Postmodern Fables

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by Jean-Francois Lyotard,

Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele

University of Minnesota Press

Due/Published April 1999, 272 pages, paper

ISBN 0816625557

New in paper! (S99)

In this collection of fifteen "fables" Lyotard asks "how to live, and why?" In sections titled "Verbiages," "System Fantasies," "Concealments," and "Crypts," Lyotard unravels and reconfigures idealist notions of subjects as various as the French Revolution, the Holocaust, the reception of French thought in the Anglo-American world, the events of May 1968, the Gulf War, academic travelers as intellectual tourists, the collapse of communism, and his own work in the context of others'.

Review

"I would love to describe the present situation in a way that had nothing of critique, that was frankly 'representational,' referential rather than reflective, hence naïve and even puerile. Something like a tale told in the manner of Voltaire.... In an informal fashion, of course, even a bit timid, as if this fable were the unavowable dream the postmodern world dreams about itself. A tale which in sum, would be the great narrative that the world persists in telling itself after the great narratives have obviously failed."

When you think fable you also think moral. Moral? In today's postmodern world where an idea such as "truth" is regarded with such suspicion and morals are seemingly vaporized can we really look to a fable to provide us with a moral to live our lives by? This is the challenge Lyotard sets for himself in this dazzling, provocative and erudite new collection of postmodern essays. Lyotard's morals still ask the questions how to live and why? knowing that the answers are deferred, contradict one another and far from definitive. However, the different morals "make a rustling of maxims, a cheerful lament" and as Lyotard argues "that's life." He continues, "Every which way of life is flaunted, exhibited, enjoyed for the love of variety. The moral of all morals would be that of 'aesthetic' pleasure." With a combination of irreverence and sober philosophical investigations of such matters as justice, ethics, and aesthetics, Lyotard's fables reinvestigate subjects such as the French Revolution, the Holocaust, the Gulf War, Academic travelers, and Anglo-American reception to French Theory. Certainly not the stuff of Aesop but certainly one of the more original takes on postmodernism around.