Abstract

In this essay I argue that part of the reason why Lyotard's return to Kant seems to have left him without the 'dis-sensus communis' he was looking for, may be due to the phraseological bias in the analysis of 'silence' given in The Differend. It also could be attributed to Lyotard's subsequent failure to realize that the related notions of 'soul' and 'the inhuman' are pointing toward a philosophy of impassibility. The moment of ontological separation, hinted at in these notions, rather necessitates a further discrimination between the ethical and the political. This would correct the tendency to envisage problems of 'difference', 'alterity' etc. through the exclusively political spectacles that became fashionable in a certain 'postmodern' appropriation of Lyotard's far subtler philosophy