Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 32 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jean-Francois Lyotard.

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Famous Quotes By Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 183090

I shall call modern that art which ... presents the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 1095271

Knowledge [savoir] in general cannot be reduced to science, nor even to learning [connaissance]. Learning is the set of statements which, to the exclusion of all other statements, denote or describe objects and may be declared true or false. Science is a subset of learning. It is also composed of denotative statements, but imposes two supplementary conditions on their acceptability: the objects to which they refer must be available for repeated access, in other words, they must be accessible in explicit conditions of observation; and it must be possible to decide whether or not a given statement pertains to the language judged relevant by the experts. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 1475049

One knows that frontal and/or profile photography is torn to pieces ... Inversely, what remains of the photograph must be seen as a fragment coming to fill a gap in the drawing. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 993790

On the other hand, in a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an issue, it is clear that language assumes a new importance. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 791130

Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 1693174

The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 352163

Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 983401

A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 2145851

A new problem appears: devices that optimize the performance of the human body for the purpose of producing proof require additional expenditures. No money, no proof - and that means no verification of statements and no truth. The games of scientific language become the games of the rich, in which whoever is the wealthiest has the best chance of being right. An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 559743

... We are in a system that doesn't give a rap about sacredness. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 1748252

... Desire baffles knowledge and power. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 1558123

What is required of a working hypothesis is a fine capacity for discrimination. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 1645209

And today more than ever, knowing about that society involves first of all choosing what approach the inquiry will take, and that necessarily means choosing how society can answer. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 1695126

It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 1731009

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 1031136

... is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change? — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 1845754

Saddam Hussein is a product of Western departments of state and big companies, just as Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were born of the 'peace' imposed on their countries by the victors of the Great War. Saddam is such a product in an even more Flagrant and cynical way. Because the Iraqi dictatorship proceeds, as do the others, from the transfer of aporias in the capitalist system to vanquished, less developed, or simply less resistant countries. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 1878185

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 2200528

My professor, he reminded us of Kant: to think by oneself, to think in accordance with oneself. Today they say that's logocentric, not politically correct. Streams must flow in the right direction so that they may converge. Why all this cultural bustling? Just to assure oneself that everyone is speaking of the same thing. Of what? Of Otherness. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 2239101

What is new in all of this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions are losing their attraction. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 1239658

Postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta", catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 1109430

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences ... — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 114675

What guides Marxism, then, is a different model of society, and a different conception of the function of the knowledge that can be produced by society and acquired from it. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 908454

Liberalism does not preclude an organisation of the flow of money in which some channels are used in decision making while others are only good for the payment of debts. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 873222

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 861788

... In the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 860719

If we wish to discuss knowledge in the most highly developed contemporary society, we must answer the preliminary question of what methodological representation to apply to that society. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 617372

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 616405

Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 430204

One can decide that the principal role of knowledge is as an indispensable element in the functioning of society, and act in accordance with that decision, only if one has already decided that society is a giant machine. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 231345

Even now it is no longer composed of the traditional political class, but of a composite layer of corporate leaders, high-level administrators, and the heads of the major professional, labor, political, and religious organisations. — Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes 148427

Are we, intellectual sirs, not actively or passively 'producing' more and more words, more books, more articles, ceaselessly refilling the pot-boiler of speech, gorging ourselves on it rather, seizing books and 'experiences', to metamorphose them as quickly as possible into other words, plugging us in here, being plugged in there, just like Mina on her blue squared oilcloth, extending the market and the trade in words of course, but also multiplying the chances of jouissance, scraping up intensities wherever possible, and never being sufficiently dead, for we too are required to go from forty to the hundred a day, and we will never play the whore enough, we will never be dead enough — Jean-Francois Lyotard