 Returning to themes in The Postmodern Condition, 1988’s The Inhuman returns to the problems of consumer capitalism. This set of essays, most first given as lectures, are remarkable in their literary and philosophical quality, with each indirectly, as the subtitle suggests, taking up the problem of temporality, that is, our openness to the unphraseable events given in a future worthy of the name. Like other French thinkers of his day, Lyotard was a thoroughgoing critic of humanism and its pretension to define and thus limit what the human was to be. The Inhuman begins by dissociating two forms that the “inhuman” has taken in postmodernity: on the one hand, there is the dehumanizing inhumanism of contemporary capitalism and its reduction of the human to modes of efficiency and the needs of the technocratic order, specifically through the ideology of “development”. Under this rubric, what is dubbed the human is constrained to become more like machines in their functioning, or indeed that the machines we have built will replace us in terms of the thinking we thought integral to the human being. The opening essay, “Can Thought Go on without a Body?” takes this up as the ultimate dream of technoscience, arguing, in a dialogue between a “he” and a “she”, that “the sole serious question to face humanity today” is the fact that in 4.5 billion years, the sun will burn out and take all of human thought, including the entire archive that human beings ever existed, with it (Inhuman, 9). Techno-science, the “he” claims, has its telos in escaping this fate, which “he” calls a “pure event”, one that, in the terms of The Differend, could never be put into a phrase since no one would be there to think it. “All the events and disasters we’re familiar with and try to think of”, “he” writes, “will end up as no more than pale simulacra” (Inhuman, 11). While hyperbolic, Lyotard’s surmise is that technoscience is driven by a need to conquer our being-towards-death and indeed, the possibility of the ultimate finitude of any living-on of any memory or history of humanity marked by the coming solar catastrophe. Digital technologies offer the hope of a becoming-inhuman of thought, of thought going on without a body, one that “she” offers would have to transcend “the differend of gender” and corporeal existence (Inhuman, 22–3). “She” argues that suffering and pain can only exist within a body, and thus any impetus to resistance to the literal programming of phrase regimens (computer programming being the most purified form of what Lyotard had called discourse in Discourse, Figure) would disappear. This surmise is no longer hyperbolic: there are myriad research programs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere for performing precisely what Lyotard suggests, namely making thought go on without a body, though whether one could call this thought in the full sense is precisely why Lyotard calls this the “sole question” facing humanity, given that it goes to what we mean by the word human.