Jean-François Lyotard Quotes

Philosophy is possible only because the material ensemble called “man” is endowed with very sophisticated software. But also, this software, human language, is dependent on the condition of the hardware. Now: the hardware will be consumed in the solar explosion, taking philosophical thought with it (along with all other thought) as it goes up in flames. So the problem of the technological sciences can be stated as follows: how can we provide this software with a hardware that is independent of the conditions of life on earth? That is: how can we make thought without a body possible?

Here is the question: is a legitimization of the social bond, a just society, feasible in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific activity? What would such a paradox be?

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production...

Already in the last few decades, economic powers have reached the point of imperiling the stability of the state through new forms of the circulation of capital that go by the generic name of multinational corporations.

What is new in all this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions are losing their attraction. And it does not look as though they will be replaced, at least not on their former scale.

Legitimation is the process by which a legislator is authorized to promulgate such a law as a norm.

Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable, let us activate the different and save the honor of the name.

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new product.

True knowledge, in this perspective, is always indirect knowledge; it is composed of reported statements, that are incorporated into metanarratives of a subject that source their legitimacy.

…Scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to, and in competition and conflict with, another kind of knowledge, which I will call narratives in the interest of simplicity.

Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game.

In the discussion we had last year at Siegen, in this regard, emphasis was put on the sort of emptiness that has to be obtained from mind and body by a Japanese warrior-artist when doing calligraphy, by an actor when acting: the kind of suspension of ordinary intentions of mind associated with habitus, or arrangements of the body. It’s at this cost, said Glenn and Andreas, … that a brush encounters the “right” shapes, that a voice and a theatrical gesture are endowed with the “right” tone and look. The soliciting of emptiness, this evacuation—very much the opposite of overweening, selective identificatory activity—doesn’t take place without some suffering. … The body and mind have to be free of burdens for grace to touch us.

The decline of narrative can be seen as an effect of the blossoming of techniques and technologies since the Second World War, Which has shifted emphasis from the ends of action to this means; it can also be seen as an effect of the redeployment of advanced liberal capitalism after its retreat under the protection of Keynesianism during the period of 1930-1960, a renewal that has eliminated the communist alternative and valorized the individual enjoyment of goods and services.

The body might be considered the hardware of the complex technical device that is human thought.

I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives.