Lyotard as a Kantian; Hegel as a post-postmodernist

Lyotard’s claim that postmodernism starts with a fundamental incredulity towards “metanarratives” is a repetition of Kant’s claim on the impossibility of metaphysics. Kant’s prohibition of a philosophical system and the necessary regionalization of reason is not post but radically modern. Hegel does not represent the culmination of modernity, but an attempt to revive metaphysics within modernity. Hegel is not a classical metaphysician; his “system” is neither deduced from a first principle, like in Spinoza, nor submitted to an all-encompassing logical principle, like Leibniz. His system is closer to a big patching of motives. “Dialectics” is more a work of weaving than a logical machine. But isn’t Hegel the thinker of totality par excellence? Sure. But his totality is no longer monotonic. It is closer to what Fernando Zalamea calls a “sheaf”, i.e. a global space made of patches of local regions. Global space is articulated by local intersections of the patches, not by a constant all-embracing principle. This is the real task of postmodernism, to articulate a non-monotonic totality, to link different “language games”. Lyotard gives up on such an attempt. He considers totality a modern motive. He accepts the archipelago of language games announced by Wittgenstein. Hegel’s work is not an example of a metaphysical Pangaea, prior to the dissemination of truth. On the contrary, Hegel’s work is a reconstruction of a totality emerging from the fragments of experience.  This shows Hegel as a response to postmodernism.