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and further destabilizing humanity, for Lyotard the project of modernity has been liquidated. The
French title of Lyotards book translates as postmodernism explained to children, and the letters are
addressed to the children of his friends and colleagues. But it is hard to imagine many children fully
comprehending Lyotards references to Adornos negative dialectics, Habermas appraisal of the project
of modernity, and Kants transcendental philosophy. Some of the later letters in the volume reveal how
the title might be disingenuous. Lyotard explicitly turns to the topic of childhood when he brings up
Adornos idea of micrologies, such as the tales of childhood in Benjamins One Way Street, which
register an event that is an initiation, that cut[s] open a wound in the sensibility, a wound that has since
reopened and will reopen again, marking out the rhythm of a secret and perhaps unnoticed temporality.
And later, when speaking of the difficulty of teaching philosophy, which requires a kind of
autodidacticism, to a young generation already indoctrinated into a world of exchange, narcissism, and
competition, Lyotard singles out for praise Vincennes (University of Paris-VIII) and its non-traditional
students: Maybe there is more childhood available to thought at thirty-five than at eighteen, and more
outside a degree course than in one. A new task for didactic thought: to search out its childhood
anywhere and everywhere, even outside childhood.
Posted 23rd July 2010 by Brian Rajski
Labels: theory
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