Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 10, 2018

Contemporary Philosophy

Progress in Contemporary Continental or Speculative Philosophy
Lyotard’s Criticism and Development of Derrida’s Philosophy

Contemporary French philosopher, Jean-Francois Lyotard, claims to have developed a new system based on the ideas of Jacques Derrida. I present Derrida’s three main dialectical a priori concepts structuring his phi-losophy, following the patterns that I call canonical, classical, or traditional.” Each of these three concepts is a model for any object of knowledge, and they are related in an increasing development of his theory of knowledge. Although the third dialectical a priori concept (the supplement) does guarantee the con-sistency of his previous concepts, it leads to a dilemma that is unsolvable on the basis of an implicit faulty presupposition. The only way for philosophy to progress, in Lyotard’s view, is to transform the faulty presupposition into a new hypothesis about knowledge. I present all three of Derrida’s dialectical a priori concepts because the new start by Lyotard is a change of Derrida’s philosophy as a whole, and even of all of the history of philosophy. I present the passage in which Lyotard claims that epistemology should be based on the idea of figurality in discourse; in Discourse, Figure (1971) he also calls this the “figure image,” which in a general way is analogous to the start of Derrida’s philosophy: both (Derrida’s difference and Lyotard’s figurality in discourse) are new beginnings in philosophy; both are dialectical a priori concepts; and both lead to a philosophical system having a tripartite structure. This paper, thus, focuses on Lyotard’s new idea of figurality in discourse as a transforma-tion of Derrida’s supplement.