ABSTRACT
In the avalanche of poststructuralist, deconstructive, and postmodern critique, we seem to have lost track of transcendence, a worn-out word in philosophy. Who cares? Certainly Levinas does, as well as Girard, Blanchot, and Bataille. But Lyotard? Lyotard, the terminator of “transcendental” modernism and other excesses of Western Vernunft? Surely not. There is good reason for using the concept of transcendence as a key to Lyotard’s thinking. It is useful even in the postmodern mise en abime, where traces of transcendence are supposed to confirm their enclosure in immanence. 1 “Transcendence in immanence” is the formula, expressing the view held by the majority of philosophers who even bother to speak in these terms at all, Lyotard himself not excluded. But Lyotard himself appears ambiguous in this respect. In The Inhuman, for example, he ridicules the “reassuring transcendent immanence of thought to its objects,” while all the same developing certain notions which are transcendent to the grasp of the human mind: sexual difference; the immemorial time of the event; matter; soul; timbre; nuance; childhood. 2 They are unthinkable, but they launch thinking endlessly, haunting the mind as “a familiar and unknown guest, which is agitating it, sending it delirious but also making it think” (/, 2). This is a far cry from the Kantian frame in which the enlightened mind cherishes the golden radiance of its own transcendence under the law of freedom. But still… a postmodern transcendence?
