| Popis: |
This thesis provides a reading of Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard's thoughts on the relationship between writing, the event, and resistance. My argument is that for Lyotard, writing has a responsibility to inscribe in the writing itself what resists thinking and as such, to articulate the inarticulable. Chapter 2 traces how this responsibility arises with the receptivity and affirmation of an unconditional imperative(Understood in this context, writing is the performative response to an ethical demand or event of obligation to which it bears witness. The thesis illuminates how Lyotard articulates the event as a receptivity to alterity through his readings of Kant's theory of obligation (Chapter 2) and Freud's thoughts on trauma and the unconscious affect (Chapter 3). One of the main tasks of the thesis is to show how the task of bearing witness - the political task par excellence for Lyotard - necessitates the use of reflective judgment (judgment without rules). I explore this task through a delineation of Lyotard's readings of the Kantian sublime (Chapter 2) and the task of perlaboration in psychoanalysis (Chapter 3). These discussions are framed within the context of Lyotard's. diagnosis of the failure of the grand narratives of modernity and as such, within the problematic of responding to nihilism. Finally, Chapter 4 is an attempt to recommence a dialogue between Lyotard and Nietzsche that is motivated by the former's Heideggerian reading of the latter in The Inhuman, to which this chapter responds. The aim is to show how their thoughts intersect and supplement one another in their respective diagnoses of nihilism but also in their attempt to write the event and bear witness to that which resists thinking. My argument is that Nietzsclie's theory of the event is inscribed in the thought of eternal return which establishes an ethical resonance to the diagnosis of the death of god. |
