Jean-François Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard (ˌljɔːtɑːr; liːoʊtɑːrd; ʒɑ̃ fʁɑ̃swa ljɔtaʁ; 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. Jean François Lyotard was born on August 10, 1924, in Vincennes, 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. 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 DES thesis, Indifference as an Ethical Concept (L'indifférence comme notion éthique), analyzed forms of indifference and detachment in Zen Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism, and Epicureanism.