Nothing Like Maudlin

References

• Jean-François Lyotard, Chambre sourde: l'anti-aesthétique de Malraux, (from now on referred to as CS), (Galilée) Paris 1998, p. 67, quotation modified.
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• La Confession d'Augustin, (from now on referred to as CA), (Galilée) Paris 1998.
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• Économie libidinale, (Minuit) Paris 1974. Engl, trans. Libidinal Economy, (Athlone) London 1993.
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• L'Inhumain: causeries sur le temps, (Galilée) Paris 1988, p. 45. Engl, trans. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, (Polity) Cambridge 1991.
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• This explication cannot be about significance. It is neither a matter of certainty regarding the meaning and truth of the texts, nor of their importance. The former would place them in the realm of what Lyotard calls the cognitive. Admittedly, a definition that has come under attack through his career, for example, in Alain Badiou's remarks on the distinction to be drawn between the cognitive defined in legal terms, or in line with the natural sciences, and the cognitive defined in mathematical terms. In ‘Custos Quid Noctis?’ his critical reading of The Differend, Badiou argues that Lyotard fails to appreciate the grounding significance of mathematics: “Mathematical sentences—and in my opinion all sentences the stake of which is truth—falsify [Lyotard's] definition of the cognitive. The fact that there “is” mathematical thought is not governed by any procedure for the establishment of a real referent […] Lyotard's epistemology remains critical (juridical) […] It is not directed according to the right paradigm. (Alain Badiou, ‘Custos Quid Noctis’, Critique, volume 40, 1984, Number 450, p. 861).
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• For Badiou, the cognitive defined according to a model of evidence may well fall prey to doubts regarding the possibility of presenting satisfactory evidence in all just cases. It may also be prone to doubts regarding the possibility of finding rules for the admissibility of evidence that are fair to the grievances of all sides of a dispute. But this is not the case for the mathematical, where theorems that hold in all other realms can be deduced without error or injustice. This does not necessarily lead to a strong determination of those realms; the laws that follow are often very thin in terms of how they determine the realms, as evinced in Badiou's use of set theory in his own work (See, L'Être et l'événement, (Seuil) Paris 1987).
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• Jean-François Lyotard, Moralités postmodernes, (Galilée) Paris 1993, p. 209. Engl, trans. Postmodem Fables, (University of Minnesota Press) Minneapolis 1997.
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• As in the exergue, this passage has been modified to emphasise the poetic form and a possible breathless, abyssal, reading of Lyotard's last texts. See also the ‘All stripped down’ section on Waits’ lyrics below.
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• L'Enthousiasme: la critique kantienne de l'histoire, (Galilée) Paris 1986.
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• See an extended defence of this view in: James Williams, Lyotard: Thinking the Political, (Routledge) London 2000, pp. 110–18 and 126–34).
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• Bone Machine, Island Records & Warner Chappell Music Ltd., 1992.
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• Jean-Pierre Moussaron, Feu le free? Et autres écrits sur le jazz, (Belin) Paris 1990, p. 244.
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• Gary Hatfield, ‘The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: the Mediations as Cognitive Exercises, in: A.O. Rorty (Ed.), Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, (University of California Press) Berkeley 1986, p. 59.
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• Ibid, p. 69.
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• Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin, (Penguin) London 1961.
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• Gary Hatfield, ‘The Senses and the Fleshless Eye’, p. 72.
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• Lyotard, Jean-François, Le Différend, (Minuit) Paris 1983, pp. 236–8. Engl, trans. The Differend, (Manchester University Press) Manchester 1988.
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