The Reading Warehouse

The first volume of Jean-Francois Lyotard's Miscellaneous Texts on contemporary art and artists, Aesthetics and Theory of Art, contains nine essays on general aesthetics and the theory of art. They are published in the original French along with the translations in English. Most of these texts, preserved in the Lyotard archives of the Bibliotheque Litteraire Jacques Doucet in Paris, are presented here for the first time. They cover the whole period of his production, from 1969 to 1997, and they make the development of his philosophy of art explicit. After the "libidinal" conception of art in his early writings, the "Kantian twist" of around 1980 places his view on art under the aegis of the sublime.