Jean-François Lyotard

This article makes the case for rethinking the relation between poststructuralism and postcolonialism, by building on the claims advanced by Robert Young, Azzedine Haddour and Pal Ahluwalia that the history of deconstruction coincides with the collapse of the French colonial system in Algeria, and with the violent anti-colonial struggle that ensued. I choose to examine narratives of theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Cixous because not only they provide the link between colonial violence, the poststructuralist project that ensued, and postcolonialism, but also because the problems I identify with their projects are replicated by much poststructuralist work in International Relations (IR). I signal that one of the most significant consequences of conducting poststructuralist research without attention to postcolonial horizons lies in the idealisation of the marginalised, the oppressed or the native without attending to the complexity of her position, voice or agency. Bringing these theories together aims to highlight the need for a dialogue, within IR, between poststructuralism's desire to disrupt the disciplinarity of the field, and postcolonialism's potential to transcend the self-referential frame of IR by introducing perspectives, (hi)stories, and voices from elsewhere.

Der Beitrag diskutiert den Einfluss von Postmoderne und Poststrukturalismus auf die Organisationsforschung. Beide Denkrichtungen sind als ein Plädoyer für Differenz zu verstehen und zugleich durch eine Skepsis gegenüber den modernen Erzählungen des Fortschritts, der Ratio-nalität und der Wahrheit geprägt. Der Beitrag geht zunächst auf die Entstehungsgeschichte ein und diskutiert anschließend mit Sprache und Diskurs, Macht, Subjektivierung und Prozesshaf-tigkeit von Organisationen zentrale Themen der Debatte in der Organisationsforschung. Mit Exkursen zu Lyotard, Baudrillard, Derrida und Foucault werden vier wichtige Autoren der De-batte näher vorgestellt. Abschließend werden zentrale Kritikpunkte an einer an Postmoderne und Poststrukturalismus anknüpfenden Organisationsforschung benannt.

Keywords: Postmoderne, Poststrukturalismus, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard

This essay concerns the role of political affect in cinema. As a case study, I analyze the 2006 film V for Vendetta as cinematic rhetoric. Adopting a multi-modal approach that focuses on the interplay of discourse, figure, and ground, I contend that the film mobilizes viewers at a visceral level to reject a politics of apathy in favor of a politics of democratic struggle. Based on the analysis, I draw conclusions related to the evaluation of cinematic rhetoric, the political import of mass art, and the character and role of affect in politics.

This chapter argues that The Secret Agent functions as a sequel that offers the “alternative frame of reference” sought by Chinua Achebe to Marlow’s imperialist and racist discourse in “Heart of Darkness.” Drawing on theories of the sublime from Longinus to Lyotard, I argue that Conrad shows how sublimity—rhetorical, natural, and artistic—is not recuperated by Romantic transcendence, but is merely an artifact of human limitation. The people—the beating heart—are both the source and the victims of sublime imperial rhetoric, and Conrad’s metropolitan readers are those capable of altering this state of affairs. Conrad effectively rewrites the aesthetic of the sublime as post-Romantic, post-imperial, posthumanist, and immanent, as appropriate for the dawning twentieth century and an ethics of care.

This paper asks whether the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend can be reasonably classified as postmodernist, a label applied to him by friends and foes alike. After describing some superficial similarities between the style and content of both Feyerabend's and postmodernist writings, I offer three more robust characterisations of postmodernism in terms of relativism, 'incredulity to metanarratives', and 'depthlessness'. It emerges that none of these characterisations offers a strong justification for classifying Feyerabend as 'postmodern' in any significant sense. Indeed, what does emerge is that Feyerabend's work was fundamentally informed by a humanitarian vision of the value of science that is, in fact, strikingly modern.

Jean-Luc Nancy's phenomenology of listening (trans. 2007) makes a series of claims about the sonic / auditory nature of the subject. First among these is the claim that the subject is a subject to the extent that it is listening, that it is all ears. The subject emerges on the back of the resonance of timbre in the body and the body's becoming-rhythmic.

Reading Augustine's "Confessions" after Roland Barthes's "La Chambre claire" ("Camera Lucida") and "Journal de deuil" ("Mourning Diary") helps to delineate an often-overlooked problem in the "Confessions": the reality of the past outside of one's own personal memory. From a theological perspective, the past is grounded in God's eternity. Yet, when it comes to the narration of his own past, Augustine seems to need evidence of its reality. His mother Monica is the hinge that connects the unfolding of his story and the presentness of all time in God. One's own mother, not the figure of the Mother, appears to be the basis of confession and its temporality: she allows the past and the future to intersect the present of Augustine's telling of his story or Barthes's viewing of the photograph. Barthes's mother, in fact, reveals herself as the 'punctum' that opens up what would otherwise be a moment of the past frozen in its image and makes that past operative in the present of the son observer. To explore Barthes's affinities with Augustine, the article also looks at Jacques Derrida's "Circonfession" ("Circumfession") and Jean-François Lyotard's "La Confession d'Augustin" ("The Confession of Augustine"), which show revealing differences from both Augustine and Barthes and, along with Julia Kristeva's "Stabat Mater" and "Le vréel" ("The True-Real"), help to reassess the "mad" proposition of a mysticism of photographic technology offered in "La Chambre claire".

The subcultural practices of urban explorers are studied through an analysis of the accomplishments of Canadian Jeff Chapman. Using his zine Infiltration as a resource, this essay considers his key sites of exploration, two active downtown Toronto hospitals, not only from the viewpoint of his experiences at both as a patient but also as ur-sites for exploration and an original rethinking of the city. Chapman's illness is metonymic, not metaphoric, and this informs his style of urban exploration. While situating Chapman's investigations in terms of driftworks, surrealist strolls, situa-tionist perambulations, and De Certeau's counter-panoptic walks, the nontheoretical character of Chapman's ethico-aesthetic preoccupations is allowed to shine through in his homespun nonmas-tery of exploration and displays of personal courage as he rambled around closed hospital wings in his gown along with his intravenous pole.

Knowing Victims explores the theme of victimhood in contemporary feminism and politics. It focuses on popular and scholarly constructions of feminism as ‘victim feminism’ – an ideology of passive victimhood that denies women’s agency – and provides the first comprehensive analysis of the debate about this ideology which has unfolded among feminists since the 1980s.

The book critically examines a movement away from the language of victimhood across a wide array of discourses, and the neoliberal replacement of the concept of structural oppression with the concept of personal responsibility. In derogating the notion of ‘victim,’ neoliberalism promotes a conception of victimization as subjective rather than social, a state of mind, rather than a worldly situation.

Drawing upon Nietzsche, Lyotard, rape crisis feminism and feminist philosophy, Stringer situates feminist politicizations of rape, interpersonal violence, economic inequality and welfare reform as key sites of resistance to the victim-blaming logic of neoliberalism. She suggests that although recent feminist critiques of ‘victim feminism’ have critically diagnosed the anti-victim movement, they have not positively defended victim politics. Stringer argues that a conception of the victim as an agentic bearer of knowledge, and an understanding of resentment as a generative force for social change, provides a potent counter to the negative construction of victimhood characteristic of the neoliberal era.

This accessible and insightful analysis of feminism, neoliberalism and the social construction of victimhood will be of great interest to researchers and students in the disciplines of gender and women’s studies, psychology, sociology, politics and philosophy.

In this paper, I examine the politics of performativity that Judith Butler develops in Excitable Speech. In particular, I assess the usefulness of Butler's talk of performativity for describing discursive events involving victimised subjects. I propose that performativity's descriptive purchase is best gauged by foregrounding its presuppositions, and that these last include a Peircean conception of semiosis and a rhetorical postulate of genre.

Contemporary forms of anti-critique take issue with critical distance as the root of critique’s “Olympian” and hierarchical stance. Instead, they constantly call us to get closer: to immerse, network, touch, or skim. Against claims to hidden or encrypted meaning to be revealed, they stress we stay as close to the surface of things as possible. These forms of “surface reading” characterise a common orientation of literary and critical studies at the present moment – from invocations of materialities, networks, and objects, to statistical and cognitive methodologies. Taking issue with these orientations, I explore how such claims falsely characterize critique – notably psychoanalysis and Marxism – as based on distance and exteriority. In fact, these modes of critique constantly insist on our immersion and embeddedness in forms of relation: whether socio-economic or psychic. The forms of anti-critique dispute this form of immersion in the name of an affirmative form of taking a distance, escaping what they see as the problematic space of negativity that binds critique to its objects. So, while claiming to get us close, anti-critique inscribes an affirmative distance. I return to negativity as the inscription of a messy proximity that carves out an internal dissension and distance within the experience of immersion.

Interrogando-se sobre o lugar da filosofia de Theodor W. Adorno no âmbito do pensamento crítico contemporâneo, o presente artigo procura dar conta dos revezes da recepção político-filosófica da dialéctica negativa (das posturas críticas de Habermas, Lyotard ou Agamben às mais favoráveis de Jameson e Holloway) e discutir a sua relevância actual. Defender-se-á que a politização do pensamento adorniano é possível, muito embora as suas valências críticas não se restrinjam a essa possibilidade. Hoje, a dialéctica negativa funcionaria também como antídoto contra os atalhos tomados pelas correntes " voluntarista " (Peter Hallward), " messiânica " (Agamben) e " ontológica " (realismo especulativo) da filosofia, à entrada do século XXI. Contudo, atendendo a que a relação entre teoria e prática é complexa em Adorno, a sua relevância actual ressaltaria em relação com as reacções críticas que o movimento do " realismo especulativo " tem suscitado. Em diálogo com alguns dos seus interlocutores (Markus Gabriel e Adrian Johnston), sugere-se que o desenvolvimento de uma " dialéctica constelar " depende da introdução de um elemento destotalizador no seio do diagnóstico radical – a um só tempo materialista e transcendental – da dialéctica negativa.

This paper understands the basic elements of neoliberalism in education and governmentality to be the technologies for the neoliberal government of education. It outlines Foucault’s methodology for analysing governmentality and shows how neoliberalism is a discursive formation which homogenises apparently unrelated language games and discourses. It places particular emphasis on the rhizomatic dispersion of neoliberal discursive and non-discursive practices, which in the end create a mosaic of thinking and acting with its own existing internal logic. This paper provides a cross-sectional perspective on how neoliberalism has implanted itself as a universal phenomenon along the horizontal and vertical lines of the education sphere and shows how, particularly through the policy of lifelong learning for a knowledge society, it is transforming first of all the education of adults and how subsequently it has become a fundamental blueprint for the complex revision of higher education and regional schooling, including pre-school education. This paper prefaces this single-issue edition of the Journal of Pedagogy and therefore presents and summarises the articles published in this issue, and suggests how they are thematic examples of a single and more general theoretical framework.

This article explores critically the relationship between capitalist performativity and the disability category. It draws on Jean-François Lyotard's analysis of postmodernity to define 'performativity' as the principle of performance enhancement governing the world of contemporary techno-capitalism. The analysis then traces the historical development of the disability category in the 20th and 21st centuries and explains its complex interlinking with performativity. Special attention is paid to the impact of neoliberalism since the 1980s that includes both the disability category's administrative shrinking and its market-based expansion. These theoretical and historical reflections are supplemented by a reading of Terry Gilliam's movie The Zero Theorem. The conclusion discusses some possibilities for resisting performativity, suggested by the disability studies perspective espoused in the article.

This article investigates Catherine Malabou’s claims to have produced some form of beyond of deconstruction with her reworking of the Hegelian concept of “plasticity” (Plastizität). In the light of Malabou’s critique of the unsuitability of the Derridean non-concept of “text” for being a suitable metaphor for neuronal functioning in her Plasticité, I turn this question back on Malabou’s own work; that is to say, this article will examine what the implications of the metaphorics of plasticity are for Malabou’s own oeuvre and its relationship with neuroscience and her critique of connexionist capitalism. To this end, this article is particularly interested in the political claims made for plasticity and how some of the “everyday” meanings of plasticity, and Malabou’s decision not to incorporate them into her conceptual working through, might threaten this enterprise.

Tesar, M., & Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016). Cute, creepy and sublime unnamed childhood monstrosities. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(5), 694–704. doi:10.1080/01596306.2015.1075708

Strangers, Gods, and monsters are all names for the experience of alterity and otherness within and amongst us. We need monsters in our lives. In this paper we use philosophy as a method to explore language, developmental and cultural instabilities, and terrifying (and discursive) monstrosity located within children's literature and childhood contexts. Philosophy as a method serves as an engagement, an ethical relationship with monstrous thoughts, and as an opening to the philosophical thinking of everyday practices of childhood play (i.e., through objects, practices, language, text, and images). Alongside and through cute, creepy and sublime notions of monsters in children's literature children become monsters–monsters become children. We draw from Derrida's notions of hospitality and hostility and Deleuze and Guattari's deterritorialization of minor literature as well as from literature on monsters, monstrosities, and ugliness. We argue that different representations of childhood monstrosity can help educators and other adults to see the 'productive' in childhood otherness, to consider the always present 'childhood undecidable' (simultaneous presence of cute and creepy) and the generative in infinitely unknown and unrecognizable childhood objects and discourses.

This essay considers the shifting meanings and stakes of the sublime, from the Lisbon earthquake to Auschwitz and the unpresentable, from Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to Theodor W. Adorno and Jean-Francois Lyotard. This essay for The Yale Journal of Criticism was revised as chapter one in Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2011), pp. 19-32.

This paper explores the possibilities of examining four of Jim Jarmusch’s films (Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law, Dead Man and Ghost Dog) from the perspectives of various postmodern philosophies. It places Jarmusch’s opus within the larger frame of modern and postmodern cinema employing the theory of Jean-François Lyotard. Philosophies of Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Foucault and Heidegger are used to analyze several aspects of these films. However, the main focus is on a psychoanalytic approach relying on theories of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek. Thus, Stranger than Paradise is explained through the concepts of big Other and the repressed Other. Down by Law is seen as a quest for the Other which is “deprived of its Otherness”. Dead Man is a Heideggerian Exploration of the Being whose Beckettian character resonates with neurotic anxiety and childhood trauma. The ancient mythology in Ghost Dog concludes the discussion of the Other with mechanisms of condensation and projection, and with an attempt to find a religious solution to postmodern skepticism and relativism.

Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and its relation to metaphysics has been widely accepted in the East. Yet the conception that there is only one—originally Greek—type of technics has been an obstacle to any original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought.

Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger’s challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and technologies as anthropologically universal.

This investigation of the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of modern Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani, sheds new light on the obscurity of the question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological modernity and westernization?

In The Question Concerning Technology in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical questioning of globalized technics.

This article discusses the way in which a group of contemporary cultural theorists in whose work we see a ‘‘new materialism’’ (a term coined by Braidotti and DeLanda) at work constitutes a philosophy of difference by traversing the dualisms that form the backbone of modernist thought. Continuing the ideas of Lyotard and Deleuze they have set themselves to a rewriting of all possible forms of emancipation that are to be found. This rewriting exercise involves a movement in thought that, in the words of Bergson, can be termed ‘‘pushing dualism to an extreme.’’ By this movement, Deleuze has stated, ‘‘difference is pushed to the limit,’’ that is, using Colebrook’s words, ‘‘difference is shown differing.’’ The article addresses the ways in which modernity’s dualisms (structured by a negative relation between terms) are traversed, and how a new conceptualization, and ontology, of difference (structured by an affirmative relation) comes to be constituted along the way. New materialism leaves behind all prioritizations (implicitly) involved in modern dualist thinking since a difference structured by affirmation does not work with predetermined relations (e.g., between mind and body) nor does it involve a (counter-)hierarchy between terms. The article makes explicit the methodology of the current-day rise of non-dualist thought, both in terms of its non-classificatory mode of (Deleuzian) thinking and in terms of the theory of the time of thought thus effectuated (Lyo- tard’s notion of ‘rewriting modernity’ is not a post-modernism). Throughout the article we will engage with an example in order to demonstrate the ontology that is being practiced following this methodology: How does a new (feminist) materialism traverse the sexual dualisms that structure modernist (feminist) thinking? This example also shows how a feminist post-modernism (found in the canonical work of Butler) has remained dualist, and what makes new materialism ‘‘new.’’ Freed from a dualist methodology, the modernist emancipatory project comes to full fruition in new materialism.

In this paper, I relativize the widespread representation of the generalized relativism of 1970s philosophy. I will show how the group of thinkers of this period often referred to as the 'French Theory' movement is not always defined by the affirmation of a radical relativism, but rather by the obstinate search for an original 'reality' (as thing in itself) capable of competing and denouncing the false 'reality' constructed by reason. To demonstrate this, I will focus on the journey of a philosopher who is emblematic of this period, namely Jean-François Lyotard. I will demonstrate that Lyotard claims a form of realism, which I will qualify as 'tragic realism.' Then, I will compare this 'tragic realism' with the more contemporary forms of realism , in particular speculative realism.
Nous voudrions, dans cet article, relativiser la représentation (aujourd'hui largement répandue) d'un relativisme généralisé de la philosophie des années 70, en montrant comment la constellation formée par les penseurs de cette période ne se définit pas toujours (et pas seulement) par l'affirmation d'un relativisme radical ou conséquent, mais bien plutôt par la recherche obstinée d'un « réel » originaire, susceptible de concurrencer et de dénoncer une « réalité » construite par la raison. Pour le démontrer, nous nous concentrerons sur le parcours d'un philosophe emblématique de la période, à savoir Jean-François Lyotard. Nous nous attacherons à remonter au geste principiel qui, à notre sens, structure toute sa philosophie, par-delà ses apparentes évolutions, à savoir : le nouage qu'il effectue entre l'idée d'une critique de la raison et l'affirmation d'un réel en soi. Ce lien d'implication qui caractérise le premier moment de sa philosophie (I), demeure inchangé dans les années 80, marquées par sa reprise de Kant (II). Ce geste fait de Lyotard le représentant d'un réalisme tragique, que nous pourrons situer, dès lors, par rapport à différentes formes plus contemporaines de réalismes (III), en particulier le réalisme spéculatif.

Teaching poetry presents difficulties of various kinds, and these can be illustrative of wider curricular and pedagogical challenges. This paper considers questions of knowledge and remembrance as they arise in two poems-Paul Celan's Todesfuge and Seamus Heaney's 'Mid-Term Break'-placing these in relation to Jean-François Lyotard's conception of the immemorial. Lyotard is concerned with a kind of repression in dominant conceptions of knowing and thinking, and with the insulation from experience that this effects. I shall argue that, in reading the poems, it is not so much the seeking of essential meanings that is at stake as a turning of attention to what cannot be fully grasped or contained. Towards the end, and with reference to Stanley Cavell, I discuss how refinement of judgement in relation to works of art can lead the way in shaping responsibility in our ethical and political lives. Such responsibility will be evident in our very words where these presuppose, depend on and are addressed to those of others.

En el presente trabajo pretendemos abordar una problemática que tiene que ver con aquella hipótesis, erigida en corazón de la posmodernidad, que sostenía la radical imposibilidad de construir metarrelatos capaces de hallar un sentido último del devenir histórico. Como corolario de lo anterior, habríamos asistido a una radical deslegitimación del marxismo como teoría capaz de proveer verdadero conocimiento histórico y, por ende, también habría quedado desacreditado como programa político de emancipación. Ubicado como uno de los grandes relatos de la modernidad europea que ya no tendrían nada que ofrecer, y defenestrado como ideología salvífica, el marxismo debe sin embargo dialogar con esa misma crítica para mostrar que todavía tiene legítima potencia a la hora de narrar con sentido (pero también con validez epistémica) algunas de las más determinantes subyugaciones que atenazan a buena parte de la humanidad.

While the general intellect continues to provide a rich resource for understanding post-Fordism and for theorizing resistance, there remains a neglected aesthetic dimension to the general intellect and the role that art can play in resistance based on it. This article develops the general intellect along these lines by drawing on two theorists who are rarely thought together: Paolo Virno and Jean-François Lyotard. The article begins by introducing the general intellect and Virno's reconceptualization of it as the general or generic intellect. It then introduces a relationship between art and the general intellect by reading Virno's theory of language, speech, and communication. From here, it goes to his theory of exodus, which is then read back through his linguistic theory to draw out the key role that subjective defection plays in the project. Although Virno doesn't spend much time discussing art, his brief remarks are used as an entry point to move to Lyotard's writings on music and art, where the author fleshes out an aesthetic dimension to the general intellect and the project of exodus. The argument focuses on the artistic gesture (the "art" in/of the artwork) and especially timbre as witnesses and eruptions of the potentiality of the general intellect that can never be properly actualized. By analyzing timbre as a fugitive force that desubjectifies those gathered around music, the author argues that it provides an example of the opening necessary for the subjective defection that inaugurates exodus. In this way, the aesthetic dimension added to the general intellect is the generic capacity to be affected and disindividuated.

As social movements amplify across the globe, activists and researchers are increasingly interested in the pedagogies of revolutionary transformation. To provide a rich resource for political educators and organizers, this article formulates what we call an (un)communicative communist pedagogy that is oriented against communicative capitalism. We show that there is a taut connection between capitalism and democracy that consists of a shared logic, pedagogy, and aesthetic that revolves around communication, inclusion, and transparency. Without grasping this aesthetic connection, anticapitalist struggles are reduced to liberal reforms that end up reinforcing and deepening capitalist production relations. To break out of this trap, we block together several political, philosophical, and aesthetic theories that might otherwise be thought of as mutually exclusive. In particular, we return to Immanuel Kant and his theory of the beautiful and the sublime to make a case that connections between capitalism and democracy rest on an unexamined aesthetic of the beautiful. To sever this link, and thus to push democratic struggles for equality toward a communist horizon, we suggest a new alignment between radical politics and aesthetics of the sublime via the Communist Party. Importantly, we find in the work of Jean-François Lyotard the point of intersection between communist pedagogy and sublime aesthetics. In closing, we read this aesthetic communist pedagogy through a communist study group in the Jim Crow South. What we find is a different aesthetic relationship between self and world that is not prefigured in various forms of liberal reformism. Rather, an excessive surplus is discovered that presses beyond the boundaries of what can be known and what can be imaginatively figured, provoking a sense of ineffable sublimity or political opacity. We call this excess the aesthetic dimension of (un)communicative communism.

This article fo cuses in a comparative manner on the thought of Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard with a view to lending support to Busch's claim, that 'existentialism' preceded poststructuralism and postmodernism as far as criticism of certain features of modern philosophy are concerned. Attention is first
given to Lyotard's critique of artificial intelligence, especially in so far as it displays a dependence on and development of
insights on the part of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological-existential understanding of human embodiment and the speci- ficity of human perception. The focus then shifts to Merleau-Ponty in order to demonstrate the remarkable extent to which his understanding of human embodiment and related issues such as perception and creativity, paved the way for the work of, among others, Lyotard, and anticipated the critique of artifi- cial intelligence on the part of the latter.

While research on sound and education has opened up important pathways, it dominantly approaches sound as meaningful. This paper charts another tendency, exploring sound as educational precisely because it resists our attempts at understanding. The force that guides this trajectory is that of timbre, or the nuance of sounds. I begin with Eidhsheim, who delinks timbre from essence and identity, showing the infinite potential of vocal timbres. While this weakens the link, the pedagogy she articulates remains within the drive to produce knowledge under the order of the beautiful. To experience timbre’s pedagogical charge requires a move to the aesthetic of the sublime. To make this move, I link together Lyotard’s writings on writing, thinking, aesthetics, and sound, providing an expansive conception of timbre and showing the sonic dimensions of writing and thinking, through which the writer suspends their drive to know and becomes possible to the timbre of words.

One of the dominant themes structuring the trajectory of Jean-François Lyotard's philosophical work is his concern to think the event in a way that renders it intelligible, but that also respects the alterity and the uncanniness that are essential to it. In this paper I defend Lyotard's earlier understanding of the event, articulated most thoroughly in Discours, figure, from the criticisms of the later Lyotard, articulated most thoroughly in The Differend. More specifically, I attempt to demonstrate that the event, as disruption of the stable system of signification, is given immediately with the signification that it disrupts.

In this article I bring Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘whatever singularity’ into critical pedagogy. I take as my starting point the role of identity within critical pedagogy. I call upon Butler to sketch the debates around the mobilization of identity for political purposes and, conceding the contingent necessity of identity, then suggest that whatever singularity can be helpful in moving critical pedagogy from an emancipatory to a liberatory project (a distinction I take from Marx). To articulate whatever singularity I situate the concept within the work in which it appears, and then take a detour into Agamben’s general philosophical project. I propose that, for critical pedagogy to take whatever singularity seriously, it must uphold a respect for the ineffability of being, which entails in part the suspension of dialogue. To help flesh out what I mean by this proposal, I turn to a fragment of Lyotard’s philosophy and his critique of democracy. I conclude by addressing a pressing ontological critique of Agamben, which leads me to argue for a materialist appropriation of the figure of whatever singularity, one that is held in tension with ontological concerns of identity.

The article presents an attempt to use the logical theory of Dignāga (ca 480 - ca 540) to address the critique levelled against the treatment of “truth” as an unattainable ideal in postmodern/poststructuralist philosophy. Dignāga has famously endorsed the Buddhist critique of language as an imperfect tool to articulate valid statements about reality, but he has also shown how double negation can be used to make limited positive statements by denying their opposites. In practice, this method can be used for the development of ethical concepts that can be shared between parties who would not agree, for example, on a positive definition of “justice”, but would nonetheless all consent to characterize certain practices as unjust.

While there was a flurry of articles throughout the 1990s in philosophy of education on Lyotard, there are still several key concepts in his oeuvre that have import for but remain largely underdeveloped or absent in the field. One of the most interesting of these absent concepts is Lyotard’s notion of the figural. In this paper, I take the figural as an educational problematic and ask what new educational insights it can generate in regard to the existing literature. As such, this article begins with a survey and synthesis of educa- tional literature on Lyotard and the primary work on which most of it is based, exploring the relationship between knowledge, performativity, the differend, and ‘‘the system.’’ I then examine conceptions of education oriented toward defending the differend and disrupting the system and claim that, while helpful, these conceptions are limited in that they do not mention how educators and students might engage the alterity that the system seeks to repress. I believe that it is here that Lyotard’s notion of the figural can be productively engaged. The next section of the paper performs a partial and educationally partisan reading of Discourse, Figure. After this reading I move to formulate a figural education, which is composed of three educational processes and modes of engagement: reading, seeing, and blindness. A figural education, I argue, holds each of these practices in an uncertain and unsettling relation and, in so doing, can help educators defend the figural and the differend against the discursive demands of the system.

Dans « La dent, la paume » (Des dispositifs pulsionnels, 1973), Jean-François Lyotard envisage que l’aspect rituel de la représentation théâtrale puisse être aboli pour permettre l’avènement d’une nouvelle forme de présence scénique. Il cite alors l’oeuvre de Hans Bellmer qui manifeste probablement les principales exigences de ce « théâtre énergétique » dont il décrit les contours. Nous nous proposons de dresser le portrait de Bellmer, marionnettiste d’un après Kleist, dont le pantin se voit libéré d’une fixité de la forme. La poupée, matrice d’une oeuvre et d’une vie, devient l’exemple même de l’objet surréaliste par excellence : celui d’un temps plus que d’un espace; peut-être une autre forme de théâtre.
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Following Lyotard’s words in "La dent, la paume", if we consider that the ritual aspect of theatrical performance can be abolished, then the plasticity of Bellmer's work already represents a form of “théâtre énergétique”. We propose to draw a portrait of Hans Bellmer, an after-Kleist puppeteer, whose puppet is freed from fixity. The Doll, matrix of a life’s work, becomes the archetype of the Surrealist object: art of time more than of space; perhaps another form of theater.

Many are in shock that today in politics truth doesn’t seem to matter. This analysis misses the mark: politics was never about a correspondence with an existing truth, but about the formulation of a new truth. The contemporary moment thus offers up an important opportunity to reclaim the nature of the political, to develop new political positions on that basis and, most importantly, to assert those politics. This is a deeply pedagogical task, but it is one to which critical forms of education aren’t suited. Critical education is really good at denouncing the present moment. There is no shortage of articles and blog posts condemning our political scene in near apocalyptic terms. At best, these writings end with a vague call for action. This is not sufficient. Those of us in education who want to fight for a better world need to move from critique to politics, from politics to movement. It is to this end that I offer this chapter, in which, with the help of Lyotard and Dean, I diagnose our present moment of the “post-truth” as one of democratic communicative capital-ism, and propose a way out: a pedagogy of clarity, imagination, organization, and force. The task is not to return to some “truth era,” but to organize in order to vindicate a new truth, a just truth.

Communist Study: Education for the Commons poses a series of educational questions pertinent to revolutionary movements: How can pedagogy bridge the gap between what is and what can be, while respecting the gap and its uncertainty and figurality? How can pedagogy accommodate ambiguity while remaining faithful to the communist project? In answering these questions, educational theorist Derek R. Ford develops a pedagogical constellation that radically opens up what education is and what it can mean for revolutionary struggle. To chart this constellation, Ford takes the reader on a journey that traverses disciplinary and ideological boundaries, innovatively reading theorists as diverse as Agamben, Marx, Lyotard, Butler, and Lenin. Demonstrating that learning is the educational logic that underpins capitalism and democracy, Ford articulates a theory of communist study as an alternative and oppositional logic. Poetic, performative, and provocative, this theory of study is oriented toward what Ford calls “the sublime feeling of being-in-common,” which, as he insists, is always a commonness against.


"This book clearly establishes Ford as one of the boldest and most insightful emerging political and educational theorists. Ford moves deftly and daringly between disparate thinkers and concepts, weaving together philosophy, history, and educational theory in creative, profound, and lucid ways. He identifies and answers the most pressing political question of our moment: What does it mean to study like a communist? In doing so, he develops a groundbreaking communist theory of study, a praxis that is as provocative as it is practical."
— Peter McLaren, Chapman University

"Communist Study should be required of all theorists and activists concerned with radical political transformation. With brilliance and courage, Derek R. Ford dismantles dogma old and new, pressing us to forge the commonness that can make us a political force."
— Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

"Ford understands that revolutions don’t organize themselves, nor do they evolve naturally and painlessly from the social and economic system destroying the world and crushing humanity today; revolutions are not a walk in the park nor do they arrive on the wings of aspiration alone. This surprising book extends that battle based on the Marxist principle that it’s not enough to interpret the world—‘The point . . . is to change it.’ It maps the treacherous, hopeful territory between the pessimism of the head and the optimism of the heart. Communist Study is a necessary book."
— Bill Ayers, Emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago

Buddhism and Postmodernity is a response to some of the questions that have emerged in the process of Buddhism's encounters with modernity and the West. Jin Y. Park broadly outlines these questions as follows: first, why are the interpretations and evaluations of Buddhism so different in Europe (in the nineteenth century), in the United States (in the twentieth century), and in traditional Asia; second, why does Zen Buddhism, which offers a radically egalitarian vision, maintain a strongly authoritarian leadership; and third, what ethical paradigm can be drawn from the Buddhist-postmodern form of philosophy? Park argues that, as unrelated as these questions may seem, the issues that have generated them are related to perennial philosophical themes of identity, institutional power, and ethics, respectively. Each of these themes constitutes one section of Buddhism and Postmodernity. Park discusses the three issues in the book through the exploration of the Buddhist concepts of self and others, language and thinking, and universality and particularities. Most of this discussion is drawn from the East Asian Buddhist traditions of Zen and Huayan Buddhism in connection with the Continental philosophies of postmodernism, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. Self-critical from both the Buddhist and Western philosophical perspectives, Buddhism and Postmodernity points the reader toward a new understanding of Buddhist philosophy and offers a Buddhist-postmodern ethical paradigm that challenges normative ethics of metaphysical traditions.

In Australia in the 1990s, ‘reconciliation’ emerged as an organizing discourse for political debate and policy-making in relation to Aboriginal affairs and the unfinished business of decolonisation. Unlike in countries such as Chile and South Africa, however, reconciliation was not pursued in the wake of a new constitutional settlement. Rather, reconciliation was proposed as an alternative to a treaty (between indigenous people and the state), which had been pursued by Aboriginal activists (at least) since the 1970s. Conservative and Labour governments entertained the proposition of a treaty or ‘Makarrata’ in the 1980s. By the 1990s, however, the claim to Aboriginal sovereignty, which underwrote the demand to negotiate a treaty, was deemed unreasonable by both major political parties. During the debate about a treaty in 1988, John Howard (Australian prime minister, 1996– 2007) declared: ‘It is an absurd proposition that a nation should make a treaty with some if its own citizens. It also denies the fact that Aboriginal people have full citizenship rights now’ (Howard 1988, 6). In this chapter, I take Howard’s notion of an ‘absurd proposition’ seriously as a characterization of the ‘agonic relation of colonial governance vis-à-vis indigenous resistance’ in Australia (Tully 2000, 13). In particular, I unpack the sense in which the clam to Aboriginal sovereignty might be characterized as an absurd proposition in terms of Lyotard’s conception of the differend and Jacques Rancière’s conception of disagreement.

Grebowicz argues from the perspective of Jean-François Lyotard's critique of deliberative democracy that the project of democratizing knowledge may bring us closer to terror than to justice. The successful formulation of a critical standpoint requires that we figure the political as itself a contested site, and incorporate this into our theorizing about the role of dissent in the production of knowledges. This essay contrasts Lyotard's notion of the differend with Chantal Mouffe's agonistic model.