Jean-Francois Lyotard

The Interviews and Debates

Jean-Francois Lyotard, Kiff Bamford, Kiff Bamford

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Academic
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350081321
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Art
• Thema: Art & Politics

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the most important French philosophers of the Twentieth Century. His impact has been felt across many disciplines: sociology; cultural studies; art theory and politics. This volume presents a diverse selection of interviews, conversations and debates which relate to the five decades of his working life, both as a political militant, experimental philosopher and teacher. Including hard-to-find interviews and previously untranslated material, this is the first time that interviews with Lyotard have been presented as a collection. Key concepts from Lyotard's thought – the differend, the postmodern, the immaterial – are debated and discussed across different time periods, prompted by specific contexts and provocations. In addition there are debates with other thinkers, including Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, which may be less familiar to an Anglophone audience. These debates and interviews help to contextualise Lyotard, highlighting the importance of Marx, Freud, Kant and Wittgenstein, in addition to the Jewish thought which accompanies the questions of silence, justice and presence that pervades Lyotard's thinking.

CHAPTER 1

‘PUBLISH OR PERISH!’: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE INTERVIEWS AND DEBATES

by Kiff Bamford

‘Publish or perish!’, this ironic rallying cry penned by Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98) thirty years ago, will ring true for many today, not least academics.¹ The ceaseless demand to produce, disseminate and create ‘impact’ is not limited to those beholden to the system of academic observation and evaluation, however. The pressure to assert an individual identity through publication on social media is at least as great: acts in which users are perhaps more willingly complicit. Yet there is an important sense in which this declaration is delivered with a wry smile, perhaps the equivalent of a winking face emoji or an accompanying meme of a playful cat. Lyotard, it seems, was always good-natured in combat even when delivering the most virulent of critiques, or when playing with an interlocutor’s ideas and assertions. Yet he is also deadly serious:

One writes because one does not know what one would want to say, to try and find out. But today’s slogan is: Publish or perish! If you are not public, you disappear; if you are not exposed as much as possible, you don’t exist. Your no-man’s land is interesting only if expressed and communicated. Heavy pressures are put on silence, to give birth to its expression.²

For Lyotard, philosophizing is an ongoing act, a mode of constant re-evaluation, deliberately not arriving at a final word or theoretical position. Too often what is required by the media is something neatly packaged, easily reducible to multiple formats and speedy distribution: Lyotard’s work resists this simplistic push for uniformity, for univocality. It is in this spirit that the present collection is set before you as a diverse range of narratives drawn from varied sources, sometimes playful, often illuminating, but rarely giving the neatly packaged philosophical maxim you might long for. This introduction will present the rationale for its existence, the choices and exclusions made, and give some contextual background to both the material and the lines of thought to which they attest.

When researching for the short critical biography of Lyotard’s life and work, Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Lives (Reaktion, 2017), I came across many sources which were either out of print, hard to find or untranslated. This included a good number of interviews and debates which helped to re-orientate my reading of Lyotard’s work and give a clearer idea of the complex contexts in which he was working. A selection of those is printed here but it is by no means exhaustive – the definite article of the title suggested by the publishers is one I accept only as temporary, not definitive: ‘The interviews and debates’ (i.e. the only one for now, at least). For those readers less familiar with Lyotard’s life and work it may be useful to give a brief outline, and it is into this timeline that information about some of the interviews and debates collected will be inserted, with a necessary detour to explain some of the missing content. Lyotard was born in 1924 in Versailles on the outskirts of Paris to a lower-middle-class family. His education followed a traditional academic path to the point where he applied unsuccessfully to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, and instead continued his study of philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1950 he was posted to teach philosophy in Algeria, then a French département; at that point he was married with one child and had finally achieved the competitive agrégation, necessary to teach philosophy in the final year of lycée and at university. This is where the traditional career path stalls; he continued to teach, moving from Algeria to mainland France (La Flèche, Sarthe) in 1952, now with two daughters, and eventually back to Paris in 1959. In itself this geographical path is not unusual, in particular the eventual return to the capital, which exerted a dominance over the philosophical and wider cultural life of France. Lyotard’s engagement with the traditional institutions of academic philosophy came late, however, delayed by more than a decade of intense political activism, in particular with the group Socialisme ou Barbarie, more details of which will be given below.

Although Lyotard had written a short book on phenomenology in 1954, an introduction that has remained in print in French for more than six decades, his first ‘real’ book of philosophy was published in 1971. Titled Discourse, Figure this was Lyotard’s thesis for the higher doctorate, the doctorat d’État which he presented for examination before a jury which included his contemporaries the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (b. 1925) and the experimental writer Michel Butor (b. 1926). In May 1972 the fortnightly literary review La Quinzaine littéraire responded to the publication of Discourse, Figure with a short interview with the author, included here (Ch. 5), accompanied by an illustration of Paul Klee’s Fragmenta Veneris, showing an abstracted depiction of limbs: a fragmented or dismembered body. This image appears as one of several plates included in Discourse, Figure – though what is odd is that Lyotard correctly reproduces the image in portrait format whereas La Quinzaine littéraire makes the hackneyed mistake, sometimes jokingly applied to modern art, of reproducing it the ‘wrong way round’. Had it been Lyotard’s version which rotated the canvas, it might have been more understandable: Discourse, Figure plays frequently with notions of rotation, reversal and reorientation in relation to perspectival representation and Freudian workings of desire. Whichever way round it is shown, Klee’s image is analogous with Lyotard’s description of the book as given in the interview: on the one hand ‘broken apart and in a somewhat inconsistent state; indefinitely referencing outside itself’ whilst also setting up a ‘field of concepts’.³

In the same issue of La Quinzaine littéraire is a short untitled review of the book by Deleuze (Ch. 6) whose Anti-Oedipus, the desire-fuelled revolution written with Félix Guattari, had just been launched in March 1972. Deleuze affirms the beauty of the book’s performance as a ‘critique of the signifier’, undoing the presumptions of signification, breaking open a Saussurean system to the hidden figural energies within discourse: ‘And Lyotard does not even say all this, he shows it, he makes us see it, he makes it visible and mobile.’⁴ Without doubt the construction and organization of the book, together with its detailed self-reflexive investigation into the roles of its component parts – the title of one section is ‘The Line and The Letter’ – show its refusal of the oppositional thinking on which conventions of signification had become based, and also the limitations of Jacques Derrida’s overly textual approach to deconstruction.

Lyotard had worked on these complex reflections on the work and workings of Freud, Frege, Hegel, Husserl, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and linguists such as Benveniste and Jakobson, whilst teaching at Nanterre during the tumultuous period of the events of 1968. It was out of the crucible of 1967–9 that these names became something other than a sum of their parts in Lyotard’s work with a decidedly revolutionary approach to the material. As Deleuze makes apparent in his review, it is the visual and the textual which dance together in Lyotard’s writing, imbricated as they are in one another; consequently the roles of artists and artworks are integral to its workings. This fascination with the revolutionary potential of art to thought is clearly evidenced in the earliest interview reprinted in this collection (Ch. 4), undertaken for the second issue of VH 101, a magazine focused on art, culture and theory. The interview, by Brigitte Devismes, editorial assistant and former student of Lyotard’s at Nanterre, is accompanied by two photomontages by Lyotard. Whilst not worthy of any particular artistic comment, what these images demonstrate is Lyotard’s practical involvement in the material with which he was engaged, an involvement that extended to an interest in experimental film during the same period, including the creation of short films on 16mm and the influential essay ‘Acinema’ (1973).⁵ Both this interview from 1970 and the later essay on film were included in the two collections Lyotard published in 1973: Des dispositifs pulsionnels and Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud, the latter including a more situated series of evidential reflections on the political situation in France in the aftermath of 1968, though still mobile and refusing any form of systemization.

In editing the present collection an attempt has been made to represent the span of Lyotard’s philosophical life: from the time of Discourse, Figure, published when Lyotard was aged forty-seven, to Signed Malraux, his late book on André Malraux, published in 1996; Lyotard’s untimely death from leukaemia came eighteen months later in April 1998, at age seventy-three. The nature of the material available varies greatly, however, becoming much more extensive in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of his growing international reputation. As a consequence, the selection made from the 1970s draws by necessity on a diverse range of publications and situations, giving a sometime fragmentary impression if read in sequence. To lessen the potential disorientation created by rapid shifts and changes between sources in these sections, the introductory information provided in the original publications has been retained, where applicable, and footnotes added to give further context. Lyotard writing a joint letter with Gilles Deleuze to the journal Les Temps modernes in protest at the undue influence of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the workings of the philosophy department at the University of Paris-VIII in 1975, for example, will need some explanation for many readers (see Chapter 8). In fact, Lyotard and Deleuze were close colleagues in the philosophy department of Paris-VIII, both at Vincennes (1970–80) and after its move to Saint-Denis (see Chapter 11), until they both retired from the French University system in 1987. Lyotard continued to teach internationally, including part-time positions in the United States; his final academic home at Emory University, Atlanta, is represented here by the eulogy voiced by his colleague, the writer Philippe Bonnefis (Ch. 2) with whom he discussed his book on Malraux (Ch. 25): ‘Malraux was to have been for me a way to access politics through the mourning of politics.’⁶

What has been retained is a chronological ordering of the main texts; whilst this might seem to run against Lyotard’s refusal of linear – in particular implicitly progressive – narratives, it seemed unnecessary to further disrupt the complex interweaving of events, recollections, reconsiderations and rebuttals which make up many of the documents. The most significant omission, however, is any significant testimony to Lyotard’s participation in the intense political debates which pre-date 1968, Discourse, Figure or the collections of 1973. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Lyotard was an active member of the far-left political group ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ (‘Socialism or Barbarity’, a phrase attributed to the Marxist theorist and activist Rosa Luxemburg, though the group is known usually as Socialism or Barbarism). Still little known in the anglophone world, except among some left-wing political activists and Marxist researchers, Socialisme ou Barbarie (S. ou B.) was led principally by the émigré Greek political thinker Cornelius Castoriadis. The group and its journal of the same name were founded by Castoriadis and the philosopher Claude Lefort in 1949 as a breakaway from the Trotskyist Fourth International and led through several reorientations of its political position in relation to interpretations of Marxism and autogestion (worker’s self-management). Disagreement was common, with resulting fractures and the departure of many, including Lefort in 1958 and Lyotard in 1964, before its eventual demise: the fortieth and final issue of the journal appeared in 1965 and a final typescript circulaire (circular) delivered to readers and subscribers in 1967.

Lyotard’s involvement with S. ou B. began in 1952, following his return to mainland France after two years teaching in Constantine, Algeria. He owed his political militancy to his time there, a result of both his experiences of the quasi-colonial situation and the crucial political friendship with Pierre Souyri. Lyotard and Souyri became members of S. ou B. in 1954, together with their respective partners Andrée-May and Mireille, and Lyotard began writing on the developing situation in Algeria, writing twelve articles for the journal between 1956 and 1963. When the group splintered, however, he and Souyri both joined the breakaway group, named Pouvoir ouvrier (Workers’ power), with whom Lyotard remained until 1966. In the 1994 interview with Richard Kearney (see Chapter 22), Lyotard describes how S. ou B.’s ‘main objects of critique were dogmatic Marxism, Stalinist politics, the class structure of “Soviet” society, the inconsistencies of the Trotskyist position and post-war capitalism’.⁷ For over a decade Lyotard was engrossed in the debates that fuelled S. ou B. and its practical activities which included ‘co-operating with workers, wage-earners and students with a view to creating self-management groups’.⁸ It was an experience that inflected all his subsequent work. The importance of this cannot be overstated and must be reiterated here in order to counteract the lack of consideration common in anglophone scholarship; it might be reasonable to say that this involvement in militant politics is an essential part of what makes Lyotard different from his contemporaries.

Fellow S. ou B. member Daniel Blanchard, writing in the French edition of the S. ou B. anthology, reflects on the ways in which this isolated militant group differed from the large organizations of the left at the time: repeatedly attacking the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union to which the French Communist Party and unions paid obedience.⁹ He also warns against the ways in which claims for its importance are now being built retroactively, particularly in France, with the risk of misrepresenting its marginal position in the 1950s and 1960s: the group had ‘remained invisible, or nearly so, and yet now, once dead, it has become mythical’.¹⁰ I am arguing for the importance of Lyotard’s experiences with the group and the centrality of debate to its existence. However, I am not seeking to contribute to Blanchard’s worries about the myth-making of S. ou B., but rather wish to emphasize the background against which Lyotard’s later philosophical writings need to be understood. The emphasis on collectivist approaches should also be noted. All articles written for the journal were debated and edited collectively, despite being published under individual names, albeit for the most part pseudonyms.

What remains, however, is a significant shift in Lyotard’s position. Sometimes it is mistakenly characterized as an abandonment of politics or even a turn against the values of the left, but it remains an unavoidable, historically informed change in his thinking. It is the refusal to continue to believe that grand historical or political claims can be made. It is the aspect of his work that has been most reductively recounted through the aphoristic summary, quoted in isolation from The Postmodern Condition (1979) – ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’. It is a quotation that should be rendered in context: ‘Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it.’¹¹ Lyotard is here defining his use of the term ‘postmodern’ for the purposes of this short ‘report on knowledge’: the book’s subtitle, itself an abbreviation of the title as commissioned by the president of the council of universities of the provincial government of Quebec: Report on the problems of knowledge in the most developed industrial societies.¹² A publication which, rather surprisingly, became a best-seller (in academic terms) and launched Lyotard’s international recognition to a previously unanticipated level. For our purposes here, however, it is worth noting that the claim regarding the attitude towards so-called metanarratives (métarécits), alternatively translated as grand narratives or overarching stories, is not necessarily stating Lyotard’s own position but is rather part of his observations on the state of knowledge in technologically advanced societies, at the time of writing in 1979. And yet, in these interviews the reader will find that this is also the explanation given by Lyotard as regards his turn from Marxism in an ideological sense. A turn away from the belief in the alternative propagated by S. ou B. and its support of workers’ self-determination, and in spite of the positive response he had to the events of May 1968, positive in m...