Jean-François Lyotard’s Anti-Humanist Agonistics: Communication and Conflict After the Human

In The Differend, postmodern philosopher Jean-François Lyotard presents a communicative theory of conflict. Lyotard terms the element of conflict in society the differend. Here, I propose to approach this difficult concept via anti-humanism. In the first section of this article, I connect the concepts of the differend, language games, and anti-humanism. Lyotard's post-anthropocentric view of discourse as autonomous and self-organizing is the foundational premise of his social thought. In the second section of my article, I bridge the concepts of anti-humanism and the proposed extinction of philosophy, arguing that if anthropocentric critique is obsolete, then a new kind of politics is necessary. In the third section, I conceive of Lyotard’s communicative vision of society as one that accounts for the increasingly automated nature of social systems. In the concluding section, I apply Christian Baier's concepts of "epistemic spheres" and "epistemic differend" to analyze contemporary political polarization, while also engaging critically with Eric Goodfield's recent critique of Lyotard’s perceived liberalism.