SOURCE: “Lyotard's ‘Kantian Socialism’,” in Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1990, pp. 23-37.

In the following essay, Geiman characterizes Lyotard's arrival at the idea of dissensus-as-authentic-consensus as the evolution of a Kantian socialism he sees at the root of Lyotard's politics.

The work of Jean-François Lyotard has been characterized as “an eclectic look at the overlapping boundaries between aesthetic, political and ethical territories.”¹ This is not surprising. Like most French philosophers in the twentieth century—including Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—Lyotard pursues his philosophical investigations with a great sensitivity to contemporary political and cultural developments. What separates him from many of his former and present compatriots, whose work has been often deemed “bereft of any moral orientation,”² is his active concern for the place and the character of ethics in this constellation. His more recent works, Au juste³ and Le Différend,⁴ reflect this concern. In them...