Common senses: Deleuze and Lyotard between ground and form

Common senses Deleuze and Lyotard between ground and form Frédéric fruteau de laclos ‘One day, perhaps, this century will be known as Deleuzian.’ This is how Michel Foucault famously opened his admiring review of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. [1] Responding to the praise, Deleuze merely called attention to the hint of humour underlying Foucault’s […]

A Marxist heresy?: Accelerationism and its discontents

Dossier: Future Stasis

In his study of the semantics of historical time, Reinhart Koselleck proposes that ‘two specific determinants’ characterize modernity’s ‘new experience of transition: the expected otherness of the future and, associated with it, the alteration in the rhythm of temporal experience: acceleration, by means of which one’s own time is distinguished from what went before’. If […]

Juddering: On Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure

Discourse, Figure* represents an early transition in Lyotard’s eclectic philosophical development. [1] And yet it has acquired a certain authority in the field of Cultural Studies, attracting enthusiasts who are willing to make significant claims on its behalf: it overturns the distinction between theory and practice, it reconciles aesthetics with both historical materialist and psychoanalytical […]

72 Reviews

REVIEWS Paradise postponed David Schweickart, Against Capitalism, Cambridge and Paris, Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de I’Homme, 1993. xiii + 387 pp., £40.00 hb., 0 521 41851 8. Despite a dismal economic performance since its resurgence in the late 1970s, it is currently fashionable to be for capitalism. Throughout the […]

64 Reviews

REVIEWS AVANT-TARD Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Oxford, Polity Press, 1991. viii + 216pp., £35 hb, 0 7456 0772 1 NorbertElias, Time: An Essay, translated in part from the German by Edmund Jephcott, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1992. 216pp., £35 hb,O 631 157980 Is it ever too […]

54 Reviews

REVIEWS Isidor Feinstein Stone, The Trial of Socrates, London, Cape, 1988, xi + 282pp, £12.95 hb, ISBN 022402591-0 Near the end of his life 1. F. Stone turned away from the hidden history of US politics to look at an older story, the trial of Socrates. Always a defender of democracy and freedom of speech, […]

Svelte Discourse’ and the Philosophy of Caution

‘Svelte Discourse’ and the Philosophy of Caution Stuart Sim Recently, Radical Philosophy was offered a piece by JeanFrancois Lyotard, one of the leading lights of the postmodernist movement, entitled ‘Svelte Discourse and the Posunodern Question’. The piece came not from Lyotard himself but from his translator, Mark S. Roberts. So odd did this particular piece […]

Lyotard and the Politics of Antifoundationalism

Lyotard and the Politics of Antifou ndational ism Stuart Sim 11 An increasingly important trend in recent philosophy has been antifoundationalism: the rejection of the search for 10gical1y-consistent, self-evidently true “grounds” for philosophical discourse, and the substitution of ad hoc tactical manoeuvres as justification for what are quite often eccentric lines of argument. Antifoundationalism is […]

British Society for the History of Philosophy; Philosophers for Peace; The Question of Postmodernity; Chomsky Smear Campaign; Tomin; Royal Institute Lectures

News British Society for the History of Philosophy $ Every few years since the war, a British Society for the History of something-or-other has been set up. This wlll form an interesting study for the future historian of academe, as reveallng in its way as the flurry of scientific, phllosophical and llterary societies in early […]

Jean-François Lyotard, 1924–1998

Obituary Jean-François Lyotard, 1924–1998As a boy, he wanted to be a Dominican monk, a painter, or perhaps a historian. Whilst he was not afraid of poverty, chastity was not for him. He had no artistic talent, and his poor memory made him an unlikely historian. And so he became the philosopher who died of cancer […]

The sublime from Lyotard to Schiller: Two readings of Kant and their political significance

The sublime from Lyotard to Schiller Two readings of Kant and their political significance Jacques rancière I will here offer a few reflections on a paradoxical object that Jean-François Lyotard puts at the centre of aesthetic theory: the aesthetic of the sublime. Two closely interconnected questions will be raised: What makes this theoretical construction possible? […]

Theory: (Madness of)

Dossier: From Structure to Rhizome: Transdisciplinarity in French Thought (2)

Forty years or so after it initially rose as a rather new name for a rather new thing, theory is still an obtruse signifier, troubling and floating, requiring we go back to basics. Theory as we most often understand it today is the name given by the English-speaking intellectual community to a certain type of […]