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Jean-François Lyotard
Abstract
Jean- François Lyotard (1924–98) was born in Versailles, France, and taught philosophy at boys’ schools in Algeria and La Flèche before writing a masters thesis in literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1971, he received his doctorat d’état for Discours, figure. His first published writings were political in nature and concerned with the French colonization of Algeria. He was on the editorial committee of Socialisme ou barbarie and also contributed to Pouvoir Ouvrir until events of the late 1960s precipitated his disengagement from Marxism. From 1959 to 1966 he held the position of maître-assistant at the Sorbonne and then taught at the Paris X University Nanterre from 1966 to 1970. From 1970 he taught at the University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis. He was appointed Professor of Philosophy in 1972. From 1974 he simultaneously held numerous international posts in the US, Canada, Brazil, Denmark and Germany. Described as a polymath because of the broad disciplinary embrace of his endeavours (philosophy, literature, art, politics and ethics), he is most renowned for his work on postmodernism, particularly The Post-Modern Condition (1984), which was commissioned by the government of Quebec. Other works include The Differend (1988), Phenomenology (1954; English trans. 1991), Dérive à partir Marx et Freud (1973), Des dispositifs pulsionnels (1973), Libidinal Economy (1974; English trans. 1993), Duchamp’s TRANS/formers (1977; English trans. 1990), La Partie de peinture (1980), Les Immatérieux (1985), The Postmodern Explained to Children (1986; English trans. 1992), Heidegger and “the Jews” (1988; English trans. 1990), The Inhuman (1988; English trans. 1991), Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991; English trans. 1994), The Confession of Augustine (1998; English trans. 2000) and Misère de la philosophie (2000).
Jean-François Lyotard's work remains a largely untapped resource for film-philosophy. This article surveys four fundamental concepts which indicate the fecundity of this work for current studies and debates. While Lyotard was generally associated with the “theory” of the 1980s which privileged language, signs, and cultural representations, much of his work in fact resonates more strongly with the new materialisms and realisms currently taking centre stage. The concepts examined here indicate the relevance of Lyotard's work in four related contemporary contexts: the renewed interest in the dispositif, new materialism, the affective turn, and speculative realism. The concept of the dispositif (or apparatus) is being rehabilitated in the contemporary context because it shows a way beyond the limiting notion of mise en scène which has dominated approaches to film, and Lyotard's prevalent use of this concept feeds into this renewal. While matter is not an explicit theme in Lyotard's writings on film, it is nevertheless one at the heart of his aesthetics, and it may be extended for application to film. Affect was an important theme for Lyotard in many contexts, including his approaches to film, where it appears to subvert film's “seductive” (ideological) effects. Finally, the Real emerges as a central concept in Lyotard's last essay on cinema, where, perhaps surprisingly, it intimates something close to a speculative realist aesthetics. Each of the fundamental concepts of Lyotard's film-philosophy are introduced in the context of the current fields and debates to which they are relevant, and are discussed with filmic examples, including Michael Snow's La Région centrale (1971), Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli (Stromboli, terra di Dio, 1950), Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), and neo-realist cinema.
The theme of sacrifice appears in Jean-François Lyotard's writings on cinema not in terms of any representational content but in terms of the economy of the images from which a film is formally constructed. Sacrifice is here understood in a sense derived from Bataille, and related to his notions of general (as opposed to restricted) economy, and of sovereignty. Lyotard's writings on cinema have received some attention in English-language scholarship, but so far this attention has been focused almost exclusively on two essays which have appeared in English translation: “Acinema” and “The Unconscious as Mise-en-Scène.” I offer an analysis which also incorporates his two other important essays on cinema, “Deux métamorphoses du séduisant au cinéma” [Two Metamorphoses of the Seductive in Cinema] and “Idée d'un film souverain” [The Idea of a Sovereign Film]. The interest of the former is that it makes most explicit the aesthetic politics – evident in many of Lyotard's writings on art – specific to cinema. In the latter, Lyotard gives his most extensive treatment of cinema, and frames it in terms of Bataille's notion of sovereignty. I offer an interpretation of Lyotard's philosophy of cinema which links these quite disparate essays, foregrounding the political dimension of the sacrificial economy of images he proposes: films of any variety, even commercial cinema, may include some sequences and images which are “sacrificial” in that they are “other” to the chronological narrative of the whole. These images liberate us from the seductive effects of the narrative, and the invitation to fantasise, which act as means of imposing and reproducing dominant social and cultural norms.
This paper provides a comparative analysis of Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011), two recent films that engage with the sublime aesthetic. Bringing together Brian Massumi's writing on affect with Jean-François Lyotard's understanding of the sublime, we develop the notion of the ‘affective sublime’, a theoretical methodology that locates the sublime experience at the threshold between the cognitive and the corporeal. Drawing upon Lyotard's distinction between the modern and postmodern sublime, we suggest that while The Tree of Life establishes the sublime as a central absence within a nostalgic narrative, Melancholia forces a direct collision with the unpresentable. Consequently, in accordance with Massumi's delineation between emotion and affect, we suggest that the two films produce different affective responses. The Tree of Life provides absent content with formal and emotional coherence, quelling the feelings of pain and anxiety evoked by the sublime. In contrast, Melancholia refuses correct forms and actualises the potential of affective intensity through an encounter with sublime annihilation. We conclude that the affective sublime opens up new understandings of the interaction between the sublime object and spectator, one in which the visible object is less important than the sublime instant of affective experience.
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