This volume traces the topic of affect across Lyotard's corpus and accounts for Lyotard's crucial and original contribution to the thinking of affect. Highlighting the importance of affect in Lyotard's philosophy, this work offers a unique contribution to both affect theory and the reception of Lyotard.

Affect indeed traverses Lyotard's philosophical corpus in various ways and under various names: “figure” or “the figural” in Discourse, Figure, “unbound intensities” in his “libidinal” writings, “the feeling of the différend” in The Differend, “affect” and “infantia” in his later writings. Across the span of his work, Lyotard insisted on the intractability of affect, on what he would later call the “differend” between affect and articulation. The singular awakening of sensibility, affect both traverses and escapes articulation, discourse, and representation. Lyotard devoted much of his attention to the analysis of this traversal of affect in and through articulation, its transpositions, translations, and transfers. This volume explores Lyotard's account of affect as it traverses the different fields encompassed by his writings (philosophy, the visual arts, the performing arts, literature, music, politics, psychoanalysis as well as technology and post-human studies).

Claire Nouvet is the Director of the Emory Psychoanalytic Studies Program and Associate Professorin the Department of French and Italian at Emory University, USA. She is the co-editor of Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-Francois Lyotard (2007) and the author of Enfances Narcisse (2009), Abélard et Héloïse: La Passion de la Maîtrise (2009) and the editor of Literature and the Ethical Question (1991).

Julie Gaillard is a Doctoral candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University, USA. She was an organizers of the 'Traversals of Affect/Traversées d'Affect' international conference.

Mark Stoholski is a Doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University, USA.

Introduction – Claire Nouvet, Julie Gaillard, Mark Stoholski, Emory University
I. Affect: An Unarticulated “Phrase”
1. “'Emma' and the Unconscious Affect: A Case of Differend” – Claire Nouvet, Emory University
2. “Apathèmata” – Mark Stoholski, Emory University

II: Affect in the Work of Art and in Commentary
1. “Pragmatics and Affect in Art and Commentary” – Ashley Woodward, University of Dundee
2. “Anamnesis” – Anne Tomiche, Université Paris IV – La Sorbonne
3. “Lyotard's Gesture” – Kas Saghafi, University of Memphis
4. “No Place for Complacency: the Resistance of Gesture” – Kiff Bamford, Leeds
Metropolitan University

III. Affect as Figure
1. “Effects of the Drive: Lyotard's Engagement with the Freudian Notion of the Death Drive
in the Elaboration of the 'Figural'” – Julie Gaillard, Emory University
2. “Concentrations of Affect – Philip Guston's Piles” – Jana V. Schmidt, SUNY Buffalo
3. “Lyotard, Lines and Affect. Encounters with Julie Mehretu's Fragment and Guillermo
Kuitca's Mozart Da-Ponte” – Heidi Bickis, University of Alberta

IV. Affect and the Sublime in the Age of New Technologies
1. “Opening” – Geoffrey Bennington, Emory University
2. “Autoaffection and Lyotard's Cinematic Sublime” – Erin Obodiac, Cornell University
3. “Gods, Angels, and Puppets: Lessons On Listening” – Kirsten Locke, University of Auckland

V. Affect in Postmodern Politics
1. “A New Kind of Sublime: Lyotard's Affect-Phrase and the 'Begebenheit of Our Time'” – Peter Milne, Seoul National University
2. “Lyotard, Affect and Media: or the Postmodern Explained by Orwell's 1984” – Kent Still

Bibliography
Index