Just Gaming (Theory and History of Literature Series) Book

Lyotard and Thébaud open Just Gaming by discussing L's Libidinal Economy, a book L argues "aims to produce effects" rather than state truths (3). T sees L's book as thus irresponsible, but L asserts all writing'at least in modernity'"is irresponsible" (8). For in modernity'unlike in classicism'the author "no longer knows for whom he writes" (9). The dialogic approach of Just Gaming, however, situates it in a different "language game" than modern texts (8)'at least until it becomes a book.

L points to avant-garde artworks, which refuse the notions of a "subject of history" and "a universal subject" (10), as exemplifying modernity. Such works are experimental and have no a priori audience: If they are "strong," they "produce people to whom [they] are destined." (10). Modernity is also "humorous" (12), "untimel[y]" (14), and not nostalgic, so is neither classical nor romantic but in between. Untimely moderns, sans historico-theoretically derived sensus communis, "judge without criteria" (14). In fact, "anytime that we lack criteria, we are in modernity" (15). This lack also constitutes what L terms "paganism" (16). T notes that, for L, "pagan" also denotes "a prescription" (16). L agrees, but clarifies that "prescriptives … are never grounded" in paganism: For modern pagans, "either the just comes to us from elsewhere … we are never more than the addressees of prescriptions…. Or … prescriptions are not received" (17). L cites K, who leaves "the ability to judge … mysteriously hanging" on the "unfathomable principle" of the will. Judging isn't about finding grounded criteria, but using "imagination" as "the power to invent criteria" (17)'criteria "regulated [only] by an Idea" (18).

The book's second section opens with T noting that L often says "'Let us be pagan,' and "Let us be just'" (19). L links the two to interrupt "pious," theoretical, Platonic notions of justice implying "a lost origin" (20) that suggests "the prescriptive can be derived from the descriptive" (21). L counters, via Levinas, that such derivation is fallacious. The prescription only comes from within the prescriptive language game, for at the pragmatic level one can't simply move from "the true to the just" (24). Modernity's response to this predicament has been "an answer through autonomy": that "the set of prescriptions produced by the whole of a social body to which the prescriptions apply, will be just" (25). With no ideal of justice, "each situation is singular" (27) and the judge must judge without set criteria and only assess the judgment's justness after the fact (26). Instead of the notion that "one gives oneself one's own laws," there is the "idea [in the Kantian sense] that no … utterer … is ever autonomous…. [but] first of all an addressee" (31). The utterer is "heteronomous" (32), "the recipient of a narrative in which one is narrated" (33) and in which invention occurs via "experimentation" (34). In the Cashinahua and Jewish traditions, "someone speaks to me; he places me under an obligation … to retell…. And in this sense, the will is never free" (35). Heteronomy interrupts the fixed subject, who "change bodies" as narrated narrator (40), and the privilege of "the pole of the addressee" "actively forgotten" in "Western thought" (37). But in paganism'unlike the Jewish tradition in which the deity is posited in a metalinguistic position'"The gods are implicated in the narratives," "immanent [like humans] to stories in the making" and thus unable to serve as prescribers (43).

L turns to K to break the "relation between" the pre- and descriptive language games (45). L substitutes K's term "Idea"'"the maximization of a concept" (46)'for "prescriptive." And the Idea of "freedom," i.e. "reason in its practical use" (46), leads to a definition of justice as "act[ing] in such a way that … the maxim of the will may serve as a principle of universal legislation" (47). The "that," however, is a "negative clause" that offers no positive inkling of "a condition that defines justice" (47). K thus shifts the focus from why we judge to "what regulates our judgments" (47). With no descriptive "real" on which to found regulations, we are regulated by different sets of rules in a variety of "multiplying and refining language games" (49), each "bound to a specific pragmatics" (52). L's "paganism," for instance, involves "the Idea … of a set of diverse pragmatics" that "cannot be synthesized into a unifying metadiscourse" (58). In Kantian terms, the Idea of "one must be pagan" is "one must maximize as much as possible the multiplication of small narratives" not founded on ontology (59). Since all games operate on their own pragmatics, the ontological game cannot ground "the game of justice," which occurs "in the field of prescriptives" (62) and thus "cannot be justified [as] … conclusions of a reasoning" (64). L does offer a negative insight in that excluding the "possibility of continuing to play the game of the just," as in "terrorism," does constitute "[a]bsolute injustice" (66). Positively, however, justice is an empty "transcendence" (69)'as K puts it, "that which obligates is something absolutely beyond our intelligence" (71). Thus in "the game of the just," "one speaks as a listener" (72), never a priori assured of one's authority as a judge.

L asserts K, some sophists, and Aristotle all assume there is "no reason of history" on which one can ground "knowledge in matters of ethics" (73). L notes that this situation can lead to a sort of tyranny of "convention," but interprets K as offering a potential way out. K is like the Aristotle's Corax: one who, rather than accepting the rule of convention as a sycophant, sees "the reasonable idea" as "produc[ing] … the inverisimilar, the unlikely" (78). L claims K can be interpreted as a sophist who breaks with the convention's tyranny (78). The Kantian Idea of a "field of finality" in which "prevails … the Idea of something that is not yet here, that will never be here" is the maximization that makes possible this break. What K calls judgment is "the capability of thinking outside of the concept and outside of habit" (82), thinking at the unknowable "horizon of justice" (83).

L notes some difficulties in his interpretation of K, as the latter's moral system is founded upon notions of totality, whereas L is searching for "a multiplicity of justices" and "justice of multiplicity" (100)'justices that occur within diverse language games that are being multiplied and refined, but never beholden to universal rules even as the "justice of multiplicity" is "assured, paradoxically enough, by a prescriptive of universal value" (100). But here L must stop making positive assertions lest he take on the role of "the great prescriber himself" (100). Ha ha.