Product details
- ISBN 9781350201903
- Weight: 400g
- Dimensions: 154 x 232mm
- Publication Date: 21 Mar 2024
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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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.
Kiff Bamford is 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: The Interviews and Debates (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Margret Grebowicz is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. She is the author of Whale Song (Bloomsbury, 2017) and editor of Gender after Lyotard (2007).
