ABSTRACT
The finality here can be taken as translating Kant’s ‘purposiveness’. ‘Working through’ therefore is not straightforwardly teleological. Indeed it is the absence of the teleological that leads Lyotard to privilege the absence of the end (understood in the twofold sense of purpose and point of finish) over the specificity of ‘working through’. He summarises the Freudian enterprise in such a way that, because of what he takes to be Freud’s apparent commitment to the emancipatory, and therefore of its having to run the risk of repeating the situation from which it intended to inspire ‘emancipation’, another possibility is presented as having to be found. The emancipatory Freudian undertaking is described by Lyotard as wanting to
deconstruct the rhetoric of the unconscious, the preorganised set of signifiers which constitute the neurotic or psychotic device and what organises the life of the subject as destiny.
