Jean-François Lyotard

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Lore & Background

Lyotard was born on 10 August 1924 in Versailles, France, to Jean-Pierre Lyotard, a sales representative, and Madeleine Cavalli. He went to school at the Lycée Buffon (1935–42) and Louis-le-Grand, Paris. As a child, he had many aspirations: to be an artist, a historian, a Dominican friar, and a writer. He later gave up the dream of becoming a writer when he finished writing an unsuccessful fictional novel at the age of 15. Lyotard served as a medic during the liberation of Paris in the Second World War, and soon after began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in the late 1940s, after failing the entrance exam to the more prestigious École normale supérieure twice. His 1947 diplôme d'études supérieures was 'Indifference as an Ethical Concept', analyzing forms of indifference and detachment in Zen Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism, and Epicureanism. He studied for the agrégation at the Sorbonne alongside Gilles Deleuze, François Châtelet and Michel Butor; in 1949 whilst waiting to retake the oral examination, he left Paris to teach at l’École militaire préparatoire d’Autun. Having gained the agrégation in 1950, Lyotard took up a position teaching philosophy at the Lycée d'Aumale in Constantine in French Algeria but returned to mainland France in 1952 to teach at the Prytanée National Militaire in La Flèche, where he wrote a short work on phenomenology, published in 1954. 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. His writings in this period are mostly concerned with far-left politics, with a focus on the Algerian situation—which he witnessed first-hand while teaching philosophy in Constantine. As the principal correspondent on Algeria for Socialisme ou Barbarie, during the period of Algeria's struggle for independence, Lyotard wrote a dozen essays analyzing the economic and political situation (1956–63). Following disputes with Cornelius Castoriadis in 1964, Lyotard left Socialisme ou Barbarie for the newly formed splinter group Pouvoir Ouvrier, from which he resigned in turn in 1966. Although Lyotard played an active part in the May 1968 uprisings, he distanced himself from revolutionary Marxism with his 1974 book Libidinal Economy. In 1971, Lyotard earned a State doctorate with his dissertation Discours, figure under Mikel Dufrenne. Lyotard joined the Philosophy department of the experimental University of Vincennes, later Paris 8, together with Gilles Deleuze, in the academic year 1970–71; it remained his academic home in France until 1987. He was a director of the International College of Philosophy founded by Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Dominique Lecourt, serving as its second Director in 1985. Lyotard frequently lectured outside France as visiting professor at universities including Johns Hopkins University, University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, Stony Brook University and the University of California, San Diego in the U.S., the Université de Montréal in Quebec, and the University of São Paulo in Brazil. In 1987 he took a part-time professorship at the University of California, Irvine where he held a joint post with Jacques Derrida and Wolfgang Iser in the Department of Critical Theory. Before his death, he split his time between Paris and Atlanta, where he taught at Emory University as the Woodruff Professor of Philosophy and French from 1995–8.

Reader's Guide

Lyotard's work is characterized by a persistent opposition to universals, métarécits (meta-narratives), and generality. He is fiercely critical of many of the 'universalist' claims of the Enlightenment, and several of his works serve to undermine the fundamental principles that generate these broad claims. In his writings of the early 1970s, Lyotard rejects what he regards as theological underpinnings of both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud: 'In Freud, it is Judaical, critical sombre (forgetful of the political); in Marx it is catholic. Hegelian, reconciliatory (...) in the one and the other the relationship of the economic with meaning is blocked in the category of representation (...) Here a politics, there a therapeutics, in both cases a laical theology, on top of the arbitrariness and the roaming of forces'. Consequently, he rejected Theodor W. Adorno's negative dialectics because he viewed them as seeking a 'therapeutic resolution in the framework of a religion, here the religion of history.' In Lyotard's 'libidinal economics' he aimed at 'discovering and describing different social modes of investment of libidinal intensities'. Later Lyotard works were about André Malraux: a biography, Signed, Malraux, and an essay entitled Soundproof Room. Another later book was The Confession of Augustine, a study in the phenomenology of time, published posthumously in the year of Lyotard's death. Lyotard repeatedly returned to the notion of the Postmodern in essays gathered in English as The Postmodern Explained to Children, Toward the Postmodern, and Postmodern Fables. In 1998, while preparing for a conference on postmodernism and media theory, he died unexpectedly from a case of leukemia that had advanced rapidly. He is buried in Division 6 of Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Did You Know?

• Lyotard failed the entrance exam to the École normale supérieure twice before studying philosophy at the Sorbonne.
• He served as a medic during the liberation of Paris in the Second World War.
• His 1947 diplôme d'études supérieures analyzed indifference in Zen Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism, and Epicureanism.
• Lyotard died unexpectedly from rapidly advanced leukemia in 1998 while preparing for a conference on postmodernism and media theory.