Rereading Jean-François Lyotard: Essays on His Later Works

241 Pages·2013·2.071 MB·English

by  Heidi Bickis and Rob Shields (eds.)

ReReading
Jean-FRançois LyotaRd

Rereading
Jean-François Lyotard
essays on His Later Works
edited by
Heidi Bickis and RoB sHieLds
University of Alberta, Canada
First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright © Heidi Bickis and Rob Shields 2013
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Rereading Jean-Francois Lyotard : essays on his later
works.
1. Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 1924-1998. 2. Lyotard,
Jean-Francois, 1924-1998--Influence.
I. Bickis, Heidi. II. Shields, Rob, 1961-
194-dc23
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rereading Jean-François Lyotard : essays on his later works / [edited] by Heidi Bickis and
Rob Shields.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-3567-9 (hardback) 1. Lyotard,
Jean-François, 1924-1998. I. Bickis, Heidi. II. Shields, Rob, 1961-
B2430.L964R47 2012
194--dc23
2012024263
ISBN: 978-1-4094-3567-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-3156-0554-8 (ebk)
Contents
List of Figures vii
Preface ix
Notes on Contributors xi
1 New and Late Encounters: An Introduction 1
Heidi Bickis
2 The Affective Economy of the Lyotardian Archive 11
Antony Hudek
3 Lyotard’s St Paul 25
Matthew Pateman
4 Anthro-paralogy: Antihumanism in Lyotard’s Late Works 43
Matthew R. McLennan
5 The Weight of Writing: Lyotard’s Anti-Aesthetic in ‘À l’écrit bâté’ 55
Stephen Barker
6 Presentation to ‘À l’écrit bâté’
Lettre perpétuel – Perpetual Letter 69
Dolorès Lyotard, translated by Rob Shields
7 ‘To Burdened Writing’
[À l’écrit bâté] 73
Jean-François Lyotard, translated by Stephen Barker
from Misère de la philosophie (2000a)
8 A Late Performance: Intimate Distance (Yingmei Duan) 81
Kiff Bamford
9 Can Sustainability be Domesticated? 97
Margret Grebowicz
10 Oblique Views and Heterodox Spaces: Le Corbusier’s Conventus 107
Rob Shields
vi Rereading Jean-François Lyotard
11 Lyotard and Irigaray on Eros, Infancy and Birth:
the Dissymmetrical Horizons of Being Between 119
Rachel Jones
12 The Politics of Creation: Lyotard, Castoriadis and Malraux 137
Neal Curtis
13 Voicing Nihilism: Lyotard on Malraux 155
Keith Crome
14 Testimony and the Affect-Phrase 169
Ashley Woodward
15 Lyotard’s ‘Critical’ ‘Aesthetics’ 189
Peter W. Milne
Bibliography 209
Index 219
List of Figures
Figure 8.1 Kiff Bamford, Intimate Distance (Yingmei Duan),
Video, 2010 (© Kiff Bamford) 84
Figure 10.1 La Tourette, Eveux-sur-Arbresle, France
(sketch by R. Shields) 108
Figure 10.2 Le Corbusier – La Tourette Convent Axonometric
(sketch by R. Shields) 109

Preface
In February 2011, a small group of junior and senior scholars from around the
world – UK, US, Iran, Turkey, Belgium, New Zealand, and Canada – gathered
together for a conference on the work of Jean-François Lyotard at the University
of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. The conference – ‘Rewriting Lyotard’ – was
jointly organized by the editors of this book with Peter W. Milne (Seoul National
University) and Kent Still (Emory University) as part of an effort towards bringing
together the disparate community of scholars working on and with Lyotard’s
thought. The French philosopher has received limited attention in the English
speaking academy with the exception of a couple of conferences/symposiums
held shortly after Lyotard’s death. The omission is made more apparent by
the widespread turn to Deleuze in the past decade and an ongoing attention to
Lyotard’s other contemporaries such as Derrida and Foucault. We find it odd
that this fascinating, intriguing (and always difficult) thinker, relevant to many
of the topics social and cultural theorists concern themselves with (for example,
confession, the body, affect, the subject, modernity and so on) is often passed over.
‘Rewriting Lyotard’ brought together 30 presenters and another 10 to 20
audience members. The conference papers addressed topics such as art and
aesthetics, modernity, the body, politics, music, and literature. On the Saturday
night, Sarah Wilson presented by proxy the first Canadian screening of a film that
featured Lyotard in conversation with French artist Jacques Monory. This collection
includes revised versions of some papers developed from presentations written
for the conference. Others will be featured in a special journal issue of Cultural
Politics. The conference materials are archived online at Lyotardproject.org.
The conference was funded in great part by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council Aid to Conferences and Workshops and the Henry Marshall
Tory Chair. We are grateful for additional support we received from the University
of Alberta’s Vice-President of Research, the Faculty of Arts Conference Grant,
the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, Imre Szeman, the Departments of
Sociology, Philosophy, Art and Design and English and Film Studies. We would
also like to acknowledge the support and interest of the Consulate of France.
Thank-you also to Paule Zajdermann for the cover image. Finally, we would
like to thank Dolorès Lyotard for generously responding to our inquiries about
Lyotard’s works at various stages of this project. We are especially grateful for her
contribution to this collection, a ‘Presentation’ to ‘À l’écrit bâté’, and a copy of
one of Lyotard’s manuscript pages.
There is still work to be done, a need to ‘link with’ Lyotard and his heterogeneous
writings that offer a rich set of provocations, ideas, threads of thought and concepts
(of a sort), and that invite us to think differently and most importantly, think what