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.

This text introduces the work of Jacques Monory to an English speaking audience and provides a historical and critical contextualization of Lyotard's committment to writing on art.

Stephen Zepke shows how the idea of sublime art waxes and wanes in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière and the recent Speculative Realism movement.

An innovative study of the thought and writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard in relation to contemporary art and in particular performance art.

This specially-priced set includes all seven volumes in the series, Jean-François Lyotard: Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists-- Karel Appel, A Gesture of Colour Sam Francis, Lesson of Darkness Duchamp's TRANS/formers Miscellaneous Texts, Volume I: Aesthetics and Theory of Art Miscellaneous Texts, Volume II: Contemporary Artists Que peindre?/What to Paint?: Adami, Arakawa, Buren The Assassination of Experience by Painting, Monory Each volume reprints the original French text and English translations on facing pages and includes significant numbers of illutrations of the artists under discussion.

What does Lyotard's thought offer contemporary theory? By focusing on key concepts and themes from his later texts, such as affect, aesthetics, Andre Malraux, St Paul, nihilism, infancy, space and writing, Rereading Jean-François Lyotard: Essays on His Later Works explores the impact and relevance of Lyotard's largely undiscussed late philosophical works for contemporary theoretical debates. In his works produced from 1990 until his death in 1998, Lyotard addresses a number of themes that both revisit and move beyond those from his earlier work. These include: art and aesthetics; affect; ethics and politics; modernity and the subject. Despite designating these texts as part of a 'late period', the chapters do not exclude a wider engagement with Lyotard's thought and often seek to engage in connections, resonances and developments across his many texts. Each chapter within this book places Lyotard as a figure with much to offer current theoretical debates, reasserts Lyotard as an important thinker for developments in social thought, and draws out the many links between his philosophical work and broader social questions. This is the first work in English to focus on Lyotard's later writings and will therefore be a key text to all scholars of his ideas.