ABSTRACT
The last half-decade or so has seen an intensification of interest (precipitated amongst other things by the revelations concerning Paul de Man’s wartime writings) in the ethical purport of poststructuralist and postmodernist literary criticism and theory. In relation to this concern, the work of Jean-François Lyotard is particularly pertinent.1 For in Lyotard’s work the poststructuralist gestures (for instance, the displacement of the categories of the subject and the person) that many regard as inimical to ethics, are explicitly presented as arising in response to an ethical demand. Hence he implies that to criticize these gestures on ethical grounds itself involves a certain ethical blindness. More particularly, he contends that the privileging of the subject and the person is tied to a specifically Western thought, a thought which by no means exhausts ethics.
