Peter W. Milne

While Lyotard's first book was an introduction to phenomenology, most of the work that follows can be said to openly challenge the limits of phenomenological analysis. This is particularly evident in the well-known writings on the Kantian sublime, which Lyotard reads as a “temporal crisis” that undoes the conscious knowing subject and escapes “experience” in the phenomenological sense. Nonetheless, if this allows him to relate the sublime to Freud's “unconscious affect,” this “crisis” only becom

While references to a "postmodern sublime" were once common in work on Lyotard, the tendency of commentary today, particularly in the English language, is to downplay the role of the postmodern in Lyotard’s writings in order to both avoid confusions with postmodernism and to draw attention to other aspects of his work. In this essay, I revisit the link between the sublime and the postmodern both in order to problematize any too easy association between the two, but also to suggest where somethin

Aesthetics, according to Jean-Francois Lyotard, is characteristic of a particular era and mode of thinking that is associated closely with the Enlightenment and romanticism. Aesthetics is thus linked to subjectivity, and subjectivity, in turn, is linked to a very particular arrangement of time. Contrary to the tendency to speak, perhaps a little too quickly, of the 'postmodern' sublime, this 'contradictory feeling' must, at least initially, be understood as a part of 'modern' aesthetics. The 'su

While Lyotard’s interest in the sublime is well known, his later investigations of the beautiful are much less so. In part this seems to have to do with his own evolving views toward the beautiful as an aesthetic category, which in much of his best-known writings appears mostly to be aligned with representation and thus with Classicism and the Enlightenment. Nonetheless, there is another and more subtle understanding of the beautiful to be found in Lyotard, where it is even found alongside the s

This essay takes as its point of departure a little known text by Jean-Francois Lyotard on art and its relation to global networks of telecommunication in order to explore the possibilities for social and political communities in the context of global capital. Borrowing Heidegger’s notion of an “enframing” (Gestell) of nature by technology, Lyotard inquires into a similar enframing of art, arguing that art, through the very fact that it is an unprogrammable kind of techne, has the power to “susp

본고는 반성에 대한 리오타르의 후기 저작 두 가지를 논한다. 리오타르는 그의 칸트 독해에서 반성 개념에 대해 논한 바 있다. 본고는 그 중 칸트의 숭고미에 대하여 를 리오타르의 보다 이전의 저술인 비인간 에 포함된 에세이, “Si l’on peut penser sans corps” 와 관련하여 논한다. 이는 칸트의 반성에 대한 리오타르의 보다 자세한 논의인 칸트의 숭고미에 대하여 를 보다 넓은 차원에서 이해하고자 하는 시도이다. 이를 위해 본고는 후기 리오타르 사상에서 주요하게 등장하는, 사유와 신체 모두와 연관을 맺는 정념 개념에 주목한다.