Professor Kiff Bamford

A collection of interviews and debates with French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, focusing on his later work and the period from 1984 to 1997. Jean-François Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) is one of the most important French philosophers of the Twentieth Century. His impact has been felt across many disciplines: sociology; cultural studies; art theory and politics. This second volume of interviews and debates focuses on his later work with contributions selected from the last fifteen years of his life. Including hard-to-find interviews and previously untranslated material, this is the first time that many of these debates have been made accessible to an anglophone audience. Taking place between 1984 and 1997 these diverse debates and interviews follow in the wake of Lyotard’s most notable publications, including The Postmodern Condition (1979 [1984]) and The Differend (1983 [1988]). Whilst continuing to contest and reconfigure the claims of these writings, Lyotard and his interlocutors help to contextualise the questions raised within the fields of art, philosophy, literature and politics. Discussions in Paris and London include contributions from thinkers such as Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe; Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Alain Badiou whilst significant interviews elsewhere in Europe, North and South America elucidate the consequences of the varied reception given to his work. The importance of Kant, Freud and Wittgenstein is readily apparent as are the themes now closely associated with Lyotard: the inhuman, infancy and resistance to ‘the system’. Provocative and insightful questioning sets Lyotard’s discourse alight. These interviews and debates record an evident delight in the activity of thinking which is not about rhetorical flourish or rehashing staid assumptions but of grappling with some of the most important questions confronting thought today.

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the most important French philosophers of the Twentieth Century. His impact has been felt across many disciplines: sociology; cultural studies; art theory and politics. This volume presents a diverse selection of interviews, conversations and debates which relate to the five decades of his working life, both as a political militant, experimental philosopher and teacher. Including hard-to-find interviews and previously untranslated material, this is the first time that interviews with Lyotard have been presented as a collection. Key concepts from Lyotard's thought – the differend, the postmodern, the immaterial – are debated and discussed across different time periods, prompted by specific contexts and provocations. In addition there are debates with other thinkers, including Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, which may be less familiar to an Anglophone audience. These debates and interviews help to contextualise Lyotard, highlighting the importance of Marx, Freud, Kant and Wittgenstein, in addition to the Jewish thought which accompanies the questions of silence, justice and presence that pervades Lyotard's thinking.

This volume – with a new introduction and afterword by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford – contextualises Lyotard's thought and demonstrates his continued relevance today.

This introduction to the anthology identifies the role of discussions related to and following on from Lyotard's main book of philosophy, The Differend, articulating its contemporary resonances in relation to considerations of colonialism, the meta narrative of 'the west', and re-orients currently dominant views of Lyotard's work in relation to a certain discussion of the postmodern. The extent to which the collected interviews and debates complicates and questions the narrow legacy of Lyotard's work is made possible by the location of a longer, changing view of the postmodern through considerations of interactions with 'the Inhuman', 'the Immaterial' and material found in archival sources. The contextualising introduction is conceived as a critical part of the volume, a chapter which re-considers the legacy of The Postmodern Condition and The Differend in contemporary debates and discuss the implications of Lyotard’s work outside Metropolitan France. For example, the volume includes the transcription of a video interview made in English in 1996 with Patricia Dailey (then a research student at Emory University, now faculty at Columbia University, NY) which throws light on the late seminars given on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Bataille and a late approach to aesthetics which is infrequently discussed. This video was found, undigitized, in the archives of the University of California, Irvine whilst on a research visit in 2019 and through correspondence with Professor Dailey its publication is now being made possible. Continuing the approach taken in the previous volume, correspondence with interlocutors, translators and interviewers help to furnish and embellish previously underestimated connections and contexts. These details appear in the volume either as editorial notes to the published chapters or discussed in the introductory chapter.

Restricted blood flow to the limbs results in claudication. Claudication makes one limp. Such limping is used by Lyotard, both as a physical manifestation and as a metaphor for thinking without certainty, in the two texts, “Apathy in Theory” and “Interview with Art Présent,” presented in this volume for the first time in English translation. They don’t present a theory of “limping” but encourage rather a multiplicity of theories which trade on the inherent excitement of the unknown, the as yet undetermined. This is the same “manner” which appealed to Lyotard in Kant’s third Critique; the same wandering attention that appealed in Freud and an openness to the sometimes uncertain encounters in art practice. In this chapter these themes from the two “new” texts will be drawn out through specific examples of performance art practice, their dissemination and attempts at a limping commentary. The vibration of inner organs fired by a sound installation, the smell of recently cut marine ply, the odd encounter of Lyotard with Augustine of Hippo via cassette recorders which should be obsolete, lay bare the body’s limits

Through an engagement with the philosophy of Jean-Francois Lyotard, this volume addresses the current crisis in the production and value of knowledge in the humanities and questions what we understand as 'research', 'art practice' and 'the university'. In the spirit of Lyotard's Postmodern Fables, the essays here chase 'the same force of lightness' that Lyotard saw in the arts and the sciences, minimizing jargon and literature review and forging new architectures for interdisciplinarity, critical practice and creative academic work. Alongside a selection of short texts by Lyotard himself, some of which have been translated for the first time, Lyotard and Critical Practice brings together international scholars and artists to explore how Lyotard's thought urges us to question, disrupt and find alternatives to the established programme of the humanities today.

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the previous centurys most provocative thinkers. Can his work help us address the crisis currently facing the humanities?

Bamford, K. (2017) Performance and Uncertainty. Bamford developed two Symposia with colleague Harold Offeh exploring issues of re-performance, politics and narrative which took place at two locations: Symposium One at The Tetley, Leeds on Saturday 4th February including the participation of Rana Hamadeh; Corin Sworn; Dora Garcia and Casey Orr. And, Symposium Two at The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London on Saturday 4th March including the participation of Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Hayley Newman, Irit Rogoff and Sonia Boyce. Bamford also presented the Symposia Introduction and the performance talk 'Opening Uncertainty'; the latter responding to the video by Vito Acconci Open Book (1974), which was screened at both events.

Bamford, K. (2014). ‘Comment devenir Je et cela en vaut-il la peine? Une action “mineure” de Gina Pane’ (trans. Jef Caro). In F. Pinaroli (Ed.), RE: vers une histoire mineure des performances et expositions. Paris: It: Editions. 8 images showing own performance, drawings and projections. Bamford, K., & Bosson, O. (2014). ‘REC: Une formation du spectateur’. (trans. Jef Caro). In F. Pinaroli (Ed.), RE: vers une histoire mineure des performances et expositions. Paris: It: Editions. Two contributions to edited book, the first includes several images of my own working practice – performance / drawing etc and discussion of its process in relation to ideas of re-performance of a work by Gina Pane and ideas from Lyotard. The second is my account of the presentation of film maker Olivier Bosson at the event which prompted part of the publication, a two-day event at Raven Row gallery and the Slade (UCL). NB. English edition forthcoming. Launch event was at The Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris. Publication includes contributions from Jean-Philippe Antoine, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Kiff Bamford, Lucas Bouissou, Olivier Bosson, Mathieu Copeland, Christophe Domino, Will Holder, Adam Lauder, Ju Hyun Lee & Ludovic Burel, CS Leigh, MoM (Museum of Museum), Warren Neidich, Émilie Parendeau, Fabien Pinaroli, Adrien Sina.

Contribution to Encyclopedic work. Entry on Jean-François Lyotard [500 words]. Bloomsbury Handbook to Literary and Cultural Theory, edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo. 2018.

Bamford, K (2017) ‘Powerlessness and the Word: Lyotard’s Breathless Hesitation’ Presented at: ‘Jean-François Lyotard: Power of the Word’, held at Leeds University on Tuesday 17th October, organised by Dr Andy Stafford (dept. French) and chaired by Prof. John Mowitt (Critical Humanities).

This volume – with a new introduction and afterword by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford – contextualises Lyotard's thought and demonstrates his continued relevance today.

A written account of a performance by Yingmei Duan translated to video. How does this attempted return relate to that which Lyotard termed the affect-phrase, anamnesis, gesture?

This collection presents, for the first time in English, Jean-Francois Lyotard's major essays on film: Acinema,The Unconscious as Mise-en-scene, Two Metamorphoses of the Seductive in Cinema; and The Idea of a Sovereign Film; Then, eight critical essays by philosophers and film theorists examine Lyotard's film work and influence across two sections: 'Approaches and Interpretations' and 'Applications and Extensions'.

Lyotard, Jean-François (1924-1998) was born and educated in Paris. He became an active member of the far-left group Socialisme ou Barbarie in the 1950s, later turning to a more conventional philosophical career in France and North America. Lyotard is perhaps best known for his writings on the postmodern, especially The Postmodern Condition ([1979] 1984) which gained international attention. This short ‘report on knowledge’ as it is subtitled, reflected on changes in post-industrial societies and the increased marketization of knowledge, famously summarized by the description of ‘performativity’ as maximizing output whilst minimizing input. It pre-empts many of the more complex philosophical ideas presented in his important book The Differend ([1983]1988). Lyotard analyses competing modes of discourse with attention to both the imbalance between genres of discourse and the extent to which particular regimes of phrases follow pre-existing rules to achieve set goals, regardless of those who are rendered silent

In an interview in 1978, Lyotard was asked if he believed a “communication volontaire” is possible. The difficulty of translating this phrase — “self-directed” or “voluntary” communication? — is enhanced by the fact that such a notion seems oddly out of time. Lyotard’s reply invokes aspects of the strange and strained relationship between his most philosophical book, The Differend: Phrases in dispute, and his most popular, The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge, in particular the shift from Wittgensteinian ideas of “language games” to that of phrase regimen and its attending critique of anthropocentrism. Is there, in this shift, a move that echoes current questions asked by the conjuncture of art and technology and into which it might, in turn, feed? The possibility of a “communication volontaire” will be considered through the inter-relationship of both texts, Lyotard’s own response in relation to his teachings at the university of Vincennes, and through artworks which perform aspects of this voluntary process.

I’m going to look at a particular event in the history of art and philosophy in France in the late twentieth century, one which relates to the history of exhibitions, to technology but more specifically to an experiment in ways of exchanging information and discussing ideas. The idea of the labyrinth highlighted in the lecture’s title appears in several ways and is an image of the complexity of both the inter-relationships which I’ll be sketching out and the ideas themselves. But there is a flaw to the labyrinth as a chosen image or metaphor: as a puzzle the labyrinth has an achievable goal, to reach its centre and then to find the exit. I’m not sure that this is either possible or desirable in this instance, but rather to be continually lost in the labyrinth of both ideas and archival research is at once the goal in itself, and by necessity the answer.

Visual studies, often also referred to as visual culture, is a field of research with at least three decades of history, disagreement and debate. Whilst generally acknowledged to have grown out of a desire to expand the remit of disciplines such as art history, by incorporating theoretical innovations from film, media and cultural studies, the range of areas to which such studies can both relate and contribute are wide. Writing as one of the editorial team for a special issue of the journal Visual Studies in 2021, Derek Conrad Murray summed up the field, its history and position as follows: “Without a doubt, Visual Studies has developed into a vibrant multi-disciplinary field of study, one that spans the social sciences, arts, and humanities. As interrelated intellectual arenas, visual studies and visual culture tend to view images as central to the formation of meaning in the social world.” However, as Murray and many respondents were also quick to point out, visual studies is not without its problems. These include both the consequences of dismantling disciplinary boundaries and the need to further broaden the field, both geographically and intellectually. The dynamism brought by such difficulties can be creatively productive, however, as this chapter aims to demonstrate by turning to examples of art practice which feed into and feed from such theoretical approaches. An important precedent for this work is the 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux: a sensorial mix of art, science and technology it activated philosophical questions as multidisciplinary theory in practice. The sensorial range of this exhibition links directly to the example of contemporary art practice which opens the chapter: Otobong Nkanga’s use of performance, song and site to trace transcultural commodity exchange, presenting its findings via a live-streamed performance.

Visual studies, often also referred to as visual culture, is a field of research with at least three decades of history, disagreement and debate. Whilst generally acknowledged to have grown out of a desire to expand the remit of disciplines such as art history, by incorporating theoretical innovations from film, media and cultural studies, the range of areas to which such studies can both relate and contribute are wide. Writing as one of the editorial team for a special issue of the journal Visual Studies in 2021, Derek Conrad Murray summed up the field, its history and position as follows: “Without a doubt, Visual Studies has developed into a vibrant multi-disciplinary field of study, one that spans the social sciences, arts, and humanities. As interrelated intellectual arenas, visual studies and visual culture tend to view images as central to the formation of meaning in the social world.” However, as Murray and many respondents were also quick to point out, visual studies is not without its problems. These include both the consequences of dismantling disciplinary boundaries and the need to further broaden the field, both geographically and intellectually. The dynamism brought by such difficulties can be creatively productive, however, as this chapter aims to demonstrate by turning to examples of art practice which feed into and feed from such theoretical approaches. An important precedent for this work is the 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux: a sensorial mix of art, science and technology it activated philosophical questions as multidisciplinary theory in practice. The sensorial range of this exhibition links directly to the example of contemporary art practice which opens the chapter: Otobong Nkanga’s use of performance, song and site to trace transcultural commodity exchange, presenting its findings via a live-streamed performance.

Kiff Bamford, Uncontained, 2025, print on folded band, 7.82cm x variable dimensions in silver pouch.

In the performance work of artist Otobong Nkanga words are fractured; spoken broken English slams up against percussive sounds and is softened then with song. How the matter of language carries and echoes the extraction of materials is part of the story told by her work, but it is also a figural repositioning of language, this paper will argue. A figural repositioning more radical than the ‘phrase–image’ of Jacques Rancière: it is not only a ‘semantic displacement’ but a deeper distrust of semantics which undermines the assumption that understanding might be possible or desirable. To mine the depths of the figural one has to turn to Jean-François Lyotard’s usage of the term, both from Discourse, figure and the later return of the figural through the quasi-phrasing to which Rancière alludes, most evident in his writings on contemporary art. How Nkanga’s work is written about, in turn, and how an ekphrasis might do justice to the inarticulated phrases which give it force is at the heart of this seminar’s concerns. The contemporary slippage between forms of artistic practice present not only an intensity and excitement but a political reframing of the wasteland we are making: So Wettin You Go Do? So Wettin You Go Do? Oya Na.

1500 word review of 'Painting, History and Meaning: Sites of Time' by Craig Staff

Jean-François Lyotard Kiff Bamford Jean-François Lyotard is one of the most important, and complex, French thinkers of the twentieth century. Best known in the English-speaking world for his book The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard produced a multi-faceted work that has often been obscured by its sometimes problematic association with the postmodern. His life refuses to follow the clear trajectory common to academics in France: it stalls and hesitates, with Lyotard’s first ‘career’ consisting of fifteen years of militant Marxist political engagement. Kiff Bamford traces this circuitous journey, unravelling the thrust of Lyotard’s main philosophical arguments, his struggle with thinking and his confrontation with the task of writing and thinking philosophy in a different way. These all take place within a series of very particular contexts: the Algerian war, the experimental university at Vincennes and a sustained engagement with the visual arts. Lyotard’s own tentative reflections on his intellectual life help to frame his suspicions of easy narratives and highlight his rejection of ‘the delusion that we are able to programme our life’. It is by following these cautions that Kiff Bamford is able to present a compelling portrait of a challenging subject.

Lyotard’s references to film and video are so limited, it should be relatively easy to expand his repertoire and consider his thoughts in relation to those of my own. But I have struggled, and skirted round my chosen topic for too long; how can his ideas be brought to play productively to my own ends – to consider the relationship of performance art to film? Perhaps that is the problem: I have sought a productive return on my investment, rather than light that match simply to watch it burn. Listen to me, then, as I set fire to the skin of the film and confront the tangled mess of melted celluloid: after the performance.

This paper investigates the potential of the disparate and unconventional aspects of what can be considered an archive, as a means by which to respond to a past performance. According to French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, commentary on art works seeks to link onto the gesture or trace of the event and to provoke further art works, as commentary. It is this affective response to fragments from a past performance which motivates this project. In 2013-14, I worked with students from two art institutions, one in Poland and one in the UK, to respond to a performance by British artist Stuart Brisley, which took place in Warsaw in 1975. Photographs from the performance are readily accessible on-line but there remains no archival record of the performance at the event’s location. It was, therefore, to investigate this performance by other means that students were asked to work with fragments from the past. Keywords: performance art; archive; affect; Lyotard; Stuart Brisley http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Article,id=19831/

I admit that the title of this article is a bit flirtatious, even bamboozling. What follows does not explicitly address the figural, nor does it offer a history of performance art. What is examined, however, are examples of Lyotard's work informed by a trace of the figural: What to Paint? Adami, Arakawa, Buren; Karel Appel, A Gesture of Color, and the exhibition Les Immatériaux. Lyotard's response to artworks and the questions they raise, however, bears no shortage of affinities with performance and the provocations of the practice of performance art. This proximity emerges from a style of writing and a curatorial approach that shifts chronology and calls attention to the possibilities of presence. The questions posed are never more than beginnings. What to Paint? questions the possibilities offered by painting, as that which other forms of expression seem incapable of producing. In the narrator's unusually autobiographical account "You," the event of presence is illustrated by an experience of a bicycle ride under the blue skies of a childhood in Vendée. This little story is continued throughout the first dialogical section "The Presence" to evoke the inarticulable. The interlocutor, "He," asks: "But confess that something, I do not say a thing, an object, but that an event, which is not a thing, but at least a caesura in space-time, takes place, and that it is this that must be "rendered…"

In this paper, I am rewriting a previous presentation on the “power of the word,” given in the context of Roland Barthes’s early writings on rhetoric. Feeling uneasy with this claim to power, I titled my presentation ‘the powerlessness of the word’. Then, Lyotard was the interloper; now, in a context where Lyotard’s The Differend is made the welcome but unusual focus, I am forced to rethink the claim of the weak over the strong. The power or powerlessness is not of the word but of the phrase, in the full breadth of Lyotard’s usage. It is but a chain in the linkage of thoughts which, I will argue, Lyotard necessarily makes us reconsider.

An in-conversation event with Kiff Bamford and Robert Harvey at the Philosophy Department of Stony Brook University, NY, where Lyotard had taught as a Distinguished Visiting Professor, several times. Close to the twentieth anniversary of Lyotard's death (22 April 1998) and the fiftieth anniversary of the events of March 22 and May '68, in which Lyotard was heavily involved, this discussion considers what legacy Lyotard leaves for us today.

ABSTRACT. The argument here is that certain theoretical positions are regarded as démodé, simply because their historical time has past, thereby ignoring still-prescient approaches. The example to be explored in this paper is that of Jean-François Lyotard’s thought: dumped in the trash-can along with the cultural postmodernism to which it owed little, and without a concern for its particular mode or manner of approach. Yet it is Lyotard’s experimental approach that is his most relevant for the theme of this conference, experimental in the sense of doing otherwise, never static, never ceasing for long enough to cohere, yet deliberately stalling the conventions of philosophy, of thought, informed by an experimental artistic, filmic and literary practice that dared to challenge. ‘Publish or perish!’ was the ironic rallying cry he penned with a knowing wink, always playing with the reader’s or interlocutor’s ideas and assertions. Yet he is also deadly serious: ‘One writes because one does not know what one has to say. But today’s slogan is: Publish or perish! If you are not public, you disappear; if you are not exposed as much as possible, you don’t exist’. This need for self-exposure, exacerbated in a time of social media, is questioned through Lyotard’s own exploratory role-playing as evinced in his dialogues, both imaginary and through interviews and debates, which take Diderot as their role model – slipping between the expected characterizations of what constitutes a permissible ‘position’. Drawing on research undertaken for a forthcoming volume of interviews and debates with Lyotard, this paper will enact the ‘stealth mode’ highlighted in the call for papers, arguing that Lyotard’s fifteen-years of militant experience, as a member of the radical, non-authoritarian Marxist groups Socialisme ou Barbarie and Pouvoir Ouvrier, left their mark on his philosophical practice.

Book Review article of: Spacing Philosophy: Lyotard and the Idea of the Exhibition, by Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Berlin: Sternberg, 2019, 252 pp., 4 b. & w. illus. paperback. Material Noise: Reading Theory as Artist’s Book, by Anne M. Royston, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019, 224 pp., 16 b. & w. illus., hardback.

I am always in the middle of an ongoing research project concerning the work of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and therefore try to ensure that all roads lead, not to Rome, but to JFL. Consequently, a google search for 'Lyotard brewing" led me to the recent book by Bernard Steigler 'States of shock: stupidity and knowledge in the 21st Century' which fortuitously frames the terms of reference for this provocation. [...] Brewing as a metaphor concerns both expansion and transformation, this provocation will explore the warnings felt by Lyotard, noted by Steigler< of overcapitalisation and ask what lessons might be learnt as the global expansion of 'live art' parallels the 'performativity' of its global counterpart in global capitalism.

Considering writing and performance in its broadest sense, this article questions the role of text in art works where the presence of the textual element does not seek to make an immediate visual impact, but rather hides behind conventions of administration (Art & Language); exhibition information (Teresa Margolles) or contracts (Adrian Piper; Gina Pane; Marina Abramović; Margolles). Through a comparison of two installation pieces linked to conceptual art and exhibited at Invisible: art about the unseen 1957-2012 (Hayward Gallery, London), the ways in which this ‘quiet’ text questions the conventions of language as a static form is discussed with reference to ideas of the figural put forward by Jean-François Lyotard in Discourse, Figure. Lyotard’s concern for the ‘thickness’ of language is exemplified in the writings of Marguerite Duras as pictured in an article by Sanford. S. Ames, printed in the journal Visible Language in 1978. Such references help us to recognise the role that textual practice has played in the development of contemporary art practice as both discursive and unsettled: an art history of revisiting, re-performance and restlessness.

Professor Kiff Bamford gives a short introduction to the work of the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and why it’s been important to his thinking on art, performance, philosophy and writing. I keep coming back to Lyotard’s writings, his provocations and mischievous dialogues. He did more than just write about art. He wrote with works and was transformed by them: you could almost say he performed with them. It is this process of challenge and transformation I want to convey in this lecture, aimed at beginners and sceptics alike. I will give a brief overview of Lyotard’s life and the cultural contexts of his work, drawing both on my recent research and the short biography written for the series Critical Lives. This will be augmented by the presentation of a more personal project: an attempt to work my way into some of his last writings through a process of drawing, working through the repetition of similar motifs in a manner which isn’t there yet but which entails searching, slowly for that which is ‘inopportune, unseemly, and even disquieting…’.

To kick the habit of conventional scholarship this article appeals to the affective draw of the archive via an imaginative pedestrian peregrination. It takes a walk through the uneasy spaces of Vito Acconci's 1972 work Anchors and listens to the dialogue of conflicting voices which still demand to be heard, forty years after their construction. It becomes unclear who is initiating the dialogue; the text is hard to read and perverse. The resulting disorientation of Anchors is matched by a later, larger, exhibition in Paris: Les Immatériaux, co-organised by French Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. Here the labyrinthine confusion of spaces, sounds, smells and sights acts out an excess of information, echoing the affective intensity of Acconci's Anchors. However, the parallel between Acconci and Lyotard comes through a stumbling manner: eager to avoid the foot-fall that forms a well-trodden path the aim is to keep moving. We cannot dust off these archives whilst reclining in a recumbent posture; we must leap to our feet and become participants in their performance. Neither must we aim to decode the unarticulated voices which grunt and girn their way into our reading. Such bodily emissions were termed the ‘affect-phrase’ by Lyotard, not in order to decipher their meaning, but to acknowledge their effect in leaving conventions of communication provocatively unfulfilled. Let us proceed on foot.

This original study offers a timely reconsideration of the work of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in relation to art, performance and writing. How can we write about art, whilst acknowledging the transformation that inevitably accompanies translations of both media and temporality? That is the question that persistently dogs Lyotard's own writings on art, and to which this book responds through reference to artists from the recently-formed canon of performance art history, including the myths of seminal figures Marina Abramovic and Vito Acconci, and the controlled documentation of Gina Pane's actions. Through the unstable, untranslatable element that Lyotard calls the figural, his thought is brought to bear on attempts to write a history of performance art and to question the paradoxically prescriptive demand for rules to govern 're-performance'.

The challenge I address in this chapter is a fear of repetition, as I turn to a performance by an artist whose work has already provoked my own thought and writing – the Chinese-born artist based in Germany: Yingmei Duan. At a performance in a London gallery I found space-time-matter transformed by her presence, in spite of my personal acquaintance with the artist and despite my own fears, misgivings and hesitancy. Or perhaps it is because of this hesitancy and the unanticipated power of the gesture that I was prompted to respond in kind, mouthing manacled words to camera in the making of a video piece that attempted to link onto that gesture. The art is in the gesture, not the artist or the work, and it is the presence of the remainder which prompts the transference, as Lyotard writes ‘The body doesn’t belong to you’.

3000-word encyclopedia entry on the French Philosopher for the on-line subscription only publication The Literary Encyclopedia

How can I hope to embody and live a past performance whilst maintaining its minority? This presentation focuses on ‘Je’, an action by Gina Pane which sits outside her best-known work and which has preoccupied me in my own writing and practice for some time. I usually turn to the writings of Jean-François Lyotard for an uncomfortable kind of support: his declaration that the work must force the body ‘beyond what it is and what it is able to do, beyond what we believe it is and is able to do’ challenges the risk of complacency as I ask how ‘I’ can become ‘Je’.

‘The other befalls the ego’ is how Jean-François Lyotard summarises the ethical position of Emmanuel Lévinas in The Differend (1983). The ethical challenge is not to host the other – which suggests leaving the ego at home and in charge – but to open oneself unquestioningly to its call. This obligation and Lyotard’s analysis of Lévinas’ demand to respond ethically to the other informs my account of a performance ‘action’ made by French artist Gina Pane in 1972, in a public square in Bruges. Pane’s set-up explicitly elicits the confrontation between Je and Les autres: standing outside on a second floor window ledge looking in, she is herself excluded. Lyotard, for his part, advocated a response to art that mirrors the obligation to the other, what he terms a prescriptive address that demands that the addressee respond without sense (knowledge) ‘because it assumes the insufficiency of knowledge’. This paper will seek to highlight the provocation of this approach – one that Lyotard refers to as ‘passibility’ – in order that an openness to the ‘insufficiency of knowledge’ might question the presumed ability to host the other, or as Derrida puts it in Of Hospitality: ‘The guest becomes the host’s host’.

Abstract This paper investigates the potential of the disparate and unconventional aspects of what can be considered an archive, as a means by which to respond to a past performance. According to French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, commentary on art works seeks to link onto the gesture or trace of the event and to provoke further art works, as commentary. It is this affective response to fragments from a past performance which motivates this project. In 2013-14, I worked with students from two art institutions, one in Poland and one in the UK, to respond to a performance by British artist Stuart Brisley, which took place in Warsaw in 1975. Photographs from the performance are readily accessible on-line but there remains no archival record of the performance at the event’s location. It was, therefore, to investigate this performance by other means that students were asked to work with fragments from the past. Keywords: performance art; archive; affect; Lyotard; Stuart Brisley

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the most important French philosophers of the Twentieth Century. His impact has been felt across many disciplines: sociology; cultural studies; art theory and politics. This volume presents a diverse selection of interviews, conversations and debates which relate to the five decades of his working life, both as a political militant, experimental philosopher and teacher. Including hard-to-find interviews and previously untranslated material, this is the first time that interviews with Lyotard have been presented as a collection. Key concepts from Lyotard’s thought – the differend, the postmodern, the immaterial – are debated and discussed across different time periods, prompted by specific contexts and provocations. In addition there are debates with other thinkers, including Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, which may be less familiar to an Anglophone audience. These debates and interviews help to contextualise Lyotard, highlighting the importance of Marx, Freud, Kant and Wittgenstein, in addition to the Jewish thought which accompanies the questions of silence, justice and presence that pervades Lyotard’s thinking.

My Practice as Research Ph.D. comprises three works accompanied by a critical reflection: Echoes from a Berlin Childhood (Sheffield: Gordian Projects, 2016), ‘Articles Lost’ (London: MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2017), and a set of ten posters titled Voices from the Archive (2018), presented as a broadsheet newspaper. The works explore the politics of women’s bodies in the public space of the street. Lone and collective urban walking is considered as a political act. I present the city as autobiography, exploring this through the figure of the flâneuse in literature and visual art from the nineteenth century to contemporary walking practices, emerging with the passante as the figure whose pace is more in step with mine. Each work employs quotation as a method. The book works take extracts from Walter Benjamin’s Berlin essays, placing his writing on the city into new contexts. In Echoes from a Berlin Childhood, Benjamin’s words from Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (1932) are poetically re-composed with photographs made on the streets of his childhood walks, using a 5MP wearable camera with automatic shutter. ‘Articles Lost’ takes extracts from ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ on dreaming and walking in cities, and presents them — and the gaps in Benjamin’s text — as spaces for reinvention. Both works present an alternative mapping of Berlin, a multitude of voices in the writing of the city are heard in my interventions. Voices from the Archive re-composes archival material from the Reclaim the Night movement, encountered during a residency at the Feminist Archive North in 2018. I propose the use of quotation in my practice as an allegorical method, taken from Sigrid Weigel’s Body-and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin. I break the thought-images from their continuum in order to speak the text, retaining its origin through citational method while re-instating the urban woman walker. I situate this practice in the field of conceptual, autobiographical writing by women, alongside practices of iteration that reimagine canonical texts, employing the fragment as method, such as the writing of Lisa Robertson, Lauren Berlant, Kathleen Stewart, Anne Boyer, and Moyra Davey. The thesis presents the contextual field of walking practices (and contemporary walking research), considering artist and writer Sharon Kivland’s Freud on Holiday series, and her work on the passante. I propose the allegorical method — where visual and textual fragments are composed to create political statements — as confirmation of the value of the quotation/fragment in both academic/art writing and visual art practice.

In one of his last essays, and one of the few directly referring to film, Jean-François Lyotard adopts Deleuze’s discussion of ‘free indirect vision’, itself having flowed from Pasolini, to question the moment when the flow stops, is halted, confused and made to question those conventions of space-time which have allowed the body and its visual correlate, the eye, to function irrespective of that which ‘is immanent to visible reality’. The cessation is necessarily a temporary one, but is sufficient to indicate the persistent need for new films and new ideas: not the modish new demanded by consumer capitalism but the ungraspable desire which Lyotard has termed the figural. Now the museum wants to capture the new of performance art; is it simply to freeze its flow and seize the instant of its occurrence, or is it perhaps possible to maintain indeterminacy through the fluidity of the libidinal body, to open up the skin of the museum and let us in? This paper takes Lyotard’s fluid ideas to the eightieth birthday performance of Stuart Brisley and the currently homeless Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, searching for productive blockages.