We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Poststructuralism, aesthetics and events
Jean-François Lyotard's poststructuralism is distinctive due to its emphasis on aesthetics and on art. He seeks to introduce aesthetic events into structures, subjects and objects. Structure is infused with emotion and a troubling materiality. Wherever the detachment of structure is relied upon, Lyotard injects feelings associated with art and with other felt events (a political act or feeling, a use of language, a passionate caress, a burst of enthusiasm).
Events are important because they undermine and transform linguistic structures and their relations to things. Aesthetic events, such as the feelings associated with artworks – the events of an encounter with art – also transform and are part of things. This means that there is no independent reality. There are transforming relations between matter, feelings and language (structure). These transformations are events. They can be forgotten, hidden, repressed or ignored, but they are there at work, nonetheless.
Lyotard does not believe that language or discourse, a connected subset of language, can capture events. Instead, deeply felt encounters show the structures of discourses to be insufficient for accounting for events. More profoundly, discourses depend on feelings and on the disturbance they cause. There is no discourse without the intensity of feelings.
Language and discourse owe their significance and evolution to events, defined as relations between feelings and matter. It is not about what you know about love, or even about what that knowledge allows you to do. It is about love-events, their shaping of knowledge, and the way they always escape the net that knowledge or subsequent decisions throw over them.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
