ABSTRACT
In characterizing Lyotard’s work as providing ‘a rationale for lying back and enjoying late capitalism’, Alex Callinicos speaks for a number of critical sociologists and Marxist cultural analysts. 1 Horrified by the prospect of a paganism that leaves him nothing to believe in and everything yet to be done, Callinicos concludes that the benefit one draws as a reader of Lyotard is the indulgence of perversions; simply that one ‘may now sample the benefits of commodity fetishism without a twinge of guilt’. 2 Paganism, it seems, is the old spectre of fin de siècle perversion and decadence. I want to argue that Lyotard’s rethinking of philosophy as a process of experimental or pagan judgement allows the question of justice to be kept alive in late capitalism. Just as paganism is not merely decadent perversion, it is not the return to primitive mysticism that Habermas claims. 3 Lyotard’s insistence on the radical heterogeneity of language games provides a series of hints as to the stakes in the complete ‘overhaul’ of ‘the meaning of the world “politician” ’for which he calls in Just Gaming. 4
