Lyotard and the Greeks

Abstract

I read Kant or Adorno or Aristotle not in order to detect the request they themselves tried to answer by writing, but in order to hear what they are requesting from me while I write or so that I write.

  J.-F. Lyotard

Notes

Notes

1. J.-F. Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?,” trans. R. Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984) 71–82, at 79.

2. J.-F. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988) xii. All further references to The Differend will be given using the abbreviation D, followed by either page or section number, in parentheses in the main text.

3. J.-F. Lyotard, “Wittgenstein ‘After,’ ” in Jean-François Lyotard: Political Writings, trans. B. Readings and K.P. Geiman (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) 19–22, at 20.

4. Au juste (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1979), a series of conversations with Jean-Luc Thébaud, published in 1979, announced Lyotard's interest in Kant's critical philosophy. La Condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979), also published in 1979, further evidenced Lyotard's appeal to and use of Kant, particularly in its discussion of the status of paralogy in contemporary scientific discourses. In The Differend, Lyotard's third – and perhaps last – major philosophical book, the importance of Kant is amply demonstrated, with four significant sections devoted to Kant's critical works. Lyotard then went on to publish two works specifically on Kant: L’enthousiasme: La critique kantienne de l’histoire (Paris: Galilée, 1986), and Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime (Paris: Galilée, 1991).

5. See D. Köveker “Le(s) temps du différend,” in Jean-François Lyotard: L’exercice du differend, eds. D. Lyotard, J.-C. Milner and G. Sfez (Paris: PUF, 2001) 223–39.

6. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, [1929] 1990) A445, B473. All further references will be abbreviated CPR and given in parentheses in the main text.

7. J.-F. Lyotard, “Judiciousness in Dispute, or Kant after Marx,” trans. C. Lindsay, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. A. Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) 324–59, at 336.

8. I. Kant, Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics That Can Qualify as a Science, trans. P. Carus (Chicago: Open Court, 1993) § 52c.

9. This expression is taken from the prefatory definition of the differend given in D xi.

10. Lyotard, “Judiciousness in Dispute” 336.

11. Ibid. 337.

12. Lyotard defines a wrong as: “a damage [dommage] accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the damage” D § 7.

13. J.-F. Lyotard and J.-L. Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. W. Godzich (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985) 73.

14. Ibid. 78.

15. For a fuller reading of Lyotard's treatment of Gorgias’ On Not-Being, see my Lyotard and Greek Thought: Sophistry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) in particular 122–45.

16. Aristotle, On Melissus, Xenophanes, and Gorgias, in Minor Works, trans. W.S. Hett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980) 979a25 ff., cited in D 16).

17. Ibid. 980a9, cited in D 16.

18. Although Lyotard does not explicitly acknowledge it, the term “logology” is, I presume, taken from Barbara Cassin, who declares that she has taken it from Novalis. Cassin uses the term “to indicate that being, inasmuch as it is, is first produced, performed, by speech” (“Sophists,” in A Guide to Greek Thought: Major Figures and Trends, eds. J. Brunschwig and G.E.R. Lloyd (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000) 435–54, at 441). For Lyotard, it is because of the priority given to language by the sophist Gorgias that it becomes necessary for Plato and Aristotle to seek to bring argument within rules. In particular, see the Plato “Notice” in D 19–25.

19. G. Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988) 126.

20. To the best of my knowledge, Barbara Cassin was the first to point out the significance of the title ascribed to Gorgias’ treatise. See her Si Parménide (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1980) and L’effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).

21. See J. Derrida, “Ousia and Grammē: Note on a Note from Being and Time,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982) 29–67. As Lyotard's remarks in the third and last section of the “Aristotle Notice” make clear, there is a certain commonality of intent between his analysis of the now and Heidegger's thinking of the event.

22. Indeed, as Pierre Aubenque has observed, the entire Aristotelian analysis of time appears to rest on the idea of the permanence of the now: without it, time would be nothing, because the past is what has been and is no longer, and the future is what will be and is not yet, and that which is composed of what is not itself is not. See P. Aubenque, Le Problème de l’être chez Aristote (Paris: PUF, 1966). Cf. also J. Derrida, “Ousia and Grammē” 39: “The nun is the form from which time cannot ever depart, the form in which it cannot not be given.”

23. W.D. Ross, Aristotle's Physics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936) 122.

24. Ibid. 67.

25. The very traditionality of Ross's reading prevents the possibility of a point by point comparison with Hegel on this issue. It will suffice to quote Hegel's remark in The Encyclopaedia that exemplify the profound relation between time, the presence of the present and the presence of self-consciousness: “Time is the same principle as the I = I of pure self-consciousness,” Hegel's Philosophy of Nature (Encyclopaedia Part Two), trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) Section 258, Remark 36. For Heidegger's claims regarding Hegel, see Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, [1962] 1990) § 82.

26. J.-F. Lyotard, “Time Today,” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991) 58–77, at 59.

27. See, for example, M. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987) 101.

28. M. Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, trans. R. Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2003) 3–4.