143LYOTARD, JEAN-FRANCOISLyotard argues for a multiplicity of het-
erogeneous and so, incommensurable
language-games with their own imma-
nent criteria. Anyone who rejects this
must be thinking from a totalitarian or
rigidly doctrinaire standpoint. In The
Postmodern Condition (1979), Lyotard
argues for a postmodern sublime against
Kant’s argument concerning the unrepre-
sentable aspects of the sublime as “a
combination of pleasure and pain: the
pleasure that reason should exceed all
presentation, the pain that imagination or
sensibility should not be equal to the con-
cept.” Lyotard stresses the manner in
which Kant’s critical philosophy is per-
petually interrupted by uncontainable
moments of excess such as the sublime.
In contrast, Lyotard’s postmodern sub-
lime “puts forward the unpresentable in
presentation itself.” Due to incommensu-
rable absolutes, the postmodern sublime
cannot privilege consensus: instead
Lyotard looks for a means to mobilize dif-
ference. Thus Lyotard concludes that the
“terror” of modernity’s absolute univer-
sality is disturbed and to be, continually,
disrupted by postmodern difference. Yet
later essays, found in his The Inhuman
(1988), suggest that the sublime of avant-
garde painters is also “an event, an occur-
rence” in the “here and now”: this creates
“the joy obtained in the intensification of
being.” Lyotard’s works include Phenome-
nology (1954), Discourse, figure (1971),
Libidinal Economy (1974), The Postmod-
ern Condition (1979), Just Gaming (1979),
The Differend (1983), Driftworks (1984),
Peregrinations (1988), Heidegger and “the
Jews” (1988), The Inhuman (1988), and
Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime
(1991), and two collections, the Lyotard
Reader (1989) and Political Writings
(1993).