Discourse in a coma; A comment on a comma in the title of Jean-François Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure

One of the key claims in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s “Discourse, Figure” is that the dialectical method (the backbone of Western philosophy) tends to obscure and hide all which is invisible, illegible and sensual. Lyotard’s strategy in exposing this rift within language (and philosophy) is by way of showing that the distance between the sign and the referent should not be thought of as negation but as a form of expression. Instead of the dialectical relation between the image and the object Lyotard proposes radical heterogeneity that he names ‘thickness’. This paper examines Lyotard’s non-dialectical approach in relation to the title of the book and argues that the comma is positioned as the sensual technology that creates the possibility of discursive continuity.