Traversals of Affect: On Jean-Francois Lyotard

This volume traces the topic of affect across Lyotard’s corpus and accounts for Lyotard’s crucial and original contribution to the thinking of affect. Highlighting the importance of affect in Lyotard’s philosophy, this work offers a unique contribution to both affect theory and the reception of Lyotard.

Affect indeed traverses Lyotard’s philosophical corpus in various ways and under various names: figure or the figural in Discourse, Figure, unbound intensities in his libidinal writings, the feeling of the differend in The Differend, affect and infantia in his later writings. Across the span of his work, Lyotard insisted on the intractability of affect, on what he would later call the differend between affect and articulation. The singular awakening of sensibility, affect both traverses and escapes articulation, discourse, and representation. Lyotard devoted much of his attention to the analysis of this traversal of affect in and through articulation, its transpositions, translations, and transfers. This volume explores Lyotard’s account of affect as it traverses the different fields encompassed by his writings (philosophy, the visual arts, the performing arts, literature, music, politics, psychoanalysis as well as technology and post-human studies).