Lyotard and Critical Practice

Kiff Bamford, Margret Grebowicz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350201903
• eBook ISBN: 9781350192041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the previous century's most provocative thinkers. Can his work help us address the crisis currently facing the humanities?

The dominant economic discourse sees the humanities as "low-value," an irritation at best. Lyotard helps us to think against this pervasive dismissal of creative activity, not by defending the honor of the humanities, but by inviting critical practices which aggravate this irritation. Critical practices trouble what counts as critique, embrace incertitude, and listen for silenced voices.

Twelve essays by artists and researchers take up Lyotard's invitation and begin to develop the idea of critical practice in the contemporary context. Three sections titled "What resists thinking;" "Long views and distances" and "Why art practice?" address contemporary concerns like affectivity, aesthetics, economic imperatives, militarism, pedagogy, posthumanism, and the closure of what in Lyotard's time was called "the West."

Four short pieces by Lyotard intervene in and buttress the discussion: "Apathy in Theory" and "Interview with Art Présent," here published in English for the first time, and "Affect-phrase" and "The Other's Rights" republished here to highlight his prescient concern for that which cannot be articulated.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 What Resists Thinking
• 1 Listening to the Mute Voices of Words: Errant Pedagogy in the Zone
• 2 Animal Testimony: Cetaceans Between the Interspecies and the Inhuman
• 3 Under Threat: Rights and the “Thing”
• 4 A Matter of Time: Color, Affect, and the Suffering of Thought
• Lyotard Supplement I
• 5 The Affect-phrase (from a Supplement to The Differend)
• 6 The Other’s Rights
• Part 2 Long Views and Distances
• 7 Citing and Siting the Postmodern: Lyotard and the Black Atlantic
• 8 Jean-François Lyotard’s Marxism, in Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Algerian War
• 9 Lyotard and the Inhuman Mode of Production
• 10 Lyotard, After Us
• Lyotard Supplement II
• 11 Apathy in Theory
• 12 “What we cannot reach flying we must reach limping . . .” Art Présent: Interview with Jean-François Lyotard
• Part 3 Why Art Practice?
• 13 Mute Communication: Drawing the Military-Industrial Complex
• 14 Critical Practice and Affirmative Aesthetics
• 15 “hang on tight and spit on me”: Lyotard and Contemporary Art
• 16 Uncertain? For sure. Limping? Certainly: Limp Thoughts on Performance Practice
• “Afterward”: Lyotard’s Prescience
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright