ABSTRACT
To approach autonomy after Kant is to think the moral law: to think the moral law after Jean-Francois Lyotard is to radically question autonomy. Indeed Malraux's life, as given by Lyotard, is a good example of the 'dizziness' Lyotard himself felt when he realised how groundless the criteria were for responding to the law. Lyotard's phrase analysis, however, undoes the possibility of finding both a founding phrase that would give legitimacy to all the others, and a first phrase from where the subject might create itself. The competency Lyotard refers to is not just a competency of perception for it is also a competence of judging how to respond to a phrase, for one cannot phrase. The necessity of judging according to the singularity of a case is most evident in the doctrine of the mean to be found in the Nicomachean Ethics.
