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Discourse, Figure
Lyotard’s earliest major work, available in English for the first time?
Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Jean-François Lyotard is recognized as one of the most significant French philosophers of the twentieth century. Although nearly all of his major writing has been translated into English, one important work has until now been unavailable. Discourse, Figure is Lyotard’s thesis. Provoked in part by Lacan’s influential seminars in Paris, Discourse, Figure distinguishes between the meaningfulness of linguistic signs and the meaningfulness of plastic arts such as painting and sculpture. Lyotard argues that because rational thought is discursive and works of art are inherently opaque signs, certain aspects of artistic meaning such as symbols and the pictorial richness of painting will always be beyond reason’s grasp.
A wide-ranging and highly unusual work, Discourse, Figure proceeds from an attentive consideration of the phenomenology of experience to an ambitious meditation on the psychoanalytic account of the subject of experience, structured by the confrontation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis as contending frames within which to think the materialism of consciousness. In addition to prefiguring many of Lyotard’s later concerns, Discourse, Figure captures Lyotard’s passionate engagement with topics beyond phenomenology and psychoanalysis to structuralism, semiotics, poetry, art, and the philosophy of language.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Jean-François Lyotard is recognized as one of the most significant French philosophers of the twentieth century. Although nearly all of his major writing has been translated into English, one important work has until now been unavailable. Discourse, Figure is Lyotard’s thesis. Provoked in part by Lacan’s influential seminars in Paris, Discourse, Figure distinguishes between the meaningfulness of linguistic signs and the meaningfulness of plastic arts such as painting and sculpture. Lyotard argues that because rational thought is discursive and works of art are inherently opaque signs, certain aspects of artistic meaning such as symbols and the pictorial richness of painting will always be beyond reason’s grasp.
A wide-ranging and highly unusual work, Discourse, Figure proceeds from an attentive consideration of the phenomenology of experience to an ambitious meditation on the psychoanalytic account of the subject of experience, structured by the confrontation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis as contending frames within which to think the materialism of consciousness. In addition to prefiguring many of Lyotard’s later concerns, Discourse, Figure captures Lyotard’s passionate engagement with topics beyond phenomenology and psychoanalysis to structuralism, semiotics, poetry, art, and the philosophy of language.
- GenresPhilosophyTheoryArt
512 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1985
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230 people want to read
About the author
Jean-François Lyotard
123 books341 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 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 24, 2015
This is a monumental work, to be counted amongst the greatest works of twentieth-century philosophy. Long-awaited in English translation, DF can now be held up as the important work that it is. It can also, dense and brickish as it is, be used to thump those who would like to believe that Lyotard's importance (and not just fame) rose and fell with the feverish wave of postmodernism in Anglo-American universities.
Beginning with a protestation and a distinction, DF immediately sets itself apart from the doxa of the time: "The given is not a text"; seeing is not reading. Of course it is the titular dyad that is most important of all, that is, the distinction between discourse and figure, yet as the figural nature of the comma hanging between the two suggests, the relationship is not simply oppositional. Discourse is on the side of conceptual knowledge, totalisation, consciousness and order. The figural is on the side of sensation, the unconscious, disorder and destabilisation. First the two are set against each other, before this opposition is "deconstructed" (while Derrida is present, Lyotard has his own sense of this term). The figural interrupts discourse while discourse tries to subordinate the figural. The figural eludes language, yet that is our only tool to get at it, as it constantly dis-figures discourse, in alignment with desire.
Lyotard works through the linguistic theories of Frege, Saussure, Benveniste, Jakobson, Hegel and those of a generative grammar stripe (Chomsky, Thorne, etc), pushing each of them on the question of language's relationship to reality and its subsumption under signs. For Lyotard, one must acknowledge the distance between the linguistic sign and the thing being referred to or designated. This is a question of negation. Not only is there negation between the sign units themselves (a la structuralism's claim of language as a system of equally spaced, differentially ordered sign units), but a fundamental negation or distance between the sign and the thing represented: the negation proper to vision. Emphasising the axis of designation puts Lyotard at odds with those content to play with signifiers and signifieds on the axis of signification.
Throughout the first section of the book, Lyotard uses the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to undermine the structuralist position, taking "the side of the eye". However, it is not like the experience of seeing escapes any organisation, discursive or otherwise. The visible is also subject to a kind of organisation that can be understood as something like that of a Cartesian plane, or more pertinently, perspective in painting. In fact painting and its developments are of high importance for Lyotard, so much so that the central section of the book, entirely italicised, is devoted to it. "Veduta on a Fragment of the 'History' of Desire" is the strange intermediate space around which the book is organised, illuminating and reflecting, or even advancing and setting up, the arguments advanced throughout the rest of the book.
The second major section of the book is where psychoanalysis comes to figure most prominently. After leaving the fixed surface of the text and the transformations of visible space, we enter the unconscious in search of the figural. While not always mentioned explicitly throughout the book, Lacan is lurking behind every corner as the foe who motivates much of it. Lacan was at the height of his popularity during the '60s, as was structuralism, famously claiming that "the unconscious is structured like a language". Of course, Lyotard disagrees totally with this position, and returns to Freud's texts in turn to provide an alternative.
Freud said of dreams that they are the "royal road to the unconscious", which leads Lyotard to The Interpretation of Dreams to find the necessary ideas to emphasise an energetics of the unconscious. Two distinctions are centrally important here: that between the dream-work (what they do) and the dream-thoughts (what they are about); and that between the primary and secondary processes. Dreams are like a workshop, working over its materials through condensation, displacement, conditions of representability and secondary reversal. The first two of these are the more well-known workings of the unconscious, famously tied to the linguistic/rhetorical categories of metaphor and metonymy by Lacan. Lyotard however, refuses to wed them to language, as they are the characteristic aspects of the primary processes. It is the primary processes, the movement of the libido which can be invested anywhere, the non-rational part of the unconscious, which is at stake. By claiming the unconscious to be structured like a language, Lacan effectively subordinates the nature of the primary processes to that of the secondary processes, which is the rational, linguistic and binding part of psychic activity. Lyotard wants to stress that the secondary processes emerge from the primary processes and attempt to order or regulate them, as again the dyad order/disorder is all-important. We can begin to see how Lyotard's energetics of the libido pre-figures Libidinal Economy.
This working over or transformation enacted by desire puts it into "connivance" with the figural. However, the latter is not reducible to the former. Nor is it "a figure" or "some figures" in the sense of a representation. The figural works over not only the written but the seen, or more broadly, any kind of representation. In connivance or complicity with desire, with the primary processes, the figural violates the two spaces of language: that of the system and reference; a transgression of the two negations: spacing between signs, gap between sign and referent. Lyotard claims there to be three elements of the figural:
This triad of image, form and matrix constitutes the "rows" of the figural, while the triad of signifier, signified and designated constitute the set discourse, along the axes of signification and designation. To see how these relate is to understand how the figural inhabits discourse.
Where are we then lead to? Towards the death drive which asserts itself in these disruptive operations of difference: "Now we understand that the principle of figurality that is also the principle of unbinding (the baffle) is the death drive: 'the absolute of anti-synthesis': Utopia." It is the artwork, in Lyotard's estimation, that unfulfills desire, leaving open and mobile the space of the primary processes, "preserving its voidness". The deep figure of desire is not bound and repeated, as a conscious re-presentation of an unconscious presentation, wherein the latter is subordinated to the former. Rather, it is the processes that are re-presented, the operations of the unconscious themselves. Such is the nature of the double reversal in its critical aspect.
Appended to the text is Lyotard's translation of Freud's "Die Vernienung". The copious footnotes of the original French, taking over the pages, disrupting the discourse, as it were, have become endnotes. A section of plates in gloss are also included, giving reference points primarily to the Veduta. The book itself is beautiful in hardback, and is a great scholarly edition.
I can only hope that this paltry, uneven summary of the text will encourage others to engage with the force of its workings.
Beginning with a protestation and a distinction, DF immediately sets itself apart from the doxa of the time: "The given is not a text"; seeing is not reading. Of course it is the titular dyad that is most important of all, that is, the distinction between discourse and figure, yet as the figural nature of the comma hanging between the two suggests, the relationship is not simply oppositional. Discourse is on the side of conceptual knowledge, totalisation, consciousness and order. The figural is on the side of sensation, the unconscious, disorder and destabilisation. First the two are set against each other, before this opposition is "deconstructed" (while Derrida is present, Lyotard has his own sense of this term). The figural interrupts discourse while discourse tries to subordinate the figural. The figural eludes language, yet that is our only tool to get at it, as it constantly dis-figures discourse, in alignment with desire.
Lyotard works through the linguistic theories of Frege, Saussure, Benveniste, Jakobson, Hegel and those of a generative grammar stripe (Chomsky, Thorne, etc), pushing each of them on the question of language's relationship to reality and its subsumption under signs. For Lyotard, one must acknowledge the distance between the linguistic sign and the thing being referred to or designated. This is a question of negation. Not only is there negation between the sign units themselves (a la structuralism's claim of language as a system of equally spaced, differentially ordered sign units), but a fundamental negation or distance between the sign and the thing represented: the negation proper to vision. Emphasising the axis of designation puts Lyotard at odds with those content to play with signifiers and signifieds on the axis of signification.
Throughout the first section of the book, Lyotard uses the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to undermine the structuralist position, taking "the side of the eye". However, it is not like the experience of seeing escapes any organisation, discursive or otherwise. The visible is also subject to a kind of organisation that can be understood as something like that of a Cartesian plane, or more pertinently, perspective in painting. In fact painting and its developments are of high importance for Lyotard, so much so that the central section of the book, entirely italicised, is devoted to it. "Veduta on a Fragment of the 'History' of Desire" is the strange intermediate space around which the book is organised, illuminating and reflecting, or even advancing and setting up, the arguments advanced throughout the rest of the book.
The second major section of the book is where psychoanalysis comes to figure most prominently. After leaving the fixed surface of the text and the transformations of visible space, we enter the unconscious in search of the figural. While not always mentioned explicitly throughout the book, Lacan is lurking behind every corner as the foe who motivates much of it. Lacan was at the height of his popularity during the '60s, as was structuralism, famously claiming that "the unconscious is structured like a language". Of course, Lyotard disagrees totally with this position, and returns to Freud's texts in turn to provide an alternative.
Freud said of dreams that they are the "royal road to the unconscious", which leads Lyotard to The Interpretation of Dreams to find the necessary ideas to emphasise an energetics of the unconscious. Two distinctions are centrally important here: that between the dream-work (what they do) and the dream-thoughts (what they are about); and that between the primary and secondary processes. Dreams are like a workshop, working over its materials through condensation, displacement, conditions of representability and secondary reversal. The first two of these are the more well-known workings of the unconscious, famously tied to the linguistic/rhetorical categories of metaphor and metonymy by Lacan. Lyotard however, refuses to wed them to language, as they are the characteristic aspects of the primary processes. It is the primary processes, the movement of the libido which can be invested anywhere, the non-rational part of the unconscious, which is at stake. By claiming the unconscious to be structured like a language, Lacan effectively subordinates the nature of the primary processes to that of the secondary processes, which is the rational, linguistic and binding part of psychic activity. Lyotard wants to stress that the secondary processes emerge from the primary processes and attempt to order or regulate them, as again the dyad order/disorder is all-important. We can begin to see how Lyotard's energetics of the libido pre-figures Libidinal Economy.
This working over or transformation enacted by desire puts it into "connivance" with the figural. However, the latter is not reducible to the former. Nor is it "a figure" or "some figures" in the sense of a representation. The figural works over not only the written but the seen, or more broadly, any kind of representation. In connivance or complicity with desire, with the primary processes, the figural violates the two spaces of language: that of the system and reference; a transgression of the two negations: spacing between signs, gap between sign and referent. Lyotard claims there to be three elements of the figural:
The figure-image, that which I see in the hallucination or the dream, and which the painting and film offer me, is an object placed at a distance, a theme. It belongs to the order of the visible, as outline [tracé révélateur]. The figure-form is present in the visible, and may even be visible, but in general remains unseen. This is Lhote's regulating line [tracé régulateur], the Gestalt of a configuration, the architecture of a picture, the scenography of a performance, the framing of a photograph—in short, the schema. By definition, the figure-matrix is invisible, the object of originary repression, instantly laced with discourse: "originary" phantasy.
This triad of image, form and matrix constitutes the "rows" of the figural, while the triad of signifier, signified and designated constitute the set discourse, along the axes of signification and designation. To see how these relate is to understand how the figural inhabits discourse.
Where are we then lead to? Towards the death drive which asserts itself in these disruptive operations of difference: "Now we understand that the principle of figurality that is also the principle of unbinding (the baffle) is the death drive: 'the absolute of anti-synthesis': Utopia." It is the artwork, in Lyotard's estimation, that unfulfills desire, leaving open and mobile the space of the primary processes, "preserving its voidness". The deep figure of desire is not bound and repeated, as a conscious re-presentation of an unconscious presentation, wherein the latter is subordinated to the former. Rather, it is the processes that are re-presented, the operations of the unconscious themselves. Such is the nature of the double reversal in its critical aspect.
Appended to the text is Lyotard's translation of Freud's "Die Vernienung". The copious footnotes of the original French, taking over the pages, disrupting the discourse, as it were, have become endnotes. A section of plates in gloss are also included, giving reference points primarily to the Veduta. The book itself is beautiful in hardback, and is a great scholarly edition.
I can only hope that this paltry, uneven summary of the text will encourage others to engage with the force of its workings.
October 3, 2012
Didn't think I could do it, but I did- managed to teach the ch on dream work to upper level undergraduates!
February 27, 2013
this is pretty difficult to decipher but my prof is pretty good @ unpacking this for us. whew ... I hope I'll never need to read lyotard again.
November 11, 2012
I am reading this book now. Tough-going. I have to read paragraphs twice to even get a slight understanding. But I am very interested in what he has to say, so I will persevere. If anyone has any insights (perhaps the person who taught this to undergrads?), please share.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews