The Big Stories Are Over: Lyotard, the Postmodern Condition, and What Comes After
Lyotard on incredulity toward metanarratives, language games, and the differend. The Postmodern Condition and paralogy.
Steps
- 1
- Reading· ~12 min
Language Games, Incommensurability, and the Differend
How Lyotard uses Wittgenstein's concept of language games to explain the fragmentation of postmodern knowledge, and why his concept of the differend is his most important and most neglected philosophical achievement.
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- Reading· ~9 min
Paralogy: Lyotard's Alternative to Both Consensus and Chaos
What Lyotard actually puts in place of the metanarratives, why it is not relativism, not conservatism, and not a celebration of chaos, but something more specific and more interesting.
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- Text Explore· ~8 min
The Postmodern Condition and The Differend: Key Passages
Read the central claims of Lyotard's two most important works in conversation with the key critical responses.
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- Argument Map· ~10 min
From Metanarratives to Paralogy: Lyotard's Full Architecture
Map Lyotard's complete argument from the diagnosis of postmodernity through language games and the differend to his positive political and epistemological proposals.
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- Dialogue· ~10 min
Dialogue: Can Lyotard Condemn Injustice Without a Metanarrative?
Habermas's fundamental challenge, and whether Lyotard's philosophy is politically self-undermining.
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- Reflection· ~8 min
Reflection: Your Own Language Games
Lyotard's most useful legacy is not the grand claim about metanarratives but the specific practice of noticing when incommensurable games are being forced into false translation.
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