© Philosophy Today ISSN 0031-8256 Philosophy Today Online First: February 8, 2022 DOI: 10.5840/philtoday202224442 The Catastrophe to Come: Lyotard’s Differend and the Tragedy of the Ecological ANTHONY CURTIS ADLER Abstract: Taking its departure from e Differend’s analysis of Auschwitz as a sign for the evental character of history, I argue that the looming ecological disaster we now face reveals both the continuing relevance and limits of Lyotard’s thought. While the form of political agency of the catastrophe to come involves a differend, this differend cannot be attached to a proper name, however problematic its mode of signification. is, however, suggests the even greater relevance of Lyotard’s treatment, in the con- clusion of e Differend, of capitalism in terms of temporal contradiction, as well as his theorization of oikos and ecology in subsequent works, where he distinguishes between the economic and the ecological. is distinction, I conclude, is rendered problematic by the catastrophe to come, as indeed is any attempt to draw an absolute distinction between “philosophical politics” and mere technocratic management or even to exclude speculation from the heart of philosophy. Key words: ecology, differend, Lyotard, tragedy, temporality, capitalism, history, Kant, Marx, politics I. Lyotard’s Dated/Belatedness R eturning, aſter long absence, to Lyotard’s Differend—a text that I first encountered as an undergraduate, not so much reading as devouring, and whose influence on my own thinking, I only now realize, was far more profound than my memory would suggest—I suspect that I am not alone in feeling that it seems now, almost four decades aſter its composition, at once belated and dated, urgent in its address to the present yet also somehow