Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Softcover

Lyotard, Jean-François

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804738998 ISBN 13: 9780804738996

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Enthusiasm studies what Kant calls a "strong" sense of the sublime, not as an aesthetic feeling but as a form of political judgment rendered not by the active participants in historical events but those who witness them from afar. Lyotard's analysis, preparatory to his work in The Differend and subsequent publications, is a radical rereading of the Kantian "faculties," traditionally understood as functions of the mind, in terms of a philosophy of phrases derived from Lyotard's prior encounters with Wittgenstein's theory of language games. The result is a kind of "fourth" critique based in Kant's later political and historical writings, with an emphasis on understanding the place of those sudden and unscripted events that have the power to reshape the political/historical landscape (such as the French Revolution, May 1968, and others).

About this title

Review:

"Exploring the notions of 'passages', the sublime, freedom, the nature of the political and the sign of history, Enthusiasm may be fascinating to undergraduates newly-introduced to Lyotard's work and intriguing to those seeking to contextualize what they have already grasped." Author: Benjamin Hutchens Source: James Madison University, Philosophy in Review

From the Author:

Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist best known for his theories of postmodernity (The Postmodern Condition, 1979) and for his wide-ranging work on questions of justice, judgment, politics and aesthetics. Among his most influential books are Phenomenology (1953); Discourse/Figure (1972); Libidinal Economics (1974); Just Gaming (1979); The Differend (1983); The Inhuman (1998); Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991); and Postmodern Fables (1993).

About this edition

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0804738998
• ISBN 13: 9780804738996
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104
• Editor: Van Den Abbeele Georges