ABSTRACT
For Lyotard, the linguistic turn meant the recognition that we must surpass our ‘humanist’ tradition, too close to the Enlightenment project of overcoming prejudice and ignorance through knowledge. He clearly states in The Differend that his purpose is to ‘refute the prejudice anchored in the reader by centuries of humanism and of “human sciences” that there is “man”, that there is “language”, that the former makes use of the latter for his own ends, and that if he does not succeed in attaining these ends, it is for want of good control over language “by means” of a “better” language’.37 The search for knowledge and truth-what Lyotard calls ‘grand narratives’—can undermine the fundamental hermeneutic recognition that a theory of knowledge is only possible in language and through language. This is not language created by ‘man’. This is the recognition that man is created by our intersubjective linguistic world.
