Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition

Ashley Woodward is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee and is a founding member of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition: Reflections on Nihilism, Information and Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and Nihilism in Postmodernity: Lyotard, Baudrillard, Vattimo (The Davies Group, 2009).

• Series Editors’ Preface; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction: Beyond the postmodern?: The inhuman condition; 1. The End of Time: Evolution, extinction, and the fate of meaning; 2. Information and Event: Lyotard’s philosophy of information; 3. Economy, Ecology, Organology: On technics and desire; 4. Nihilism and the Sublime: The crisis of perception; 5. Aesthesis and Techne; New technologies and Lyotard’s aesthetics; 6. Immaterial Matter: Yves Klein and the aesthetics of the sensible; 7. Inhuman Arts: From cubism to new media; Conclusion: The Judgement of the Inhuman; Bibliography; Index.

Ashley Woodward’s bright analysis rests upon a deep understanding of the whole corpus of Lyotard’s writings, from the earliest to the posthumous, and is contextualized by a confrontation with the philosophies of Bergson, Deleuze, Stiegler, Virilio, Habermas, Heidegger, Luhmann, Merleau-Ponty and others. His book outlines with great clarity the complexity of Lyotard’s view of the ‘inhuman condition’, and particularly his fascination of the ‘artistic event’.