ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how the shift in Jean-Francois Lyotard's treatment of testimony takes place in its most formal dimension, from the philosophy of phrases outlined in The Differend, to its supplementation with the concept of the affect-phrase. The affect-phrase is intimately related to the theme of testimony because it is an attempt to formulate more rigorously two related notions 'silence' and 'feeling'. The concept of the affect-phrase is also developed elsewhere in Lyotard's later work under a number of different names most significantly in the essays 'Voices of a Voice' and 'Emma'. The chapter interrogates the affect-phrase by examining its capacity to deal with the problem of unpresentability, which coincides with Lyotard's move to the 'second philosophy of the differend'. With the notion of the affect-phrase in the supplemental essays, however, Lyotard revises how the silence of the unconscious affect is to be 'translated' into his philosophy of phrases.