LYOTARD VERSUS HEGEL: THE VIOLENT END OF POSTMODERNITY

Abstract

In the final phase of the Cold War, Jean-François Lyotard popularized the end of modernity and the dawn of a new era, “postmodernity”. But postmodernism is already over again. In the resurgence of the great empires and civilizations that perished in European colonization and European-American hegemony, the rise of the “others”, a new epoch of history is emerging that will define the entire 21st century. Lyotard’s position is characterized by three different approaches that seem to flow into each other but need to be separated: A critique of Hegel with the core assertion that Auschwitz, as a symbol of infinite suffering, abrogated his philosophy of history, and the extension of this critique to the great narratives of modernity. This is followed by a meta-discourse on the great narratives of history on the basis of linguistic-philosophical considerations (in fact a meta-meta-narrative) and, finally, the construction of an alternative great narrative, that of the individual, particular, other, of postmodernity. This latter is only ostensibly not an alternative construction because it is intimately connected to the critique of grand narratives. In all three subfields, Lyotard has made groundbreaking considerations – but their immediate connection has reversed these advances. Lyotard exchanged a totalizing discourse of the absolute through a similar totalizing discourse of the particular. We not only need a radical reversal of the concepts of Western modernity, but also of those of post-modernity and re-invent a kind of different dialectics. It must be granted to Lyotard that an abridged interpretation of Hegel could support his critique. However, it is completely disputed whether Hegel’s approach is based on a closed or an open system. The thesis presented here is that Hegel’s approach is both open and closed at the same time. A simple and illustrative example is a sine curve on a slightly rising x-axis. This wave model is closed on the y-axis, but completely open and even infinite on the x-axis. Critics and proponents of Hegel’s philosophy of history misunderstood his approach as a closed system and derived from it an “end of history” (Marx as well as Fukuyama). With Hegel, however, it can be argued that we are at the violent end of postmodernity. I wanted my text not only to attempt a critique of Lyotard and a reconstruction of the Hegelian method, but also to lay out the consequent substantive perspectives, even if they are necessarily not yet fully elaborated. In addition, I see Lyotard as an outstanding representative of post-structuralism, with whom he shares comparable problems, so that I make cross-references to similarities in this position, even if I do not treat them separately here.