Bearing Witness To The Differend:A Study Of Lyotard's Postmodern Thought Of Sublime

Jean-Francois Lyotard,one of the most famous postmodern thinkers,is also recognized to be the Father of contemporary renaissance of the sublime.He has made outstanding contributions to the revival and prosperity of sublime culture in the middle and late twentieth century.Lyotard's theory of sublime is thought to be re-interpretation to the classical sublime discourse(e.g.,Kant,Burke)in light of postmodern spirit.This re-interpretation makes a correlation between sublime feeling and the notion of diversity and difference,and thus makes sublime a kind of postmodern aesthetic category.Lyotard's postmodern sublime provides in turn the possible support for his postmodern aesthetics,politics and philosophy.This dissertation makes a research on Lyotard's postmodern sublime theory,with the aim of exploring both his key connotation of sublime and the interaction between such sublime and his postmodern thoughts.Firstly,this dissertation introduces and illustrates the basic task or purpose of Lyotard's postmodern thought.In his most valued philosophy writing The Differend:Phrases in Dispute,Lyotard puts forward the proposition of "bearing witness to differends"."The differend" characterizes the absolute heterogeneity of language games;and the proposition of "bearing witness to differends" is a more positive statement as well as a more specific expression of his postmodern assertions like"suspecting great narratives" or "rewriting modernity".For Lyotard,what exits between the opposing discourses is not an ordinary and resolvable divergence,but a differend,a kind of insurmountable difference or irreconcilable conflict.Any control and conciliation by meta-discourse or meta-rule will transform the differend to a silence and make it unrecognized;meanwhile,the wrong or the unjust initiating from this nonrecognition would also be unrecognized,so that the differend and the wrong become a kind of indemonstrable thing.Therefore,Lyotard proposes the task of"bearing witness to differends",which concerns justice and the honor of thought,in order to resist the ruling of grand narratives of modernity,and to give due rights to the suppressed diversity and difference.The sublime concept raised by Lyotard is first and foremost a response to the question of how to testify the differend or the indemonstrable in the situation of silence,which is the most fundamental concern of Lyotard's entire postmodern thought including his sublime theory.The concept of sublime thus becomes a way of bearing witness to difference and otherness.Then this dissertation makes a comparative study on Lyotard's and Kant's sublime thoughts in order to displays their different comprehensions and purports.By the way of this comparative study,the remodeling of sublime by Lyotard's postmodern thought of differend can be examined.The divergence of the two thinkers on the issue of sublime,first and foremost,begins with replacing by the differend the basic contradiction which is a reconcilable "conflict" between imagination and reason in Kant's sublime.With this replacement,more fundamental differences occur such as in the respects of time,subjectivity and reflection judgment,the result of which is that Lyotard's sublime is no longer a manifest of the integrality and the transcendence of reason,but a presentation either to the differends of faculties of subject or to an unbridgeable division.The reshaping of sublime by the thought of differend philosophy provides a base for Lyotard's construction of a postmodern sublime category,whereas the sublime feeling,as the testimony of differend,also plays a fundamental or active role in the construction,development and improvement of his postmodern thought.This sublime feeling is not isolated from or inessential to Lyotard's postmodern thought,but only the available way of bearing witness to the differend,to the unpresentable or to the absolute otherness within this field.So the following sections of this dissertation is to explore the implication of Lyotard's sublime concept and its "testifying" role in the domains of Lyotard's postmodern aesthetics,politics and philosophy.Lyotard's postmodern aesthetics is basically a kind of postmodern sublime aesthetics.By means of sublime feeling,Lyotard is committed to construct a form of sensibility which is adapted to postmodern cultural;meanwhile his sublime aesthetics becomes a postmodern aesthetics,which is sensitive to the unpresentable,with the aim of not only defending the practice of contemporary avant-guard art but also criticizing the alienation of the human nature caused by the capitalist industrial civilization.In the field of political thought,the sublime feeling also supports the construction of Lyotard's politics of justice.On one hand,Sublime feeling provides for the politics of justice a kind of aesthetic reflection judgment and the ability to present an idea.On the other hand,it serves as a deconstruction of the enlightenment subject as a political agent and provides a kind of split and disordered postmodern subject as judger,who judges under constrain of the idea of justice,that is to say,as a "witness" of the differend.The intervention of sublime into the political of justice renders sublime a political connotation.Finally,this dissertation discusses Lyotard's positioning of postmodern sublime,in the field of the philosophy of the differend and the philosophy of the event.Lyotard's philosophy of the event is a critique and deconstruction of the metaphysical thought or the tradition of theory of knowledge,among which Heidegger's ontology and Husserl's phenomenology,especially Husserl's theory of time-consciousness become the primary targets.Meanwhile,Lyotard developed a concept of event or occurrence and a genetic concept of instant as the philosophy footholds of his postmodern thought.Thus the sublime feeling,acting as a "basic mood"(Grundstimmung)of Being and as a testimony to the time and place that beyond the grasp and location of consciousness,engages in the construction of Lyotard's philosophy of event and of his postmodern foundation plans in the respect of time.Therefore,Lyotard's sublime feeling has gained a connotation of phenomenology and ontology as well.At least three innovations can be found in this dissertation:First,based upon the perspective of postmodern philosophy,this dissertation makes a systematic and in-depth analysis and research to Lyotard's postmodern sublime theory,and mainly explores how the sublime,as a way of presentation assigned to the feeling and sensation,gets constructed in the domain of Lyotard's postmodern theory,and how it is involved in the construction of his postmodern thought.Second,focusing on the differendization of the conflict of faculties within Kant's sublime,this dissertation displays the line of Lyotard's deconstruction to Kant's sublime theory.Third,this dissertation reinterprets the problem of time in sublime feeling from the phenomenological time-consciousness theory's point of view,and reveals Lyotard's plan to found his postmodern concept in the aspect of phenomenological time-subject.