 Lyotard’s writings of the early 1970s were, it’s fair to say, far less influential at the time than, say, the writings of Michel Foucault (1926–1984) or Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). Yet, like Julia Kristeva (1941–), who developed in well-known articles leading to The Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) the distinction between the semiotic (the libidinal disruptiveness of bodily motility) and the symbolic (the structured grammar whose extreme form is mathematics) that together make language possible, Lyotard was interested in what escapes discourse but yet needs it to exist, just as there is no pure semiotic or symbolic language for Kristeva. In Discourse, Figure (1971), Lyotard differentiates discourse, that is, the written text investigated by semiotics and structuralism, and the figural, that is, the visual, which he discusses through the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Lyotard’s work was avowedly a shot across the bow at structuralism, whether found in Lacan’s reading of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) or Louis Althusser’s (1918–1990) structuralist Marxism. As he put it in a later interview, “I was against this way of thinking”, and for that reason the book was “ignored at the time because it was explicitly against structuralism” (“Resisting a Discourse of Mastery”, 191). For Lyotard, the emphasis on the written text in structuralism continues the Western tradition’s emphasis on the intellectual over the sensual. The figural is the disruptive force that is irreducible to any systemic or linguistic approach to language. For this reason, Lyotard valorizes the eye and its modes of seeing figures—shadings of meanings—that cannot be reduced to a single meaning or representation. The figural is what makes it impossible to collapse language into pure signification, what Kristeva would dub the symbolic, and this makes changes in language possible, as seen in poetry and literature. Discourse and figure, however, are not opposed but are co-implicated: texts always contain figures (metaphors and the poetic in general) while visual milieu would be chaotic without being ordered or structured discursively such that one can perceptually make one’s way about the world. In this way, what is libidinal and sensual is not, as Lacan argued, structured like a language, and Lyotard’s writings testify to an attunement of figural events that disrupt pre-given significations.