Addressee: To whom or to what a phrase/expression is addressed; the listener or receiver of a phrase/expression from an addressor; e.g., when the Sly Fox tells the Wily Hare to run, the Wily Hare is the addressee.  This is one of the four “moments” or “instances” of Lyotard’s “Phrase Universe.”

Addressor: The one who expresses a phrase to another, or that ‘through’ which or in the name of which the expression is expressed; e.g., when the Sly Fox tells the Wily Hare to run, the Sly Fox is the addressor, or, the addressor of the phrase “stop” printed on a red octagonal sign could be the government, or the body of laws concerning motor vehicles.  This is one of the four “moments” or “instances” of Lyotard’s “Phrase Universe.”

Arbitrariness of the Sign: Theory proposed by one of the founders of Structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure (Cf., Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966)) that there is a basic arbitrariness or difference between the word and the thing, the signifier and the signified.  This undermines and dismisses a theory of language that says that there is a one to one correspondence, an unbreakable bond, between, for example, the word “desk” and a thing called a desk.  De Saussure liberates language from being chained to its static instantiation in a particular reality and instead reveals that there is no ultimate rule or set of structures for a relationship between a word and that which it represents

Autonym: an autological (aka homological) word whose definition is self-describing, i.e., its definition is self-referential (it has the property it denotes); often, adjectives (e.g., polysyllabic: it has and means more than one syllable), but can also be nouns, verbs, or phrases (e.g., three words long--this phrase describes what it is, i.e., three words long).  Cf., “Citation submits the phrase to an autonymic transformation” (§46).

Autopsy: an exhaustive examination, often used to find the cause of death; etymologically, from the Greek Autoptes, “eyewitness,” from the conjunction of Auto, “self,” and Optos, “seen.”

Bad Faith: mauvais foi; was coined by Jean-Paul Sartre to name (and as an interpretation of) the conception of inauthenticity developed by Martin Heidegger.  It is the lynchpin of existentialism.  For existentialism, one is thrown into the world/existence without a pre-given essence, hence one’s existence has no meaning or value.  Meaning/value must be made.  If presumed to be innate or made through social roles (as mother, student, child, wife, etc.) or accepted from our parents and other figures of authority--all these sources of meaning are inauthentic, to live under them, mauvais foi.  It is only by embracing our meaninglessness that we can make meaning: this is to accept our radical freedom and take responsibility for our value; this is the only stance that is authentic human living.  It is a very hard stance to take; most often, even if we can or do acknowledge thrownness, we fall into false meaning and fulfill false roles and live under false values; this is mauvais foi.  The term, however, is also used in law to designate the intentional dishonesty of not fulfilling a contract.  A breach of contract is cause for a charge of bad faith. 

Brachylogical: c.f., Protagoras Notice.  In rhetoric, this refers to the study of combining forms, but more generally it can mean conciseness, a brevity of speech (instead of the study of how one generally combines forms so as to have concise expression, as it comes from the Greek: Brakhus: short), or designate expressions like “afternoon,” instead of “good afternoon.”

Cézanne, Paul: cf., §218 (1839-1906) French post-impressionist painter, represents the cusp between 19th and 20th c. painting (or, from impressionism to cubism, etc.).  He may be most known for his impressive and real, yet dramatic use of color and his high skill in draftsmanship (attention to form) in his paintings which focused, often, early on landscapes and later on subjects.  Beyond The Differend, Lyotard extensively considers Paul Cézanne as the iconic one who challenges painting to reveal the invisible—thus doing for the landscape what phenomenology can for understanding experience: reject static presentation; reveal dynamism.  Through the dynamic, the canvas is shown to hold more than what is there—and that potential reveals towards the invisible.  Yet, Cézanne surpasses the phenomenologist by subverting understanding, as Lyotard reveals when considering space in his late paintings, when Mont Sainte-Victoire “cease to be an object of sight to become an event in the visual field: this is what the phenomenologist hopes to understand, and which I believe he cannot” (Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 16; as one example of Paul Cézanne’s many paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, see “Road near Mont Sainte Victorie,” oil on canvas, 81 x 99 cm, c.1902, held by Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia).  Cézanne is transfixed, immobilized, before the mountains not because of the given, but because of his searching for the bestowal of the visible that remains invisible for any articulable meaning.  Spatiality herein, Lyotard argues, is no longer representational; instead, it captures “the deconstruction of the focal zone by the curved area in the periphery of the field of vision,” wherein the beyond is no longer geometrically seen, but revealed as the mountains’ process of the revelation of their every possible perspective.  Revealing the invisible, Cézanne “manifests the landscape with its distortions, overlappings, ambiguities, and discrepancies, such that one can see it before looking at it. … the painter made us see what seeing is” (Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, Op. Cit., 197).

Damage(s): results from an injury inflicted upon the rules of a genre of discourse, but is reparable; e.g., you said I lied, I did not, but you can compensate me and make it all better.

Deictics: from the Greek, deiktos, “demonstrative,” hence, a word or expression whose meaning is dependent upon the context in which it is used, for example: here!, now!, next Tuesday, you!, that, this, etc., hence, their origins are not static, but are presented or co-presented with the universe of the phrase in which they appear (e.g., the referent and sense of “this” depends upon whether the phrase includes an addressor pointing to a paper shredded by a puppy or a grim receptionist thrusting piles of papers at you when you ask her what needs your signature).  “Deictics relate the instances of the universe presented by the phrase in which they are placed back to a ‘current’ spatio-temporal origin so named ‘I-here-now.’  These deictics are designators of reality” (§50).

Differend: a case of conflict that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments (cf., §12, and: “As distinguished from a litigation, a differend [différend] would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments” (xi)) and “The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be” (§22) and “In the differend, something ‘asks’ to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away” (§23). 

The Dreyfus Affair: (affaire Dreyfus)  a French political scandal around the 1890’s-1900’s. 

Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was convicted for treason in 1894 and sentenced to life in prison (solitary confinement) for allegedly conveying French military secrets to Germany.  In 1896, evidence revealed the real culprit to be Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy.  This evidence, though, was suppressed and the latter was acquitted.  False documents, created by a French counter-intelligence agent Hubert-Joseph Henry, were produced to further incriminate Dreyfus and were uncritically accepted.  The writer Émile Zola, in 1898, started a massive public protest about the acceptance of these documents and the framing of Dreyfus was exposed (Zola’s letter can be read here).  In 1899, Dreyfus was re-tried; this split French society.  Those who condemned him were largely right-wing and anti-Semitic and sought only the protection of the military right and power.  The court eventually decided that the charges against Dreyfus were baseless.  Exonerated, he rejoined the French military and worked hi way up to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. 

Eponymy: giving one’s name to something, e.g.: “boycott,” to abstain support as protest, is named after Charles C. Boycott, a land owner in Ireland ostracized by his tenets because of his high rent; “mesmerize,” to induce one into hypnosis, was named after Dr. Franz A. Mesmer, the Viennese doctor who used magnetism as a type of hypnotism; the “poinsettia,” the plants one often sees around the winter holidays, was named after Joel R. Poinsett, who established friendly commercial relations to Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, where the plants are native.  Many products are named after their inventors or company owners, e.g., the beer Guinness after Arthur Guinness; the ice cream Ben and Jerry’s; Henry Ford’s cars.

Event: “A phrase ‘happens’” (“Question,” xii)—“Happens” = Ereignis, the German for: event, occurrence, presencing, enowning, appropriation, “propriating” (an allusion to “proprietary” and echoes the French proper, “own,” to incorporate the sense of ownness (born from the German root eigen) into the idea of an event).  Source and illusion predominately from/to Heidegger, wherein it is a nebulous, yet central, idea: not a straightforward noun, something one could ostensively indicate, but both an activity and site, a something and nothing at once that relates intimately to Being and to language.  Examples: death (presence and deferral by which we define our Being), the call of conscience (unspoken call, from us, calls us back to reflect upon ourselves)—i.e., non-specific indications that solicit our response; is a coming to presence and that which presences, the revelation and withdrawal of Being.

Exogamic moiety: cf., Cashinahua Notice; a descent group determined by marriage of parties from different clans.  Horticulture defines exogamy as cross-pollination of different plants.  Exogamic moiety would be the genetic classificatory groups and would be what one would review to determine the “species” origins of a hybrid, for example, a Heucherella is a distinct plant, yet also the result of a cross between the distinct species Heuchera (coralbells) and Tiarella (foamflower).  For zoology, this type of classification would find that the mule was the hybrid result of the breeding of horses and donkeys.  Within anthropology, the human groups would be divided more subtly, for example, on Cuba one could find a “hybrid” whose parentage is both African and Spanish.  Within linguistics, this practice would be an act similar to tracing the etymology of a word, for example, considering the adoption of a foreign word to name a new phenomenon

Faurisson, Robert: (1929-) Holocaust denier; historical revisionist.  See more information, here.  Faurisson is described in Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s work, which Lyotard references, as “[p]ursuing his crusade—whose theme may be summarized as follows: the gas chambers did not exist because they can not have existed; they can not have existed because they should not have existed; or better still: they did not exist because they did not exist—Robert Faurisson has just published a new book.”  A book that is “neither more nor less mendacious and dishonest than the preceding ones” (Pierre Vidal-Naquet, On Faurisson and Chomsky, collected in Assassins of Memory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.  Reprinted electronically here).

Fiat lux et lux fuit: “Let there be light and there was light,” identified by Lyotard as a “model of sublimity” cf., §155.

Frege, Gottlob: (1848-1925) German logician/philosopher at Jena (elder to Russell); see here for more.

Genres of Discourse:  rules for linking phrases together (e.g., to know, to teach, to be just, to seduce, to justify, to evaluate, to rouse emotion, to oversee, etc.,--e.g., justification may require a linear causal chain of phrases)

Heim: German, “home,” cf., “The vicus, the home, the Heim is a zone in which the differend between genres of discourse are suspended.  An ‘internal’ peace is bought at the price of perpetual differends at the outskirts” (§218).

Hermeneutics: whether concerned with the Talmud, Bible, Plato, or the human person as text, it teaches methods of discernment of (often esoteric) messages through the careful consideration of etymology, tone, use of symbol, and consideration of form. 

Homo faber: cf., §32; “Man the Maker” (a ‘maker’ or ‘crafter’ as in a smith, e.g., blacksmith, silversmith) in contrast to Homo sapiens, “man the wise” (as in ‘the human is the rational animal’).  This Homo faber - Homo sapiens distinction is employed by sociologically-inclined contemporary Continentals including Hannah Arendt, Max Scheler, and Henri Bergson; the first two prefer Homo faber when essentializing human nature, designating that humanity controls its environment through tools, Bergson, in his The Creative Evolution (1907), uses Homo faber simply but radically to define human intelligence. 

Humanism: often designates the intellectual, literary, and scientific thought from the 14th -16th c. that modeled itself after the intellectual and cultural productions of antiquity.  Classical training (i.e., the “humanities”), they proposed, could perfect humans.  This was reactionary privilege of human greatness against the late medieval emphasis on human nature to tend to weakness, falling prey to attachments to worldliness, inducements to sin (e.g., one of Saint Augustine’s many definitions of sin: longing for things that can be taken away from one rather than eternal things).  In contrast, the humanists use the classics as a model demonstrating the worldliness to which the educated person should aspire and, in relation, the value placed upon the worldly connection of humanity.  They emphasize the value of the human and seek to study what is human about the human.  Humanism persists today with these general aims, yet often veers from the foundation in the classics (religious humanism and secular humanism counters the Church’s authoritarianism via the same basic means but to opposing ends, political humanism often rejects a specific value of the human, while embracing its general value, etc.).  For Lyotard, the specific frame of reference he intends is the debate between Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre--the latter made the former’s existential-phenomenology into a humanistic-existentialism.  Specifically, Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” charges Sartre with the slander of ‘doing metaphysics’ for interpreting his Dasein (the generic being who asks the question as to what is Being) as a specific human being (i.e., thus, instead of determining anything about what it means essentially to be human, the latter ended up asking what it means to be Suzy and then mistakenly applying this universally to all humans).  Lyotard takes Heidegger’s side in this debate.  Despite his intense political-humanitarian commitments, Lyotard believes that humanism covers over too much, makes false equations, and forbids us from asking necessary questions.  For example, cf. Lyotard, “Introduction: About the Human,” The Inhuman: Reflections on Time:

1. “Humanism administers lessons to ‘us’ (?).  In a million wars, often mutually incompatible.  Well founded (Apel) and non founded (Rorty), counterfactual (Habermas, Rawls) and pragmatic (Searle), psychological (Davidson) and ethico-political (the French neo-humanists).  But always as if at least man were a certain value, which has no need to be interrogated.  Which even has the authority to suspend, forbid interrogation, suspicion, the thinking which gnaws away at everything.
   

2. What value is, what sure is, what man is, these questions are taken to be dangerous and shut away again pretty fast.  It is said that they open the way to ‘anything goes’, ‘anything is possible’, ‘all is worthless’.  Look, they add, what happens to the ones who go beyond this limit: Nietzsche was taken hostage by fascist mythology, Heidegger a Nazi, and so on. … ”
   

Idealism: Things do not exist independent of the mind; holds that there is subjective, dependent reality (i.e., think of the clichéd question: if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?  The idealist would answer that they only fall and make noises in so far as someone is there and experiences them as tress, falling). 

Joyce, James: cf., §218 ff. (1882-1941) Irish writer, poet, key innovator of the modernist novel, most famous for his massive tome Ulysses (1922, not published in the US until 1933 because censors declared it obscene), his short story collection Dubliners (1914), and novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). 

Lebenswelt: German phenomenological term meaning life-world or the world of lived experience, as a contrast to the mathematization of nature.

Legein: the Greek verb “to say something,” or “to talk about something,” “to name something,” also, perhaps, “discoursing [about something].”  Frequently used by Lyotard (e.g., cf., Antisthenes Notice) to add an allusion to Martin Heidegger who focused upon the etymological implication of the word in his examination of the idea of the human as the ‘rational animal:’

1. “In the ordinary and also the philosophical ‘definition,’ Dasein, that is, the Being of man, is delineated as zoon logon echon [living animal able to speak; rational animal], that creature whose Being is essentially determined by its being able to speak.  Legein [discoursing] (see section 7 B) is the guideline for arriving at the structures of Being of the beings we encounter in discourse and discussion” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time). 
   

Litigation: one principle can be judged just and applied to two sides to find their balance

Linkages: every phrase calls for another, by necessity—linkage is the call & connection between phrases; not fixed.

Metalepsis: is a figure of speech in which one thing is referenced by something merely remotely associated with it; a sophistical allusion.  For example: “I’ve got to go catch the worm tomorrow!”  This would mean that I will awaken early tomorrow in order to achieve success.  It is an instance of metalepsis because it makes an association between waking up early and success by allusion to the cliché ‘the early bird catches the worm.’ 

1. The famous rhetor Quintilian writes: “37. Of tropes which modify signification, there remains to be noticed the μετάληψις (metalepsis), or transsumptio, which makes a way, as it were, for passing from one thing to another. It is very rarely used, and is extremely liable to objection, but is not uncommon among the Greeks, who call Chiron the Centaur and νήσοι ὀξεῖαι (nesoi oxeiai), ‘sharp-pointed islands,’ θοαί (thoai), ‘swift.’  Who would bear with us, if we should call Verres Sus ‘Hog’ or Laelius Doctus ‘Learned?’  38. For the nature of metalepsis is that it is an intermediate step, as it were, to that which is metaphorically expressed, signifying nothing in itself, but affording a passage to something. It is a trope that we give the impression of being acquainted with rather than one that we actually ever need. The most common example of it is [cano ‘to sing’ is equivalent to canto ‘to reiterate,’ and canto equivalent to dico ‘to say;’ therefore, cano is equivalent to dico (explicated from Watson’s footnote --LH)].  39. I shall dwell no longer upon it, for I see but little use in it except, as I said, where one thing is to lead to another” (Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, trans. Rev. John Selby Watson (CITY: Iowa State University, 1856, 2006), Bk. 8, Ch. 6, §37-9.  Available here.). 
   

Nomenclature: Cf. §49.  From the Greek nomen, “name,” plus clatura, “calling,” hence, it is a system of names.  There are many systems of naming.  In the most general sense, a system could be discerned by repetition and pattern (e.g., all of the north-south roads in Manhattan are Avenues and all the east-west ones are Streets), but then there are more rigidly codified nomenclatures like: 

1. Chronological system: last week, tomorrow, now, etc.
   

2. Topographical system: a description of structure, mapping surface features; examples would include a visual or written map of hydrographic, geographic, man-made features.
   

3. Toponymic system: (topos, “place,” plus onuma, “name”) a system of place names, their origins, meanings, and use; a study of place names similar to how etymology studies the origins of words in language (e.g. “Walton,” people who lived in a walled town; “Taylor,” person was a tailor; “Shumacher,” person who makes shoes; “Smith,” a blacksmith).
   

4. Anthroponymic system: (anthropos, “human,” plus onuma, “name”) a system of naming relating to humans; information relating to human names (important especially as a means of preserving information or uses of language that have disappeared from common usage; e.g., “Silver City, NV,” city of silver mines; “Oro Preto, Brazil,” (Portuguese: “gold black”) gold was discovered, mined there by African slaves).
   

5. 
   

Onomatology (Onomastics): the study of proper names.  It is the genus which includes toponymy and anthroponymy (see “Nomenclature,” above). 

Pagani: Latin, “country-dweller” (root of ‘pagan,’ the polytheistic) cf., §218.  Lyotard identifies Joyce, Schönberg, and Cézanne as pagani, as pagans, as those who inspire possible conflict in the border zones.

Pagus: Latin, “a district within a state, a community” (from the Greek pagos, “that which is fixed”), cf., §218.  Lyotard is explaining that it is within the pagus that pacts and peace (pax) are made and unmade.

Parataxis: is the combination of phrases without conjunctions (the elimination of “and,” “so,” “therefore,” etc.; in opposition: Syntax is the rule-abiding combination of statements, ordering of words and structural phrases and sentences; the set of rules for making grammatical structures).  Lyotard identifies Gertrude Stein and Theodor Adorno as the key proponents of parataxis (cf. Stein Notice and §100):

1. “Paratax [La parataxe] thus connotes the abyss of Not-Being [l’abîme de non-être] which opens between phrases, it stresses the surprise that something begins when what is said is said.  And [Le et] is the conjunction that most allows the constitutive discontinuity (or oblivion) of time to threaten, while defying it through its equally constitutive continuity (or retention)” (§100). 
   

Paris Commune: A government of the conjoined Anarchists and Socialists that ruled Paris from march to may 1871 in the name of the Working Class; it rose in rebellion of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war.

Pax:  Latin, “peace,” a peace accord; cf., “The vicus, the home, the Heim is a zone in which the differend between genres of discourse are suspended.  An ‘internal’ peace is bought at the price of perpetual differends at the outskirts” (§218).

Phenomenology: method and school of contemporary Continental philosophy founded by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in the 1920’s; it is primarily a method of examining how things present themselves to an individual consciousness without bias (through a ‘bracketing’ of bias he calls ‘the epoché’) because in the presentation of the world to the self and the self to the world, meaning is formed (i.e., humanity is not ‘the measure of things,’ but meaning is cooperatively formed).

Phrase: an expression, but not only oral utterance; it goes beyond language, narrowly understood, to include other speech acts, silence, gestures; Lyotard’s examples include: “It’s daybreak; Give me the lighter; Was she there? … ax2+bx+c=0; Ouch! … This is not a phrase; Here are some phrases” (§109) and, the “raised tail of a cat” (§123).  Every phrase happens, and the happening of a phrase calls for a response; there is, therefore, never a last phrase.  “The only one [object] that is indubitable, the phrase, because it is immediately presupposed.  (To doubt that one phrases is still to phrase, one’s silence makes a phrase)” (xi).  Types of phrases include, but are not limited to the following:

1. Cognitive phrases: describe, define (e.g., “red” = wavelengths of 650-750 millimicrons of radiation; descriptive phrases: “The empire has a capital for its political center” or “in an internment camp, there was mass extermination by chambers full of Zyklon B”).
   

2. Ostensive phrases: show (e.g. this red flower, here; “Here is Rome;” “here it is”).
   

3. Nominative phrases: name(e.g. it is called a rose; “This capital is called Rome;” “that camp is called Auschwitz”). 
   

Phrase Regimen:  the rules for constituting a phrase (e.g., reasoning, knowing, describing, recounting, questioning, showing, ordering, etc.—e.g., reasoning’s rules may include a premise, a conclusion, and the argument between).

Phrase Universe: the reality instantiated/created by the event of a phrase and composed of four moments: the addressor, the addressee, the sense (the meaning of the thing), and the referent (the thing of which the phrase refers to) (cf., §18).

Positivism: a (much derided) school of epistemology that proposes that the only authentic knowledge must have as a base actual sense experience.  The idea has been around since antiquity, but was coined as a distinct school and taken up predominately by sociologists; coined by Auguste Comte and expanded by Émile Durkheim, (the 20th c. Max Weber, Georg Simmel, etc. sharply rejected its strictness).  Kant permits us an eloquent rebuff to the Positivist: “Experience is the first product of our understanding (yielded via sensible impressions), yet, despite experience’s breadth, it is not the limit of our understanding.  Experience tells us what is, but not that it must necessarily be so.  It gives us no true universality.  Reason is thus stimulated by experience, but not wholly satisfied” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction A 1-2).  In psychology, behaviorism is basically positivistic (psychology can be determined by watching behavior—its counter was mentalism; both were severely countered by Wittgenstein’s P.I.).  Logical Positivism was a 20th c. development that rejected all metaphysics and tried to reduce everything to statements and statements to pure logic; this theory grounds Analytic Philosophy (i.e., Anglo-American school, the counter to Continental Philosophy).  For Lyotard, positivism, dreadfully and to great consequence, confuses reality and referent (c.f., §37).

Post-Structuralism: some argue this to be a continuation of Structuralism, some say it is its critique; primarily French theory and school from the 1960’s and 70’s; its main difference from the former is that it does not divorce these structures from us and posit them as self-sufficient, but that their rigidity is only dependent upon our re-enforcement of them, thus they change with us as they change us; another main difference is that most of post-structuralist writings are the practice of applying insights from recognizing these structures to try and reveal and/or undo them.

Postmodernism: for Lyotard, its better name is “re-writing modernity.”  It is primarily methodological, anti-historicism, and actively seeks to uncover biases of grand narratives.  It is critique that constantly turns back to the canon (widely conceived) and takes it up and works through it to see many alternate narratives therein.  It does not draw rigid boundaries between disciplines or schools of thought.  It is therapeutic.  It seeks to lay bare what remains unsaid—according to Lyotard, the postmodern’s presentation of the unpresentable is one “which refuses the consolation of correct forms… and inquires into new presentations—not to take pleasure in them but to better produce the feeing that there is something unpresentable.”  In this sense, it is a very Socratic form of philosophy, turning with dogged and scarred wonder to the world and (nevertheless) lovingly seeking to know what one does not.

Paralogical Operations: logical operations whose reasoning defies the rules of logic (para-, “beyond,” -logic, “reasoned”); a paralogical expression would be one that is beyond systematization or unable to be codified or categorized; paralogy would be a movement against an established type or form of reasoning.  Literary/rhetorical examples include: métabolè (change, movement, but in the sense of transformation, not moving from one place to another; Greek: metabole, “turning around”)  mimèsis (to imitate), peithô (persuasion).

Prosopopoeia: A rhetorical device and figure of speech in which an imaginary, dead, or absent person speaks (from the Greek prósopon, “face” or “person” and poiéin, “to make” or “to do”), e.g., the young boy spoke to me as a kind old woman, or the preacher spoke like Moses.

Realism: Things exist independent of the “I;” holds that there is objective, independent reality (i.e., think of the clichéd question: if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?  The realist would answer that they fall and make noises even if no one sees or hears them). 

Referent: (often referred to in its Latin: ta pragmata) what a phrase/expression is about, the case; e.g., the referent in the phrase “what a mighty bark he has!” is “that dog” (despite the fact that “bark” could, in another situation, refer to the rough growth on the outside of a tree trunk).  This is one of the four “moments” or “instances” of Lyotard’s “Phrase Universe.”

Russell, Bertrand: (1872-1970) British logician/philosopher at Cambridge (anti-idealism; teacher to Wittgenstein); see here for more.

Sense: (often referred to in its German: der Sinn) what a phrase/expression signifies about the case, the meaning, e.g., in the phrase “what a mighty bark he has!”, the sense most literally is that the dog (the referent) has a loud bark, however, given the case, the sense will say much more than just this, perhaps the addressor is being ironic because the dog gave a really quiet bark, or s/he is indirectly commanding the addressee to shut the dog up, etc.  This is one of the four “moments” or “instances” of Lyotard’s “Phrase Universe,” and by far the most complex.

Schönberg, Arnold: cf., §218 ff (1874-1951) Austrian-American classical music composer famous for his innovative atonal music, notably his invention of the 12-tone technique [dodecaphony], which sounds all 12 possible notes of the chromatic scale in perfect balance so that no one or several notes are played more often than others within a piece and which prohibits the music being in any one key; his music, with jazz, was labeled “degenerate” in Nazi Germany and is the basis for 20th c. avant-garde composition.

Stalingrad: cf., §157; was a major battle in WWII between Nazi Germany and the former USSR for control of Stalingrad in 1942-3; it was the bloodiest of battles, nearly two million dead at its end, it was the first substantial German defeat and a first turning point in the war.

Structuralism: primarily French theory and school of contemporary Continental philosophy primarily founded by Ferdinand de Saussure (also, importantly, Claude Lévi-Strauss) around the 1950’s that argued that meaning is structured and given to us by our involvement in language / society (not just reality itself); this meaning structure is also a structure of power.

Thermopylae, the Battle of: cf., §157; an alliance of Greek states led by Sparta against the Persian Empire in 480 b.c.e. during the Persian invasion of Greece; while dramatically outnumbered, the Greek held the Persians back for seven days—it is a preeminent account of a famous, courageous last stand. 

Volk: German, “the people,” cf., §218.

Wrong: results when the rules of the genre of discourse by which one judges are not the same rules of the judged; e.g., you said I lied, I did not, but according to your definition of a lie, I cannot prove it.

Zero Degree Style [le degré zéro du style]: “[my] ideal is to attain a zero degree style and for the reader to have the thought in hand, as it were” (xiv).  While a well-used literary term, its definition varies.  It sometimes means a “deconstructed” style, which is sometimes used generically to refer to the stylistic similarities of philosophers considered deconstructionists, or more specifically, a style wherein one’s methodology is represented by the careful textual analysis or hermeneutics demonstrated in the argumentative style of Plato’s dialogues, defined in Aristotle’s De Interpretatione and elaborated in his Poetics and Rhetoric, codified into theory through medieval Biblical analysis, and exemplified in contemporary Continental philosophers who de-construct texts to seek subtexts, underlying influences prejudices (in the text or its historical interpretation), generally asking questions previous unasked.  However, “deconstructed” can also designate the Heideggerian “destroyed” text, wherein he tries to erase the typical signification of words by printing “Being” in font crossed out or replacing it altogether with only an ellipsis.  Another common understanding of “zero degree” style is minimalism, for example, like Beckett’s plays.  One way to understand its use for Lyotard is to consult Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero (trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)), wherein he questions Jean-Paul Sartre’s insistence that literature is a matter of taking positions (cf., Sartre’s “What is Literature?”); however, Lyotard would not likely agree with Barthes’ further analyses that suggest that zero degree is a desired “artless” style (e.g., style is a secret beyond the limits of literature).  Such “artless style” can be exemplified by the silence of John Cage or absence of artifice from the premises of film’s Dogme 95; Lyotard would approve these examples, name them as attempts to embody the revelation of the unthought, but they do not necessarily exemplify his own literary style used in The Differend.