ABSTRACT
Anthro-paralogy can be understood as a search for instabilities and novelties in the human. The difference between anthro-paralogy and anthropology is, admittedly, something of a terminological quibble, since contemporary anthropology as practised is not necessarily positive or totalizing. In any case, anthropology as social science is more or less empirical, whereas anthropology as philosophical enterprise is more or less conceptual and universalizing. Jean-Francois Lyotard's postmodern philosophy of phrases is antihumanism. Gerald Sfez is right, the later Lyotard's notion of the good, plastic, inner inhuman preserves the Idea of Humanity, specifically, the one which Lyotard holds open, and an idea of constitutive openness, against the bad inhumanity of the technoscientific system which threatens its survival. Lyotard comes full circle to the uneasy position he occupied in his early phenomenological-Marxist phase, during which he characterized the human as the site of a permanent questioning and struggle over the establishment of meaning and history.
