Continental · 1924–1998
Jean-François Lyotard
French philosopher who defined the postmodern condition
Lyotard defined the postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives”: grand stories of progress, emancipation or spirit no longer legitimate knowledge, which splits into many incommensurable language games.
Life and thought
Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) taught philosophy at a lycée in French-ruled Algeria in the early 1950s and spent more than a decade in the radical Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie, writing on the Algerian war. After 1968 he broke with Marxism and taught at the experimental University of Paris VIII. The Postmodern Condition, written as a report on knowledge for the government of Quebec, made him famous worldwide in 1979.
Lyotard defined the postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives”: the great stories that once justified knowledge and politics, of reason’s progress, of humanity’s emancipation or of spirit’s self-realisation, no longer convince. What remains are many local “language games”, in science, law and art, each with its own rules. In The Differend he described cases where a wrong cannot even be stated because the parties share no common idiom, as when a victim must prove harm in the language of the court that judges them. Philosophy, he held, should bear witness to such differends rather than settle them by force.