a defiance of the occurrence, the contempt for Being” remains the evil it has always been.13 How does one establish that there is nothing but heterogeneous phrase regimens with no possibility of unification, that there is no language in general, and no transcendental signifieds? Or has that already been established and put into force with the creation of Planet Auschwitz by those few still somehow capable of unifying what we subjects of heterogeneous phrase regimens cannot do? And “we” know that what cannot get itself unified gets annihilated. In the shadow of Auschwitz and its idealistic administrations, “we” have become accustomed to things and people being “blown off.” With Lyotard, Derrida, and a host of others all linked by the notoriously shifting appellation “postmodern,” has philosophy fallen into ruin? Linking philosophy and Auschwitz makes the former hostage to the latter, rendering it incapable of saying anything other than what is appropriate to its newly configured home. Thinking cannot appropriate Auschwitz, but might not Planet Auschwitz appropriate philosophy and annihilate what is still not appropriate in it in the same systematic way it annihilates Jews? Charlotte Delbo says: “Reason holds out against everything, but it gives in to thirst.” 14 The heart of philosophy is broken at Auschwitz, where it comes face-to-face with itself and its ultimate self-subsumption. Jean Amery speaks of this face-to-face within the camps: The intellectual always and everywhere has been under the sway of power. He was, and is, accustomed to doubt it intellectually, to subject it to his critical analysis, and yet in the same intellectual process to capitulate to it.. .. No matter what his thinking may have been on the outside, in this sense here he became a Hegelian: in the metallic brilliance of its totality the SS state appeared as a state in which the idea was becoming reality.15

When the idea becomes Reality and law the Law, reason and compliance desicate the subject. But surely this broken heart of philosophy is a deception, a falling into darkness away from the truth, a faux pas led by those whose recent sublimations of engaged thought criticize intellectuals who, in their estimation, were not properly engaged. Heidegger, for example, never batted an eyelash over Auschwitz. With a couple of easy paragraphs, the death camps and their 145

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remains were drily subsumed under the forgetfulness of Being in the reign of global technology. Perhaps Heidegger correctly understood that philosophy, ethics, art, religion, and politics, as domains of the spirit, have never been matters of responsibility. On the contrary, the greatest injustice is done when the autonomy of thought, holding out against anything and anyone that engages (binden) it otherwise than on its own terms, is misconstrued as bound to something other than itself. “Yes, that’s It”— the autonomous It, only partially conscious, must have its own proper and essential way, especially with those of us who have fallen. Who today can really doubt that the force of the unconscious and its army of associated representations are decisively on the side of sovereign, autonomous thought. The number of fallen ones is hardly a match for this swollen colossus of countercathexes. In this specific sense Elie Wiesel is right: we have all become Jews. For obvious reasons, however, Wiesel leaves implicit the corollary: some of us Jews hate ourselves because of our wretched fall into inauthenticity, weakness, and mindless babble. Beside the great Election and its guarantee of salvation, how can our hesitant, always suspicious and tentative, incomplete thoughts compare, we Jews who are otherwise than Being, otherwise than G-d? But what/who do “Jew,” “Being,” and “G-d” signify after Auschwitz? Are these proper names or mutations of propriety? Which G-d was silent as Jewish children were burned alive and Heidegger’s Sein (Uber-Ich?) withdrew into the sheltering of its self-protection mechanisms? After such “events,” the business-as-usual litigation of differends continues the annihilation process, but so does the “linking” of this evil with “the contempt for Being.” What does the persistence of the “ontologische Bediirfnis” after Auschwitz indicate? The cult of Being, or at least the attraction of the word as of something superior, lives by the fact that in reality, as once upon a time in epistemology, concepts denoting function have more and more replaced the concepts denoting substance. Society has become the total functional context that liberalism used to think it was: to be is to be relative to other persons and things, and to be irrelevant in oneself. This frightening fact, this dawning awareness that it may be losing its substantiality, prepares the subject to listen to avowals that its unarticulated being— equated with that substantiality— cannot be lost, i.e., that it will survive the functional context.16 Incomplete phrase regiment that we are, we “jews” could choose the game of Election, a very well-established pre- and post-Auschwitz Lebensform. We could, in other words, fall differently, away from inauthenticity into the representational mirroring of sovereign thought, thus fashioning ourselves into a proprietary kind— a people, a Volk, a race, a nation, an ethnic identity. Then, and only then, would we become real Jews. Real because we would be self-fashioned as an oppositional yet, as Heidegger would say, “essentially the same” grouping, preparing ourselves for the prerequisite sacrifice prefigured in the logos of autonomous thought. Only Real Jews make sense, albeit always a derivative sense. If, as Kant thought, the law of practical reason “makes use of” productive imagination such that the latter becomes “violently interested” in the freedom which is its servitude before the law, this is only because (real) Jews had already been fashioned in the productive Christian imagination. The sacrificial (and hardly free) economy of the Kantian faculties thus points to a specific 146

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series of historical events, both past and yet to come. The reign of Christian practical reason first gave Jews their choices: conversion, exile, or persecution. And, indeed, the Jewish productive imagination became “violently interested” in its newly found freedom/servitude. Thus were fashioned proprietary Jews— the proper Other of Christendom. Moreover, this fashioning of real Jews is a dialectical operation, giving rise to the formation of real Christians. In other words, without real Jews, no real Christians. In the terrible and wondrous dialectical duplicity of Ontology and History so dear to Hegel, Christians ontologically precede the Jews that historically give birth to them. But then, as we have witnessed, History and alienation come to an end. When the rational becomes the real, real Jews disappear— ideally, without traces. But that is precisely the difference between the Nazis and Hegel. The Nazis failed to annihilate Jews without any traces; they failed to realize der Begrijf. A cynically resurrected Hegelianism governs the aftermath of our resentment for this failure. This explication of nature, in which you are now, will disappear into its implication, but in the new explication you will abide. Remain in the disappearing explication, and you remain in the eternal sorrow. The explication as the explication is the abstract side, and this you have chosen— forgetting that you are the concrete, and will still be the other that emerges.17 The moments of the single mutation, which reign over even us who refuse the presentational game of engendering proper kinds under the principle of the homogeneity of the variety of individuals, might well be enjoying the comedy of differences. Yet we “jews” remain nothing but moments of what was and can never become present. How then are we to (re)present ourselves for philosophical interrogation?

IV. Un-Kind Links These, then, are what I take to be some of the things at stake in questions concerning philosophy and its subjects after Auschwitz, each and everyone of them a personal matter. While struggling with my thoughts on thinking after Auschwitz several years ago, I wrote that I had become a “jew” without kind, a non-proper jew (BA, 15-16). I read Lyotard’s text Heidegger and “the jews” later, after much difficulty in admitting and confronting the functional context (self-) shaped by years of subscribing to Heidegger’s seductive texts. Heidegger knew and shaped me. Functionalized for essential thinking, so to speak, I went into the wastelands to pursue the Other(s). It was there that I first encountered the monstrous shadows of Auschwitz. Heidegger (and not just a few other philosophers) was there with me. Self-recognition is difficult when der Spiegel reflects the actual work of the principle of identity. Reflection works, however, only in the event of the failure of identity. Without traces, ashes, emaciated bodies, survivors, witnesses, exculpatory responses, there can be no troubled (more precisely, “de-ranged”) 18 identity: Father Heidegger and me, the Nazi self, reflected by their own failure. But then comes the essential message of Father Heidegger’s obdurate silence in the face of all this: 147

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Sein— eine Sache, aber nichts Seiendes. Zeit— eine Sache, aber nichts Zeitliches.19 Years later I read: “ ‘The jews’ are the object of a dismissal with which Jews, in particular, are afflicted in reality” (HJ, 3). With all the factual differences between “Jews” and “jews” noted, there are very good reasons for making this philosophical and political connection. But, for the very same reasons, in no sense can Heidegger, even the “Heidegger of philosophical texts,” be considered a “jew.” Lyotard’s linkage of Heidegger and “the jews” is a travesty not because of what Heidegger did not say, but precisely because of what he and his texts did say. Here I quote Lyotard against himself: The only thought adequate to the disaster is that which remains available to the waiting for God, such as Heidegger understands it in Holderlin’s poems. For Heidegger, Holderlin is the German Homer. But this Homer cannot tell of the return of meaning to itself, as Hegel and the literature of Bildung still tell it. He can sing only of the interminably deferred. And maybe he can only sing it. For thought cannot actualize, act out, the return of the disappeared but merely watch (over) the Forgotten so that it remains unforgettable. From FiXhrer, the thinker changes into Hiiter, guardian: guardian of the memory of forgetting. Here, as in Wiesel, the only narrative that remains to be told is that of the impossibility of narrative. Here, I would say, is the “moment” in Heidegger’s thought where it approaches, indeed, touches, the thought of “the jews.” (HJ, 79)

Certainly thought cannot “actualize” the return of the disappeared, but any thought today not haunted by the actual return of the terminated nameless millions is not worthy of the name. If Heidegger’s Kehre was indeed a “moment” when his thought touched the thought of “the jews,” it was not a haunted moment of returning Jews. If Heidegger’s thought during his alleged Kehre touches the thought of “the jews,” why is no discussion or mention of Paul Celan’s poetics (especially, “Der Meridian”) in any of Heidegger’s published writings?20 A distinctive intransitivity prevails in Lyotard’s phrase “Heidegger and ‘the jews.’ ” By linking Heidegger (more precisely, Heidegger’s turn to the supremacy of Being) and “the jews,” Lyotard has set up a framework for sheltering the expression of thought from any possible complicity with the identificational procedures of totalitarian powers. For Lyotard there is always a linkage between (real) Jews and those souls “to whom the Forgotten never ceases to return to claim its due” (HJ, 3). It is, moreover, a linkage always capable of becoming an identity in the identificational framework of fascist politics. To write about Jews— Juden— is therefore to operate within a representational mode, the duplicity of which I have already sketched. For Lyotard, the danger of a representational mode of writing is not just its forgetting of the Forgotten, but its assumption of a position from which the Forgotten can be dismissed once and for all. In other words, identificational recruitment is totalitarian; it leaves no remainders or reminders. From this absolute standpoint (e.g., the Nazi identification of Jews as the antirace), Jews refuse totalization and must be eradicated. How, then, does one write about what has happened without 148

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engaging, being engaged by, and assisting in the identificational recruitment of the aestheticized politics of racism and anti-Semitism?21

V. The French Gelassenheit Effect In June, 1969, at a colloquium honoring Heidegger on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, Jean Beaufret set forth “desinvolture” as a possible French translation of Gelassenheit.22 This was Beaufret’s way of invoking the elegant, homely embrace of Heidegger’s thought by (certain) French intellectuals. And in France Gelassenheit-desinvolture had its effect. A decade later Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe would say: “We should now be able to ask the question once again: if it is not to thinking, if it is not exclusively to thinking, then to what, in ‘Heidegger himself,’ is it a matter of gaining access?” 23 The story of the Gelassenheit effect in France after May-June, 1968, is too torturously complex for any simplified or “essentialized” treatment to render justly. One aspect of its complex plot is very relevant here, however: what to do with the remainders. But what must be done must be done elegantly, in a French manner. An example from Paris 1990: “we must know what fascism is in its essence.” Whether Adorno was the best placed to satisfy this demand is uncertain. Beyond merely wielding the word as an insult, what did he mean by “fascism”? If he simply meant the empirical-historical reality of Nazism, then the accusation would not hold for a moment, unless one were quite dishonestly to conflate Heidegger’s writings with those of Rosenberg (or Krieck, or Baumler, or so many others of even lesser stature). And unless one were— equally dishonestly— to ignore the accepted evidence of the extent to which Heidegger distanced himself after 1933-1934 from the regime and its ideology, even if one were to judge only by the first published editions of his lectures from the 1930s (Introduction to Metaphysics; Nietzsche). Or did Adorno possess a concept of fascism that was fascism’s truth and that, in particular, made it possible to detect it in places where it was not self-evidently present: in the thinking of Being, for example? This is precisely what is in doubt, insofar as Adorno’s “critique” of fascism never freed itself from its Marxist or para-Marxist presuppositions and therefore revealed itself incapable of reaching the place where, a long way this side of their reciprocal hostility (which was in fact irreducible), and therefore a long way this side of “ideological” or “political” divergences or oppositions, the ontological-historical cobelonging of Marxism and fascism— or if one prefers, at another ( “methodological”) level of sociologism and biologism— can be established. Perhaps Adorno, who was eager as could be to speak about it, said less about fascism than did Heidegger in the very parsimony of his declarations or in the stubborn determination with which, during the fascist years, he attempted to indicate where the truth and the lost or ruined “inner greatness” of the National Socialist revolution lay (HAP, 106-107). Perhaps Adorno the Jew, eager as he could be to speak about fascism, says less than the parsimonious Heidegger and self-appointed “jews” in their detour from and around the “ontological cobelonging of Marxism and fascism!” Here we have the new philosophical-political program of certain French intellectuals in sheltering 149

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withdrawal from France’s own (excuse the conflation) Marxist-fascist past. The death camps, after all, were nothing more or less than a symptomatic effect of fascist love for their coreligionists. In the ashen light of such statements, is it any wonder that survivors are still unable to shed their shame for Being? With his linking of Heidegger and “the jews,” Lyotard has taken his first step beyond the postmodern condition. Whatever the merits of his linking of Jews and jews* his Heidegger-jews conjunction severely compromises these, as it will serve only the project of elegantly eliminating remainders— including the addendum called Adorno. The proper is always a result of Oedipal politics, including that of the orthodox rabbis who attempt to make the Jew a matter of biology and/or strictly circumscribed practices. Yet jews will always reject slavery and every form of unfreedom disguised as a state-sponsored realized universal. The jews are defeated and paradoxically still exhibit: features to which totalitarian domination must be completely hostile: happiness without power, wages without work, a home without frontiers, religion without myth. These characteristics are hated by the rulers because the ruled secretly long to possess them. The rulers are only safe as long as the people they rule turn their longed-for goals into hated forms of evil. This they manage to do by pathological projection, since even hatred leads to unification with the object— in destruction. This is the negative aspect of reconciliation. Reconciliation is the highest notion of Judaism, and expectation is its whole meaning.24

What Heidegger very well understood, after and following both Hegel and Kierkegaard, is that there can be no Jewish Dasein if proto-Christian existence is the moment-place in and from which the world worlds. “Do not mix Heidegger’s thought with his ‘politics’ and the sociohistorical context in which it was played out. Remember that thought exceeds its contexts (something Farias forgets)” (HJ, 59). Lyotard’s old saw doesn’t cut through this adamant adherence to mythic origins and pseudo-mournings. Against the Gelassenheit effect, thought thinks against itself. Dialectical thought remains the paradoxical truth of antagonistic society, a truth, moreover, desperately refuted within the canons of a formal logic which are themselves the ideal projections of that society’s deepest desires. Without dialectics, however, those ideal projections remain nothing but abstractions used for the purpose of maintaining the status quo, business as usual— the terrible unfreedom of material life. All thought that turns away into the rapture of the essential withdraws when faced with the dirty business of extending the unfreedom of the many for the sake of the few’s pleasures.25 It is thus fitting that the reminding remainders have the last word in writings about new eradication projects.

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Chapter 10

LYOTARD AND HISTORY WITHOUT WITNESSES Thomas R. Flynn Centuries of the future, here is my century, solitary and deformed— the accused. . . . This century is a woman in labor. Will you condemn your mother? Eh? Answer! (Pause) The thirtieth century no longer replies. Perhaps there will be no more centuries after ours. Perhaps a bomb will blow out all the lights. Everything will be dead— eyes, judges, time. Night. Oh tribunal of the night— you who were, who will be, and who are— I have been! I, Franz von Gerlach, here in this room, have taken the century upon my shoulders and have said: “I will answer for it. This day and forever.” What do you say? . . . Eh? Answer! (voice of Franz from a tape recorder). — Jean-Paul Sartre, The Condemned ofAltona The name of “Auschwitz,” deprived of its “positive-rational operator,” the Resultat, cannot engender anything, not even the skeptical we that chomps on the shit of the mind. The name would remain empty, retained along with other names in the network of a world, put into mechanographical or electronic memory. But it would be nobody’s memory, about nothing and for no one. — Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend

Valery is reputed to have said that there are two dangers in the world, disorder and order. As philosophers, lovers of “wisdom,” we seem committed to “ordering” things in accord with Aristotle’s maxim that it is a characteristic of the wise person to put things in order (dei ton sophon epitatein). As Chaos Theory exemplifies in its own way, we do seek order and regard disorder as constituting some kind of intellectual defeat. This “rage for order” finds its extreme expression in the rationalist passion to equate the “rational” with the “real,” logic with metaphysics, thought with being. Those philosophers known as “postmodern” share a suspicion of this rage, even as they seek to sort out (that is, to order) its workings in mainstream Western philosophy across the centuries. I wish to consider the manner in which one such, Jean-Fran9 ois Lyotard, attempts to avoid Valery’s two dangers, order and disorder, by introducing the concept of the differend to separate and unite these apparently mutually exclusive notions.1 In suggesting what looks like a “middle” between two contradictories, Lyotard might seem at first blush either to be taking flight in dialectical rationalism a la Hegel or to 151

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be undermining the very basis of sense-making, and hence of ordering, in philosophical discourse as we know it. Regarding the former, his split with erstwhile colleagues in the movement Socialisms ou Barbarie is a clear rejection of dialectic for Kantian logic, of Reason for Understanding, of contradiction for (a kind of) identity.2 On the other hand, the attack on sense-making could be symptomatic of the “end” of philosophy, so often proclaimed in recent years.3 And yet there is something inevitably “philosophical” about Lyotard’s enterprise: it is radically self-questioning (philosophy asks about its own rule),4 it is in conversation with the tradition, it relies on a close reading of canonical philosophical texts, and it addresses perennial philosophical questions, even as it seems to settle for an impasse: “Philosophical discourse is waiting for its criterion” (LR, 394). In other words, postmodern or not, Lyotard’s enterprise is “philosophical” in a commonly accepted sense. Nor is his criteriological problem specifically postmodern. The ancient skeptics settled for a similar impasse: the epoche or suspension of belief. But in Lyotard’s reading, that very impasse constitutes the “passage” across which one may shift, if not pass, between discourses.5 The image is one of movement, not stasis. Still, one might insist, the middle or third (in the sense of “tertium datur”) “belongs” to the others in some sense, or else it would not be a middle or third, but simply a random item. Passages “connect” in some sense. Setting aside the idealist (and intentionalist) conviction that a gap becomes a passage only for a project of some kind, the “objective possibility” (as Weber might say) of some states of affairs functioning as a passage and others not is in an important sense a matter of those states themselves. Lyotard recognizes and partially concedes this point when he appeals to analogy and metaphor, specifically to the metaphor of passages among an archipelago of islands of language games or families of “phrases,” his term for our communicative attempts (LR, 397).6 As we shall see, this simultaneous fragmentation and interchange symbolizes the impossibility of any totalizing History with a Hegelian “H.” But it doesn’t imply that “anything goes”; the passage is between order and disorder. Lyotard, of course, would refuse to speak of a mediating third a la Hegel and Sartre, because the differend is precisely not a member of a series; it functions as the state of insuperable incommensurability, heterogeneity, otherness. He likes to cite Kant’s cosmological antinomy and Russell’s theory of types to this effect (see LR, 399). But neither Kant nor Russell were “heterologists.”7 Despite the irreducibility of Freedom to Nature, for Kant, and of class to its membership, for Russell, each would have admitted that the “other” was other to the “same.” Are not unity, identity, sameness, ontologically prior to multiplicity, difference, otherness? So claims the tradition. Yet Derrida insists that identity and difference are “equiprimordial,” to borrow a term from Heidegger. And this claim has the force of a basic “metaphysical” thesis for postmodemity. Lyotard’s differend springs from a similar conviction. Still, one might retort, the differend enjoys the unity of a verbal; it sounds gerundive: “d iffe re n d u s Is it not a form of “doing” rather than of “being” ? Consider its relation to event as an “occurring” rather than an occurrence.8This unity/meaning is what we are trying to grasp. Lyotard insists that “between the SS and the Jew there is not even a differend, because there is not even a common idiom (that of a tribunal) in which even damages could be formulated, be 152

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they in place of a wrong” (D, 106; emphasis mine). It appears that in embracing the heterogeneous, the incommensurable, Lyotard is slipping nolens volens into the metaphysical— the one and the same, the “common idiom” (seeD, 61). Lyotard would argue/insist that in the case of the differend, like Gratylus, we can only remain silent and point, we are reduced to bearing witness: “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” (D, 13).9 Humans in such situations find themselves “summoned by language . . . to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist” (D, 13, italics mine). But surely that’s the message of the poet and the mystic, of every linguistic innovator: of Heidegger, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein as well. Lyotard joins these philosophers of the limits of language but adds to the process a moral flavor when he explains: “One’s responsibility before thought consists . .. in detecting differends and in finding the (impossible) idiom for phrasing them. That is what a philosopher does” (D, 142). My topic is history, specifically Lyotard’s strictures against that paradigm of Enlightenment thought: universal history. To the extent that this is history, it entails narrative of some sort (or at least a “plot” in Paul Veyne’s sense of the word);10 as universal, it transcends the limits of history read as “national biography,” raising the possibility of a universal subject such as the proletariat, the people, or simply humanity. Traditionally, history has been the narrative of “events” conceived as datable public happenings. Though the so-called New French Historians have questioned the adequacy of this understanding, the concept of “event” is central to Lyotard’s thought, and its peculiarities may account for much that is unorthodox and difficult in his concept of History. This is the path I intend to follow. I shall proceed in four stages. After 1) concluding this description of Lyotard’s use of the terms “event,” “history,” and “differend,” 2) address the problem of history as Lyotard conceives it, 3) admitting contrasting light from Foucault’s use of the term “event,” in order to 4) conclude with reflections on the nature of a “postmodern” theory (or nontheory) of history, what I shall call “a history without witnesses.”

I. Foucault has insisted that a certain privileging of the historical is a mark of the modem.11 Accordingly, the postmodern would seem to entail a moving beyond that category, if not its denial pure and simple. The historical he has in mind is the “world-historical” in the Hegelian sense, doubtless inverted by Marx but retaining its totalizing and telic features.12 This is history as progressive metaphysics, the thesis that das Wesen ist was gewesen ist to which Foucault’s archaeology and especially his genealogy constitute an alternative or even a parody. Whoever says “history,” in this Hegelian sense, Foucault argues, says “consciousness,” indeed, “collective consciousness,” and that entails a set of philosophical difficulties that he finds insoluble. And yet Foucault remains a historian, though suo modo. Lyotard’s difficulty with such omnivorous History, in addition to its prob153

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lematic “We,” is its inability to digest a certain type of phenomenon that he calls the “event” in the twin senses of Kantian Begebenheit [arrive-t-il?], a chance deal from the deck of life, and of Heideggerian Ereignis.13 Although Lyotard seems to eschew the more mystical, if not the poetical, uses of the Heideggerian term, he values both its resistance to totalization and the paradoxically prognostic character of Kant’s Begebenheit as “sign” and guide (Jil conducteur) of historical sens (meaning-direction). Explaining Kant’s use of the term, Lyotard observes: “The Begebenheit, which is a datum in experience at least, if not of experience, must be the index of the Idea of free causality” (LR, 400); and “The Begebenheit must not itself be the cause of progress, but only an index of progress. Kant immediately makes clear what he means by sign of history: ‘signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognostieum’ ” (LR, 400). In other words, the guide of historical meaning, in Kant’s sense, not only remembers a past and/or absent occurrence and articulates the moral sense of the present subjects of that experience, but it foretells the reasonable expectations for the future in that domain. The enthusiasm of the crowd facing the French Revolution, even of those physically distant from the event (Kant’s example), foretells the hope for social justice and universal peace that will encourage reform movements in the next century. Whence Lyotard concludes: that the meaning of history (i.e., all phrases pertinent to the historico-political field) does not only show itself in the great deeds and misdeeds of the agents or actors

who become famous in history but also in thefeeling of the obscure and distant spectators who see and hear them and who, in the sound and fury of the res gestae, distinguish between what is just and what is not. (LR, 401-402; emphasis mine)

The sign of history and the meaning it conveys are not primarily cognitive but are a matter of feeling; they are “aesthetic” in the broader sense of the word. But this feeling is likewise “moral,” as in Kant’s example. For just as the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good, for Kant, so what, following Schiller, we might call the “historical sublime” is the sign of the possibilities of human freedom and the meaning/direction (sens) which that freedom hopefully will take. For Lyotard, “event” denotes, among other things, the fragmenting power of lived time. Totalizing history and “myth” serve to weaken this disruptive power of the event: “myth . . . is more of a genre of discourse whose stakes are in neutralizing the ‘event’ by recounting it” (D, 152). Whereas the temporal was the traditional enemy of permanence and form, existential temporality since Kierkegaard and Heidegger has served to tame this wild profusion with the force of resolution and choice. Lyotard and postmodems generally have revived the corrosive power of time and the event. Hence “postmodern” history must respect this power of the event even as it attempts to express it in a history (understood as “all phrases pertinent to the historico-political field”). As a warning against traditional approaches to historical sense-making, Lyotard remarks: “By inserting names into stories, narration shelters the rigid designators of common identity from the events of the ‘now’ ” (D, 153). In order to foster the events of the “now” in his phrasing, Lyotard speaks of “the occurrence and . . . the differends bom from the occurrence” (D, 151). So the event and the differend as event or function of events guarantee that histories will never be “History.” 154

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II. But what makes an event as simple occurrence, as contingent, datable fact, a “sign,” “an ‘as-if this,’ an analogon, a sign” (D, 135) and specifically a “sign of history”? As Lyotard notes, “historical sequences forming a series only give data to the historian (data which are at best statistically regular)— and never signs” (LR, 408). Once one has given cognition its due, what happens to the remainder? According to Lyotard: this remainder is waiting for the teleological phrase, and yet its lack of form looks as if it ought to cause the absolute failure of this phrase. But the enthusiasm aroused in the Gemut of the spectators by this formlessness [in Kant’s example of the French Revolution], this failure of all possible finalization is itself finalized. (LR, 405).

Lyotard displays his heavy Kantian inspiration by analyzing the sign of history in terms of Kant’s hypotyposes, extraordinarily powerful images of an Idea of Reason.14 Kant’s now-classic instance, as we said, is the universal and disinterested enthusiasm of the spectators for the emancipatory event of the French Revolution, taken as the symbol of “the Idea of the Republic which unites the Idea of autonomy, of the people and that of peace between the States” (LR, 405). Unlike the schema or exemplum of cognitive judgments, the “sign” is neither true nor false. Lyotard insists that “the historico-political only presents itself to assertions through cases which operate not as examples, still less as schemes, but as complex hypotyposes (perhaps what Adorno was asking for under the name Modelle)\ the most complex being the most certain” (LR, 408). The sign of history does share the quality of the sublime in combining joy (jouissance) and pain. In fact, this enthusiasm is a modality of the “sublime feeling” (LR, 404). Lyotard reminds us that “causality through freedom gives signs, never ascertainable effects, nor chains of effects” (D, 127). So the first condition of a sign is that it be linked to freedom, not to nature as such.15 Auschwitz16is, for Lyotard, the paradigmatic sign of the impossibility of history as commonly understood: [People] will say that history is not made of feelings, and that it is necessary to establish the facts. But with Auschwitz something new has happened in history (which can only be a sign and not a fact) which is that the facts, the testimonies which bore the traces of here's and now’s . . . all this has been destroyed as much as possible. Is it up to the historian to take into account not only the damages but also the wrong?

Not only the reality, but also the meta-reality that is the destruction of reality? Not only the testimony, but also what is left of the testimony when it is destroyed (by dilemma), namely, the feeling? Not only the litigation, but also the differend? Yes, of course, if it is true that there would be no history without a differend, that a differend is bom from a wrong and is signaled by a silence, that the silence indicates that phrases are in abeyance of their becoming event, that the feeling is the suffering of this abeyance. But then, the historian must break with the monopoly over history granted to the cognitive regimen of phrases, and he or she must venture forth by lending his or her ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge. Every reality entails this exigency insofar as it entails possible unknown senses. Auschwitz

155

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Lyotard writes that “without the presupposition of [the] permanence of a thinking ‘we/ there would have been no movement in search of a whole” (D, 102). But in his argument, “Auschwitz” designates the impossibility of just such a totalization. The issue is not simply the impossible plurality of the “we”; it is its permanence: whatever may have been the case, “we” are no longer. He sees here a “dispersion worse than the diaspora, a dispersion of phrases” (D, 98). The punishment of Babel revisited? The scourge of nominalism? As we shall see, Lyotard takes our experience of this “fission” of meaning as the Begebenheit of our epoch. For Lyotard is convinced that every philosophy of history since the Enlightenment is directed by a form of the same Idea or Ideal in the Kantian sense of the term, namely, emancipation. Not just the liberation of a group or a collective but humanity as a whole. In other words, the philosophy of history presupposes the marriage of two concepts that Lyotard strenuously rejects, namely, a final, ideal goal and a universal subject. And he grounds his opposition on something other than metaphysical conviction (which would beg the question). Our experience of the impossibility of any single form of sense-making, our feeling that the unifying and ordering power of any “master narrative” is shipwrecked on the shoals of Auschwitz, Budapest 1956, and the rest— it is this “sign” of history that signifies the impossibility of History in our day.17 Note, such signs are not empirical facts that a statistician could compile into a series or a scribe enlist in a chronicle. Since it undermines the adequacy of rationalist sense-making, it must be at right angles to such an enterprise. Such is the Begebenheit of our day: the experience of the breakup of meaning, the realization that the center cannot hold. Umberto Eco once wrote that the secret of the Hermetic-Gnostic approach to interpretation (where he locates postmodern readings) is that there is no secret.18 Gould we say that the point of Lyotard’s “postmodern” history is that there is no history? At least there is no History. But are there histories? That reputedly modernist thinker, Jean-Paul Sartre, once observed, a propos Hegelian approaches to History, that unity is achieved only at the price of violence.19 With Foucault, Lyotard shares the view that unity is the product of “power.” Still, he asks: “Are some phrases and genres strong, and others weak?” (D, 158). He concludes that this is ascertainable only with regard to their respective interests/stakes (see D, 159). The criterion for phrasing is pragmatic. And if history requires the differend, and the differend entails a certain violence— that of a harm that cannot be voiced— then Lyotard would seem to agree with Sartre that historical unity is purchased at the price of violence. In fact, Lyotard associates historical unity-totality with inevitable injustice and evil: “The universalization of narrative instances cannot be done without conflict” (D, 157), and “The savage thus suffers a wrong [at the hand of universal history]” (D, 156). In this he sides with Sartre. But the existentialist’s “as if,” Sartre’s “sign of history,” if you will, is the “reign of freedom, mutual positive reciprocity among equals,” of which the experiential analogon is the spon156

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taneous group praxis. Sartrean “History,” in other words, though aware of the inevitability of violence, remains mildly hopeful. Lyotard, on the contrary, rejects what he takes to be the confusion of “schemata or exempla with analoga,” of cognition with prescription, and the “unfortunate politics” to which it commits people like Sartre (see D, 162). Paul Veyne quotes Jacques Maritain to the effect that every philosophy of history presumes a “sound philosophy of man” (WH, 156). Although Lyotard rejects the “philosophy of history” as he refuses the totalizing subject, and for the same reason— “ ‘Philosophies of history’ are forged around a redemptive future” D, 155)— he too supports a theory of the human condition, as Sartre would say, if not a philosophy of human nature sans phrase. This surfaces in his account of the inevitability of the differend and of the injustice (wrongs) they entail: It is not that humans are mean or that their interests or passions are antagonistic.... [It is that] they are situated in heterogeneous phrase regimens and are taken hold of by stakes tied to heterogeneous genres of discourse. The judgment which has passed over the nature of their social being can come into being only in accordance with one of these regimens, or at least in accordance with one of these genres of discourse. The tribunal thereby makes this regimen and/or this genre prevail over the others. By transcending the heterogeneity of phrases, which is at play in the social and in the commentary on the social, the tribunal also necessarily wrongs the other regimens and/or genres. (D, 140)

Like Spinoza before him, Lyotard sees the evil we do as somehow both a function of our finitude (read “heterogeneity”) and as inevitable. The “necessary wrong” is inflicted by the phrase regimen. Hence, rather than some apocalyptic “reign of freedom-equality” a la Sartre, Lyotard counsels damage control: But suppose the change [to another tribunal with more equitable criteria] took place, it is impossible that the judgments of the new tribunal would not create new wrongs, since they would regulate (or think they were regulating) differends as though they were litigations. This is why politicians cannot have the good at stake, but they ought to have the lesser evil. Or, if you prefer, the lesser evil ought to be the political good. ( D, 140)

“By evil,” he explains, “I understand, and one can only understand, the incessant interdiction of possible phrases, a defiance of the occurrence, the contempt for Being” ( D, 140). Of course, arguably for Lyotard as for Spinoza, the net effect of this apparent equating of evil with finitude is to weaken its force, both psychological and ontological, by confusing the phrasing (or its impossibility) with the acts and states of interdiction, of defiance, of contempt. And, conversely, as it locates the harm in the regimen, so the responsibility must rest there as well. So the same paradox arises that plagued Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx: we are enjoined to alter a system whose products we are said to be. Although Lyotard insists that “the unity of genres is impossible, as is their zero degree” and that “there is no genre whose hegemony over the others would be just” (D, 158), he pauses to consider the Christian narrative with its message of love: “Love as the principal operator of exemplary narrations and 157

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diegeses is the antidote to the principle of exception that limits traditional narratives” (D, 159). Is this exception to the rule of exceptions the functional equivalent of Sartre’s “reign of freedom,” the hypotyposis that could serve as the “sign” for a universal history? Yes, to the extent that “love persists in secular, universal history in the form of republican brotherhood, of communist solidarity”— the Enlightenment doctrine of emancipation (D, 160-161). No, because its superiority is only within the genre of narratives, and Lyotard has warned us against granting “the narrative genre an absolute privilege over other genres of discourse in the analysis of human, and specifically linguistic (ideological), phenomena, particularly when the approach is philosophical” (Per, 23). For as we have seen, Lyotard believes this genre tends to suppress or to exile the differend. Of course, it leaves us with the paradox that the condition of the possibility of history, namely, the existence of differends, is also the reason why narrative history is to be rejected. It would appear we are left with a nonnarrative “history,” perhaps after the fashion of the New French Historians or Foucauldian archaeology or genealogy. But if narrative fades to the background, can the “event” trail far behind?

III. An event. . . is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship offorces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax. The forces operating in history . .. always appear through the singular randomness of events.20

In his survey and analysis of Lyotard’s writings up to 1988, Geoffrey Bennington suggests that: “perhaps the most coherent view of Lyotard’s work as a whole is that it strives to respect the event in its singularity.... Lyotard ... has even suggested that [such a stress on the singularity which is not an individual] might be taken as a guiding thread of what in the English-speaking countries is known as ‘post-structuralism.’ ” 21 It would be enlightening to consider the relation between this focus on singularities and “nominalism,” as it has developed in the tradition.22 But I shall attend to a parallel topic, the historical “event,” in the work of another so-called poststructuralist, Michel Foucault. My point is not to present a lengthy, detailed comparison and contrast of these thinkers, but to use Foucault’s concept as a foil to illuminate what is original and what has become common to poststructuralist thought.23 The concept of the event is pivotal in both the archaeological and the genealogical phases of Foucault’s work. In his methodological treatise for the former, The Archaeology of Knowledge, he evicts a host of notions dear to traditional, event-oriented historians, such as the theme of continuity with its attendant concepts of origin, tradition, influence, development, and evolution. In their stead he gives us discursive regularities which will emerge from the “pure description of discursive events” that he proposes as an initial phase of his archaeological project. His aim is to define “a method of analysis purged of anthropologism.” 24 What links the archaeological Foucault with the later work of Lyotard is the former’s interest in what he calls the “statement/event” and 158

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his questioning not the grammar of the statement or its semiosis, but “how it is that one particular statement appeared rather than another” (AK, 27). It is the “materiality” of the statement/thing that interests Foucault in particular, its sharing in an “economy” of discourse where scarcity and abundance, inflation and deflation are appropriate qualities. This feature of statements prepares the way for Foucault’s subsequent “genealogical” analyses in terms of “power” relations. If there is an “economy,” there is likewise a “politics” of discursive (and nondiscursive) practices. The Nietzschean program of Foucauldian genealogy is to unmask their sources (pudenda origo). Foucault argues that statements are differential events, not atomic entities, and that the archaeological method is diacritical and comparatist, not descriptive and intuitionist. If events occur in series, those series are themselves events, subject to the vicissitudes of chance. Indeed, it is Foucault’s stated purpose to reintroduce chance into history and “to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion” (LCP, 146). He allows that “archaeology distinguishes several possible levels of events within the very density of discourse” (AK, 117). The famous epistemological “breaks” analyzed in The Order of Things are the rarest but most far-reaching of such events. Does Foucault in his writings leave room for the “differend” or its equivalent? He employs “dissonant” thinking, that is, the thinking of difference, to reflect on contemporary experience. He likens thought to a theatrical performance, a form of sense-making that injects spatial, nondialectical intelligibility into temporal narrative: against “the neurosis of dialectics,” he joins Gilles Deleuze in proposing an “affirmative thought whose instrument is disjunction; thought of the multiple” (LCP, 184-185). And the multiple is to the plural as Lyotard’s singular is to the individual. One of the few commentators to have given the notion of “event” the centrality it deserves in Foucault’s thought— James Bernauer— observes that the goal of the archaeological project is that of “thinking difference and confronting the event,” words that could easily capture the direction of Lyotard’s work as well. And Bernauer reads the “bizarre machinery” of The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault’s expression) as the attempt “to develop a language for thinking adequate to the event.” 25 As with Lyotard, the twin “influences” of Kant and Wittgenstein are obvious in the work of Foucault, the latter especially in the concept of “games of truth” that figures so prominently in his last lectures and interviews. Although he does not appeal to the concept of “justice” in advocating social change (discursive and nondiscursive counterpractices), Foucault’s understanding of the ubiquity and inevitability of power relations (especially in the negative sense of “domination and control”) parallels Lyotard’s belief that the differend is endemic to the human situation; and his appeal to “the intolerable” as the concrete criterion for resistance echoes Lyotard’s notion that “the lesser evil ought to be the political good” (D, 140). Both thinkers are theoretical antitheorists of the multiple, politicoethical advocates, and historical nominalists. Their respective analyses of the historical event are ingredient in a critical move against Enlightenment humanism and traditional Platonism. Despite a certain “light-footed positivism” (Foucault) and shared antimetaphysical bias, their aim is directed at a profoundly metaphysical issue: the Parmenidean prejudice in favor of unity, identity, and sameness. As Lyotard would say, the “stakes” are of the highest philosophical order. 159

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By defining the “event” in terms of the diacritical and locating it in the series of (discursive and nondiscursive) practices, Foucault is no more intent than was Kant on allowing “blind chance [to take] the place of the guiding thread of reason” (D, 163). But, like Lyotard, he sees these threads as multiple and disjunctive, and the history they guide as local and hypothetical. He too seeks a space between blind chance and a single thread of Reason, between disorder and order. The epistemic breaks that his archaeologies uncover are, to be sure, chance events; they occur without why. But the discursive practices that they make possible display a coherence and yield an intelligibility that is far from haphazard. As Foucault once said, “truth is a thing of this world” (AK, 131). So too is the history that proposes to reveal it.

IV. A history without witnesses? A message wandering through space from an extinct planet? What would a postmodern (non)theory of history resemble? If we follow Lyotard’s lead, it must be the history of “events,” not in the traditional sense of “Vhistoire evenem en tiellethe “battles and treaties” so disparaged by the New Historians. But Lyotard is not even concerned with “event” in the inevitably metaphysical sense of “datable, nonrepeatable, occurrences,” though he does play on the ambiguity of that usage when he speaks of “singularities.” And the “events of May, ’68,” for example, are certainly datable in the standard sense of that term. Such “metaphysical” events have always been an embarrassment to rationalists because of their recalcitrance, their resistance to subsumption into systems. (Parenthetically, the “historical” seems to be more about the future than the past. In this sense, postmodern history would be intent on creating its own witnesses. As Jean-Luc Nancy observes, “the ‘we’ comes always from the future.”)26 But the event of the differend, the differend qua event, concerns Lyotard and that distinguishes postmodern approaches to history. A singularity, yes, but not a datable occurrence in the metaphysical sense. In this respect, he follows Foucault’s notion of a plurality of events and “levels” of events. Lyotard rightly asks whether the present age is capable of experiencing this Begebenheit as a “sign of history.” For its character as dispersive, as “othering,” seems to militate against the very possibility of historical ordering. Of course, one might attempt to redefine “history” and the “historical.” Paul Veyne did so by replacing “temporal sequence” with “plot” (Vintrigue). This led to the curious conclusion that “sociology . . . does not exist,” its having been replaced by “complete history” (WH, 275, 286). Nancy makes an analogous claim, substituting “community” for “past” : “History . . . does not belong primarily to time, nor to succession, nor to causality, but to community, or to being-in-common” (FH, 149). But this seems to invert Veyne’s transformations, substituting a kind of sociology for traditional history! Yet in either case the redefinition of “history” yields a Pyrrhic victory— a history few would recognize as such. Lyotard, too, questions whether such history remains possible in our era. Presumably, his “sign of history” is the sign of the impossibility of history as we have known it, that the “we” who both fashions history and is shaped by it has 160

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faded into an indistinguishable murmur— the sign that the hermeneutical circle on which history relies is shattered. History without hope? Even Beckett by telling his tales hopes to communicate successfully. The operation would “misfire” if the lights went out, the actors had laryngitis, or the stage collapsed. That archenemy of postmodernism, Jurgen Habermas, is certainly correct to insist on the hopefulness of attempts at communication. What the postmoderns defend is the limited scope of this confidence, its inability to extend to any transcendental horizon. Not only does Lyotard counsel damage control rather than utopian hopes and expectations, he suggests that we “work through” in the Freudian sense our loss of the emancipatory hope, whether metaphysical or psychological, associated with philosophical modernity (PE, 48). But if history is not merely biography, it must be “ours” or “theirs,” as Nancy implies; it occurs in the plural. Not simply in the postmodern sense that history itself is plural, that there are only histories, no history, but in the further, communal sense to which Nancy refers: history as community and as public performance, what we could call “history as the poiesis of community” Jean-Luc Nancy’s “finite history” is a matter of “the space of time, of spacing time and/or of spaced time, which gives to ‘us’ the possibility of saying ‘we’— that is, the possibility of being in common, and of presenting or representing ourselves as a community . . .” (FH, 157). On the face of it, hope for such community and the history that engenders it looks precisely like what Lyotard is opposing. But when we recall Nancy’s Derridian background and the respect for radical “differance” that he shares with Lyotard, such misgivings are allayed, and we find the postmodern approach to “history” illuminated from yet another direction. Explaining his remarks on finite history and the “community” it produces, Nancy admits: obviously, this is nothing other than an attempt to comment on or develop (even if it does not directly engage Heidegger’s theory of history) the Ereignis of Heidegger— that is, being itself as the happening that appropriates existence to itself, and therefore to its finitude in the sense of nonappropriated existence or nonessentiality. The logic of Ereignis is what Derrida expressed as the logic of “differance,” which is the logic of what in itself differs from itself. I would add that this is the logic of existence and (as) community, not as they exist or are “given,” but as they are offered. We are offered to ourselves, and this is our way to be and not to be— to exist (and not to be present or to be) only in the presence of the offering. The presence of the offering is its coming, or its future. To be offered, or to receive the offer of the future, is to be historical.

(FH, 169)

This is the sense in which history is more about the future than the past— or better, it is about the “future-past” or Lyotard’s “now.” And Nancy’s finite history “is the occurrence of existence, in common, for it is the ‘togetherness of otherness’ ” (FH, 162). Though Lyotard leaves us with a challenge (to work through the mourning of our departed selfhood, individual and collective) and not a solution to a theoretical problem, it seems that his message, too, is one of tolerance and “charity,” of a search for the (impossible) common idiom (justice?) that enables us to pass from togetherness to otherness and back. 161

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But the perennial problem of the limits to tolerance, of justice and injustice, that haunts all political-historical phrasing is not settled by respecting otherness sans phrase! These injustices cry out to be named (phrased), even if their name is “Legion.” The very notion of violating another’s person (their integrity?) demands a “common idiom,” as Lyotard admits. Such an idiom might indeed be one of “feeling,” as ethical noncognitivists have long argued. It may not have to be “criteriological” in the epistemic sense. The heart may indeed have its reasons; Kant’s reflective judgments may prevail in the political as well as in the aesthetic realm, as Lyotard suggests. But just as the aesthetic object need not yield a concept and the moral exemplum may not instantiate a principle, and yet each be directive of judgments of value/disvalue in their respective domains, so the felt certainty of “gaps” between master narratives and their falsifying singular “events” need not preclude a discourse that draws attention to these heterogeneities and even suggests ways to deal with this failure of modernity. Moreover, the clarificatory project that Lyotard has undertaken a propos traditional history is carried out in language that intends to communicate conceptually. When it does, it favors traditional Aristotelean-Kantian logic over Hegelian dialectic, even as it bumps up against the limits of the phrasable. The postmodern approach to history is more “aesthetic” than “historicist,” as the latter term is commonly understood. It does not attempt to attain the past as it actually happened, but constructs a “history of the present” (Foucault), to “keep up with the now”— maintenir le maintenant, for Lyotard (D, xv)— by means of analogies, plausibilities, and values presently at hand. Lyotard concludes toward the end of The Differend: This is, in sum, what we have for the cognitive phrase: it doesn’t have much to say about history which could be validated by the critical judge. In fact, it ignores the historical-political because it remains under the rule of intuitive presentation. There remain many other possible phrase families. Their presentational rules are different. We can expect to see analogies or, more generally, “passages” at work there. (D, 163)

The historical-political is the locus of the reflective judgment, the kind Kant introduced in the third Critique that judges “without recourse to a predetermined rule.” As Lyotard explains, “presumably there are no more criteria in politics than in esthetics. We have to listen’ here and there to the manifold contingency of data, be it chromatic or anthropological” (Per, 20-21). This, he believes, holds true for history as well. There the issue is “time as the medium of life (including your life)” and one must resort to metaphors— a lesson of existentialist philosophers but also one as old as Plato. But “the concept able to play the part of time must include contradiction instead of excluding it as it had seemed reasonable to do since Aristotle” (Per, 23-24). Rather than exhibit a conversion to dialectical logic, these remarks remind us that the “differend” captures the nonidentity of the event as “now” without recourse to substances, subjects, or syntheses of any kind. What then is the “sign” of our history, the Begebenheit of our time, of what has been called “postmodemity” ? For Lyotard, it is “the feeling produced by the fission of the great discursive nuclei.” (One immediately thinks of the thrill Nietzsche ascribes to the overman as he courses past the last lighthouse and 162

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the remaining wisp of land fades from view.) This Begebenheit for our era, Lyotard continues: would induce a new type of sublime, more paradoxical still than that of enthusiasm, a sublime in which we would feel not only the irremediable gap between an Idea and what presents itself to “realize” that Idea, but also the gap between the various families of phrases and their respective legitimate presentations. (LR, 409)

Postmodernity faces us with what I would call a “crisis of criteria.” Auschwitz, Budapest 1956, the “events” of May 1968 in Paris— these events constitute the Begebenheiten of our time. “The fact remains,” Lyotard observes, “that all of them liberate judgment, that if they are to be felt, judgment must take place without a criterion, and that this feeling becomes in turn a sign of history” (LR, 409). We are urged to judge them “as if they proved that this history has moved on a step in its progress,” namely, away from dogmatism of the “single purpose,” on the one hand, and skeptical abstention, on the other (between order and disorder), toward the Idea that the purpose of history consists in “the formation and free exploration of Ideas in the plural, the Idea that this end is the beginning of the infinity of heterogeneous finalities” (LR, 409). The postmodern Begebenheit as the “event of fission,” not only explodes universal history, master narratives, and totalizing ends, but attacks the collective or transcendental subject and Enlightenment rationality as well (see LR, 410). Still, Lyotard believes that this “unnamed feeling” can help us judge the pretensions of Capitalism and its “computerized society” according to a reestablished critical tribunal. He warns that we cannot judge “according to the Idea of man and within a philosophy of the subject, but only according to the ‘transitions’ between heterogeneous phrases and respecting their heterogeneity” (LR, 410). So-called “postmodern” history is a history of the Other (objective genitive). It deals with the marginalized and the excluded— those who have no voice, whose “phrase” is often silence. This contrasts with and contests traditional history that is proverbially the narrative of the victors; to this extent postmodern history is “critical.” But the Other’s history (subjective genitive) is that its “sign” is multiple, its “telos” is apertural, open-ending, and its “event” a feeling of sheer possibility that the “Other” occasions, whether as threat or as promise, and most frequently as both at once. Finally, postmodern history is other-history, what in another context I have called “counter-history.” It defines itself in alterity to the established series, which it uses against that very series, not to deny it (the “post” in “postmodern” is more conceptual than temporal), but to contextualize and humble its totalizing claims. As Nancy insists, “this is not a theory, for it does not belong to a discourse about (or above) history and community.” In sum, history is a matter of decision, not discovery; like the aesthetic, whose analogies it resembles, it is a making (a poiesis), not a knowing. And “postmodern” history, or history after Auschwitz, like the incomplete (or broken?) arch, lacks a resolution (Resultat) even in the “as if” of the creative imagination— such is the moral of Lyotard’s “histoire” : an event in search of witnesses.

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Chapter 11

LYOTARD AND “THE FORGOTTEN” Stephen David Ross

Lyotard speaks of the Forgotten (I’Oublie) (with a capital letter) in terms of proper names, repeatedly speaks of remembering and honoring proper names, as he repeatedly, with propriety, and unforgettingly, unforgettably, speaks of Kant. Kant tells us, read by Lyotard under “the sign of history,” that enthusiasm for an historical event marks humanity’s progress under the Idea, toward culture: that “a phenomenon of this kind in human history can never be forgotten (vergisst sich nicht m e h r)”1 Much could be said of Lyotard’s refusal to forget Kant, and its oblique repetition of Kant’s insistence that history presents unforgettable events, events that can never be forgotten. When we suffer, with Lyotard, the endless, impossible burden of remembering, we find ourselves too easily prone to forget, or deny, one injustice after another, bound as we are to history by sacrifice and loss, bound by memories of endless forgetting. But I will not take up this question of forgetting Kant, will not take it up here, perhaps ever, perhaps because Baudrillard already has asked us to remember Jarry and to “Forget Foucault.” Or perhaps it is because I wonder how we are to forget philosophy’s rule when we insist on remembering Kant, or Aristotle, or Lyotard himself. Or perhaps just because I do not quite know how to remember or to forget Lyotard himself, who presents for me a difficult task: of remembering or forgetting. Rather, I wish to speak with you (more of that, more of our speaking, or writing, or belonging together later, we who come together to read and remember) of what Kant, in the sentence describing the sign of history, calls “a phenomenon of this kind,” emphasizing kinds more than figures or events. This kind of which Kant speaks names, properly names, the enthusiasm of the crowds during the French Revolution, the enthusiasm that we remember (did Kant forget?) engendered the Terror. Perhaps Kant remembered; after all, he believed war, properly enacted, belonged to the sublime: a properly safe war without too great a risk.2 So much for that. So much for philosophy and the sublime as signs of alterity, of danger, of the abyss, and of the good. In our time, we know other enthusiasms: of German crowds at terrorizing Jews, at mutilating, torturing, and exterminating them, and of other crowds, in Poland and Bolshevik Russia. Do we also, if we remember Kant remembering the French Revolution but forgetting its Terror, imagine that these and other 164

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enthusiasms also mark a history of humanity’s improvement, of any improvement, under the sign of the Forgotten? Lyotard’s own signs of history, “for our time, then,” bear the proper names of “Auschwitz, Budapest 1956, May 1968 . . (.LR, 409), and to which we may add Bosnia 1992 to whenever, and more ellipses, more elliptical signs of the good. These events in our time, perhaps, as Kant says, can never be forgotten, events in the plural, giving rise to (Lyotard says) “Ideas in the plural, the Idea that this end is the beginning of the infinity of heterogeneous finalities” (LR, 409), perhaps a sign of other histories. Yet we know, because Lyotard tells us repeatedly, that these events with proper names, properly named by Lyotard himself (with a proper ellipsis), can too easily be forgotten, are constantly forgotten, are forgotten in order that we human beings have a proper name. And when they are remembered, they are frequently drenched again in blood. He says it directly, about “the jews” (lesjuifs), those lowercase jews, in quotation marks, who were forgotten while (uppercase— but not just upper-class) Jews were gassed, about “jews” who lack a proper name: How could 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?3

Europe’s Forgotten, the (lowercase, quotation-marked) jews, enabled Europe to be Europe in the absence of proper names. For only uppercase Jews have proper names. Uppercase Jews die as proper names. Lowercase jews exemplify the uppercase Forgotten and exemplify without a proper name what cannot be represented but does not die. Proper names cannot represent; but they can be remembered. I am concerned with the task of remembering the murder, without quotation marks, of Jews, uppercase, historical Jews, as Jews, and others, also women, upper- and lowercase, upper- and lower-class, as women, and other kinds, Armenians, Bosnian Muslims, and others, remembering proper names as belonging to a kind, to many different kinds. I am concerned with the task of remembering (with enthusiasm) events and places with proper names, concerned that the propriety of names marks another (many other) forgettings. I am concerned with the proper name of the arrive-t-il, with the singularity of the il (or elle). I am concerned, that is, with heterogeneity, with the threat of another reduction of heterogeneity in the name of the good. Who more than Lyotard reminds us of heterogeneity? And who, along with the rest of us, having remembered might more easily forget it? He speaks of the heterogeneity of phrases, regimes, and genres. We think of the heterogeneity of proper and improper names, of sorts and kinds, of the heterogeneous reality he describes in speaking of the differend: “La realite comporte le differend” (translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele as “reality entails the differend”).4 We think of nature’s heterogeneity. Nature, reality, is made up of differends, of multiple and heterogeneous kinds. That is nature’s plenitude: natura naturata. 165

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What does one do with the inexhaustible, multiple, heterogeneous kinds that compose the world and experience? If we cannot consume them or use them, we arrange them, sort them, and order them into groups— by kith and kin, similarities and differences— into a taxonomy, a system of organization— from the small to the large, the low to the high, the inner to the outer, the near to the far, the limited to the unlimited. And heterogeneity insists that every measure itself belongs to a kind, and that there are many heterogeneous kinds of measure. All is measured, and all exclusive, while measure is heterogeneous. Even within the taxonomy in which multiple species and kinds are arranged together, some are excluded from the height, from the near, from reason, truth, and from the good. Some are proper, others improper; some are acceptable, others unacceptable; some are masters, others slaves. The taxonomy arranges to exclude, to order, to regulate the heterogeneity. Yet the reality that is made of differends cannot be reduced in heterogeneity, because every differend is made of up other differends, disrupting every taxonomy and measure, displacing every place as echoes of silence and forgetting. How easy it is to forget, not to know, to refuse to think under the sign of the (capital) Idea of progress! We refuse to forget that Spinoza (in Kristeva’s words) excluded women from his ethics.5 And he rejected any ethical responsibilities we might bear toward animals.6 In this way, he followed Aristotle, for whom women fall under the authority of men, naturally, as slaves fall under the rule of masters, by nature.7 Where there are multiple, heterogeneous kinds, some, it seems, must rule over the others, by nature. That is what Spinoza says of animals and seems to say of men and women. “But if we further reflect upon human passions . . . how very ill-disposed men are to suffer the women they love to show any sort of favour to others, and other facts of this kind, we shall easily see that men and women cannot rule alike without great hurt to peace.” 8 On a certain reading, we may imagine that Spinoza places women under the dominion of men, by nature, because men do not by nature take to being ruled by women. Some kinds shall have dominion over others, by nature, in virtue of their own cantankerous nature. Elsewhere, again like Aristotle, speaking of the endless plenitude of nature, Spinoza seems to say something different, of nature and natural kinds. The infinite numbers of attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, each of which is or expresses God, represent the inexhaustible plenitude of the world. When Spinoza says that “The more reality or being a thing possesses, the more attributes belong to it” ( Ethics, I, Prop. IX), it follows that God possesses infinite numbers of attributes, that is, by necessity embodies “infinite numbers of things in infinite ways” (Ethics, I, Prop. XVI). This infinite number of things and ways— this irreducible and inexhaustible heterogeneity of ways and kinds of things, of attributes of God and nature— knows no taxonomy, even absorbed into the unity of One God. This unity of infinite numbers of heterogeneous infinites would be Heterogeneity Itself, if heterogeneity could have a proper name. One way we might find to reduce this heterogeneous plenitude in Spinoza’s Nature is to give some of these infinite kinds over to the rule of others, excluding them from proper sovereignty. Another way is through development and dispersion. Irigaray reminds Lyotard (and us) that ever since the beginning we have forgotten, even to the point of extirpating, women as women, except that we (men 166

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and women) cannot endure without them. We, men and women, live in proximity with women, in violent proximity to the bodies of women. The scandal of the proximity of women is for us an endless extermination. “The [lowercase] jews” remain in their (or our) ghettos, as if they do not bring us to ethics except within their extermination. “The women,” upper- or lowercase, belong to every human place under the sign of the good. Every thought of sexual difference is a profoundly ethical thought. Irigaray asks Levinas: “is there otherness outside of sexual difference?”9 She answers: “That the function of the other sex as an alterity irreducible to myself eludes Levinas for at least two reasons: He knows nothing of communion in pleasure . . . he substitutes the son for the feminine” ( IR 180-181). Some might say that an “alterity irreducible to myself,” if not to the other sex, pervades Levinas’s understanding of ethical responsibility. Yet Irigaray finds it lacking. The face-to-face with the other knows an infinite responsibility in the face of alterity. Yet woman is absent, even in the maternal. Heterogeneity is lacking. The heterogeneity of the feminine kind is absent within the faceto-face. Levinas’s ethics is face-to-face, yet seems to know nothing of what a woman might know of sexual difference, or of pleasure. We find ourselves in the place of the other as irreducible alterity. Yet that place is displaced, at rest elsewhere, without the mother, and lacks sexual difference: its blood and kin. Irigaray tells us in the very first words, at the very beginning, of Ethics of Sexual Difference: “Sexual difference represents one of the questions or the question that is to be thought in our age. According to Heidegger, each age has one thought to think. One only.”10 The question! Perhaps the question of our age, the question, perhaps, of any age, is the question of sexual difference. If so, then ethics and ethical difference and the question of our age must all be sexed. And indeed, Irigaray describes a sexed ethics, an ethics that includes, that emanates from, sexual difference. Perhaps ethics itself is sexed, insists on sexual difference, as alterity, heterogeneity, multiple kinds and genders, as the others. The other kinds (in French and German, if not in English) are always sexed.11 Kristeva speaks of “herethics (herethique)”: a meeting between a sexed ethics and a sexed heresy, a figure perhaps of witchcraft, joined with two additional motifs: For an heretical ethics separated from morality, an herethics, is perhaps no more than that which in life makes bonds, thoughts, and therefore the thought of death, bearable: herethics is undeath [a-mort], love.. . . EiaMater, fons amoris. . . . So let us again listen to the Stabat Mater, and the music, all the music . . . it swallows up the goddesses and removes their necessity. ( KR, 185)

These motifs, of the mother standing in love and sorrow, and the music, call for other discussions, elsewhere. For the moment, we think of the sex of ethics, where ethics and politics comporte le differend as reality and compose a nature filled with heterogeneous genders and kinds. We think of the sex or sexes of the reality or realities made up of heterogeneous kinds in love, pleasure, joy, and sorrow. We think of the mother standing in love and sorrow, and joy, standing before us face-to-face. How can we insist on sexual difference, how can we ensure a heterogeneous ethics of sexual difference, except in virtue of the dyad of gender, face-to-face, 167

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in intimacy and proximity? By this dyad of gender, I do not mean heterosexuality, though that dyad cannot be forgotten. We do not wish to forget or forgo different sexualities, profuse sexualities, diverse sexual envelopes and jouissances. We may wish to know them and to nurture them. But there are men and there are women, males and females, even among countless other kinds. And even within many other sexualities, heterogeneous sexualities made up of differends, human sexuality is dyadic, face-to-face, even men with men, women with women, intimately face-to-face, in sex and love. In the faceto-face, we bear witness to the differend. Irigaray suggests that men and women, face-to-face, represent alterities irreducible to each other, in the language of place ( place not lieu): Man and woman, woman and man are therefore always meeting as though for the first time since they cannot stand in for one another. I shall never take the place of a man, never will a man take mine. Whatever identifications are possible, one will never exactly fill the place of the other—the one is irreducible to the other.... Who or what the other is, I never know. But this unknowable other is that which differs sexually from me. (IR, 171) “Man and woman” ; “woman and man” : two dyads organized around sexual difference into two. One will never occupy the place of the other. One and the other equals two. Two different genders meet face-to-face, two kinds that engender heterogeneity, two kinds that meet intimately in proximity. Heterogeneity as heterogender, heterosex, intimate proximity with the other sex, gender, genre, and kind meet heterotopically, face-to-face in different places. Facing the other kind, the kind of the other, face-to-face, questioning the other’s gender or kind, could that proximity, that intimacy with the other kind be the task of the good; could it be hetero- and herethics? Yet man and woman, woman and man, are not proper names, may not be names at all, proper or improper. In Levinas, for example, who and what the other is I never know: always; every other; nature’s heterogeneity. I do not know (the irreducible alterity of the other) that I suppose to know. And love: Lacan heightens this heterogeneous impossibility in speaking of the (m)Other with a certain finality in terms of the One, and of my/our relation to the Other/One, a “subject supposed to know,” as love: “There is something of One is to be taken with the stress that there is One alone. Only thus can we grasp the nerve of the thing called love,. . . : the subject supposed to know. . .. He whom I suppose to know, I love.”12 Or she. For The Woman, written under erasure (by us, by men) without a name, “she is not all” (GJW, 144), giving rise to “a supplementary jouissance” (GJW, 144), “ajouissance beyond the phallus” (GJW, 145), which I suppose to know. And love. The finality, for us here, is that the interval, the entre/antre, the differend, is inhabited by the not-all, the not-sayable as All, in the twin forms of “my” love and “her” jouissance, which I and “she” are “supposed to know” even when “I/we/she” do not know it or her. Desire, here, inhabits the entre (which may be indistinguishable, so far as we may know, from the antre or ventre, indistinguishable in kind). We think of the opening words of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, that all human beings (or men) by nature desire to know even that which is most obscure, love to know the essences of heterogeneous things, what 168

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they are by nature, desire to know what cannot be ordered within the One and desire to know by ordering within. For these categories of essences by nature are, at least for men and women, categories of domination and subjection, are not proper names, may not be names at all, proper or improper: “Man” and “woman” are political concepts of opposition, and the copula which dialectically unites them is, at the same time, the one which abolishes them. It is the class struggle between women and men which will abolish men and women. The concept of difference has nothing ontological about it. It is only the way in that the masters interpret a historical situation of domination.13

Man and woman are a pair that mimic master and slave, and the “and” that unites them is their abolition, abolishes their equality and reciprocity. There can be no reciprocal, equal pair, no couple, where one is dominated by the other. As a consequence, women among women, breaking off intercourse with men, are not “women” : “Lesbians are not women” (SM, 32). Lesbians disperse the dyad. The dyad they disperse, on our first reading, stamped by Wittig with the mark of gender, repeats the domination of master and slave. We have seen it in Aristotle and Spinoza, as if to bring two or more kinds in proximity forces the one to rule the other, except under the mark of the universal, the sign of history. Lyotard, surely with irony, presents his narrative of writing and reading, evokes the erotic proximity of writing and reading, as a narrative of master and slave: “Leave to the servants the task of,” if a work requires a task (LR, vii). Writing and reading occupy a domestic space, filled with servants doing the housework {LR, vii), making “domestic arrangements” (LR, viii). If we are puzzled at the domesticity of so public an activity as writing, we may be more perplexed by servants who serve willingly, by nature, as if they owned no other desires, as if they were women. Marking the irony, we may still wonder if another figure of writing and reading might avoid subjecting the reader to the text, if another figure of intimacy might avoid subjecting women to the rule of men. After all, we are told (twice removed: it may be, they say), writing is masculine. “It may be that you are forced to be a man from the moment that you write” (LR, 111), whether you are a man or woman. If you write and you are a woman, you must write as a man (un ecrivain, un auteur), must be a man as you write, and must write belonging to another kind, if that were possible within the differend. You must be a man, you must be white, in public, to write, and read, to speak, and listen. To rule. To exercise authority. To judge. You must have the wherewithal, however impossible, to bring forth a dommage. You must be able to speak, and write, as a man. If you could. Writing “as a woman, femininely,” is possible “if it operates by seduction rather than conviction” (LR, 111). Still marking the irony, the grasp of language’s gender, knowing that (perhaps) Lyotard does not speak for himself, we face this possibility of writing as a woman, described by a man. I would not dream of offering you another description of writing femininely, though I might dream of writing as a woman, might hope as a man to write as a woman, but not femininely, seductively, without conviction. Arleen Dallery speaks of “writing the [feminine] body” as an event that “signifies those bodily territories that 169

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have been kept under seal; it figures the body” ; “The characteristics of women’s writing are, therefore, based on the significations of woman’s body,” what we may call the “geography of the body.”14 Yet after all, Lyotard does not embrace geophilosophy though one might expect him to do so: The Heidegger affair is a “French” affair. One can detest this designation, and I detest it for the geophilosophy it contains and propagates, and which, among others, comes to us (again) through Heidegger, from the present (and probably irremediable) darkening of the universalism of the Enlightenment. (HJ, 5)

Why so detest geophilosophy? For its resistances to truth’s circulation? For its German spirit? For its local authority? For the blood it circulates, the blood it sheds? Why detest Jewish, women’s, or African philosophy? Why detest geoinscription and local truth, especially in the place of a woman, who according to Irigaray reading Freud, has no place, no place to read and write, or jouissance? Or in the life of a woman who, according to Lyotard, does not know, or use, but laughs at death? “What is pertinent for distinguishing the sexes is the relation to death: a body that can die, whatever its sexual anatomy, is masculine; a body that does not know that it must disappear is feminine” (LR, 112). In relation to this body, which does not know (do we suppose it to know?) its death, are endless exclusions: “savagery, sensitivity, matter and the kitchen, impulsion, hysteria, silence, maenadic dances, lying, diabolical beauty, ornamentation, lasciviousness, witchcraft and weakness” (LR, 114). I am especially interested in witchcraft, how it differs from paganism. I am interested in the differend between witchcraft and paganism. For by paganism, Lyotard tells us, he means justice in a godless society (LR, 123). By witchcraft, I mean to remember the injustice in any society, impressed upon the bodies of women, among others, geojustice and geo-oppression. I will pursue an analogy, perhaps something more than an analogy. Within this repeated dyad of masculine and feminine, especially in relation to death, we find endless dyads of mastery and domination, not least because of the rule of the highest spirit that can know its death. This male figure that knows its death is sexed, bears the mark of gender. In German, this is the mark of Geschlecht. The dyad lesbians disperse, on our second reading, the dyadic mark of gender, master and slave, may be read in German out of Derrida. Some of you have heard this reading primarily of Heidegger’s German Geschlecht, which Derrida has read aloud at least four times. Other readings are waiting. For Heidegger thinks the essence of “man” in order to exclude animals, at the very least, from humanity. Man is not a rational animal because he is not an animal at all. Well, that may be so for (uppercase) Man, but women are different, and even men, the women and men with proper names, proper bodies, properly sexed bodies. Sexual differences, sexed bodies, refuse this possibility absolutely. Yet what Heidegger says of humanity rests in the gift of language, cutting off animals and other creatures: “Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either.”15 Or, again: In the common view, the hand is part of our bodily organism. But the hand’s essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ which can grasp. Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely

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Derrida responds to this last— he calls it, “seriously dogmatic”— claim in terms of a cluster of ideas closely related to our ethical responsibilities, all organized around the German word Geschlecht, a word that always appears as “ours” : unser Geschlecht In the idea of the logos, of reason, proof, and showing, even of language and poiesis, there unfolds a monstrosity that must be discarded in the name of propriety, possibly the propriety of names. For in the name of the gift of language, Heidegger excludes animals entirely from our Geschlecht, in an eminence without compassion. Geschlecht, around which this discussion turns (to name the Geschlecht of man, ours), is the German word for gender, sexual difference, reintroducing the link between sexual and animal difference, the entre/antre of genders and kinds. It is described by David Krell as follows: Paul lists three principal meanings for Geschlecht (Old High German gislahti). First, it translates the Latin word genus, being equivalent to Gattung: das Geschlecht is a group of people who share a common ancestry, especially if they constitute a part of the hereditary nobility. Of course, if the ancestry is traced back far enough we may

speak of des menschliche Geschlecht, “humankind.” Second, das Geschlecht may mean one generation of men and women who die to make way for a succeeding gen-

eration. Third, there are male and female Geschlechter, and Geschlecht becomes the root of many words for the things males and females have and do for the sake of the first two meanings: Geschlechts-glied or -teil, the genitals; -trieb, the sex drive; -verkehr, sexual intercourse; and so on.17

From this humankind, but repulsing the dominion of the Human, we consider the English language’s “kind,” sometimes restricted to Our Own Kind. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the following major meanings of kind (Old English gecynde), in two groups: 1. (a) what belongs to one by origin, birth, or nature, including place, property, and quality; (b) one’s own, properly, by nature; (c) nature in general, generically; a class possessing attributes in common; (d) a race, or class, of creatures, also family, tribe, clan, kin, kinfolk; therefore, offspring, progeny, descendants, kin and kinfolk; family, stock, ancestry; (e) bread and water in the Eucharist; leading to kind of, the class, family, tribe etc. to which an individual belongs, a sort, sort of, vulgarly, to some extent, in a way; then in kind, alluding to goods or property. 2.

(a) natural, native, inherent; (b) proper, appropriate, fitting; belonging by right

of birth; (c) well-born, of good kind; (d) benevolent, bearing good will, generous and caring, agreeable, pleasant, thankful; (e) soft, tender, easy to work with.

This dyadic, heterogeneous kindness may express an ethics closer to nature’s heterogeneity than we have so far considered. But first another brief digression. Derrida, in a thought of sexual difference that we will wish to repeat, another unforgetting, asks us to remember that sexual difference cannot be forgotten even when neutered. Face-to-face before Heidegger, but with the entire world, at 171

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least Western world, in the wings, Derrida notes that the absence of Dasevris sex, Heidegger’s silence on sex, means . . . sex, Geschlecht: Of sex, one can readily remark, yes, Heidegger speaks as little as possible, perhaps he has never spoken of it. Perhaps he has never said anything, by that name or the names under which we recognize it, of the “sexual-relation,” “sexual-difference,” or indeed of “man-and-woman.”18

But insofar as it is opened up to the question of being, insofar as it has a relation to being, in that very reference, Dasein would not be sexed (G l, 66). The point to which Derrida brings us, acknowledging the possibility of extreme violence, is that the very neutrality of Dasein1s lack of sexual difference is sexed. This may be the question of sexual difference, of our age, giving birth to an ethics, the question for us of how nature, everywhere, is heterogeneous, sexed, filled with known and unknown kinds. We have heard the exclusion of animals from the privileged realm of humanity— another animal sacrifice. Animals cannot speak. Animals cannot experience death as death (OWL, 107). Derrida speaks of this silence that excludes the animal, in Heidegger, in what he properly names his fourth discussion of Geschlecht.19 Beginning with the words in Being and Time, the passing and cryptic words, uals Horen der Stimme des Freundes, den jedes Dasein bei sich tragt” (as in hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it),20 Derrida returns us to a neutrality devoid of body, materiality, and sex, this invisible and disembodied friend. “The friend has no face, no figure. No sex. No name. The friend is not a man, nor a woman” (G4, 165), and certainly not an animal, who has neither ear nor voice nor hand and does not know its death. So Heidegger says, and Derrida asks us to reconsider, though not by representing the animal as voiced, with Care, but within a certain negativity and silence, still resisting Heidegger’s exclusions: The animal has no friend, man has no friendship properly so called for the animal. The animal that is “world poor,” that has neither language nor experience of death, etc., the animal that has no hand, the animal that has no friend, has no ear either, the ear capable of hearing and of carrying the friend that is also the ear that opens Dasein to its own potentiality-for-being and that. . . is the ear of being, the ear for being. (G4, 172)

There is something profound about the animal voice and ear, excluded by Heidegger’s absolutely originary and primordial refusal of anthropology, sociology, ethics, and politics. Perhaps in this refusal of ethics there can be found another ethics, toward animals and other natural things, as there is in the refusal of Dasein's sex a certain sexual difference, a double and triple and quadruple blow. And perhaps there is another blow in the granting of the animal voice, if only under the sign of death. For Heidegger says that animals do not know death as death, as they do not know language as language.21 Yet Hegel understands the triangle of voice, death, and animal in an altogether different, profoundly haunting way. In the early and unpublished work in which he speaks of death “in terrifying terms,” 22 Hegel speaks of the animal voice: 172

ROSS The empty voice of the animal acquires a meaning that is infinitely determinate in itself. . . . Language, inasmuch as it is sonorous and articulated, is the voice of consciousness because of the fact that every sound has a meaning; that is, that in language there exists a name, the ideality of something existing, the immediate nonexistence of this. (JR, I, 212, LD, 44)

The voice is active hearing, purely in itself, which is posited as universal; (expressing) pain, desire, joy, satisfaction, (it is) Aufheben of the single itself, the consciousness of contradiction. Here it returns into itself, indifference. Every animal finds a voice in its violent death; it expresses itself as a removed self ((als aufgehobnes Selbst). (Birds have song, which other animals lack, because they belong to the element of air— articulating voice, a more diffused self) (JR, II; LD, 44-45). Death draws its terrible majesty upon us within our dominion over animals, as if anything could justify our crimes, including death. Lyotard asks us to think of a victim who has no way to testify to a wrong, who lacks authority to name injury. In the extreme, animals represent the utmost victims, as if they have no voice: Some feel more grief over damages inflicted upon an animal than over those inflicted upon a human. This is because the animal is deprived of the possibility of bearing witness according to the human rules for establishing damages, and as a consequence, every damage is like a wrong and turns it into a victim ipsofacto. . . . That is why the animal is a paradigm of the victim. (D, 28)

Yet what could grant an animal or deprive it of this possibility of witness? Fairy tales imagine animals who speak and testify, who act and suffer. Every animal finds a voice in life or death. Is it more or less of a victim if we cause that death, if we do not listen? Do concentration camp survivors cease to be victims when we build memorials to their suffering? Or does our testimony make them more explicitly victims? It seems that the blow that strikes sexual difference, its curse, curses animals more profoundly. In the silence of their death, even in their screams, because they do not speak grammatically, we are ethically, morally, in service to the good and God, sure that we treat them well to use them for our purposes. The blow under which women, slaves, and other races fall, falls repeatedly and catastrophically on animals. We struggle with the idea that this primordial blow, originary polemos, works to the destruction of one or another kind of creature or human being, when we know in our heart of hearts that to destroy a kind is to commit the worst possible crime. We know it even when we are not philosophical. “Genocide, the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious, political or social group, is the ultimate crime against humanity.” 23 Perhaps the destruction of a kind is the ultimate crime against nature. Perhaps we may seek an ethics of kinds. Maria Lugones presents an image of multiple identities in a gesture against flux and fragmentation. Within the frame of “ ‘outsiders’ to the mainstream of, for example, the White/Anglo organization of life in the U.S.,” 24 Lugones speaks of “shifting from the mainstream construction of life where she is constructed to other constructions of life where she is more or less ‘at home’ ” 173

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(.PWT, 3). She offers this image of world-traveling, of shifting place and identity, as loving and creative, “ethical” : As outsiders to the mainstream, women of color in the U.S. practice “world”travelling, mostly out of necessity. I affirm this practice as a skillful, creative, rich, enriching and, given certain circumstances, as a loving way of being and living.

(PWT, 3)

Women of color, rainbow witches, find themselves by necessity within multiple displacements of identity and place, thrown into places where they have no place, places of heterogeneity. Lugones and other writers of color suggest that this displacement, this heterotopia, however painful, offers another possibility of the good. People of color, especially women and especially children of slaves, have always inhabited multiple, heterogeneous worlds, public and private, so that they know no safe place, if anyone knows any places of safety. Even so, they know the possibility of creating the good in the heterogeneous demands of traveling, shifting, from world to world, kind to kind. Heterogeneity knows sadness and grief, pain and suffering, but also joy. If world-traveling means being able to participate in multiple cultural and natural worlds, as if one belonged anywhere and everywhere, it knows nothing of heterogeneity. If world-traveling means participating in other worlds, entering other places, masterfully, dominatingly, it is anything but ethical. If world-traveling means participating in the rush to development in which heterogeneity is exchange and substitution, we give way to empty mastery. Yet something ethical may be recognized in the multiple and heterogeneous identities world-traveling constructs and presupposes: “I am different persons in different ‘worlds’ and can remember myself in both as I am in the other. I am a plurality of selves” (PWT, 14). Lugones’s worlds are ethnic, social, and communal: “For something to be a ‘world’ in my sense it has to be inhabited at present by some flesh and blood people. . . . A ‘world’ in my sense may be an actual society given its dominant culture’s description of life, including a construction of the relationships of production, of gender, race, etc.” (PWT, 9-10). I am pursuing this idea of heterogeneity into nature’s inexhaustible kinds, into natura naturata. It does not mean “my” kind as against “yours,” not even “ours,” but a certain heterogeneity of kinds. Lyotard speaks of the dispersal of identity in relation to universal history, speaks of universal and proper names: “Gan we continue today to organize the multitude of events that come to us from the world, both the human and the non-human world, by subsuming them beneath the idea of a universal history of humanity?” (LR, 314). Did we ever do so? Lyotard believes we did in modernity. But who is this we? Was there ever a universal we, and is there now? Lyotard suggests that, at least for Kant and Hegel, emancipation entails that there will be a we made up of us all. But in the “present minority situation,” emancipation forces us into the tension between the “singularity, contingency and opacity of its present, and the universality, self-determination and transparence of the future it is promised” (LR, 316), that is, between proper names and universal language and history. Here we may again revert to kinds, located somewhere between (entre/antre) proper names and universality. Or rather, kinds are nowhere between proper names and universality, but rest 174

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in-between in each, made up of differends. Proper names represent a singular individual, but every individual belongs to many kinds, divides over different kinds, travels among them, moves between them. Every individual belongs to many kinds, but especially, perhaps, those human individuals disenfranchised from dominant discourses, including the discourse which insists that we are always between proper names and universality. Every individual is individual in virtue of its multiple kinds. This does not seem to be a thought for Lyotard, for whom the we moves between the proper and common name, between the singularity of the event and the universality of language and history. “It seems that it [the we] is condemned . . . to remain particular, to remain (perhaps) you and I, and to exclude a lot of third parties” (LR, 316). It seems that Lyotard, like Levinas, takes the face-to-face to fall between the one and the other, face-to-face, two individual others, resisting universality. It seems that Lugones takes the face-to-face to fall between the one kind and the other, takes the reality made up of differends to fall between different kinds of places and identities, regardless of universality. Gender, among other kinds, inhabits spaces of sorrow and joy, souffranee and jouissance, that we suppose to know as we inhabit them multiply. Irigaray’s criticism of Levinas is that he does not know the heterogeneity of the other sex, and does not know the communion of pleasure, love, jouissance, in virtue of that heterogeneity. I take the risk here of calling this heterogeneous eros, “heterosex,” but I do not mean especially sex between men and women. I mean intimacy, love, and pleasure, in the body, between different kinds, divided by gender, genre, kin, kindred, culture, stock, family, nation, etc. Here is where I would place childhood. Lyotard suggests that “an immigrant enters a culture by learning proper names” (LR, 319). The names he learns, according to Lyotard, are “the names used to designate relatives, heroes . . . places, dates and, I would add . . . units of measure, of space, of time and of exchange-value” (LR, 319). These are all names of kinds, names as kinds, proper-names-belonging-to-a-kind, many kinds. We learn in time to understand, to participate in, to find ourselves and other individuals in kinds, temporally. We seek an ethics of multiple kinds. Such an ethics resists the universalizing movement Lyotard describes, repeatedly, where for example he reads the declaration, “We, the French people” to bear universal intent. Perhaps it was geodeclarative, as all such declarations are, declarative for the French people, declarative for our kind of people, whoever they may be, and whatever they may be supposed to know. For kinds exceed their limits, the multiplicity of kinds exceeds its and every other limit: kinds in multiple profusion. It seems that heterogeneity for Lyotard is always restricted. Yet La realite comporte le differend, and “Politics . . . is the threat of the differend. It is not a genre, it is the multiplicity of genres, the diversity of ends, and par excellence the question of linkage” (D, 138). And even here, We, the French people exclude women. I repeat Lyotard’s words: How could 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

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LYOTARD: PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, AND THE SUBLIME 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?

(HJ, 4)

We might rather say: How could this thought, a thought so devoted to remembering that a forgetting takes place in all thought, in all art, in all “representation” of the world, how could it possibly have ignored the thought of sexual difference, which, in a certain sense, thinks, tries to think, nothing but that very fact? How could this thought forget and ignore “Women” to the point of suppressing and foreclosing to the very end the horrifying (and inane) attempt at silencing, at making us forget forever what, for men, reminds us, ever since the beginning, that “there is” the Forgotten? And something else, heterogeneous in kind: Gould the heterogeneity of kinds be the Forgotten? Lyotard’s utmost critique of Heidegger is that: “remaining anchored in the thought of Being, the ‘Western’ prejudice that the Other is Being, it has nothing to say about a thought in which the Other is the Law” (HJ, 89). I would say rather that the Other is the Good. Its other names are kinship and kindness. Reality is made up of heterogeneous kinds. We cherish the kinds that plenish the earth.

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PART IV BEFORE AESTHETICS

© IIui>h J. Silverm an.

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Chapter 12

POSTMODERN THINKING OF TRANSCENDENCE Richard Brons

In the avalanche of poststructuralist, deconstructive, and postmodern critique, we seem to have lost track of transcendence, a worn-out word in philosophy. Who cares? Certainly Levinas does, as well as Girard, Blanchot, and Bataille. But Lyotard? Lyotard, the terminator of “transcendental” modernism and other excesses of Western Vemunft? Surely not. There is good reason for using the concept of transcendence as a key to Lyotard’s thinking. It is useful even in the postmodern mise en abime, where traces of transcendence are supposed to confirm their enclosure in immanence.1 “Transcendence in immanence” is the formula, expressing the view held by the majority of philosophers who even bother to speak in these terms at all, Lyotard himself not excluded. But Lyotard himself appears ambiguous in this respect. In The Inhuman, for example, he ridicules the “reassuring transcendent immanence of thought to its objects,” while all the same developing certain notions which are transcendent to the grasp of the human mind: sexual difference; the immemorial time of the event; matter; soul; timbre; nuance; childhood.2 They are unthinkable, but they launch thinking endlessly, haunting the mind as “a familiar and unknown guest, which is agitating it, sending it delirious but also making it think” (/, 2). This is a far cry from the Kantian frame in which the enlightened mind cherishes the golden radiance of its own transcendence under the law of freedom. But still. . . a postmodern transcendence? When reading Lyotard, one finds dozens of occurrences of transcendence, although they never occur in a customary manner. Rather, Lyotard’s usage of the term is always equivocal. It is almost as if he wished to maintain a free range of notions, so as to be able to haunt our thinking precisely in the way cited above: “never letting itself be thought, but launching thought endlessly.” When it comes to traces or signs of this transcendence, we can read Lyotard on two tracks, one on which he follows Kant, and another on which he listens to Freud. On the Kantian side, there is the transcendence of reason, Vemunft, manifesting itself in signs of the absolute, beyond the laws of nature. Sentiments such as respect for the moral law, enthusiasm for a political Idea, or the sentiment of the aesthetic sublime stimulate the mind and remind it of its transcendence. Quite another story is the Freudian Nachtraglichkeit, the

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aftermath of primary repression, with its subliminal traces and eruptions. Are these “accidents” worthy of the title “transcendence”? My argument is not for the sake of retaining the term “transcendence” per se, with its abundance of meanings and associations.3 By favoring this particular word, I mean to highlight “one of the things at stake” in Lyotard’s own struggle.4 With Lyotard, the struggle itself seems to be the issue at stake par excellence. In his work we find no single phrase or turn without this strange tension, this restless sense of resistance and uncertainty. Writing and reading in this way intensifies the tension up to a point where it is difficult to resist the easy way out, leaving his readers and himself in the dark. After all, is there any relief or compromise ever offered in even one of his texts, which resemble philosophical thrillers lacking any resolution or glimpse of a denouement ? There is no compromise, for agony (agonistics) and suspense are here to stay. At least, that is, if there is any honor left for thinking, or, more specifically, if there is honor in a thinking always in conflict with something transcendent to itself. Far from emotivist or voluntarist connotations, Lyotard’s honoring of thinking as a conflict bears upon the consideration of elemental conditions of the mind, notably affects of “tautegoric” and heuristic reflection.5 In his Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, he sketches the outline of a basic reflection that is tantamount to a thinking informing itself about its affects, trying to channel them into one of its genres.6 Kant sorted these genres under the headings of the faculties, whereas Lyotard approaches them as families of phrases, in the sense of Wittgensteinian language-games. In its tautegoric core, thinking is a reflection on itself, on how it feels to think, in either positive or negative autoreflection. The emotive accounts of this elemental evaluation hardly come to the fore, however, when thinking can follow and apply the rules and limits of its various established genres, faculties or phrase-families. Reflective thinking becomes more alert and affected when genres (families) with conflicting rules meet. Rules and genres of thinking collapse in the face of the thoughtaffects that they cannot mediate without violating the principles of their own heterogeneity and the mutual differences that demarcate them. Such can be the agony of thinking, fighting differends of heterogeneity in a movement contrary to Hegelian speculative dialectics. To anticipate this agony, thinking wants to make sure of its (internal and external) limits in order to cope with its own discord. At the same time, however, this limiting movement necessarily meets the limitless, the absolute, the transcendent. Is this a return of thinking to itself, as Kant would have it? If so, it is a return as anamnesis, as Lyotard is quick to amend. This anamnesis can be understood as an elemental state of thinking stripped to the core, to its soul, only capable of comparing analogically certain states and proportions, very much like the body compares its ever-altering states. Nevertheless, this stripped self-reflection is purported to be the primary source and first vantage point of all heuristic reflection, critique, and, not least, philosophy (L, 21, 41, 47). In some philosophical traditions, such resources as those thinking extracts from itself appear under the title of transcendence. In these traditions, transcendence as such has always been a main trump, hidden or overt. With Lyotard, transcendence is still a vital source, although in a sense quite different from what we know from Heidegger, Girard, or even Levinas. Maybe this is a postmodern thinking of transcendence, provided that period-labels signify not much more than different closures of think180

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ing, different closures of its transcendence. In that vein, postmodern thinking of transcendence means this: returning to the elementals of thinking before the closure (the self-captivating immanence) of the mind typical of (postmodernism. In redeeming the debt thinking owes to itself, Lyotard honors an age-old spirit of transcendence, saving it in the face of postmodernism and from all periodizing and other modes of abstract time management. Yet what purpose or good is served by taking the trouble to vindicate an almost rudimentary notion, one not even explicitly appreciated by Lyotard himself? In other words, what do we gain that we could not obtain from more familiar strands of critique or sensibility? My argument here bears upon the assumption that a historical model of changing attitudes toward transcendence can add to the understanding of the very special conditions we are dealing with when reading Lyotard. Through his textual and contextual performance of such remarkable notions as the figural, the pagan, the differend, and the sublime— very versatile agents of subversion— Lyotard is trying to save the honor of thinking by thinking of transcendence as the source (the “mother,” the Greek mater; “matter,” far beyond good old Mother Nature) of the agonistic labor in which thinking is involved from its very beginning.7 This notion of transcendence is not fully understandable without retracing the differend and the sublime to certain traditional accounts of transcendence, notably those developed by Kant, Heidegger, and Levinas. These three philosophers have opened pathways of thinking about transcendence rather than closing down along the tracks that Lyotard has redirected them. The following short historical survey of transcendence takes Kant as a point of departure, especially regarding the distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent. To be sure, this distinction does not come from Kant, but stems from a thousand years of ambiguous use of Augustine’s transcedere, which in itself had already two meanings: the way toward God, and the way of God.8 The ambiguities which did arise gradually came down to a distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent. Within medieval scholasticism, we find the two almost literally transposed: the transcendental (transcendentia) as the first principles of knowing or even of being and the Augustinian meditations about the way to God.9 Taken in a very broad sense, this twofold is still present in today’s connotations: any transcendental supervising of science and knowledge is scorned as a relic of traditional metaphysics, and the transcendent stands for the supernatural or supersensible. Obviously the transcendent and the supersensible overlap each other a great deal, but philosophically they are not equivalent, since in some important traditions the transcendent involves epistemological or ontological considerations of the meaning and the relevance of the unpresentable. Thinking the supersensible as the unpresentable led Kant to delimit valid (representable) experience, but not without trying to give a universal or communal sense to what is impossible to represent— an Idea, or a feeling— as a valid experience. This has led to the distinction between concepts of understanding and Ideas of the unpresentable. The Kantian Ideas are called transcendent because they transgress known and representable reality. Therefore epistemology will tend to criticize these transcendent Ideas and tolerate them only insofar as they are necessary to finalize knowledge of reality, i.e., to conceive the external boundaries, aims, and possible extensions of knowledge. Kant was one of the first to resist the use of 181

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unpresentable Ideas when knowledge of reality was at stake. But at the same time, Kant acknowledges and even emphasizes that certain transcendent Ideas are indispensable for dealing with the results of his First Critique: without them it would be impossible to bridge the gap between conflicting aims and interests of the human faculties. Moreover, the most important Idea supporting Kant’s exploration of a possible harmony within and between the mind, the soul, and society is the very “Idea of the Idea,” which is the Idea of supersensible transcendence in itself, as the ultimate precondition for a universal community of thinking entities. Together with its companion of the ages, the transcendental, the notion of the transcendent is all but indispensable for Kant. Modifying this dual notion of transcendence, he substituted a traditional metaphysical usage for an epistemoethical usage, according to which transcendence is defined as nonobjectifiable output of the mind, of considerable ethical or practical importance but never a possible object of knowledge. But the critique also means to judge the value of nonobjectifiable Ideas. For Kant, valuable Ideas are fixed, innate, and natural to the mind because they help to regulate the economy of heterogeneous thinking. There is a distinction between transcendental and transcendent ideas here. A transcendental Idea is the logically necessary result of the transcendental analysis, which delimits and defines the various faculties of mind and soul. According to this analysis, each faculty has an ideal finalization beyond its own limits. The best example of this is the Idea of reality itself, which is thinkable but also infinite and therefore unrepresentable. A transcendent Idea, on the other hand, does not logically follow from transcendental analysis itself. A transcendent Idea is an Idea of Reason which gives no finalization of limits but which gives an account of reflective thinking touching upon the limitless, upon the unpresentable without beginning or end. Through transcendent Ideas, Reason accounts for the absolute infinite which is independent of the finite. The unconditional, the supersensible, and the ethical Law are completely independent of causality, sensation, and volition. Therefore the ability to think these transcendent Ideas exhibits the very possibility of the mind not only to think freedom, but also to judge independently of rules and of the law of causality. Transcendent Ideas thus work like beacons when it comes to judging the indeterminate and the indefinite. Reason’s ability to think transcendence in Ideas gives reflective thinking a universal, communal substratum when judging particular cases which do not fit into one of the faculties. Now, how is this universal substratum legitimated? As mentioned before, Kant’s “Idea of the Idea” implies a supersensible communality (Gemeinsinn) in which thinking is alleged to be embedded. Thinking, Nature, Freedom, and Finality, or World, God, and Soul, as so many instances of the supersensible, involve the Idea of the very possibility of thinking the supersensible. It is also the last account thinking can give of itself. According to Kant, this last account consists in the Idea of a universal and necessary contiguity of all possible thinking, particularly in its movements of dynamic synthesis— namely, a necessary contiguity of all of its heterogeneous elements. This implies the possibility of each and every thought to meet or to be in touch with any other affect and movement of the mind in a communal environment and, ultimately, a supersensible environment, a sensus communis, or a universal community of thinking entities (L, 249-267). 182

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Kantian ideas of transcendence, however, have been criticized for their ahistorical and too absolute opposition of nature and freedom, as well as for their dependence upon the unifying notion of an autonomous, reasonable subject (the Ich denke). Even so, they are relatively harmless compared to the many other intellectual products of the Enlightenment. Let me recall once again the most important characteristic of Kant’s transcendent Idea, that is, its lack of possible presence or presentation in empirical reality or mental images ( Vorstellung) of reality. Although, according to Kant, some of these Ideas are quite natural to the human mind, even necessary for its attaining and maintaining a balance between conflicting drives and goals, we still have to be careful not to fall into the transcendental illusion of mistaking guidelines and metaphors for cognitive concepts that refer to an objective comprehension of reality. Kant’s warning against mistaking the transcendent for the real or even the possible surely takes a strong critical stance against totalizing and unifying Ideas, the act of which has left a terrible trace of violence and exclusion throughout Western history. Thus the Kantian stance against literal uses of Ideas seems to have much critical merit even today. But what about his own positive use of such Ideas? In Lyotard’s later work, we find a peculiar ambivalence with regard to the Ideas, crucial as they are to Kant’s philosophy. To bring this ambivalence into focus, I want to discuss the distinction between the merits of a transcendent Idea and those of thought-affects manifesting themselves when reflection fails to link a “case” (a Fall, something “befallen” on the mind, the event) to appropriate genres of thinking or phrasing. If we believe, with Kant, that there is an elemental state of mind where thinking is supposed only to reflect its being affected tautegorieally and where thinking is supposed to find rules for linking these affects to appropriate genres heuristically, then this elemental thinking has to search its way through a whole gamut of sensations, feelings, and thoughts. For Kant, reflection and critique have to purify their subjectivity of all material (i.e., preconceptual and nonformal) content in order to channel the event into its proper faculty— today we would say into its “proper discourse.” This channeling is guided by Ideas of the unpresentable evoked by signs of conflict when reflection does not succeed in allocating the case to a proper genre of rules. These conflicts are thus conceived as Wiederstreiten or differends between faculties of the mind and thus “solved” by Ideas— implying the freedom of the mind to make rational and ethical use of the necessary heterogeneity and contiguity of all thinking. We have to recall the purport of a transcendent Idea, which consists in the account that Reason can give of the indeterminate as an instance or sign of the Absolute. Accordingly, the “thoughtaffects” that reflection is unable to link to a proper genre are transformed, or rather mitigated, into signs of the Absolute, signs of a transcendence that do not disturb thinking because they give occasion to the absolute values of humanity— namely freedom, the infinite ethical Law of the Good, and the universal communality of all thinking. Far from suggesting that Kant has not been aware of the broad spectrum between Idea and thought-affect, I want to point out (following Lyotard’s indications) that, in the Kantian account of transcendence, the evocative or disturbing force of certain unpresentable perceptions and intuitions is put under the custody of the Idea as soon as possible. Remarkably enough, the full responsibility 183

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for guiding the particular case to its proper faculty lies in the hands of reflection, which does not belong to a specific faculty but operates “before,” or “between,” the faculties. At least that is one of the main points the Third Critique wants to establish (L, 13-68). Consequently, with Lyotard we could ask whether this tautegoric and heuristic reflection is obliged to any Ideas at all. Is this reflection subdued, from its very beginnings, to the faculty of Reason or is it is ultimately at work without even the faintest predilection? The answer depends on how one reads the Third Critique, which is where Lyotard’s ambivalence begins. He suggests that the Third Critique leaves room for an interpretation according to which reflection is the cornerstone and engine of all forms of thinking, from instinctive comparing and intuitive recognition to the highest Ideas of Reason. Reflection carries the responsibility for all judgment, and, in virtue of this reflection, all differentiations and transitions between the faculties are made possible. But the universal validity necessary for this reflective disposition to bridge the gaps is founded in the Idea of the Idea, the communal sensibility which is absolutely transcendent (L, 253-262). To ask a question that Lyotard does not pose explicitly: Is reflection unthinkable without this Idea of the Idea, this mother of many “lower” Ideas such as those of nature, freedom, God, etc? If the answer to this question is affirmative, it follows that all these Ideas are indeed “a priori” and “natural to the mind.” They are not invented by reason nor by reflection but are reconstructed and exposed by critique. Then again, a transcendental critique is only possible in virtue of critical reflection. Read in this manner, Kant becomes caught in a circularity. If Lyotard wanted to emphasize the priority of reflection, he should have explicitly renounced Kant’s very notion of transcendence, the primacy of the “Idea of the Idea” altogether. Consider now Lyotard’s most important work The Differend.10A differend is an event of injustice that cannot be expressed according to the rules of genres of phrasing. In a later article we find the explanation that a differend is a phrase-ajfect, which is a suffering impossible to assimilate into any human discourse, like a child crying or an animal in pain.11 The similarity with the failure of Kantian reflection to determine a case is obvious. In The Differend, Lyotard states that thinking can save its honor only by finding and expressing differends. This sounds odd. How can one express something which is inexpressible? By inventing new idioms, he says, and by inventing new rules for phrasing these new idioms. Does this mean the philosopher has to work like the poet or like the painter? Here, we meet Lyotard’s ambivalence to the Kantian Idea. Appealing to new idioms and rules presupposes a universal communality of all possible phrases, just like the Kantian communality of thoughts. In both cases we deal with an Idea, and a prenotion of transcendence. What Lyotard actually does in most of The Differend, however, is to make clear how differends can be analyzed in terms of unsolvable conflicts between genres and how each phrase actually gives rise to a differend because there is always an unsolvable struggle for what the next phrase will be. The necessity that there will always be a next phrase is not the solution to this everlasting struggle. The struggle and the conflicts are here to stay— along with the injustice and the failures of thinking to produce solutions. Along the lines of The Differend, Lyotard looks for the lesser evil, for it would be much worse and even unbearable to ignore, neglect, and worst of all, to deny the differend. As has been shown by Lyotard, and often in a very thorough manner 184

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(L, 101-179), Kant’s dealings with the sublime are an example of the Ideas of Reason taking over from reflection when it fails to deal with the unpresentable. Ideas save the honor of thinking by appealing to a prenotion of transcendence that can be formulated in a negative and in a positive way. The impossibility of representing something in the realm of knowledge means that it is presentable under the aegis of communal Reason, because Reason is always able to measure even the most difficult cases against some ideal standard. This ideal standard bears upon a prenotion of transcendence, namely, the Idea of transcendence itself as the universal communality of Reason. Lyotard’s study of Kant could reveal a more “material” notion, one which might not be entirely inconsistent with Kant’s own approach and which would also correspond to a more general, everyday usage. According to this notion, transcendence involves an interplay between thinking and its interruptions, ranging from feelings and vague intuitions to the shock of sudden events, always defying available rules and arrangements for recognizing something as a continuation or repetition of the known, of that which can be described and assimilated. The rules resisted include social rules and values as well as rules for the proper use of language, meaning, and reference. In this light, transcendence could also be regarded as the resistance felt by reflection trying to cope with the inability to transform feelings and intuitions into clear concepts or the manageable facts of experience. As soon as the inability turns out to be an impossibility, the conditions are set for this complex interchange between thinking and the unthinkable, or, as in The Differend, between phrasing and the unphrasable. Consequently, transcendence taken in this sense is thinking or phrasing the failure to finalize (idealize) anything other than the insufficiency of thinking and phrasing. Yet to think and to phrase such a failure does not seem to be what Kant was trying to do. Nevertheless, as Lyotard suggests (L, 253-286), the entire Kantian critique reveals how thinking, compulsively searching for its limits, cannot avoid transcending these limits— not because it is subordinate to Ideas of Reason, but because it cannot avoid getting mixed up in differends. In these differends, thinking meets a resistance that triggers many feelings, thoughts, and ideas, but one that is ultimately transcendent to reasoning and to all critical effort as well, including the conceiving of Ideas, however transcendent and unpresentable they might be. Speaking of differends, then, is referring to conflicts between reflective thinking on the one hand and affective events on the other hand, cutting right through the daily routine of the mind. But thinking itself does the cutting and inflicting its injuries upon itself, just as, in The Differend, phrasing itself gives occasion to differends. The resistance thinking and phrasing run into is truly transcendent because it is impossible to represent or reconcile the sheer materiality of this resistance in an Idea (such as one of god, nature, fate, destination, or community). As the Idea belongs to the genre of Reason, it is not necessarily linked to the operations of reflection. We have no ideal transcendence within material immanence a la Merleau-Ponty, because the “flesh of the mind” is blind matter-of-the-mind that breaks all reflection into refraction. Transcendence originally consists of a kind of elemental thinking that attempts to cope with sensations and feelings that do not let themselves be taken in by one of the phrase-genres or by the Ideas that guide these genres. 185

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To paraphrase transcendence in Lyotard’s terms: “it” (the Thing, the Id, the Res, the Unpresentable) is a fracture of thinking and phrasing that can at best result in a reflective concept expressing awareness of that breach. That breach sometimes brings about new Ideas, but never repairs itself; it only leads to new differends. Transcendence itself is involved not so much in these concepts or Ideas as in the preceding relation between thinking and the unphrasable. The majority of transcendent Ideas or Ideas of a certain transcendence generally originate in a feeling, like the sublime, or like religious and ethical feelings. One might agree with Lyotard that the entire enterprise of Kantian critique ultimately originates from the basic reflection of thinking affecting itself. In this view, Kant’s Ideas of transcendence that pertain to a supersensory sensus communis actually would have originated in an awareness of an indefinite materiality that thinking cannot formally transpose into one of its finalized and regulated modes, i.e., faculties or phrase-genres. The crucial point in Lyotard’s interpretation is that the linkage between this elemental awareness and the Ideas of Reason is not necessary at all but is rather one of the possible linkages. Lyotard’s suggestive reading of Kant leaves us with questions that are very relevant to thinking today: In order to cope with otherness and the Other, with the political and cultural problems typical of our time, do we need to “forget” as many Ideas as possible, since they only prevent us from being affected by the particular event? Do we have to regard at least some transcendent Ideas as the last, but inevitable and even decisive, resort of thinking? Or do we have to regard these Ideas as virtually always outdated products of a much more substantial “work” of affective and heuristic reflection? Nobody will deny today the Kantian ambivalence between a more determining and a more differentiating mode of philosophy, one which seems to go back to an elemental tension— or even differend— between mind and soul. To state this crucial Kantian ambivalence more precisely, it should be remembered that Kant took a crucial step in setting limits to unbridled metaphysical speculation and to all sorts of notions of a boundless human mind. The other side of the coin shows a stilloveractive mind, present always and everywhere as critical watchman and guide, reflecting and judging everything happening inside and outside the body, ardently drawing its own borders and deciding what belongs to its domains in which way. This all-enclosing presence is just as typical for thinking as the circulation of blood is for the heart. But given the restrictions that he himself imposed, one could ask whether, in Kant’s model, thinking just reflects sensibility or whether it neutralizes and anesthetizes our intuitions and tensions by transforming them all-too-soon into signs of transcendent Ideas. In the final case, certain occurrences of conflict are either disavowed too soon or put under the custody of a universal Reason. To conclude my discussion of Kant, I take it from Lyotard that the Kantian critique, though giving us a very useful “framework” for reflective thinking, narrows the variety and range of possible links between thinking and event and between judgment and conflict. Transcendent Ideas confine the temporal range and the very passibilite (alert sensibility) of reflective judgment. Considering transcendence as the disposition of the reasonable mind toward a universal communality of thinking entities implies a disposition of reflective judgment toward Ideas. The illuminating and abstracting effects of Ideas are devastating to a passibilite of affects, as we find, for example, in the strange behavior of a 186

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group of women in “Speech Snapshot” (cf. LR). The feelings of anger and indignation aroused by the names of Auschwitz and Faurisson are easily exchanged for the calm haven of an Idea, albeit a transcendent Idea. Turning from Kant to Heidegger and to postmodern thinking seems to require the radical replacement of the term transcendence with sharper-edged notions such as difference, differance, or the differend. Should not an outmoded notion of transgression give way to a more appropriate sense of the unpresentable? As mentioned before, there are some good reasons to withhold a term with different interacting historical connotations and elaborations. Heidegger comes much closer to recognizing what I have called transcendence as a basic relation between the awareness of something unpresentable, on the one hand, and reflection of this occurrence, on the other. “Closer” in this context means that the event of the original incentive to reflective thinking is brought much nearer to the fore and plays a leading part in Heidegger’s work. The main difference with respect to Kantian transcendence lies in Heidegger’s ontological recognition of transcendence as the original instance, Ereignis, unfolding itself in a reflecting or rather a turning back to the unthought time when regular thinking had been interrupted and will be interrupted again in the face of something which can be given many names . . . from unthinkable to unpresentable, from Being to differend to phrase-affect. Heidegger and Kant do have in common, however, a readiness to take transcendence as the source for thinking with an unpresentable orientation, one vital and indispensable not only in ethical and existential matters, but also in the humanities, politics, and even science. Of course, Heidegger developed quite different orientations, rooting them, for instance, in an experience of life, place, time, and space, going way beyond the restrictions Kant imposed on the relations between thinking and experience. Kant’s Ideas have the function of supplementing and complementing the limits of objective knowledge, of extending them only insofar as necessary to fulfill certain alleged natural needs and dispositions of the individual mind, enlightened culture, and liberal society. For Heidegger, this is far too centered on the principles of empirical knowledge, or, to put it in his terms, far too dependent upon a presentation of beings which is taken for granted instead of unveiled as the limited ontology it actually is. At the risk of simplification, we could say that Heidegger criticizes Kant’s recipe for judging without a rule, as in the case of an incomprehensible feeling. Heidegger’s judging transcends the act of judging into another mode of awareness wherein something more is at stake than mere judgment. At stake, rather, is the quality of a fusion between thinking and sensibility. I stress the word “quality,” because to Heidegger what matters is the value of an existential orientation or receptiveness resulting from the encounter between thinking and unpresentable Ereignis. Especially in his later works, the value of a transcendent orientation as an interference between thinking and the unpresentable event becomes ever more important to Heidegger. The postmodern reception of Heidegger is divided on precisely this point. His notions of certain existential and even political “time-transcending” orientations are sharply rejected by those who accuse him of neutralizing the frontiers, which Kantian critique had so diligently built up, between cognition, aesthetics, ethics, and most importantly, politics. Heidegger’s counseling an ethico-aesthetical destiny of Being (iSein) is an easy prey to political abuse, particularly when the authentic view 187

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is regarded as presentable in public reality and transcendence is confounded with a public utopia.12 Yet we also find a positive reception of Heidegger in the mainstream of postmodernism. The postmodern text unfolds differences and different ontological orientations, illuminating the Heideggerian shift from transcendental philosophy of knowledge to a thinking toward transcendent Being and Time.13 However, to associate the postmodern text with transcendence is difficult because, exceptions notwithstanding, something is missing that we do find in Heidegger and Kant as well as in Levinas and Lyotard— the call of the ethical. In this respect, the postmodern reception of Heidegger may have led to a neglect of the ethical aspects of the sublime. The unpresentable sublime, very important in postmodern critique, appears to have lost a great deal of its Kantian potential to mobilize judgment of conflict. Traditionally, these ethical dispositions are typical of thinking transcendence, which, so it seems, have vanished into thin air with the postmodern aestheticizing of the unpresentable sublime. We have here hit upon a decisive point in dealing with transcendence today. Even Lyotard appears to defer the ethical appeal of the transcendent Law in his outline of elemental auto-affective and heuristic thinking.14 In his Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Lyotard meticulously elaborates the argument that the sentiment of the sublime does not necessarily imply the passage from the incomprehensible feeling to the Ideas of Reason that disclose the infinity of the moral Law. Even the link between the sentiment of the sublime and the sentiment of ethical respect is not a necessary one (cf. L, 153-158, 272-278). These considerations lead to the conclusion that the sublime and the ethical do not go together by themselves. This is one of the reasons why I prefer to use the term transcendence, which has firmer historical links with the ethical. But what is the ethical mark of Lyotard’s material transcendence? Much of the reception of Lyotard concentrates on his ethics, even regarding his later work as a plea for a Judaic justice. This discussion of his work is no exception, since it also stumbles into the well-known confrontation (or should we say differend?) between postmodern aesthetics of the sublime and ethical critique. But what about the option that Lyotard emphasizes and radicalizes this very differend throughout his analysis of the sublime and the basic reflection which accompanies not only the sublime but any movement of the mind? Adhering to Lyotard’s view of reflection, we could assume that his “honor of thinking” consists in the ethical duty to remain at the elemental level of reacting and reflecting upon the unpresentable event, withholding determination or finalization as long as possible. This passibilite— which is not mere passiveness— takes responsibility for the irredeemable injustice of the unpresentable as differend. As explained above, a differend is a suffering which is unpresentable in-between the discourses of representation. This in-between is also the infinitesimal Now between what will happen and what we expect to happen. In watching a movie, we don’t want to miss anything nor do we want to know what will happen in advance. To consider these elemental exigencies only from an aesthetic view is already attaching reflection onto one specific genre, whereas an exclusively ethical interpretation would also be too hasty— at least for Lyotard.15 Avoiding the differend is not so much an aesthetic loss as a general flaw of the mind avoiding too much conflict, anguish (Angst), and complication. But then again, to criticize unjust presumptions of the unpre188

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sentable is to commit oneself at least to an explanation or a paraphrase of what it would mean to do justice to the unpresentable. This paraphrasing is exactly what Lyotard is doing in his writings, and to understand this, we need also to understand Levinas, particularly because Lyotard is not just copying Levinas’s model of ethical transcendence.16 Let me first relate to Levinas in terms of Lyotard’s elemental notion of transcendence. As a linkage between thought and awareness of something unpresentable, this transcendence does not involve much of a mental performance. Take, for example, our amazement at receiving a cryptic message not addressed to us and without indications of a particular sender. Levinas would certainly argue that our very first thought is not to decipher such a message by appealing to available codes of logos. For Levinas, a message is first of all an ethical event having an original impact which transcends all categories of knowing, willing, imagining, etc. This original impact issues from a presence which Levinas calls the Other, implying a transcendence not just unpresentable but also impossible to turn into any Idea whatsoever. Although unapproachable by the logos, this transcendent Other maintains an ethical relationship with us, expecting from us only to receive and to respect its impact, which is pure otherness.17 The implications of Levinas’s ethical transcendence for thinking are quite radical. Indeed, the unpresentable otherness of the Other precedes both Kant’s Ideas and Heidegger’s transcendent ontological orientation. Any orientation involved is of the purest ethical kind, implying obligation and respectfulness, and judging something not on the grounds of any logic or rationality, but exclusively from the consideration of whether one feels obliged to a certain judgment or course of action. The feeling or appeal of this obligation is not rooted in a faculty or discourse, nor can it be rationalized in terms of any interest or goal. If this feeling is finalized, after all, it no longer has anything to do with Levinas’s ethical transcendence, which is an irrevocable relation with unpresentable otherness. Yet this relation seems to presuppose certain rather wellknown feelings, such as love, devotion to duty, and responsibility. For Levinas, the urge to develop transcendent finalization or orientation, crucial to Kant and Heidegger, gives way to a tendency to promote certain feelings and moods of the ethical kind, quite specific and selected intentionally. So with Levinas, transcendence apparently consists in an excluding of cognitive, ontological, and even aesthetic framing of the unpresentable, whereas the ethical reception of the unpresentable other is framed within certain emotional categories. There is nothing wrong with that, Lyotard would say. The problem lies in the exclusion of certain emotions or affects in favor of those belonging to the family of edifying, overawing emotions, which Kant denominates as respectful. This exclusion runs against the grain of Lyotard’s basic reflection, where the gamut of feelings and affections is not (as yet) preselected in any way. Traces and signs of conflict, of differends between mind and transcendent matter, do not always have to evoke respect and awe; just as often they evoke the urge to criticize ambitions and claims propelled by trains of thoughts and phrases, however high or austere may be the ideals they are aiming at. At this point, it is opportune to return to Lyotard’s notion of the phase-affect, in combination with anima, the most minimal disposition to be affected by something. Presumably, the phrase-affect stands for the unpresentable occurrence, 189

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one which fails to arrive in a well-formed phrase but still arrives as an affect inflicted upon elemental thinking. Such an affect may very well run counter to all accepted conditions of time, space, identity, and unity, except for a minimal one implying the ability to receive an interruption having the impact of an affect. This is surely the most radical version of an elemental unpresentable in Western thinking, except for Leibniz’s monad (/, 37-46, 65,161-164). The crucial difference from Leibniz’s monad is, however, the involvement of transcendence in the elemental sense I have been advocating. This is supposed to mean that the syndrome of anima and affect is, at least with Lyotard, always in touch with reflection (animus). Anima (soul), animus (mind), and phrase-affect replace Levinas’s devotion to the Other in the sense that the affect has an elemental, protoethical value, notably a being-there that precedes any fixed or anticipating notion. This value implies a presence felt in anima, but as this presence is unpresentable, all regulated modes of thinking and phrasing are interrupted, and, more important, it makes every next move a wrong one, since it can do no justice to the unpresentable affect. The reflective awareness of this leads to a never-ending struggle, an effort to return to a minimal aesthesis of presence and to return from all subsequent claims to describe and present it in a mode of discourse. This never-ending return does not preclude any claim, but it does preclude any definitive or final claim. This amounts to a turn from a judging, peacekeeping philosophy to a discordant, inciting philosophy that intensifies the struggle and tension to maintain the tension between different genres of discourse and new possible phrases in order to avoid the terrible outcome of there being only one single, winning argument or phrase regime. Lyotard exercises this strategy not only on his fellow philosophers, but also on his own writing, and with far-reaching implications. For instance, Lyotard’s strategy does not restrict itself to intertextual debate, but is always drawing its energy from the unpresentable interruption itself. This energy does not only involve the strong impact of always impeding failure, suffering, and conflict but also involves the elusive relief from escaping the artificial management of time and space, typical of every phrase regime and genre of discourse. The intermittent time of the affect-phrase seems to be the only nonabstract, “real time” left, at least in Western culture.18 This intertime implies a resistance against the monolithic continuity of one-sided development, especially the evolution of technique and complexification in one direction rather than in as many (indefinite instead of infinite!) directions as one can render justice to from a position “in-between.” 19 However, philosophy cannot occupy this interposition. It can only render it in a reflection of the interrupting affect. One could still ask whether it is necessary to adhere to the notion of transcendence in order to give this account of Lyotard. It is important to position this account in a history of thinking and, from a certain historical point of view, the notion of transcendence to connect the different approaches Lyotard uses throughout his work. Notions like figure, sublime, differend, and even the postmodern might be considered as reflective concepts, which Lyotard himself in his account of Kant’s Third Critique (L, 13-68) reserves for the paradoxes and conflicts met by tautegoric and heuristic reflection. This comparison does not follow the laws and categories of logic but proceeds analogically, heading its touches under 190

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“reflective titles,” notably those of same/otherness, dis/cordance, in/outside and determine /determined (L, 52-68). Through these titles, reflection is able to “bring home” and domesticate the particular case in the domains of thinking. According to Kant, these are the necessary and inevitable preliminaries to proper thinking, relevant only in a preparatory course (Vorschule) of philosophy. For Lyotard, philosophy does not have to go any further. By reflecting the differends in thinking and phrasing only tautegorically and heuristically, philosophy tries to render the transcendent resistance to human ambitions as faithfully as possible. Contrary to the Kantian transcendence of Ideas, this is a material transcendence proper to a self-reflective subjectivity still without a subject. Nevertheless, Lyotard holds considerable respect for Kant, notably in a certain ambivalence that he retains toward the discord between fixed Ideas of transcendence and a reflective thinking of transcendence. Maybe the notion of humanity is dependent upon the Ideas of Reason, and maybe the finalizations of the faculties and the discourses are “all-too-human.” Thinking transcendence as resistance is neither too human nor beyond the humane.

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Chapter 13

LYOTARD: BEFORE AND AFTER THE SUBLIME Serge Trottein

Jean-Frangois Lyotard’s multiple publications and wide-ranging interventions are all contributions to what can be defined as a critical philosophy of the postmodern. Lyotard offers a philosophy of the postmodern— which is not exactly to say of postmodernity, of a postmodemity simply understood as the historical period which comes after modernity. Lyotard is not a philosopher of postmodemity insofar as he does not (at least not exclusively) represent his times, the times in which we live. As determined by our history and culture, we certainly are all philosophers and witnesses of postmodemity, supposing this to be a suitable qualification for our age. But the philosopher of the unpresentable— and Lyotard is indeed a philosopher of the unpresentable— cannot just represent his age: he has to be “untimely” in the Nietzschean sense, and untimeliness is essential to the postmodern. For “post,” in postmodern, does not mean only “after” but also “before,” and even “within.” Apart from his relationship to postmodemity, Lyotard is also a critical philosopher. He describes himself as a type of Kantian, a Kantian “if you wish, but [a Kantian] of the Third Critique.”1 More specifically, Lyotard identifies himself as a Kantian of the “Analytic of the Sublime.” Why this appeal to Kant, and this preference for the Third Critique?2 And what link exists between the sublime and the postmodern? When one thinks of Lyotard’s first works (for example, Discours, figure3 or Libidinal Economy4), the reference to Kant may seem surprising: one would expect Freud, Marx, or Nietzsche, the three great masters of suspicion who exercised their influence on a whole generation of contemporary French thinkers . . . but not Kant! Kant is being rediscovered as the horizon of postmodern thought. Lyotard’s attempt to think the postmodern is inconceivable without taking into account his constant and explicit recourse to the Kantian theory of aesthetic judgment. But, why the Third Critique and why the sublime? As we all know, the First Critique5 is about knowledge, the second about morality, and the third about aesthetics and finality in nature (i.e., teleology). As an aesthetician, it seems only natural that, of the three critiques, Lyotard privileges the one dealing with art; after all, the Critique of Judgment is generally considered to be the first philosophical aesthetics. However, the reasons for Lyotard’s selection of 192

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the Third Critique are far deeper and more complex than this obvious focus on aesthetics. For example, he seems sometimes even tempted to define himself as a Kantian of the “ Fourth Critique,” namely, a critique of political reason or of political judgment, something Kant never wrote, but that Lyotard might have been tempted to write. Elsewhere, he mentions that: “There is lacking an empirical ethics (an ethics of ‘prudence’), that is, a politics. There is lacking not quite a fourth ‘Critique,’ but a third part to the Third Critique. One can wonder at the fact that, in the Third Critique, reflective judgment is at work only on the aesthetic object and nature as teleology. Because there is yet another realm to which reflective judgment obviously applies: the realm of political society.”6 Kant’s theory of reflective judgment in general would interest Lyotard as a political thinker as well as an aesthetician (not just his aesthetic theory of the sublime). Reflective judgment, as opposed to determinant judgment, does not start with concepts for which it tries to find intuitions, examples, or realizations; it does not impose itself on reality, as is the case with knowledge and morality, the respective domains of theoretical and practical reason. Reflective judgment, according to Kant, does the opposite: it starts with the singular (i.e., the events, the cases, etc.) and tries to discover or to invent the rule or the concept which might correspond to their multiplicity. Hence reflective judgment displays an experimental character; it constantly has to invent new ways of understanding the events, of thinking the singular, of playing the multiple and heterogeneous games at our disposal. Reflective judgment also has a political character, for it preserves the heterogeneity and multiplicity of the elements at play in a given situation. This mode of judgment resists the pretensions of certain games to provide the rules for other games, to become metalanguages or metanarratives in Lyotard’s terms. Reflective judgment implies resistance to any imperialism, to any attempt of domination by a singularity, be it of particular interests or of a universal concept of reason, since their predominance would immediately reduce a reflective judgment to a determinate or determinant one. From this perspective, there can therefore be no political theory, describing or prescribing what society should be, but only political judgments without preexisting criteria (or, rather, ethical judgments, as they still presuppose a certain idea of justice which regulates them without nevertheless telling us what there is to be done). By borrowing Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment as purely reflective, Lyotard does not aestheticize the political, nor does he politicize the aesthetic, since the political and the aesthetic, as both thought in terms of indeterminate judgments without criteria, cannot legitimate each other. They are heterogeneous fields which it would be unjust to collapse into each other. However, this Fourth Critique (as an extension of the Third Critique) is hardly Kantian. There is nothing accidental about the fact that Kant did not write a major work dedicated to political theory. For Kant himself, political theory can be only an appendix to the metaphysics of morals, itself entirely dependent upon the Critique of Practical Reason. A Kantian politics can be merely a politics of practical reason, which is always determinant and constitutive of its objects: there is no escape from moral law and from the categorical imperative, at least not through the indeterminacy of judgment. What exactly is not Kantian in Lyotard’s recourse to Kant’s practical 193

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philosophy? Very characteristic of Lyotard in his revival of Kant is the insistence on the nondeterminant nature of moral ideas. In Lyotard’s dialogue with Jean-Loup Thebaud in Just Gaming, Thebaud asks: “Why can’t we have a politics of practical reason? Why must we appeal, as it seems to me that we must, to judgment to regulate politics? Why, if not because the concept of freedom is determinant here. It legislates” (JG, 84). Lyotard answers by denying what his interlocutor presents as Kantian: To say that it is determinant. . . Kant said it was not determinant. To begin with, freedom is a concept that is not conceivable, that is what Kant says. It is rather a force, an entity that is presupposed as a source of law but one does not have any experience of it. (JG, 84)

Lyotard continues: It does not determine the will inasmuch as it is the will in its pure state. It is transcendental freedom. But it does not determine it in the sense of determination in speculative reason; in other words, it does not determine it the way a cause deter-

mines an effect. It determines it only the way a teleological idea regulates a conduct, which is something altogether different. It is for this reason that the moral law has no content. If freedom determined the maxim of the will, the latter would have a content. In practical matters, there would be sensible intuitions to put under the laws enunciated by freedom, that is, under the obligations. But there is no content to the law. And if there is no content, it is precisely because freedom is not determinant. Freedom is regulatory; it appears in the statement of the law only as that which must be respected; but one must always reflect in order to know if in repaying a loan or in refusing to give away a friend, etc., one is actually acting, in every single instance, in such a way as to maintain the Idea of a society of free beings. (JG, 84-85)

This passage makes more perceptible Lyotard’s obsession with the supposedly Kantian idea of a nondeterminant freedom, an idea which is crucial for Lyotard’s whole strategy of a “return to Kant.” To be brief, and at the risk of being excessively reductive, one could sum up Lyotard’s political problematics with the following transcendental question: Under what conditions is a political or even ethical practice possible after deconstruction, that is, in a postmodern world of particular relations, forces, values, quantities, and qualities to be evaluated without criteria? In lieu of such criteria, one is left with opinions. This realm of opinions is what Lyotard calls the “pagan” (JG, 74). We need something “that allows us, if not to decide in every specific instance, at least to eliminate in all cases (and independently of the convention of positive law) decisions, or to put it in Kant’s language, maxims of the will, that cannot be moral” (JG, 74). That which allows us to escape the undecidability of opinions is “a regulating Idea” (in Kant’s terminology). This seems, at first glance, to be in complete contradiction to a philosophy of opinions “in the sense of the Sophists,” a philosophy of the pagan postmodern: “the problem is indeed how to articulate this philosophy of opinions with the Kantian notion of Idea” (JG, 75). In order for that articulation to work, the Idea of justice, for example, while not an opinion, cannot be a criterion either: it cannot be a concept or have any specific content, and must be “incapable of placing intuitions under its 194

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concept” (JG, 85). In a word, the Idea cannot be determinant, but only regulative or reflective. To become a guide in the chaotic world of multiple and heterogeneous opinions, it has to be emptied of all content, of all representation, even of all conception. If one objects that Kant, however, defines the Idea as a concept of reason, and, like Thebaud, that “to have a politics of practical reason takes us back to the hypothesis of a suprasensible world and [that] this suprasensible world is supposed to legislate” (JG, 85), then Lyotard’s answer still remains the same: We are not dealing with a determinant synthesis but with an Idea of human society. And that is very different. It is an Idea. It is not a concept that determines; it is a concept in its reflective, and only in its reflective, use. Which means, and you know this as well as I do, that this use ultimately leaves the conduct to be adopted undetermined. Suprasensible nature does not determine what I have to do. It regulates me, but without telling me what there is to be done. This is what Kant calls formalism (a very poor term, as far as I am concerned). (JG, 85)

If one still objects that Kant said exactly the opposite— that moral Ideas are always determinant even in their reflective use, or that what characterizes moral judgments is precisely that their content can be deducted from their form (hence Kantian formalism)— Lyotard finally concedes that the Kantian Idea or moral judgment “is not absolutely undetermined . . . it is presupposed that this Idea is the idea of a totality. Whereas the problem that faces us, even if it is put in terms of Idea and reflective judgment, is that it is no longer a matter, for us, of reflecting upon what is just or unjust against the horizon of a social totality, but, on the contrary, against the horizon of a multiplicity or of a diversity” (JG, 87). This concession even leads Lyotard to doubts about his own Kantianism: This is where both practical reason and political reason are still beholden, in Kant, to metaphysics, because of this idea of totality. But it is not a metaphysics, at least in the Kantian sense, because it is an Idea and not a concept. This is where I would operate a divide, at my own risk, because I am not certain that I am in the strict Kantian tradition. In other words, to resume our discussion where we left it, I believe that it is now a matter of doing a politics of opinions that would give us the capacity of deciding between opinions and of distinguishing between what is just and what is not just; and to have this capacity of deciding, one must effectively have an Idea; but, in contradistinction to what Kant thought, this Idea is not, for us today, an Idea of totality. (JG, 87-88)

How our decisions are going to be regulated by an Idea of multiplicity and of diversity is another story. For now, we are only trying to understand in what sense Lyotard can indeed describe himself as a Kantian of the Third Critique. Lyotard voluntarily ignores or forgets the other two critiques; he refuses the Kantian conceptions of truth and moral law. He does this by conceiving “determination” in a very restricted sense, as a kind of causality which necessarily implies a relation to knowledge. Thus Lyotard rejects the terrorism or imperialism of judgments of truth in favor of Ideas, assimilated to reflective, 195

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undetermined judgments, which appear as the only possible foundations of a postmodern politics and a postmodern aesthetics. Kantianism thereby becomes the philosophy of the postmodern, on the condition that it be rid of any determination, that is, of any reference to truth and morality. However, this condition is hardly met, for Lyotard does not realize, as Kant has shown, that if most judgments are indeed reflective, then they are almost never purely reflective. Instead, they are, at one and the same time, almost always determinant. This means that truth, morality, knowledge, and the law cannot be so easily evacuated. In fact, judgment and reflection are at work throughout the Critique of Pure Reason as well as the Critique of Practical Reason, although always in the service of concepts, be it concepts of the understanding or concepts of reason (i.e., Ideas, theoretical or moral). For that reason, a critique of judgment could only have been an appendix to the other critiques if Kant had not meanwhile discovered a new kind of judgment, a judgment that is merely reflective and not simultaneously determinant. This judgment is not political judgment, which, as Lyotard rightly insists, always presupposes an Idea of reason and therefore can never be purely reflective. This judgment is aesthetic judgment, and this is why a Kantian of the Third Critique must be concerned with aesthetics in the first place. Lyotard’s political philosophy must be understood as an attempt to think the political in an aesthetic way: not of reducing politics to aesthetics in a grossly determinant way (i.e. dogmatic, metaphysical, fascist, and so on), but of developing a purely reflective political theory, if such a production is indeed possible. Here the sublime comes into play. Aesthetic judgment, with which the Third Critique starts, is the judgment of taste or the judgment on the beautiful. As such, it functions as purely reflective but undoubtedly brings into play imagination and understanding with a view toward a cognition (a cognition which never fully takes place, or else that judgment would not be an aesthetic one but only a judgment of knowledge). In any case, the link between the beautiful and the good (or the just, as postmodems would say) is all but obvious, mostly because in the beautiful there can be no direct intervention of reason. Everything seems to take place at the local level, so to speak, just under the level of the understanding and its rules that are licensed by concepts. With the beautiful, we remain within the multiplicity and heterogeneity of pagan games. Fortunately and unexpectedly, Kant introduces a second kind of purely reflective judgment: the judgment on the sublime. Among all the differences which separate them, the one that interests us (and certainly interests Lyotard above all) is that, contrary to the beautiful, the sublime can be contained in no sensible form and concerns only the Ideas of reason (Kant explicitly notes this in the very first paragraph of the “Analytic of the Sublime” [§ 23]). With the sublime, Lyotard finally finds what he is seeking for the political: the theory of a judgment regulated by Ideas without content, without any possible representation or even presentation, the theory of a feeling of the ethical without any overly moral prescription telling us “what there is to be done.” The question is: Is the judgment on the sublime a purely reflective judgment? Doesn’t its concern for the Ideas of reason prevent it from keeping its aesthetic status, making it already teleological? Isn’t the judgment on the sublime a moral judgment that doesn’t admit itself as such (a moral judgment by 196

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another name)? If one can forget for a moment that the sublime is ultimately the secret manifestation of an undetermined concept of reason (that Idea which is so indispensable for a postmodern politics), the sublime can be understood as first and foremost the result of a failed attempt of the imagination to comprehend an absolute of magnitude or power, that is, to present something which exceeds all presentation, which is unpresentable. Modem art has to do with the sublime inasmuch as it is about presenting something unpresentable, as opposed to classical art, which devotes itself to the beautiful representation of nature. Before the sublime, there was the beautiful (i.e., premodernity). What, then, is postmodernity? Isn’t it also often defined by Lyotard in terms of the sublime? Or, if the sublime is to be reserved for modernity, what is there after the sublime? Is the postmodern also postsublime? What would that mean? The postmodern doesn’t come after modernity; it belongs to the modern as a part of it. The postmodern is the precipitation of suspicion, the acceleration of questioning, so that “a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.” 7 And Lyotard proposes to think the difference between the modem and the postmodern in terms of the distinction between the two aspects which constitute the sublime. The emphasis can be put either on the impotence of the faculty of presentation (thus on the nostalgia for presence felt by the subject) or on the power of the faculty of conceiving (and the jubilation resulting from the invention of new rules of the game, whatever it is). Hence two kinds of avant-gardes: on the side of melancholia, the modern (the German Expressionists, Malevitch, De Chirico, Proust); on the other side, the side of novatio, the postmodern (Braque and Picasso, Lissitsky, Duchamp, Joyce): Here, then, lies the difference: modern aesthetics is an aesthetics of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. (PC, 81)

The postmodern within the modern would then be the true sublime within the apparent sublime, the truth or the essence of the modern as sublime (i.e., the presentation of an event, namely, that there is something which cannot be presented, which escapes any knowledge and a fortiori any common representation, and which must remain undetermined). If the postmodern, however, does not exactly come after modernity, but appears within modernity (or just before, at its birth), what then is to come after— post— postmodern modernity? What comes after the sublime? Lyotard deals with that question in a 1987 paper published in The Inhuman and appropriately named “After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetics.” Its point of departure is once again the “Analytic of the Sublime” from Kant’s Critique of 197

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Judgment, and more specifically “the disaster suffered by the imagination in the sublime sentiment.”8 This disaster is also a disaster for form, for the beautiful, and quite possibly for aesthetics in general: As every presentation consists in the “forming” of the matter of the data, the disaster suffered by the imagination can be understood as the sign that the forms are not relevant to the sublime sentiment. But in that case, where does matter stand, if the forms are no longer there to make it presentable? How is it with presence? With a view to resolving this paradox of an aesthetics without sensible or imaginative forms, Kant’s thought looks towards the principle that an Idea of Reason is revealed at the same time as the imagination proves to be impotent informing data. (I, 136)

Lyotard continues: The Idea, especially the Idea of pure practical reason, Law and freedom, is signaled in a quasi-perception right within the break-up of the imagination.. . . In this way the sublime is none other than the sacrificial announcement of the ethical in the aesthetic field. Sacrificial in that it requires that imaginative nature (inside and outside the mind) must be sacrificed in the interests of practical reason.. . . This heralds the end of an aesthetics, that of the beautiful, in the name of the final destination of the mind, which is freedom. (/, 137)

Such is supposed to be Kant’s solution to the paradox of an aesthetics without forms: the end of aesthetics and the birth of the ethical. We have seen that this functions as Lyotard’s solution, as a basis for a postmodern thought of the ethical as well as the political. Again, before the sublime there was the beautiful. But, if it is so clear that the sublime has now replaced the beautiful, why is Lyotard still asking questions about the status of art, such as: “what is an art . . . in the context of such a disaster? . . . What is still in play for the mind when it is dealing with presentation (which is the case with every art), when presentation itself seems impossible” (I, 137-138)? In other words, what is this unpresentable that art still has to attempt to present while knowing and making obvious that this is an impossible task? The unpresentable has to be ultimately something else than an Idea of reason, for its advent would not just mean the end of an aesthetics (that of the beautiful), but simply the end of aesthetics and of art in general in favor of ethics. The sublime and the avant-gardes would thus have announced a second death of art, which did not take place any more than did the first one announced by Hegel. If something like art (or aesthetics) resists the repeated announcements of its demise, this is because it remains something other than the occasional attempt of an impossible presentation of some ethical idea. Art has to do with what remains in the absence of any Idea, concept, or form, before and after their imposition. Lyotard calls this remainder “matter, by which I mean matter in the arts, i.e. presence” (/, 138). Lyotard states: As the idea of a natural fit between matter and form declines (a decline already implied in Kant’s analysis of the sublime, and one that for a century was both hidden and shown up by the aesthetics of Romanticism), the aim for the arts, especially of

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(I, 139)

To understand fully what is at stake in this fundamental passage, one has to recognize in it the echoes of another passage from Kant’s Third Critique: section 14 of the “Analytic of the Beautiful.” This paragraph, entitled “Elucidation through Examples,” is the place where Kant discusses at some length whether simple colors and sounds can lend themselves to aesthetic judgments (exactly what Lyotard is doing here with regard to art). One should note, by the way, that this is also the very paragraph which Derrida privileges in his analysis of the parergon (even though the parergon appears only at a later stage within Kant’s own elucidation). What is so intriguing in the parallel suggested between these two texts, and why is it relevant to the question of the postmodern? It illustrates perfectly Lyotard’s unsuspected Kantianism: a Kantianism of the Third Critique, certainly, but in the end (and perhaps in spite of himself) of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” more than that of the Sublime. This apparently easy passage of Kant’s text is in fact quite twisted (its successive editors didn’t even agree on the presence of a negation on which Kant’s entire thesis obviously depends). Unraveling Kant’s text would take too long within the context of the present discussion, so I shall have to affirm, without demonstrating it fully, that what Kant is trying to elaborate here is not at all a formalist aesthetics (as Lyotard pretends to believe two paragraphs before the passage quoted immediately above), but more precisely an aesthetics of pure colors and sounds, that is, before they meet any formal determination. If Kant’s aesthetics were formalist, as a long tradition of interpretations claims, it could not be an aesthetics of pure reflective judgment, since the appearance of forms would add determination and thus immediately make the judgment on the beautiful determinant at the same time (i.e., teleological). Thus beauty would no longer be free but only adherent. So it is hardly a paradox to claim, on the contrary, that Kant’s aesthetics is materialist, namely, an aesthetics of matter in Lyotard’s sense (i.e., an aesthetics of immaterial matter). Lyotard adds: From this aspect of matter, one must say that it must be immaterial. Immaterial if it is envisaged under the regime of receptivity or intelligence. For forms and concepts are constitutive of objects, they produce data that can be grasped by sensibility and that are intelligible to the understanding, things over there which fit the faculties or capacities of the mind. The matter I am talking about is “immaterial,” an-objectable, because it can only “take place” or find its occasion at the price of suspending these active powers of the mind.. . . So we must suggest that is a state of mind which is a prey to “presence” . . . a mindless state of mind, which is required of mind not for matter to be perceived or conceived, given or grasped, but so that there be some something. And I use “matter” to designate this uthat there is, ” this quod, because this presence in the absence of the active mind is and is never other than timbre, tone, nuance in one or other of the dispositions of sensibility, in one or other of the sensoria, in one or other of the passibilities [passibilites] through which mind is

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Kant could not have put it more beautifully, especially if he had lived in the postmodern age (except maybe for the last sentence, which seems to reintroduce a trace of the sublime, which, I would argue, Lyotard is proposing to think from the perspective of the beautiful and not the other way round, as some have recently tried to do). This aesthetics of matter, of the Thing always forgotten and unforgettable (as Lyotard also names it in more Heideggerian terms at the end of his essay), is not, however, an aesthetics of the sublime but of the beautiful. Before and after the sublime, within the sublime, there remains the beautiful. Before and after the modem, within the modem, there remains the postmodern. Now, can or must there be a postmodern politics of the beautiful? The question remains open.

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Chapter 14

LYOTARD, KANT, AND THE IN-FINITE Wilhelm S. Wurzer

For Lyotard, philosophy is not something relegated to a rainy Sunday afternoon when there is not much else to do. Instead, it is “a state of mind which is prey to ‘presence’ (a presence which is in no way present in the sense of here-andnow) . . . a singular, incomparable quality— unforgettable and immediately forgotten.” 1 A delightful ambivalence, simultaneously critical and erotic, this impossible presentation, beyond mimetology, plays for the mind.2 Without shooting a picture of the whole, Lyotard is in search of bodies writing their differences. The body, however, is now regarded as “political economy, that is, capital, carried even into the sphere of passions.”3A presence without present, this configuration becomes immaterial in Lyotard’s intriguing re-tum to the sublime as he rewrites the Kantian aesthetic while inscribing it into a post-Gadamerian figurability (Gebilde). Reason is now much closer to the flowers of evil. It comes and goes, as Baudelaire says— the Demon tags along, hanging around like the air we breathe.4 What is sacrificed in philosophy’s novel figurabilities is the comic and old presentation of the absolute. This is precisely what Lyotard finds in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, a text that connects modernity and postmodernism, setting metaphysics spinning from within. Yet Kant does not let metaphysics go. To the very end, he sustains a desire for the metaphysical. What happens in the Critique of Judgment is a question that also touches on the larger question Lyotard poses: “And what do we want of philosophy?”5 For Kant, philosophy is no longer merely a matter of representation (Vorstellung) but of Verstellung, a fictioning of the infinite. Epistemology finds itself destabilized. A new point of departure arises: imagination’s free play narrows the gap between natura naturans, a transcendent absolute, and natura naturata, spirit-in-nature. Suddenly it is a matter of letting the rift go by organizing philosophy around an aesthetics of the sublime, not another philosophy of art but a certain manner of judging philosophy itself. For once, philosophy begins to judge its old “writing,” opening itself to “the perplexity into which it falls,” no longer a science but an economy of judging.6 Kant writes: “Time was when metaphysics was entitled the Queen of all the sciences; and if the will be taken for the deed, the preeminent importance of her accepted tasks gives her every right to this title of honor. Now, however, the changed fashion of the time brings her only scorn; a matron outcast and forsaken” (Cl, 7). Beyond positing world solely by reason (Setzung), Kant tells the story of imagination’s figurabilities: a 201

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subject judging, indeed Being-in-play, Geistesgefuhl, a “movement of the mind” characterized by “negative pleasure” (negative Lust). In its greatest expansion, imagination cannot make the in-finite sensible (anschaulich). This failure (MiBlingen) is simultaneously pleasing and painful. Nonetheless, pleased to see that it cannot see everything, imagination is genuinely free for reason (Vemunft), allowing the subject to think nature beyond the phenomenal. This paradoxical turn uncovers an “unconditional doing,” neither merely epistemic nor merely moral, wherein the very matter of thinking is now transformed into an aesthetic performance of Gemiith. This performance (a Gelingen/Mifilingen) marks a new operation of judgment (Beurteilung) which imagination presents to reason. Regarded aesthetically, the event of philosophy’s new play becomes the very judging of this play (FJ, 66). Hence subject, independent of object, inscribes the in-finite into its-self. Belonging to play, the self presupposes a radical displacement of the absolute. The Third Critique, therefore, circumvents the very thing metaphysics holds so dear— the exterior power of substance, the force of the in-finite. The sublime unfolds this circumvention, deconstructing the absolute outside subject, making it into an aesthetic interplay of reason and imagination. Presenting this interplay, judgment expresses resistance (Abwehr) toward a transcendental exteriority. In the Third Critique, especially, Kant discovers the unconditional within the subject. This necessary widening of Gemiith is what is most reflective, most performative, and most intriguing about Kant’s sublime infinitizing. Clearly then, the effectuation ( Verwirklichung) of the in-finite as law of imagination’s free play lets Geist be entirely free, belonging unexpectedly to “what the eye reveals” (Augenschein).7 When the in-finite is revealed by Augenschein, the sublime happens in the relation by which the sensible in the representation of nature is judged available for a possible supersensible use.8 Or, as with Wordsworth in “Tintem Abbey” : And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. As Paul de Man underscores, Augenschein does not allude to a Hegelian Ideeschein, a sensory appearance of the in-finite.9 What strikes the eye is the aestheticfigurability of the in-finite, a sublime inscription into the finite. This lets presence— as nature or world— be seen as if it were art. While the tie with morality lingers, the sublime, no longer as de Man claims a matter of lawdirected labor (gesetzliches Geschaft), signifies an imaginal aesthetic performance, effecting an astonishment that borders upon terror ( Verwunderung, die an Schreck grenzt). Astoundingly and frighteningly, the in-finite is suddenly here (Da-sein). The “here” is not the inversion of pure transcendence but a continuous playing/doing/telling. What happens “here” is an enveloping and overflowing of the self in which the in-finite is viewed as an aesthetic, deteleologic presence. Transformed into new alliances, it begins to reveal spontaneous 202

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spectralities. A new philosophical task arises, which is to think the electronic question of Augenschein: To what extent can truth endure outside of Truth?10 Kant’s aesthetic sublimity inaugurates this task. After Kant, modernity is characterized in large part by the eloquence of Marx and Nietzsche. In-between the political and the aesthetic, Lyotard tells the story of a postmodern Augenschein. While his narrative is far from a theoretical backup for another metanarrative, it appears to be a discourse primarily for intellectuals. From the time of Plato to that of Derrida, philosophy speaks mostly to “philosophical readers.” The metanarrative may have dissipated, yet the story philosophy tells is still one that belongs to “an isolated sanctuary” of scholars, revealing idiosyncratic relations, connections, an uncommon community to be sure. Where’s the exchange? What messages are philosophers sending? Does anything arrive? Is philosophy mostly a “messianism without religion,” even, perhaps, messianic without messianism?11 Ironically, within this very “intellectual” leading, it is appropriate to ask, with Lacoue-Labarthe: Where today can one see a work of any kind of thinking (i.e., whatever its origins, field and scope) which can be called philosophy? And in the space academic usage nominally reserves for philosophy, which is indeed itself already counted among the “human sciences,’’where can one see the possibility of a philosophy emerging or even the possibility of observing the act of philosophizing taking place?12

And what of his statement: “that. . . (philosophy) is and can only be a mere tinkering around in inessential and subordinate matters (ethics, the rights of man, etc.), journalistic socratism, or anthropological approximations. It has nothing to do with the work of thought” (HAP, 4)? Remarking on this further, LacoueLabarthe writes: “Philosophy is finished/finite; its limit is uncrossable. This means we can no longer— and we can only— do philosophy, possessing as we do no other language and having not the slightest notion of what “thinking” might mean outside of “philosophizing” (HAP, 4). This “renunciation” of the philosophical is not a denunciation. Rather it is an invitation to pose Lyotard’s question “and what do we want of philosophy?” more rigorously. At the edge of such discursive scepticism, Lyotard, like Lacoue-Labarthe, does not worry about the strength of thought, believing instead that thinking should not be sure of its direction.13 This soft approach to thought at the millennial turn only complicates further the relation of philosophy to social relationships. The last thing attentive readers want is another theoretical grab bag used to explain what cannot be illustrated by the cultural disciplines. Lyotard’s texts strive to shed light on this matter. But he is also the first to know that the site which philosophers choose to speak and listen (to being or beings), in spite of their multiple styles, is not very different from that of the eternal return of the same comfort, the same desire for insight, paradoxically, the eternal return of a genealogy of reason all over again. No longer in old clothing, philosophy is now barely dressed. But does anyone care to see what she looks like? Philosophy may mourn like Hecuba, but does she eventually turn into a fiery-eyed dog?14 As in Kant’s time, our relation to philosophy today is one of “weariness and complete indifference” inasmuch as the continual unmasking of reason, the desire for the freely open, is still a matter of reason not as an end in itself but 203

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as a means to whatever ends theorization provides. How much, then, can philosophy still achieve today? Lyotard notes that we are neither at home with the language metaphysics speaks nor at ease with the post-Kantian stylizations of the sublime schematized in diverse meta-aesthetic strategies. Hence, his defense of a more “careless and casual” style. After Kant, the play of thought engages in paradoxical figurabilities. Exceeding the game of the in-finite, the conversation “turns towards a thing which does not turn towards the mind.” A frightening claim, indeed! Beyond the sublime (and after the hegemony of willing), the Thing is not waiting to be destined, it is not waiting for anything, it does not call on the mind. From this point of view, theory, aesthetic theory, seems, will have seemed to be, the attempt by which the mind tries to rid itself of words, of the matter that they are, and finally of matter itself. Happily, this attempt has no chance of success. “One cannot get rid of the Thing. Always forgotten, it is unforgettable” (/, 143). The renunciation is clear. As Stefan George concedes: “Sadly I learned renunciation: Where the word is wanting no thing can be.”15 In Lyotard’s view, however, the Thing does not cease when the word is late. But what is this Thing that does not turn to the mind? From Marx to Lyotard, it is preferably named capital. Exceeding the dialectic of the particular and the universal, it can no longer be enframed in a primordial field of inquiry. For Lyotard, this Thing is the trace of presence and the relations of future presencings. Beyond the language of a phenomena/noumena difference, thought is concerned with this Thing and with how the eye views it. Lyotard’s “satirical politics” allows philosophy’s turn to art, presumably, a turn to discerning what the Thing is actually doing.

I. Philosophy, Augenschein, and the Inhuman For centuries, philosophers have been known to claim that art lies and that it loves to imitate mere appearances, arguing that philosophy, imitating the beautiful, tells the truth. Shunning the senses, philosophy in part sketches art as something inhuman. Ironically, however, the origin of the inhuman lies precisely in the notorious (and comic) practice of separating the sensible from the intelligible. Lyotard illustrates a different painting of philosophy, a landscape in which it slips into art without sliding away from justice. This satirical turn begins with a desire to resist the inhuman by a singular imitation. Such is the question, then: resistance by mimesis— the power of mirroring something unpresentable, perhaps, an irreducible Gebilde of the just by means of which the eye fashions something yet to be. There is a certain anticipatory beauty (and pleasure) that determines this fashioning. For Lyotard, however, seeking after ineffability cannot be used as an excuse for disregarding suffering.16 Bringing philosophy and art into proximity, therefore, serves a double design: it frees philosophy from the arrogance of philosophers, namely metaphysics, and it sheds new light on how to resist the inhuman. So, by glancing at individual artworks, philosophy takes a fall, frequently finding itself in bed with Kant, who writes: “Spirit must be free in art.” Viewing specialities beyond the irreducibly intentional, philosophy liberates itself from the dialectical “wisdom” of theoreticism. This does not mean that it suddenly becomes irrational. 204

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Quite the contrary, philosophy becomes more rigorous in uncovering how art desires to express the truth about this world and its inhumanities. Unafraid to regard the inhuman, art does not avoid intensities or passions. Speaking through images, sounds, and words, it is not bound to representation. By means of audiovisual operations, art frequently reveals the nonvisual, the invisible, the silent, and, in this configuration, what Rilke calls the open: “For there is no place where we can remain.”17 Thus an artwork’s “meaning,” particularly if it is a painting, does not consist simply in its material configurations but in viewpoints of Augenschein, that is, in what strikes the eye: “new beginnings, signs, and changes.”18 Invariably, a double fictioning occurs. All at onee Augenschein becomes what Heidegger calls, “a flaming intuition” (flammendes Anschauen)— unpresentable, as viewed in an individual work of art that reveals the theme of eros, Alexei Jawlensky’s Liebe (1925).19 Several parerga present themselves— coloration, tone, lighting, circles and semicircles, horizontal and vertical lines. The geometrical precision and the mystical coloration call to mind a theme that ultimately cannot be represented. While the painting appears to be very constructive, its forms point to another fictioning that occurs as philosophy advances to a new presentation. Each time it contemplates this work, the painting is painted anew. The mimetic/countermimetic readings keep fashioning the material, intensifying the feelings, wondering how love will be. On this fictioning, Jawlensky’s work reveals numerous possibilities of erotic justice. We encounter an Augenschein of friendship, even a Liebes-Schein that interlaces the human and the divine, face and landscape. Lyotard writes: “The face is a landscape, several landscapes” (I, 184).20 Jawlensky painted hundreds of faces which signify passages from the true to the just. Without necessary models, love is at work here, “a work without end” rewriting the spacings of modernity (/, 30). One of these spacings brings to light Paul Klee’s Destroyed Place, a 1920 painting referring to the horrors of war. The site could be anywhere. The viewer is overwhelmed by a sense of the anonymous, by an expressive absence of justice. The work succeeds in exposing the inhuman endlessly “above the strange and distant city, time.” 21 An uncanny emptiness surfaces, a lack of coming and going. Nothingness emanates through the blue-black sky and the gray and violet ruins of the village. Still, Klee’s painting gives the impression that the inhuman is not insurmountable. Disquieting, the message reveals a certain andante, a still listening, letting the eye hear what the image has to say regarding the West as a “destroyed place,” a monadic Auschwitz: “A thousand questions fall silent before they are answered.” The windows signify a failed dialectic, an inevitable disappointment with historical models, an impoverished metaphysics, a culture gone astray. Yet beyond this dark nothingness we may also find traces of hope. The inhuman invites us to see other paintings and poems in this painting— regarding the silent language of the dead and those not yet bom. The two are interlaced by tomorrow’s hope. We see clumps of vegetation, marking a rebirth of nature: a Dionysian sign, a monadic glimpse of a world more just, perhaps. On second reflection, the inhuman is shattered, if only in imagination. And in that realm, philosophy continues to rewrite the relations in Augenschein until the painting steps out of the frame into the open and lets presence be— the painting proper. The open, then, is time coming out— inside other paintings still. 2 05

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So, in “second reflection,” one looks attentively at aletheia, “the painter’s model” ( TIP, 6), without looking the goddess over dialectically. Philosophy is still a matter of theory, not in the sense of analysis but in the sense of judging/reading precisely how the eye reveals— “images” of justice, “without mediation, makeup, mask, or veil.” 22 It is painting, writing/rewriting aletheia, the goddess attending to das Unheimliche— the improper, the inhuman. This means painting different passages from the true to the just, where one encounters gods who no longer speak to us. “Which means there is no reference by which to judge the opponent’s strength.” 23 Philosophy may not know exactly how to engage in resistance. Thus she finds herself at work endlessly in a set of narratives. “There is no outside. There is no place from which one could photograph the whole thing” (JG, 43). The play plays countless possibilities. And “history,” Lyotard writes: consists of a swarm of narratives, narratives that are passed on, made up, listened to and acted out; the people does not exist as a subject; it is a mass of thousands of little stories that are at once futile and serious, that are sometimes attracted together to form bigger stories, and which sometimes disintegrate into drifting elements, but which usually hold together well enough to form what we call the culture of a civil society. ( LR, 134)

Such a spontaneous culture Kandinsky’s names “a many-colored world” in which the chaos of masses, patches, lines, and colors reveals the poetic and musical mood of Das bunte Leben, the last of his early cycle paintings (1907). This poetic imaging points to “multiplicity and incommensurability of works” (LR, 193). Like his contemporary Klee, Kandinsky concedes that a painting is never completely formed in its material configurations, invariably deserving an attentive, “aesthetic” regarding and listening that forms the painting ever anew. On second reflection different patterns emerge. Beyond the mystery of this colorful world lies a hidden spirit, a Dionysian stranger— the blue rider. Always on the move, in search of the promise of a new painter’s model, the blue rider is a leitmotif in which nothing is absolute and everything falls into Ungrund. This acting/gaming/judging has no origin; it is not derivable (JG, 49). In it, the blue rider rides away to an open terrain where the infinite and finite collide, where Rilke’s “Spanish Dancer” lies raging on the floor, where the painting turns into a per-forming poem. Desiring manifold presencing, philosophy becomes a sensuous spirit mirrored in art, always in flux, advancing to evernew paintings of flaming intuitions regarding a goddess gaming in which the true and the just are radically displaced. Formerly one, spirit now becomes two: philosophy and art, a riding couple dissolving the infinite into the finite on the way to countless spectral detours. In a richly colored painting, they stand still beyond the “dusty, isolated rooms” of scholars in a small park among birch trees shrouded with golden leaves, next to a quiet river flowing along an old Russian city. Mimesis happens in the city. Kandinsky makes of it an aesthetic doing, blending together the visible and invisible. The painting becomes justly philosophical, drawing the supersensible into the sensible, belonging neither to substance nor subject. Out in the open, off center, eccentric, philosophy makes the truth in sublime radiance with 206

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beams of colored light pointing to a singular site, at once absent and present. Obscured by the irresistible fascination of semicircular spots, this site highlights the surface with its tiny brush strokes of colors. The radiance that emanates from Kandinsky’s work marks a fusion between space and the infinite, singularly infinitizing the senses. The contours of reality dissolve into an Augenschein of novel horizons, signifying many more paintings that reveal “a multiplicity of justices.” For Lyotard, this finally points to a necessary rewriting of the sublime, granting the power to think the inhuman and to resist inhumanities.

II. Dionysus, Judging Resistance, beyond the aura of hermeneutics, is a matter of linking philosophy’s eye to how things are to this eye. This “critical” regarding is not to be confused with mere ocular vision. Resistance is reflection. “Reflection,” Lyotard elucidates, “is a disposition of the mind by which it judges without concept.” 24 It brings to light an uncanny figurability— Dionysus— the philosophical eye that judges. “To judge, that is, to settle (itrancher), to decide, to discern: the strength to discern, Urteilskraft, is also the strength to bring together, to synthesize” (TP, 174). In short, Dionysus marks the “figure” with the strength to judge the Thing. Not ever entirely beyond it, Dionysus is the “critical” yet bewildered spirit(-in-capital) after Hegel. On the way to Dionysus, philosophy’s friendship with art unravels reflection and resistance, multiplying experimentations necessary for this constellation. “How should we judge?” Lyotard asks. “Often and intensely. Since it makes for a long life, we should judge a great deal. For the more we judge, the better we judge” (LR, 332). What, then, strikes the eye for it to judge so eagerly? “The master of our narratives is not some pagan god; our master is capital. Capital makes us tell, listen to, and act out” (LR, 140) our narratives. With the emergence of exchange in the form of commodity-production, the sublime disappears. It is neither seen nor said. “Let us think this thought through in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness.” 25 Dionysus judges this nothingness, celebrating the event of differend (Streitigkeit). In dispute is not merely the exterior violence in society but also philosophy’s interior inhumanity with its exclusively logocentric concerns. The dispute is not resolved since it marks philosophy’s reluctance to address the problematic of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.26 Lyotard’s appeal to agitation (Erschiitterung) and dispersion (Zerstreuung) motivates his strategy of commencing with “the figure of judgmental instance,” Dionysus judging. “To judge,” he writes, “is to open an abyss between parts by analyzing their differend” (LR, 326), thus naming the very condition of philosophy today in its “hidden subterranean entrance.” 27 For Nietzsche at least, philosophy’s task is to resist “meaninglessness,” not by pursuing the sublime with its “transcendental heights of the highest nonsense,” but by discovering “that realm in which we, too, can still be original, as parodists of world history— our laughter. ” 28We may yet have a future if we learn to dance and laugh beyond the Geistespiel of the infinite and finite. Lyotard concedes that “the paradox of art ‘after the sublime’ is that it turns toward a thing which 2 07

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does not turn towards the mind” (I, 142). Accordingly, the work of art reveals the parergon, the irreducibly singular. But as Derrida notes: “Philosophical discourse will always have been against the parergon” ( TIP, 54). Does it matter that after Nietzsche the unpresentable is no longer regarded as the infinite per se?29 Indeed, what appears most unpresentable is the event, the celebration of the very absence of the infinite, the radiance of parerga. Thus we see a certain relation (Thing) shaping up between various styles of (post)sublimity. In Kant the sublime remains primarily aesthetic. It becomes more powerful and chilling when, losing its transcendentality, it fades into capital. A renunciation occurs. The sublime is no longer present to itself. It dissolves into Verschweigung, a peculiar, electronic stillness, coming, as Rilke notes, with new beginnings, signs, and changes. In its “postmodern” context as capital, the word “sublime” (erhaben— erheben— in die Hohe heben) becomes a sign that cannot be read so easily. Drawn into an aesthetic explosion of appearances (as Adorno might say), and sliding off from mimesis, the sublime marks the very scene of the differend wherein the dissolve becomes capital, a promise without finality, a maddening presence. “In the end the sublime turns into its opposite anyway.” In the words of Adorno: “It might be better to stop talking about the sublime all together.”30 While we need not take Adorno’s remark about excluding the sublime too seriously, it is important to highlight very briefly the radical transformation of the sublime from an aesthetic to a paradoxical an-aesthetic— the Thing or capital. This transformation displays the sublime as breaking out of the phenomenon /noumenon difference, appearing unexpectedly in a new differend. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant already resists the gap between Ersckemung and Ding an Sfeh in his attempt to present the unpresentable in imagination’s free play. Beyond this aesthetic play (and after Kant), the sublime twists itself free from hermeneutic gaming, dissolving into an electrifying overflow of representations. Simmel writes: “The philosophical significance of [capital] is that it represents within the practical world the most certain image and the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being, according to which things receive their meaning through each other.”31 Making the exchange between beings possible, capital, unlike any other being, is paradoxically both the least and the most representational (Thing). Never entirely present, it stands at an insurmountable distance from the subject that craves and enjoys it. “To be sure, (capital) abolishes this distance again; it moves the otherwise unattainable closer to us” (M, 128). Lyotard maneuvers laboriously with the notion of capital. On his view, it is an intractable figurability— an imageless rewriting of modernity, a working through the possibilities of reflection/resistance. “In this way, rewriting comes under the problematic of the sublime” (I, 33). And the sublime (rather than the beautiful) comes under the problematic of an electronic network of sending and receiving: “Capital must be seen not only as a major figure of human history, but also as the effect, observable on the earth, of a cosmic process of complexification” (/, 67). Suddenly, the sublime turns into the In-human. There are no longer clearly identifiable subjects and the new sendings come out of Tradition into human Augenschein. Lyotard asks: “What if human beings were in the process of, constrained into, becoming inhuman? And what if what is proper to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman” (/, 98)? 208

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At stake is an enormous question, a double sublimity: a sublime counterfeit and a counterfeit sublime. Which guides the other? Or are both intimately connected? For Lyotard they are both inhuman. The sublime counterfeit is uthe infinitely secret one of which the soul is hostage” (I, 2). It begins essentially with Plato and culminates in the Kantian discourse on nature, the beautiful, and the infinite. In some sense, this metaphysical counterfeit may haunt the self, challenged by the sublime’s transition into capital. In general, however, it is unlikely that this is so. The distractions and disruptions are too numerous. Even Lyotard concedes: “To believe, as happened to me, that the first can take over from the second, give it expression, is a mistake” (/, 2). As counterfeit sublime, capital may bring about the forgetting of the inhuman. Its an-aesthetic is disturbing to say the least, agitating the mind, sending it ecstatic signals but also making it think. With regard to this inhuman an-aesthetic, is it possible to resist the new differend (capital)? Does the new transfigurability resemble the sublime at all? Or does the sublime mask itself, withdrawing endlessly from its old genealogy? Is its new presence counterfeit? Is capital counterfeit sublime as Marx may have thought? Or is it sublime counterfeit, the end of metaphysics, the height of technicity discerned in Heidegger’s Erdugnis? Lyotard’s idea of philosophy turning to art is probably more Nietzschean than Marxian, pursuing Dionysus as one who judges, as Augenschein opening the abyss. Here resistance lies neither in the negation of the sublime or nor in that of the counterfeit but rather in striving to match the default of representation to which the feeling of the sublime and its counterfeit an-aesthetic attests (TP, 198). A network of diversions brings relief without loss of regarding. Resistance, therefore, remains relevant. Relief is relevant not just etymologically. It is what Augenschein brings to light. To paraphrase Kant, it is what poets do when philosophers do not (regard the eye). Relief is here, yet who is relieved? What strikes the eye is an uncertain becoming, a Deleuzian voyaging, smooth and light. Upon succeeding to a disinherited landscape, philosophy makes a payment to our time by regarding/resisting the relief brought on by the new an-aesthetic. Responding cautiously to this landscape, Lyotard writes: “Capital is not an economic and social phenomenon. It is the shadow cast by the principle of reason on human relations” (/, 69). Belonging to the history of the body, it is not a “great monad.” “One could go so far as to say that the desire for profit and wealth is no doubt no other than this process itself, working upon the nervous centers of the human brain and experienced directly by the human body” (/, 71). Viewing capital from the closure of desire, every political economy is therefore libidinal.32 In his post-Marxian reading of capital, Lyotard is closer to Freud than to Heidegger. However, it is more likely that capital exceeds the dimension of desire, linked to what Heidegger names “the relation.” Beyond desire stands the relation of sendings in capital, counterfeit and/or sublime. Its essence is not desire but always already its subversion. There is no instantiation, no intensity in capital. It is always moving, slipping away, turning to new directions. Invariably apparitional, it breaks out of the libidinal, lest it be shown, captured, or confined to a definite site. Sublimely inhuman, it is justly ready for exchange. Without a body, it speaks “the madness of economic reason.” Not ever here and now, is it a genuine counterfeit? Can there be a counterfeit when there is no original? 209

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The relation of all relations, capital does not presume to be original. “It is not waiting to be destined, it is not waiting for anything, it does not call on the mind. How can the mind situate itself, get in touch with something that withdraws from every relationship” (I, 142)? Clearly, philosophy cannot get rid of this Thing. In light of its monadic expansions, Lyotard wants to multiply manners of speaking and sensing by means of “satire.” “Whether or not in satire nature shows her rear is not the most interesting thing for the philosopher, rightly or wrongly. What is interesting is first of all that nature shows something and hence that it addresses itself to us, and second that nature shows us not one, but many things” (LR, 185). But what does nature mean to us today? Who is she? How does she show herself? It appears that Lyotard regards her as if she were art. “And so,” he writes, “it is very hard for us to know what it wants to signify to us; it is as if nature were unaware of us. Nature never says to the artist, ‘that’s the way to show it,’ or to the critic, ‘that’s the right commentary,’ or to the philosopher, ‘you’ve got it, speak for me’ ” (LR, 185). There is no Vorstellung of nature, only the “greater artfulness” of dissipating identity. Nature has yet to be rewritten in order to show her spectral expansions, her propensity for ecstatic satire. There is a double requirement for satire. On the one hand there must be the reversibility of what is visible with what sees, of what can be said with what speaks.. . . On the other hand, there must be a lack of referentiality for the whole set of experiences, an impossibility of making them topographically contingent and synchronous, a necessity for the contingency of points of view and/or speech, or the infiniteness of the system of stages. (LR, 189)

Beyond the arrogance of metaphysical thought, there is satirical politics, the joy of dwelling “after nature” inside her new naturing. Disengaged from mirroring a particular cultural space, nature is sketched as a sublime straying from presence and simulation. The most heterogenous experimentations are inimitable. Everything is filmed out. Everything is thinned out. The very task of a postmodern epoche, the very look of a post-Husserlian ethics is attentive to apparition and discontinuities. How are things, then, to the eye?

III. Schlufttiick “Being doesn’t choose Cezanne to express itself. Don’t try to reestablish these ponderous elections, poetic institution, Heideggerian preaching” (LR, 189). So, “what do we want of philosophy?” 33 In sum, Lyotard wants resistance, a perpetual rewriting of Platonism, a continual displacing of a dialectic belief in an originary principle ( Grund), whether it be the Idea of the Good, or Nietzsche’s will to power (I, 28-29). He wants to radicalize the sublime, transforming it into specialities, while letting things come as they present themselves.34 This kind of rewriting/resisting is illustrative of Adorno’s belief that after Auschwitz there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theological one, that has any right unless it underwent a transformation. Accordingly, rewriting means going beyond mere reflections on the sublime, turning away from the shadow of moral ontology (see AT, 284). Lyotard concedes that Kant already defines the 210

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sublime in terms of resistance {Widerstand), a resistance of spirit against a superior power ( Ubermacht). Kantian resistance, however, is still determined by the principle of the teleological. Indeed, for Kant, the teleological is precisely what philosophy is for. In recognizing the sublime as unbounded Geistesgejuhl, he expands the nature-of-the-subject as well as the subject-in-nature. No matter how subjective, no matter how aesthetic, the imaginal free play presupposes a teleological design, caught in the web of an interest in the supersensible. Rewriting the sublime, for Lyotard, means to take teleology out of the play of presentations and to do away with it altogether. This is indeed sublime. Yet it is no longer a sublime feeling. In Holderlin’s words: “Is there a measure on earth? There is none.”35 From now on, judgment begins to wander aimlessly, radically disinterested in classic sublimity. Resisting sublimity while paradoxically seeking what it desires may be beautiful; it may also be ugly.36 Nonetheless, rewriting lets presence be less violently inhuman, since it begins with the ruin of the imitable signifieds and the appearance of an unknown luminous distance from ground. There is no awakening of a feeling for the supersensible. “Following this sort of attitude, every moment, every now is an ‘opening oneself to.’ ” “In support of this,” Lyotard continues: “I’d invoke Theodor Adorno or Ernst Bloch’s “Die Spuren” (I, 32)— specifically, one might say Bloch’s idea of Vorschein, a preview, or perhaps, more rigorously, a certain improvisation. Bloch’s turn to art is not a contemplative gesture. Nor is it the kind of “relaxed schematics” that classical aesthetics provides. It is the opposite of an idealistic corrective. Vorschein stands on the horizon of world without letting it disappear into abstract appearances (Abstrakt-Schein) 37 What is in play is a rewriting of presence as improvisation. Indeed, one cannot see ahead (providere) unless one stands in Vorschein. What precisely strikes the eye here? “Instead of the impenetrable enjoyment of art, Vorschein provides a connection to knowledge at the very least, and a connection to the material of grasped hope at the very most” (UF, 74). In short, a rewriting of modernity in terms of something unforeseen (improvisus), yet foreseen in Augenschein without conceding to the future as “a craven flattery of the mighty. For the future is always mightier than the present. It will pass judgment upon us, of course. But without any competence.”38 Suddenly, philosophy turns to improvisation not unlike Ausflug— excursion in the sense of a deviation (detour) from a direct, definite, or proper path. Indeed, rewriting, advanced by Lyotard and Bloch, concerns digression— turning aside, that is, turning to art in order to see ahead (providere) and not just to see ahead but, more importantly, to be within the unforeseen—in-provisus. To be inside means to be ever ready for an “opening oneself to the unforeseen.” Kandinsky’s Improvisation 6 (1909) transforms the play of understanding into vibrant figurabilities. The contours of the subject are dissolved. Kandinsky explains this re-painting of the sublime: “I dissolved objects to a greater or lesser extent within the same picture, so that they might not all be recognized at once” (BR, 29). A witness to the fading of the essentialist enterprise, philosophy turns away from Plato’s eyes glancing at Athens, forgetting the house it had once lived in. The West becomes increasingly blurred. Other beginnings emerge. What strikes the eye is the white, rectangular wall on the left side of the painting. It is an African house, perhaps near the ancient site of Carthage. A different narrative begins. That of a turban, a headdress, covering, 21 1

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hiding the head. Beyond capital, in a different light, now or then, robes, huge garments. “Can Thought go on without a Body?” Improvisation 6: The witness is African. At first, this might not be recognized at all. Yet what is witnessed cannot be seen in the painting. The inhuman is concealed. The resistance, however, continues. The witness lies in reflection. Someone has died. Someone was stabbed. An old queen, mostly forgotten. Discerning not, philosophy is ending. Like Dido stabbing herself without judging her gaming with Aeneas justly. Her last words: “Thus, thus to go beneath the shade is pleasant” (Aeneas, 102). Resistance is enigmatic, nonetheless, rigorous in a Promethean sense. The poet is a factor “not as one who repeats given material but rather as another god (alter deus) who creates and establishes” ( UF, 76). Improvisations . . . memories of God in the Middle Ages. . . . We start, however, from new beginnings, scenes, and changes. “We are down and out and no longer know how to play. We have forgotten.” (UF, 78) What lingers is the unheard of stillness and, of course, the intractable Augenschein. But is this what philosophy wants of Lyotard?

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Chapter 15

THE SUSPENSE Wayne Froman

The avant-garde art of the past two centuries is, Jean-Frangois Lyotard finds, an art of the sublime. This avant-garde art “ [bears] pictorial or otherwise expressive witness to the inexpressible,” 1to what is unrepresentable, to the event that gives a word, a color, a form, a line. That no further word, or color, or form, or line may follow, is the “terror” described by Edmund Burke that marks sublimity. That nothing may follow is the pain, the first privation or suspense. The “delight” (Burke’s word again) of sublimity is that the terror is “kept at bay,” and this marks the next suspense, the pleasure that follows from the pain. And Lyotard cites Burke, indicating that, thanks to art, “the soul is returned to the agitated zone between life and death, and how this agitation is its health and its life” (LR, 205). Unlike the Romantic sublime, the sublime of more current art does not reside in some far-off place or time, but rather, as determined by Lyotard, it is provided by the artwork insofar as “here and now there is this painting, rather than nothing, and that’s what is sublime” (LR, 199). Lyotard would bear witness to the sublimity occasioned by such art. But to do so, he must ward off a number of misapprehensions: For example, Walter Benjamin’s concern with a certain weakening or atrophying of “experience” that the “delight” of avant-garde experimentation may reflect. Or the way Adorno understands art’s “seriousness” {LR, 191-192). Or Lacan’s exclusion from knowing “forms— the different modes of organization of data into time and space, the rhythm of sounds, the correspondences of timbres, the rhymes of colors and luminous values, the compounding of lines, surfaces, and volumes, and writing as an art”— all of which are relegated, by Lacan, to the Imaginary, to “the economy of Ego demands,” while the field of knowing, and of language as well, is reserved for structures of opposition associated only with the Symbolic.2 The delight of avant-garde experiments, attendant upon the pain of the unrepresentable, the inexpressible, is disallowed by the insistence on experience, on a meaningful seriousness, or on “structures of opposition.” Concerning Lacan, Lyotard tells us that twenty years would go by before he understood his own resistance— indeed, “anger”— toward the distribution of the Symbolic and the Imaginary that he heard in Lacan’s seminars of the 1960s. Kant provides Lyotard with the means to articulate the resistance. In an essay called “The Sign of History” (1982), Lyotard describes how, according to Kant’s analytic of the sublime, the imagination, when it encounters what 213

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cannot be reproduced in a manner that would accord with the concepts of the understanding, an occurrence that prompts a sublime affect, will give way, in effect, to moral law and thus to the rule of Reason. But the imagination can also “unlimit itself” or become “unleashed.” From the point of view of the ethical, the “unleashed” imagination is pathological. And yet, aesthetically, the delight in this release from the pain in the encounter with the inexpressible or unrepresentable is “aesthetically sublime.” “The Sign of History” is concerned with transferring the analytic of the sublime from nature to history, taking some support from Kant’s account of the enthusiasm generated by the popular agitation following the French Revolution. But I think it clear that in art the imagination that unlimits itself is that of the experimental avant-garde. It can operate only when not surrendered to theory and its structures of opposition, to meaningful seriousness, or to a demand for a fullness of experience. And the spectator, or “the addressee,” in turn, can bear witness to this only by not giving way to any of this. In the 1987 essay “After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetics,” Lyotard puts the issue succinctly: The sublime is none other than the sacrificial announcement of the ethical in the aesthetic field. Sacrificial in that it requires that imaginative nature (inside and outside the mind) must be sacrificed in the interests of practical reason.. .. This heralds the end of an aesthetics, that of the beautiful, in the name of the final destination of the mind, which is freedom. On the basis of these rapid considerations, the question is this: Why is an art, painting or music, an art and not a moral practice in the context of such a disaster?3

Lyotard goes on to say that he believes we have “an advantage over Kant. . . in that we have at our disposal the experiments and essays of Western painters and musicians of the last 200 years” (/, 138). He then concentrates on one factor in art, namely, matter, “by which I mean matter in the arts, i.e., presence” (I, 138). What he finds in the avant-garde art is matter that is immaterial in that it can only find its occasion by a suspension of the active process of the mind that grasps sensibility and renders it intelligible to the understanding. Such immaterial matter could be found by an imagination that had unlimited itself. Lyotard proposes that “we’d need to reconsider from this angle, that of immaterial matter, certain Minimalist or arte povera works, and certain works called abstract expressionist or not (I’m thinking of certain pieces from the Cobra group)” (I, 141). Lyotard looks to this work for art that is not under the sway of taste in beauty but, rather, is art of the imagination that has unlimited itself instead of sacrificing itself to the moral law. Such art Lyotard locates in the work of a painter who was in fact akin to the Action Painters, the first generation of “abstract expressionists,” and who encouraged the work of Minimalists getting started when his own work had reached its height, namely Barnett Newman. In the work of this artist, who had read Burke (as well as Kant and Longinus), and who had written an essay called “The Sublime Is Now,” Lyotard finds an art of the sublime. In the essay “Newman: The Instant,” Lyotard quotes from Thomas Hess’s text for the major Museum of Modern Art exhibition of Newman’s work that traveled in the fall of 1972 to the Grand Palais. In this text, Hess reports on a conversation with Newman in which Newman described his visit to remains of indigenous tribes 214

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in the American Ohio Valley: “Looking at the site you feel, Here I am, here . . . and out beyond there (beyond the limits of the site) there is chaos, nature, rivers, landscapes . . . but here you get a sense of your own presence” (I, 86). In an early draft of notes on the occasion of his visit that bore the title Prologue fo r a New Aesthetic, apparently an unfinished text, Newman wrote: “My paintings are concerned neither with the manipulation of space nor with the image, but with the sensation of time.” In a later version, published as “Ohio, 1949” in the 1990 book Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, we find the following: Here in the seductive Ohio Valley are perhaps the greatest art monuments in the world. . . . Here is the self-evident nature of the artistic act, its utter simplicity. There are no subjects— nothing that can be shown in a museum or even photographed; [it is] a work of art that cannot even be seen, so it is something that must be experienced there on the spot: the feeling [is] that here is the space; that these simple and low mud walls make the space; that the space outside, the dramatic landscape looking out over a bridge one hundred feet high, the falling land, the chasms, the rivers, the farmlands and far-off hills are just picture postcards, and somehow one is looking out as if inside a picture rather than outside contemplating any specific nature. Suddenly one realizes that the sensation is not one of space or [of] an object in space. It has nothing to do with space and its manipulations. The sensation is the sensation of time— and all other multiple feelings vanish like the outside landscape.4

Lyotard finds that Newman was after presence. What distinguishes Newman’s work is the unexpected answer that it gives to the question concerning time, that is, that time is the picture itself (I, 78). To the suspense of Burke’s terror, the unrepresentable event gives a word, a color, a form, and a line. This will be followed by no further word, color, form, or line. Lyotard writes: “A painting by Newman is an angel. It announces nothing; it is in itself the annunciation” (I, 79). Thomas Hess associates Newman’s “sensation of time” with the artist’s later concern with place. Lyotard associates that concern with the sublime. With the unrepresentable event that gives a word, a color, a form, a line comes the terror that no further word, color, form, or line will follow. Lyotard writes: “One feels that it is possible that soon nothing more will take place. What is sublime is the feeling that something will happen, despite everything, within this threatening void, that something will take ‘place’ and will announce that everything is not over. That place is mere ‘here,’ the most minimal occurrence” (I, 84). Lyotard observes that Newman adopted the Hebrew word for place, “M a k o m which is also one of the terms in Hebraic literature that is used to refer to God. And this takes Lyotard to the series of canvases painted by Newman in 1968, the series that he controversially called: Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabaehtani? ( “Why hast Thou forsaken me?”) Newman explained that the burden for him falls on the “why?” in the title. It is an expression of individual anguish. When asked, in the moment that it gets asked, it becomes taken up in the divine. Lyotard quotes from the Newman text that accompanied the exhibition of the paintings: “this question that has no answer has been with us so long— since Jesus— since Abraham— the original question.” And then Lyotard adds 215

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his own understanding of the Messianic in the Hebraic tradition. He writes: “this is the Hebrew version of the Passion: the reconciliation of existence (and therefore of death) and signification does not take place. We are still waiting for the Messiah who will bring meaning. The only ‘response’ to the question of the abandoned that has ever been heard is not Know why, but Be” (/, 87). Two of Newman’s paintings bear the one-word title Be, numbered I and II. In this Be is relief from the terror that accompanies the unrepresentable event that prompts the sublime feeling. Lyotard writes: When we have been abandoned by meaning, the artist has a professional duty to bear witness that there is, to respond to the order to be. The painting becomes evidence, and it is fitting that it should not offer anything that has to be deciphered, still less interpreted. Hence the use of flat tints, on non-modulated colors and then

the so-called elementary colors of Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? (1966-7) The question mark of the title is that which appears in Is It happening? (i.e., the

unrepresentable event), and the afraid must be taken as an allusion to Burke’s terror, to the terror that surrounds the event, the relief that there is.

(I, 88)

Lyotard ends the essay “Newman: The Instant” by describing Newman’s work in sculpture from the 1960s as three-dimensional versions of the vertical band in Newman’s canvases. One of those works, Broken Obelisk, where the tip of an inverted obelisk, broken off at the other end (its base), rests on the tip of a pyramid on the ground, is likened by Lyotard to the finger of God touching that of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Lyotard writes: “the work rises up in an instant; but the flash of the instant strikes it like a minimal command: Be” (/, 88). Again, then, the artist bears witness to the relief from terror. “Newman: The Instant” was taken from the catalogue of an exhibition in Brussels called “Time: Looking at the Fourth Dimension.” The essay was published independently in 1985, one year after “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” appeared, describing how the avant-garde artist bears witness to the relief from terror. “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” begins with a reference to Newman and his statement to the effect that in his painting, he is not concerned with a “manipulation of space nor with the image, but with a sensation of time” (/, 89). Lyotard then contrasts Newman’s “sensation of time” with “ ‘the present instant,’ the one that tries to hold itself between the future and the past, and gets devoured by them,” which is the “now [as] one of the temporal ‘ecstasies’ that has been analyzed since Augustine’s day and particularly since Edmund Husserl, according to a line of thought that has attempted to constitute time on the basis of consciousness. Newman’s now which is no more than now is a stranger to consciousness” (I, 90). Newman’s “now” would be that immaterial materiality, that presence that is found by an imagination that has unlimited itself. In “After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetics,” Lyotard writes: “the matter I’m talking about is ‘immaterial,’ anobjectable, because it can only ‘take place’ or find its occasion at the price of suspending these active powers of the mind. I’d say that it suspends them for at least ‘an instant’ ” (/, 140). That is Newman’s instant. But let us now consider more carefully the contrast drawn here by Lyotard. A more thoroughly attentive reading of Husserl on the phenomenology of time finds that while for Husserl, the now is a synthesis of a retention— a not-yet 216

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past— and a protention— a not-altogether future, the movement that brings about that now is, in effect, unrepresentable. Husserl refers to this movement as a “flux,” but he adds that he does so metaphorically, and that what he is speaking of is “n a m e n lo s it has no name. Heidegger, in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, determined that Kant, too, came upon the unrepresentable movement of time in the first version of the latter’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. This is the temporalizing that Heidegger associates with the imagination in its transcendental role. Heidegger suggests that Kant drew back from this because he must have realized that it threatened reason as ground. This reading provides a bridge between the discussion of imagination in the Third Critique— particularly as it pertains to the sublime— and the transcendental deduction in the First Critique. Temporalizing, the movement of time, could be the sublime affect. In Heidegger’s Being and Time, the unrepresentable movement of temporalizing turns up as the anticipatory character of Dasein itself, its vorlaufendes character, its running ahead of itself always. Dasein, of course, is not the rational Ego. The final description in Being and Time of this futural quality of Dasein equates it with what Heidegger calls “being in the process of having been.” And this, Heidegger finds, is what makes possible a sense of Fate. If Newman’s “sensation of time” is understood as the movement of temporalizing, pointed toward by phenomenology, which is not the grasp of the now that Lyotard attributes to Husserl and to others, then Heidegger’s determination that to have a sense of Fate is made possible by “being in the process of having been” can help us to understand why it is that Barnett Newman turned to Greek tragedy as a source of inspiration for his work. This can tell us more of what does not enter Lyotard’s response to Newman’s art. Here is Newman, first on Greek art other than tragedy, then on the attachment of European art since to Greek art other than tragedy, then on his own affiliation with the tragedians: It was the Greeks who invented the idea of beauty.. . . Their gods had to be not only mysterious forces but also ideal sensations.. . . [Greek art turned to] a fanaticism of refinement. And that is why we have rejected it, for an art of refinement must in the end lead to an art of self-conscious sensibility, to the love of ideal sensations, to an economy of beauty. ( BNS, 166)

And then: The world the European artists have created has always been tied to sensation, in spite of the fact that in recent years their constant struggle has been to free themselves from the natural world. Brilliant as their successes have been, they have always had their base in the material world of sensuality. They may have transcended it, but they have never been able to do without it.. .. The links of the Cubists, Fauvists, and Surrealists with nature are obvious. The purists tried to deny nature and became involved with its diagrammatic equivalents— with the realism of geometric shapes. . . . In truth, the purists, from Mondrian to Kandinsky, never denied nature but asserted they were depicting the truest nature, the nature of mathematical law. (BNS, 162-163)

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And last: Whereas the Greek artists [other than the tragedians] can be said to have failed because of their inability to transcend their love of the Egyptian form to arrive at the tragic subject matter, the Greek writers were more successful. I believe that [the difference] can be partly explained by the language difficulty: the writers did not have the foreign forms to fall in love with, and they could concern themselves with the raw problem without the handicap of any [one] else’s formal presentation of it. This [rawness] made impossible in Greek poetic drama an art of refinement and sensibility. The writers had to grapple [directly] with the subject matter. That is why we as artists can paradoxically reject the Grecian form— we do not believe any longer in its beauty— while accepting Greek literature, which by its unequivocal preoccupation with tragedy is still the fountainhead of art. (BNS, 168)

Newman set himself to destroying— to use the word that he most often used— the formal elements through which European abstractionists had sought to free themselves from an economy of beauty regulated by self-conscious sensibility, only to become caught up by “an absolute of perfect sensations.” 5 He said that what he sought was “living form” in contrast to empty geometry. Going back to early canvases, we find that Newman sought to destroy the rectangular format in order to end up with “living form” by means of contrasting a vertical and an organic setting or environment inside the format. (See Newman’s painting The Command.) He continued his experimentation and, in 1947, he completed a canvas that gave him the wherewithal to destroy the rectangle in favor of “living form.” In an interview from March 3, 1967, Newman says that “what happened . . . was that I’d done this painting and stopped to find out what I had done, and I actually lived with that painting for almost a year trying to understand it. I realized that I’d made a statement which was affecting me and that was, I suppose, the beginning of my present life. . . . ” (BN, 245). That painting is Euclidean Abyss, which was followed in 1948 and 1949 by a series that Newman called Onement I-IV. The vibrancy in this work is no longer the result of a composition of elements, such as vertical, organic setting, and rectangular format, but rather is inseparable from the whole canvas, as a whole, that is, as integral, as one, and indivisible— a unity, or simply onement. No longer directed toward, no longer bound up at all with “ideal sensations,” a “zip painting”— “zip” was Newman’s name for the vertical, which could announce anything and everything that moved him or that provoked him to paint. The “zip” could show up in a 1950-1951, 8'-by-18' painting called Vir Heroicus Sublimis, to announce strains and intervals as in the tempo and harmonics for the scoring of a musical work. Or it could show up by itself in a 6'10"-by-6" painting from 1958 called Outcry. Again, the “zip” could show up at one edge of the painting, as in Not There— Here from 1962, which is 6'6" by 2'11". And it could show up both rule-edged, on the one hand, and irregular, on the other, as found in The Triad from 1962, which is 8'5V4" by 10'%". It could also show up irregular and rule-edged on either side of a painting where it is nearly impossible for vision to take in both, by virtue of the void in between— Be I I from 1961-1964 (6'8" by 6 ')— after showing up barely visible by virtue of color that almost engulfs it in Be I from 1949 (7'10" by 7'2"). The second version of Be I (9r3V2r by 7'), painted in 1970, the year Newman died, 218

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is more vibrant because of a change from oil to acrylic. This is a sampling of Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings. To a critic who suggested that, variations notwithstanding, the paintings are formally redundant, Newman replied: “I don’t think the paintings look that much alike. To me, they look entirely different” (BN, 51). The critic saw the paintings as anonymous, and indeed looked at them anonymously, which is to lose them altogether. In 1968 and 1969, Newman worked on a triangular format. His aim was the same. He wrote: Gould I do a painting on the triangle that would overcome the format and at the same

time assert it? Gould it become a work of art and not a thing? I knew that if I conformed to the triangle I would end up with a graphic design or an ornamental image. I had to transform the shape into a new kind of totality. .. . I knew that I must assert its shape but in doing so I must make the shape invisible or shapeless.

(BN, 59)

He reported that he found a way to accomplish what he wanted when he saw how the triangle is a sector of a rectangle. He had found the vectors for the destruction of the triangle that would yield up “a new kind of totality.” Chartres is one such triangle painting; Jericho is another. Newman described what he was about in destroying the formal elements that became ideal sensations for the European abstractionists, binding their work to the economy of beauty, as “destroying the wall.” What he wanted to do amounted to the destruction of those formal elements in order that they could be encountered for the first time. In effect, he did in painting what Husserl did in the late text on “The Origin of Geometry.” A reader not only of mystical Kabbalah but of Talmud as well, Newman sought not to ignore universal abstraction but to break down its code in order to locate what cannot be duplicated, as when he writes of the American painters (himself included) who “refuse to live in the abstract” (BNS, 173), and who “transcend [the] abstract world to make that world real” (BNS, 163). Color would have to be destroyed too. This gives us a more accurate sense of the title Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue? The color expanses on the Newman canvases provide the emptiness that is background for the unitary quality of the paintings. This is why Newman dissociated his work from the color-field painters. On one occasion, when he saw three empty canvases next to one another that Ad Reinhardt had contributed to an exhibition, Newman is known to have remarked: “emptiness is not that easy— let him ‘try it with paint.’ ” Brought to the verge of emptiness— like the void that resulted from the Tzim Tzum in the title of a Newman sculpture, the contraction by God whereby creation was begun, according to Kabbalah— the painting reaches the tensive point when the “zip” is located. That is the central factor in the creative act for Newman, and with it the formal elements will be encountered for the first time rather than be rendered ideal sensations. Newman likened that locating to possession by a daimon, and this is what he wanted for the viewer as well. The daimon here is what Newman, in a 1965 statement for an exhibition in Sao Paulo, identified as the subject matter for him of both painting and sculpture: “the self, terrible and constant.” In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger finds that the imagination in its transcendental role, that is, temporalizing, is a constant source of 219

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self. And this is the abyss that threatens reason as ground. The self is not the cumulative result of repeated surrenders to the demands of rationality. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes how the constancy of the self comes with “being in the process of having been,” the anticipatory quality that makes possible a sense of Fate. Neither mortality nor natality break into “being in the process of having been.” The question concerning self-constancy turns out to be one that brings with it exceptional danger (and is one of the crucial factors involved in the question concerning how Heidegger’s work stands in relation to National Socialism). The route that took Heidegger to the Abgrund, the abyss of the self, the phenomenological route, shows that the identification of the self, terrible and constant, as the subject matter, for Barnett Newman, of painting and sculpting is fully in accord with the artist’s earlier realization that his work is concerned with “the sensation of time.” The self, terrible and constant, is what attracted Newman to the Greek tragedians, who, in contrast to the sculptors and their love of ideal sensations, found that they could not distance themselves from, and so had to grapple directly with, the subject matter of tragedy. Barnett Newman demanded in his essay “The New Sense of Fate” that artists, in contrast to the Greek sculptors who “ [played] with an art of quality, an art of overrefinement, of sensibility, of beauty” should rather, like the Greek writers, “tear the tragedy to shreds” (BNS, 169). Newman’s sculpture is the art of his painting in three dimensions. The sublime of Newman’s art is neither far off in time nor far off in space. Like the locating of the “zip,” the stationing of the pillar in the sculptures called Here I-III, is the creative act whereby artist and viewer find themselves in a place for the first time. “And Jacob awakened out of his sleep, and he said ‘Surely the Name is in this place (Makom) and I knew it not.’ And he was afraid, and said: ‘How full of awe is this place (Makom)\ This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’ And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put under his head, and set it up for a pillar. . . .”6 Whereas Newman’s “zip” paintings set him to work on the Here sculptures, his work on the pyramidal pedestal of the sculpture Broken Obelisk intrigued him with the triangle and set him to work on a triangular format in painting. In his Barnett Newman, Harold Rosenberg notes that Broken Obelisk arouses more associations than Barnett Newman normally invited to cluster around his canvases. There is the cult of the Pharaoh, the Tablets thrown down and broken on the rust-colored sand of the desert, Jericho— the city that fell at the sound of the trumpet blast to make way for the Promise— the soaring spire of Chartres (BN, 74-77), and— if M. Lyotard would insist— the contact between the Finger of God and the finger of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Like suggestions of, allusions to, and references to sacred tradition throughout Newman’s work, these do not signify compliant religious piety. Rather, they are a backdrop in time and space for the towering obelisk, broken off at the summit of the sculpture that takes a pyramidal monument as its base. When stationed on Park Avenue in front of the Seagram Building— the first steeland-glass tower to rise there— it announces the self in the midst of a citadel of modernity, in a city where (as Harold Rosenberg put it) the future had found itself under contract to do its first rehearsals. Broken Obelisk continues Newman’s art of grappling directly with his subject matter. His entire work is, in a sense, one encounter: 220

FROMAN And Jacob was left alone and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.. . . And he [the man] said: “Let me go, for the day breaketh.” And he [Jacob] said: “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.” And he [the man] said: “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel.. . . ” And Jacob asked him, and said: “Tell me I pray thee, thy name.” And he said: “Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?” And he blessed him there. (G, xxxii, 25-30)

For Jean-Frangois Lyotard, the imagination that has unlimited itself to bear witness— in an immaterial materiality of avant-garde painting, for example— to the relief that something must follow the unrepresentable event that gives a word, a line, a color, and a form (and brings a terror that there will be nothing that follows) is without self. The self is dismissed early on, in Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, in Lyotard’s assault on semiotics, to which he attributes the following: There is a subject (two subjects), that is to say an instance to which all predicates, all the postponements of meaning, all the events experienced and toured, are related. This someone is something that will expand in proportion to the experience accumulated (experience, remember what Hegel said, where the subject will never stop saying that it is forever dying, oh hero, oh Ego!), to the extent that events, tensors, passages of intensity, find themselves split into signs— and then these signs, it is the “receiver,” the addressee who will assume their stock-piling and ownership, and he will say: look, I have been to Egypt, look, I have navigated between Gharybdis and Scylla, look, I have heard the sirens, look, I left my dwelling for the wilderness, and he will say, all these emotions, are messages that I have heard, I must understand them, they speak to me, it has spoken, who is the sender? The I is constituted in this relation of the sign as both addressee (what Kant calls Sinnlichkeit, Rezeptivitat)

and the decoder and inventor of codes (intellect, Selbsttatigkeit, autonomy). Receptivity is here only the indispensable, constitutive moment of autoactivity.. . . Oh the pretty movement of the jaw by which the head grasps meanings, takes them up, oh formation of capital, gracious game of sublation.7

For Lyotard, then, the self is indissociable from the subject, and Marx exposed that as a ruse of capital. That it cannot be otherwise was made known by Freud’s analysis of “the primary processes.” If, as others have found, Marxist humanism is bound up with a metaphysical understanding of who we are, and the unconscious as understood by Freud is based on a prior understanding of consciousness that is strictly metaphysical— which means, I would say, not phenomenological enough— then it is a metaphysical predilection that precludes (as metaphysics always will) that a self enter into Lyotard’s work. Self does, most certainly, enter into Barnett Newman’s art. Newman’s art is anything but self-less. Gall this, if need be, a differend, but in this case it is a differend with Jean-Frangois Lyotard.8 Newman describes what he does in the act of painting as follows: “the struggle is to bring out from the nonreal, from the chaos of ecstasy something that evokes a memory of the emotion of an experienced moment of total reality” ( BNS, 163). What this means to Newman can perhaps best be captured by a statement from Nietzsche about his hero Goethe: “what he wanted was totality. . . . He disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself.” 9 221

Chapter 16

LYOTARD A N D THE EVENTS OF THE POSTM ODERN SUBLIME HughJ. Silverman Das Postmoderne ist das Erhabene der Moderne welches jetzt geschehen sein wird. The Postmodern is the Sublime of the Modern which now will have happened (at a site).

What does philosophy want from Lyotard? What does philosophy want from any philosopher? It wants truth, vision, understanding, perspective, in short, a reading of what is, what can be, and what should be. Does philosophy want all this from Lyotard? Certainly. But can his writings provide it? These are the questions to be asked— and they can be reasonably asked in a modem context. But Lyotard is concerned with the postmodern— what it is and where it can be. Within the modem, questions of “truth, vision, understanding, and perspective” still make sense. But what do they mean in a postmodern framework? Philosophy asks of Lyotard that he give theses, or ideas or a method of some sort, for only then can one be a Lyotardian— one whose theses or ideas are associated with or derived from Lyotard’s theses or ideas, or one who offers a method which can be practiced and repeated after the fashion of Lyotard. But where are the theses, ideas, or methods associated with Lyotard? Upon reading him, these very expectations escape determination. Theses, ideas, even a method are not provided. But then theses, ideas, methods are the requirements of a modern philosophy— and an ancient philosophy as well. Whether it be Descartes or Locke, Plato or Aristotle, Kant or Hegel, Augustine or Aquinas, there will be theses, ideas, and/or a method of philosophizing. With Lyotard, while these elements may leave their traces in Lyotard’s thought, they are hardly determinations. And yet out of Lyotard’s writings, the outlines of theses and ideas, if not a method, do appear— but they appear at the very edges of modem philosophy, modern thought. The modem (and modern philosophy with it) wants to articulate the realm of the here and now. Its task is to break with tradition, to interrupt the accepted, to constitute innovation. The modem presumes a centered subject— an ego cogito, a bundle of impressions, a transcendental or pure ego, a psychic realm, a subjectivity, a conscious self. From the centered position, the 222

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manifold of experience is constituted. This modem condition is characterized by Foucault as the “empirico-transcendental doublet.” This doublet is always seeking to produce something new, something revolutionary, something original. Repetition is without virtue in itself. Marginalization is to be discounted. Displacement has no place. The avant-garde appears on the scene in order to lead the way, to blaze new territory, to crack the stronghold of tradition. Hence the weight of Barnett Newman’s 1948 essay “The Sublime Is Now” (as examined by Lyotard in “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde”).1 Lyotard meditates on this truth, pointing out that the first three sculptures by Newman were entitled Here /, Here II, and Here III. Then there is a painting called Not Over There, Here. Lyotard is especially concerned with the “here and now of these words— or at least of their titles. Lyotard stresses the identity of “The Sublime Is Now.” What could this title mean? If the sublime is now, it must be happening now. The now is here linked with the here— and the here is now linked with the now. But where is the sublime? The sublime must be here and now. Barnett Newman is an avant-garde artist. He cannot think only of the here and now. He must also be concerned about a future place and a future time. The avant-garde is the army (infantry— a kind of French Foreign Legion) that marches forward— before all the rest. The avant-garde artist seeks to affirm the new and break with the old. The avant-garde artist cannot confine him/ herself to the present— or at least, not exclusively. The “now” in “The Sublime Is Now” is, as Lyotard points out (in 1984), one of the temporal exstases— linked with Augustine2 (as either temporal or eternal) and later with Husserl (as part of a theory of consciousness).3 But we can take the account further— into Derrida’s “Ousia and Gramme” (1968),4 where he reads Aristotle as offering a line of “now” points— a series of nuns—maintenant, jetzt, or nun. It is as if Nietzsche’s “noon” (Mittag, as in Ecce Homo)5 were repeated in series, rather than as a moment of the eternal return. But Derrida opposes Aristotle’s “now” points with Hegel’s “now.” For Hegel, all is now— or at least, from the Absolute Geist's point of view.6 The Absolute Mind subsumes all under its gathering phase. There is no longer any consciousness, nor any self-consciousness. Absolute Mind has been there and will have at best a memory— an Erinnerung ( “out of the inside”) of all that went before. For Hegel, the “now” is a whole, a now-ness described by Art, Religion, and Philosophy, encompassing the whole space or site which the Absolute Mind totalizes. Although Derrida says nothing of it in “Ousia and Gramme,” Nietzsche’s “now” is between that of Aristotle and Hegel. Aristotle’s series of “now-points” and Hegel’s totalization into an all-encompassing now are mediated by a now which has a temporal location and yet which (according to Nietzsche) must be willed to happen again and again and again— eternally. Derrida is content to pass through Husserl’s phenomenology of internal time-consciousness in order to articulate the modem view of the “now.” The now, for Husserl, occurs in a continuous series of intentional positings. The transcendental ego directs its consciousness toward an object in a site outside (or inside) consciousness. The intentional act occurs at a particular moment, but it bears a structure of protentions and retentions, expectations and primary memories. Hence the intentional act is neither the Aristotelian “nowpoint” that is succeeded by another “now-point,” nor is it the unifying and 223

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synthesizing functions of Hegel’s now of the Absolute Geist. As with Hegel, Husserl’s phenomenology of internal time-consciousness is a phenomenology— a development of appearances, but for Husserl, appearances remain discrete and determinate, but with their umbrella of expectational and memorial functioning. Yet Husserl has no eternal return of the Same as does Nietzsche. The return of a past memory occurs in a new now— it is represented (or “presentified,” as Vergegenwartigung is translated)— presented again in a new conscious (present) intentional act. So what now is Lyotard’s account of “Newman’s time?” Newman is an avant-garde artist. He paints for the next time— he paints it (or sculpts it) now. The “now” should be ahead of its time, yet by the end of the 1940s, the avantgarde had been at work for over three decades. So the avant-garde is already, to a certain extent, Vorbei. Yet the avant-garde continues to announce itself at the verge of a new discovery, a new Duchamp urinal, a new Oppenheim furlined cup, a new Kandinsky abstract expressionist style. The avant-garde is the now of the future which, by 1948, was already at risk of becoming passe. Yet there were more and more avant-garde artists to come. Minimalists, Pop artists, Conceptual artists, Action artists, etc.— all artists of the future, artists who— in some now— were able to carry the flag of modernism to a new stage of development. So again, with Lyotard, what is Newman’s time? In “Newman: The Instant,” Lyotard writes: A distinction should be made between the time it takes the painter to paint the picture (time of “production”), the time required to look at and understand the work (time of “consumption”), the time to which the work refers (a moment, a scene, a situation, a sequence of events: the time of the diegetic referent, of the story told by the picture), the time it takes to reach the viewer once it has been created (the time of circulation) and finally, perhaps, the time the painting is.”7

For a phenomenology, or a phenomenological hermeneutics, the “time of production” and the “time of consumption” are of capital importance. Even the “time to which the work refers” is amply elaborated with respect to literature by Roman Ingarden (in Das Literarische Kunstwerk).8 A political economy of aesthetic production, as in Benjamin and Adorno, will focus on the “time of circulation.” But what of the “time the painting is?” The time the painting is falls under the category of what Lyotard refers to as “the instant”— the time of “the picture itself. ” The painting itself is the very moment in question. But what sort of time is it that is the painting itself? Newman’s paintings are abstract— one would say that there is no subject matter, no topic that is presented. And yet Lyotard recalls that, in The Plasmic Image (1943-1945), “Newman stresses the importance of subject-matter in painting” (LR, 243). But on the surface, looking for a figure, the figures of figurative (representational) painting, one might claim that there is nothing there. Lyotard reports, however, that for Newman, “the subject-matter” of his work is “artistic creation itself, a symbol of Creation itself, of the Creation story of Genesis” (LR, 243). Yet this cannot be a representation— a Vorstellung— of artistic creation itself, for there is nothing to see. And yet something is presented—etwas ist dargestelt. Can it be the “instant” of creation— the infinitesimal moment when the state in which 224

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there was nothing is replaced by the state in which there is something? This instant is not seen, is not even noticed, and yet it happens. Newman’s painting is this event of happening in the site of the painting. The event of happening is what Heidegger calls Ereignis.9 Ereignis is the event, the happening, the occurrence, the appropriation of what is in its relation to Being. Ereignis is the happening of the Being of beings in the site of the event of ontological difference, of the Open, in the clearing (Lichtung). Newman’s painting is this event of happening. It happens. Before it was not, after it will no longer be— and yet at the moment of the painting, the instant of artistic creation happens. The subject matter of Newman’s paintings is this instant of artistic creation that happens in the site of painting. Ereignis is no small event. It opens up a space for disclosure ( Unverborgenheit) of making one’s own out of what simply is. Ereignis as the happening of the event is ecstatic— it stands outside the frame set by the everyday, le quotidien. Joyce (in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) called it an “epiphany.” 10 It does not belong to anything, to anyone other than itself. It is itself. It is its own event. Ereignis for Heidegger is the event of the es gibt— the il y a, the “there is.” Donner le temps. Donner le temps— give some time, giving time, make space for time— but there is cannot wait and yet there is nothing to wait for. It happens. This is the moment of artistic creation for Newman, and it happens in a painting, in painting, in the event of painting. There is nothing to wait for, and it is not awaited. Yet it happens. It is not even the case that something happens, for nothing in particular does happen. In Newman’s paintings, nothing in particular is awaited. Lyotard writes: Newman’s now which is no more than now is a stranger to consciousness and cannot be constituted by it. Rather it is what dismantles consciousness, what deposes consciousness, it is what consciousness cannot formulate, and even what consciousness forgets in order to constitute itself. What we do not manage to formulate is that something happens, dafi etwas geschieht. Or rather, and more simply, that it happens . . . da&es geschieht. Not a major event in the media sense, not even a small event. Just an occurrence. (LR, 197)

It happens— the event of Newman’s now is that it happens. What happens? The painting happens. In “Ousia and Gramme,” Derrida indicates that Ereignis is an event of ownness— of what is one’s own— of an appropriation.11 This now is only difference, without any determinate place in space and time. Derrida distinguishes between le propre and la propriete. “What is proper” is “what is proper to someone,” like a proper name. Le propre is also what is one’s own, what belongs to one, and hence one’s property (propriete). What is one’s own is Eigen. An Er-eignis is an event of ownness. This event of ownness is now. And yet Lyotard asks: “Is it happening?” (arrive-t-il?) This question is critical. He is not affirming— as Heidegger does— that it is happening, but rather he asks a question: “Is it happening?” The question is the question of moment. The question “Is it happening?” is now. It is not a question for later, a question whose content is to be postponed. It cannot be postponed. “Is it happening?” is now. This now is not a now of successive points, as in Aristotle, nor is it a general encompassing of all, nor is it an act of 225

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consciousness. Rather it is an event— and this event is now. It happens— but the question of the event cannot be postponed. Lyotard also wants to assert that there is a difference between “Is it happening?” (Geschieht es?) and “What happens” (etwas findet statt, quelque chose se passe) or just “What is happening?” (Was ist los? Que-est-ce qui se passe?) “What happens” or “What is happening?” is the question of the new; “Is it happening?” is the question of the now. This means that the event of happening is different from what happens. What happens is what can be characterized as novelty and innovation. What happens is the concern of the avant-garde artist. The avant-gardist has to make something new. Something has to happen. There is no avant-garde if it doesn’t actually happen. But the question “Is it happening?” cannot be a matter of innovation, that is, rather, a question about the now. And Lyotard wants to claim that Newman’s paintings are concerned with the event— “Is it happening?” 12 In the essay “Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable,” Lyotard points out that the avant-gardes: “facing the inanity (‘chocolate box/ ‘official art’) of the craft of painting in a community without prince or people, turn to the question ‘what is painting?’ ” (I, 124). Lyotard goes on to say: One after the other, the presuppositions implied by the exercise of the craft are subjected to trial and contestation: local color, linear perspective, the rendering of color values, the frame, formats, hiding the support by covering the surface completely, the medium, the instrument, the place of exhibition, and many others beside, are plasmically questioned by the various avant-gardes. “Modem painters” discover that they have to form images that photography cannot present because those same presuppositions that their research interrogates and discovers are those that role over the manufacture of cameras and because, in the photographic industry, they are what defines the ideal result, the “good photo.” These painters discover that they have to present that there is something that is not presentable according to the legitimate constructions. They begin to overturn the supposed “givens” of the visible so as to make visible the fact that the visual field hides and requires visibilities, that it does not simply belong to the eye (of the prince) but to the (wandering) mind. (I, 124-125)

The avant-gardes, as Lyotard calls them, are compelled to seek after the new. Yet they are also concerned about the images that they present. They discover that they have to present that there is something that is not presentable. . . . This moment of unpresentability is the now of “Is it happening?” The question is not only one of event but also one of presentation. The event of presentation is an event that takes place in a site, but in such a way that nothing new occurs, nothing that will break with tradition, nothing that will seek to provide novelty, innovation, fame through doing what others have not yet done. The event of presentation will be a question of whether it is happening at all. The tradition of modem painting from Monet and Renoir through Cezanne and Van Gogh, Klimt and Schiele, Picasso and Braque have sought after improved vision, improved visibility, improved technique. Their task has been one of making more visible what is already visible— they still want to present what is seen, to represent something other than the event of the painting itself. 226

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But with the late modernists like Newman, the something other is the unpresentable itself. Lyotard writes: The avant-gardes . . . cut themselves off from the public. The public brandishes camera and flicks through “clean” illustrations (at the cinema too). It is convinced that the programme of artificial perspective must be completed and does not understand how one can spend a year painting a white square, i.e. in representing nothing (unless it be that there is some unpresentable). (/, 121)

This unpresentable is what Lyotard, following Heidegger, calls the uGeschieht es?”— an Ereignis or the event that is happening now. In the interview with Lyotard answering the question “What Is Postmodernism?” functioning as an appendix to the American edition of The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard states that the postmodern is “the presentation of the unpresentable in presentation itself.”13 But he also applies this description in his reading of late modernist painters such as Barnett Newman. Newman is presenting the unpresentable. The postmodern is the presentation of the unpresentable in presentation itself. Newman is no longer seeking after novelty, the new, innovation for its own sake. He wants to present the unpresentable in presentation itself. But this is already a postmodern reading of Newman. Newman the artist, Newman the critic of his own work, is still a modernist— ultimately offering something new, yet already putting the “new” in question “now” in the site of his own paintings. Lyotard’s reading of Newman seeks out a presentation of what is unpresentable even in Newman’s terms. In Newman’s painting Vir Heroicus Sublimis, a series of panels of red or orange are juxtaposed one next to the other on a large rectangular canvas which is much wider than it is high. The five panels (although it is one continuous painting) are marked by interruptions. The interruptions are what Newman himself calls “zips” (and this was before the days of Zip disks and Zip drives). These zips are vertical lines, usually black or white, which separate the panels. But a typical viewer of the painting will see only the panels. The zips are like outlines or markers or separators. They are not seen as “part” of the painting. Yet they are “part” of the painting. They are even “inside” the painting— though it could be argued that they are “outside” the large red or orange panels. The zips, then, located in various sites across the painting, interrupting but also bringing together the panels, constitute that which is unpresentable in the painting. The panels are presentable, the panels are presented, the zips are interruptions in those presentations. The zips are the sites of difference in the painting. The zips constitute the sublime moments in the painting. The zips mark the presentation of the unpresentable in the presentation of the Newman painting. Of course, in good Gestalt tradition, it would also be possible to “see” the zips as dominant, as the figures against the background of the panels. But whichever, the issue is not a figure-ground relation. That would still be a distinctly modem conception. What is at issue are the markings of difference between the panels, or between the zips. Hence the postmodern sites are neither the figure nor the ground. The postmodern sites are not given as figure or ground. The postmodern sites are events of difference between the panels and the zips, or between the panels when the zips 2 27

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interrupt the panels, or between the zips when the panels interrupt the zips. The postmodern sublime is the very question as to whether the difference is happening at all. So what is happening here? The appearance of the unpresentable is also an effect of the postmodern condition. This is not to say that Newman is a postmodern— not at all. He is still an avant-garde. He is still inscribed in the history of modernism. Yet what is occurring, what is happening, is that there are gaps, ruptures, fissures in the modern itself. In the many places where the new is still the principal value, the unpresentable appears, and there are multiple sites for these presentations. In the height of modernism, something is happening— but what? That is not so clear— there seem to be no boundaries to what is happening. Indeed, the question returns: Is it happening? And here we come to the crux of the issue. The question “Is it happening?” is unpresentable. It is now, but it is not presented as something, for the something would have to be something new. So there is the presentation itself and the presentation of the unpresentable in presentation itself. While Lyotard has called this “presentation of the unpresentable in presentation itself” the postmodern, it also has another name: the sublime. And because the sublime does not characterize an object but rather an event, and there are such events in many places, the sites of the sublime are also multiple. Unlike beauty, the sublime is unbounded. It happens, and yet it is not anything in particular. The sublime is an event— an Ereignis. It operates below the surface— it is subliminal in that sense. The sublime is below the line, underneath the level of evidence, inconspicuous to direct seeing. But the sublime— as Er-habene is also lifted up— over the line, Er-heben. Or to put it another way, the Erhabene-sublime is on the line— between the over and the under. In other words, the sublime has no determinate place in the history of the new, in the march of progress, in the development of the modem. And yet the sublime is inscribed in the interstices of the modem. The sublime is traced through the modern— as in Newman’s painting, where a white square is not just the presentation of the white square. The sublime in question is no longer the Kantian sublime. “After the sublime” means: after the Kantian sublime where beauty and the sublime are placed in conflict. “After the sublime” means another sublime— sublime that can have no after, that cannot be the next stage in a sequence of moments. “After the sublime” is no longer the sublime. There is no sublime after the sublime— it is something else, another moment, an entirely other, many others. So now we come to understand what Newman means when he says that uthe sublime is now. ” The sublime is not a past occurrence. The sublime has no place in a history of aesthetic presentations. The sublime is not presented as such. Rather the sublime happens. Or does it? That is the question. Is the sublime happening? Look at the Schlem in the Siidtirol Dolomites, at the “lake” from Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, at a sunset over the Port Jefferson Harbor in Long Island, New York, at San Francisco Bay when landing by plane at the airport, at the magnificent Great Barrier Reef north of Gaims, Australia. Is it happening? The Dolomite mountain is there, the “lake” is there, the harbor is there, the bay is there, the coral reef is there. But is it happening? This is the problem with Newman’s paintings. There is a white square as in The Voice or there is the large rectangular zipped open spaces (filing a single room 228

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in the Washington National Gallery) as in Fourteen Stages of the Cross (19581966). One might proclaim: Es gibt ein WeiBes Viereck, but is it happening? And the postmodern. Is it happening? This is the debate. Some, such as Habermas, Wellmer, and Frank, for instance, say that the postmodern is not happening. Others, such as Charles Jencks, Philip Johnson, Linda Hutcheon, William Spanos, and Gianni Vattimo, all say that the postmodern is happening. But is it really happening? If it is happening, then the postmodern is nothing other than the presentations of the unpresentable— the limit frames, the edges, or margins— of the modern. The postmodern is sublime— if it is at all. The postmodern is the sublime of the modern which is now happening (in many different sites). But is it happening? That is the question. That is the story Lyotard tells to philosophy, and he tells it (sadly) only in his writings now. But is it happening? Once again, that is the question. . . .

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION: LYOTARD—BETWEEN POLITICS AND AESTHETICS 1. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 140-141. Henceforth cited as I. 2. Andrew Benjamin, ed., The Lyotard Reader (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 332. Henceforth cited as LR. 3. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. I. H. Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993). Henceforth cited as LE. 4. For a further elaboration of “interruptions” in the postmodern, see my essay “Postmodern Interruptions: Between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida,” in Ecart and Differance: on Seeing and Reading in Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, ed. M. C. Dillon (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), pp. 208-219. Now available from Humanity Books (an imprint of Prometheus Books). 5. See Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. and trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: Chicago, 2001). See in particular the section on Jean-Francois Lyotard: “All-Out Friendship” and “Lyotard and Us” (pp. 211-241). 6. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck 1971). English translation by Mary Lydon forthcoming, Harvard University Press. 7. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Phenomenology (1954), trans. Brian Beakley (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991). 8. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 9. Large portions of the papers from this conference were published in the “Schizo-Culture 1” issue of Semiotext(e), III, 2 (1978). This volume includes Jean-Frangois Lyotard’s essay concerning the discourse of the master (the magesterial discourse), entitled “On the Strength of the Weak,” pp. 204-214. 10. The publication resulting from this exhibit is entitled Modemes, et apres? “Les Immateriaux” (Paris: Autrement, 1985). The volume includes an interview between Jean-Frangois Lyotard and Elie Theofilakis, entitled “Les Petits Recits de Chrysalide” (pp. 5-14). 11. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, VEnthousiasme: La Critique kantienne de I’histoire (Paris: Galilee, 1986). 12. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 231

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13. The photos I took of Jean-Frangois Lyotard in March 1990 are now interspersed throughout this volume. 14. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Toward the Postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark Roberts (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1993). This important volume of essays is now available from Humanity Books (an imprint of Prometheus Books). 15. Jean-Frangois Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber, The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999). 16. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Signed, Malraux, trans. Robert Harvey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 17. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics, trans. Robert Harvey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 18. Andrew Benjamin, ed., Judging Lyotard (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). CHAPTER 1: EMMA: BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS 1. Yan Thomas, “Du sien au soi,” L’Ecrit du temps, vol. 14/15 (1987), pp. 157-172. 2. Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895), in The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), pp. 283-397. Henceforth cited as SE, followed by volume and page number (SE, x:iii). 3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martins Press, 1965), B347-349. Henceforth cited as Cl. 4. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Jean Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Henceforth cited as D. 5. See Aristotle’s Physics 4,11. Henceforth cited as P. 6. Here I am reintroducing Freud’s notation using arabic numerals: scene 1 with the clerk; scene 2 with the shopkeeper; and I add scene 0, on the couch. This notation follows the order of appearance in Emma’s story during the course of her sessions. 7. Inserting Freud’s numbering onto the Husserlian diagram, T ' and T" are representations of the scenes numbered on the horizontal line. To be exact, it would be necessary to divide, at T0, the moment of the evocation of Ti (at T 'i), the scene of with the clerk, and that of T2 (= T"2), the scene where the shopkeeper is remembered. See Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964). Henceforth cited as ITC. 8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), § 12. Henceforth cited as C3. 9. Mikkel Borch-Jacobson, “In statu nascendi,” Hypnoses (Paris: Galilee, 1984). 10. Jean Laplanche, uFondements: vers la theorie de la seduction guere realisee Nouveau fondements pour la psychoanalyse (Paris: P.V.F., 1987), pp. 89-147. 11. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Second Meditation. 12. See D, esp. the section “The Referent, The Name,” as well as the lexicon of terms for “Proper name.” 232

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CHAPTER 2: CONVERSATIONS IN POSTMODERN HERMENEUTICS 1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., rev. trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), p. 368. Henceforth cited as T&M. 2. Wilhelm von Humboldt, “The Nature and Conformation of Language,” in The Hermeneutic Reader, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York: Continuum, 1988), p. 102. This conception is nicely reflected in Schleiermacher’s presupposition of universal life: “Everyone carries a tiny bit of everyone else within him” (cited in T&M, 189). 3. See Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 107, 115. 4. The conversation is well documented and well discussed in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989). Henceforth cited as DD. 5. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 149. 6. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), notice 32. Henceforth cited as D. 7. Perhaps Gadamer was thinking of passages like this one in Levinas: “The face, whose ethical epiphany consists in soliciting a response . .. is not satisfied with a ‘good intention’ and a benevolence wholly Platonic.” Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 225. For Levinas, goodwill and benevolence are attitudes assumed under the community-form of commercial civil society; they can be elements of history and politics. But this reduces the ethical face-to-face, an asymmetrical relation, to an interchangeable, economic sameness. So in the move from conversational communication to community, a move made quite often by Gadamer and reminiscent of Platonic harmony and Hegelian civil society, Gadamer would efface the differences between the self and the other. 8. On another level this may reflect the inevitability of metaphysics. At some points Gadamer seems to suggest that conversation predates metaphysics (e.g., DD, 109-111), and for him language is not necessarily the house of metaphysics. Of course, for Derrida, Gadamer’s position is itself metaphysical, i.e., to posit the primacy of nonmetaphysical conversation is already a metaphysical move. More than this, for Derrida, language is the house of metaphysics, and in this respect metaphysics is inescapable even in deconstruction. 9. Fred Dallmayr, for instance, challenges Gadamer on his ambivalence here. He writes: “A certain ambivalence concerns the relation between the ‘universality’ or ‘universal claim’ of hermeneutics and the notion of hermeneutical ‘limits’—two views Gadamer seems to endorse simultaneously (but without clarifying their compatibility)” (Dallmayr, “Prelude: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction,” DD, 84). On a related set of objections see Philippe Forget, “Arguments),” (DD, 143), and Gadamer’s discussion of Manfred Frank and Philippe Forget (DD, 111). 10. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). Henceforth cited as PMN. Michael Oakeshott, “The 233

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11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” in Rationalism and Politics (New York: Methuen, 1975). See John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Henceforth cited as RH. Jeff Mitscherling, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and ‘The Tradition/” Man and World 22 (1989), pp. 247-250, working on the Gadamerian side, maintains the distinction by pointing out that, on Rorty’s reading, the conversation is something that we control—we make the effort to keep the conversation of the West going—which seems to imply that it could stop at any moment. For Gadamer, on the other hand, conversation is unstoppable—we do not control it, but rather, it is the condition of possibility for continuing or discontinuing personal or social practices and discourses. Caputo, working on the Derridian side, also recognizes the difference between Gadamer’s conversation and Rorty’s, favoring Rorty’s. He calls Gadamer’s conversation inadequate to the postmodern situation at the same time that he champions the conversation of mankind. For Caputo, and he claims, for Derrida, “things get worked out in a way which is very much like what Rorty (following Oakeshott) calls the conversation of mankind (but with no Rortyan illusions about the charms of bourgeois liberalism)” (RH, 196). Caputo explains that this “is not merely a hermeneutic problem in the Gadamerian sense. . . . It is rather a deconstructive problem which requires vigilance about the subversion of discourse by a priori metaphysical schemes, by exclusionary practices, by a rhetoric systematically bent on sustaining the prevailing order” (RH, 261). Caputo also recognizes the difference between Gadamer and Rorty in a way similar to Mitscherling. See “The Thought of Being and the Conversation of Mankind: The Case of Heidegger and Rorty,” Review of Metaphysics 36 (1983), p. 672 ff. Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” p. 202. This is also what attracts Caputo to the concept of conversation. In the conversation of mankind, his “ethics of dissemination” takes its stand “with those for whom the system was not designed—women, children, the mad, the ill, the poor, blacks, the religious and moral minorities—those who are being excluded by the system” (RH, 264). Jean-Fran9 ois Lyotard and Jean Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 19 ff. Henceforth cited as JG. This requirement can be seen very clearly in Rorty’s support for E. D. Hirsch’s educational ideal of cultural literacy. For Rorty and Hirsch, education—“even the education of the revolutionary or the prophet—needs to begin with acculturation and conformity” (PMN, 365). Rorty argues that the program of cultural literacy supports a pluralistic democracy precisely because of the neutrality of the cultural knowledge required for democratic communication. Rorty, “That Old-Time Philosophy,” The New Republic 3820 (April 4, 1988), pp. 28-33. For further critical discussion of these matters, see my Hermeneutics and Education (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992). For further discussion of this example, see my “Violence and Intelligence: Answers to the Irish Question,” Political Communication and Persuasion 2 (1983), pp. 195-221. David Ingram suggests similar examples: “For persons of African-American or 234

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19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

Native-American descent who feel that their needs for freedom and dignity do not find adequate expression in the dominant language of formal rights, for women and gays who feel that their needs for self-identity do not find adequate expression in traditional gender roles, and for workers who feel that their needs for justice do not find adequate expression in the contractual language of a wage agreement, refusal to enter into the established discourse may well represent a principled moral stance against oppression and injustice.” Critical Theory and Philosophy (New York: Paragon House, 1990), p. 130. Nancy Fraser, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?” in Critical Theory: The Essential Readings, eds. David Ingram and Julia Simon-Ingram (New York: Paragon House, 1992), p. 369. Carole Pateman, “The Personal and the Political: Can Citizenship Be Democratic?” Lecture 3 of the Jefferson Memorial Lectures, delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, CA (February 1985), unpublished, qtd. in Nancy Fraser, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?” p. 369. Josef Simon explicates the Gadamer-Derrida encounter along the same lines, with some reference to Habermas. See his “Good Will to Understand and the Will to Power: Remarks on an ‘Impossible Debate’ ” (DD, 162-175). Lyotard, “Universal History and Cultural Differences,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 316. Henceforth cited as LR. See Richard Rorty, “Cosmopolitanism without Emancipation: A Response to Jean-Frangois Lyotard,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 214-215. Henceforth cited as CWE. uDiscussion entre Jean-Frangois Lyotard et Richard Rorty,” Critique 41, no. 456 (May 1985), p. 581. Henceforth cited as DLR. Rorty offers only a minimal response to these remarks, focusing on the distinction between persuading and convincing. This distinction, he claims, would have importance only if it was based on the presence and absence of physical violence. That would not be a matter for philosophical debate but for empirical examination. (DLR, 584). Rorty’s ethnocentric thesis seems consistent with conversational imperialism. For a good critique of this thesis, see D. Z. Phillips, “Reclaiming the Conversation of Mankind,” Philosophy 69 (1994), pp. 35-53. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, “The Sign of History,” in LR, 410. See, e.g., D, xiii, 91, 183, and the interview with Lyotard entitled “Links, the Unconscious, and the Sublime,” in Ellipsis 1 (1990), p. 112. Richard Bernstein, “Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind,” Review of Metaphysics 33 (1980), p. 772 ff. John Keane raises the same worries with respect to conversational models in both Rorty and Lyotard. See “The Modern Democratic Revolution: Reflections on Jean-Frangois Lyotard’s La Condition postmodemeChicago Review 35, no. 4 (1986), pp. 13, 18 n. 8. Caputo, “The Thought of Being and the Conversation of Mankind,” p. 679; see my “The Place of Phronesis in Postmodern Hermeneutics,” Philosophy Today 37 (1993), pp. 298-305. Rorty puts this in terms of a Davidsonian point about the translatability of language and maintains that: “it is misleading to say, as Lyotard does in an essay on Wittgenstein, that Wittgenstein has shown that ‘there is no unity of language, but rather islets of language, each governed by a system of rules un235

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translatable in those of the others’ ” (CWE, 215). See Lyotard’s response in DLR, pp. 581-582. Also see Rorty, “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodemity,” in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard Bernstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 171-174. 31. William Cowper, “Conversation,” Poems (London: J. Johnson and Co., 1811), p. 219. CHAPTER 3: LYOTARD, BAKHTIN, AND RADICAL HETEROGENEITY 1. I wish to thank Tim Craker, Len Lawlor, Tom Rockmore, and the members of the International Philosophical Seminar, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the Canadian Society for Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought, the Radical Philosophy Association National Conference, and the University of New Hampshire Speaker Series for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 2. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, “Judiciousness in Dispute, or Kant after Marx” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Henceforth cited as LR. Here Lyotard indicates his concurrence with this distinction between radical and nonradical heterogeneity when he points out that the heterogeneity assigned by Kant to the faculties ( “phrases” for Lyotard) is not final: “But this unity [from Kant’s Idea of systematicity] does require that the phrases’ heterogeneity, while conserved, must at least be ordered towards a single end comprising the object of an Idea.” (LR, 339). It is just this sort of systematic unity—and its nonradical, mediated heterogeneity—that Lyotard, as we shall see, repudiates. 3. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 100. Henceforth cited as JG. 4. David Carroll, “Narrative, Heterogeneity, and the Question of the Political: Bakhtin and Lyotard” in The Aims of Representations: Subject/Text/History, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 103. 5. For discussions of Bakhtin’s affinity with poststructuralism (beyond Lyotard’s particular brand), see Iris M. Zavala’s “Bakhtin and Otherness: Social Heterogeneity” in Critical Studies 2 (1990) and Barry Rutland’s “Bakhtinian Categories and the Discourse of Postmodernism,” also in Critical Studies 2 (1990). To the degree that a similarity between Bakhtin’s ideas and poststructuralism exists, it is particularly striking in that Bakhtin completed most of his works prior to the advent of post-structuralism and cites Marxism, Husserl, and neoKantianism as his primary sources of philosophical inspiration. At the time of his death in Moscow during the 1970s, Bakhtin appears to have known nothing of the poststructuralists. 6. Nietzsche distinguishes between three types of nihilism, “negative,” “reactive,” and “passive.” In his reading of Nietzsche, Deleuze takes “negative nihilism” to be the most basic of the three and to signify our inability to embrace chaos as the condition and setting of our existence. This is the basic sense in which I employ the term here, though, as will be seen, I reinterpret “chaos” in terms of the Bakhtinian notion of “dialogized heteroglossia.” For a fuller treatment of these different senses of Nietzsche’s notion of nihilism, see chap. 1 of Evans, Psychology and Nihilism: A Genealogical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993). 236

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7. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. xii. Henceforth cited as D. 8. Another example of a differend concerns the clash between the liberal bourgeois and Marxist ideas of society. The bourgeois genre of social and economic law does not recognize that the extraction of surplus value is exploitation, does not recognize what the Marxist genre proclaims, that one possesses “laborpower” as one’s essence rather than just as a commodity. It therefore judges the phrase and its instances, the addressor (the workers), the addressee (the bourgeoisie), the referent (labor-power), and the sense of the referent (essence of worker or commodity) in terms that do not and cannot provide the phrases within the Marxist genre with a hearing; in terms, therefore, that “wrong” workers, making them no more than mere plaintiffs within the bourgeois genre (D, 10). Indeed, the only phrase in which this differend can be witnessed as a differend is through the silence of the feeling of suffering on the part of the workers when they are subordinated to the finality of capital and its judgment (D, 81, 171). 9. In the Kantian terminology that Lyotard adopts and adapts to his own purposes, the prescriptive judgment is a “reflective judgment,” that is, one that does not determine objects (does not give them an attribute), one that tries to find a concept rather than imposing one, one that is of the sort found in aesthetic deliberations and not in the Kantian notion of the cognitive exploration of nature and the practical deliberations of morality. In the latter type of judgment, the object of the judgment is determined practically, is subjectively cognizable though not knowable, that is, not ostensibly verifiable. This is because what the moral law commands (that we achieve the “final purpose”) presupposes a final purpose (happiness for the virtuous) and the supersensibles linked to the possible achievement of this purpose (immortality and God), which are, for Kant, practically determined though not ostensibly verifiable. The objects of aesthetic judgment, the beautiful and the sublime, are neither cognitively nor practically determinable; properly speaking, they do not concern objects directly, though they are guided by the Kantian regulative Idea of a supersensible totality. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), pp. 98, 111, 213. Henceforth cited as C3. 10. Thus Lyotard agrees that “everything is political if politics is the possibility of the differend on the occasion of the slightest linkage”; but he also holds that “politics is not a genre” and thus “politics is not everything . . . if by that one believes it to be the genre that contains all the genres” (D, 139). 11. “Now the transcendental concept of reason is directed always solely towards absolute totality in the synthesis of conditions, and never terminates save in what is absolutely, that is, in all relations, unconditioned. . . . Reason concerns itself exclusively with absolute totality in the employment of the concepts of the understanding, and endeavors to carry the synthetic unity, which is thought in the category, up to the completely unconditioned.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: The Macmillan Press, 1978), p. 318. Henceforth cited as CL 12. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant says that because the realm of freedom— practical reason, morality—must be able to have an impact on the realm of nature, there must be a basis uniting the supersensibles that underlay these 237

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two realms—Freedom and Nature (C3, 14-15). Such a basis allows us “to think of nature as being such that the lawfulness in its form will harmonize with at least the possibility of [achieving] the purposes that we are to achieve in nature according to laws of freedom” (C3, 15). This basis, according to Kant, is ultimately the supersensible substrate of man and the world, God, who is the moral author of the world and puts the latter here for man and his or her moral purposes. The analogy, symbol (C3, 226-227), or sign that allows us to conceive (though not to cognize in Kant’s sense) this being is our own purposeful or intentional use of things (G3, 379-380, 20). This analogical conception of God is mediated by aesthetic judgment, for it is only through this judgment, and on the basis of the signs to which it is attuned, that is, the feelings of the beautiful and the sublime, that we first conceive of the indeterminate concept of the supersensible basis of the subjective purposiveness of nature (cf. Pluhar’s comments, lxxxv). Because the Idea of nature that is supposed to validate reason’s demand for unity is also the product of that demand, Beardsworth argues that there must be a judgment prior to reflective judgment and to the Idea of unitary finality, one that regulates this unitary finality. See his “On the Critical ‘Post’: Lyotard’s Agitated Judgment,” in Judging Lyotard, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 66. Henceforth cited as JL. This judgment provides reflective judgment with the type of rule that pertains to the analogy between nature and the productive causality of man, thus making it possible for reflective judgment to use this analogy in the subjective conceiving of the supersensible substrate and hence God. As we shall see, Beardsworth thinks that Lyotard presupposes a similar “prejudgment,” though one that establishes the archipelago rather than the unity of system as the regulative Idea. 13. Beardsworth cites a text from Lyotard’s “Introduction a une etude du politique selon Kant” that supports this claim: “If [the judge who looks for ‘passages’ which attest the coexistence of heterogeneous families] shows himself thereby to be accommodating [transigeant], it is because he himself is nothing but the faculty of judgment, critique, and that the latter can only decide [trancher] if it is in the position to intervene on all the islands of the archipelago, if at least, it ‘passes’ without a rule ‘before’ the rules, analogically or otherwise, in order to establish them” (JL, 73). But if critique or reflective judgment must “pass before” in order to establish the rules on the “islands,” then why not a critique in the name of unity (Kant) rather than incommensurability or heterogeneity (Lyotard)? This same problem is indicated in the text from The Differend quoted in the paragraph before the preceding one above: the faculty of the milieu enables the delimiting of “territories and realms” (genres) only because of “the commerce or the war it fosters between genres,” that is, only because it has already passed over the islands and declared them ready for the absolute divisions that reflective judgment will establish there. 14. In other words, Lyotard is not simply admonishing us to judge each case on its individual merits; he is saying that we should always look at each case in a way that obeys the imperative “Be plural!” (and is regulated by the Idea of the archipelago) rather than the Kantian imperative “Seek unity!” (and which corresponds to the regulative Idea of the supersensible substrate). But he provides, and can provide, no grounds for this choice of imperative. 15. I have already given examples of unifying analogies (person : artifact :: God : 238

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16. 17. 18. 19.

world); the archipelago itself is a symbol or sign for the Idea of a multiplicity of genres or faculties (see above and JL, 70). Steven Hendley, “Judgment and Rationality in Lyotard’s Discursive Archipelago,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 33:2 (1991). Henceforth cited as J&R. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 272. Henceforth cited as DI. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1984). Henceforth cited as PD. In Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin says that “voice” “includes height, range, timbre, aesthetic category (lyric, dramatic, etc.). It also includes a person’s world view and fate” (PD, 293). In other words, a voice is both a sociolinguistic genre and the person actualizing and actualized by the genre. As for sociolinguistic or “speech” genres themselves, Bakhtin views utterances as always part of a speech genre and takes “language” as a collective noun for the genres at play in the linguistic community: Language is realized in the form of individual concrete utterances (oral and written) by participants in the various areas of human activity. These utterances reflect the specific conditions and goals of each such area not only through their content (thematic) and linguistic style, that is, the selection of lexical, phraseological, and grammatical resources of the language, but above all through their compositional structure. All three of these aspects—thematic content, style, and compositional structure—are inseparably linked to the whole of the utterance and are equally determined by the specific nature of the particular sphere of communication. Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances. These we may call speech genres.

See Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 60. Henceforth cited as SG. By “compositional structure” Bakhtin means “particular types of construction of the whole, types of its completion, and types of relations between the speaker and other participants in speech communication (listeners or readers, partners, the other’s speech, and so forth) (SG, 64). By “construction of the whole,” Bakhtin apparently means the general way in which sentences must be strung together in order to count as a scientific text, or as a poem, etc. 20. “The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogized heteroglossia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual utterance” (DI, 273). Bakhtin also says that dialogized heteroglossia is at least sometimes a conscious attempt to undermine the dominance of monoglossic tendencies in culture: “Heteroglossia, as organized in these low genres . . . was a heteroglossia consciously opposed to this literary language. It was parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically against the official languages of its given time. It was heteroglossia that had been dialogized” (DI, 273). 21. Thus our identity or “personality” is our voice, and our voice is always the 239

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dissemination of a sociolinguistic genre, that is, the product of social interrelations or heteroglossia: There is no such thing as thinking outside orientation toward possible expression and, hence, outside the social orientation of that expression and of the thinking involved. Thus the personality of the speaker, taken from within, so to speak, turns out to be wholly a product of social interrelations. Not only its outward expression but also its inner experience are social territory. Consequently, the whole route between inner experience (the “expressible”) and its outward objectification (the “utterance”) lies entirely across social territory. See V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986 [1929]), p. 90. Moreover, because these speech genres are also “worldviews” and strategies for their own persistence within the heteroglossic community, they are more “subjectified” than Lyotard’s formalistic genres. For example, where Lyotard speaks of prescriptive and cognitive phrases as genres, Bakhtin would substitute the socioideological or subject position of a particular religious, scientific, or professional group (see D, 157, for the claim that, because “narrative” is a single genre of discourse, the “necessary conflict” between the narratives of different communities is not an example of a differend; but then see LR, 393-394, where he refers to Marxist historical materialism and similarly political ideas as genres of discourse, to which the notion of the “differend” and its prescription would then apply). Indeed, a Bakhtinian might claim that Lyotard’s rigid division between prescriptions and descriptions is itself either the voice of one of the religious traditions of the West and/or of a culturally erected superego, rather than the obvious incommensurability that Lyotard takes it to be. 22. Lyotard identifies dialogue with its use in the Platonic tradition. According to this tradition, the “principal rule [of a dialogue] is that the agreement concerning the referent ought to be obtained for ourselves by ourselves,” that is, within the dialogue (D, 25-26; see also 86). More strongly, “ [dialogue] simultaneously institutes and seeks to institute the rules for what we call scientific cognition” (D, 26). The adherents of the contrasting genre, “agonistics,” “think that success in the eyes of the third party is the sign of the true,” of what the referent really is (D, 26). Bakhtin would identify “dialogue” with Lyotard’s “agonistics,” adding the proviso, however, that the third party’s claim becomes simply another voice added into the multivoiced dialogue, a dialogue as much concerned with its own continuation as with its finalization in a truth. 23. I shall assume, with many Bakhtin scholars, that Bakhtin wrote the works that are, for political reasons, signed by his friends and fellow Soviet linguists Volosinov and Medvedev. In citing these works, however, I shall list the publications with the name that comes before the slash, for example, Volosinov in Volosinov/Bakhtin. 24. Utilizing the term “subsequentiality” to denote the utterance as a response to a previous utterance, and the Derridean term “supplementarity” to denote the same utterance as an anticipation of a future utterance, Weber describes the identity of the Bakhtinian utterance as “an effect of subsequentiality and supplementarity,” that is, as a point of intersection in the movement from response 240

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to anticipation, as a “vanishing point.” See Max Weber, The Intersection: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislar Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 102-103. Henceforth cited as MPL. 25. The primacy of the dialogic process over its result is also evident in Bakhtin’s remarks about the Platonic notion of dialogue in relation to Dostoyevskian dialogue: This is what distinguishes Dostoyevsky’s dialogue from Platonic dialogue. In the latter, while it is not a thoroughly monologized pedagogical dialogue, all the same the multiplicity of voices is extinguished in the idea. The idea is conceived by Plato not as an event, but as existence. To participate in the idea means to participate in its existence. But all hierarchical interrelation between perceiving human beings, created by the varying degrees of their participation in the idea, are ultimately extinguished in the fullness of the idea itself. (PD, 279-280). 26. In Psychology and Nihilism, I have worked out some of the details of this account of cognitive competence within the context of a critique of contemporary cognitive psychology, connectionism, and ecopsychology. 27. Thomas Kent has examined in detail the sense in which Bakhtin’s speech genres provide the basis of hermeneutics and communication. See “Hermeneutics and Genre: Bakhtin and the Problem of Communicative Interaction,” in The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture, ed. David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 282-303. Each genre carries its own rules, or better, general constraints, for the appropriate moves within it. Thus, the subjects’ tacit knowledge of these genres provides the common background necessary for communication and the continuation of exchange across heterogeneous terrain. The notion of the linguistic community as a plurivocal body allows us to add that subjects have a basis for a hermeneutical knowledge of the entire linguistic community, at least in its outline and structure as an interplay of voices. In contrast to the subjects in Bakhtin’s dialogism, those in Lyotard’s archipelago of genres are hermetically sealed within the happenings of the incommensurable phrases that provide them with their being and identity (JG, 43; D, 136, 116). The one possible exception to this—the addressor of an indeterminate reflective judgment—is either itself completely indeterminate, and hence not a subject, or, as we saw in the previous section, guided by either the Idea of unity or the Idea of multiplicity, and hence bound by the direction and rules of a specific genre. Thus Lyotard’s multiplicity of incommensurable phrases denies him any epistemological basis for claiming that the community is structured like an archipelago of heterogeneous genres, let alone like an interplay of voices. Unlike the adherent of the expanded Bakhtinian view, Lyotard is forced to institute or prescribe, rather than discover, the radical heterogeneity that lies at the basis of the community. 28. Lyotard also mentions the importance of “hearing” in the pregnant sense to which we have just alluded: “There are language games in which the important thing is to listen, in which the rule deals with audition. Such a game is the game of the just” (JG, 71-72). But because dialogue is not a constitutive feature of interpersonal interaction for him, Lyotard lacks the sense in which this 241

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29.

30.

31. 32.

“hearing,” from the very beginning, is already a “responding” to another as part of the ongoing interplay of voices. Because any phrase implies all the rest of language and because a “first” phrase already implies a series, Lyotard claims that no phrase can be said to be first (D, 59-60). Moreover, the modes of linkage implied by the phrase previous to any current phrase are ready to take the current phrase into account and to inscribe the latter into the pursuit of the stakes set by genres. For this reason, no phrase occurs unless it is already involved in the conflict between genres that would or could claim it for the realization of their respective stakes (D, 136). Furthermore, encounters between phrases cannot be avoided: “It is necessary to link onto a phrase that happens (be it by a silence, which is a phrase), there is no possibility of not linking onto it. . . . to link is necessary; how to link is contingent” (D, 29; see also 66). Lyotard’s refusal, in Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), henceforth cited as Per, to accept the Marxist genre or “metanarrative” follows not only from his insistence that Marxism is only one genre among “at least several incommensurable genres of discourse in play in society none of which can transcribe all the others” (Per, 72), that “the roles of the protagonist of history are not played out in a single genre of discourse” (Per, 61), and that we cannot “forget that differends are embodied in incommensurable figures between which there is no logical solution” (Per, 61); it also stems from his claim that there isn’t “any Self at all in experience to synthesize contradictorily the moments and thus to achieve knowledge and realization of itself.” See Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in David McLellan, Karl Marx Selected Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977 [1844]), p. 146. I have argued that “sociolinguistic genre” can refer to both linguistic and nonlinguistic practices (thus undercutting the problems that arise with a separation of base- and superstructure in classical Marxism). See my “To ‘Informate’ or ‘Automat’: The New Information Technologies and Democratization of the Work Place,” The Journal of Social Theory and Practice 17:3. CHAPTER 4: LYOTARD, LEVINAS, AND THE PHRASING OF THE ETHICAL

1. Sandra Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, eds. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), p. 80. 2. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-77, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton, UK: 1980), p. 98. Quoted in Bartky, p. 82. 3. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 35. Henceforth cited as Per. 4. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Henceforth cited as D. 5. Emmanuel Levinas, “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” in The Levinas Reader; ed. Sean Hand (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), p. 202. 6. David Carroll, “Rephrasing the Political with Kant and Lyotard: From Aesthetic to Political Judgments,” in Diacritics (Fall, 1984), p. 78. Henceforth cited as RP. 242

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7. Quoted in Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 112; original citation appears in Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Instructions paiennes (Paris: Galilee, 1977), pp. 19-20. A different translation of the same passage appears in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), p. 126: “Bullets . . . are also a great help to narrators who are determined to convince incredulous listeners.” 8. See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 76. Henceforth cited as OB: “The sensible experience of the body is already and from the start incarnate.” One cannot emphasize too much the importance of the incarnate body in Levinas’s argument for ethical subjectivity. See OB, 74: “Only a subject that eats can be forthe-other, or can signify. Signification, the one-for-the-other, has meaning only among beings of flesh and blood.” 9. This statement, although true, needs an important qualification. In Levinas’s own words: “I have said . . . that I am responsible for the persecutions that I undergo. But only me! My ‘close relations’ or ‘my people’ are already the others and, for them, I demand justice.” Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 99. 10. “Levinas’s Ethical Discourse,” in Re-Reading Levinas, eds. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 90. Henceforth cited as ED. 11. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), p. 244. 12. For a more developed view of Levinas’s views on conscience, emotions, and subjectivity, see his “Bad Conscience and the Inexorable,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard Cohen (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986), p. 37. 13. Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement que savoir (Paris: Editions Osiris, 1988), p. 61. CHAPTER 5: LYOTARD, GADAMER, AND THE RELATION BETWEEN ETHICS AND AESTHETICS 1. All Kant references are to the Akademie-Textausgabe of Kant’s Werke (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), p. v, 119, 121. Henceforth cited as WAK. 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Lob der Theorie: Reden und Aufsatze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983). Henceforth cited as LT. 3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., rev. trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1992), p. 124-125. Henceforth cited as T&M. German edition: Wahrheit und Methode: Grundziige einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 4th edition (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1975). Henceforth cited as WM. 4. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Concerning Empty and Ful-filled Time,” trans. R. Phillip O’Hara, in The Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 8 (Winter 1970). Henceforth cited as EFT. 5. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Intuition and Vividness,” trans. Dan Tate, in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 160. Henceforth cited as RB. 6. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Continuity of History and the Existential Moment,” trans. Thomas Wren, in Philosophy Today, no. 16 (Fall 1972), p. 238. 243

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7. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “What Is Practice?” in Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 72. Henceforth cited as RAS. 8. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Vielfalt Europas: Erbe und Zukunft” in Das Erbe Europas, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990). Henceforth cited as EE. 9. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Uber die Politische Inkompetenz der Philosophies in Sinn und Form, vol. 45 (1993), p. 5-12. 10. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 116-119. Henceforth cited as L. 11. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, VEnthousiasme: La Critique kantienne de Vkistoire (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1986), p. 108. Henceforth cited as E. 12. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 42. 13. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 3. Henceforth cited as PC. 14. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, “Interview with Florian Rotzer,” in Conversations with French Philosophers, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), p. 73. Henceforth cited as CFP. 15. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 94. Henceforth cited as JG. 16. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. xi. Henceforth cited as D. 17. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, “Anima minima” in Moralites postmodemes (Editions Galilee, 1993). Henceforth cited as MP. See also Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 18. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, GA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 100. Henceforth cited as I. 19. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). CHAPTER 6: LYOTARD, NANCY, AND THE MYTH OF INTERRUPTION 1. Jacques Derrida, uPrejuges: Devant la loi, ” in La faculte de juger (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985), p. 87. 2. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 181. Henceforth cited as D. 3. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Henceforth cited as IC. 4. Lyotard there analyzes the equivocity of the phrase “I can come by your place.” 5. This is probably the appropriate place to recall that this essay is fully revised from earlier versions first presented at the annual meeting of the Society for 244

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6.

7. 8. 9.

Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in Boston and then later to the Department of Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook. I thank those who attended for their many fine questions and suggestions. My hypothesis is that only such a resistance to the thinking of resistance, and not simply a resistance to forgetting or absence, on the one hand, or memory or immanence, on the other, will be able to resist a myth of interruption. Such resistance cannot be, however, merely formal. Lyotard writes: “It is not desirable to base resistance to the fullness of instituted narratives on the void of a universal principle of discourse.” Lessons in Paganism, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), p. 36. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 7. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Heidegger and uthe jews, ” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 48. Note that the word “conviviality” is used by Lyotard in a positive sense in The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 7. Henceforth cited as PC. CHAPTER 7: LYOTARD, FRANK AND THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING

1. Manfred Frank, Die Grenzen der Verstandigung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988). Henceforth cited as GV. I follow here Christine Pries’s excellent review in Philosophisches Jahrbuch 1 (1990): 273-77. 2. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988). Henceforth cited as D. 3. Manfred Frank, What Is Neostructuralism? trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard Gray (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Henceforth cited as WN. 4. Geoff Bennington, Lyotard. Writing the Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 106-175. 5. Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 119. Henceforth cited as IL. 6. Manfred Frank, Das individuelle Allgemeine (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977). 7. See also Manfred Frank, Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), where, in a different context, he again opposes his hermeneutics of individuality to Habermas’s discursive ethics. 8. See Manfred Frank, Das individuelle Allgemeine. 9. In Das individuelle Allgemeine, Frank criticizes all logocentric attempts to purify language of rhetorical traces by establishing an illusory world of pure transcendental signifieds. 10. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 11. Hans-Dieter Gondek, “Annaherungen und Abwendungen: Jacques Derrida,” in Tumulte (Vienna, 1991), p. 25. My argument follows Gondek’s excellent account. 12. Manfred Frank, uZweifacher Auftritt. Die Bewegung der deutschen Philosophic,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (June 29, 1988). 13. Manfred Frank, uAufklarung als analytische und synthetische Vemunft,” in 245

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Aufklarung, Gegenaufklarung in der europaeischen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik von der Gegenwart bis zur Antike (Darmstadt, 1987), p. 380. 14. Manfred Frank, “Kleiner (Tiibinger) Programmentwurf” in Frankfurter Rundschau (March 5, 1988). Henceforth cited as KP. 15. This expression is taken from Jochen Horisch, Die Wut des Verstehens (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988). CHAPTER 8: INTERRUPTING LYOTARD: WHITHER THE WE? 1. My question, “Whither the We?” concerns a number Lyotard’s essays found in The Lyotard Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Henceforth cited as LR. See especially “Universal History and Cultural Differences” (314-323); “Discussions or Phrasing ‘After Auschwitz’ ” (360-392); and “The Sign of History” (393-411). It also addresses his work Heidegger and the “jew s” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Henceforth cited as HJ. 2. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 222. Henceforth cited as DM. 3. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, “Something Like: ‘Communication . . . without Communication,’ ” The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 116. Henceforth cited as I. 4. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959), p. 153. Henceforth cited as SF. 5. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 40. Henceforth cited as Per. 6. Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 18. 7. Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 56. Henceforth cited as EY. 8. Rene Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987). CHAPTER 9: LYOTARD, HEIDEGGER AND “THE JEWS” 1. Genesis 11: 6-7. See also Tanakh (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985), pp. 16-17. 2. In his The Evil Demon of Images (Sidney: The Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1987), for instance, Baudrillard proclaims the arrival of the paradoxical situation in which the real and the imaginary are equally impossible. The idol, he claims, “no longer represents anything but reveals itself as a pure, impassioned, contagious image which effaces the difference between the real being and its assumption into the imaginary” (p. 28). This would be the final triumph of a purified truth in a world without memories and/or impulses. 3. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche II (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), p. 482: “Die seinsgeschichtliche Erinnerung mutet dem geschichtlichen Menschentum zu, dessen inne zu werden, da vor aller Abhangigkeit des Menschen von Machten und 246

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4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

Kraften, Vorsehungen und Auftragen das Wesen des Menschen in die Wahrheit des Seins eingelassen ist. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die frohliche Wissenschaft, in Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 3 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967), p. 424. Nietzsche reading Heidegger is one example of the “Balal effect” on reading Heidegger reading—settling accounts with—Nietzsche. Plato, Republic, 389 and 414. Berel Lang, “Language and Genocide,” in Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, eds. Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Meyers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 341-361. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, GT: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 133. Henceforth cited as IM. Here Heidegger makes approving reference to Heraclitus and his characterization of the many as dogs and donkeys. See James R. Watson, Between Auschwitz and Tradition: Postmodern Reflections on the Task of Thinking (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), “Facet 1: Semiterate Writing,” pp. 29-39. Henceforth cited sl sBA. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Hurley, Seem, and Lane (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), p. 51. This is the title of one of Anselm Kiefer’s paintings. See Mark Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1987), p. 16. See Jean-Frangois Lyotard, “Jewish Oedipus,” trans. Susan Hanson, Toward the Postmodern, eds. Robert Harvey and Mark Roberts (Humanities Press, 1993), p. 31. Richard L. Rubinstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York: Harper Colophon, 1978), p. 6. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 140. Also, see Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 144-149. Charlotte Delbo, None of Us Will Return, trans. John Githens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 79. Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p. 12. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973), p. 65. James Hutchison Stirling, The Secret of Hegel: Being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form and Matter (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1908), p. 741. Here I mean “de-ranged” otherwise than Lyotard when he says “I would say that Heidegger’s thought is an arrangement under the guise of the greatest derangement. It is yet another way of making an ‘ordinary’ event signify.” JeanFrangois Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews, ” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 23. Henceforth cited as HJ. Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1969), p. 4. On this point of Heidegger’s avoidance of “returning Jews,” see Veronique M. Foti, Heidegger and the Poets: Poiesis/Sophia/Techne (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992), chaps. 6 and 7. 247

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21. This is a reference to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger; Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), especially chap. 7, “The Aestheticization of Politics.” Henceforth cited as HAP. 22. Jean Beaufret, “Heidegger Seen From France,” trans. Bernard Dauenhauer, Southern Journal of Philosophy 8/4 (Winter, 1970), p. 437. 23. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Subject of Philosophy, trans. Trezise, Silverman, Cole, Bent, McPherson, and Sartiliot (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 73. 24. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum Book, 1972), p. 199 (my emphasis). 25. This is my rewording of what Adorno says in Negative Dialectics, Part Two. CHAPTER 10: LYOTARD AND HISTORY WITHOUT WITNESSES 1. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 101. Henceforth cited as D. 2. See Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). See the Afterword: “A Memorial of Marxism: For Pierre Souyri,” p. 50. Henceforth cited as Per. 3. Did it have anything to do with the approaching third millennium? Should we conceive of these prognosticators as secular parodists of Joachim of Floris? 4. See Jean-Frangois Lyotard, “The Sign of History,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 394. Henceforth cited as LR. Another version of this important essay appears in Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Henceforth cited as D. 5. See Jean-Frangois Lyotard, L’Enthousiasme: La Critique kantienne de Vhistoire (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1986), p. 26 ff. 6. As one of his translators observes: The term [phrase] is not a grammatical—or even a linguistic—entity (it is not the expression of one complete thought nor the minimal unit of signification), but a pragmatic one, the concern being with the possibility (or impossibility) of what can (or cannot) be “phrased,” of what can (or cannot) be “put into phrases.” ... A phrase is defined by—as it, in fact, defines— the situating of its instances (addressor, addressee, referent, sense) with regard to one another. Rather than defining a grammatical or semantic unit, a phrase designates a particular constellation of instances, which is as contextual as it is textual—if it is not indeed precisely what renders the “opposition” between text and context impertinent. (D, 194) 7. Bataille seems to have introduced this expression to the poststructuralist discourse of De Certeau, Foucault, et al. See his “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” in George Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, et al. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1985). 8. This would parallel his understanding of the “figural” as event. See Adolfo Fernandez Zoila, uLe Figural evenem en tielin the Lyotard issue of VArc 64 (1976), p. 50. 9. Bearing witness to what? One is reminded of Quine’s example of the indeterminacy of the deixic, namely, the native’s pointing to an animal and saying to 248

NOTES TO CHAPTER 10

the anthropologist: “Gavagai!” To what is the person referring? To rabbits? Rabbit stages? Undetaehed rabbit parts? See Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962), p. 29 ff. Something like what we might call “the cunning of the Same” seems to be at work here. 10. See Paul Veyne, Writing History• trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), pp. 32-34. Henceforth cited as WH. 11. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1970), p. 219. 12. Responding to Sartre’s accusation that he shows “contempt for history,” Foucault explains: For philosophers, History is a kind of grand and extensive continuity where the liberty of individuals and economic and social determinations come to be intertwined. If you touch one of these great themes—continuity, the effective exercise of human freedom, the articulation of individual liberty with social determinations—then right away these grave gentlemen begin to cry rape, and that history has been assassinated. In fact, it was some time ago that people as important as Marc Block, Lucien Fevre and the English historians put an end to this myth of History. They write history in a completely different mode. . . . The philosophical myth of History ... I would be delighted if I have killed it, since that was exactly what I wanted to do. But not at all history in general. One doesn’t murder history but history for philosophy. That’s what I wanted to kill.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966-84, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), p. 41. “There are differends because, or like, there is Ereignis” (D, 138), a term given almost mystical connotation by the later Heidegger. See also Lyotard’s critique of those who would “coddle the event” in a politics of false supermen (D, 142). The event, as Lyotard understands this term, is occasion for modest recognition of alternatives and limits, not for the exercise of voluntaristic power, though one could question how he can exclude the latter, given Lyotard’s penchant for cruising the archipelago nominalistically. Although Kant sometimes seems to use the term to denote “modes of presentation” generally (LR, 395), usually he distinguishes hypotyposes from exempla and schemes (e.g.,LR, 408). “Whatever acceptation is given to the Idea of nature, one’s right of access to it is only through signs, but the right of access to signs is given by nature. Not even a denaturalized nature and signs of nothing, not even a postmodern nonteleology, can escape this circulus” (D, 135). Again, the passage between order and disorder (nature and artifact). He sometimes adds other terms as signs as well: Budapest in 1956 and Paris in 1968, for example (see E, 96). Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Le Postmoderne explique aux enfants (Paris: Galilee, 1988), pp. 45, 50. Henceforth cited as PE. See also Postmodernism Explained: Correspondence, 1982-1985, trans. ed. by Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Afterword by Wlad Godzich. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 25, 32. In fact, he insists that “the Hegelian dialectic is the very image of violence. . . . 249

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

The goal and final justification of violence is always unity." Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 184, 186. Of course, “fratemity-terror” constitutes an inescapable dyad in Sartre’s own philosophy of history. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 154-155, my emphasis. Henceforth cited as LCP. Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (New York: Columbia University, 1988), p. 9. See my “Foucault and Historical Nominalism,” in Phenomenology and Beyond: The Self and Its Language, eds. Harold A. Durfee and David F. T. Rodier (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), pp. 134-147. This section of the essay is a gloss on my “Michel Foucault and the Career of the Historical Event,” in At the Nexus of Philosophy and History, ed. Bernard P. Dauenhauer (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987), pp. 178-200. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1972), pp. 27, 16. Henceforth cited asAK. See also my “Career,” p. 180. James Bemauer, Force of Flight (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990), pp. 94, 104. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Finite History,” in The States of “Theory,” ed. David Carroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 165. Henceforth cited as FH. CHAPTER 11: LYOTARD AND “THE FORGOTTEN”

1. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, “The Sign of History,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 406. Henceforth cited as LR. Quoted from Immanuel Kant, The Contest of the Faculties. 2. We recall that Kant speaks of judging nature’s might from a safe place, a place where we may regard nature’s might as fearful without fear. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), p. 101. We also recall that “War itself, if it is carried on with order and with a sacred respect for the rights of citizens, has something sublime in it. . . . ” Critique of Judgment: quoted by Lyotard in “Judiciousness in Dispute, or Kant after Marx” (LR, 324). 3. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 4. Henceforth cited as HJ. 4. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Le Differend (Paris: Minuit, 1983), p. 90; Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 55. The sole meaning of comporter given in the Larousse Dictionnaire de la Langue Frangaise, 1979, is “Avoir comme parties essentielles, avoir comme qualite naturelle,” synonymous with “se composer de. ” 5. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 185. This essay was first published as “Herethique de Iam our” in Tel Quel, 74 (Winter 1977). Henceforth cited as KR. 6. “I by no means deny that brutes feel, but I do deny that, on this account, it is 250

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

unlawful for us to consult our own profit by using them for our own pleasure and treating them as is most convenient for us, inasmuch as they do not agree in nature with us, and their feelings are different from our emotions” (Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. William Hale White and rev. Amelia Hutchinson Stirling, ed. and int., James Gutmann (New York: Hafner, 1949), Part IV, Prop. XXXVII, Note. Henceforth cited as Ethics. Spinoza follows the most infamous side of Aristotle, that authority’s rule is by nature. “Hence we see that is the nature and office of a slave; he who is by nature not his own but another’s man, is by nature a slave; and he may be said to be another’s man who, being a human being, is also a possession” (Aristotle, Politics, 1254 a). “Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals . . . the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master” (Aristotle, Politics, 1254 b). When Aristotle speaks of the rule of wisdom, he may not speak in such a contaminated voice. “For the wise man must not be ordered but must order, and he must not obey another, but the less wise must obey [peithesthai] him” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982 a). See my Injustice and Restitution: The Ordinance of Time (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), chap. 9. All references to Aristotle are to The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R. McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). Benedict de Spinoza, A Political Treatise, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951), p. 387. Luce Irigaray, “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,” in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford, trans. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 178. Henceforth cited as IR. In French Irigaray’s words are: “La difference sexuelle represente une des questions ou la question qui est a pense a notre epoque. Chaque epoque— selon Heidegger—a une chose a penser.” Luce Irigaray, Ethique de la difference sexuelle (Paris: Les Editions de minuit, 1984), p. 13. This phrase is translated by Sean Hand as: “Sexual difference is one of the important questions of our age, if not in fact the burning issue. According to Heidegger, each age is preoccupied with one thing, and one alone” (Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” in IR). Here the gendering of language may say something profound about heterogeneity, about the sex of anything embodied or named in language (but not perhaps our English language). Jacques Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of Woman,” in Feminine Sexuality, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1985), p. 139. Henceforth cited as GJW. Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” in The Straight Mind and other Essays, foreword Louise Turcotte (Boston: Beacon, 1992), p. 29. Henceforth cited as SM. Arleen B. Dallery, “The Politics of Writing (the) Body: Venture Feminine,” in Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo, Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), p. 59. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 107. Henceforth cited as OWL. Martin Heidegger, “What Galls for Thinking?” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 357. 251

NOTES TO CHAPTER 12

17. Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., Deconstruction and Philosophy: the Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 191-192; quoted in David Krell, Intimations of Mortality (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986). 18. Jacques Derrida, uGeschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” in Research in Phenomenology\ ed. John Sallis, XIII (1983), p. 65. Henceforth cited as Gl. 19. Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV),” in Reading Heidegger, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Henceforth cited as G4. 20. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 163. Henceforth cited as BT. 21. “Dasem’s going-out-of-the-world in the sense of dying must be distinguished from the going-out-of-the-world of that which merely has life [des Nur-lebenden]” BT, p. 284. 22. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 44. Henceforth cited as LD. Hegel says of death, leading to the animal voice, that: “Man is this night, this pure nothing that contains everything in its simplicity, a realm endlessly rich in representation and images. . . . In phantasmagoric representations he is surrounded by night; suddenly a bloody head juts forth here, there another white figure, and just as suddenly they disappear. One glimpses this night when one looks into the eyes of another human—into a night, which becomes frightening; here each of us is suspended confronting the night of the world” (G. W. F. Hegel, Jenenser Realphilosophie II, Die Vorlesungen von 1803-1804, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Leipzig: 1932), pp. 180-181; quoted and translated in Agamben, LD, pp. 41-42. 23. Firuz Kazemzadeh, “The Slaughter of the Armenians,” in The New York Times Book Review (April 25, 1993), p. 13. 24. Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” in Hypatia 2/2 (Summer 1987), p. 3. Henceforth cited as PWT. CHAPTER 12: POSTMODERN THINKING OF TRANSCENDENCE 1. See, for example, Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987). uMise en abime” is the optical illusion or linguistic suggestion of endless layers of worlds within worlds. 2. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections in Time, trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 9. Henceforth cited as I. 3. All sorts of variations on transgression orbit around the lexical denotation: “beyond the range of . . . (human powers, etc.).” 4. Jean-Frangois Lyotard. “One of the Things at Stake in Women’s Struggle,” in Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1989), p. 111. Henceforth cited as LR. 5. In Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck 1971) and Economie libidinale (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1974), Lyotard actually built upon a voluntaristic position which he explicitly renounced in Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich 252

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6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Nevertheless, in the nineties he is reported to have redeemed his voluntaristic past, most notably in his lectures and teachings at various universities in the US. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). Quotations in this paper, however, are my own translations taken from the from the original French version, Legons sur Vanalytique du sublime (Paris: Galilee, 1991). Henceforth cited as L. For the figural (figure) see Discours, figure. For the pagan ( paien), see Just Gaming. The sublime is very much present in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime and The Inhuman: Reflections in Time. For “Childhood” (en/ance), see The Inhuman: Reflections in Time and Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Postmodern Fables (1993). For the immemorial (oublie), see Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews, ” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Henceforth cited as HJ. Finally, for the inhuman, matter, and soul, see I. St. Augustine: Confessiones, De Civitate Dei, De Vera Religione, and Tractatus in Joannis Evangelium. My sources are from Otto Duintjer, De vraag naar het transcendentale (Leiden: 1966). Duns Scotus, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Henceforth cited as D. uL’inarticule ou le differend meme,” in Figures et conflicts rhetoriques, ed. Michel Meyer and Alain Lempereur (Brussels: Universite de Bruxelles, 1990), pp. 201-207. See esp. HJ. See, for example, McHale, Postmodernist Fiction. SeeL, for example, pp. 153-158; 272-278. See not only L, p. 269 ff., but also D, pp. 107-127, esp. the “Levinas Notice.” Having read HJ, one is tempted to focus on Lyotard’s ethics as partisan against all ontological thinking. A nonontological ethical commitment could only be transcendent, strictly nonformal, empty; indeed, a “Judaic” ethics. Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987). The problem of time and time-involvement certainly is the most important issue in Lyotard’s elemental reflection of the affect. See, in particular, / about the complexification. A close reading reveals that Lyotard himself does not hold the metaphysical hypothesis of complexification (leading to the exodus of intelligence from body, planet and humanity). CHAPTER 13: LYOTARD: BEFORE AND AFTER THE SUBLIME

1. Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 106. See also Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Instructions paiennes (Paris: Galilee, 1977). 2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). 3. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck 1971). English translation by Mary Lydon forthcoming from Harvard University Press. 253

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4. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. I. H. Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965). 6. Jean-Frangois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 88. Henceforth cited as JG. 7. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 79. Henceforth cited as PC. 8. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, GA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 136. Henceforth cited as I. CHAPTER 14: LYOTARD, KANT, AND THE IN-FINITE 1. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 140-141. Henceforth cited as I. 2. “This point,” Lyotard writes, “concerns matter, by which I mean matter in the arts, i.e., presence” (I, 138). 3. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. I. H. Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 5. Henceforth cited as LE. For a counterFreudian reading of capital, see my Filming and Judgment: Between Heidegger and Adorno (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990), in particular chap. 7 (“Radical Spacing in ‘Gelassenheit’ ”) and chap. 8 (“Surflectants”). Henceforth cited as FJ. 4. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mai, trans. R. Howard (Boston: David R. Godine, 1983), p. 121. 5. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, “Philosophy and Painting in the Age of their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodemity,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 193. Henceforth cited as LR. 6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 7. Henceforth cited as Cl. 7. Kant highlights the idea of “what the eye reveals” under the name of Augenschein (literally: “the eye shining”). Indeed, he regards Augenschein in relation to the poet’s doing and the sublime: uwie die Dichter es tun, nach dem, was der Augenschein zeigt.” See Kritik der Urteilskraft, vol. 10 of Werhausgabe, ed. W. Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), p. 196. Henceforth cited as KU. 8. “Das Erhabene besteht bloss in der Relation, worin das Sinnliche in der Vorstellung der Natur ju r einen moglichen ubersinnliehen Gebrauch desselben als tauglich beurteilt wird” (KU, 192). 9. See Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in The Textual Sublime—Deconstruction and Its Differences, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Gary E. Aylesworth (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1990), pp. 87-108. 10. “To what extent (then),” as Nietzsche asks, “can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.” See The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 171. 254

NOTES TO CHAPTER 14

11. Derrida alludes to the nature of deconstruction (that is, its very possibilities) from the standpoint of “a messianism without religion.” See Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 59. 12. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. G. Turner (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 4. Henceforth cited as HAP Heidegger poses this question when he writes: “Even if we have devoted many years to the intensive study of the treatises and writings of the great thinkers, that fact is still no guarantee that we ourselves are thinking, or even ready to learn thinking. On the contrary—preoccupation with philosophy more than anything else may give us the stubborn illusion that we are thinking just because we are incessantly ‘philosophizing.’ ” See Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 371. Henceforth cited as BW. 13. Adds Lyotard, “And (it) is only right and proper . . . that you are unsure of where you are” (LR, vi). 14. “Forsaken, she mourns like Hecuba . . .’ (C l, 8). 15. “So lemt ich traurig den verzicht: Kein ding sei wo das wort gebricht.” Stefan George, “Das Wort,” in Gedichte (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960), p. 67. 16. With regard to this, Richard Rorty writes: “What is comic about us is that we are making ourselves unable to see things which everybody else can see— things like increased or decreased suffering—by convincing ourselves that these things are ‘mere appearances.’ ” See Essays on Heidegger and Others (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 74. 17. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Duino Elegies,” in Selected Poetry, trans. S. Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1982), p. 153. “Denn Bleiben ist nirgends 18. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. C. F. MacIntyre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. 3. “Neuer Anfang, Wink und Wandlung. . . . ” 19. The five paintings I’m briefly alluding throughout this chapter can be seen in Armin Zweite’s The Blue Rider (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1989). The pages for the artists are: Jawlenksky, p. 88; Klee, p. 112; Kandinsky, pp. 19, 18, and 29. Henceforth cited as BR. 20. For this artist, “The work of art is a visible god, and art itself is a ‘longing for God’ ” (BR, 85). 21. Uuber der wunderlichen Stadt der Zeit” Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The Book of Hours,” in The Selected Poetry, trans. S. Mitchell (Vintage: New York, 1989), p. 3. 22. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), p. 5. Henceforth cited as TIP 23. Jean-Frangois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 43. Henceforth cited as JG. 24. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Toward the Postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark Roberts (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1993), p. 174. Henceforth cited as TP. 25. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power; trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 55. Henceforth cited as WP 26. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 145. 255

NOTES TO CHAPTER 14

27. Philosophy in its “great depth, (its) great silence” is precisely the Dionysian Augenschein, as Nietzsche illustrates in his notes ( WP, 541). 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 150. 29. For Kant, the unpresentable is properly the infinite. Die Sache selbst is the infinite. 30. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. G. Lenhardt (New York: Routledge, 1984), p. 283. Henceforth cited as AT. It might be argued that Kant’s limitation of the sublime to a feeling for nature derives from the fact that he could not have experienced the prevalence of capital during his time. 31. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. T. Bottomore and D. Frisby (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 128-129. Henceforth cited as M. 32. “There is no external reference, even if immanent, from which the separation of what belongs to capital (or political economy) and what belongs to subversion (or libidinal economy), can always be made, and cleanly; where desire would be clearly legible, where its proper economy would not be scrambled” (LE, 108). 33. Lyotard: “The powers of sensing and phrasing are being probed on the limits of what is possible, and thus the domain of the perceptible-sensing and the speakable-speaking is being extended. Experiments are made. This is our Postmodemity’s entire vocation, and commentary has infinite possibilities open to it.” In short, “the diversity of artistic ‘propositions’ is dizzying. What philosopher can control it from above and unify it? Yet it is through this dispersion that today’s art is the equal of being as the power of things possible, or the equal of language as the power of plays” (LR, 190). 34. Lyotard writes: “In shutting out the experience of the inhospitable, blinding age of big-scale industrialism, the eye perceives an experience of a complementary nature in the form of its spontaneous after-image, as it were” (I, 157). There words collapse. Is there anything left to say about the world? Does the world listen? Who listens to philosophers? Are there figures in philosophy’s after-image? A motif by Baudelaire: le jeu, in particular, the image of the gambler. “Gambling became a stock diversion of the bourgeoisie only in the nineteenth century; in the eighteenth, only the aristocracy gambled” (I, 178). What about the spectrality of the philosopher/gambler. He is out to win. “Yet,” Lyotard writes, “one will not want to call his desire to win and make money a wish in the strict sense of the word. He may be inwardly motivated by greed or by some sinister determination” (I, 178). Sinister determinations. Nietzsche regarded them as “ground” for philosophizing. Even Heidegger insists that “playing with words” can be a dangerous game and gamble in which, by the essence of language, we are the stakes: “What is it that calls on us to think?” (BW, 383). “Is this return a whim, or is it to play games?” (BW, 388). Undoubtedly, the philosopher participates in this posthermeneutic gambling. 35. Friedrich Holderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1968), p. 601. 36. “Art must seek to reverse this position in order to bring out precisely what the idea of sublimity desires” (AT, 284). 37. Ernest Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. J. Zipes and 256

NOTES TO CHAPTER 16

F. Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 73. Henceforth cited as UF. 38. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1986), p. 20. CHAPTER 15: THE SUSPENSE 1. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” trans. L. Liebmann, in The Lyotard Reader; ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1989), p. 199. Henceforth cited as LR. 2. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 10-11. 3. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 137. Henceforth cited as I. 4. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. J. P. O’Neill, with text notes and commentary by M. McNickle, and an introduction by R. Shiff (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), pp. 174-175. Henceforth cited as BNS. 5. Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman (New York: Abrams, 1978), p. 173. Henceforth cited as BN. 6. Genesis 28:16-18. Henceforth cited as G. 7. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, translated by I. H. Grant (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 48. 8. On the matter of what Lyotard’s unleashed imagination makes of the Shoah, the Holocaust—where, instead of matter that is immaterial, Lyotard would have us find Jews who are not Jews—I personally find that even a differend is unformulable. See Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); and Heidegger and “the jews,” trans. A. Michel and M. Roberts, with an Introduction by David Carroll (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Tkvilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), ix: 49. CHAPTER 16: LYOTARD AND THE EVENTS OF THE POSTMODERN SUBLIME 1. “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” is included in Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). Henceforth cited as /. 2. See St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Edward B. Pusey (New York: Collier, 1966). 3. See Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1905-1910), trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964). 4. Jacques Derrida, uOusia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time in Margins of Philosophy, trans. (with additional notes) Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp 29-67. Henceforth cited as OG. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1888), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967). 2 57

NOTES TO CHAPTER 16

6. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 7. The Lyotard Reader; ed. Andrew Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), p. 240. Henceforth cited as LR. 8. Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of OntologyLogic, and Theory of Literature (1931), trans. George G. Grabowicz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 9. See Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). This seminar was delivered on January 31, 1962, at the University in Freiburg (where Heidegger taught for many years prior to and during World War II) at the Studium Generale, directed by Eugen Fink. Stambaugh translates “Ereignis” as “Appropriation.” We now also have the benefit of an English translation of the important Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), which appeared in German in 1989, edited by Wilhelm von Hermann. The 1999 Indiana University Press translation, entitled Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly makes evident the significance of “Ereignis” for Heidegger in 1936 to 1938 when he wrote this work. Although Emad and Maly discuss at length their choice of “Enowning” for “E r e ig n is the neologism detracts from the very sense of “event” imbedded in this notion. For the most part, I retain the German term here in order to show its importance for Lyotard’s thinking. 10. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) (New York: Viking, 1964). 11. Concerning Heidegger, Derrida asks: “And why qualify temporality as authentic—or proper (eigentlich)— and as inauthentic— or improper—when every ethical preoccupation has been suspended?” But he then goes on to point out that this very question “remains within Heidegger’s thought.” OG, 63-64. 12. For a further presentation of “Is it happening?” see I, 106-107. 13. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 81.

258

BIBLIOGRAPHY: JEAN-FRANGOIS LYOTARD H^tene Volat

This bibliography is an expanded version of my contribution to Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Toward the Postmodern, Robert Harvey and Mark Roberts, eds. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993; reprinted Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), pp. 223-44. See also Joan Nordquist’s Jean-Frangois Lyotard: A Bibliography (Santa Cruz: Reference and Research Services, 1991). For a bibliography including a list that aspires to exhaustivity, see Jean-Frangois Lyotard: A Bibliography by Eddie Yeghiayan, available on the Web at: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/nscctr/Wellek/lyotard/. BOOKS AND ARTICLES BY JEAN-FRANGOIS LYOTARD For a given year, all books are listed first, then articles. Lyotard’s many articles published in Socialisme ou barbarie have not been listed. For a selection of those texts, see La Guerre des Algeriens [1989]; for a bibliographic checklist, see Peregrinations [1988]. 1948 “La Culpabilite allemande.” Review of Karl Jaspers, Die Schulfrage: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Frage. L’Age nouveau 28 (1948): 90-94. “Nes en 1925.” Les Temps modemes 3, no. 32 (1948): 2052-2057. “Rencontre avec la jeunesse allemande.” VAge nouveau 24 (1948): 62-66. 1949 “Texte.” Imprudence 3 (1949): 78-82. 1952 Review of Elliot Jaques, The Changing Culture of a Factory. Cahiers intemationaux de sociologie 12 (1952): 179-181. 1954 La Phenomenologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954, 1956, 1959, 1961, 1964, 1967, 1982, 1986. Phenomenology. Trans. Brian Beakley. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. 1957 “Note sur le marxisme.” In Alfred Weber et Denis Huisman, eds. Tableau de la philosophic contemporaire, 55-61. Vol. 3 of Histoire de la philosophic europeenne de 1850 a 1957. Paris: Fischbacher, 1957. 259

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1963 “Algeria.” International Socialism 13 (1963): 21-26. Trans. Ian Birchall. 1965 “Les Indiens ne cueillent pas les fleurs ” Annales E.S.C. 20, no. 1 (1965): 62-83. 1966 “Les Formes de Faction.” Cahiers de philosophic 2-3 (1966): 13-25. 1967 Review of Andre Jacob. Temps et langage. L’Homme et la societe 5 (1967): 220-224. 1968 “Preambule a une charte.” Esprit 36, no. 373 (1968): 21-25. “Le Travail du reve ne pense pas.” Revue d’Esthetique 21 (1968): 26-61. “The Dream-Work Does Not Think.” Trans. Mary Lydon. Oxford Literary Review 6, no. 1 (1983): 3-34. 1969 “A la place de Thomme, l’expression.” Review of Mikel Dufrenne, Pour Vhomme. Esprit 7-8/383 (1969): 155-178. “La Place de l’alienation dans le retoumement marxiste.” Les Temps Modemes 25, nos. 277-278 (August-September 1969): 92-160. “Un Marx non marxiste.” Le Monde 7530 (March 30-31, 1969): 15. 1970 “L’Eau prend le ciel: Proposition de collage pour figurer le deni bachelardien.” In Bachelard. Paris: L’A rc (42), 1970: 38-54. “Espaee plastique et espace politique.” Revue d’esthetique 23, nos. 3-4 (1970): 255277. With Dominique Avron and Bruno Lemenuel. “Plastic Space and Political Space.” Trans. Mark S. Roberts. Boundary 2, 14, no. 1-2 (1985): 211-230. “Nanterre: Ici, maintenant.” Les Temps modemes 26, no. 285 (1970): 1665. “Notes sur la fonction critique de l’oeuvre.” Revue d’esthetique 23, no. 3-4 (1970): 400-414. “Notes on the Critical Function of the Work of Art.” Trans. Susan Hanson. In Driftworks (1984): 69-83. “Oedipe juif.” Critique 26, no. 277 (1970): 530-545. “Jewish Oedipus.” Trans. Susan Hanson. Genre 10, no. 3 (1977): 395-411. 1971 Discours, figure. Paris: Klincksieck, 1971, 1978. Discourse, Figure. Trans. Mary Lydon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (forthcoming). “A Few Words to Sing. Sequenza III de Berio.” Musique en jeu 2 (1971): 30-44. With Dominique Avron. 1972 “Capitalisme energumene.” Critique 28, no. 306 (1972): 923-956. “Energumen Capitalism.” Trans. James Leigh. Semiotext(e) 2, no. 3 (1977):ll-26. “Plusieurs silences.” Musique en jeu 9 (1972): 64-76. “Several Silences.” Trans. Joseph Maier. In Driftworks (1984): 91-110. “Psychanalyse et peinture.” In Encyclopaedia universalis. Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis, 1972, 13: 745-750. 260

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2000 Misere de la philosophie. Paris: Galilee, 2000. 2001 Vexercice du differend. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001. INTERVIEWS WITH JEAN-FRANQOIS LYOTARD “Sur la theorie.” VH 101 1 (1970): 55-65. With Brigitte Devismes. “En finir avec l’illusion de la politique.” La Quinzaine litteraire 140 (1972): 18-19. With Gilbert Lascault. “L’Important, ce sont les intensites, pas le sens.” La Quinzaine litteraire 201 (1975): 5-6. With Christian Descamps. “Un Barbare parle du socialisme.” Le Nouvel Observateur 584 (1976): 52-53. With Bernard-Henri Levy. “Narrations incommensurables. Reponses a des questions de Patrick de Haas.” Art Press International 13 (1977): 19. “Jean-Frangois Lyotard: De la fonction critique a la transformation.” Parachute 11 (1978): 4-9. With Jean Papineau. “Jean-Frangois Lyotard dans la societe post-modeme.” Le Monde 10.795 (1979): 16. “Conversazione con Lyotard.” Filmcritica 30, no. 300 (1979): 426-429. With Gianfranco Baruchello. “Le Jeu de l’informatique et du savoir.” Dialectiques 29 (1980): 3-12. With Yannick Blanc. “II Dissidio, Conversazione di Jean-Frangois Lyotard con Paolo Fabbri e Maurizio Ferraris. Alfabeta 5, no. 55 (1983): 20-22. “La Deflexion des grands recits: Entretiens avec Jean-Frangois Lyotard.” Intervention 7 (1983/84): 48-58. With Etienne Tassin. “On Theory: An Interview.” Ed. and trans. Roger McKeon. Driftworks (1984): 1933. With Brigitte Devismes. “Le Design au-dela de l’esthetique: Passage du temoin de Jean-Frangois Lyotard a Frangois Burkhardt.” Le Monde 12.372 (November 4-5, 1984): xi. “Interview: Jean-Frangois Lyotard.” Diacritics 14, no. 3 (1984): 16-21. With Georges Van Den Abbeele. “Langage, temps, travail.” Change International 2 (1984): 42-47. With Giairo Daghini. “Plaidoyer pour la metaphysique: Passage de temoin de Jacques Derrida a JeanFrangois Lyotard.” Le Monde 12.366 (October 28-29, 1984): xi. “Un colloquio con Lyotard.” Domus 662 (1985): 64. With Giuliano Nicolo. “A conversation with Jean-Frangois Lyotard.” Flash-Art 121 (1985): 32-39. With Bernard Blistene. “Discussion entre Jean-Frangois Lyotard et Richard Rorty.” Critique 41, no. 456 (1985): 581-584. “Les Immateriaux.” Du: Zeitschrift fu r Kunst und Kultur 6 (1985): 106-107. With Marie-Louise Syring and Clemens-Carl Harle. “Les Petits recits de chrysalide: Entretien Jean-Frangois Lyotard-filie Theofilakis.” In Elie Theofilakis, ed., Modemes et apres? Les Immateriaux, 4-14. Paris: Autrement, 1985. “La Police de la pensee.” UAutre journal 10 (1985): 27-34. With Jacob Rogozinski. 270

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“Quand un philosophe s’expose.” Sciences et Avenir 485 (1985): 86-88. With Cecile Lestienne. “Gesprach.” In F. Rotzer, ed., Franzosische Philosophen im Gesprach, 101-118. Munich: Boer, 1986. “Interview with Florian Rotzer” in Conversations with French Philosophers. Trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995). “A propos du Differend.” Cahiers de philosophie 5 (1988): 35-62. Collective interview introduced by Christine Buci-Glucksman. “An interview with Jean-Frangois Lyotard.” Theory, Culture, and Society 5, nos. 2-3 (1988): 277-309. With Willem van Reijen and Dick Veerman. “Les lumieres, le sublime.” Cahiers de Philosophie 5 (1988): 63-98. With Willem van Reijen and Dick Veerman. “El laberinto de los inmateriales: Entrevista con Jean-Frangois Lyotard.” Quimera 46-47 (n.d.): 23-29. “Entretien avec Jean-Frangois Lyotard.” In Les Metamorphoses Butor 59-73. Sainte Foy: Le Griffon d’argile, 1991. With Mireille Calle. “Jean-Frangois Lyotard: La Ruine du marxisme peut atteindre Hegel.” Le Figaro litteraire (September 30, 1991): 6. With Lucile Laveggi. “Quand a l’Oeuvre Butor: Entretiens avec Michel Butor, Jean Starobinski et JeanFrangois Lyotard.” Revue des Sciences Humaines 221 (January-March 1991): 232-234. With Mireille Calle-Gruber. “Interview: Jean-Frangois Lyotard.” Constructions 7 (1992): 95-109. With Peter Gilgen and Lo-Kwai Cheung. “That Which Resists After All.” Philosophy Today 36, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 402417. With Gilbert Larochelle. “Malraux pour la gloire, un entretien avec Jean-Frangois Lyotard,” VOeil 483 (November-December 1996): 40-41. With Philippe Piguet. “La vie de Malraux doit etre lue comme un recueil de legendes.” Magazine Litteraire 347 (October 1996): 26-28, 30. With Philippe Bonnefis. BOOKS ABOUT JEAN-FRANGOIS LYOTARD Attridge, Derek, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young, eds. Post-Structuralism and the Question of History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Benjamin, Andrew, ed. Judging Lyotard. New York: Routledge, 1992. Bennington, Geoff. Lyotard: Writing the Event. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Billouet, Pierre. Paganisme et postmodemite. Paris: Ellipses, 1999. Blocker, H. Gene. Contextualizing Aesthetics: From Plato to Lyotard. Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1998. Boulad-Ayoub, Josiane, ed. Le Discours de la representation. Montreal: Universite du Quebec, 1989. Brons, Richard, and Harry Kunneman, eds. Lyotard lezen. Amsterdam: Boom, 1995. Browning, Gary. Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000. Brugger, Niels, Finn Frandsen, and Dominique Pirotte, eds. Lyotard, les deplacements philosophiques. Avec un avertissement de Jean-Frangois Lyotard. Bruxelles: De Boeck-Wesmael, 1993. Trans, from Danish by Emile Danino. 271

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Carroll, David. Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida. New York: Methuen, 1987. Clement, Catherine, and Gilbert Lascault, eds. Lyotard. Paris: VArc [64], 1976. Dekkens, Oliver. Lyotard et la philosophie (du) politique. Paris: Kine, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning. Ed. and trans. Pascale-Ann Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Dews, Peter. The Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. London: Verso, 1987. Dillon, Pradeep Ajit, and Paul Standish. Lyotard: Just Education. New York: Routledge, 2001. Ferraris, Maurizio. La svolta testuale: il decostruzionismo in Derrida, Lyotard, gli “Yale critics. ” Milan: Unicopli, 1986. Frank, Manfred. What Is Neostructuralism? Trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard Gray. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Gualandi, Alberto. Lyotard. Paris: Belles lettres, 1999. Guibal, Francis, Jacob Rogozinski, et al. Temoigner du differend, quand phraser ne se peut: Autour de Jean-Frangois Lyotard. Paris: Osiris, 1989. Haber, Honi Fern. Beyond Postmodern Politics: Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault. New York: Routledge, 1994. Harvey, Robert, ed. Afterwords: Essays in Memory of Jean-Frangois Lyotard. Stony Brook, NY: Humanities Institute, 2000. Ivekovic, Rada. Le sexe de la philosophie. Essai sur Jean-Frangois Lyotard et le feminin. Paris: UHarmattan, 1997. Kauffman, Lane, ed. Passages, Genres, Differends: Jean-Frangois Lyotard. Special issue oiVEsprit createur (31, no. 1 [1991]). Kearney, Richard. Poetics of Imagining: From Husserl to Lyotard. New York: Routledge, 1991. Kilian, Monika. Modem and Postmodern Strategies: Gaming and the Question of Morality. Peter Lang Publishing, 1998. Lechte, John. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodemity. New York: Routledge, 1994. Murphy, John W. Postmodern Social Analysis and Criticism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989. Nagl, Ludwig, and Hugh J. Silverman, eds. Textualitat der Philosophie—Philosophie und Literatur. Vienna and Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994. Pefanis, Julian. Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, Lyotard. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Raffel, Stanley. Habermas, Lyotard and the Concept of Justice. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1992. Readings, Bill. Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics. London: Routledge, 1991. . Introducing Lyotard: Here He Is. London: Routledge, 1990. Reese-Schaffer, Walter, ed. Jean-Frangois Lyotard. Cushaven: Junghans, 1989. Rojek, Christopher, and Bryan S. Turner. The Politics of Jean-Frangois Lyotard: Justice and Political Theory. New York: Routledge, 1998. Ruby, Christian. Les Archipels de la difference: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard. Paris: Ed, du Felin, 1989. Samp, Madan. An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. Sim, Stuart. Jean-Frangois Lyotard. New York: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996. 272

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. Lyotard and the Inhuman. Totem Books, 2001. Steuerman, Emilia. The Bounds of Reason: Habermas, Lyotard, and Melanie Klein on Rationality. New York: Routledge, 2000. Svez, Gerald. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, la faculte d’une phrase. Paris: Galilee, 2000. Veerman, Dick, et al., eds. Postmodernism. Special issue of Theory, Culture, and Society (5, nos. 2-3 [1988]). , eds. Jean-Frangois Lyotard: Reecrire la modemite. Special issue of Cahiers de philosophie (Lille) (5 [1988]). Williams, James. Lyotard and the Political. New York: Routledge, 2000. . Lyotard: Towards a Modem Philosophy. London: Blackwell, 1998. ARTICLES ABOUT JEAN-FRANGOIS LYOTARD Altieri, Charles. “Judgment and Justice under Postmodern Conditions, or How Lyotard Helps Us Read Rawls as a Postmodern Thinker.” In Reed Way Dasenbrock, ed., Redrawing the Lines, 61-91. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Babich, Babette, “Nietzsche and the Condition of Postmodern Thought,” In Clayton Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990. Badiou, Alain. “Custos, Quid Noctis?” Critique 450 (1984): 851-863. Beardslee, William A. “Christ in the Postmodern Age: Reflections Inspired by Lyotard.” In David Ray Griffin, ed., Varieties of Postmodern Theology, 63-80. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989. Beardsworth, Richard. “Just Attempts at Justice.” Paragraph 10 (1987): 103-108. Benhabib, Seyla. “Epistemologies of Postmodernism: A Rejoinder to Jean-Frangois Lyotard.” New German Critique 33 (1984): 103-126. Bennington, Geoff. “August: Double Justice.” Diacritics 14, no. 3 (1984): 64-71. . “Lyotard: From Discourse and Figure to Experimentation and Event.” Paragraph 6 (1985): 19-27. . “Not Yet.” Diacritics 12, no. 3 (1982): 23-32. Billouet, P. “Enthousiasme et modernite.” Les Temps Modemes 50 (SeptemberOctober 1995): 151-185. Birringer, J. “Overexposure: Les Immateriaux.” Performing Arts Journal 10, no. 2 (1986): 6-11. Blanchard, Marc. “Never Say Why?” Diacritics 9, no. 2 (1979): 17-29. Bourriand, Nicolas. “Anti-Thinkers in the 1980s.” Flash-Art 142 (1988): 83-85. Boyne, Roy, and Scott Lash. “Communicative Rationality and Desire.” Telos 61 (1984): 152-158. Brons, H. R. “Philosophy Under Fire: Jean-Frangois Lyotard Transcending the Trenches of Postmodernity: Lyotard’s Use of Ideas: To Criticize Rather Than to Extend Knowledge.” History of European Ideas 20, nos. 4-6 (February 1995): 785-790. Brunkhorst, Hauke. “Adorno, Heidegger, and Postmodernity.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 14 (1988): 411-424. Butor, Michel. “Le Debut d’un voyage.” Le Monde 9351 (7 February 1975): 20. Cacciavillani, Giovanni. “J. F. Lyotard e le macchine desideranti.” Aut Aut 175-176 (1980): 123-45. Calcagno, Antonio. “Interface: Modernity and Post-Modernity: The Possibility of Enthusiasm according to Immanuel Kant and Jean-Frangois Lyotard.” Philosophy Today 39 (Winter 1995): 358-370. 273

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CONTRIBUTORS

GARY E. AYLESWORTH Gary E. Aylesworth is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Eastern Illinois University. He has also taught at Siena College and at Stony Brook University. He is coeditor of The Textual Sublime: Deconstruction and Its Differences (SUNY, 1990), and translator of Heidegger’s Basic Concepts (Indiana, 1993), Florian Rotzer’s Conversations with French Philosophers (Humanities, 1995), and the Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (Humanity Books, 2002). He has written articles and presented papers on Gadamer, Ricoeur, Heidegger, Lyotard, and Derrida.

DEBRA B. BERGOFFEN Debra B. Bergoffen is Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at George Mason University where she chaired the Department of Philosophy and Religion from 1980-1987 and received the university’s Distinguished Faculty Award in 1989. She was Executive Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy from 1993-1996. She is author of The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (SUNY Press, 1997) and has coedited (with Babette Babich and Simon Glynn) a volume on Continental and Postmodern Perspectives in the Philosophy of Science (Avebury Press, 1995) as well as two volumes of Philosophy Today: Remembrance and Responsibility (1998) and Other Openings (1997). She has published articles in a wide range of topics in Continental Philosophy, including work on Nietzsche as well as Descartes, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Lacan.

RICHARD BRONS Richard Brons recently completed a Dutch governmental sponsored researchproject on Lyotard at the University of Humanist Studies in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The project resulted in two books in Dutch: Lyotard lezen (1995) and Lyotards Weerstand (1996). He has also published several articles in English, and is currently working on a book to be entitled Postmodern Transcendence.

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FRED EVANS Fred Evans is Associate Profesor of Philosophy and Coordinator of the Center for Interpretive and Qualitative Research at Duquesne University. He is author of Psychology and Nihilism: A Genealogical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind (SUNY Press, 1993). He has eoedited, with Leonard Lawlor, Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of the Flesh. He has published articles in continental philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of psychology, and the philosophy of technology. He is currently working on a book entitled The Multi-Voiced Body: SocietyCommunication, and the Age o f Diversity.

THOMAS R. FLYNN Thomas R. Flynn is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. He has served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, and has been on the Executive Committee of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature as well as the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. He is author of Sartre and Marxist Existentialism (Chicago, 1984) and coeditor (with Dalia Judovitz) of Dialectic and Narrative (SUNY Press, 1993). The first of his two-volume study, Sartre, Foucault and Reason in History, Vol. 1, Toward an Existentialist Theory (Chicago, 1997), has already appeared and the second is anticipated for 2002. He is author of over seventy-five articles in areas of continental philosophy, including political philosophy, history of philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of religion.

WAYNE FROMAN Wayne Froman is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies and served for a decade as Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at George Mason University. During 1995-1996, he was a Senior Fulbright Guest Professor at the Hegel-Archiv, Ruhr-Universitat, Bochum, Germany, and he served for six years on the Executive Committee of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature. In addition to coediting (with John Burt Foster, Jr.) Thresholds of Western Culture (Continuum Books, 2002), he is the author of Merleau-Ponty: Language and the Act of Speech (Bucknell University Press) as well as articles on phenomenology, hermeneutics, post-structuralism, and art.

SHAUN GALLAGHER Shaun Gallagher is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Cognitive Science Program at Canisius College, Buffalo, New York. He has held visiting positions at the Center for the Study of Semiotics, University of Aarhus (Denmark), and at the Medical Research Council’s Cognitive and Brain Science 282

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Unit at Cambridge University (England). He is author of Hermeneutics and Education (SUNY Press, 1992) and The Inordinance of Time (Northwestern University Press, 1998), coeditor of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and editor of Hegel, History, and Interpretation (SUNY Press, 1997), and coeditor (with Jonathan Shear) of Models of the Self (Imprint Academic, 1999) as well as (with Thomas Busch) Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism (SUNY Press, 1992). His book, Brainstorming: Views and Interviews on the Mind, and an edited volume, Ipseity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity are forthcoming.

JAMES HATLEY James Hatley is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Salisbury State University in Maryland. He is author of Suffering Witness: the Quandry of Responsibility in the Aftermath of the Irreparable (SUNY Press, 2000). He has published articles and delivered papers on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Levinas, Kristeva, and on the poetry of Paul Celan. His essay on Heidegger and Gadamer was published in Continental Philosophy IV entitled Gadamer and Hermeneutics. He was a founding assistant editor of the Routledge Continental Philosophy series and continues as a Corresponding Editor.

MICHAEL NAAS Michael Naas is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at DePaul University. He is author of Turning: From Persuasion to Philosophy (Humanities, 1994) and is the cotranslator (with Pascale-Anne Brault) of Jacques Derrida’s The Other Heading (Indiana, 1992), Memoirs of the Blind (Chicago, 1993), and The Work of Mourning (Chicago, 2001). They have also translated Jean-Frangois Lyotard’s The Hyphen—Between Judaism and Christianity (Humanity Books, 2000). He has written articles on ancient Greek literature and philosophy as well as on contemporary French thought.

STEPHEN DAVID ROSS Stephen David Ross is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature and Director of the Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture Program and the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture at Binghamton University in the State University of New York. He is the author of many books, including more recently Inexhaustibility and Human Being: An Essay on Locality (1989), The Limits of Language (1994), and Locality and Practical Judgment: Charity and Sacrifice (1994), published by Fordham University Press, and Metaphysical Aporia and Philosophical Heresy (1989), The Ring of Representation (1992), Injustice and Restitution: The Ordinance of Time (1993), Plenishment in the Earth: an Ethic of Inclusion (1995), The Gift of Beauty: The Good as Art (1996) and The Gift of Truth: Gathering the 283

C O N TRIBUTO RS

Good (1997), The Gift of Touch: Embodying the Good (1998), The Gift of Kinds: The Good in Abundance (1999), and The Gift of Property: Having the Good (2001) all published by SUNY Press.

SERGE TROTTEIN Serge Trottein is Associate Director of the Center for the History of Modem Philosophy (CHPM) at the CNRS in Villejuif, France. He taught previously at Dartmouth College (1985-1990). His research and publications focus on Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Postmodern philosophical aesthetics. Recent research includes a translation and edition of Agostino Nifo on the Beautiful, Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and contemporary theories of the sublime. His publications include “La textualite sans texte ou l’esthetique en philosophie,” in Textualitat der Philosophie: Philosophie und Literatur; ed. Ludwig Nagl and Hugh J. Silverman (Oldenbourg, 1994), “L’humanisme esthetique d’Agostino Nifo,” in La dignite de I’homme, ed. Pierre Magnard (Champion, 1995), “Esthetique ou philosophie de l’art?,” in Kants Asthetik/Kant’s Aesthetics/L’esthetique de Kant, ed. Herman Parret (de Gruyter, 1997), Humanisme et esthetique. Analyse et traduction du De Pulchro (1531) dfAgostino Nifo (Vrin, 1997), and “The Beauty of the Postmodern Sublime,” in Afterwords: Essays in Memory of Jean-Frangois Lyotard, ed. Robert Harvey (Stony Brook Humanities Institute, 2000). He has also edited the volume L ’Esthetique, nait-elle au XVIIIe Siecle? (Presses Universitaire de France, 2000).

ERIK VOGT Erik Vogt is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. He taught previously at Loyola University, New Orleans, and has been Gastprofessor at the University of Vienna (2001) and Lecturer at Oxford University. He has published Sartre's Wiederholung (Passagen, 1995), and has translated many books in American Continental Philosophy into German for his book series with Turia + Kant, including works by Hugh J. Silverman, James R. Watson, Wilhelm S. Wurzer, and Slavoj Zizek. His published articles focus on contemporary German and French philosophy.

JAMES R. WATSON James R. Watscm is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University in New Orleans. He is also a professional photographer and an Associate Editor of the Routledge Continental Philosophy Series. He is on the Editorial Board and a regular contributor to The New Orleans Art Review, writing reviews on photography, painting, and sculpture. He is also author of Thinking With Pictures: Photographs and Essays (The Art Review Press, 1990) and Between Auschwitz and Tradition: Postmodern Reflections on the Task of Thinking (Rodolpi, 1994) and editor of Continental Philosophers in the United States: 22 Photogrammic Portraits (Indiana University Press, 1998). The two latter 284

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books have been translated by Erik Vogt into German for Turia and Kant in Vienna. His eoedited volume Portrayals of Auschwitz: Philosophical Challenges (Humanity Books) appeared in 1998. In 1994, he was a visiting scholar at the Forderungsgesellschaft Wissenschaftliche Neuvorhaben (Max Planck Institute, Berlin), conducting research on the development and applications of racial hygiene since the Weimar Republic.

WILHELM S. WURZER Wilhelm S. Wurzer is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Duquesne University. He is Co-Director of the International Philosophical Seminar, which is held every summer in Alto Adige, Italy. His books include Spinoza und Nietzsche (Hain, 1975) and Filming and Judgment: Between Heidegger and Adorno (Humanities Press, 1990), which has been translated into German by Erik Vogt for Turia and Kant (Vienna). He has published numerous articles in the areas of nineteenth and twentieth century European philosophy and continental thought.

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ABOUT THE EDITOR

Hugh J. Silverman is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University. He was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at the University of Vienna (2000-2001), and has been Visiting Professor at the Universities of Warwick and Leeds (England), Nice (France), Cork (Ireland), Torino, Rome II-Tor Vergata, and Milan (Italy), three times at the Universitat-Wien (Austria), Helsinki (Finland), and Sydney (Australia). He is Executive Director of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature and previously served for six years as Executive Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (1980-1986). Author of Inscriptions: After Phenomenology and Structuralism (Routledge, 1987; 2nd ed. Northwestern University Press, 1997), Textualities: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (Routledge, 1994), and more than one hundred chapters and articles in Continental philosophy, aesthetics, philosophical psychology, and literary/cultural/art/film theory, Professor Silverman has lectured widely in North and South America, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Scandinavia, Continental Europe, and Australia. He is editor of Writing the Politics of Difference (SUNY Press, 1991) and Piaget, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Northwestern University Press, 1997), and coeditor of Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to His Philosophy (Duquesne/Harvester, 1980), Continental Philosophy in America (Duquesne, 1983), Descriptions (SUNY Press, 1985), Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (SUNY Press, 1985), Critical and Dialectical Phenomenology (SUNY Press, 1987), The Horizons of Continental Philosophy: Essays on Husserl, Heidegger; and Merleau-Ponty (Nijhoff/Kluwer, 1988), Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy (SUNY Press, 1988), The Textual Sublime: Deconstruction and Its Differences (SUNY Press, 1990), Merleau-Ponty’s Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy• Politics, and Cultural Understanding (Humanities Press, 1992, 1996), and Textualitat der Philosophie—Philosophie undLiteratur (Oldenbourg, 1994). He edits (and introduces) the Routledge Continental Philosophy series, including: Philosophy and NonPhilosophy since Merleau-Ponty (Routledge, 1988/Northwestern University Press, 1997), Derrida and Deconstruction (Routledge, 1989), Postmodernism—Philosophy and the Arts (Routledge, 1990), Gadamer and Hermeneutics (Routledge, 1991), Questioning Foundations: Truth/Subjectivity/Culture (Routledge, 1993), Cultural Semiosis: Tracing the Signifier (Routledge, 1998), and Philosophy and Desire (Routledge, 2000).

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