File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9810, message 38


Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 17:30:34 +0000
Subject: Re: PMC:  What is Postmodernism?:  An Interruption, An Eruption


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	Aufklaerung is the German word for Enlightenment.  In particular, it
was the subject of a discussion in a Berlin newspaper in the late
eighteenth century that went under the title of "What is Enlightenment?"
 Notable contributors to that discussion included Moses Mendehlson and
Immanuel Kant, whose essay on the subject defined enlightenment as
"humanity's exit from self-imposed nonage."  (I will have to lay my
hands on a German collection of some of the contributions.  Also notable
is Foucault's late piece under the same title focusing on Kant's essay.)
	In particular, the word Aufklaerung has the adjective klar at its root,
which is a German word for clear in the broad possible sense.  One of
the meanings sedimented into Aufklaerung, often attributed to Habermas's
perspective, is that of clarity or transparency, particularly in
relation to language.  I am very fond of quoting Derrida's commentary on
this matter in his "Afterword: Towards An Ethic of Discussion" in
_Limited, Inc._ which is precisely a questioning of the role of
reiteration and repetition in language (i.e. whether meaning other than
the intended content represent a *deviation* from the ideality of
language or whether the notion of dissemination which Derrida has
advanced is internal to the structure of language, particularly in its
written form):

	"These things are difficult, I admit; their formulation can be
disconcerting.  But would there be so many problems and
misunderstandings without this complexity and without these paradoxes? 
One shouldn't complicate things for the pleasure of complicating, but
one should also never simplify or pretend to be sure of such simplicity
where there is none.  If things were simple, word would have gotten
round, as you say in English.  There you have one of my mottos, one
quite appropriate for what I take to be the spirit of the type of
"enlightenment" granted our time.  Those who wish to simplify at all
costs and who raise a hue and cry about obscurity because they do not
recognize the unclarity of their good old Aufklaerung are in my eyes
dangerous dogmatists and tedious obscurantists.  No less dangerous (for
instance, in politics) are those who wish to purify at all costs."  (p. 119)

The question of complexity, already at stake, and put into play
explicitly in this passage, is one of the affinities between Derrida and
Lyotard, who provides some formulation of the question in _The Inhuman_
and _Postmodern Fables_.  Derrida lays into the idea of language as a
mode of transport or transmission rather ruthlessly and irresistibly in
"Signature, Event, Context," the opening essay of _Limited, Inc._.  The
idea of reiteration as the persistence of alterity in repeated phenomena
is what I take to be a conception of the event which Derrida and Lyotard share.
	Another link between Lyotard and Derrida would be their insistence upon
theories of language which maintain language as an event, despite
anxieties about the consequences for idealized and supposedly
transcendental conceptions of justice.  Both subscribe to rigorous
theories demonstrating the incompatibility of the idealized (demanded)
result with the structure of the phenomenon such that something such as
justice cannot be determined as the teleology of these phenomena.  In
short, I would say that Lyotard and Derrida share a conception of the
linguistic events which refuses to guarantee something such as justice
and even opens itself to the impossibility of justice, as defined by
principles so-called Englightenment theorists would like to elevate not
just to transcendental status but to the status of overriding necessity.
 (I take this to be one motivation for Lyotard's later interest in
Kant's theorization of the sublime in aesthetics as that which is beyond
prior determination and even refusing of representation.)
	In this sense, Enlightenment will be neither an exit nor a project
brought to completion.  It will be an impossible task undertaken by
tools which will not be simple instruments of our will.  This
formulation is, of course, rather incomplete and lacking in the rigourr
I so love in Lyotard.  I hope this answer will do in a pinch.

-Bayard

-- 
"Don't give me your poetry, boy, show me your numbers."
-Robert McNamara

"M. Collette" wrote:
> 
> When Lyotard mentions "Aufklarung" on page 72 I am guessing he is
> referring to an aspect of Modernism. Does any one have an English
> translation of this word and how it applies?+
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