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Philosophy Today

Volume 66, Issue 2, Spring 2022
Rereading 'The Differend', Rewriting 'The Differend'

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Displaying: 1-14 of 14 documents


rereading the differend, rewriting the differend
1. Philosophy Today: Volume > 66 > Issue: 2
Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz Rereading The Differend, Rewriting The Differend: Introduction
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2. Philosophy Today: Volume > 66 > Issue: 2
Parisa Vaziri False Differends: Racial Slavery and the Genocidal Example
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The Holocaust serves as a foundational critical resource in postwar philosophy. Interventions into the logic of its exemplarity tend to treat exemplarity as a matter of archival selection that ignores earlier histories of genocide and slavery. A recent example is Alexander Weheliye’s critique of Giorgio Agamben (Habeaus Viscus), which seeks to restitute racial slavery as a theoretically significant moment of biological precarity. In a continuation of this logic, this essay introduces the history of Indian Ocean slavery, which precedes transatlantic slavery but is comparatively lesser known. In doing so, I suggest that complaints against archival selection do not go far enough, for they do not address the problem of a kind of event whose very nature is to destroy its own archive. Reading Jean-François Lyotard’s differend as a critique of the modern genre-supremacy of historiography, I argue that the very ground of historical examples (namely, the demand that there be proof) demonstrates the regressive nature of exemplarity itself.
3. Philosophy Today: Volume > 66 > Issue: 2
Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz Lyotard and the Trolls: The Differend, Sophistry, and the Right
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The present article examines the contemporary stakes and “application” of The Differend with particular attention to neo-fascist denialism, trolling, and alt-right “free speech” discourse. This entails investigating the text’s own rhetorical performance as well as the shifting attitudes towards the sophistic tradition in The Differend and its precursor text, “On the Force of the Weak.” The article thus also takes up in detail three examples of the characteristic sophistic form of the dilemma or double-bind, two of which are drawn from Lyotard: the Holocaust denialist Robert Faurisson’s infamous dilemma of “the witness to the gas-chambers”; the canonical ancient dilemma through which Protagoras wins his fee from his student Euathlus despite seemingly never having helped him win a dispute; and “if you can speak, you can breathe,” the contemporary denialist’s rejoinder to “I can’t breathe.” Lyotard’s arguments are briefly compared to those of other thinkers (Cassin, Rancière, Moten).
4. Philosophy Today: Volume > 66 > Issue: 2
Naomi Waltham-Smith The Silences of Feeling
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In Le différend Lyotard evocatively describes what remains to be heard as “the silence of feeling.” Setting Lyotard’s différend among a differentiated set of incommensurable family resemblances, including Rancière’s mésentente and Derrida’s différance, this paper argues that le différend même, far from coinciding with itself, points to the re-marks and differs from itself, silencing itself by putting itself under a conditional. This is what gives its particular affective quality that is bound up with address and listening. From this perspective, it also becomes possible to develop a new analysis of the silencing said to constitute “cancel culture,” demonstrating that the marketplace-of-ideas model falsely presupposes a fictional equality of audibility and originary purity of speech. What Lyotard teaches us is that free speech cannot but silence itself.
5. Philosophy Today: Volume > 66 > Issue: 2
Simon Wortham To Give the Differend Its Due: Damages/Distress
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For Lyotard, “Auschwitz” is named only as the terrible sign of a differend. However, this paper argues that the dissymmetrical address alluded to in a 1993 lecture given by Lyotard for Amnesty, “The Other’s Rights,” makes possible an alternative legacy found in the very formation of civil politics which might itself “rephrase” this differend otherwise, transforming what may be termed “distress” into “rights” without recourse to the type of (post-war) contractuality that would risk both repressing and compounding a “wrong” by seeking to litigate it.
6. Philosophy Today: Volume > 66 > Issue: 2
Jan Mieszkowski Phrasing, Steining
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The thesis of this essay is that Gertrude Stein plays an important role in The Differend, the brevity of her appearance in the book notwithstanding. Scarcely one and a half pages long, Lyotard’s discussion of a string of quotations from Stein is the most sustained consideration of a female author in his text. Lyotard is intrigued by Stein’s efforts to conceive of la phrase less as a form or building block than an event—or rupture—of language. Characterizing her work as écriture féminine, he cannot decide whether her “vagabond prose” is one genre among others or a uniquely disruptive verbal praxis that unsettles his most basic ideas about phrases and genres. In the final analysis, the precise status of Stein in Lyotard’s thought remains uncertain, as if her unruly presence might simply be a quirk of the signifier stein.
7. Philosophy Today: Volume > 66 > Issue: 2
Erin Graff Zivin Trans-genre Lyotard
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If Lyotard is correct to acknowledge the role of commentary in guarding the kernel of misunderstanding at the heart of the ethical phrase when he exclaims, “but isn’t this exactly what commentary does with ethics! It comments upon it as though it were a misunderstanding, and it thereby conserves in itself its own requirement that there be something ununderstood,” he does not account for that which a trans-generic or transmedial “commentary” might permit, what troubling, unanswerable questions it might raise, what ekphrastic or synesthetic call it might echo. This essay considers several artistic reworkings, interpretations, and distortions of the biblical scene of near sacrifice upon which Lyotard comments, arguing that the exposure of the ethical (phrase or genre) to the explicitly aesthetic (phrase or genre) would bring to the surface something that might be latent, that which is always already there, albeit spectrally.
8. Philosophy Today: Volume > 66 > Issue: 2
Anthony Curtis Adler The Catastrophe to Come: Lyotard’s Differend and the Tragedy of the Ecological
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Taking its departure from The Differend’s analysis of Auschwitz as a sign for the evental character of history, I argue that the looming ecological disaster we now face reveals both the continuing relevance and limits of Lyotard’s thought. While the form of political agency of the catastrophe to come involves a differend, this differend cannot be attached to a proper name, however problematic its mode of signification. This, however, suggests the even greater relevance of Lyotard’s treatment, in the conclusion of The Differend, of capitalism in terms of temporal contradiction, as well as his theorization of oikos and ecology in subsequent works, where he distinguishes between the economic and the ecological. This distinction, I conclude, is rendered problematic by the catastrophe to come, as indeed is any attempt to draw an absolute distinction between “philosophical politics” and mere technocratic management or even to exclude speculation from the heart of philosophy.
9. Philosophy Today: Volume > 66 > Issue: 2
Jacques Lezra The Schema of Institution
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Regress threatens throughout Lyotard’s Differend, especially where the argument appears to make normative ethical or political claims. How a term, a case or an example “links onto” a phrase serves as a way of examining how instituting can be non-regressively grounded, and with what consequences for abstract political subjectivity. The essay offers an alternative to liberal philosophical (Arendt, Nussbaum) and jurisprudential (Marbury v. Madison) schemata of political institution.
book reviews
10. Philosophy Today: Volume > 66 > Issue: 2
John W. M. Krummel Reiner Schürmann, Tomorrow the Manifold; Neo-Aristotelianism and the Medieval Renaissance; and The Philosophy of Nietzsche
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11. Philosophy Today: Volume > 66 > Issue: 2
Walter Brogan Nancy Tuana and Charles E. Scott, Beyond Philosophy: Nietzsche, Foucault, Anzaldúa
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thirty years in the pharmacy: the work of michael naas
12. Philosophy Today: Volume > 66 > Issue: 2
Nicole Anderson The Fox and the Hound: A Double Spiral in the Work of Michael Naas
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13. Philosophy Today: Volume > 66 > Issue: 2
Leonard Lawlor Persuasion and Automation: What Philosophy Might Have Been, in the Thought of Michael Nass
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14. Philosophy Today: Volume > 66 > Issue: 2
Michael Naas Thirty Years in the Pharmacy: Response to Len Lawlor and Nicole Anderson
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