Jean-Francois Lyotard's Underground Aesthetics

Abstract

Jean-Fran;ois Lyotard leaves us a large and complex oeuvre we are perhaps yet to understand; Discours, Figure, an important work still fresh today, is yet to appear in English; and even in French one awaits several posthumous publications. What sort of oeuvre is it? Perhaps since Adorno no philosopher has worked as directly with aesthetics; and unlike some of his more textualist contemporaries, Lyotard was peculiarly concerned with arts, one might even say with the visual in art. Painting retained its privilege for him, no matter all computer consoles of postmodern condition. Lyotard invented a peculiar style, an original way of doing aesthetics. His aesthetic writings trace a powerful line that runs through all more philosophical works for which he is better known-a line of fragility and mobility that accompanies his thought. In his hands aesthetics was thus not a high-minded appreciation of works; it was not a methodological aid to historical research or critical appraisal; it was not even a theory, unless by that one means an attempt to think-and to seejust where one doesn't or can't know. It was more a tool to expose often unseen tensions, shifts, and complications in philosophical thinking and its relations with society-a way of helping it depart from doxa without assurances of higher knowledge or even a sensus communis. That is why in philosophical works that name and work out these tensions, we find not one philosophy but many talking to one another, held together without being unified, notion of aesthetics itself assuming different guises with rhythm of their unresolved tensions. For Lyotard's philosophy was by design without doctrine or method, but rather embraced a weakness he took to be its force and with which he would navigate across and in between all geographic and conceptual boundaries dividing up philosophy since World War II. In Hegel aesthetics is absorbed in a higher philosophical synthesis-that is what makes it a melancholy science, tied up with end or dying of art; and even Heidegger, taking up this idea, would imagine art agonizing for several centuries under aegis of aesthesis.i For Lyotard, by contrast, aesthetics