From: "Mary Murphy  and Eric Salstrand" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: The Intractable
Date: Mon, 6 May 2002 22:53:56 -0500


All,

I have owned a copy of "Postmodern Fables" since it was first published and
have read all the essays at least twice. Yet today when I re-read the essay
"Unbeknownist" I felt like I was reading it for the first time.

Even though Lyotard never formulated a system, he remains a very systematic
thinker. I am impressed with the way he develops diverse concepts such as
the sublime. the enfans, the inhuman,anamnesis, figural and dispositif.
They all bear the marks of what Wittgenstein called "family resemblances".
Lyotard develops a loose confederation of singularities which nevertheless
continue to modify one another. Each one causes ripple effects to occur
within the mind. Echo effects of a deep reverberation.

What Lyotard calls the intractable in this essay is both the unruly and the
unmanageable; something that resists being understood as much as it resists
being communicated.  Lyotard links it with forgetting. He writes: "all
politics is a politics of forgetting, and that nonforgetting (which is not
memory) eludes politics.

Politics signifies the attempt to bring about a union or a solidarity, an
ordering of the polis. In doing so, it can only attempt to silence the
thing that resists being coordinated with the system, that refuses
development, containment, and modification. That thing is what Lyotard
names the intractable. It is simultaneously our great curse and our great
hope. Lyotard writes:

"If the thing is not manageable politically, it is because it is outside
the chain.  If we seek to link it onto the chain, which is the whole
business of politics, it remains unlinked and only inspires more
unleashing. Revolutions, all revolutions, are attempts to approach it, to
make the community more faithful to what, unbeknownst to it, inhabits it;
at the same time, revolutions attempt to regulate, to suppress, to efface
the effects that the thing engenders. There is a fidelity and an infidelity
in the fact of revolution."

Just as the mind forgets what it previously has read, so society must
forget the intractable, although society remains haunted by it through and
through. It is like the ghost of a murdered child who somehow miraculously
lives in us in spite of ourselves and still goes on speaking, even after a
long silence. An uncanny thing that will not go away - which we cannot
remember and cannot forget. A stone in the mind as still as the rock in a
Japanese garden, around which a community forms, like a city built upon the
graves of its dead.

eric