Background

Jean-François Lyotard was born on August 10, 1924, in Vincennes, Ile-de-France, France to the family of a sales representative Jean-Pierre Lyotard and Madeleine Cavalli. Lyotard's youthful aspirations to be a Dominican monk, a painter, a historian, or a novelist eventually gave way to a career in philosophy.

Education

Jean-François Lyotard was schooled at the Paris Lycée Buffon and Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He studied philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne (after twice failing the entrance exam to the Ecole Normale Supérieure), where he became friends with Gilles Deleuze. His early interest in philosophies of indifference resulted in his Master of Arts dissertation Indifference as an Ethical Notion. Lyotard describes his existence up until the Second World War as a ‘poetic, introspective, and solitary way of thinking and living.’ The war disrupted both his way of life and his thought; he acted as a first-aid volunteer in the fight for liberation in the Paris streets in August 1944, and gave up the idea of indifference for a commitment to the investigation of reality in terms of social interactions. Lyotard produced a Diplôme d'études supérieures (a diploma formerly awarded in France, roughly equivalent to a Master of Arts) dissertation, "Indifference as an Ethical Notion," whose central belief in indifference he would spend his career repudiating. He passed the agrégation (the examination required in order to teach in France).

Lyotard attended the radical psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s seminars in the mid-60s, and his reaction to Lacan’s theories resulted in Discours, figure, for which he received the degree of doctorat d’état (State Doctorate) in 1971.

Career

Jean-François Lyotard passed the agrégation (the examination required in order to teach in France) and took up a position teaching philosophy at a boy’s lycée (school) in Constantine in French-occupied East Algeria in 1950. From 1952-59 he taught at a school for the sons of military personnel at La Flèche.

Lyotard became an intellectual militant and asserts that for fifteen years he was so dedicated to the cause of the socialist revolution that no other aspect of life (with the sole exception of love) diverted him from this task. His writings in this period are solely concerned with ultra-left revolutionary politics, with a sharp focus on the Algerian situation (the war of independence had broken out in 1954). He contributed to and edited the Socialisme ou Barbarie journal, and wrote pamphlets to distribute to workers at protests and at factory gates. In 1964 a schism erupted in Socialisme ou Barbarie over Castoriadis’ new theoretical direction for the group. Lyotard, along with Souyris, became a member of the splinter group Pouvoir Ouvrier (Worker’s Power), but resigned in 1966. He had lost belief in the legitimacy of Marxism as a totalizing theory and returned to the study and writing of philosophy. From 1959 to 1966 Lyotard was maître-assistant at the Sorbonne, and then gained a position in the philosophy department at the University of Paris X, Nanterre. There he took part in the May 1968 political actions, organizing demonstrations for the "March 22 Movement."

From 1968 to 1970 Lyotard was chargé de recherches at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. In the early 1970s Lyotard was appointed to the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes, where he was a popular teacher and a prolific writer. In 1972, he was made maître de conferences, and in 1987 he became Professor Emeritus at Vincennes. The 1979 publication of The Postmodern Condition brought Lyotard worldwide fame, and in the 1980s and 90s, he lectured widely outside of France. Lyotard was professor of French and Italian at the University of California, Irvine, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of French at Emory University, and a founding member and sometime president of the Collège International de Philosophie. Lyotard was a visiting professor at numerous universities, including John Hopkins, the University of California, Berkeley and San Diego, the University of Minnesota, the Université de Montréal, Canada, the Universität Siegen, West Germany, and the University of Saõ Paulo, Brazil.

Achievements

• Jean-François Lyotard became one of the world's foremost philosophers, noted for his analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. A key figure in contemporary French philosophy, his interdisciplinary discourse covers a wide variety of topics including knowledge and communication; the human body; modernist and postmodern art, literature, and music; film; time and memory; space, the city, and landscape; the sublime; and the relation between aesthetics and politics.

Works

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• book

  • Discourse, Figure

    (Jean-François Lyotard is recognized as one of the most si...)

    1973
  • La phénoménologie 1954
  • Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud 1973
  • Des dispositifs pulsionnels 1973
  • Économie libidinale 1974
  • Rudiments païens 1977
  • Les Transformateurs Duchamp 1977
  • La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport Sur Le Savoir 1979
  • Au juste: Conversations 1979
  • Le différend 1983
  • Tombeau de l'intellectuel: Et autres papiers 1984
  • Que peindre ?: Adami, Arakawa, Buren 1987
  • Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants: Correspondance, 1982-1985 1988
  • L'inhumain: Causeries sur le temps 1988
  • Heidegger et "les juifs" 1988
  • Critique de la faculté de juger 1989
  • Leçons sur l'Analytique du sublime 1991
  • Signé Malraux 1996
  • La confession d'Augustin 1998
  • Misère de la philosophie 2000
  • L'assassinat de l'expérience par la peinture, Monory 1984
  • Pourquoi philosopher? 1964
  • Logique de Levinas 2015
  • Jean-François Lyotard : questions au cinéma 2015

Religion

Lyotard's religious views are unclear, nevertheless, he spoke much of theology discourse and especially paganism. His paganism is based on the idea that there is not a single prescription, dictated by reason or truth, but a multitude of them - "little narratives" that are defined according to the rules specific to each language game. Some sources refer to him as a neopagan.

Politics

Constantine Lyotard read Marx and became acquainted with the Algerian political situation, which he believed was ripe for the socialist revolution. In 1954, Lyotard became a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, a French political organization formed in 1948 around the inadequacy of the Trotskyist analysis to explain the new forms of domination in the Soviet Union. Socialisme ou Barbarie became increasingly anti-Marxist and Lyotard was prominent in the Pouvoir Ouvrier, a group that rejected the position and split in 1963. His writings in this period are mostly concerned with ultra-left politics, with a focus on the Algerian situation, which he witnessed first-hand while teaching philosophy in Constantine. Other members of the organization included Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, and Pierre Souyris. Lyotard had met Souyris at a union meeting late in 1950, and they had a long and close friendship, eventually troubled by political and theoretical differences.

Views

Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) is often said to represent the beginning of Postmodern thought. It was originally written for the Quebec government as an epistemological report. The text is an examination of late capitalist configurations of science, technology, and knowledge. The status and function of ‘metanarratives’ is one of the principal foci of the book, in particular the way in which social and scientific configurations are legitimated by the teleological meanings formed by metanarratives. The historical materialist account of how society functions propounded by Marx, for example, gives meaning to dispersed social and scientific activities which they may not possess in themselves. The Enlightenment and German Idealism created powerful metanarratives which structured the production and use of knowledge during modernity. The metanarrative is a defining characteristic of modernity, around which modern society is structured and organized. Postmodernity implies that these goals of knowledge are now contested, and, furthermore, that no ultimate proof is available for settling disputes over these goals.

With the publication of his essay ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’ in 1982, Jean-François Lyotard addresses the debate about the Enlightenment and specifically Jürgen Habermas’ take on the Enlightenment project. Jean-François Lyotard argues that all aspects of modern societies rely on ‘grand narratives,’ or a sort of meta-theory that seeks to explain the belief system that exists. These metanarratives represent totalizing explanations of things like Christianity or Marxism – dominant modes of thought. For Jean-François Lyotard, the Enlightenment project as promoted by Jürgen Habermas constitutes another attempt at authoritative explanation. Thus, Jean-François Lyotard bases his definition of Postmodernism on the idea that postmodernist thought questions, critiques, and deconstructs metanarratives by observing that the move to create order or unity always creates disorder as well. Instead of ‘grand narratives,’ which seek to explain all totalizing thought, Jean-François Lyotard calls for a series of mini-narratives that are ‘provisional, contingent, temporary, and relative.’ Jean-François Lyotard, then, provides us with an argument for the postmodern breakdown or fragmentation of beliefs and values instead of Jürgen Habermas’ proposal for a society unified under a ‘grand narrative.’

In his work, Jean-François Lyotard has written of speculative discourse as a language game – a game with specific rules that can be analyzed in terms of the way statements could be linked to each other. The ‘differend’ is the name Jean-François Lyotard gives to the silencing of a player in a language game. It exists when there are no agreed procedures for what is different (be it an idea, an aesthetic principle, or a grievance) to be presented in the current domain of discourse. The differend marks the silence of an impossibility of phrasing an injustice. For Kant, the sublime feeling does not come from the object (e.g., nature), but is an index of a unique state of mind which recognizes its incapacity to find an object adequate to the sublime feeling. The sublime, like all sentiment, is a sign of this incapacity. As such the sublime becomes a sign of the differend understood as a pure sign. The philosopher’s task now is to search out such signs of the differend. A true historical event cannot be given expression by any existing genre of discourse; it thus challenges existing genres to make way for it. In other words, the historical event is an instance of the differend.

Unlike the homogenizing drive of speculative discourse, judgment allows the necessary heterogeneity of genres to remain. Judgment, then, is a way of recognizing the differend – Hegelian speculation, a way of obscuring it. The force of Jean-François Lyotard’s argument is in its capacity to highlight the impossibility of making a general idea identical to a specific real instance (i.e. to the referent of a cognitive phrase). Jean-François Lyotard’s thought in Le Différend (The Differend) (1983) is a valuable antidote to the totalitarian delirium for reducing everything to a single genre, thus stifling the differend. To stifle the differend is to stifle new ways of thinking and acting.

Jean-François Lyotard is best known to English speakers for his analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. A key figure in contemporary French philosophy, his interdisciplinary discourse covers a wide variety of topics including knowledge and communication; the human body; modern and postmodern art, literature, and music; film; time and memory; space, the city, and landscape; the sublime; and the relation between aesthetics and politics. Jean-François Lyotard maintained in The Differend that human discourses occur in any number of discrete and incommensurable realms, none of which is privileged to pass judgment on the success or value of any of the others.

Quotations: "The logic of maximum performance is no doubt inconsistent in many ways, particularly with respect to contradiction in the socio-economic field: it demands both less work (to lower production costs) and more (to lessen the social burden of the idle population). But our incredulity is now such that we no longer expect salvation to rise from these inconsistencies, as did Marx."

"Scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to, and in competition and conflict with, another kind of knowledge, which I will call narratives in the interest of simplicity."

"True knowledge, in this perspective, is always indirect knowledge; it is composed of reported statements, that are incorporated into metanarratives of a subject that source their legitimacy."

"Already in the last few decades, economic powers have reached the point of imperiling the stability of the state through new forms of the circulation of capital that go by the generic name of multinational corporations."

"The body might be considered the hardware of the complex technical device that is human thought."

"Matter asks no questions, expects no answers of us. It ignores us. It made us the way it makes all bodies - by chance and according to its laws."

Membership

Jean-François Lyotard was a member of 'Socialisme ou Barbarie' group.

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  Socialisme ou Barbarie , France

Personality

Jean-François Lyotard was found of avant-garde art.

Physical Characteristics: Lyotard suffered from a case of leukemia that had advanced rapidly and became a cause of his death in 1998.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari

• Writers

  André Malraux

• Artists

  Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Delaunay, Barnett Newman

• Music & Bands

  Claude Debussy, Pierre Boulez

Connections

Lyotard became a husband and father at a young age, marrying Andrée May in 1948 and subsequently having two children, Corinne and Laurence. He married his second wife Dolorès Djidzek in 1993 with whom he had a son, David in 1986.

Father:

Jean-Pierre Lyotard

Mother:

Madeleine Cavalli

ex-wife:

Andrée May

Daughter:

Corinne Enaudeau

Son:

Laurence Lyotard

Wife:

Dolorès Djidzek

Son:

David Lyotard

Lecturer:

Jacques Lacan

Friend:

Gilles Deleuze

References

• Jean-François Lyotard
  2017
• Jean Francois-Lyotard: His Post Modernism Explained
  2020
• Jean-François Lyotard
  2005
• Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard
  2006
• The Lyotard Reader
  1991