This remarkable posthumous work by one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century engages Augustine's "Confessions," one of the major canonical works of world literature and the very paradigm of autobiography as a definable genre of writing.
Lyotard approaches his subject by returning to his earliest phenomenological training, rearticulating Augustine's sensory universe from a vantage point imaginarily inside the confessant's world, a vantage point that reveals the intense point of conjuncture between the sensual and the spiritual, the erotic world and the mystical, being and appearance, sin and salvation. Lyotard reveals the very origins of phenomenology in Augustine's narrative, and in so doing also shows the origins of semiotics to lie there (in the explication of the Augustinian heavens as skin, as veil, as vellum).
Lyotard's explication of Augustine is also a final survey of the entirety of the philosophical enterprise, a philosopher's profound reflections on the very basis of philosophy. He sees the "Confessions" as a major source of the Western--and decidedly modern--determination of the self and of its normativity, the point of departure for all reflection and the condition of possibility of all experience. Lyotard suggests that Augustine's "I," Descartes's "cogito," and Husserl's "transcendental ego" in essence or structurally say the same thing.
Lyotard aims at no simple ascription of Augustine's position. Instead, his text centers on what he takes to be Augustine's central confession: the repeated avowal of an essential uncertainty concerning the status of the faith confessed, of being in a sense already too late, of a difficulty in being no longer of this world while being in it all the same. Far from offering the foundation of all subsequent journeys to selfhood, Lyotard sees the "Confessions" as many evocations of a certain loss of self, of a temporality that is not given or recuperated all at once--or once and for all--but that time and again is lost or forgotten.

What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.
The Aristotelian concept persisted, in one form or another, until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of technics. Lodged between mechanics and biology, a technical entity became a complex of heterogeneous forces. In a parallel development, while industrialization was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of knowledge as well as contemporary social organization, technology was acquiring a new place in philosophical questioning. Philosophy was for the first time faced with a world in which technical expansion was so widespread that science was becoming more and more subject to the field of instrumentality, with its ends determined by the imperatives of economic struggle or war, and with its epistemic status changing accordingly. The power that emerged from this new relation was unleashed in the course of the two world wars.
Working his way through the history of the Aristotelian assessment of technics, the author engages the ideas of a wide range of thinkers--Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela.

This reasessment of the political implications of deconstruction also provides a reading of Derrida's philosophy through political philosophy. Such a reading is apposite, not simply because it is in line with current trends to reconsider the political application of philosophy, but because it responds to Derrida's own recent shift towards political theory, particularly in his evaluation of the "new world order" in his "Spectres of Marx". This study opens the political implications of Derrida's thought in terms of a philosophy of time. Focusing on the political dimension of the Derridean themes of aporia, invention and the lesser violence, it considers these motifs in the context of untying time from logic. It argues that in order to articulate the "and" between Derrida's philosophy and the political, this untying calls for a reinvention of the relation between political organisation and temporality.

This reasessment of the political implications of deconstruction also provides a reading of Derrida's philosophy through political philosophy. Such a reading is apposite, not simply because it is in line with current trends to reconsider the political application of philosophy, but because it responds to Derrida's own recent shift towards political theory, particularly in his evaluation of the new world order in his Spectres of Marx. This study opens the political implications of Derrida's thought in terms of a philosophy of time. Focusing on the political dimension of the Derridean themes of aporia, invention and the lesser violence, it considers these motifs in the context of untying time from logic. It argues that in order to articulate the and between Derrida's philosophy and the political, this untying calls for a reinvention of the relation between political organisation and temporality.

What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.
The Aristotelian concept persisted, in one form or another, until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of technics. Lodged between mechanics and biology, a technical entity became a complex of heterogeneous forces. In a parallel development, while industrialization was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of knowledge as well as contemporary social organization, technology was acquiring a new place in philosophical questioning. Philosophy was for the first time faced with a world in which technical expansion was so widespread that science was becoming more and more subject to the field of instrumentality, with its ends determined by the imperatives of economic struggle or war, and with its epistemic status changing accordingly. The power that emerged from this new relation was unleashed in the course of the two world wars.
Working his way through the history of the Aristotelian assessment of technics, the author engages the ideas of a wide range of thinkers--Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela.

This remarkable posthumous work by one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century engages Augustine's "Confessions," one of the major canonical works of world literature and the very paradigm of autobiography as a definable genre of writing.
Lyotard approaches his subject by returning to his earliest phenomenological training, rearticulating Augustine's sensory universe from a vantage point imaginarily inside the confessant's world, a vantage point that reveals the intense point of conjuncture between the sensual and the spiritual, the erotic world and the mystical, being and appearance, sin and salvation. Lyotard reveals the very origins of phenomenology in Augustine's narrative, and in so doing also shows the origins of semiotics to lie there (in the explication of the Augustinian heavens as skin, as veil, as vellum).
Lyotard's explication of Augustine is also a final survey of the entirety of the philosophical enterprise, a philosopher's profound reflections on the very basis of philosophy. He sees the "Confessions" as a major source of the Western--and decidedly modern--determination of the self and of its normativity, the point of departure for all reflection and the condition of possibility of all experience. Lyotard suggests that Augustine's "I," Descartes's "cogito," and Husserl's "transcendental ego" in essence or structurally say the same thing.
Lyotard aims at no simple ascription of Augustine's position. Instead, his text centers on what he takes to be Augustine's central confession: the repeated avowal of an essential uncertainty concerning the status of the faith confessed, of being in a sense already too late, of a difficulty in being no longer of this world while being in it all the same. Far from offering the foundation of all subsequent journeys to selfhood, Lyotard sees the "Confessions" as many evocations of a certain loss of self, of a temporality that is not given or recuperated all at once--or once and for all--but that time and again is lost or forgotten.

This book explores the role that states might play in promoting a cosmopolitan condition as an agent of cosmopolitanism rather than an obstacle to it. In doing so the book seeks to develop recent arguments in favour of locating cosmopolitan moral and political responsibility at the state level as either an alternative to, or a corollary of, cosmopolitanism as it is more commonly understood qua requiring transnational or global bearers of responsibility. As a result, the contributions in this volume see an on-going role for the state, but also its transformation, perhaps only partially, into a more cosmopolitan-minded institution - instead of a purely 'national' or particularistic one. It therefore makes the case that the state as a form of political community can be reconciled with various form of cosmopolitan responsibility. In this way the book will address the question of how states, in the present, and in the future, can be better bearers of cosmopolitan responsibilities?