Lyotard met Jacques Monory in 1972, and the text on him published at that time was the first that Lyotard dedicated to contemporary art since Discourse, Figure. Lyotard's interest in the plastic arts thus fits fully within the setting of his political preoccupations. The artist-protagonist stages the recurring motifs that fascinate Lyotard: the scene of the crime, the revolver, the woman, the victim, glaciers, deserts, stars. The atmosphere of the essays on Monory is "Californian." Monory's imaginary repertoire goes well beyond the masters of modernity and is in line rather with a "modern contemporary surrealism." Both Lyotard and Monory live the "dilemma of Americanization," the America represented by cinema, fashion, novels, music. It is in this atmosphere that Lyotard and Monory will finally evoke their supreme experience of difference: desire and fear, exultation and a profound malaise. The plastic universe of Monory and the aesthetic meditations of Lyotard are in perfect symbiosis. Sarah Wilson's epilogue thoroughly outlines both the history of a friendship and, at the same time, the intellectual and artistic climate of the 1970s.

Some of the artworks pose difficulties in interpretation, but regardless of amorphous subjects and confusing representations, Butor's creativity finds poetry in them.".

Lyotard and the Political is the first book to consider the full range of the political thought of the French philosopher François Lyotard and its broader implications for an understanding of the political. James Williams clearly and carefully traces the development of Lyotard's thought from his early Marxist essays on the Algerian struggle for independence to his break with the thought of Marx and Freud. This is compared with Lyotard's later, highly influental writings on the politics of desire and his attempts to base a postmodern political discourse on the sublime. An indispensable work for all who are interested in modern continental philosophy, Lyotard and the Political offers the first systematic analysis of the political dimension of the work of one of the most controversial and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Also available in this series: Lacan and the Political Pb: 0-415-17187-3: £12.99 Heidegger and the Political Pb:0-415-13064-6: £12.99 Derrida and the Political Pb: 0-415-10967-1: £13.99 Nietzche and the Political Pb: 0-41510069-0: £12.99 Foucault and the Political Pb: 0-415-10066-6: £12.99

Ashley Woodward demonstrates what a new generation of scholars are just discovering: that Lyotard's incisive work is essential for current debates in the humanities. Lyotard's ideas about the arts and the confrontations between humanist traditions and cutting-edge sciences and technologies are today known as 'posthumanism'. Woodward presents a series of studies to explain Lyotard's specific interventions in information theory, new media arts and the changing nature of the human. He assesses their relevance and impact in relation to a number of important contemporary thinkers including Bernard Stiegler, Luciano Floridi, Quentin Meillassoux and Paul Virilio.