SOURCE: “Jean-François Lyotard's Postmodernism: Feminism, History, and the Question of Justice,” in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 20, Nos. 3-4, March, 1992, pp. 259-72.

In the following essay, McGraw discusses the importance of Lyotard's theory and critique of narrative for feminists in the pursuit of justice and reconstructing history.

“Lorsque l'Un est pulvérisé et l'identité disloquée, et que règne le polémos, c'est alors … qu'il n'est plus question de faire n'importe quoi et qu'il est urgent d'être juste.” Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe. (La Faculté de Juger)

Balance-sheet

The capitalist game of competition waged between the Anglo-American type of feminist pragmatics and the various forms of French theoretical imports has resulted in a net loss: eight years of Reaganomics, prolonged by the present laissez-faire attitude, has just about cancelled any socio-economic advances made in the sixties and seventies by cultural feminists. Unmistakably echoic, an anxious literary establishment...