Adrift with Lyotard

The complexities. . . are pasted together. . . into a narrative, but one that trips and jumps, fixating on the abject elements in both life and fiction: the uncertainty between bios and graphia” (13). What Kiff Bamford writes here, of Jean-François Lyotard contemplating the life and work of André Malraux, could be just as easily said of Bamford himself as he masterfully renders the sometimes baffling but ultimately rewarding complexities of Lyotard’s passage among us. Bamford is an artist and senior lecturer in the School of Art, Architecture, and Design at Leeds Beckett University. He is the author of Lyotard and the “Figural” in Performance, Art, and Writing (2012).1The concise, illustrated titles in this well-curated series “present the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period.” Far less the “postmodernist” that with maddening persistence he is packaged as, Lyotard is first and foremost a resolute avant-gardist. That’s why Bamford is truly clairvoyant to begin and end this beautiful little book meditating aloud about Lyotard’s fascination with the life and work of Malraux. For those readers eager to develop a full grasp of Lyotard’s idiosyncratic contributions to philosophy, this framing is crucial. As with Malraux, the thread running through every twist and turn of an atypical career path was a profound conviction that art protects a space where innovative politics and ethics can and must be invented and activated. Bamford announces from the outset that what he is presenting is “a life of non sequiturs and ironic juxtapositions” (16). Unlike Malraux, Bamford offers playfully ironic invitations for his readers to catch the drift of thought that form the dominant characteristic of the Lyotardian commitment to cultural politics.All this is set up in “Openings,” after which Bamford draws us immediately to the dual wellsprings of Lyotard’s militant activism: his parents’ dismay at his love for a Jew, Andrée May, and his experience in the early 1950s teaching in Constantine, Algeria. As Bamford observes, justly paraphrasing James Williams, “It was this triggering of affect through aesthetics which later drew Lyotard to the importance of artistic examples” (40). His Algerian experience is absolutely essential in founding Lyotard’s lifelong dissident leftist proclivities that first manifest through his participation in Socialisme ou Barbarie. The pillars of Lyotard’s militancy were indignation at racism and colonialism and abhorrence toward socialist bureaucracy that supplanted France once Algerian independence had been achieved. Meanwhile, Lyotard’s engagement with Judaism defines one of the two poles between which his abiding concern with judgment is negotiated. When engaged with art as with politics and ethics, those two decisional valences are Kantian indeterminate judgment and the implacable law of the Torah. These scintillating chapters by Bamford are titled simply “Politics” and “Algeria and After.”With this compact gem of a book, Bamford has the audacity to speculate about the future repercussions of Lyotard’s meanderings and ironic interventions. Equally audacious is his having this work placed along with others in Reaktion’s series, for as of 2017 there was no biography anywhere of Lyotard — “an absence that singles him out from other figures in this series of Critical Lives.” And yet, one cannot but be taken by Bamford’s confession on his university web page that “the hesitation which dominates the tone of the book” is due to his “uncertainty with regard to the genre of biography.” With extreme skepticism among writers — including Joyce and Foucault — about any biographical enterprise, this uncertainty is certainly justified. And yet from Richard Ellman and Didier Eribon we have great biographies of the lives of these very skeptics. There is thus audacity too in Bamford’s hitting all the right notes when so many of the notes to be hit in this life of dissidence are dissonant.Bamford’s purpose could not be clearer: “To open up some of the lesser-known aspects of Lyotard’s work through a discussion of his central ideas placed within the wider historical, political and cultural contexts of the second half of the twentieth century” (10). Yet, faithful to the spirit of his subject’s politics of experience and to one of the dominant tones of his writing, the irony behind so many of Lyotard’s core concepts emerges under the light of Bamford’s exhibition. Less a concept than an attitude, la dérive or the drift — the drift of imagination-fueled thought — lends impetus from the outset to the entire life, the politics, and the thought that all reflect “Lyotard’s desire to wander” (18). Indeed, “Dérive” is the title that Bamford lends to one of his strongest chapters, in which we are treated to a discussion of Lyotard’s preoccupation with the dreamwork. Like minoritized social groups with respect to a presumptuous we subject, the dreamwork takes second fiddle to consciousness because it does not “think.” Figural, as Lyotard’s thesis would have it, the dreamwork fails at discourse. Yet, ironically, consciousness is incomplete, teeters on annihilation without its figural counterpart — thus, in parallel, Lyotard’s predilection for the strength of the weak argument found with the Sophists.Forever adrift both from and with the nexus formed by Marx and Freud, all the other key concepts emerging from Lyotard’s philosophical thought are treated by Bamford: the intractable, the differend, the coercive we of all grand narratives, and so forth. Along the way, Bamford rescues from oblivion or incomprehension the absolutely essential Immatériaux project that Lyotard organized in the mid-1980s at Beaubourg: the philosopher in the museum is premonitory of Lyotard’s late interest in Malraux. In an effort to imagine the mind before language, in a figural state before discourse, Lyotard devoted his last two decades largely to a cluster of notions that attend the state of infancy where something like an affect-phrase may abound, but of which we may know nothing unless anamnesis or belated (Nachträglich) thinking finds the words. All of these concerns and tools — including the infamous “postmodern,” which he astutely treats in a chapter justly bearing the book’s subtitle — Bamford illuminates while leaving just enough shadow to ensure the pedagogical commitment that Lyotard expected from his students and other interlocutors.Regardless of whether Bamford actually met Lyotard or not, he has definitely heard his voice, its tones, its intonations, its “ironic dismissal[s]” (11), its love of the fragment, of suggestion, of teasing and teasing out. Along the way, the reader encounters refreshing reflections on just what it is that he is doing writing such a book. And it is a thoroughly researched one, too, with new material gleaned from interviews with Lyotard’s two daughters, Corinne Enaudeau and Laurence Kahn, as well as with Lyotard’s second wife, Dolorès. I should add that Bamford’s dignified discretion while confronting the complexities of Lyotard’s later life and his generosity with the ever-generous Jacob Rogozinski are admirable.“The ‘witness’ Malraux bore was to the contradictions of modernity, to the playing out of its grand narratives; but it is to the gesture of Malraux’s writing that Lyotard responds, not the life of the individual” (148). Similarly, although the life of the individual receives ample and accurate profile, it is to the gesture of Lyotard’s thought that Bamford responds. This is why this little book is an invaluable contribution to Lyotard’s legacy and thus to the future of cultural politics

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