Jean-François Lyotard Book order

'Nobody knows how to write'. Thus opens this carefully nuanced and accessible collection of essays by one the most important writer-philosophers of the twentieth century, Jean-Fran ois Lyotard (1924-1998). First published in French, in 1991 as Lectures d'enfance, and investigating Lyotard's idea of infantia, or, the infancy of thought that resists all forms of development, be it human or technological, these essays have never been printed as a collection in English. Each essay responds to works by writers and thinkers who are central to cultural modernism, such as James Joyce; Franz Kafka; Hannah Arendt; Jean-Paul Sartre; and Sigmund Freud. Although published between 1986 and 1991 in several different English publications, the pieces are no longer in print and have been given scant critical attention as a cohesive body of thought. This volume - with a new introduction and afterword by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford - contextualises Lyotard's thought and demonstrates his continued relevance today.

First published in 1974, Libidinal Economy is a major work of twentieth century continental philosophy. In it, Lyotard develops the idea of economies driven by libidinal 'energies' or 'intensities' which he claims flow through all structures, such as the human body and political or social events. He uses this idea to interpret a diverse range of subjects including political economy, Marxism, sexual politics, semiotics and psychoanalysis. Lyotard also carries out a broad critique of philosophies of desire, as expounded by Deleuze and Guattari, Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault and de Sade.

This remarkable posthumous work by one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century engages Augustine's Confessions, one of the major canonical works of world literature and the very paradigm of autobiography as a definable genre of writing. Lyotard approaches his subject by returning to his earliest phenomenological training.

Over the past decade, radical questioning of the grounds of Western epistemology has revealed that some antinomies of the aesthetic experience can be viewed as a general, yet necessarily open, model for human understanding. This book is a rigorous explication de texte of a central text for this thesis, Kant's Analytic of the Sublime.

"In a wide-ranging discussion the author examines the philosophy of Kant, Heidegger, Adorno and Derrida and looks at the works of modernist and postmodernist artists such as Cezanne, Debussy and Boulez. Lyotard addresses issues such as time and memory, the sublime and the avant-garde, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Throughout his discussion he considers the close but problematic links between modernity, progress and humanity, and the transition to postmodernity. Lyotard claims that it is the task of literature, philosophy and the arts to bear witness to and explain this difficult transition." "This important contribution to aesthetic and philosophical debates will be of great interest to students in philosophy, literary and cultural theory and politics."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In The Differend, Lyotard subjects to scrutiny- from the particular perspective of his notion of 'differend' (difference in the sense of dispute)- the turn of all Western philosophies toward language; the decline of metaphysics; the present intellectual retreat of Marxism; the hopes raised and mostly dashed, by theory; and the growing political despair. Taking his point of departure in an analysis of what Auschwitz meant philosophically, Lyotard attempts to sketch out modes of thought for our present.

This book explores science and technology, makes connections between these epistemic, cultural, and political trends, and develops profound insights into the nature of our post-modernity. Many definitions of postmodernism focus on its nature as the aftermath of the modern industrial age when technology developed. This book extends that analysis to postmodernism by looking at the status of science, technology, and the arts, the significance of technocracy, and the way the flow of information is controlled in the Western world.