_Minima Memoria_ attests to the impact of the works of Jean-François Lyotard, one of the most influential French philosophers of the twentieth century, and the continuing effects of these works across a wide array of fields: philosophy, literature, political theory, gender theory, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. Particular attention is paid to Lyotard's repeated warnings regarding the way in which the complexity of events can be occluded in the very attempt to represent them. Indeed, through the contributors' careful and critical analysis, Lyotard's (...) complex intellectual trajectory—all the way up to the posthumously published works _The Confession of Augustine_ and _The Misery of Philosophy_—is traced in different and often conflicting manners, which bring out the different currents that traverse his writings and the sites of tension that such terms as "different," "affect," and "infancy" mark. What emerges is not a grand narrative that would organize Lyotard's life and work around one unifying idea, but multifaceted approaches that extend in new and unforeseen directions. (shrink)

This article looks at the effects of the irruption of silence within the psychoanalytic encounter, as both a refusal of all storytelling and the rejection of the transferential address that therapy presupposes, to ask what position the therapist should adopt once s/he has been summarily dismissed from the position of addressee. The question is explored through reading a famous ‘poem about nothing’ written by Guillaume IX, the first known troubadour. In this poem, lyric poetry puts itself in relation to the (...) muteness of what Jean-François Lyotard, after Lacan, calls the Thing. Literature, I will argue, transmits the intractable resistance of this inarticulate ‘nothing’. (shrink)

The contributors to this issue—among them writers, philosophers, literary critics, and psychoanalysts—evaluate the relationship between ethics and literature. Their diverse topics range from a discussion of notions of humanity and responsibility to a reading of the Holocaust as it is explored in the film _Shoah. _.