Jean-François Lyotard

French philosopher (1924–1998); phenomenologist-turned-figural-theorist and later theorist of the "postmodern condition." For the purposes of this wiki he is primarily relevant as Carbone's interlocutor on the ontology of the screen — the figure Lyotard called the "specular wall in general" — and as the thinker who pressed phenomenology past perception toward desire.

Key Points

  • Phenomenologist by training: Lyotard's early work La phénoménologie (1954) is an introduction to the Husserlian tradition and shows continuing Merleau-Pontian sympathies.
  • Break with phenomenology in Discourse, Figure (1971): Lyotard's PhD thesis argues for the figural as a domain irreducible to the discursive — including the "phantom," the hallucination, the libidinal. "We reach here the limits of a phenomenological interpretation: with hallucination, we move beyond the sensible." Where Merleau-Ponty conceives language as "metamorphoses of the structures of the visible world" (a decentering and restructuring of the visible), Lyotard insists on the irreducibility of discourse and figure.
  • "Acinema" (1973): in Des dispositifs pulsionnels, Lyotard develops an analysis of cinema as desire — not perception. He grounds this via Lacan's mirror-stage: "Film acts as the orthopedic mirror analyzed by Lacan in 1949 as constitutive of the imaginary subject or objet a." From this he derives the programmatic question: "how and why the specular wall in general, and thus the cinema screen in particular, can become a privileged place of the libidinal cathexis."
  • The "specular wall in general": Lyotard's term for a generalized mirror-screen apparatus. Carbone draws directly on this for his arche-screen: "I would propose to define such a 'specular wall in general' as 'arche-screen.'" (Philosophy-Screens ch. 4 p. 78)
  • Carbone's critical distance: Carbone holds that Lyotard misreads MP's late concept of vision by narrowing it to the perceptual domain only, then adds "desire" as its missing dimension — whereas MP's late vision, for Carbone, already contains the relation to desire via sensible-ideas and the flesh. Lyotard also conflates the 1949 Lacanian mirror-stage with the later objet a (developed in 1964, partly after Lacan's reading of MP's posthumously-published V&I).

Principal Relevance to This Wiki

Lyotard's work matters here for three reasons:

  1. He names the phenomenon Carbone will theorize as the arche-screen (the "specular wall in general").
  2. He is the philosophical interlocutor Carbone has to negotiate to recover MP's vision from its narrowing-to-perception.
  3. His postmodern condition is the historical frame of the book's Part Two on today's screens.

The Lacanian Conflation

Carbone (carbone-2019-philosophy-screens, ch. 3 p. 56) notes that Lyotard's "Acinema" cites Lacan's 1949 paper as if it already contained the objet a — but the objet a is only developed later (with precision in 1964, partly thanks to the posthumous publication of MP's V&I). Moreover, Lacan's 1949 mirror-stage concerns identification with "a primordial form of the 'I' [Je]" — not identification with a "subject." The objet a, Žižek notes, designates "the part of our image that eludes the mirrorlike symmetrical relationship" — the opposite of what Lyotard implies. This matters because Lyotard's analogy (infans' body : social body :: mirror : cinematic screen) depends on a reading of Lacan that neither Lacan nor Žižek authorizes.

Carbone's Recovery

Where Lyotard reads the screen as a site of libidinal cathexis in opposition to a perceptual reading, Carbone argues the screen is libidinally cathected because it is arche-screenic — i.e., because it promises "always something else to see" (MP). Desire is not an addition to vision but a structural consequence of the arche-screen's excessive character:

"The arche-screen accentuates the side of our sensible relationship with the world called 'imagination.' ... If there is no vision without the arche-screen, then the arche-screen not only allows the direct power of vision but also releases that indirect or negative power of vision that is constitutive (but not exclusive) of imagination." (ch. 4 p. 82)

Thus Lyotard's question is kept but his answer is revised: the specular wall becomes "a privileged place of libidinal cathexis" because its concealing/showing structure is intrinsically excessive, not because it is a mirror in Lacan's sense.

Connections

  • is the source of the "specular wall in general" — term Carbone redeploys as arche-screen
  • is read critically by carbone-2019-philosophy-screens — as narrowing MP's vision and conflating Lacan's 1949 with 1964
  • contrasts with maurice-merleau-ponty — on whether language "restructures" or is irreducibly other to the figure
  • contributes to the genealogy of philosophy-cinema — as one of the key inheritors of the philosophy-cinema project who took it in a direction Carbone does not follow
  • influenced by Lacan's mirror-stage (1949), but with the interpretive liberties noted above

Open Questions

  • Is Carbone's claim that Lyotard narrows MP's vision fair, or does Discourse, Figure contain a more sympathetic engagement with MP than Carbone acknowledges? (Lyotard does read MP in detail in the first parts of Discourse, Figure.)
  • Could the "specular wall / arche-screen" relation be read as continuous rather than as Carbone's-correction-of-Lyotard? Carbone himself borrows the term.

Sources

  • carbone-2019-philosophy-screens — ch. 3 "The Torn Curtain: Lyotard, the Screen, and a Cinema Named Desire" (pp. 53–60) is the primary source on Lyotard for this wiki. Works cited by Carbone: Discours, Figure (1971); Dérive à partir de Marx et de Freud (1973); Des dispositifs pulsionnels (1973); "Notes on the Critical Function of the Work of Art" (1970); "Acinema" (1973). Lyotard's La condition postmoderne (1979) is referenced as the "postmodern condition" frame.