The Differend

Introduction

Published in 1983, The Differend is written in numbered paragraphs interspersed with “notices” on Kant, Hegel, Levinas, Wittgenstein and others. A differend is a conflict that cannot be fairly settled because no rule of judgment applies to both parties: the wrong suffered by one side cannot even be expressed in the idiom of the tribunal. Lyotard’s opening example is the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, who demanded an eyewitness of a gas chamber – someone who could only have seen one by dying in it. The book analyses “phrases”, their “regimens” and the “genres of discourse” that link them, and asks philosophy to bear witness to differends rather than to resolve them.

Connections

Builds on

• Critique of Judgment1790 · Immanuel Kant
• Philosophical Investigations1953 · Ludwig Wittgenstein

More works by Jean-François Lyotard

• 1979The Postmodern Condition

Appears in

• Journey ‘Thinking after Auschwitz’ · Stop 8 of 10