“Utopia is the fact that truth never appears where it is expected.”

- Lyotard, Discourse, Figure

This seminar will consist of a close reading of Jean-Francoise Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure. Published in 1971, this book is both one of the great works of aesthetic theory in the 20th century and one of the greatest and lesser-known efforts to synthesize the insights of phenomenology (particularly, the work of Merleau-Ponty), the philosophy of language (Frege and the linguistics of Saussure), Freudian psychoanalysis, and Marxism (historical materialism). Lyotard turns to the work of art (particularly the practice of painting and writing poetry) in order to think the materiality of a practice that transforms the relation between the sayable (speech, language) and the sensible, words and things. It is this space marked by the comma separating (and relating through the form of this separation) “Discourse” and “Figure” that Lyotard seeks to define and conceptualize. And, as we will see, to conceptualize this space between discourse and figure, word and image requires a new theory of the subject and the rethinking of dialectical negativity. This subject foregrounded by artistic practice appears only as a blind spot in the interstice between discourse and figure: indicative of a site inaccessible to consciousness and whose convulsive appearance remains a critical historical symptom of what in the present is already otherwise.