Discourse, Figure

NOTES TO CHAPTERS

397 Introduction 1. This observation is reported by Geoffrey Bennington in his introduction to Lyotard: Writing the Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 2. 2. Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 45–75. 3. Jean-François Lyotard, Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (Paris: UGE, 1973), 18. My translation. 4. Precisely during this period Louis Althusser was finishing his Diplôme d’études supérieures , “On Content in the Thought of G.W.F. Hegel,” and a few months earlier, in late 1947, he published a short review of Kojève’s study,“Man,That Night”in the Cahiers du Sud. Although both he and Thao accuse Kojève of being a dualist, Thao’s piece—both in terms of its venue and its substance—is the far more trenchant statement. 5. See Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event; Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991); Federico Jiménez Losantos,“Prologo”to Discurso, Figura (Barcelona: EGG, 1979); and Mary Lydon, “Veduta on Discours, Figure,” Yale French Studies 99 (2001): 10–26. 6. One might say that as many figures hover over Discourse, Figure as commentators. However, the relation between Lacan and Lyotard, as it operates in this book, has received perhaps its most sustained treatment in Peter Dews, “On the Letter and the Line: Discourse and Its Other in Lyotard,” from diacritics 14, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 40–49. 7. The well-known quarrel between Lacan and Derrida over Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” did not come from nowhere. Consider in this regard Lacan’s formulation from “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” that one is to grasp the letter à la lettre, that is, literally,and Derrida’s counter in the title to section one of his Of Grammatology, “Writing Before the Letter,” in French, avant la lettre, that is, before the fact, before, that is, the literal. Never to shirk a provocation, Lacan responded in the Points edition of the Écrits by insisting that his insight into the “instance/agency of the letter preceded any grammatology .” This in turn appears to have prompted The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan by Derrida partisans Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.The titular phrase, le titre de la lettre, might also be rendered as the “deed to, or rank of the letter.” Here is not the place to elaborate the stakes of this face-off,but suffice it to say that at issue is the nontrivial problem of whether philosophy can think the general economy of signs that conditions the possibility of language, whether spoken or written. NOTES TO CHAPTERS 398 notes to pages xvii–3 8. Jean-François Lyotard,Libidinal Economy, trans.Ian Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 45. 9. Deleuze, who served as a member of the academic jury selected to evaluate Lyotard’s thesis, also published a short review of Discourse, Figure in La Quinzaine littéraire where, among other things, he flags its “anti-dialectical”spirit. See Gilles Deleuze,“Appr éciation,” in L’Île déserte et autres textes (Paris: Minuit, 2002): 299–300. 10. See Gilles Deleuze, “Désir et plaisir,” Magazine littéraire 325 (October 1994): 59–65. 11. See Gopal Balakrishnan, ed., Debating Empire (London: Verso, 2003) and Samir Amin, “Empire and Multitude,” The Monthly Review 57, no. 6 (November 2005). 12. Sorting through what might be at stake in a non-dialectical Marxism would require a monograph of its own. Suffice it to say that in the context of these remarks what is at issue might be rendered in the repudiation of finitude, that is, in the repudiation of the intimate, structural articulation of death, negation, and eschatology, or, to summon their anti-Oedipal avatar, “lack.” The Bias of the Figural [Lyotard no doubt intended the title of the opening chapter of Discours, figure—“Le parti pris du figural”—to cut through to the book’s core, namely the role of the figural in the libidinal economy of the visible, while at the same time maintaining the figural’s fundamental ambiguity between subject and object, signifier and signified, word and image. For if “le parti pris du figural” suggests taking the side of the figural, it also evokes the figural’s own one-sidedness or prejudice, in blatant disregard for discourse’s aspirations to structure and communication. As Mary Lydon has remarked, behind this title may lie a reference to Francis...