Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 15:47:14 -0700
From: Lois Shawver <rathbone-AT-california.com>
Subject: Re: Das Capital


Brent,

<the contentious question(s) is really:  "what value are lyotard's
writings, removed from their strategic function within the political?" 
and are those displaced writings still, in a significant sense,
"lyotard"?  (signed, lyotard?)> 

Well, I use to theorize about psychotherapy.  And, within the
psychotherapy arena, I feel, that paralogy's agonistics need not be
warlike, or out to defeat the client's position -- let us hope.  And
Lyotard says somewhere, I don'thave time to look forward, but I could
find the quote and you may know it, that the adversary in agonistics
might not be the other person, but the language one is working with.  I
believe that people get themselves in language game scripts, and
therapists need to assist in finding a way out of self-defeating
scripts.

Sure, you can call this "political" but I resist this because there is
another move in psychotherapy that is more frankly political.  There is
a move to turn psychotherapy theory into an arena in which the client is
taught to protest his or her oppression in various conversational
arenas.  I prefer other ways to do therapy, and yet I like to build my
therapy on Lyotard's notion of paralogy, as I'm interpreting it.

..Lois Shawver