Source: A review of Le différend, in Sub-Stance, Vol. 15, No. 1, November, 1986, pp. 83-6.

In the following review, Rappaport considers Le différend, its philosophical influences, its divergences from them, and an ethical looseness he finds in it.

Le différend by Jean-François Lyotard develops further the French post-structuralist engagement with analytic philosophy and is very sensitive to questions which concern speech acts in the broadest sense of the term. In large part I find that the book develops ideas central to Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty, in which the issue of validating or proving propositions is considered from the perspective of judgment.

We recall that in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein offered as one of the tentative conclusions that if one has to say a proposition is identical to what it represents, then such a proposition is necessarily not identical. In short, identity is not constative but inherent...