File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9810, message 41


Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 15:36:27 -0500
Subject: Re: PMC:  What is Postmodernism:  A Demand


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Donald Turner wrote:
> 
> What does art that presents a "stronger sense of the unpresentable" (p.81)
> look like?  Are there examples of this today?

	I'm not sure if the "look like" part of the question is well-formed in
this instance.
	For Lyotard's treatment of this question in the work of a contemporary
painter, please see Sigmar Polke, _Transit_.  The book includes plates
of the artist's work, in addition to Lyotard's essay "Vorstellung,
Darstellung, Undarstellbarkeit: Presenting the Unpresentable : the
Sublime".  Also instructive might be an article by Meyer (or is it
Meier: I can't remember) on Mapplethorpe's photography in Abelove, et
al. (eds.), _The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader".  (This may be read
more fruitfully in conjunction with Lyotard's "The General Line", which
appears in both the _Political Writings_ and _Postmodern Fables_.)

> What does Lyotard's "war on totality" (p.82) and rejection of the whole
> mean for ethics?  Are traditional grounding ethical systems also rejected?

In this regard, I think you will have to deal with Lyotard's
relationship to the ethics of Emmanual Levinas (Lyotard's essay in
Bernasconi and Critchley (eds.), _Re-Reading Levinas_ would provide a
good starting point).  Lyotard was one of several philosophers who
"encountered" Levinas in a way I can't describe.  Levinas is certainly
not easy reading, and his philosophy is considerably complicated by his
receptivity to Derrida's critiques (especially "Violence and
Metaphysics" in _Writing and Difference_) and his extended relationship
with Blanchot, both of which provide ample examples of what his
"non-allergic reaction to the Other" could be.
	However, the question is the rejection of totality in relation to
ethics, so I would have to say that this ought to be read in conjunction
with Levinas's work (particularly _Totality and Infinity_) if you want
to have anything like an answer to a question as broad as the one you
have asked.  If you would like, I could try to summarize (although
summarizing Levinas tends to give me severe headaches: I haven't read
him enough to feel really comfortable doing that, and his style, which I
can only describe as reiterative, makes me feel guilty for summarizing).
 I found Colin Davis's _Levinas: an Introduction" an excellent starting
point--extremely concise.
	As for "traditional grounding ethical" systems, if I understand the
question correctly, the answer is that they are rejected without reservation.

> How can live in a manner that "invent[s] allusions to the conceivable that
> cannot be represented?" (82)  What does such a life look like?  What is the
> human relationship to those "Ideas of which no presentation is possible?"
> (78)

	Here Lyotard is speaking in the idiom of Kant's _Critique of Judgment_
and all the problems it has bequeathed.  I believe that the Introduction
to the _Critique_ is probably the best resource.  I will see if I can
dig up the copy I started reading and provide a summary.
	All this highlights Lyotard's adlinguisticty.  Shall we talk about it?
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