Someone I know very well was reading a book about quantum physics and they described to me their mounting frustration about the different ways the author described the positive applications of quantum thinking. What she seemed to be describing were various kinds of money-making venture that at first looked like positive forms of expropriation; but in effect seem more like a different kind of privatisation. However, the objections she wanted to make, or more, I suppose, the ones I would now want to make, were very hard to put into words.

Lyotard's différend has a way with this that very few ideas do. To object to the way this book was describing the potential effects of quantum physics was hard because of the way the book was written: that is, the form of its discourse. That form, if one looks at it as much as what happens when the form is followed (ie, read the book and think in relation to what is written), is surprising. It seems to involve writing about objects of quantum experimentation: financial schemes or medical interventions. Applications, to use that word again. But as soon as one begins to try and understand quantum physics there is a problem: quantum physics is not understandable within the terms of a discourse invested in applications. It seems to be, what? A something (a discourse?), that dispenses with the ideas of objects.

Some people, like Fred Moten, are more invested in trying to absorb that understanding than running with the forms of object-oriented discourse that the book my friend was reading had unhesitatingly committed itself to. When that happens, surprising things follow. Subjectivity, for example, or any discussion of subject-object type relationships might be less of a thing to discuss ... as what becomes of any thing?

Lyotard's différend describes how some forms of objection become impossible as they cannot operate within the terms of a particular discourse. This is unsurprising if one thinks about what objections owe to our understanding of objects: the concretisation of language that becomes necessary in order to discuss things, which is also a profound form of censorship. In concretising, what gets lost?

I think of this every day. What happens if I try to remain open to what may have become lost in what somebody is trying to say? J-F Lyotard, like a number of very interesting thinkers I try to read, often does not get read because his work is described as difficult. Difficulty is necessary, isn't it? Why would we read anything and expect it to be easy? If something is unclear that's a different matter; but easy reading, rather like easy listening will never confer much beyond the common ground of thoughts and feelings least likely to cause us difficulty. Difficulty that rewards sustained attention is different from the kind of difficulty presented by gatekeeping or badly-written obscurity. The charge of difficult gets used to dismiss both indiscriminately.

Finding a sense of freedom in difficulty might be another way of expressing something of what can happen in psychotherapy.