Lyotard Quotes

“For many scientists, as Lyotard concedes, scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge there is, but if so, how then do we understand fairy stories and law?”
― Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty : The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind - A History

“The time of the photograph is [always] after. This imprecision accommodates the numerous successions, the end upon seismic end, in a time without time, un[re]countable: still. In this, it is a perfect crime, “l’anéantissement anéanti, la fin… privée d’elle-même.”
― Nathanael, Sisyphus, Outdone.: Theatres of the Catastrophal

“By calling into question the very ideal of a universal, autonomous reason (which was, in the Enlightenment, the basis for rejecting religious thought) and further demonstrating that all knowledge is grounded in narrative or myth, Lyotard relativizes (secular) philosophy's claim to autonomy and so grants the legitimacy of a philosophy that grounds itself in Christian faith. Previously such a distinctly Christian philosophy would have been exiled from the 'pure' arena of philosophy because of its 'infection' with bias and prejudice. Lyotard's critique, however, demonstrates that no philosophy - indeed, no knowledge - is untainted by prejudice or faith commitments. In this way the playing field is leveled, and new opportunities to voice a Christian philosophy are created. Thus Lyotard's postmodern critique of metanarratives, rather than being a formidable foe of Christian faith and thought, can in fact be enlisted as an ally in the construction of a Christian philosophy.”
― James K.A. Smith, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church

“…the narratives we tell to justify a single set of laws and stakes are inherently unjust.”
― James Williams, Key Contemporary Social Theorists

“La sustitución de la historia por la ontología fue, sin embargo, una estación de tránsito: al cabo de pocos años, Lyotard se había pasado a la astrofísica.”
― Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity

“Everything is dead already. Solar death is catastrophic because it vitiates ontological temporality as configured in terms of philosophical questioning’s constitutive horizonal relationship to the future. But far from lying in wait for us in the far distant future, on the other side of the terrestrial horizon, the solar catastrophe needs to be grasped as something that has already happened; as the aboriginal trauma driving the history of terrestrial life as an elaborately circuitous detour from stellar death. Terrestrial history occurs between the simultaneous strophes of a death which is at once earlier than the birth of the first unicellular organism, and later than the extinction of the last multicellular animal.”
― Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction