Just Gaming

Published in France in 1979, five years after his "scandalous" Economie Libidinale, Just Gaming/Au Juste both develops themes from the latter book, and seeks to establish a distance (if tenuous) from the "philosophy of the will" Lyotard formerly espoused (it should be noted that, as he puts it in Just Gaming, Lyotard sees all his texts as concrete interventions in a specific milieu; they are thus to be taken as strategic moves rather than definitive pronouncements of the Truth).
Just Gaming is a dialogue between Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud (editor of French quarterly L'Esprit). Thebaud is a capable interviewer/questioner. The notion, on the back cover, that it is a "Platonic" dialogue is somewhat misleading, as the relationship show more between Socrates and his confounded interlocutors undergoing enlightenment or refutation is not really comparable at all to what goes on between JFL and JLT. Much of the discussion centers around interpretations of Aristotle and Kant, and the possibility of bringing together, or linking in some way, the "Jewish" (Lyotard refers to Levinas and Buber a good deal) and the "Greek" (Aristotle and Sophists), or Kant and the Sophists is a major issue.
The afterword by Samuel Weber brings out some of the problematic paradoxes of the position Lyotard is attempting, but is rather dense. show less

Lyotard and Thebaud use language games to examine the problem of justice. Engagingly structured as an extended Platonic dialogue. A post-modernist classic.