Jean-Francois Lyotard

born August 10, 1924, Versailles, France
died April 21, 1998, Paris

French philosopher and leading figure in the intellectual movement known as postmodernism.

As a youth, Lyotard considered becoming a monk, a painter, and a historian. After studying at the Sorbonne, he completed an agrégation (teaching degree) in philosophy in 1950 and joined the faculty of a secondary school in Constantine, Algeria. In 1954 he became a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie (“Socialism or Barbarism”), an anti-Stalinist socialist group, contributing essays to its journal (also called Socialisme ou barbarie) that were vehemently critical of French colonial involvement in Algeria. In 1966 he began teaching philosophy at the University of Paris X (Nanterre); in 1970 he moved to the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes–Saint-Denis), where he was appointed professor emeritus in 1987. In the 1980s and ’90s he taught widely outside France. He was professor of French at the University of California, Irvine, from 1993 and professor of French and philosophy at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., from 1995.

In his first major philosophical work, Discourse/Figure (1971), Lyotard distinguished between the meaningfulness of linguistic signs and the meaningfulness of plastic arts such as painting and sculpture. He argued that, because rational thought or judgment is discursive and works of art are inherently symbolic, certain aspects of artistic meaning—such as the symbolic and pictorial richness of painting—will always be beyond reason’s grasp. In Libidinal Economy (1974), a work very much influenced by the Parisian student uprising of May 1968, Lyotard claimed that “desire” always escapes the generalizing and synthesizing activity inherent in rational thought; instead, reason and desire stand in a relationship of constant tension.

In his best-known and most influential work, The Postmodern Condition (1979), Lyotard characterized the postmodern era as one that has lost faith in all grand, totalizing “metanarratives”—the abstract ideas in terms of which thinkers since the time of the Enlightenment have attempted to construct comprehensive explanations of historical experience. Disillusioned with the grandiose claims of metanarratives such as “reason,” “truth,” and “progress,” the postmodern age has turned to smaller, narrower petits récits (“little narratives”), such as the history of everyday life and of marginalized groups. In his most important philosophical work, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1983), Lyotard compared discourses to “language games,” a notion developed in the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951); like language games, discourses are discrete systems of rule-governed activity involving language. Because there is no common set of assumptions in terms of which their conflicting claims or viewpoints can be adjudicated (there is no universal “reason” or “truth”), discourses are for the most part incommensurable. The basic imperative of postmodern politics, therefore, is to create communities in which the integrity of different language games is respected—communities based on heterogeneity, conflict, and “dissensus.”

Richard Wolin