Jean-François Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard (; ; 10 August 1924 – 21 April 1998) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as epistemology and communication, the human body, modern art and postmodern art, literature and critical theory, music, film, time and memory, space, the city and landscape, the sublime, and the relation between aesthetics and politics. He is best known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. Lyotard was a key personality in contemporary continental philosophy and authored 26 books and many articles. He was a director of the International College of Philosophy founded by Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Dominique Lecourt.

Biography

Early life, educational background, and family

Jean François 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, Lyotard 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.Sica, Alan. 2005, "Jean Francois Lyotard." ''Social thought: from the Enlightenment to the present''. Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon, 682. Ultimately, Lyotard described the realization that he would not become any of these occupations because of "fate", as he describes in his intellectual biography called ''Peregrinations'', published in 1988.

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 ' (roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) was ''Indifference as an Ethical Concept'' (''L'indifférence comme notion éthique''). It analyzed forms of indifference and detachment in Zen Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism, and Epicureanism. He studied for the agrégation at the Sorbonne alongside fellow students Gilles Deleuze, Francois 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 (now Lycée Ahmed Reda Houhou) in Constantine in French Algeria but returned to mainland France in 1952 to teach at the Prytanée military academy in La Flèche, where he wrote a short work on phenomenology, published in 1954. Lyotard moved to Paris in 1959 to teach at the Sorbonne: introductory lectures from this time (1964) have been posthumously published under the title ''Why Philosophize?'' Having moved to teach at the new campus of Nanterre in 1966, Lyotard participated in the events following March 22 and the tumult of May 1968. In 1971, Lyotard earned a State doctorate with his dissertation '' Discours, figure'' under Mikel Dufrenne—the work was published the same year. Lyotard joined the Philosophy department of the experimental University at Vincennes, later Paris 8, together with Gilles Deleuze, in the academic year 1970-71; it remained his academic home in France until 1987. He married his first wife, Andrée May, in 1948 with whom he had two children, Corinne and Laurence, and later married for a second time in 1993 to Dolores Djidzek, the mother of his son David (born in 1986).

Political life

In 1954, Lyotard became a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie ("Socialism or Barbarism"), 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'' and the publication of the same name had an objective to conduct a critique of Marxism from within the left, including the dominance of bureaucracy within the French Communist Party and its adherence to the dictats of 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), which were later reproduced in ''La Guerre des Algeriens'' (1989) and translated in ''Political Writings'' (1993). Lyotard hoped to encourage an Algerian fight for independence from France, and a social revolution, actively supporting the FLN in secret, whilst also being critical of its approach. Following disputes with Cornelius Castoriadis in 1964, Lyotard left ''Socialisme ou Barbarie'' for the newly formed splinter group ''Pouvoir Ouvrier'' ("Worker Power"), 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''. He distanced himself from Marxism because he felt that Marxism had a rigid structuralist approach and they were imposing "systematization of desires" through a strong emphasis on industrial production as the ground culture.

Academic career

Lyotard taught at the , Algeria from 1950 to 1952. In 1952, Lyotard returned to mainland France to teach at the Prytanée military academy, La Flèche, Sarthe. He published the book ''La phénoménologie'' (''Phenomenology'') in 1954 and began to write for the journal ''Socialisme ou Barbarie'' under the pseudonym François Laborde. Returning to Paris in 1959 Lyotard taught first at the Sorbonne, then moving to its recently created Nanterre campus in 1966. In 1970, Lyotard began teaching in the Philosophy department of the Experimental University Centre, Vincennes, which became the University of Paris VIII in 1971; he taught there until 1987 when he became Professor Emeritus. In 1982-3 Lyotard was involved in the foundation of the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, serving as its second Director in 1985. Lyotard frequently lectured outside France as visiting professor at universities around the world. From 1974, these included trans-Atlantic visits, 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 (Canada), 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. He was also a professor of Media Philosophy at The European Graduate School.

Later life and death

Later works that Lyotard wrote were about French writer, activist, and politician, André Malraux. One of them was a biography, ''Signed, Malraux'', another an essay entitled ''Soundproof Room''. Lyotard was interested in the aesthetic views of society that Malraux shared. Another later Lyotard book was ''The Confession of Augustine'': a study in the phenomenology of time. This work-in-progress was published posthumously in the same year of Lyotard's death. Two of his later essays on art were on the artwork of artist Bracha L. Ettinger: Anima Minima (Diffracted Traces), 1995, and Anamnesis (L'anamnese), 1997.

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.

Work

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.