1) His Biography:
On August 10, 1924, Jean-Francois Lyotard was born in Versailles, France. He was conceived by Madeleine Cavalli and sales representative Jean Pierre Lyotard. He received his primary schooling at the Paris Lycee Buffon and Louis Le Grand. Later, he enrolled in the Sorbonne to study philosophy. He worked as a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research after receiving his degree.
He started teaching philosophy in Constantine, French Algeria, in 1950. With the help of his dissertation, “Discours, Figure,” he earned a State Doctorate in 1971. He wed Andree May in 1948, and the two of them had two children together, Laurence and Corrine. He wed Dolores Djidzek, his second wife, in 1993. The couple produced a son named David.
Jean-Francois Lyotard joined the French political movement “Socialisme ou Barbarie” in 1954. He published essays while he was a member of the organization to inspire optimism in the Algerian people during the Algerian War of Liberation. He abandoned the original organization in 1964 and joined a splinter group called Pouvoir Ouvier. He gave his resignation from the latter company in 1996. He authored “Libidinal Economy,” a book about revolutionary Marxism, in 1974.
He started working as a teacher at the Lycee of Constantine in Algeria in 1950, where he remained until 1952. He began teaching at the University of Paris VIII in 1972, and continued there until 1987, when he was given the title of Professor Emeritus. At the University of California, he also taught Critical Theory. In addition to the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Stony Brook University, Yale University, University of California, University of Montreal in Canada, and University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, were where he also served as a visiting professor.
Along with Francois Chatelet, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard cofounded the International College of Philosophy. At Emory University, he was also the Woodruff Professor of French and Philosophy. Throughout his career, he fought against metanarratives, universals, and generalization.
While getting ready for a conference in France, Jean-Francois Lyotard passed away on April 21, 1998, from complications related to his leukaemia. At the age of 73, he passed away. His remains are interred in Pere Lachaise Cemetery’s Division 6 in Paris.
2) Main Works:
The Postmodern Condition:
Lyotard is an opponent of contemporary cultural theory. The influence of the postmodern situation was to arouse suspicion toward universalizing theories, according to his 1979 book ‘The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’. As a result of the development of methods and technology since World War II, according to Lyotard, we have outgrown the need for metanarratives (French: métarécits). According to James Williams, Lyotard believed that “the narratives we make to justify a particular set of laws and stakes are fundamentally unjust.” He argues against the feasibility of justifying narratives that bring together disciplines and social behaviours, such as science and culture.
In addition, Lyotard asserts that “even under fascism, politics is a matter of opinions and hence values”. Our perception of science, art, and literature is impacted by our diminished faith in metanarratives. Little stories are currently the preferred method for describing social changes and political issues. This, according to Lyotard, is the impetus for postmodern science.
The Inhuman:
The philosophy of Kant, Heidegger, Adorno, and Derrida, as well as the works of modernist and postmodernist artists like Cézanne, Debussy, and Boulez, are all thoroughly discussed by Lyotard in his book ‘The Inhuman’. In the book, Lyotard discusses time and memory, the sublime and the avant-garde, and the connection between aesthetics and politics. In his research, he examines the transition to postmodernity as well as the tight yet problematic relationships between modernity, development, and humanity. According to Lyotard, it is the responsibility of literature, philosophy, and the arts to bear witness to and explain this difficult transformation.
The Differend:
Based on Immanuel Kant’s ideas of the division of Understanding, Judgment, and Reason, Lyotard describes the differend as the time when language fails and explains what it is as follows: “…the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be… the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication, learn through the feeling of anguish which accompanies silence”.
The widespread belief that phrases’ meanings may be decided by what they allude to is challenged by Lyotard (the referent). It is impossible to fix the meaning of the phrase “an occurrence” by referencing reality (what actually happened). By defining “reality” in an innovative way—as a complex of conceivable senses connected to a referent through a name—Lyotard creates this theory of language. The correct sense of a phrase cannot be decided by making a reference to reality because reality is defined as the complex of conflicting senses associated to a referent and the referent itself does not fix sense. As a result, the term “event” is still vague.
Aesthetics:
‘Discours, Figure’ (1971), Lyotard’s thesis, was primarily concerned with aesthetics. Lyotard spent a lot of time thinking about aesthetic concerns in an effort to depart from the Hegelian viewpoint, which required art to view itself as the manifestation of the mind. According to him, it serves as “more of a tool to expose often hidden tensions, shifts, and complications in philosophical thinking and its relations with society — a way of helping it depart from doxa without the promises of higher knowledge or even a sensus communis.”
Libidinal Economy:
In ‘Libidinal Economy’, one of Lyotard’s best-known works, he criticizes Marx’s notion of “false consciousness” and asserts that the working class of the 19th century delighted in taking part in the industrialization process. The term “libidinal” comes from the term “libido,” which is used in psychoanalysis to refer to the wants of our deeper awareness. According to Lyotard, this was caused by libidinal energy. Libidinal Economy has been hailed as a success in our efforts to live with the rejection of all moral and religious ideals by destroying the accompanying institutions.
3) Main Themes in his Works:
Paganism:
In “Lessons in Paganism” Lyotard develops the idea of paganism. A system of thinking that considers and seeks to be just toward incommensurable differences is referred to as “paganism.” Lyotard’s pagan philosophy demonstrates a concern for pluralism and multiplicity, just as paganism holds that there are multiple gods rather than a single God.
Despite the fact that paganism opposes all universal standards of judgement, Lyotard maintains that we must judge since doing so is required by justice. So how do we make judgments without standards? In his response, Lyotard mentions both Nietzsche and Kant. According to Kant, we judge using our constitutive imagination. This capacity for judgement and the creation of standards is enigmatic to Kant, and little is known about it. According to Lyotard, judgement is a manifestation of the drive to power in Nietzschean words. Lyotard may have been incorrect when he said that paganism is judgement without standards, as it is just judgement without universal norms.
Instead, we (as pagans) must encounter every situation that calls for judgement anew and establish standards unique to that situation through a deliberate act of the imaginative will. As a result, there will be a wide range of standards, verdicts, and judges. Instead of believing in just one rule or set of laws, paganism can be viewed of as a plurality of rules of judgement (gods). The fairness of this pluralism is ensured, somewhat ironically (as Lyotard recognises), by a prescriptive of universal value—namely, the prescriptive that the rules of different language games be honoured and that they not be combined under a single standard of evaluation.
The Postmodern Condition:
Postmodernism quickly replaced “paganism” as Lyotard’s preferred phrase. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, he introduces the postmodernist theory in its original and most prominent version. A study of the state of knowledge in computerised society is called The Postmodern Condition. According to Lyotard, certain scientific and technological developments that have occurred after the Second World War—his historical date for the birth of postmodernity—have had and continue to have a profound impact on the position of knowledge in the most developed nations in the world. Lyotard selects computerization as the defining characteristic to describe these scientific and technological developments.
According to Lyotard, the issue he is facing—the variation in the status of knowledge—is a legitimation issue. This is a matter of both knowledge and power, according to Lyotard. Who determines what knowledge is and who knows what has to be decided are really two sides of the same question. According to Lyotard, the issue of knowledge is now more than ever a matter of government in the computer age. Who determines what knowledge is worth saving (what is genuine knowledge), and who has access to these databases when there are massive volumes of knowledge saved digitally? Lyotard accuses international firms of being suspect.
Instead of the recently fashionable or “modern” views of society, Lyotard contends that the nature of the social connection has also changed in postmodernity, especially as it is manifest in society’s institutions of knowledge. According to Lyotard’s postmodern methodological analysis, society is made up of numerous and fragmented language games, but these games strictly (but not rigidly — a game’s rules can change) regulate the actions that can be taken within them by making reference to justifications that are deemed appropriate by the institutions that make up each game.
As a result, one obeys orders in the military, offers prayers in church, inquires about philosophy, etc. Lyotard initially makes a distinction between “narrative” knowledge and “scientific” knowledge in his examination of the state of knowledge in postmodernity. The information that is most common in “primitive” or “traditional” civilizations is narrative knowledge, which is centred on storytelling and occasionally takes the form of ritual, music, or dance.
One out of a number of metanarratives, the two main ones being Hegelian and Marxist in origin, served to legitimise the science narrative in modernity. The Hegelian metanarrative makes predictions about the ultimate totality and unification of all knowledge; it justifies scientific progress by claiming that it will eventually take us forward. Science plays a part in humanity’s emancipation according to the Marxist metanarrative. Postmodernity, in Lyotard’s view, is characterised by the demise of metanarratives. What therefore supports science today? Performativity is the answer offered by Lyotard. The best input/output ratio is what Lyotard refers to as the “technical criterion.”
The rise of capitalism along with recent scientific and technological advancements have led to an increase in the effect of a technological paradigm on knowledge creation. According to Lyotard, knowledge first entered the economic picture and started to be used to drive production during the industrial revolution, but it is only now that knowledge is starting to take the centre stage in postmodernity. In fact, Lyotard predicts that one day conflicts would be fought over the possession of information since he thinks that knowledge is becoming such a significant economic component.
According to Lyotard, research is not served by performativity’s use of legitimacy. He does not assert that the goal of study should be to produce “the truth,” nor does he attempt to revive the metanarratives of modernity to support his position. He views the research’s function as the generation of ideas. The creation of ideas is terrorized by the performativity-based legitimation of knowledge. So what is the other option? A more effective method of legitimation, according to Lyotard, would be legitimation by paralogy.
Knowledge, according to Lyotard, includes both the known and the “disclosure” or “articulation” of the unknown. To satisfy both the yearning for justice and the longing for the unknown, he therefore promotes the legitimation of knowledge through paralogy.
The Differend:
‘The Differend: Phrases in Dispute’ is where Lyotard most clearly discusses the philosophy of language that informs his writings on postmodernism and paganism. Here, he examines the role that language plays in injustices. A differend is a situation in which there is a dispute between parties that cannot be fairly resolved because neither party can agree on a rule of law.
A damage that is also accompanied by the loss of the ability to demonstrate the harm is referred to as a differend. Lyotard uses the example of a Martinican who holds French citizenship to demonstrate how such a person is unable to file a complaint about any potential wrongs they may have experienced as a result of holding French citizenship because French law, the only genre in which such a complaint could be made, forbids it.
This means that a differend is “the unstable state and instant of language whereby anything which must be put into words cannot yet be”. The Differend declares its ethical concerns when arguing that such sentences must be worded (as a matter of principle), and these issues are stated in terms of the right objective of culture. Lyotard claims that “culture” has come to signify “the putting into circulation of information rather than the work that needs to be done in order to arrive at presenting what is not presentable under the circumstances” in a manner that is once again evocative of The Postmodern Condition.
Reason and Representation:
Many of the assertions that have been made regarding the capacities of reason throughout the history of philosophy are refuted by Lyotard’s philosophy, which regularly brings them into doubt. For Lyotard, the issues with representation are particularly glaring examples of the limits of reason. The idea that the human subject represents the external world to itself has been the predominant rational thought paradigm in Western philosophy since Descartes. It has often been asserted that in this approach, at least in theory, perfect and certain knowledge is conceivable. Such assertions are challenged by Lyotard’s contention that events transcend representation.
In addition, Lyotard draws attention to the fact that although reason frequently employs structured conceptual frameworks that exclude the sensory and emotional, these exclusions can never be fully maintained. Any portrayal of the event will inevitably leave out some of its details, and non-rational forces like sentiments and desires will inevitably interfere with logical mental processes.
Scientific Knowledge:
According to Lyotard, scientific knowledge is not a “totality” but rather relates to a broader field of narrative knowledges that it tends to leave out. But the latter are what support social cohesion. A single discursive practice is necessary for science to work, and this practice is based on the presumption of the existence of criteria for evidence (at the empirical level) and the conviction that an empirical referent cannot be the source of two incompatible arguments. According to Lyotard, this is a “metaphysical” assumption made by science that it is unable to substantiate.
On a social level, however, this assumption has the effect of severing science from the social order by excluding other knowledge forms, and the connection between knowledge and society “becomes one of mutual exteriority”. This in turn shows that it is impossible to evaluate the truthfulness of scientific statements in relation to claims of narrative knowledge, or the opposite. So far the growth of “postmodern science” has shown that it is impossible to create “grand narratives” that attempt to capture the entirety of experience, questions of legitimacy arise from this tension. Thus, experience itself transcends the capabilities of the mind. At this point, postmodernism enters the picture as a practical solution to the issue of legitimation that makes an effort to offer multiple narratives but rejects claims of universal knowledge.
4) His Influence in our Times:
Following his passing, the Collège International de Philosophie conducted a memorial service for him, which was presided over by Dolores Lyotard and Jean-Claude Milner, the College’s director at the time. Jean-François Lyotard, l’exercice du différend was the overall title given to the proceedings when they were published by PUF in 2001. Politics, philosophy, sociology, literature, the arts, and cultural studies all still value Lyotard’s work. An international symposium on Jean-François Lyotard was conducted at the Collège International de Philosophie from January 25–27, 2007, in Paris to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Lyotard’s passing (under the leadership of Dolores Lyotard, Jean-Claude Milner, and Gerald Sfez).