Entre Merleau-Ponty, Lacan et Kripke: le(s) Descartes de Lyotard

This contribution is an attempt to question the stakes of the reference to Descartes in the works of one of the most important representatives of the French post-structuralism at the end of the XXth century. As this reference goes through successive readings, very different in their styles as well as in the kind of demonstrations they support, this text tries to analyse three significant periods: -the first period is centred on phenomenological interpretations, and their “repetition” of the Cartesian gesture, in dialogue with Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's works; but Lyotard already formulates here some critics towards the presuppositions and methods implicated by those approaches; -the second period is resolutely open to linguistic, psychoanalytical and historical points of view; influenced by the readings of Koyré or Lacan, Lyotard insists on the importance of the metaphor of vision in Cartesian thought, and tries to explain how, as a “representative” space appears in European culture, an act of “look” can become a producer of “anamorphosis”; -in the third period, finally, Lyotard elaborates his philosophy of « sentences » (or « phrases ») and refers very much to Kant, Wittgenstein and Kripke; he examines, in this context, the validity of a thesis asserting the existence or a « designated » reality, which would implicate its « transcendence » with regard to the « universe of the present sentence (or phrase) ». Those changing approaches, in the succession of the readings, question the problem of the unity, or permanence, of the « Descartes » to whom they refer. They question, in the same time, our relations with Descartes, and the way, necessarily displaced, in which he can stay, at a distance, our contemporary.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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