Description:
Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the previous century's most provocative thinkers. Can his work help us address the crisis currently facing the humanities?
The dominant economic discourse sees the humanities as "low-value," an irritation at best. Lyotard helps us to think against this pervasive dismissal of creative activity, not by defending the honor of the humanities, but by inviting critical practices which aggravate this irritation. Critical practices trouble what counts as critique, embrace incertitude, and listen for silenced voices. Twelve essays by artists and researchers take up Lyotard's invitation and begin to develop the idea of critical practice in the contemporary context. Three sections titled "What resists thinking;" "Long views and distances" and "Why art practice?" address contemporary concerns like affectivity, aesthetics, economic imperatives, militarism, pedagogy, posthumanism, and the closure of what in Lyotard's time was called "the West." Four short pieces by Lyotard intervene in and buttress the discussion: "Apathy in Theory" and "Interview with Art Présent," here published in English for the first time, and "Affect-phrase" and "The Other's Rights" republished here to highlight his prescient concern for that which cannot be articulated.Brief description: Kiff Bamfordis Reader in Contemporary Art in the School of Art, Architecture and Design, Leeds Beckett University, UK. He is author of 'Lyotard and the figural in Performance, Art and Writing' (Bloomsbury, 2012) and 'Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Lives' (2017).
Review Quotes:
"Rather than a unified picture that would prescribe a one-way relation between theory (philosophy, concepts) and practice (artistic, political), Lyotard and Critical Practice presents us with multiple ways of undoing the difference between them, sometimes close to Lyotard's own writings, sometimes remote from his concerns. In this, it is however much in the spirit of Lyotard, who was always ready to retrace his steps and take off in unexpected directions." --College Art Association
"A deeply layered cake that combines the canonical academic approach with a few intriguing essays that reveal the relevance of Lyotard as a thinker of recent cultural problems ... Lyotard and Critical Practice promises that a return to Lyotard is a publishing endeavour that is worth pursuing." --Philosophy in Review "This text is the perfect explanation of what is involved in doing critical practice through Lyotard. Using an author's conceptual tools against his own thinking is the only way for a philosopher to survive the epistemological limits of his time, and this is what we see in many of these texts. What makes a thinker contemporary is never his conclusions, but the tools he offers to future thinkers." --Cultural Politics "In Lyotard and Critical Practice, Kiff Bamford and Margret Grebowicz have assembled an exciting time machine of philosophical cultural criticism. With its poly-vocal passage through hitherto little-heard and little-considered aspects of Lyotard's work, the inventor of postmodernism is credited not only with a special presentness, but with an enormous ability for the future. Reading the book is an empathic invitation to think transversally and to sharpen an idea of critique that is deeply rooted in sensual experience, especially at a time when our existence is becoming increasingly technical." --Siegfried Zielinski, Michel-Foucault-Professor for Techno-Aesthetics and Media Archaeology, The European Graduate School / EGS, Switzerland