Jean-Francois Lyotard
Jean-Francois Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotardwas a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as knowledge and communication, the human body, modernist 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. He was co-founder of the International...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth10 August 1924
CountryFrance
The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers
What is required of a working hypothesis is a fine capacity for discrimination
One can decide that the principal role of knowledge is as an indispensable element in the functioning of society, and act in accordance with that decision, only if one has already decided that society is a giant machine
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences ...
Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.
It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.
A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before.