Readings in Infancy
BY JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD
EDITED BY ROBERT HARVEY AND KIFF BAMFORD
Bloomsbury Academic, 2023
ISBN: 9781350167360
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/readings-in-infancy-9781350167360/
"Nobody knows how to write." Thus opens this carefully nuanced and accessible collection of essays by one of the most important writer-philosophers of the twentieth century, Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998). First published in French in 1991 as Lectures d'enfance, these essays have never been printed as a collection in English. In them, Lyotard investigates his idea of infantia, or the infancy of thought that resists all forms of development, either human or technological.
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
Each essay responds to works by writers and thinkers who are central to cultural modernism, such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sigmund Freud. This volume – with a new introduction and afterword by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford – contextualizes Lyotard's thought and demonstrates his continued relevance today.
Contents include:
- Foreword, Robert Harvey
- "Infans," translated by Mary Lydon
- "Return: Joyce," translated by Robert Harvey & Mark S. Roberts.
- "Prescription: Kafka," translated by Christopher Fynsk
- "Survivor: Arendt," translated by Robert Harvey & Mark S. Roberts
- "Words: Sartre," translated by Jeffrey Mehlman
- "Disorder: Valéry," translated by Robert Harvey
- "Voices: Freud," translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele
- Afterword, Kiff Bamford
Robert Harvey is distinguished professor emeritus at Stony Brook University. His most recent books are Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2017) (translations in Japanese and French forthcoming in 2020), a translation of Deguy's To That Which Ends Not: Threnody (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics (Continuum, 2010), which appeared in French as Témoignabilité (MetisPresses, 2015), and De l’exception à la règle (Éditions Lignes, 2006) on USA PATRIOT Act. He is a major co-editor of the Œuvres complètes of Marguerite Duras in the Pléiade edition with Gallimard.
Kiff Bamford is reader in contemporary art at Leeds Beckett University, with research interests in performance art and continental philosophy. He has published widely on the work of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard with a focus on the inter-relationship between art and philosophy. Monographs include: Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Lives (Reaktion, 2017) and Lyotard and the figural in Performance, Art and Writing (Continuum, 2012). Bamford edited and introduced the collection Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates (Bloomsbury, 2020).
