Jean-Francois Lyotard's writing on politics conceives of political problems principally as problems of judgment. In his now famous account of post-modern condition Lyotard identifies defining feature of our age as absence of any authoritative, uncontested criterion, out of a multiplicity of contending criteria, for judgment of events.1 Lyotard's account of consequences of this condition is partly guided by his fascination with Kant's aesthetics. The account of reflective judgment outlined by Kant in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment differentiates judgments of from determinative, cognitive judgments primarily because there is no given or law for beauty, and judgment of a particular form as beautiful in pure taste is pleasurable only as a result of reflective search by faculties for such a rule. Lyotard sees in Kant's injunction against a science of beautiful (in which particular objects would already be determined as beautiful and thus make redundant pleasure in feeling of reflective judgment by legislating to subject how it should feel) a direct analogy to absence of given criteria in political judgment. To explicate this view Lyotard cites events in which criteria of judgment accepted as given were surpassed by events they were unable to judge.2 Accordingly, rule of judgment is for Lyotard need to invent new idioms for judgment, idioms that are themselves called forth by, rather than furnishing a readymade framework to judge, particular events. The approach to politics that emerges from this account of judgment receives its most influential formulation in work Lyotard saw as his most important: The Differend. This book sets out inadequacy of conception of justice as litigable articulation of damages [dommages] by pointing to instances of damages accompanied by loss of means to prove damage. Such instances compound privation of damage adding to it the impossibility of bringing it to knowledge of others, and in particular to knowledge of a tribunal.3 Lyotard defines such damages as wrongs [torts]. In The Differend he describes a differend as particular wrong that arises from an incompatibility between discursive genres. This incompatibility results in a differend (a wrong) when one genre imposes its rules on another. What is crucial for Lyotard is that this very imposition also silences means by which wrong suffered could be phrased. In examples that open first chapter of book, Lyotard lists holocaust survivor whose testimony is met by revisionist historian's demands for proofs; assertion of view that major pieces of literature remain unpublished and counter demand by press editor to name one such work; and Ibanskian who has to testify before communist authorities. From these examples Lyotard shows differend to be impossible task plaintiff faces in demonstrating existence of what is in dispute. The differend manifests itself as an affect-phrase, or sentiment, whose defining feature is its silence. Neither able to be expressed as a mere damage nor, as a consequence, remedied in juridical processes differend requires, on Lyotard's view, invention of new idioms by thinking, literature and art. A number of paradoxes condition this conception of differend and especially way that Lyotard attaches to it an injunction for thinker, writer, and artist to invent new idioms to bear witness to silence of differend. In particular, given status of differend as a wrong as yet unphrased, critics have asked whether injunction to form new idioms for such wrongs aims to bring them into articulation as damages and thus to bring these wrongs into an economy of remediation and deny differend its status as a differend, or whether this injunction involves inventing idioms that express differend as itself, as differend itself, le differend meme? …