Lyotard on the "Critical Image"

Abstract

In my study, I will reconstruct the term ‘critical image’ as part of Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the figure. I base my argument on Lyotard’s aesthetic work Discours, figure (DF), in which he grasps the figure through the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the psychoanalytic method developed by Freud, moving from the former to the latter in his analysis. The figure as a disorder and difference deconstructs discourse understood as a medium of meaning, a field of order and (linguistic) oppositions. I argue that the passages in DF that discuss the critical potential of the work of art, should be read in terms of the concept ‟critical image”. In addition to DF’s examples, I will also refer to Lyotard’s essay Freud selon Cézanne, also published in 1971, which can be read as a further reflection on Merleau-Ponty’s The Doubt of Cézanne and illustrates how Lyotard moves from phenomenology towards psychoanalysis.