This paper and the other paper "Lyotard's Postmodern Ethics" are very inspiring for me. They made me not only have a clearer understanding about Lyotard's theory but also gain a new way to respect postmodernism.
To most extent, I agree that the ethical reinterpretation offered by you are successful. I am very interested in the strategy that you use to interpret Lyotard, and further more, thanks to the two papers, I am planning to interpret Lyotard's theory in a more political direction in my second term paper. According to your interpretation, it seem to be possible to have a new way to understand Rawls' and Nozick's political theory from the point of view of Lyotard's postmodern ethics.
Here, I just submit few notes concerning what I thought of when I am reading the paper.
The death of metanarratives implies that no universal narrative could be morally justified and what exist there are just small discourses that are justifiable according to their own local rules. Therefore, any kind of narrative trying to be superior over others would be morally illegitimate.
Under this landscape, two levels of ethics could be drawn out. I call them macro ethic and micro ethic. On the micro level, ethics serves for particular small games. As you put forth, "to play a game entails to obey the rules of the game"(p414). And you ground it on the autonomous agent, "the real source of normatively, of the force of obligation, lies in the agent himself or herself who choose to play a certain game, thus choose to play by the very rules that define the game"(p414). Moreover, the rule of a particular game could not be changed, because the rule is public for all players in the game. So "for any one game player, the rules of the games, its ethics, are binding until such time as he or she together with all other game players decide to change them"(p415). On the micro level, if one does not like some kind of game, he or she can choose to withdraw freely. Therefore, skeptical attack have no threaten to the micro ethics. If one wants to be an absolute skeptic he will have to encounter the risk of the Shakespearean choice between to be or not to be, because as he or she exist he has been in some kind of game.
However, the most significant and meanwhile the most controversial part of Lyotard's postmodern ethics is the macro ethics. If I can say that the micro ethics deals with the relation between individual and particular games, then the macro ethics is dealing with relations during different games. On macro level, the ethical demand is to deal with the wrongs of deferends, that is, how to avoid the oppression of some by others. According to your interpretation, there are two strategies that can be drawn out from Lyotard's works. One is called as the political strategy and the other is called as the reflective strategy. The political strategy is used to deal with injustice of terrorism based on the notion that depriving other's right to play their own game is morally unjustified. Here I mainly endorse the negative component and maintain my suspicion on the positive component in your interpretation. The reflective strategy is used to deal with injustice of totalization based on the notion that no narrative could be morally justified superior over others. Therefore, the urgent demand for justice is to do our best to present the unpresentable. Finally, you arrive at the notion that "to be a game player is to be playing the game of game playing, hence to be committed to the rules of game playing, namely, the rules of just gaming. The reason why terrorism should be ruled out and totalization should be blamed because playing them breaks the rule of just gaming, the rule of meta-game.
What I am going to do is turn the focus on the role of government which was not mentioned in your paper. Before reading your paper, I was inclined to see Lyotard as an anarchist. After reading your first paper, I am going to consider Lyotard as a libertarian like Nozick. But now, I am going to think that to some extent Lyotard may endorse some of Rawls' basic statements. The first strategy, namely, political strategy, could defend for Nozick's minimal state when it meets the problem of toleration of terrorism. But according to your interpretation, I think Lyotard's theory does not stop here. Taking his political sublime, we can understand Rawls' difference principle as a witness of the least advantaged in the society. In contrast, Nozick's theory is lack of the consideration. In my second paper, I will try to argue for what I put forth here.
I am afraid that the note is full of misunderstandings about your papers. So please point them out, professor, as you find some.
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