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THE POLITICAL ETHICS OF JEAN-FRANCOIS LYOTARD
Abstract
This paper critically analyses the theory of French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist J. F. Lyotard. Jean-Francois Lyotard remains best known for his 1979 study La Condition postmoderne. Lyotard's central concern in the text, the crisis of legitimation, comes to define the postmodern condition. His declared war on "grand narratives" initiates a critical reappraisal of knowledge, aesthetics, and politics in a post-Enlightenment era. Postmodernism, as described by Lyotard, involves a challenge to universality and a rejection of exclusive claims to univocal authority. The "postmodern," as Lyotard contends, encompasses more than an historical period or a style; it refers to a philosophy that recognizes that narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. Dissensus, rather than consensus, is configured as the condition for new possibilities for thinking and living, free from the limits of operational criteria that place thinking and living under an obligation to the status quo. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities, it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. It is in Le Differend where Lyotard more fully articulates this philosophical notion of judgment as phrases in dispute. The concept of the differend allows Lyotard to join two concerns, art and politics. Lyotard's contributions to contemporary continental philosophy are many, with the concept of the differend, meta-narratives, little-narratives, pagan aesthetics, and paralogy becoming permanent entries in the postmodern lexicon. Absence of pre-established rules, in aesthetics, politics, and ethics, and the obligation to honour the differend are Lyotard's most profound contributions to the field of thinking.
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