Rereading Jean-François Lyotard

Rereading Jean-François Lyotard PDF

Author: Heidi Bickis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1317065719

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What does Lyotard's thought offer contemporary theory? By focusing on key concepts and themes from his later texts, such as affect, aesthetics, Andre Malraux, St Paul, nihilism, infancy, space and writing, Rereading Jean-François Lyotard: Essays on His Later Works explores the impact and relevance of Lyotard's largely undiscussed late philosophical works for contemporary theoretical debates. In his works produced from 1990 until his death in 1998, Lyotard addresses a number of themes that both revisit and move beyond those from his earlier work. These include: art and aesthetics; affect; ethics and politics; modernity and the subject. Despite designating these texts as part of a 'late period', the chapters do not exclude a wider engagement with Lyotard's thought and often seek to engage in connections, resonances and developments across his many texts. Each chapter within this book places Lyotard as a figure with much to offer current theoretical debates, reasserts Lyotard as an important thinker for developments in social thought, and draws out the many links between his philosophical work and broader social questions. This is the first work in English to focus on Lyotard's later writings and will therefore be a key text to all scholars of his ideas.

Jean-François Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard PDF

Author: Kiff Bamford

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2017-08-15

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 178023869X

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Best known in the English-speaking world for his book The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard was one of the most important and complex French thinkers of the twentieth century. In this new critical biography, Kiff Bamford traces the multi-faceted, sometimes surprising, journey of Lyotard’s life and work. Bamford’s book is the first to consider Lyotard’s work and ideas in the wider context of his life and times. He unravels the thrust of Lyotard’s main philosophical arguments, his struggle with thinking, and his confrontation with the task of writing and thinking differently about philosophy. Bamford takes care to situate each of these in their particular context: the Algerian war; the experimental university at Vincennes; and within Lyotard’s sustained engagement with the visual arts. The philosopher’s own suspicion of easy narratives and rejection of self-determination help to frame the book. It is only by following these prescribed cautions that Bamford is able to present a compelling portrait of a challenging subject.

Why Philosophize?

Why Philosophize? PDF

Author: Jean-Francois Lyotard

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-12-04

Total Pages: 82

ISBN-13: 0745679978

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Why Philosophize? is a series of lectures given by Jean-François Lyotard to students at the Sorbonne embarking on their university studies. The circumstances obliged him to be both clear and concise: at the same time, his lectures offer a profound and far-reaching meditation on how essential it is to philosophize in a world where philosophy often seems irrelevant, outdated, or inconclusive. Lyotard begins by drawing on Plato, Proust and Lacan to show that philosophy is a never-ending desire - for wisdom, for the ‘other’. In the second lecture he draws on Heraclitus and Hegel to explore the close relation between philosophy and history: the same restlessness, the same longing for a precarious unity, drives both. In his third lecture, Lyotard examines how philosophy is a form of utterance, both communicative and indirect. Finally, he turns to Marx, exploring the extent to which philosophy can be a transformative action within the world. These wonderfully accessible lectures by one of the most influential philosophers of the last 50 years will attract a wide readership, since, as Lyotard says, ‘How can one not philosophize?’ They are also an excellent introduction to Lyotard’s mature thought, with its emphasis on the need for philosophy to bear witness, however obliquely, to a recalcitrant reality.

Traversals of Affect

Traversals of Affect PDF

Author: Julie Gaillard

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-04-21

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1474257895

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This volume traces the topic of affect across Lyotard's corpus and accounts for Lyotard's crucial and original contribution to the thinking of affect. Highlighting the importance of affect in Lyotard's philosophy, this work offers a unique contribution to both affect theory and the reception of Lyotard. Affect indeed traverses Lyotard's philosophical corpus in various ways and under various names: “figure” or “the figural” in Discourse, Figure, “unbound intensities” in his “libidinal” writings, “the feeling of the différend” in The Differend, “affect” and “infantia” in his later writings. Across the span of his work, Lyotard insisted on the intractability of affect, on what he would later call the “differend” between affect and articulation. The singular awakening of sensibility, affect both traverses and escapes articulation, discourse, and representation. Lyotard devoted much of his attention to the analysis of this traversal of affect in and through articulation, its transpositions, translations, and transfers. This volume explores Lyotard's account of affect as it traverses the different fields encompassed by his writings (philosophy, the visual arts, the performing arts, literature, music, politics, psychoanalysis as well as technology and post-human studies).

Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm PDF

Author: Jean-François Lyotard

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 99

ISBN-13: 0804738971

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Enthusiasm is Lyotard's most elaborate and provocative statement on the politics of the sublime.

Postmodern Fables

Postmodern Fables PDF

Author: Jean-Francois Lyotard

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1999-04-01

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780816625550

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This latest offering from one of the founding figures of postmodernism is a collection of fifteen "fables" that ask, in the words of Jean-Francois Lyotard, "how to live, and why?" Here, Lyotard provides a mixture of anarchistic irreverence and sober philosophical reflection on a wide range of topics with attention to issues of justice and ethics, aesthetics, and judgment. In sections titled "Verbiages, " "System Fantasies, " "Concealments, " and "Crypts, " Lyotard unravels and reconfigures idealist notions subjects as various and fascinating as the French Revolution, the Holocaust, the reception of French theory in the Anglo-American world, the events of May 1968, the Gulf War, academic travelers as intellectual tourists, the collapse of communism, and his own work in the context of others'.

Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition

Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition PDF

Author: Ashley Woodward

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2016-01-31

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 074869725X

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Ashley Woodward demonstrates what a new generation of scholars are just discovering: that Lyotard's incisive work is essential for current debates in the humanities. Lyotard's ideas about the arts and the confrontations between humanist traditions and cutting-edge sciences and technologies are today known as 'posthumanism'. Woodward presents a series of studies to explain Lyotard's specific interventions in information theory, new media arts and the changing nature of the human. He assesses their relevance and impact in relation to a number of important contemporary thinkers including Bernard Stiegler, Luciano Floridi, Quentin Meillassoux and Paul Virilio.

Lyotard and Critical Practice

Lyotard and Critical Practice PDF

Author: Kiff Bamford

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-08-25

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 135019204X

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Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the previous century's most provocative thinkers. Can his work help us address the crisis currently facing the humanities? The dominant economic discourse sees the humanities as “low-value,” an irritation at best. Lyotard helps us to think against this pervasive dismissal of creative activity, not by defending the honor of the humanities, but by inviting critical practices which aggravate this irritation. Critical practices trouble what counts as critique, embrace incertitude, and listen for silenced voices. Twelve essays by artists and researchers take up Lyotard's invitation and begin to develop the idea of critical practice in the contemporary context. Three sections titled “What resists thinking;” “Long views and distances” and “Why art practice?” address contemporary concerns like affectivity, aesthetics, economic imperatives, militarism, pedagogy, posthumanism, and the closure of what in Lyotard's time was called "the West." Four short pieces by Lyotard intervene in and buttress the discussion: “Apathy in Theory” and “Interview with Art Présent,” here published in English for the first time, and “Affect-phrase” and “The Other's Rights” republished here to highlight his prescient concern for that which cannot be articulated.

The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film

The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film PDF

Author: Pansy Duncan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1317355644

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Emotion and Postmodernism: is it possible to imagine an odder couple, stranger bedfellows, less bad company? The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film brings this unlikely pair into sustained dialogue, arguing that the interdisciplinary body of scholarship currently emerging under the rubric of "affect theory" may be unexpectedly enriched by an encounter with the field that has become its critical other. Across a series of radical re-reappraisals of canonical postmodern texts, from Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism to David Cronenberg's Crash, Duncan shows that the same postmodern archive that has proven resistant to strongly subject-based and object-oriented emotions, like anger and sadness, proves all too congenial to a series of idiosyncratic, borderline emotions, from knowingness, fascination and bewilderment to boredom and euphoria. The analysis of these emotions, in turn, promises to shake up scholarly consensus on two key counts. On the one hand, it will restructure our sense of the place and role of emotion in a critical enterprise that has long cast it as the stodgy, subjective sister of a supposedly more critically interesting and politically productive affect. On the other, it will transform our perception of postmodernism as a now-historical aesthetic and theoretical moment, teaching us to acknowledge more explicitly and to name more clearly the emotional life that energizes it.