clem Lyotard

In this text, Lyotard, like Barthes and Macherey speaks of the gap in art and refers to Habermas's non-understanding of it. "What Habermas requires from the arts and the experience they provide is, in short to bridge the gap between cognitive, ethical and political discourses, thus opening the way to a unity of experience" (39) The issue is we are at a time where not everything can be and needs to be said. Some things in the art realm, and just in general cannot be represented such as "the infinitely great", " the infinitely powerful". These are concepts which are unrepresentable. It is what Kant calls the Sublime. He refers to "abstraction" saying it is "like a presentation of the infinite, its negative presentation". I think this is again the gap we have been speaking of in class. The absence of certain things say more than if one intends to present them. This is how Lyotard defines aesthetics.

Lyotard comments on Habermases' confusing of beauty and aesthetics which is why he want those gaps to be filled in art. I think the best way to think of the difference between beauty and aesthetics is by using Lyotards example and quote referring to Marcel Duchamp "Duchamp's "ready-made" does nothing but actively and parodistically signify this constant process of dispossession of the craft of painting or even of being artist. As Thierry de Duve penetratingly observes, the modern aesthetic question is not "What is beautiful?" but "What can be said to be art?".