Postmodernity and ontology
26
Jul
The possible conclusion of the Lyotard of the Postmodern Condition (1979)
is that the pragmatics of the rules governing the language game of science redefined its objectives, methods, and functions (Lyotard, 1979, pp. 47 and 104), where partners Are called to participate directly in the meta-rules that order social, professional and private life.
However, from the opening pages of his book Le différend (1983) he took a much more radical position than the previous inspiration, recognizing the merits of liberation from “different” practices and grammars (this is the central theme of the new Lyotard), linguistic practices (Gadamer also redefined the latter), considered the risk of the “anthropomorphic subject” that transcendental that was intended owner and user of the language.
The subject is not the “virtual user” the sender of the language, it must be defined in three other instances: recipient, meaning and reference; There is a “happening” and a “presenting”.
What gives this opening power of language is the phrase, “opening and closing power of the universe,” temporal giving instance of Being, an ontological event that presents a universe arising from silence and Nothingness that separates each phrase from any other phrase.
Language operates a “withdrawal” that reduces the singular and contingent being presented by the phrase to an ontic state dominated by “almost necessary” threads that cover the Nothingness and silence consubstantial with each phrase.
Thus, “destinator, recipient, meaning and reference” are the instances that constitute the open universe, by a phrase, the instances that all the sentence presents at the moment of its occurrence, at the moment of its unpredictable and contingent event.
There are several references of the above said, as the function of Lyotard’s envisager in ch. 1, pages 30 and 31, and also notes on Frege in Chapter 2, especially note 3.
It is not so simple, but there is in this work a passage from the “pragmatic” to the “ontological”.
Lyotard, J. The Postmodern Condition. Paris: Minuit, 1979.
Lyotard, J. Le différend, Paris: Minuit, 1983
