Lyotard’s aesthetics today

Abstract

The thought of Jean-François Lyotard is quite poorly understood today. Twenty years after his death, justice must be done for a work of the first magnitude. I propose to set out in a few points what ideas of Lyotard aesthetics are interesting to us today. First, his rereading of Kantian aesthetics, making an original return to Kant after Freud. Second, his balanced reflections on the analogies between aesthetics and politics, reminiscent of those of Hannah Arendt. Third, his understanding of art as the quintessential place of differends, of those differences that cannot be canceled. Fourth, his theory of aesthetic postmodernity, which is actually a rewriting of aesthetic modernity. Fifth, his writing, since his works on artists are not really about, but with, they are literary artifacts that allow us knowledge in constellations. Finally, in sixth place, he was an original thinker of the aesthetics of time and the precariousness of thinking.

Keywords: Lyotard, aesthetics, differend, sublime, Kant, postmodernity.