James Kirwan

The Postmodernist’s Journey Into Nature: From Philo of Alexandria to Pocahontas and Back Again, By Way of Jean-François Lyotard

This essay examines the way in which the notion of a ‘postmodern sublime’ functions in Lyotard’s later work as an attempt to recuperate the transcendental, revelatory, role traditionally assigned to encounters with ‘Nature.’ It analyses the failure of Lyotard’s attempt by examining his successive location of this hyper-authenticity in the avantgarde, in art, in a form of aesthetic perception, and, finally, in matter itself, and shows how the very self-contradictory nature of what is required precipitates this succession. The chapter concludes by noting how the course of Lyotard’s thinking, which ends, as it must, in the quasi-theological, reflects the tenacity of our belief in the epiphanic.