In The Postmodern Explained , a pedagogical sequel to The Postmodern Condition , Jean François Lyotard reports on the domination of thought by the principle of realism: 'We are in a tenor of relaxation-I am speaking of the tenor of the times. Everywhere we are being urged to give up experimentation, in the arts and elsewhere' (Lyotard, 1993, p. 1). In postmodern discourse, the terms 'pedagogy' and 'pedagogical' are often used figuratively in order to connote didacticism, delivery of communiqués and the parceling and packaging of meaning into digestible (i.e., marketable) forms. The reader might find erroneous the characterization of Lyotard's book as pedagogical. But the explanation of the postmodern-a task set forth as a promise by the title of the book-entails a certain minoritarianism of answers. Instead of delivering final answers and well-rounded, denotative statements about the meaning of postmodernism, Lyotard cites a series of letters written in the context of exchanges between him and friends; that is, encounters between 'children'. Sustaining the double sense of intimacy and fragmentation that emanates from letter writing, these philosophical explications do not claim any meta-discursive generality. Marked by the pragmatic context of their enunciation, they never claim to be anything more than what they are: a series of singular explications, each one evoked in singular occasion. Their pedagogical quality lies in hailing the reader to join in, to pick up (or to be picked up by) an explication (which might also mean a concern, a question) at any point of the book and turn this into the starting point for another singular reading. Such minoritarian writing reports on the 'the demand' while denying to subscribe to its logic. Lyotard speaks of a demand that threatens to totalize experience, to reduce language to Newspeak, to rob thinking of its childhood and pedagogy of its philosophical moment. It is the 'demand' for reality (for unity, simplicity, communicability) and remedy: remedy for the parceling and virtualization of culture, for the fragmentation of the life world and its derealization into idioms, petits récits and language games. The demand is voiced most ardently by Habermas and his disciples in calling us to keep awaiting for modernity's still-incomplete project, believing in it, deriving our visions for transformative action from it and dedicating its achievements to it. It is this demand that marks the reception of Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus as a non philosophical text, if philosophy is still understood as the discourse of reasonable argument, clarification and teaching of thought's history and future. 'I have read in a French weekly,' writes Lyotard while reviewing kaleidoscopically instantiations of the
