Book Reviews 445

In the 18th century several prominent scholars studied and lectured in Turku, especially in science. Per Kalm is most often considered to have been a Swede, but in fact he came from Finland and was a professor in Turku. He was famous because of his travels and studies in America. Heyne in GGttingen encouraged new linguistic studies, and he was interested in the Finnish language as well as other Finno-Ugrian languages. The origins of these languages had been unknown, but in the 17th and 18th centuries they began to be considered as forming a large linguistic group. The ‘father of Finnish history’ Henrik Gabriel Porthan paid a visit to Giittingen, and for a long time after his return home he corresponded with his colleagues in Giittingen. He knew the historian August Ludwig SchlGzer, who stayed for a long time in Northern Europe and wrote about the history of Sweden, Finland and Russia.

The professors of Turku purchased a great number of books from abroad and they were able to maintain links with foreign scholars, especially with Germans, because the German merchants, architects and artisans had had through the Hanseatic League agreat influence upon the countries on the shore of the Baltic Sea. The Lutheran Reformation had created a close contact between the Finnish clergy and Wittenberg. Through Latin, scholars had connections with their learned colleagues even in faraway countries. Discoveries, innovations and ideas spread easily from one university or society of sciences to other institutions. The most famous scholars w&e not the only influential innovators, numerous modest doctors and other scholars were able to make their contribution to research.

On the basis of the studies presented in this book the writers seem to claim that some Germans began to regard Finland as a land different from Sweden. It is interesting to realise that-in the eyes of the Germans, Finland was not separate from Sweden only because of its geography and unique language, but even as a scholarly unit.

Vantaa, Finland Aira Kemiltiinen

Le Postmoderne expliquk aux enfants. Correspondance 1982-85, Jean-Francois Lyotard (Paris: Editions GalilCe, Coll. D&bats, 1988), 162 pp., 78 FF, paper.

A collection of ten letters, all but four of which have appeared previously in periodicals, and all of which have some bearing on the theme of postmodernism. The most directly pertinent letter is the first; it appeared in English (admirably translated by R&gis Durand) in the appendix to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 10 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984). The

entire collection has been translated into German, as Postmoderne fib Kinder. Since Lyotard’s prose intermingles philosophical, political and aesthetic considerations in a complex web that defies generalisation, I will summarise the most substantive letters.

The first letter proposes to answer the question, What is Postmodernism? It rejects Habermas’s view of postmodernism as a conservative reaction to modernism, and sees in it something like the very essence of modernism: a reaction to what went before, but not so much a turning away from as a radicalisation of its antecedent. Lyotard goes on to offer a more subtle analysis of postmodernism in terms ofaesthetics, and what also turns out to be an asceticism. The avant-guard postmodern artist revels in revealing the inadequacy of

446 Book Reviews

form to express (except by allusion) the unpresentable. Hence a rejection of ‘good forms’, that would enable a complacent public to enjoy the collective nostalgia of embracing reality (reality being understood in the sense of that which enjoys the prestige of the collective familiarity), and the painful preference for the iconoclastic icon. Here Lyotard recommends that we interpret the postmodern work of art as a future anterior: a creation that anticipates (and hopefully generates) the norms by which it may be appreciated. The letter ends with the injunction that we should declare war on the ‘all’, i.e. on any ideology that would promise us the enjoyment of reality qua ‘all that is’, that we should embrace difference rather, and appears to open out onto an antipathy for totality reminiscent of Levinas.

The second letter distinguishes two types of narration (readers of The Postmodern Condition will recall that in that earlier work Lyotard saw the essence of postmodernism to be the destruction of the great myths, or narratives, of legitimation): the older ones, that posited a legitimating event at their beginning (e.g. creation), and the modern ones that galvanise human history toward a project, the realisation of an Idea, such as freedom, enlightenment or socialism. Lyotard surprisingly chooses the term ‘Auschwitz’ to symbolise the ‘liquidation’ of the modern project or universality-surprisingly, because unless I have misread him he puts Nazism and the Enlightenment on the same plane: a conclusion from which it would seem anyone but a philosopher coerced by the inner consistency of his system might well recoil. This letter, on the other hand, ends in a medley of views not reflective of methodological rigor.

Letter 3 takes the form of an ‘explication de texte’ in which the key terms of the following question are themselves interrogated: ‘Can we continue today to order the many events of the human and inhuman world beneath the Idea of a universal history of humanity?’ The term ‘we’ is analysed in a stimulating way: it is suggested that the modernist project has been to transform all ‘they’s, or third-person entities into first person (or at least second-person) ones. Lyotard leaves the original question unanswered, but clearly deplores the aspirations (in the aspiratory sense as well) of first-personalism as opposed to cultural pluralism.

Letters 4 and 9 take up the problem of totalitarianism from the angle of the language of legitimation, the former as manner of ‘Esprit des lois’ based on J.-L. Austin’s speech act theory, and the latter as a continuation of Claude Lefort’s critical appreciation ofOrwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Lyotard explores the paradox of totalitarian Newspeak: totalitarian language cannot be a totalising language, since it is deprived of the linguistic resources that could enable it to reflect upon the regime itself. The suggestion, not fully explored, is that language is essentially subversive.

The concluding piece is a reflection upon pedagogy and the philosopher’s relation to childhood. Himself a philosophy teacher at the University of Paris at Vincennes, Lyotard deplores the precocious formality and lack of patience of the I&year olds, and admonishes the philosopher (for whom the child is both ‘monster’ and ‘accomplice’) to seek childhood ‘anywhere, even outside of childhood’.

This collection, sometimes a bit difficult to read because of the author’s tendency to pass nimbly from one level of analysis to another, may be taken as much as an example as a description of French postmodernism.

Berry College, Rome, Georgia

Michael Smith