Anachronistic Responsibility (A Proposal): Ethics, History, and Piers Plowman

Abstract

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 includes silence, which is the negative phrase, but it also calls upon phrases which are in principle possible. This state is signaled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling: “One cannot find the words, ” etc. A lot of searching must be done to find new rules for forming and linking phrases that are able to express the differend disclosed I7y a feeling, unless one wants this differend to be smothered right away in a litigation and for the alarm sounded by the feeling to have been useless. 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.

Jean-François Lyotard