Traversals of Affect: On Jean-Franois Lyotard

(Hardback)

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This volume traces the topic of affect across Lyotards corpus and accounts for Lyotard's crucial and original contribution to the thinking of affect. Highlighting the importance of affect in Lyotards philosophy, this work offers a unique contribution to both affect theory and the reception of Lyotard. Affect indeed traverses Lyotards philosophical corpus in various ways and under various names: figure or the figural in Discourse, Figure, unbound intensities in his libidinal writings, the feeling of the diffrend in The Differend, affect and infantia in his later writings. Across the span of his work, Lyotard insisted on the intractability of affect, on what he would later call the differend between affect and articulation. The singular awakening of sensibility, affect both traverses and escapes articulation, discourse, and representation. Lyotard devoted much of his attention to the analysis of this traversal of affect in and through articulation, its transpositions, translations, and transfers. This volume explores Lyotards account of affect as it traverses the different fields encompassed by his writings (philosophy, the visual arts, the performing arts, literature, music, politics, psychoanalysis as well as technology and post-human studies).

Reviews

This collection of essays by globally acknowledged experts and newer voices in the field will doubtless set the tone for a rediscovery and reappraisal of Lyotard's considerable contributions to affect theory and its applications. More fundamentally, it sketches a performative metaphilosophy through its encounter with a thinker who enacts philosophy as a perpetual, precarious traversal. * Matthew R. McLennan, Assistant Professor, School of Public Ethics, Saint Paul University, Canada *
Anger, Joy, Disappointment, Fear, Hope, Anxiety: our era is marked by affect as its dominant feature. In the recent turn to emotion and affect in philosophy, few works have the feeling and subtlety of Jean-Franois Lyotard's essays. His wise and knowing meditations on the ethics, aesthetics, psychology and politics of affect deserve even deeper consideration than his banner ideas around the postmodern and the sublime. With this outstanding collection of chapters, by leading Lyotard scholars, we can now reflect carefully and sensitively on the affects governing our increasingly desperate actions in private and public life. Lyotard wanted to buy us a different kind of time and gift us different modes of attention to passions and their causes. This collection achieves just that. * James Williams, Honorary Professor of Philosophy, Deakin University, Australia *

Author Bio

Julie Gaillard is a doctoral candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University, and an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Teaching Fellow at Morehouse College. She is preparing a dissertation on proper names, referentiality and mediality in French literature and arts at the turn of the twenty-first century. Claire Nouvet is associate professor in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University. She is the co-editor of Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-Franois Lyotard (Stanford, 2007), the author of Enfances Narcisse (Galile, 2009), Ablard et Hlose: la passion de la matrise (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2009), and the editor of Literature and the Ethical Question (Yale French Studies, 1991). Mark Stoholski is a Mellon/ACLS dissertation completion fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University and a candidate at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He is preparing a dissertation on affect via the ancient sophists and their reception in modern literature and psychoanalysis.