Date: Wed, 26 Nov 1997 08:06:46 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: [Fwd: The scandal of obligation]


Further thoughts on #202

I appears that Lyotard sets up a number of binary oppositions in this
passage:
philosophical/intellectual, differend/genre, impossible idioms/ecstasy of
sacrifice, 
humor /politics of false supermen.

Both William McClure and Mark Bowes have been commenting in recent posts
about reflective judgment/determinant judgment in a similar way.  My question
is whether this can be mapped onto the schematic mapped in #202.  In other
words, is a philosophical application of determinant judgment possible?  Are
there times when reflective judment is merely intellectual?  Can we say that
bearing witness to the differend and linking genres is what philosophy does?

Also, Ariosto seems to imply that there is a way for philosophy to engage the
"residue" without resorting to "useless bathos" and that a possible defense
for Bataille may lie along these lines.  Is it possible to defend Bataille as
a philosopher?  Or, does his philosophy swerve in the direction of
dangerously human, all too human politics?

Other questions

Can anyone shed more light on Lyotard's references to the Grand Guignol or
Ergeinis?

William refers to page 278 of a book entitled "Reading Lyotard". Do you mean
"The Lyotard Reader"?   There is a passage on that page that seems to relate
to your discussion:  The self does not proceed from the other; the other
befalls the self.   One thought that occurs her is that if alterity is not
limited to persons as Levinas seems to do, but extended to the face of
things, (in other words, objects too have a face and their own alterity -
everything from arcades to dilapidated lawn chairs) then it might be argued
that our interiority is generated via "chocks" (as Benjamin describes it in
his essay on Baudelaire).  In other words, the alterity of the other as other
befalls and shocks the self.  These shocks further our recognition and
increase our interiority.  They also further our alienation.  I hope I am not
going off on too much of a tangent here?  

Hugh, would you give the section numbers of  the "weird" sections at the end
of "The Differend" to which you were referring?

Ariosto - thanks for the reference to Cezanne - I'll check it out - From what
I can tell- most of Lyotard's writing on art is more connected with modernism
(NOT POSTMODERNISM!) and twentieth century art.  Translated into English are
a study of Duchamp and another on Francis.  There is an essay in the Reader
on Barnett Newman.  There are quite a number of other monographs on
contempory artists that are still untranslated Also, he wrote some notes for
a show entitled "les Immateriaux".  This is discussed in some detail in an
essay on the Postmodern Sublime by Paul Crowther in the book
"Judging Lyotard".