File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9712, message 21


Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 09:17:23 -0800 (PST)
From: MATTHEW FRANCIS WETTLAUFER <mattw-AT-sfsu.edu>
Subject: Re: wittgenstein, lyotard, foucault



> Getting back to Lyotard, I think he is a very good reasoner and 
> draws on some of the best, as Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Wittgenstein.

As I was writing to Jon, I don't disagree that Lyotard is a good
reasoner.  But I don't think he would make the same truth claims about
what he is saying that some of the other people you mentioned would.
It's not a matter of being irrational as opposed to rational, because
that opposition is still within the rules of a metaphysics that Lyotard
(and his French contemporaries) would reject.  It is within the rules of
a view which sees language as either logical or figurative (proper or
"improper"!) and Lyotard  (like Derrida) would be the first to say that
such a view of language forgets the Other, is intertwined with a whole
history of forgetting that has had terrible consequences for us.

Lyotard may not be quite as radical in his reading of Nietzsche as, say,
Derrida or Deleuze, in assigning the character of a game of dice to the
production of discourse.  He may, as someone wrote, be appealing to a
gesture in Kant towards recognition of limits.  But I don't think he
would have the same conviction about the possibilities of knowledge that
Kant was working with.

> > With his reference to the Cashinahua, and the
French Constitution,
> he illustrates the the invention of stories (narratives) about who we 
> are which seem essential to the rational animal you mention above, 
> and besides that, there are about a couple of millenia of the the three
> most popular religions of the planet which go on and on.


I'm not sure an appeal to religion is helpful to your argument about Man
being a rational animal!

> 
> One kind of faith practiced by scientists of today, superseded
> others, as in the Enlightenment, and we start operating under new
> metanarratives, like Globalization without being aware.

The faith in science is a conviction stemming from the Enlightenment, and 
is precisely my point.  In critiquing the Enlightenment one is critiquing 
the assertions of science and the truth claims of its practises,
especially those which say that scientific methodology is objective and
not rooted in a particular expression of power and force.

Matt


   

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