SOURCE: “Rephrasing the Freudian Unconscious: Lyotard's Affect-Phrase,” in Diacritics, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 43-62.

In the following essay, referring to Freud and Lacan, Tomiche explores Lyotard's psychology of irreconcilables, unrepresentables, and irreducibles.

In the foreword of The Inhuman, Lyotard notes: “The irreconcilable is what, belatedly, I realize I have always tried to preserve—under various headings: work, figurality, heterogeneity, dissensus, event, thing” [12]. From Discours, figure (1971), Lyotard's first major work, up to his most recent one, Lectures d'enfance (1991), the irreconcilable has indeed been, at different levels, at the heart of his work. At the historico-political level, the critical goal of such works as The Postmodern Condition, Just Gaming, and The Differend was to make it possible to phrase that which “reality,” a politics rooted in it, and political theory have not allowed to be phrased, have always attempted to reduce, suppress, or resolve. At the aesthetic level, Lyotard's valorization...