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'Ashley Woodward's bright analysis rests upon a deep understanding of the whole corpus of Lyotard's writings, from the earliest to the posthumous, and is contextualised by a confrontation with the philosophies of Bergson, Deleuze, Stiegler, Virilio, Habermas, Heidegger, Luhmann, Merleau-Ponty and others. His book outlines with great clarity the complexity of Lyotard's view of the "inhuman condition", and particularly his fascination of the "artistic event".' Herman Parret, University of Leuven An incisive argument for the contemporary importance of Lyotard in light of posthuman trends Jean-François Lyotard was one of the leading French philosophers of his generation, whose wide-ranging and highly original contributions to thought were overshadowed by his brief, unfortunate association with 'postmodernism'. This book demonstrates that Lyotard's work is incisive and essential for current debates in the humanities, especially those concerning the arts, as well as confrontations between humanist traditions and cutting-edge sciences and technologies that today go under the name of the posthuman. Ashley Woodward presents a series of studies to explain Lyotard's specific interventions in information theory, new media arts and the changing nature of the human. He assesses their relevance and impact in relation to a number of important contemporary thinkers including Bernard Stiegler, Luciano Floridi, Quentin Meillassoux and Paul Virilio. Ashley Woodward is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee. Cover image: (c) Eleni Seitanidou/Dreamstime.com Cover design: first pulse design [EUP logo] www.euppublishing.com ISBN 978-0-7486-9724-3 Barcode
About the author
Ashley Woodward is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee and is a founding member of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition: Reflections on Nihilism, Information and Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and Nihilism in Postmodernity: Lyotard, Baudrillard, Vattimo (The Davies Group, 2009).
Summary
Ashley Woodward demonstrates what a new generation of scholars are just discovering: that Lyotard s incisive work is essential for current debates in the humanities. Lyotard s ideas about the arts and the confrontations between humanist traditions and cutting-edge sciences and technologies are today known as `posthumanism .
