The ethics of heterogeneity : a speculative critique of Jean-François Lyotard's "The differend"

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Abstract

The thesis is an attempt to develop a speculative (Hegelian) critique of the
ethical and political questions raised by Jean-Francois Lyotard's book The
Differend. I have argued that these questions are dependent upon the reading
of Kant's three Critiques, and his political essays, which Lyotard develops in
The Differend's four `notices' on Kant, and that it is this reading which opens
up his concept of difference (`heterogeneity') to the possibility of a speculative
critique. Chapter one comprises an examination of Lyotard's attempt to
establish speculative thinking's dependence upon a metaphysical idea of the
self as the possibility of ethical sublation. I have argued that Lyotard's
appropriation of Adorno's idea of "Auschwitz" as blocking dialectical sublation,
fails to recognize the speculative significance of the concrete conditions which
produced the historical emergence of Nazism. The following three chapters are
concerned to develop the argument that Lyotard's misrepresentation of the
spirituality of Hegel's philosophy, conditions his reading of the critical
philosophy as disclosing the possibility of a spontaneous (ethical) judgement of
difference. Chapter two argues that Lyotard's claim to show critical subjectivity
to be a `litigation' of self-conscious faculties, fails to recognize the actual lack of
unity which characterizes Kant's `transcendental unity of apperception'. The
exclusion of `otherness', which Lyotard claims is disclosed and suppressed in
Kant's notion of cognitive experience, actually necessitates concrete selfrecognition.
In chapter three, Lyotard's attempt to abstract an ethical
`obligation without conditions' from Kant's critical morality is interrogated. I
have argued that the aporias constituted through the spontaneity of practical
reason, are reinforced through Lyotard's concept of `ethical time'. The final
chapter develops a speculative approach to the notions of ethics and politics
which Lyotard abstracts from the Third Critique. I have argued that the notion
of an `unpredetermined' judgement which Lyotard articulates in the final
sections of The Differend, constitutes a subjective `culture' which is ultimately
non-ethical and apolitical.

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