Jean-François Lyotard is probably mostly known to the general reader for The Postmodern Condition, which sparked a debate that still goes on today even though the term “postmodernism” seems to have lost much of its appeal. His writings, however, cannot be subsumed under this heading, as if constituting a program: they trace a sinuous line that blurs divisions between genres, refuses institutional boundaries, and displays many twists and turns.

Kiff Bamford and Magaret Grebowicz’s Lyotard and Critical Practice contains a series of original essays as well as selections from Lyotard’s writings providing us with multiple approaches to Lyotard’s work, with the idea of “critical practice” indicating that what is at stake is not just another set of exegetical comments, but how his work could be extended into the present. The book is organized into three sections, “What Resists Thinking,” “Long Views and Distances,” and “Why Art Practice,” which at least at first glance, would take us from fundamental philosophical issues through politics, to discussions of art. But while the three sections correspond to decisive facets of Lyotard’s work—philosophy, politics, art—the respective contributions resist any such facile compartmentalization, and if Lyotard by all accounts is a philosopher, his work is just as much about the impossibility of any strict conceptual closure.

Thus, it is no coincidence that the first section deals with “resists thinking,” which should not be taken as something merely negative: resistance is what makes thought worthwhile on all levels. The practical aspect of this comes across in the opening essay by Derek R. Ford, who addresses the role of teaching and pedagogy, which was always crucial for Lyotard. Taking his cues from Lyotard’s writings on urbanism, in which the megalopolis becomes the name for a system that thrives and expands by consuming differences, Ford poses the question of what an educational system that does not homogenize and would listen to that which appears as mere “childish stupidity” would be (20). Aporetic as this may appear in a system aiming for efficiency, it nevertheless constitutes an imperative if thought is not to congeal.

Grebowicz and Marina Zurkow take the question of language and listening in a direction that was never developed by Lyotard, although it can be located at the margin of his thought. If the animal, as Lyotard writes in The Differend, can be taken as the paradigm of a victim, how can it then be listened to? Whales, Grebowicz and Zurkow suggest, are somehow paradigmatic animals, presenting us with a subjectivity at the imagined boundary between human and animal—but how can we approach the nonhuman without resorting to projections of the already known? Lyotard, the authors claim, does not go far enough in his reflections on the “inhuman,” and he fails not only to give voice to the animality of the speaking creature to whom rights are owed, but also, by limiting the inhuman to an ungraspable condition inside the human subject, failing to address the possibility of a relation based on a common animality.

Claire Nouvet’s essay also draws on Lyotard’s meditations on the unconscious core of the subject, the enigmatic “Thing” that he inherits from Freud and Lacan, but instead she underscores the difference between the “Thing” approached by art as something that touches us at a level beneath the subject and our relation to others that necessitates a discourse of rights and responsibilities. If art insists on maintaining the first approach, it does so by withdrawing from communal exchange, while the “republican” sociopolitical space of ethics requires the opposite. But, as Nouvet remarks, this distinction is perhaps too neat, since the relation to the “Thing” is for Lyotard also that which makes every member singular and irreplaceable and forms the basis of the respect for human rights.

For Georges Van Den Abbeele, Lyotard is a philosopher of time, which comes across not only in his work on Husserl and Freud, but also in his writings on art. In his monograph on the painter Albert Ayme, Lyotard proposes that we should understand the superimposition of dried primary colors as indicating an insuperable discontinuity of time. Abbeele suggests that this can be brought to bear on politics as well: if politics as a “democratic combinatorics” (55) is based on a time as the promise of equality that is always still to come, how can we accommodate that which falls out of time? Not only art but also politics must involve an anamnesis of that which stands outside the system, of the untimely that remains at the core of temporality.

John E. Drabinski opens the second section by stating without further ado that he has no need for Lyotard to approach his topic, Africo-Caribbean literature (for which the writings of Glissant, who is also the main reference in the essay, obviously is a more fruitful reference), and at first one may wonder why he is in the book. As Drabinski notes, Lyotard’s idea of the postmodern is rooted in a particular Western narrative that cannot be applied to other geographical contexts (as is also noted in Yuk Hui’s essay, with reference to China), but, somewhat surprisingly, he develops a parallel account of the “Afropostmodern,” (85) which shows that the grand narratives of The Postmodern Condition should be rethought in a pluralistic fashion. Whether the idea of the postmodern is still relevant for this however remains an open question.

Claire Pagès sticks more closely to Lyotard’s own trajectory and analyzes his work in Socialisme ou Barbarie, a radical socialist group that Lyotard joined in 1954, and that would remain the main source of his work for the following decade. As Pagès notes, Lyotard’s decision to leave the academic world for political activism coincides with the publication of his first book, Phenomenology, in which the latter sections are dedicated to exploring how phenomenology might be reconciled with Marxism and historical materialism. In Socialisme ou Barbarie the Algerian liberation war was a decisive issue and in Lyotard’s writings, Pagès traces the emergence of motifs that would remain after the break with Marxism, above all the move from grand to local narratives and the search for contradictions on multiple levels that refuse to be evened out.

For Bartosz Kuźniarz too, Lyotard’s conflicted relation to Marxism is at stake. In the first half of the 1970s, in the writings clustered around Libidinal Economy, capitalism was not something to be overcome, but a flow of desires and intensities taking us beyond good and evil, emptying the very idea of critique. Marx’s analysis of contradictions was read through Freud’s economy of the drives, and the conflict between them was resolved by Nietzsche becoming the winner. This position, which, paradoxically, actively denounces any taking of positions as a way to continue playing the same game over and over, was however soon abandoned. While capitalism was not placed among the grand narratives that would be dispelled in the postmodern, precisely because, as Kuźniarz argues, it is deprived of that type of goat that oriented the narratives of modernity (knowledge, emancipation), it still forms the horizon of Lyotard’s later work.

Yuk Hui understands the postmodern, which for him remains a valid concept, as a new episteme (using a term from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things) to which philosophy as such belongs just as much as any other type of discourse. In the postmodern episteme, certainty and security are no longer the necessary ground of knowledge, which mutates into other forms of legitimation. What replaces truth as a criterion is now performativity, reflexivity, or resilience, which promote a systemic order capable of absorbing anything, and in this sense, Hui proposes that the totalizing capacity and tendency of the Hegelian system and of cybernetics come close. This is why Lyotard mobilizes the sublime in art, not as a solution, but at least as a preliminary conceptual tool. And yet the question remains as to the reach of these terms. In China, Hui notes, the postmodern signals excitement towards technological modernization, towards the realization of a digital earth and its data economy, which is what the sublime, as well as all the kindred terms in Lyotard, in fact, oppose.

Jill Gibbon’s essay is undoubtedly the contribution that comes closest to bringing the critical and practice together, even though the link to Lyotard is never really worked out in any detail. In her undercover visit to the world’s largest arms fair in London, she documents her visceral reaction both in writing and drawings that accompany the text. The “affect-phrase” (172) in this way proves to not just be in language but extends out into gestures, lines, and visual forms. What is repressed here—the brute violence of the weapons, the horror of their effects, covered over by cynical sales talks—haunts the bodies of the attendees, as well as fueling the undercover artist’s anxiety over having her cover blown. The “why” of visual art practice, as well as of writing, is given by the need to testify and to give form to the affect in phrases that cut across the division between the graphic and the textual.

Ashley Woodward sets out from the distinction made by Lyotard in the early 1970s between the critical function of works of art, and an understanding of art as affirmative. Affirmative art invents something new without a negative relation to the tradition, while on another level having a critical relation to all codes, social or artistic, which blocks experimentation. This was at first tied to a libidinal aesthetic, which Lyotard would later abandon, but the claim for art as experimentation remains, whose ramifications Woodward traces in the monograph on Duchamp, in the exhibition cocurated by Lyotard at the Pompidou, Les Immatériaux, and in his more directly philosophical writings on the “crisis of foundations” that shook philosophy and the sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century. In all of them, the question posed bears on the relation between understanding and sensibility (in the Kantian vocabulary that Lyotard often employs), that is our categories and the web of space-time, whose synthesis has become increasingly tenuous.

Stephen Zepke similarly explores how art confronts us with forces that elude consciousness, from Lyotard’s early work on the death drive and the figural event to the later writings that emphasize mourning and loss. Notwithstanding the changes in vocabulary, for Lyotard art remains a “way of unknowing the world” (193) by presenting the unpresentable, notably in his many and shifting approaches to the Kantian sublime. In this sense, art for Lyotard belongs to the sphere of ontology rather than to history, and it can be confronted with other accounts of the present condition, such as Peter Osborne’s theory of “postconceptual art,” in which historical mediation is at the center. For Lyotard, art is neither linguistic nor conceptual, not sealed in an exclusively visual domain, but, as the title of his first major work, Discourse, Figure, indicates, it crosses over from image to text and back again—both of them, in the end, drawing their momentum from a more profound difference, the “figural” or the “matrix” that can only be grasped negatively in the way in which it deforms form.

Taking his cues from Lyotard’s close reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle in the 1975 essay “Apathy in Theory” (included in the volume) coeditor Bamford points out that apathy does not signal passivity, but a mode of writing that allows lines of thought to be explored regardless of the need to provide proofs. Similarly, when Lyotard later picks up the term “pagan” (206) to qualify his writing, it points to a multiplicity—for the Romans a manifold of gods, for us an irreducible variety of styles and genres, of which the theoretical demonstration is only one. Drawing on performance art, Bamford suggests that it is precisely this diversity across different fields that the present collection wants to display, providing a plea for a decompartmentalization allowing theory, political practice, and artistic explorations to develop without pre-set agendas. Concluding the volume, Peter Gratton notes that Lyotard’s writings are striking not only for refusing any linear temporal ordering between past, present, and future but also for aligning justice and “critical practice” as a constant possibility that cannot be placed within established frameworks.

Rather than a unified picture that would prescribe a one-way relation between theory (philosophy, concepts) and practice (artistic, political), Lyotard and Critical Practice presents us with multiple ways of undoing the difference between them, sometimes close to Lyotard’s own writings, sometimes remote from his concerns. In this, it is however much in the spirit of Lyotard, who was always ready to retrace his steps and take off in unexpected directions.