This text contains contributions from two Kant conferences which took place in Leuven and Cerisy-la-Salle in 1993.

Lyotard met Jacques Monory in 1972, and the text on him published at that time was the first that Lyotard dedicated to contemporary art since Discourse, Figure. Lyotard's interest in the plastic arts thus fits fully within the setting of his political preoccupations. The artist-protagonist stages the recurring motifs that fascinate Lyotard: the scene of the crime, the revolver, the woman, the victim, glaciers, deserts, stars. The atmosphere of the essays on Monory is "Californian." Monory's imaginary repertoire goes well beyond the masters of modernity and is in line rather with a "modern contemporary surrealism."

Both Lyotard and Monory live the dilemma of Americanization, the America represented by cinema, fashion, novels, music. It is in this atmosphere that Lyotard and Monory will finally evoke their supreme experience of difference: desire and fear, exultation and a profound malaise. The plastic universe of Monory and the aesthetic meditations of Lyotard are in perfect symbiosis. Sarah Wilson's epilogue thoroughly outlines both the history of a friendship and, at the same time, the intellectual and artistic climate of the 1970s."

Seven writings assembled in the context of the philosophy of art that Jean-Francois Lyotard developed in the 1980s, at the time of the Differend (1983) and of the "Kantian turn" leading to the Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1992), are here published for the first time in English translation. The texts focus on three artists with widely divergent aesthetic orientations: the colorist-draftsman Valerio Adami, the conceptual metaphysician Shusaku Arakawa, and Daniel Buren, the "pragmatist of the invisible."

These three protagonists share the notion that the interest in art does not lie in the simple denotation of a frame of reference, but in the connotations of material nuances, in flavors, in tones in one word, the visual, that is barely revealed in the anamnesis that guides the visible and provokes the essential inquietude of the aesthetic experience. What to Paint? Not reality or a world, nor a rich subjectivity, nor even the phantasms of dreams or ideals of being-together, but the act of painting itself, and, beyond the performance of the painter, the presence of matters, a presence that in Arakawa's word is quite obviously blank, elusive."

The second volume of Jean-Francois Lyotard's Miscellaneous d104s, Contemporary Artists, gathers thirty-nine essays by Lyotard that deal with twenty-seven influential and innovative contemporary artists: Luciano Berio, Richard Lidner, Rene Guiffrey, Gianfranco Baruchello, Henri Maccheroni, Riwan Tromeur, Albert Ayme, Manuel Casimiro, Ruth Francken, Barnett Newman, Jean-Luc Parant, Francois Lapouge, Sam Francis, Andre Dubreuil, Joseph Kosuth, Sarah Flohr, Lino Centi, Gigliola Fazzini, Bracha Lichtenberger Ettinger, Henri Martin, Michel Bouvet, Corinne Filippi, Stig Brogger, Francois Rouan, Pierre Skira Pastels, and Beatrice Casadesus. Many of these texts were originally published in catalogs; others were published in hard-to-find journals. This volume of Miscellaneous d104s is illustrated with more than sixty images, mainly in color, of works of art discussed by Lyotard in these writings."

The first volume in the new series Jean-Francois Lyotard: Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists is dedicated to the Dutch Abstract Expressionist painter, sculptor, and poet Karel Appel (1921 2006). Originally published in German, the book's original French text, written in 1992 as the result of a correspondence with Karel Appel, is here published for the first time. In his text about Appel, Lyotard reflects on the nature and function of color as it is used by the artist. Karel Appel, A Gesture of Colour brings together, in a special color section, twenty-five color reproductions of paintings discussed by Lyotard. The layout of this remarkable art historical survey of Appel's work emphasizes the bilingual texts.Lyotard presents Karel Appel's "matterism" as an offer of presence, presence deferred it is the visual where every predicate is suspended, the visual touched, a "gesture" of color more than a property of color, an appearance at the edge of the abyss. Christine Buci-Glucksmann's epilogue situates Karel Appel, a Gesture of Colour within the whole of Lyotard's writings on art and his subsequent work."