ABSTRACT
In spite of its negotiatory tone and structural modesty, Jean-François Lyotard’s The Différend: Phrases in Dispute is anything but casual theorizing. For from beneath the presentation of the role of language in social conflict there emerges a broad philosophical argument concerning the “real,” as well as a narrower theory of discourse, in which the différend plays its role. Lyotard draws on thinkers ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Wittgenstein to raise noth ing less than the time honored question of how we project reality by means of language. Throughout his study he turns again and again to his central example, Auschwitz, “the most real of realities,” and yet one that questions the very possibility of historical knowledge.1 From this limit Lyotard gradually unfolds a theory of reference as part of a realist textualist view of the world, a construal rooted in the conflictual structure of “phrases.” It is to these phrases and to Lyotard’s textualist universe that we must turn if we wish to understand the “différend.”
