Biography 3

Jean-François Lyotard, Ph.D., born 1924 in Versaille, 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. At the time of his death in 1998, he was University Professor Emeritus of the University of Paris VIII, and Professor, Emory University, Atlanta. Former founding director, Collège International de Philosophie Paris, and Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine, as well as Visiting Professor at Yale University, and other universities in the USA, Canada, South America, and Europe. Director of the exhibition “Les Immatériaux,” Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Author of The Postmodern Condition; Phenomenology; The Differend; Just Gaming; Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event; Heidegger and "The Jews'; The Inhuman; Libidinal Economy; Toward the Postmodern; Political Writings; Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime; Duchamp's Transformers; Postmodern Moralities; Signed, Malraux.

Jean-François Lyotard was born 1924 in Versaille, France. Lyotard became agrégé in philosophy in 1950 and received his Docteur ès lettres in 1971. After ten years of teaching philosophy in secondary schools (in Constantine, Algeria from 1950 to 1952), twenty years of teaching and research in higher education (Sorbonne, Nanterre, CNRS, Vincennes), and twelve years of theoretical and practical work devoted to the group "Socialisme ou barbarie," and later for Pouvoir ouvrier, he taught philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII (Vincennes, Saint-Denis). Lyotard was a council member and founding director, at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris, Visiting Professor at Yale University, and other universities in the USA, Canada, South America, and Europe, and was for several years Professor of Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine. He moved from that position to Emory University in Atlanta, where he was Professor of French and Philosophy, and he was University Professor Emeritus of the University of Paris VIII. He was also director of the exhibition “Les Immatériaux,” Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. He passed away in Paris during the night of April 20-21, 1998.

Although a political activist of Marxist persuasion in the 1950s and 1960s, Lyotard became the non-Marxist philosopher of postmodernity in the 1980s. Postmodernity thus marks a fundamental disengagement from the kind of totalitarian thought Marxism (and not only Marxism) represents. Lyotard's truly innovative (or experiential) thinking - and certainly the thinking for which he has become renowned – is particularly exemplified in two books: The Postmodern Condition, and The Differend.

Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) is often said to represent the beginning of Postmodern thought. It was originally written as a report on knowledge for the Quebec government. Lyotard examines knowledge, science, and technology in advanced capitalist societies. Here, the very notion of society as a form of ‘unicity’ (as in national identity) is judged to be losing credibility. Society as unicity whether conceived as an organic whole (Durkheim), or as a functional system (Parsons), or again, as a fundamentally divided whole composed of two opposing classes (Marx) - is no longer credible in light of a growing `incredulity towards' legitimating ‘metanarratives’. Such metanarratives (for example: every society exists for the good of its members) provide a teleology legitimating both the social bond and the role of science and knowledge in relation to it. A metanarrative, then, provides a 'credible` purpose for action, science, or society at large.

At a more technical level, a science is modern if it tries to legitimate its own rules through reference to a metanarrative - that is, a narrative outside its own sphere of competence. Two influential metanarratives are the idea that knowledge is produced for its own sake (this was typical of German idealism), and the idea that knowledge was produced for a people-subject in quest of emancipation. The proof is deemed to be universally valid because reality is deemed to be a universe (a totality) that can be represented, or expressed in symbolic form. However, even in physics no such universe exists which can be put fully into symbolic form. Rather, any statement that lays claim to universality can be quickly shown to be only part of the universe it claims to describe. Postmodernity implies that these goals of knowledge are now contested, and, furthermore, that no ultimate proof is available for settling disputes over these goals.

Later, with the publication of his essay "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?" in 1982, Lyotard addresses the debate about the Enlightenment and specifically Jurgen Habermas' take on the Enlightenment project. Lyotard argues that all aspects of modern societies rely on 'grand narratives,' or a sort of meta-theory that searches to explain the belief system that exists. These metanarratives represent totalizing explanations of things like Christianity or Marxism – dominant modes of thought. For Lyotard, the Enlightenment project as promoted by Habermas constitutes another attempt at authoritative explanation. Thus, 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, Lyotard calls for a series of mini-narratives that are "provisional, contingent, temporary, and relative.” Lyotard, then, provides us with an argument for the postmodern breakdown or fragmentation of beliefs and values instead of Habermas' proposal for a society unified under a 'grand narrative.'

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 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 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). 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.

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. 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. Thus, in Économie libidinale (Libidinal Economy) (1974), La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) (1979), and Au juste: Conversations (Just Gaming) (1979), Lyotard attacked contemporary literary theories and encouraged experimental discourse unbounded by excessive concern for truth.

“Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witness to the unrepresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name. Deconstruction is only the negation of the negation, it remains in the same sphere, it nourishes the same terrorist pretension to truth, that is to say the association of the sign — here in its decline, that's the only difference — with intensity. It requires the same surgical tampering with words, the same split and the same exclusions that the lover's demand exacts on skins.
The artist and the writer are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that work and text have the character of an event; hence also, they always come too late for their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put into work, their realization always begins too soon. Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).

The sublime feeling is neither moral universality nor aesthetic universalization, but is, rather, the destruction of one by the other in the violence of their differend. This differend cannot demand, even subjectively, to be communicated to all thought.” - (Jean-Francois Lyotard)

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/lyotard.html