Philosophers have recently been eclipsed by their very overabundance, by the singular avatar of their ‘newness’. However, if one reads them, which is perhaps an exercise for which they are not destined, the philosophers in question participate in newness only in the sense of the wise maxim from Don Leopold Augustus in Claudel’s The Satin Slipper, who after having demanded novelty, which he loves, for he must have ‘the new at any cost’, clarifies: ‘But what new?’ He goes on: ‘New is but the lawful issue of our past. New and not strange. New that is the development of our natural situation. New and new again, but let it be exactly like the old!’2
Jean-François Lyotard announces that, with The Differend, he has written his book of philosophy. Are we dealing with a novelty in every aspect identical to the old? It seems that Lyotard takes ‘philosophy’ in a sense that is heterogeneous to the one promoted in the magazines. That we are dealing with his book of philosophy, in the singular, furthermore amounts to the highly risky confession that what he previously put out in books was not philosophy but rather no doubt some pre-philosophical intervention, or philosophemes in the raw.
Already the style puts the Lyotard of the differend in a differend with the previous Lyotard. Here you have an upstanding and demonstrative prose, which stubbornly follows its own guiding thread; a will to investigate with care all possible objections; an overall argument as dense as it is lucid. As opposed to Gide’s Prometheus, Lyotard has to throw no powder in our eyes, no smoke bombs, and no pornographic pictures, in order to convey his message and appease the readers of newspapers.
Lyotard’s essential reference points go back to the Flood – before the blessed Ark of that pen-pushing Noah, before the zoo of essay-mixers. Look at his antiquities: Protagoras, Gorgias, Plato, Antisthenes, Aristotle, four notices on Kant and Hegel … All these respectable people are in each case given the treatment they deserve, following procedures of punctuation and transcription that showcase an astonishing novelty and a rectitude that, adapted to the most modern of tasks, knocks over our academic convictions.
Lyotard himself declares that his three sources are the Kant of the third Critique, the second Wittgenstein (the one from the Investigations), and the last Heidegger. From the first, he borrows the critical doctrine of multiple domains of judgement, the impossibility of the whole, the syntax of the imperative, and the function of feeling in justice; from the second, the analytic of language; and from the third, the withdrawn figure of Being. The Differend contains indeed nothing less than a taxonomy of genres of discourse and their incommensurability, an ethics, a politics, and an ontology. This goes to show to what extent, as Lyotard announces, we are dealing with a book of philosophy.
Let us nonetheless ask this announcement to appear before the conceptual tribunal of the book itself. In it, indeed, we can find written that ‘The stakes of philosophical discourse are in a rule (or rules) which remains to be sought, and to which the discourse cannot be made to conform before the rule has been found’ (p. 97). Does The Differend belong in this sense to the philosophical genre? Is it an autonymous book, insofar as it contains its very own definition?
The first disquieting fact is that the prescription of having to search for a rule constitutes a rule and, thus, that we dispose of a possible measure of conformity of the discourse to its own genre, contrary to what has been concluded. Let us begin by congratulating Lyotard for taking this type of ‘sophistic’ argumentation extremely seriously. Lyotard in effect rejects the (modern? postmodern?) temptation of considering the instruction of a proof a useless thing. He repudiates the style of the essay. This is confirmed by the new and convincing usage of the ‘paradoxes’ of Protagoras or Antisthenes. Just as Plato, according to Pascal, prepares Christianity, so scepticism, according to Lyotard, prepares the critique. After this, we will refute the refutation by saying the following: the fact that the philosophical discourse is in search of its rule does not constitute a rule for this discourse, because ‘search’ means that the type of linkage between phrases is neither prescribed in advance nor governed by a result.
The uncertainty as to the rule is averred in the properly de-regulated multiplicity of the procedures of linkage. In Lyotard’s book you will find, alternatively, the argumentation that touches upon the logical genre, the exegesis of a name (‘Auschwitz’), the textual insertion (authors), the putting into play of an addressee (‘you say this…, then…’), the definition of concepts and their species, the formulation of an impasse, as well as many other techniques. In this sense the book is made up entirely of passages, following a trajectory from which no totality whatsoever results: ‘What are we doing here other than navigating between islands in order paradoxically to declare that their regimens or genres are incommensurable?’ (p. 135).
This book is philosophical insofar as it is archipelagic. The rule of navigation that the navigation itself allows to be mapped out is none other than that of the differend, that is, the rule of a multiplicity that no genre can subsume under its rules. Philosophy here states that its rule is to respect that which no rule can render commensurable. This respect is therefore addressed to the pure ‘there is’ [il y a]. Evil can be philosophically defined: ‘By evil, I understand, and one can only understand, the incessant interdiction of possible phrases, a defiance of the occurrence, the contempt for Being’ (p. 140). The book’s last word thus will be: the ‘there is’ [il y a] is invincible. One can, one must bear witness against the interdiction, in favour of the occurrence.
Yet this last word still requires that we navigate our way up to it.
It has been a while since one of Samuel Beckett’s heroes proclaimed that ‘what happens are words’.3 Such is Lyotard’s point of departure: the designation of ‘what happens’ as ‘phrase’. With this gesture, Lyotard places himself within what he calls the ‘linguistic turn’ of Western philosophies. But, to be clear, this historical timeliness is only an opportunity. It does not serve as a legitimation. The philosophical rule sought after by Lyotard is not conformity with the spirit of the time. In order to establish that there is no possibility of going back further than the phrases, a linked argumentative chain is required. Lyotard rediscovers, subjects to critique, and diverts the Cartesian procedure of evidence. What resists absolutely the radical doubt is not, as Descartes believes, the ‘I think’ but the ‘There was this phrase: I doubt’. Any resistance to letting oneself be convinced that there was this phrase is itself, whenever it produces itself, nothing but a phrase. Whereas Descartes thinks he establishes the subject of the enunciation as the ultimate existential guarantee of the enunciated, Lyotard limits himself to the following: the enunciation happens. What exists is therefore not the ‘I think’ that underlies the ‘I speak’, it is on the contrary the I (of ‘I speak’) that is an inference (an instance, that of the addressor) of the existent-phrase, or, to be more precise: of the event-phrase.
The central unity of the I thus finds itself emptied out. Insofar as what exists is of the order of the event-phrase (and not of its underlying unitary guarantee), there is no reason to subtract oneself from the evidence that there are phrases, and not one phrase. Thus, what is inaugural is a linguistic atomism in which nothing is anterior to the multiplicity of occurrences of phrases: neither the subject, as we have seen, nor the world, since the world is nothing but a system of proper names. ‘Phrase’ thus designates the One of the multiple, the atom of sense qua event.
Here begins an austere analytic, of which I give only the broad lines.
That the phrase is the absolute One also signifies the multiple, both in the order of simultaneity and in that of succession.
At the level of the simultaneous, the One of the phrase is distributed over four instances:
A phrase presents what it is about, the case, ta pragmata, which is its referent; what is signified about the case, the sense, der Sinn; that to which or addressed to which this is signified about the case, the addressee; that ‘through’ which or in the name of which this is signified about the case, the addressor. (p. 14)
The programme of investigation thus requires that one occupy oneself with presentation itself (chapter on the referent, on what is presented, then on presentation); with sense (critique of the speculative-dialectical doctrine of sense in the chapter on the result); and with the couple addressor/addressee (chapter on the obligation).
At the level of the successive, the fundamental axiom holds that if a phrase takes place, it is necessary to make a linkage. Even silence is a phrase, which links up with the preceding one. And, of course, there is neither a first phrase (except in the stories of origin) nor a final one (except in the anxiety before the abyss). This point is as simple as it is crucial: ‘For there to be no phrase is impossible, for there to be And a phrase is necessary. It is necessary to make linkage. This is not an obligation, a Sollen [an ought to], but a necessity, a müssen [a must]’ (p. 66).
No less crucial with regard to this necessity, however, is that the mode of linkage, for its part, is contingent: ‘To link is necessary, but how to link is not’ (p. 66). This time the investigation demands that one occupy oneself with the linkage of phrases. Now this task is in turn double: ‘The rules of formation and linkage that determine the regimen of a phrase have to be distinguished, as we have been doing, from the modes of linking that stem from genres of discourse’ (p. 136).
The study of regimens of phrases in some way is syntactical. The internal disposition of the four instances of the One of a phrase varies according to whether this phrase is cognitive, prescriptive, exclamatory, etc. The study of genres of discourse by contrast is strategic, because a genre of discourse unifies phrases in view of a success. Or again: the regimen of a phrase governs a mode of presentation of a discursive universe, and these modes are heterogeneous. A genre is defined by its stakes: ‘A genre of discourse imprints a unique finality onto a multiplicity of heterogeneous phrases by linkings that aim to procure the success proper to that genre’ (p. 129). These stakes are in turn heterogeneous. There is thus a double qualitative multiplicity – that of regimens, which is intrinsic because it concerns the syntax of presentation; and that of genres, which, unifying intrinsic heterogeneities according to a finality, organizes a veritable war around the question, ‘how to link?’. For the contingency of the ‘how to link?’ combined with the necessity to link manifests the multiple of phrases as a conflict surrounding any occurrence of a phrase.
Now, the fact that there is the war of genres founds the omnipresence of politics. Lyotard in effect gives an intra-systematic concept of politics:
Politics is the threat of the differend. It is not a genre, it is the multiplicity of genres, the diversity of ends, and par excellence the question of linkage. It plunges into the emptiness where ‘it happens that…’ [Politics] is tantamount to Being [à même l’Être]. (p. 138)
Lyotard, as we see, does not concern himself with justifying politics through sociology, or through the economy. It is not the extant-being (the figures of the communitarian bond) that sustains politics, since politics plunges into the gap where it is convenient and inconvenient to link. The being of politics lies in naming the being-which-is-not, the risk and suspense around which the polemic of genres revolves.
Turning his back on the modern anthropologization of politics no less than on its postmodern economicization, Lyotard abruptly proposes a concept of politics of which the discursive, trans-generic inscription is, and can only be, ontological.
Lyotard’s ontology is not autonymous, it does not belong to the genre of which the rule of linkage is that the second phrase must present the presentation contained in the first (p. 78). In passing one will recognize Hegel, the beginning of the Science of Logic – the Nothing that presents the presentation of Being, and Becoming that presents the presentative disintegration.
Lyotard is certainly not Hegelian, or at least: Lyotard does not conform to the Hegel who figures in Lyotard under the rubric of the result, of the speculative genre. What is said of being will not present the presentation, but rather name the unpresentable. So there is not a discourse on being but a displaced aphoristics, included in the archipelagic trajectories.
Let us pinpoint the aphorisms of being:
•‘The necessity of there being And a phrase is not logical (the question “How?”) but ontological (the question “What?”)’ (p. 66).
•‘The occurrence, the phrase, as a what that happens, does not at all stem form the question of time, but from that of Being/non-Being’ (p. 74).
•‘Is doesn’t signify anything, it would designate the occurrence “before” the signification (the content) of the occurrence … Rather is would be: Is it happening? (the it indicating an empty place to be occupied by a referent)’ (p. 79).
And now the aphorisms of non-being:
•‘Joined to the preceding one by and, a phrase arises out of nothingness to link up with it. Paratax thus connotes the abyss of Not-Being which opens between phrases, it stresses the surprise that something begins when what is said is said’ (p. 66).
•‘What is not presented is not. The presentation entailed by a phrase is not presented, it is not. Or: Being is not. One could say that when an entailed presentation is presented, it is not an entailed but a situated presentation. Or: Being grasped as an existent is non-Being’ (p. 77).
•‘This is why negation is needed to present the entailed presentation. It is only presentable as an existent, that is, as non-Being. This is what the word Lethe means’ (p. 78).
•‘Genres of discourse are modes of forgetting the nothingness or of forgetting the occurrence, they fill the void between phrases. This “nothingness” is, nevertheless, what opens up the possibility of finalities proper to the genres’ (p. 138).
Put otherwise: from the fact that there are only phrases, it results that non-being encircles being. I say ‘encircle’, because there is a triple intervention of non-being.
First, insofar as any phrase presents a universe (according to the four instances of its One), it does not present this presentation, which is presentable only in a ‘second’ phrase and which thus, rigorously speaking, in the time of the occurrence itself, is not (for what is only is what the occurrence entails in the presentation).
Second, being itself is not, for no phrase is its occurrence. Being has no presentable, phraseable identity, or again: ‘Being is not Being, but There is’s’ (p. 138).
Third, the nothingness ‘borders’ upon each occurrence of phrase, an abyss in which the question How to link? plays itself out and which is covered up, filled, but never annulled, by the genre of discourse in which the contingency of the mode of linkage presents itself afterward as necessity.
The There is of a phrase, being unphraseable by this phrase, is not. Philosophy’s polemical safeguarding tries to preserve the occurrence, the Is it happening? and thus, against the unitary pretence of a genre, to preserve the encircling of the There is by the triplicity of non-being. The philosopher keeps up the vigilant agitation surrounding the vulnerability of non-being in which the occurrence comes up. The philosopher is the armed guardian of non-being.
Who are the enemies of the philosopher? In philosophy (but this is the non-philosophy inherent in philosophy), the speculative (Hegelian) genre, which in the figure of the result pretends to disintegrate the non-being of being, to render explicit the There is, to present the presentation, to flaunt and thus to disavow the occurrence. In politics, the enemy is the predominance of the narrative genre, which tells of the origin and the destination, acts ‘as if the occurrence, with its potentiality of differends, could come to completion, or as if there were a last word’ (p. 151).
The apogee of this narrative politics is Nazism (the Aryan myth). This politics wants the death of the occurrence itself, which is why it wants the death of the Jew – the Jewish idiom being par excellence the one that stands precisely under the sign, ‘Is it happening? ’
As a subtle warrior, Lyotard makes the speculative genre and the narrative politics wage war against each other, showing that his two principal enemies are mutually annihilating. Indeed, of what possible result is Auschwitz the sign? What can the Odyssey of the absolute Spirit possibly find to ‘sublate’ in Auschwitz? The silence in which Nazism phrases itself stems from the fact that it has been beaten, like a dog – but it has not been refuted, nor will it be, and thus it will not be sublated and will not ever contribute to any result. With regard to the Nazi massacres, the linkage is a feeling, not a phrase, nor a concept. All speculative phrases are found wanting. Only the feeling denotes that a phrase has taken place and thus that a wrong, perhaps an absolute wrong, has been committed. The feeling in which an unphrased phrase announces itself is the watchman of justice, not in the place of a simple damage but in the essential place of a wrong.
What is a wrong? We will distinguish it from a damage, which can be pleaded, in a common idiom, determining a litigation for which there exists a power entitled to decide among the phrases. Wrong refers to the differend, just as damage refers to litigation: there is no recognized power of arbitration, but complete heterogeneity of genres, with the will of one of them to be hegemonic. A wrong cannot be phrased in the genre of discourse in which it should make itself recognizable. The Jew cannot be heard by the SS. The worker has no place in which to find recognition for the fact that his labour power is not a commodity.
The hegemonic will of a genre of discourse necessarily pretends to know what is the being of any occurrence. This will posits that the being-nothing is. Now, precisely (encircling of being by non-being), ‘you never know what the Ereignis is. A phrase, in which idiom? In which regimen? The wrong is still in anticipating it, that is, in prohibiting it’ (p. 85).
Is Marxism not the discourse that pretends that its genre – its success – consists in giving voice to the wrong? Is it not the heterogeneous speech of the victims of Capital? What does Lyotard think of Marxism today?
In a first approach, Marxism may seem nothing but a nefarious combination of speculative ‘philosophy’ (as Lyotard says: ‘prisoner of the logic of the result’) and a narrative politics (‘purity’ of the proletariat, myth of the final reconciliation). Alas, history overabundantly illustrates that a certain Marxism is devoted to interdicting the occurrence, feeding the love of structures and the hatred of the event.
But things are more complex. Lyotard does not bog himself down in the muck of vulgar anti-Marxists. He thinks that ‘Marxism has not come to an end, but how does it continue?’ (p. 171). How does Lyotard inscribe this non-end, in which discursivity must give in to feeling?
There is first the analytic of capital, subsumed under what Lyotard calls ‘the hegemony of the economic genre’, of which he offers a concise and convincing description. He is right to say, against any metaphysics of the producer or of work, that the essence of the economic genre consists in the annulment of time in the anticipatory figure of exchange: ‘The economic phrase of cession does not expect the phrase of acquittal (counter-cession), it presupposes it’ (p. 173). The economic genre (capital) organizes the indifference to the ‘there is’, to the heterogeneous punctuality, since all that occurs has its reason in an accountable null sum to come. The economic genre ‘dismisses the occurrence, the event, the marvel, the anticipation of a community of feelings’ (p. 178).
It is above all under the hegemony of the economic genre that nothing has taken place but the place.
Should we at least recognize that this interdiction of marvels – which has the merit of rejecting all narratives of origins – involves a wager on a ‘pluralistic’ politics that protects our liberties? Such is, today, the common thesis, as is well known. It is even, at the level of facts, the quasi-universal thesis: the law of the market and the tyranny of exchange value are certainly not admirable, but parliamentary politics, which cannot be dissociated from them, is the least of all evils.
Lyotard does not make explicit references to pluralism, to parliaments, or to civil liberties. Democracy is not the axis of his value system. His path consists in gathering the determinations of modern politics under the unique concept of the ‘deliberative form of politics’, whose origin is Greek and whose peculiarity lies in the fact that it leaves empty the political centre and, thus, de-substantializes the phrase of power. On this account we can indeed say that ‘deliberation is a concatenation of genres, and that suffices to let the occurrence and differends sprout up within it’ (p. 150).
And yet, here comes a fundamental proof: not only is the deliberative form of politics not homogeneous with capitalism, but it is an obstacle to it. Let us quote the passage in its entirety for those who would be tempted to imagine that Lyotard is about to rally himself – for the cause of democracy, as always – to the politico-economic order of the West:
Thus, the economic genre of capital in no way requires the deliberative political concatenation, which admits the heterogeneity of genres of discourse. To the contrary, it requires the suppression of that heterogeneity. It only tolerates it to the degree that the social bond is not (yet) entirely assimilated to the economic phrase alone (cession and counter-cession). If this is one day the case, political institutions will be superfluous, as national narratives and traditions already are. But then, without the deliberative concatenation where the multiplicity of genres and their respective ends can in principle be expressed, how could the Idea of a humanity, which is not the master of ‘its’ ends (a metaphysical illusion), but which is sensitive to the heterogeneous ends implied in the various known and unknown genres of discourse, and capable of pursuing them as much as possible, maintain itself? And without this Idea, how would a universal history of humanity be possible? (p. 178)
So it is still and always against capital, in the name of the differend – of which Marxism connotes the feeling – that the point is to save the Idea of a humanity engaged along the paths of the multiple.
Deliberative politics remains for Lyotard a polemical ideal. It is not supported but fatally threatened by the ‘liberty’ inherent in the economic genre. Philosophy has not stopped being militant. And there are grounds for hope, since the differend sprouts up relentlessly, since ‘The Is it happening? is invincible to every will to gain time’ (p. 181).
1. The metaphors that present the theme of the differend in Lyotard’s book are juridical in nature: litigation, damage, wrong, victim, tribunal … What is the (Kantian) presupposition wrapped within this apparatus? Once it is critical, is philosophy constrained to phrase itself in close proximity to law and right?
I posit that there are two species of philosophical procedure, two ways of being faithful to the directive of having to search for one’s rule without knowing it: the one whose paradigm is juridical, and the one whose paradigm is mathematical. Of course, I leave aside the speculative genre.
Is Lyotard caught in the great return of right? Of human rights? Even if he correctly establishes that for the expression ‘rights of man’, which is inappropriate on account of both terms, it would be convenient to substitute ‘authority of the infinite’ (p. 31).
One could not have said it better. But, outside of the mathematical paradigm, ‘infinite’ is an erratic signifier. As for right, it is literally dominated by its hatred of infinitude.
2. I would also say: the burden of the juridical metaphor extends itself to Lyotard’s definition of knowledge (of phrases from the cognitive genre). Everything for him depends on the question of the referent, as is the case for the judge, especially the English judge, who seeks to establish in a regulated manner which fact the statements of all parties involved can be assigned to. It is with the aid of the referential (‘real’) criteria that Lyotard distinguishes the cognitive genre from the purely logical genre:
The cognitive genre is that of knowing whether the combination of signs with which it is dealing (the expression, which is one of the cases to which the truth conditions apply) makes it possible or not that real referents correspond to that expression. (p. 51)
I say that mathematical phrases just by themselves – but, in my mind, all phrases of which the effective stakes concern the truth – belie this definition of the cognitive genre. What makes the ‘there is’ of mathematical thinking is not governed by any procedure for establishing a real referent. And yet, we are not for this reason remitted to the pure ‘possible truth’ of the logical form. Lyotard’s epistemology remains critical (juridical). It does not possess the radicality of his ontology. It is not oriented according to the good paradigm.
3. A wrong is committed in this book towards the mathematical paradigm, by reducing it to the logical genre. Here the filiation stems from Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. As far as I am concerned, I posit that the mathematical genre surely is not reducible to logic, in the sense that it is said about the latter that ‘If a proposition is necessary, it has no sense’ (p. 51). One recognizes what can only be called the irresponsible remarks that are recurrent in Wittgenstein. It is manifest that mathematical propositions make sense, and it is no less clear that they are necessary. The attempt to see in them only regulated and arbitrary word games has fizzled out and, besides, it never has been anything more than an inconsistent provocation.
I would like to phrase the feeling inspired in me by the wrong done to mathematics by the postulated hegemony of the logical genre. I will only say the following – which is close to Albert Lautman’s theses – namely, that mathematics in its history is the science of being qua being, that is, being inasmuch as it is not, the science of unpresentable presentation. One day I will prove it.4
4. From this can be inferred that the book does not completely ground the fact that the phrase would be the One of the occurrence – or that it would be its appropriate name. The critique of the speculative genre, exclusively centred on the theme of the result, misses the essence of the dialectical message, which is the non-arithmetical primacy of the Two over the One, the logic of scission as form of the occurrence itself. We could establish this for the mathematical paradigm, inasmuch as its necessity lies in naming and giving consistency to pure being as existential scission of the nothing and the name (for example: ‘the empty (nothing) set (name) exists’).
Or again: in true knowledge, there is no case, there is a double. This is something that the juridical arrangement, which demands the case, forbids to perceive.
5. The notion that the occurrence may be Two allows us to respond differently from Lyotard (who answers negatively) to the question that he poses: ‘Are some phrases and genres strong, and others weak?’ (p. 158). From the point of view of politics, or of philosophy – which are not exactly genres – the occurrence that can be captured as Two, can be qualified according to its force in proportion to whether it breaks down the rule of the hegemonic genre that endeavours to count it as One. For politics, as well as for philosophy – precisely because their vocation is the safeguarding of the occurrence, the vigilance over the opening of the ‘Is it happening?’ – there is no equality of occurrences. This is a serious differend with The Differend. I posit that what an event destroys in the genre in which it is phrased (hence the need for it to be two: inscribed and ex-scribed) measures the power of the scission, the singularity of the occurrence. ‘What it destroys’ means: the dysfunction of the genre’s capacity to count the Two as One, to anticipate the sum of the generic scission.
6. Hence also why Lyotard’s polemic against the (Hegelian) subject, the Selbst, the self, of which modern history teaches us the fission, is incomplete. It affects only the subject of speculation, the telos of the result, the totalizing interiority. But ‘subject’ today designates something else completely. To be brief: a subject – that is, a subject-process – is what keeps open the gap of the Two of the occurrence, what insists in the interval between events. A subject is deduced from a dysfunction in the count-as-One of the event. Such a subject summons no whole, nor needs language (as being) in order to be. Lyotard is justified in excluding that there exists such a thing as the language. But Lacan also excludes this, since for him what ex-sists is not ‘the language’ but language, non-all. And for me as well, ‘history’ does not exist, only historicity, in which the duplicity of events is the symptom for a vanished subject.
7. And, consequently, since the nineteenth century, we can name proletariat the series of singular events that politics maps as heterogeneous to capital. One will object that there is no reason to keep this name, ‘proletariat’. I say that there is also no reason not to keep it. The truth is as follows: one has wrongly made ‘proletariat’ function as a juridico-historical name, the subject of responsibility in history. But ‘proletariat’ is a mathematico-political concept – it always has been, insofar as it refers to effective procedures. The subject here is that of the interval and the excess, in a history that in-exists, and an archipelagic, de-generated dispersion. If the name embarrasses you, take that of ‘political capacity’ (‘communist’ or ‘heterogeneous’), or of ‘non-domination’ – whatever you want: the point will always be the putting into place of a strategy, here and now, in an a-generic discourse, of that which enjoins us to fidelity to an evental series. Politics always amounts to discovering that fidelity is the opposite of repetition.
One will have understood that my differend with The Differend is situated at the point from which I pronounce that, if for me Jean-François Lyotard, the philosopher, looks too much to the desert of the multiple, we must nevertheless admit that ‘the shadow of a great bird falls on his face’.5