Rereading Jean-François Lyotard

Essays on His Later Works

Heidi Bickis, Rob Shields

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138379763
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317065708
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 New and Late Encounters: An Introduction
• 2 The Affective Economy of the Lyotardian Archive
• 3 Lyotard’s St Paul
• 4 Anthro-paralogy: Antihumanism in Lyotard’s Late Works
• 5 The Weight of Writing: Lyotard’s Anti-Aesthetic in ‘À l’écrit bâté’
• 6 Presentation to ‘À l’écrit bâté’ Lettre perpétuel – Perpetual Letter
• 7 ‘To Burdened Writing’ [À l’écrit bâté]
• 8 A Late Performance: Intimate Distance (Yingmei Duan)
• 9 Can Sustainability be Domesticated?
• 10 Oblique Views and Heterodox Spaces: Le Corbusier’s Conventus
• 11 Lyotard and Irigaray on Eros, Infancy and Birth: the Dissymmetrical Horizons of Being Between
• 12 The Politics of Creation: Lyotard, Castoriadis and Malraux
• 13 Voicing Nihilism: Lyotard on Malraux
• 14 Testimony and the Affect-Phrase
• 15 Lyotard’s ‘Critical’ ‘Aesthetics’
• Bibliography
• Index