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John Beck and Ryan Bishop (eds)
£115.00Feb 2027
Lyotard and the Inhuman ConditionReflections on Nihilism, Information and Art
£115.00
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About this book
Argues for the pivotal importance of Lyotard in light of the emerging discipline of posthumanism
Ashley Woodward presents a series of studies to explain Lyotard’s specific interventions in information theory, new media arts and the changing nature of the human. He assesses their relevance and impact in relation to a number of important contemporary thinkers including Bernard Stiegler, Luciano Floridi, Quentin Meillassoux and Paul Virilio.
Jean-François Lyotard was one of the leading French philosophers of his generation, whose wide-ranging and highly original contributions to thought were overshadowed by his brief, unfortunate association with ‘postmodernism.’ Woodward demonstrates what a new generation of scholars are just discovering: that Lyotard’s incisive work is essential for current debates in the humanities. Lyotard’s ideas about the arts and the confrontations between humanist traditions and cutting-edge sciences and technologies are today known as ‘posthumanism’.
Reviews
Ashley Woodward’s bright analysis rests upon a deep understanding of the whole corpus of Lyotard’s writings, from the earliest to the posthumous, and is contextualized by a confrontation with the philosophies of Bergson, Deleuze, Stiegler, Virilio, Habermas, Heidegger, Luhmann, Merleau-Ponty and others. His book outlines with great clarity the complexity of Lyotard’s view of the ‘inhuman condition’, and particularly his fascination of the ‘artistic event’.
Table of contents
Series Editors’ Preface; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction: Beyond the postmodern?: The inhuman condition; 1. The End of Time: Evolution, extinction, and the fate of meaning; 2. Information and Event: Lyotard’s philosophy of information; 3. Economy, Ecology, Organology: On technics and desire; 4. Nihilism and the Sublime: The crisis of perception; 5. Aesthesis and Techne; New technologies and Lyotard’s aesthetics; 6. Immaterial Matter: Yves Klein and the aesthetics of the sensible; 7. Inhuman Arts: From cubism to new media; Conclusion: The Judgement of the Inhuman; Bibliography; Index.