An examination of the excesses of Lyotard\u27s postmodern justice

Totalitarianism was the ramification of the reign of modernity’s few hegemonic metanarratives. Jean-François Lyotard challenges this violence through his pluralist notion of justice by situating little narratives into a perpetual competition and isolation where no one interferes with one another. However, this stance is pregnant with inconsistencies. It appears that for Lyotard’s justice to succeed, players of language games must form a consensus in a form of civility. Since irony is noticeable in the ‘provisional’ politics of Lyotard, it reinscribes unity on the discourses he intended to separate: the discourses of truth, taste, justice and efficiency all hang together in his aesthetic politics. Lyotard asserts that consensus is always tantamount to violence, this is the primary reason why objectivity is futile in his impotent justice; his misology poses a serious threat to human relationships by allowing a limitless proliferation of narratives as long as they are not metanarratives. This paper is a defense of the criticisms towards Lyotard’s political philosophy by examining the application of his notion of justice that excessively averts the role of argumentation and consensus in bridging the gap between the incommensurable language games. Hence, there should be a limit to the ‘anything goes’ type of justice exhausting all possibilities in politics through the regulation of all autonomous players. Keywords: excesses; Jean-François Lyotard; justice; modernity; pluralism; politics; postmodernis