ABSTRACT
From his earliest work, Jean-Francois Lyotard resisted the structuralist “linguistic turn” that emphasized the way language shapes experience, which was so influential among his contemporaries in France during the 1950s and 1960s. Lyotard’s two most influential publications are The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, originally written as a report on the state of knowledge for the government of Quebec, and The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. The postmodern condition—ascribed to the contemporary West by Lyotard—is one in which there is an increasing “incredulity” and distrust toward metanarratives. Lyotard claims that the relation between discourse and the figure reveals that reality is irreducible to representation. Lyotard’s interest in the sublime reinforces his contention about sensation preexisting cognition. Lyotard’s aesthetics of the sublime—which at once possesses the logic of play as the experience of the event—is a theorization of the particular that erodes the conceits of such narratives.
