Ashley Woodward

This fully revised and updated 2nd edition provides a comprehensive reference guide to existentialism, featuring key chapters on key existentialist thinkers, as well as chapters applying existentialism to subject areas ranging across politics, literature, feminism, religion, the emotions, cognitive science, and poststructuralism. Contemporary developments in the field of existentialism that speak to issues of identity and exclusion are explored in 4 new chapters on race, gender, disability, and technology, whilst the 5th new chapter new chapter outlines analytic philosophy's complicated relationship to existentialism. Presenting the field of existentialism beyond the European tradition, this edition also includes a new key thinker chapter on Frantz Fanon, alongside Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir, as well as new engagement with the work of scholars on race and existentialism, including Lewis R. Gordon, George Yancy, and Richard Wright. The resources section at the end of the book includes an updated A to Z glossary, and timeline of key events, texts and thinkers in existentialism, as well as a list of relevant organisations, and an annotated guide to further reading, making this 2nd edition an invaluable text for scholars and students alike.

This article surveys the notion of the event as it is treated in Lyotard’s works, and examines the implications of this treatment for his method, and for critical theory in general. While the event is of importance to many influential French philosophers, it is arguably Lyotard who has positioned his philosophy most central around the problem of accounting for events. For Lyotard, an event is an occurence which cannot be predicted in advance, and cannot be fully determined in retrospect. An event is "nothing," in so far as it cannot be captured in theoretical representations, but it is of import to theory in so far as it disrupts representations and indicates their limits. Lyotard's work engages with the problem of the event both theoretically and performatively, not only discussing the nature of the event, but letting it govern his methodology. This chapter outlines the way in which Lyotard's engagement with the event demonstrates the implications of this notion across a wide variety of critical concerns, including metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and politics. It also distinguishes Lyotard’s understanding of the event from that of other French philosophers, such as Derrida, Deleuze, and Badiou. While this chapter does not explicitly treat of the book’s main themes, its placement as the first chapter serves a general introductory function, outlining the main phases and concepts of Lyotard’s work which are frequent points of reference in the proceeding chapters.

This chapter explores Lyotard’s aesthetics in relation to the artist Yves Klein. Through the different activities of philosophy and art, Lyotard and Klein both explore the nature of sensibilité through an investigation of matter. Both paradoxically conclude that matter is in a sense immaterial. Lyotard understands matter as that part of an artwork which is diverse, unstable, and evanescent: in music, this corresponds to nuance and timbre, and in painting, to colour. Following Kant’s aesthetics, Lyotard interprets matter as that which defies conceptual grasp or rational calculation. From the point of view of the concept, then, matter appears as immaterial – it is nothing at all. Klein develops his meditation on matter firstly through his monochrome “propositions,” calling attention to pure colour (in particular, blue), which he theorises as stabilisations of energy. Beyond this, Klein invents “immaterial” works, such as the famous Void exhibition (an empty room in a gallery), and his Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility. Klein understands these immaterial works as presenting matter in its “prime state,” as energy diffused in space. This chapter develops the confluences between Lyotard’s and Klein’s reflections on “immaterial matter,” and seeks to show how the results achieved in each area of activity (philosophy and art) can contribute to the other. Lyotard’s aesthetic theory provides the basis for a new interpretation of Klein which provides an alternative to his common reception as a Conceptual artist. Klein’s work, on the other hand, not only acts as a profound example of Lyotard’s theory, but functions as a corrective to Lyotard’s emphasis on the negative and privative nature of sensitivity to matter by demonstrating the creative and life-affirmative potential of such sensitivity.

One of the less-appreciated modalities of Lyotard’s rethinking of aesthetics is a consideration of the way that technologies, and in particular information technologies, reconfigure the nature of aesthetic experience. For Lyotard, information technology presents a particular problem in relation to the arts and aesthetic experience. When art uses communication technologies themselves as its matter or medium, the “traditional” model of aesthetic experience becomes problematised. Lyotard argues that this is the case because information technologies determine or “program” a conceptual meaning in advance of an aesthetic experience. Therefore, we no longer have a situation of the “free play” between sensible forms and concepts that constitutes the aesthetics of the beautiful for Kant. Lyotard argues, however, that this decline in aesthetic experience as traditionally conceived need not be understood negatively: rather, it may be seen positively in so far as it furthers experimentation with materials. This chapter concludes by highlighting the positive potentials Lyotard sees in what may now be termed “new media arts,” but also indicates the limitations in Lyotard’s analysis – delimited in part by the theoretical models of information and communication he employed – and suggests directions for further research into new aesthetics from the bearings Lyotard has given us.

A connection is often made between postmodernism and nihilism, but the full meaning of such a connection is rarelyexplored. The contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo is one of the few philosophers to have devotedmuch work to explaining this connection. Vattimo extrapolates the relevance of Nietzsche’s theory of nihilism forthe postmodern condition, arguing that the concept of the postmodern can only be thought rigorously in relation tothe nihilistic destiny of the West. This article explores Vattimo’s postmodern reading of Nietzsche and argues thatthis reading helps to illuminate the connection between nihilism and the postmodern; the postmodern transformation of nihilism, which was originally a theory of the ails of modernity rather than of postmodernity; and why postmodernists may wish to affirm nihilism rather than take the accusation that postmodernism is nihilistic as a charge that must be refuted.