Jean-François Lyotard: biography of this French philosopher
In this biography of Jean-François Lyotard we will learn more about the driving force behind postmodern philosophy.
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher, sociologist and literary theorist very important in the study of postmodernism and social movements, especially those of liberation such as the Algerian independence movement.
With a prolific literary and academic life, Lyotard has become one of the great figures in Marxist and Freudian philosophy in France.
Here we will discover his life and how he became involved in left-wing movements through a biography by Jean-François Lyotard. a biography of Jean-François Lyotardin abridged format.
Short biography of Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard's life was that of someone who was deeply marked by the horrors of Nazi-occupied France, but who, far from falling into apathy and resentment, knew how to channel the emotions of his experiences to generate a unique, vindictive and left-wing philosophy, critical of any kind of unjust domination.
Early years
Jean-François Lyotard was born on August 10, 1924 in Versailles, France, into a humble family. He attended the Lycée Buffon elementary school and later the Lycée Louis le Grand, both located in Paris.
As a child he had the most varied aspirations, including being an artist, historian, writer and even a Dominican friar.. As time went by, he gave up on his dream of being a writer because, at the age of 15, he finished publishing a fictional novel that turned out to be not very successful. As for becoming a friar, he decided to reject this idea because, according to himself, he loved women too much.
University education
He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne University at the end of the 1940s.. He had interrupted his studies at the outbreak of World War II, serving as a first aid volunteer for the French army and participated in the fight to liberate Paris in August 1944. Witnessing so much destruction attracted him to the early promises of socialism, and he became a devout Marxist at the end of the conflict.
In 1947 he completed his studies, presenting the thesis L'indifférence comme notion éthique (Indifference as an ethical concept), in which he analyzed the forms of indifference and detachment in different traditional currents of thought, among them Zen Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism and Epicureanism. After graduation he obtained a position at the French National Center for Scientific Research.
His youth was very vindictive. He was active in leftist groups and his thought developed within what has been called critical Marxism, although he is classified as a Freudian-Marxist.although he is classified as a Freudian-Marxist. He was a student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, making him interested in phenomenology and motivated the publication of his first book on this subject in the collection "Que sais-je", providing a clear and global vision of the purpose of this philosophical current of the twentieth century.
Later, however, he moved away from Marxism and, in the 1960s in the 1960s, he began an evolution towards postmodernism, in which we can alreadyin which the development of an original thought can already be appreciated. During this period he focused on the theme of desire as a search for the impossible, using terms very close to those of psychoanalysis, especially the current of Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan.
During this same period, he made important incursions into the world of art, analyzing the pictorial works of art.analyzing the pictorial work of such important figures as Paul Cézanne. This aesthetic analysis is made by Lyotard taking his own perspective of the Freudian conception of art. Lyotard sees in Cézanne a kind of reinvestment of the meaning of the Freudian conception of art, relating it to unconscious impulses of the libido.
The Algerian experience
In 1950 Lyotard accepted a position to teach philosophy at the lycée in Constantine, Algeria. In 1971 he earned a state doctorate with his dissertation Discourse, figure under the tutorship of Mikel Dufrenne. He devoted a period of his life to the socialist revolutions, an issue that was evident in his writings that focused largely on leftist politics. It was at that time that he became interested in the Algerian War of Independence, which he experienced while he was there..
Lyotard wrote in Le Différend that human discourse occurs in a varied but discrete number of incommensurable domains, none of which has the privilege of being able to make value judgments about the others. In his works Libidinal Economy (1974) The Postmodern Condition (1979) y Au juste: Conversations (1979) he criticized contemporary literary theories and promoted an experimental discourse devoid of an interest in truth.
Lyotard criticized traditional discourses, at the philosophical, religious and economic levels, such as the Christian, the Enlightenmentsuch as the Christian, Enlightenment, Marxist and capitalist discourses. All these metadiscourses were, in Jean-François Lyotard's opinion, incapable of leading to liberation. Postmodern culture is characterized by disbelief in these meta-narratives, invalidated by their practical effects.invalidated by their practical effects. It is not a matter of proposing an alternative system to the current one, but of acting in very diverse spaces to encourage concrete changes.
Academic career
In addition to teaching at the Lycée de Constantine, Algeria, from 1950 to 1952, in 1972 he began teaching at the University of Paris VIII, teaching at the institution until 1987 to become professor emeritus. For the next two decades he taught outside France, notably as professor of critical theory at the University of Paris VIII.He was a professor of critical theory at the University of California at Irvine and also a visiting professor at universities around the world.
Among the most prominent international universities are Johns Hopkins University, the University of California Berkeley, Yale University, Stony Brook University, the University of California, San Diego in the United States, the Université de Montréal in Québec (Canada) and the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He was founding director and member of the board of the International College of Philosophy in Paris..
Last years of life
Among Jean-François Lyotard's last works we have those concerning the life of the French writer, activist and politician André Marlaux. One of them is a biography "Signé, Malraux" (Signed, Malraux). Another of Lyotard's late works is "La Confession d'Augustin" (The Confession of Augustin), a study on the phenomenology of time. This work remained unfinished, since he died during the course of its writing, although it would be published posthumously the same year of his death.
In these years he returned repeatedly to the notion of postmodernism in his essays "Postmodernity Explained to Children", "Towards the Postmodern", and "Postmodern Fables". He wanted to expound his views further in a conference he was preparing in 1998, entitled "Postmodernism and Media Theory," but, sadly he died unexpectedly of rapidly progressing leukemia on April 21 of that same year. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Political life and militancy
The political life of Jean-François Lyotard is intense, not only highlighting his important struggle during Nazi-occupied France, but also because, once the conflict was over, he mobilized for the socialist struggle. In 1954 joined the group "Socialism or Barbarism", a French political organization formed in 1948 around the inadequacy of the critical Trotskyist analysis of Marxism..
The organization's main objective was to criticize Marxism from within, at the time of the Algerian war of independence. Lyotard's writings while in Algeria are mainly concerned with the politics of the extreme left. After disputes with Cornelius Castoriadis in 1965, Lyotard left Socialism or Barbarism and joined the newly formed group "Pouvoir Ouvrier" (Workers' Power), leaving it only two years later.
He actively participated in the May 1968 revolution, although he distanced himself from revolutionary Marxism by publishing his work "Economie Libidinale" (1974). Later, he would distance himself from Marxism itself because he felt that this current had too rigid a structuralist approach, and that it imposed the "systematization of desires" through a strong emphasis on industrial production as a fundamental aspect of the predominant culture.
Bibliographical references
- Lyotard, J. F. (2000). The narrative function and the legitimation of knowledge. The postmodern condition. Madrid, Spain: Cátedra. p. 57-58. ISBN 8437604664.
(Updated at Apr 14 / 2024)