File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9706, message 121


Subject: Re: Lyotard & Derrida
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 97 17:33:30 +0100
From: Giles Peaker <G.Peaker-AT-derby.ac.uk>


Shawn Wilbur wrote:
>
>> I think Lyotard's system makes less sense as an ethic than as a utopian
>> vision.  He would like to see a world which is as he describes, but he is
>> caught.  He cannot obligate us to share his vision because then he is
>> denying the voice of those who would disagree with him.
>
>Here again, i think, a desire for innocence, for a space in which we 
>would not be implicated. Surely, tolerance is a partisan position. 
>(Didn't (at least) Marcuse make that clear enough?) 

Indeed, and well said.

>What would it mean to be "uncaught"? And does Lyotard, who, it seems to 
>me, is very aware of his own implication, hold out any sort of 
>"uncaughtness" as a possibility? Or is Lyotard's ethics finally related 
>to Derrida's "politics of memory," a "system" by which one consciously 
>shakes one's own ground? Perhaps this itself seems "impossible" or at 
>least immediately impracticable - and perhaps there is a sort of 
>"conscious utopianism" (a willingness to "ground" oneself in that 
>"nowhere") in that, but it would certainly be far from the utopianism of, 
>say, the "utopian socialists," for whom ethics were precisely something 
>to be grounded in a system.

Very interesting. Might one see this in terms of the Ethical as the 
honest encounter with its own impossibility? Or does this lend itself to 
the ethical as 'just' guilt over an inescapable implication? 

More please.

Giles

Giles Peaker
Historical and Theoretical Studies, School of Art and Design
University of Derby. Britannia Mill, Mackworth Road. Derby DE22 3BL (U.K.)
(01332) 622222 ext. 4063    G.Peaker-AT-derby.ac.uk  
Editorial collective:  
Detours and Delays. An Occasional Journal of Aesthetics and Politics.
http://art.derby.ac.uk/~detours/detours.html



   

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