From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: after-shocks
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 19:55:31 -0500


e. wrote:


on psychoanalysis: i don't think lyotard really *moves towards* any
psychoanalytic
approach here, he simply borrows a concept of working-through the same
way he
is attentive to the notion of nachtraglichkeit - seeing more of an
interesting
parallels between his thought and that of freud which doesn't really
qualify
as psychoanalytic approach. as for the infancy: how does it have
anything to do
with Lacanian thing? an interesting discussion of the infancy in terms
of *the delay*
is found in *The Confession of Augustine* - the past that never was
present stuff...

e.,

While I agree with that Lyotard doesn't 'move towards' psychoanalysis in
the sense you imply - his writing lack a therapeutic orientation; still,
I would disagree to extent you imply that he merely borrows a few
concepts. For me, from beginning to end, Lyotard is imbued with Freudian
psychoanalysis, but he approaches it is a very different way than other
political Freudians such as Marcuse, Brown, Reich or even Lacan do.

As Lyotard says in his essay "Emma":

"I speak here as a philosopher, with no (clinical) authority on the
matter on excitation, but with the (philosophical) obstinacy "to set
right" something of the Freudian lesson. On somewhat of a slippery
slope, I have tried, for some fifteen years, to drown the thesis of the
unconscious in the deluge of a general libinal economy. This was pure
metaphysics, and consequently parodical and strongly nihilistic, despite
being clothed in a cheerfulness and affirmativeness adorned with the
name of Nietzsche."

 in a cheerfulness and affirmativeness adorned with the name of
Nietzsche."

Lyotard goes on to add:

"I can not develop this idea further, as I have done in the Differend.
But what is missing there is precisely what is introduced here and what
I am trying to philosophically supplement, the quid of this unconscious
in terms of phrases."

It is my belief, that at the end of his life, Lyotard was struggling to
write a sequel or supplement to the Differend; one that would recognize
the underlying problematic of the phrase (sentence) embedded in genres
of discourse (language) and that would focus instead on the unconscious,
feeling, the inarticulate phrase.  

As we do, he never succeeded in that attempt and spent his last years
writing his books on Malraux and the unfinished essay on Augustine, to
which you refer. What I personally find so intriguing about this last
book is that it attempts to approach the topic of temporality first
found in Augustine and later echoed in the phenomenologists and
Heidegger, in a way that would have implications for the strange
marriage of Freud and Kant (with Levinas perhaps serving as matchmaker)
he was attempting.  

Don't you think this concept of the delay finds echoes in Freud's
concept of nachtraglichkeit? (Remembering all the while that the delay
was also central to Duchamp, the transformer's, concept of art.)


eric