ABSTRACT
Lyotard, like Arendt and Foucault, rejects a legislative role for the critic and finds his chief debt to Kant in Kant's writings on aesthetic and political judgement. Throughout his work, Lyotard is preoccupied by the problem of how to resist and disrupt dominating orders, both discursive and economic. From his early political writings on Algeria to his most recent work on art, time and language, Lyotard remains philosophically engaged in challenging and undermining the theoretical and practical status quo of late-twentiethcentury capitalism. However, this is not to say that Lyotard's work has not changed, both in the way it conceives of its target and in the ways in which it considers its dissident work to be possible. The most crucial shift in Lyotard's conception of his own critique and what it is criticizing came with his eventual abandonment of a Marxist framework for critique in the 1960s. 1 Following on from this, Lyotard can be seen first exploring the disruption of the discursive by the figural; then going on to examine the violence of libidinal intensity breaking through systemic order; then moving on again to the destruction of grand narrative; and most recently focusing on judgement and witness as displacing the ruling genres of discourse. 2 In all of these different incarnations, Lyotard is concerned with opposing what he frequently labels ‘terror’. What is terroristic is what is totalitarian in the sense that it eliminates not just dissidence but plurality—whether in theory or in practice. Lyotard is, therefore, very much alive to the key problem inherent in any critical philosophy. That is the danger that critique may itself come to usurp the authority of that which it criticizes, replacing one totality with another. In this chapter I will be focusing on the way that Lyotard's more recent work relates to the Kantian inheritance. It will be argued that both the pagan republican's rejection of grand narratives (see pp. 131–135) and the critical nightwatchman's readings of the signs of history (see pp. 135–140) return us once again to the paradoxes of the politics of critique and the ambivalences inherent in the position of the critical political philosopher.
