Review: Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘Readings in Infancy’
Review of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford (eds.), Readings in Infancy (Bloomsbury, 2023), 184 pages
Abstract
Jean-François Lyotard’s 1991 Readings in Infancy is now published in English in its entirety, edited by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford, a landmark. Approached philosophically, for Lyotard infancy concerns a prelinguistic affect that is both traumatizing and formative, inhabiting discourse, granting it tone and depth. These readings are thematized around six modernist writers and navigate shifting critical registers to highlight the tension Lyotard sees between the voice (as the bodily, immediate) and language (as discourse and speech). He challenges the melancholia he sees as widespread through Western metaphysics, accomplished through a bearing of witness to an irremediable debt, that of the inarticulable voice of infancy.
Reviewed by Jeremy Bell
Jean-François Lyotard’s writing has left an indelible phrasing on the 20th century, from postmodernism to the figural and the differend. It is both timely and belated that his meditation on the unspeakable and the prelinguistic then, the inability to write, should find deferral from its initial French publication in 1991 to its recent debut in English, awaiting articulation yet posthumous. In fact, Jean-François Lyotard’s Readings in Infancy offers a further of his interrogations of modernity and its meanings, another final set of what he elsewhere describes as the ‘rewritings’ of its condition (Lyotard 1991: 26).
Comprised of six readings or lectures, this rewriting into English of Lyotard’s seminal text is edited by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford. It rounds out a set of commentaries Lyotard made in his later years on affect, responsibility, and judgement, but also the feeling of being ‘gripped’ or ‘seized’ by the demand of time (Lyotard, 1993: 149). It connects to his interpretations of ‘the inhuman’ and ‘the sublime’ of the same period. Infancy, Lyotard claims, concerns an ineffable and traumatic affect, our relations to ontological and sexual difference, that precedes and helps to shape both selfhood and language. It is deeply informed by Kant and Freud, but also the distillation of a lifetime’s readings of modernity and its questions. As Lyotard’s introductory remarks observe, ‘The thing that these various writings hold in abeyance, awaiting delivery, bears different names, names of elision. Kafka calls it the indubitable, Sartre the inarticulable. Joyce the inappropriable. For Freud, it is the infantile; for Valéry, disorder; for Arendt, birth’ (1). Almost classical in format, these six canonical figures are problematized through Lyotard’s notion of infancy and its suspension but also habitation in discourse. Even as Lyotard’s voice is critical in its own fashion throughout, it also shifts.
Opening with the question of ‘return’ in James Joyce’s Ulysses, he situates Joyce into his own discourse on modernism, highlighting the heterogeneity of Joyce’s text and its resistance to totalization. As he explains, “By the time Joyce wrote Ulysses,” the focus of ‘artists and writers’ was ‘not to create beauty, but rather bear witness to a passibility to that voice that, within man, exceeds man, nature, and their classical concordance’ (9). This ‘voice’ disruptive of concordances and boundaries will be the same voice that ‘returns’ in his reading of Freud. It is just one way he conceptualizes infancy, which contrasts with the ‘prescription’ he sees in Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’, about a torture machine inscribing its sentence onto the flesh of the condemned. ‘Prescription’ rests at tension with the irreducible complexity of what Lyotard calls ‘the intractable’ (21). Phrased otherwise, a ‘differend’ persists between the law and the body (26). Lyotard’s tone through these readings is of admiration, both generous and innovative.
His distaste for Sartre on the other hand is obvious. As Harvey notes, it ‘will perhaps stick out more than it stands out. It drips sarcasm and disdain’ (ix). Initially a review of Denis Hollier’s Politics of Prose: Essay on Sartre (1986), here Lyotard defends the position of Claude Lefort, his collaborator in Socialisme ou barbarie, against the criticisms of Sartre. Retrospectively, Sartre’s lack of judgement, his emphasis on allegiance to the French Communist Party, as well as his overweening confidence in the role of the intellectual, is plain enough for Lyotard: ‘if Sartre was popular, it was because he was a populist’ (65). But at peril between Sartre and Lefort, he claims, was also a ‘metaphysics of the subject’ (65). By focusing on the crisis Sartre’s writing underwent in the early 1950s, Sartre’s position, in its unwavering commitment to politics, Lyotard suggests, foreclosed not only poetry or any kind of politics of poetry, but the bearing of witness to incompletion, the unknown, anything left unsaid or ambivalent, or inarticulable (73-74).
When he considers the ‘disorder’ that Paul Valéry’s poetry obeys, Lyotard’s tone becomes more didactic, epistemological, and focused on the poetic object. He considers the ‘indefiniteness’ or ‘indetermination’ of things, what Valéry calls their ‘disorder’ (83). Infancy’s presence is here illustrated in the construction of the work or object itself. As Lyotard says, ‘Forming a form (for there will be, in the end, a form) is not bound to a project’ (82). Infancy is resistance to form’s formation, we might say then, whether in a poetic or artistic work, writing, or even as a cognitive object. Foregrounding his Kantian pedagogy, Lyotard links Valéry’s ‘disorder’ to the sublime as ‘a conflict brought to a breaking point where the proliferating network of imaginary possibilities becomes frayed’ (85). Again, an unformed affect precedes articulation, ‘a “this” that is in no way a thing, but rather an occasion for a “pure” feeling in the Kantian sense—pure in that it is unmotivated’ (87). Valéry’s course on poetics is used to help Lyotard respond to Thierry de Duve and the statement ‘this is art’ that was part of the dialogue that developed between them and others. As the editors note, Lyotard was even a jury member of de Duve’s PhD in 1981 (129), but de Duve himself acknowledges his debt to Lyotard too (de Duve, 2018: 9).
The most complex reading, ‘Survivor: Arendt’, moves to the question of responsibility. Although addressing Arendt with respect, Lyotard maintains reservations, with a ‘prescriptive’ register is occupied more easily. Balancing a network of approaches, from phenomenology and critical theory to psychoanalysis and thermodynamics, he connects Arendt’s notion of ‘natality’ or ‘birth’ to survival, ‘a problematic of time’ he says (39). Asking if something is lost or forgotten in survival, he compares the retrospective truth of Hegel’s owl of Minerva to the disaster accumulating before Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. Mourning is impossible for the Angel of History, he suggests, a melancholia persistent through a great deal of Western metaphysics and a pretext for his discussion of ‘an ontological and historical melancholia at the heart of Arendt’s thought’ (45). For Lyotard, confronting this melancholia is only possible by acting ‘as if’ life has meaning or purpose, even if it does not (44). This is what transforms ‘birth’ into something more than just ‘survival’.
As he writes, ‘Infancy is the state of the soul inhabited by something to which no answer is ever given. It is led in its undertakings by an arrogant fidelity to this unknown guest to which it feels itself a hostage. Antigone’s infancy. I understand infancy here as obedience to a debt, which we call a debt of life, of time, of event; a debt of being there in spite of everything, a debt from which only the persistent feeling of respect can save the adult from being no more than a survivor, a creature living on reprieve from annihilation.’ (44).
As Lyotard explains, totalitarian power uses our nakedness or infancy as a force or threat against us. He criticizes Arendt for failing to recognize the proper ‘origin’ of totalitarianism (54). Today, power functions more discretely, ‘through technological, scientific, and economic competition’ (56). This expands from his reflections in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1991), where Lyotard observed two forms of ‘the inhuman’: the ‘indetermination’ of a not-yet-human that he calls ‘childhood’ and ‘infancy’; and the ‘inhuman’ of ‘development’, whether it be financial, technological, scientific, etc. (Lyotard, 1991: 2). As his reading of Arendt elaborates: ‘Development is ideological not because it is out of control in relation to the reality of things, but because it forecloses the anxiety of birth and death as an ontological enigma’ (56). This foreclosure is representative of the prejudice of Western metaphysics, he suggests. The anxiety of birth and death, as well as the traumas of sexual difference, continue to haunt us. By exploring their affective residues, the capacity for new beginnings, or what Arendt calls ‘natality’ or ‘birth’ – what she sees as the essence of political action – grants justice to that which we are each held both accountable and prisoner. This is how we challenge the melancholia he sees as typified by a bias toward the authority of language, what he elsewhere calls the ‘metanarrative’ and ‘metasubject’ (Lyotard, 1984: 34).
Then finally, in his most detached but crisply philosophical register, Readings in Infancy closes with ‘Voices: Freud’. Looking at the tension between voice and its articulation, he recalls the Aristotelian distinction between phōnē (or voice) and lexis (or speech). By examining Freud’s case history of the ‘Rat Man’, he makes plain what he alludes to throughout: ‘All writing is this attempt to bear witness, by way of the articulated lexis, to the inflexible phōnē. Writing has a debt of affect which it despairs of ever being able to pay off’ (100). Voice (or phōnē) resists speech he says, ‘whatever its timbre, it always muffles the lexis’ (92). But infancy’s voice itself too is stifled and lacks the means to respond. Nevertheless, voice resides within lexis, within narrative, granting it specificity. ‘The inarticulated voice gives timbre to the articulated one’ he says (96). Here he pivots again from the exegetical to the prescriptive: ‘Such ought to be the true force of narrative, its art, its address: to give the phōnē the opportunity of address’ (105). The proliferation of micronarratives grant address to the voice then, he seems to suggest, the not-yet-articulated and without project. The incommensurable, the non-representational, and what he elsewhere calls ‘the figural’ are again emphasized. Examining both Aristotle and Freud, Lyotard illustrates the analogies between the psychoanalytic scene and tragic drama, how both concern the struggle with a repressed voice or affect. Like the psychoanalytic scene he says, the tragic drama too carries ‘a moment of caesura, a paroxysm, when the hero’s deafness is reversed into a listening to what he was not hearing’ (103). For Lyotard, this ‘listening’ is also a kind of bearing of witness to the intractable voice of infancy.
Readings in Infancy does not describe the inarticulable so much as trace the outlines of an enigma, both traumatic and fascinating, from which we cannot escape. Resisting summarization, these readings span aesthetics and politics to semiotics and psychoanalysis, all with Lyotard’s remarkable idiom and insight. In his Foreword, Harvey expresses his enjoyment over ‘Lyotard’s lapidary and paratactic rhetoric, his allusive, ironic, parodic tone, and his irrepressible tongue-in-cheek humor,’ (xii), an enjoyment he extends to readers. We see it already in its opening phrase: ‘Nobody knows how to write’ (1). Surely not like Jean-François Lyotard anyway. Still, the humility but also poetry of his phrasing is already present, as inimitable as all voices are, but here bespeaking a sense of belatedness it feels impossible not to mourn.
References
Hollier, Denis (1986) The Politics of Prose: Essay on Sartre. Translated by Jefferey Mehlman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1991) The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1993) The Grip (Mainmise). In: Lyotard, J-F Political Writings. Translated by Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 148-158.
De Duve, Thierry (2018) Aesthetics at Large: Volume 1 Art, Ethics, Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jeremy Bell is the author of ‘Pierre Klossowski: Acéphale and (A)theology’ (2021) in Acéphale & Autobiographical Philosophy in the 21st Century, various reviews and publications concerning French culture and theory, and most recently ‘Klossowskian Economics: The Price of the Irrational’ (2023) in Pierre Klossowski: The Flesh of the Spirit. With a PhD in cultural studies from Trent University, he teaches at Fleming College in Peterborough, Canada.
Email: jeremybell@trentu.ca
