He was born in 1924 in Versailles, France to Jean-Pierre Lyotard, a sales
representative, and Madeleine Cavalli. He went to primary school at the Paris Lycées
Buffon and Louis-le-Grand and later began studying philosophy at the
Sorbonne. After graduation, in 1950, he took up a position teaching philosophy
in Constantine in French East Algeria. Lyotard earned a Ph.D in literature. He
married twice: in 1948 to Andrée May,
with whom he had two daughters, and for a second time in 1993 to the mother of
his son, who had been born in 1986.
In 1954 Lyotard became a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, a French
political organisation 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 ultra-left politics, with
focus on the Algerian situation which he witnessed first hand while teaching
philosophy in Constantine. [1] 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. [2]
In the early 1970s Lyotard began teaching at the University of Paris VIII
Vincennes until 1987 when he became Professor Emeritus. During the next two
decades he lectured outside of France notably as a Professor of Critical Theory
at the University of California, Irvine and as visiting professor at
universities around the world including John Hopkins, Berkeley, Yale and San
Diego in the States, the Université de Montréal in Canada and the University of
São Paolo in Brazil. He was also a founding director and council member of the
Collège International de Philosophie, Paris. Before his death, he split his
time between Paris and Atlanta, where he taught at Emory University as a
Woodruff Professor of Philosophy and French.
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 Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
(Biography 1)
'' Jean François Lyotard'', Wikipedia, 1/12/2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard#Biography