The Differend: Phrases in Dispute

Concept and Structure of the Work

The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Le Différend, 1983) is a central work in the later philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, often taken as a systematic deepening of themes announced in his earlier The Postmodern Condition. Whereas the earlier text famously characterized postmodernity as an “incredulity toward metanarratives,” The Differend seeks to describe, in more rigorous terms, what happens when no single discourse can legitimately regulate all others.

The book is organized into short, numbered sections composed of dense remarks, definitions, and commentaries on other authors (such as Kant, Wittgenstein, and Adorno). Lyotard structures the work around “phrases” and their “linkages” rather than around subjects or systems. Philosophy is reconceived as attentiveness to “phrase events”: occurrences in which something is said, can be said, or fails to be sayable.

Through this fragmented but methodical form, Lyotard attempts to articulate how certain conflicts are not merely disagreements that could be resolved by more information or rational debate, but structural injustices rooted in the very rules that govern what counts as a valid phrase or proof.

The Core Concept of the Differend

The book’s central notion is the differend (French: différend). Lyotard defines it, in a widely cited formulation, as follows: a differend is a case of conflict between two parties that “cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments.” In such cases, one party suffers a wrong that cannot be presented as a wrong in the dominant idiom.

Lyotard distinguishes:

• A litigation (litige): a dispute where both parties share enough rules of discourse that a common tribunal (a court, a procedure, a code of evidence) can adjudicate the case. Here, injustice may occur, but at least the wrong can be expressed and argued.
• A differend: a dispute where the rules of the tribunal themselves are in question, so that the harmed party cannot phrase the wrong within those rules. The harm is not merely unremedied; it is, by the very structure of discourse, unsayable in the available terms.

A canonical example in the book is Lyotard’s discussion of Holocaust denial and the trial of the French revisionist writer Robert Faurisson. Faurisson demanded “proof” of the gas chambers in a form that, according to Lyotard, presupposed conditions that could never be met—for instance, the live testimony of victims about their own gassing. By defining admissible evidence in this way, the very rules of proof exclude victims from bearing witness. The wrong done to them thus risks becoming a differend: it cannot be properly stated in the discourse that claims to evaluate it.

This example illustrates how a differend is not a merely linguistic subtlety but has ethical and political stakes. When the genres of discourse that dominate legal, historical, or public reasoning exclude certain forms of testimony or experience, those who suffer may be unable even to articulate their wrong. Lyotard calls this condition being “deprived of the means to argue”.

For Lyotard, a central philosophical and ethical task is to identify and bear witness to differends, resisting the temptation to treat every conflict as if it were merely a litigation. The differend is thus both a conceptual category and a call for vigilance toward latent or silenced injustices.

Language Games, Phrases, and Justice

To analyze differends, Lyotard adopts and transforms Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of language games, which he calls “genres of discourse” or “phrase regimens”. Each genre (scientific, juridical, ethical, aesthetic, economic, narrative, and so on) operates according to its own rules about:

• what counts as a valid phrase,
• how phrases may be linked,
• which ends (truth, efficiency, justice, beauty, etc.) are at stake.

In Lyotard’s vocabulary, a phrase is any minimal occurrence of saying, showing, asking, ordering, or otherwise “doing something” with language. The philosophical problem is not simply “what do sentences mean?” but “how are phrases linked, and by whom, under which rules?” Different genres impose distinct regimes of legitimacy: an economic report, a legal testimony, and a lyric poem may all be true or important in their own ways, but their validity is not measured by the same criteria.

Lyotard insists that there is no overarching meta-language or final tribunal that can integrate all genres into a single, harmonious system. Attempts to impose such unity—whether in the form of a totalizing political project, a universal rational procedure, or a grand historical narrative—risk producing differends by silencing or forcing into alien forms those phrase regimens that do not fit.

Within this framework, justice is redefined. It cannot mean the application of a universal rule that would subsume all disputes; instead, it involves:

• sensitivity to heterogeneity among language games,
• refusal to reduce one genre to another (for example, reducing ethical claims to economic calculations),
• and an openness to the invention of new phrases capable of signaling previously unphraseable wrongs.

The ethical injunction Lyotard derives is to “pay heed to the differend,” which includes the obligation to seek idioms that might let the wrong be at least indicated, even if it cannot be fully integrated into existing procedures. This is related to his reflections on aesthetics and sublimity, where art is seen as a domain in which the “unpresentable” or unphraseable may still be hinted at or felt.

Reception and Influence

The Differend has been widely read as one of Lyotard’s most rigorous and challenging works and as a key text of postmodern philosophy. It has influenced debates in:

• Political theory and legal philosophy, where the notion of differend informs discussions of minority rights, indigenous claims, and transitional justice, particularly where existing legal frameworks struggle to accommodate other normative or narrative orders.
• Holocaust studies and historiography, through its analysis of denialism and testimony, shaping arguments about the limits of representation, the status of survivor narratives, and the ethics of memory.
• Literary theory and cultural studies, where Lyotard’s attention to genres and phrase regimens supports analyses of how marginalized voices are excluded from dominant canons and discourses.
• Ethics and moral philosophy, offering an alternative to consensus-based models (such as Habermasian discourse ethics) by stressing irreducible heterogeneity and the persistence of unresolvable conflicts.

Proponents argue that The Differend provides powerful tools for diagnosing subtle forms of injustice that operate not only through overt coercion but also through discursive rules and institutions. Critics, however, contend that Lyotard’s skepticism toward universal procedures risks undermining the very normative resources needed to confront injustices effectively. Some see his emphasis on incommensurability and the unphraseable as tending toward relativism or paralysis, while defenders respond that the work instead articulates a demanding, non-totalizing conception of responsibility.

Despite such controversies, The Differend remains a central reference point for understanding postmodern critiques of universalism, the politics of testimony, and the ethical stakes of language. Its enduring significance lies in the claim that injustice can occur at the level of what can be said at all, and that philosophical reflection must attend not only to arguments, but to the conditions under which some wrongs cannot yet be phrased.