Lyotard and the “Second Copernican Turn”

Abstract

In the essay possible thematic connections between Copernicus and Lyotard are elaborated. In his late opus Lyotard elaborates the problematic of making the invisible visible, presenting the unpresentable, the emergence of something new. This theme not only throws new light on the very emergence of the Copernican revolution, if there ever was one, but also presents something which is at the very heart of the dispositive of modern science as such: a link between contingency, necessity and impossibility, elaborated by Lyotard through his new yet unfinished conceptions of time, cause and subject. Finally, some paradoxes of Lyotard’s project carried out in the name of the second Copernican turn are shown.