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Just Gaming (Volume 20)
Book by Lyotard, Jean-Francois
136 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
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292 people want to read
About the author
Jean-François Lyotard
124 books346 followersJean-François Lyotard (DrE, Literature, University of Paris X, 1971) was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well-known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and for his analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition.
He went to primary school at the Paris Lycées Buffon and Louis-le-Grand and later began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. After graduation, in 1950, he took a position teaching philosophy in Constantine in French East Algeria. He married twice: in 1948 to Andrée May, with whom he had two daughters, and for a second time in 1993 to the mother of his son, who was born in 1986.
He went to primary school at the Paris Lycées Buffon and Louis-le-Grand and later began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. After graduation, in 1950, he took a position teaching philosophy in Constantine in French East Algeria. He married twice: in 1948 to Andrée May, with whom he had two daughters, and for a second time in 1993 to the mother of his son, who was born in 1986.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 12, 2008
This was the primary source for my undergraduate thesis, which was written ten years ago and defended ten years ago to the month. I figured I should dust it off and see what I thought about it now after all these years, maybe see how much the book has aged or I've aged in the meantime. Fortunately, I think both have stood the test of time. The book is still a very enjoyable read for philosophy (that it's a conversation adds to the liveliness and accessibility), though certain parts didn't quite grab me as much now as then. Nonetheless, many of the same parts still resonated and a few new ideas popped out, particularly in relation to the internet and its tidal wave of information: a world that Lyotard (I'm assuming) would think of as a form of paganism or "pagan politics," of judging without criteria, of writing without finality, etc. I would recommend it to anyone interested in listening to a French theorist thinking out loud with an accomplice and covering a wide range of topics with ease and flair. In the end, if you're interested in what justice could look like in a world in which there are no authors or authorities, read this and you might get inspired. (Or you might get deflated, who knows?) And if you're only interested in aesthetic matters, the book is even better.
February 2, 2021
Kitap, filozofların adalet konusunda eksikliğini gösteriyor. Lyotard'ın Kant çözümlemeleri, yanlış olmasa da oldukça zorlama din oyunlarıyla içeriğinden bağımsız bir Kant felsefesine varıyor. Lyotard bunu kendisi de kabulleniyor ve savunuyor. Açıkçası bu aşırı zorlama Kant yorumunun, kitap sürecinde Kantçılıkla alakası kalmayan bir kıvama gelmesini izliyorsunuz. Lyotard'ın adalet kavramı postmodern anlayışın adalet anlayışını yani aşırı rölativist bakış açısımı gösteriyor ve adaletin aslında var olmadığını iddia ediyor. Kant yorumları hatrına 3 puanımı fazla tuttum. Alıntılama değerse bir şey bulamadım.
October 1, 2012
Lyotard and Thébaud open Just Gaming by discussing L’s Libidinal Economy, a book L argues “aims to produce effects” rather than state truths (3). T sees L’s book as thus irresponsible, but L asserts all writing—at least in modernity—“is irresponsible” (8). For in modernity—unlike in classicism—the author “no longer knows for whom he writes” (9). The dialogic approach of Just Gaming, however, situates it in a different “language game” than modern texts (8)—at least until it becomes a book.
L points to avant-garde artworks, which refuse the notions of a “subject of history” and “a universal subject” (10), as exemplifying modernity. Such works are experimental and have no a priori audience: If they are “strong,” they “produce people to whom [they] are destined.” (10). Modernity is also “humorous” (12), “untimel[y]” (14), and not nostalgic, so is neither classical nor romantic but in between. Untimely moderns, sans historico-theoretically derived sensus communis, “judge without criteria” (14). In fact, “anytime that we lack criteria, we are in modernity” (15). This lack also constitutes what L terms “paganism” (16). T notes that, for L, “pagan” also denotes “a prescription” (16). L agrees, but clarifies that “prescriptives … are never grounded” in paganism: For modern pagans, “either the just comes to us from elsewhere … we are never more than the addressees of prescriptions…. Or … prescriptions are not received” (17). L cites K, who leaves “the ability to judge … mysteriously hanging” on the “unfathomable principle” of the will. Judging isn’t about finding grounded criteria, but using “imagination” as “the power to invent criteria” (17)—criteria “regulated [only] by an Idea” (18).
The book’s second section opens with T noting that L often says “‘Let us be pagan,’ and “Let us be just’” (19). L links the two to interrupt “pious,” theoretical, Platonic notions of justice implying “a lost origin” (20) that suggests “the prescriptive can be derived from the descriptive” (21). L counters, via Levinas, that such derivation is fallacious. The prescription only comes from within the prescriptive language game, for at the pragmatic level one can’t simply move from “the true to the just” (24). Modernity’s response to this predicament has been “an answer through autonomy”: that “the set of prescriptions produced by the whole of a social body to which the prescriptions apply, will be just” (25). With no ideal of justice, “each situation is singular” (27) and the judge must judge without set criteria and only assess the judgment’s justness after the fact (26). Instead of the notion that “one gives oneself one’s own laws,” there is the “idea [in the Kantian sense] that no … utterer … is ever autonomous…. [but] first of all an addressee” (31). The utterer is “heteronomous” (32), “the recipient of a narrative in which one is narrated” (33) and in which invention occurs via “experimentation” (34). In the Cashinahua and Jewish traditions, “someone speaks to me; he places me under an obligation … to retell…. And in this sense, the will is never free” (35). Heteronomy interrupts the fixed subject, who “change bodies” as narrated narrator (40), and the privilege of “the pole of the addressee” “actively forgotten” in “Western thought” (37). But in paganism—unlike the Jewish tradition in which the deity is posited in a metalinguistic position—“The gods are implicated in the narratives,” “immanent [like humans] to stories in the making” and thus unable to serve as prescribers (43).
L turns to K to break the “relation between” the pre- and descriptive language games (45). L substitutes K’s term “Idea”—“the maximization of a concept” (46)—for “prescriptive.” And the Idea of “freedom,” i.e. “reason in its practical use” (46), leads to a definition of justice as “act[ing] in such a way that … the maxim of the will may serve as a principle of universal legislation” (47). The “that,” however, is a “negative clause” that offers no positive inkling of “a condition that defines justice” (47). K thus shifts the focus from why we judge to “what regulates our judgments” (47). With no descriptive “real” on which to found regulations, we are regulated by different sets of rules in a variety of “multiplying and refining language games” (49), each “bound to a specific pragmatics” (52). L’s “paganism,” for instance, involves “the Idea … of a set of diverse pragmatics” that “cannot be synthesized into a unifying metadiscourse” (58). In Kantian terms, the Idea of “one must be pagan” is “one must maximize as much as possible the multiplication of small narratives” not founded on ontology (59). Since all games operate on their own pragmatics, the ontological game cannot ground “the game of justice,” which occurs “in the field of prescriptives” (62) and thus “cannot be justified [as] … conclusions of a reasoning” (64). L does offer a negative insight in that excluding the “possibility of continuing to play the game of the just,” as in “terrorism,” does constitute “[a]bsolute injustice” (66). Positively, however, justice is an empty “transcendence” (69)—as K puts it, “that which obligates is something absolutely beyond our intelligence” (71). Thus in “the game of the just,” “one speaks as a listener” (72), never a priori assured of one’s authority as a judge.
L asserts K, some sophists, and Aristotle all assume there is “no reason of history” on which one can ground “knowledge in matters of ethics” (73). L notes that this situation can lead to a sort of tyranny of “convention,” but interprets K as offering a potential way out. K is like the Aristotle’s Corax: one who, rather than accepting the rule of convention as a sycophant, sees “the reasonable idea” as “produc[ing] … the inverisimilar, the unlikely” (78). L claims K can be interpreted as a sophist who breaks with the convention’s tyranny (78). The Kantian Idea of a “field of finality” in which “prevails … the Idea of something that is not yet here, that will never be here” is the maximization that makes possible this break. What K calls judgment is “the capability of thinking outside of the concept and outside of habit” (82), thinking at the unknowable “horizon of justice” (83).
L notes some difficulties in his interpretation of K, as the latter’s moral system is founded upon notions of totality, whereas L is searching for “a multiplicity of justices” and “justice of multiplicity” (100)—justices that occur within diverse language games that are being multiplied and refined, but never beholden to universal rules even as the “justice of multiplicity” is “assured, paradoxically enough, by a prescriptive of universal value” (100). But here L must stop making positive assertions lest he take on the role of “the great prescriber himself” (100). Ha ha.
L points to avant-garde artworks, which refuse the notions of a “subject of history” and “a universal subject” (10), as exemplifying modernity. Such works are experimental and have no a priori audience: If they are “strong,” they “produce people to whom [they] are destined.” (10). Modernity is also “humorous” (12), “untimel[y]” (14), and not nostalgic, so is neither classical nor romantic but in between. Untimely moderns, sans historico-theoretically derived sensus communis, “judge without criteria” (14). In fact, “anytime that we lack criteria, we are in modernity” (15). This lack also constitutes what L terms “paganism” (16). T notes that, for L, “pagan” also denotes “a prescription” (16). L agrees, but clarifies that “prescriptives … are never grounded” in paganism: For modern pagans, “either the just comes to us from elsewhere … we are never more than the addressees of prescriptions…. Or … prescriptions are not received” (17). L cites K, who leaves “the ability to judge … mysteriously hanging” on the “unfathomable principle” of the will. Judging isn’t about finding grounded criteria, but using “imagination” as “the power to invent criteria” (17)—criteria “regulated [only] by an Idea” (18).
The book’s second section opens with T noting that L often says “‘Let us be pagan,’ and “Let us be just’” (19). L links the two to interrupt “pious,” theoretical, Platonic notions of justice implying “a lost origin” (20) that suggests “the prescriptive can be derived from the descriptive” (21). L counters, via Levinas, that such derivation is fallacious. The prescription only comes from within the prescriptive language game, for at the pragmatic level one can’t simply move from “the true to the just” (24). Modernity’s response to this predicament has been “an answer through autonomy”: that “the set of prescriptions produced by the whole of a social body to which the prescriptions apply, will be just” (25). With no ideal of justice, “each situation is singular” (27) and the judge must judge without set criteria and only assess the judgment’s justness after the fact (26). Instead of the notion that “one gives oneself one’s own laws,” there is the “idea [in the Kantian sense] that no … utterer … is ever autonomous…. [but] first of all an addressee” (31). The utterer is “heteronomous” (32), “the recipient of a narrative in which one is narrated” (33) and in which invention occurs via “experimentation” (34). In the Cashinahua and Jewish traditions, “someone speaks to me; he places me under an obligation … to retell…. And in this sense, the will is never free” (35). Heteronomy interrupts the fixed subject, who “change bodies” as narrated narrator (40), and the privilege of “the pole of the addressee” “actively forgotten” in “Western thought” (37). But in paganism—unlike the Jewish tradition in which the deity is posited in a metalinguistic position—“The gods are implicated in the narratives,” “immanent [like humans] to stories in the making” and thus unable to serve as prescribers (43).
L turns to K to break the “relation between” the pre- and descriptive language games (45). L substitutes K’s term “Idea”—“the maximization of a concept” (46)—for “prescriptive.” And the Idea of “freedom,” i.e. “reason in its practical use” (46), leads to a definition of justice as “act[ing] in such a way that … the maxim of the will may serve as a principle of universal legislation” (47). The “that,” however, is a “negative clause” that offers no positive inkling of “a condition that defines justice” (47). K thus shifts the focus from why we judge to “what regulates our judgments” (47). With no descriptive “real” on which to found regulations, we are regulated by different sets of rules in a variety of “multiplying and refining language games” (49), each “bound to a specific pragmatics” (52). L’s “paganism,” for instance, involves “the Idea … of a set of diverse pragmatics” that “cannot be synthesized into a unifying metadiscourse” (58). In Kantian terms, the Idea of “one must be pagan” is “one must maximize as much as possible the multiplication of small narratives” not founded on ontology (59). Since all games operate on their own pragmatics, the ontological game cannot ground “the game of justice,” which occurs “in the field of prescriptives” (62) and thus “cannot be justified [as] … conclusions of a reasoning” (64). L does offer a negative insight in that excluding the “possibility of continuing to play the game of the just,” as in “terrorism,” does constitute “[a]bsolute injustice” (66). Positively, however, justice is an empty “transcendence” (69)—as K puts it, “that which obligates is something absolutely beyond our intelligence” (71). Thus in “the game of the just,” “one speaks as a listener” (72), never a priori assured of one’s authority as a judge.
L asserts K, some sophists, and Aristotle all assume there is “no reason of history” on which one can ground “knowledge in matters of ethics” (73). L notes that this situation can lead to a sort of tyranny of “convention,” but interprets K as offering a potential way out. K is like the Aristotle’s Corax: one who, rather than accepting the rule of convention as a sycophant, sees “the reasonable idea” as “produc[ing] … the inverisimilar, the unlikely” (78). L claims K can be interpreted as a sophist who breaks with the convention’s tyranny (78). The Kantian Idea of a “field of finality” in which “prevails … the Idea of something that is not yet here, that will never be here” is the maximization that makes possible this break. What K calls judgment is “the capability of thinking outside of the concept and outside of habit” (82), thinking at the unknowable “horizon of justice” (83).
L notes some difficulties in his interpretation of K, as the latter’s moral system is founded upon notions of totality, whereas L is searching for “a multiplicity of justices” and “justice of multiplicity” (100)—justices that occur within diverse language games that are being multiplied and refined, but never beholden to universal rules even as the “justice of multiplicity” is “assured, paradoxically enough, by a prescriptive of universal value” (100). But here L must stop making positive assertions lest he take on the role of “the great prescriber himself” (100). Ha ha.
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May 4, 2022There's a point, I think, in being an afficionado/academic in Theory where one reaches a kind of embittered understanding that (as in this book) when two old men sit down to enjoyable work through the nuances of a postmodern ethic on the political spectrum of Justice, etc., it's not really any difference from two old men sitting in a park moving chess pieces back in forth (or envision one of any other sets of obscure/particular games played by old men sitting in the food center in Singapore, or a souq in the Middle East). Just as meaningful, just as influential, by which I mean not at all. A kind of strange inner-market, speaking to itself. It's that part of me that rests assured that what Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud have to say will have zero influence on politics, anywhere. Not that I'm turning into some kind of Fish-esque "Why Philosophy Doesn't Matter," I think it's just that reading 'Just Gaming' made me realize more than some books that I'm no longer in the game, so to speak. My students won't benefit by me trying to bring out the subtle details of this, or my re-thinking of ideas of Justice and Deconstruction that I'd first cut my teeth on with Derrida, years ago. Books shouldn't be written caring about an audience, I think, and yet I also find myself thinking, I'm no longer the audience for this, nor am I interested in talking too much to the people who truly are. So, I suppose you could call that a negative review. Or is it that I've taken Lyotard's distrust of meta-narratives so much to heart that I no longer trust even his own meta-narrative.
April 4, 2023
Kinda lost me 80% in, due to my timing in reading as well as my comprehension of the details, but I enjoyed the engagement and intrigue I felt for the most part here.
The central issue is of an ethics corresponding to postmodern epistemology—what is the right thing to do when everyone is involved with different games with different rules that cancel each other out etc etc.
Lyotard’s answer—what is unjust is that which bars a questioning of justice at the threat of death—is not very satisfactory imo since it works in a negative/reactive. Ethics in the rear view mirror rather than in your face.
I am quite satisfied by the problematizing though, I agree that justice almost isn’t real! It’s more a consensus than like a standard. I was also compelled by the argument that you can’t get prescriptives out of denotatives, commands from descriptions. I’m not smart enough to really have a good explanation of what that means but I’m working on it… maybe that’s his rhetorical cop out—I’m just describing the world, and you can’t make an ethical command from a description
The central issue is of an ethics corresponding to postmodern epistemology—what is the right thing to do when everyone is involved with different games with different rules that cancel each other out etc etc.
Lyotard’s answer—what is unjust is that which bars a questioning of justice at the threat of death—is not very satisfactory imo since it works in a negative/reactive. Ethics in the rear view mirror rather than in your face.
I am quite satisfied by the problematizing though, I agree that justice almost isn’t real! It’s more a consensus than like a standard. I was also compelled by the argument that you can’t get prescriptives out of denotatives, commands from descriptions. I’m not smart enough to really have a good explanation of what that means but I’m working on it… maybe that’s his rhetorical cop out—I’m just describing the world, and you can’t make an ethical command from a description
February 27, 2022
Dismissal !
August 18, 2023
The aspects of language that hook me and everybody thinks I’m a lunatic for it
December 14, 2020
Cette discussion est une très belle introduction à la philosophie singulière de Lyotard. On se familiarise avec les concepts de jeux de langage, de pragmatique et de paganisme notamment, concepts centraux chez l'auteur. Deux thèses au moins y sont défendus : premièrement, les différents jeux de langage (dénotatif, prescriptif et esthétique notamment), présents dans la société, sont incommensurables les uns aux autres. Deuxièmement, une politique juste est une politique païenne (ou postmoderne, comme Lyotard le dira plus tard) qui préserve l'existence de ces différents jeux ainsi que leurs possibilités d'invention et d'expérimentation. On notera l'influence de la philosophie analytique d'une part et de celle de Nietzsche d'autre part sur la pensée lyotardienne. Vous en souhaitant bonne lecture!
August 12, 2020
Un libro necesario para resituar el discurso posmoderno: Lyotard, como sus contemporáneos, no quiere acabar con Occidente.
January 23, 2014
A pretty good book on the concept of justice in the contemporary era.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews