Quotes from Jean-Francois Lyotard

Liberalism does not preclude an organisation of the flow of money in which some channels are used in decision making while others are only good for the payment of debts

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.

is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change?

I shall call modern that art which ... presents the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.

In the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power.

The sublime feeling is not mere pleasure as taste is – it is a mixture of pleasure and pain... Confronted with objects that are too big according to their magnitude or too violent according to their power, the mind experiences its own limitations.

Desire baffles knowledge and power.

He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments — negative affections. In this nihilist fin de siècle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed, he is laughing, he is here. It's your sadness, idiot, he'd say.

In his analysis of the sublime effect, Edmund Burke termed 'horror' the state of mind of a person whose participation in speech is threatened. The power which exceeds the capacity of interlocution resembles night.

The unthought hurts because we're comfortable in what's already thought.

A new problem appears: devices that optimize the performance of the human body for the purpose of producing proof require additional expenditures. No money, no proof - and that means no verification of statements and no truth. The games of scientific language become the games of the rich, in which whoever is the wealthiest has the best chance of being right. An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established.

Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game.

In 4.5 billion years there will arrive the demise of your phenomenology and your utopian politics, and there'll be no one there to toll the death knell or hear it.

My professor, he reminded us of Kant: to think by oneself, to think in accordance with oneself. Today they say that's logocentric, not politically correct. Streams must flow in the right direction so that they may converge. Why all this cultural bustling? Just to assure oneself that everyone is speaking of the same thing. Of what? Of Otherness.

We are in a system that doesn't give a rap about sacredness.

Postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta", catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical.

Artists are men who want to become inhuman.

To transform the unconscious into discourse is to bypass the dynamics, to become complicit with the whole of Western ratio, which kills art at the same time as the dream. One does not in the least break with metaphysics by placing language everywhere.

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.

On the other hand, in a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an issue, it is clear that language assumes a new importance.

Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.

Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.

What guides Marxism, then, is a different model of society, and a different conception of the function of the knowledge that can be produced by society and acquired from it.

One can decide that the principal role of knowledge is as an indispensable element in the functioning of society, and act in accordance with that decision, only if one has already decided that society is a giant machine.