SOURCE: “Lyotard and the Jouissance of Practical Reason,” in Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard, Duke University Press, 1991, pp. 85-101.

In the following excerpt, Pefanis traces Lyotard's career from Marxism to Postmodernism with an emphasis of his deconstruction of Marx and his valorization of libidinal intensities in Économie libidinale.

The enemy and accomplice of writing, its Big Brother (or rather its O'Brien), is language (langue), by which I mean not only the mother tongue, but the entire heritage of words, of the feats and works of what is called the literary culture. One writes against language, but necessarily with it. To say what it already knows how to say is not writing. One wants to say what it does not know how to say, and what it should be able to say. One violates it, one seduces it, one introduces into it an idiom which it...