Lyotard’s Libidinal Modernism
Lyotard’s Libidinal Modernism

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses Jean-François Lyotard’s conception of modernist-postmodernist shift and its dynamics in the light of Lyotard’s studies concerning the energetic, libidinal potentialof art and artistic structure (or apparatus, dispositive). According to Lyotard, the postmodernwould constitute a continuous “quasi-analytical” process of exploration of the elements “repressed” by the modernist project in a struggle to gain freedom from the mechanism of repetition. Only in such context will we be able to draw some serious artistic consequences from his analysis of the cultural and philosophical changes. The second part of the article focuses on Lyotard’s book The Assasination of Experience by Painting, Monory devoted to the French hyperrealist painter Jacques Monory with whom Lyotard collaborated in the late 1970s. The book was described by Lyotard as the ”contribution of the paintings of Jacques Monory to the understanding of the libidinal set-up, and vice versa”.

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