Overview
Discussions, or phrasing “after Auschwitz” is a short text by Jean-François Lyotard arising from a colloquium held at Cerisy in honour of Jacques Derrida, where Lyotard read a paper titled “Phrasing ‘After Auschwitz.’” The volume is not a treatise or a continuous essay but a transcription — made by Lyotard himself — of the exchange that followed the reading of that paper. Its centre of gravity is therefore dialogic: it records what happened when Lyotard’s attempt to think “after Auschwitz” in terms of phrases and their linkage was submitted to Derrida’s response, and through Derrida to the question of what such a “we” — the “we” who speak after Auschwitz, and who make Auschwitz the privileged name of the wrong — might be presupposing.
Because the discussion presupposes the lecture, the text is unintelligible without a grasp of the position Lyotard was defending. That position belongs to the constellation of arguments he was developing in the early 1980s and would elaborate in The Differend: that thinking is a matter of phrases, that every phrase occurs in a genre of discourse, and that there is no meta-genre capable of adjudicating between them. A “differend” arises when a dispute cannot be settled for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both sides; in such a case the wrong suffered by one party is not merely unrepaired but unrepresentable, because the idiom in which it could be argued has no standing. Auschwitz, for Lyotard, is the name that marks such a differend at the limit. The victims are deprived of the means of proving the wrong done to them; the idiom in which they might have testified is not the idiom in which reality is administered. What remains is a name, and the obligation — phrased as an “one must” — to link phrases onto that name rather than let it fall into oblivion or be absorbed into a reassuring narrative.
The discussion turns on two linked anxieties voiced by Derrida. First, he says he finds himself in agreement with the talk but does not wish to yield to the pathos of agreement; his aim is not to “link on” in the sense of adding an approving commentary but to “add phrases.” He then asks whether the real question is not that of the multiplicity of proper names — whether the grave stakes of what Lyotard has given to think are not precisely the fact that there are several proper names. The schema he suspects in a discourse centred on Auschwitz is one that, in referring to this “nameless name” and in making a model of it, risks reconstituting a kind of centrality. That centrality would not be the centrality of speculative dialectics, but it would still be a “we” — the “we Western Europeans” who grant Auschwitz a unanimous privilege in the combat we wage against a certain Western reason. The risk is that such a “we” would consign to oblivion, or brush aside, proper names other than Auschwitz, names just as abhorrent, both names that have names and names that do not. Derrida’s worry, as recorded, is that a certain “we” reconstitutes itself in reference to what Lyotard has said so admirably about Auschwitz.
The second anxiety is described as less dramatic, more formal, and resembles the reservation Derrida feels when reading Levinas. Despite everything indisputable said about the utterly-other, about the hiatus, the relation to the utterly-other nevertheless gives rise to linkings of phrases. The absolute rupture, in other words, does not abolish the requirement of linkage; the unlinkable itself prescribes linking. Derrida’s formulation in the exchange — that the unlinkable of Auschwitz prescribes that we make links — is the pivot on which the discussion turns, since it concedes Lyotard’s “one must” while immediately reopening the question of which links, in whose idiom, and under the sign of which name.
What the text thus stages is not a refutation but a displacement: the acknowledgement that the obligation to phrase after Auschwitz is inescapable, coupled with the insistence that the name around which that obligation is gathered cannot be allowed to become the unique proper name that absorbs all the others. The exchange is compressed, allusive, and conducted in the idiom of colleagues who share a vocabulary; it offers no systematic exposition and no settled conclusion. Its interest lies precisely in that unfinished quality — in watching two philosophers test, against each other, the grammar of obligation and the politics of the proper name at the limit of what can be phrased.
What the exchange adds to the theme of the differend is a political grammar of the proper name. The question is not merely whether Auschwitz can be represented, but who is authorized to speak in its wake and how a collective subject is formed by that speaking. Derrida’s warning about a “we Western Europeans” makes the name a site of exclusion as well as witness: every phrase that links on to Auschwitz also selects among other names and risks making them merely examples. Lyotard’s position, as the discussion exposes it, is that this risk cannot be avoided by silence or by a neutral discourse; it can only be held open by phrasing that keeps acknowledging the names it does not master. The significance of the text lies in that tension — between the necessity of linking and the injustice of any link that would claim to have gathered all the names into one. It therefore reads as a limit-case for Lyotard’s thought, where the obligation to phrase is shown to be inseparable from the obligation not to totalize.
