Jean-Francois Lyotard 1924 – 1998

Jean-Francois Lyotard was a 20th-century French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist, one of the leading figures of post-structuralism and a central exponent of postmodernism in philosophy. His 1979 work The Postmodern Condition, originally a report on the state of knowledge in advanced industrial societies, defined the postmodern as incredulity toward grand narratives and shaped subsequent discussion of postmodernism in philosophy, literature, and the social sciences. His major systematic work The Differend developed an account of incommensurable language games and the political stakes of finding voice for those silenced by dominant discourses. His earlier work, including Discours, Figure and Libidinal Economy, engaged with phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. He was a co-founder of the College International de Philosophie in Paris.

Jean-Francois Lyotard was born in 1924 in Versailles. He took the agregation in philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1950 and spent his first teaching years at a lycee in Constantine in French Algeria, where his experience of the colonial situation drew him into revolutionary politics. From 1954 to 1964 he was a member of the Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie, then of its splinter Pouvoir Ouvrier, and contributed extensively to their journals.

His academic career took him from Nanterre, where he taught during the events of May 1968, to Vincennes, the new University of Paris VIII, and finally to a peripatetic late period at Emory and Yale. The major works are Discourse, Figure (1971), Libidinal Economy (1974), The Postmodern Condition (1979), and The Differend (1983), supplemented by influential essays on the sublime, on Kant, and on art.

Lyotard is best known for his definition of the postmodern as incredulity toward grand narratives, for his analysis of the differend as a wrong that cannot be expressed in the idiom of the prevailing tribunal, and for his rehabilitation of the Kantian sublime as a resource for thinking about events that exceed representation. He died in Paris in 1998.