Jean-François Lyotard: Biography Of This French Philosopher
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher, sociologist and literary theorist who was very important in the study of postmodernism and social movements, especially liberation movements such as the Algerian independence movement.
With a prolific literary and academic life, Lyotard has become one of the great figures within Marxist and Freudian philosophy in France.
Next we are going to discover his life and how he became involved in left-wing protest movements, through a biography of Jean-François Lyotard in summary format.
The life of Jean-François Lyotard was that of someone who was deeply marked by the horrors of France occupied by the Nazis, but who, far from falling into apathy and resentment, knew how to channel the emotions of his experiences to generate a unique philosophy. , vindictive and left-wing, critical of any type of unjust dominance.
Early years
Jean-François Lyotard was born on August 10, 1924 in Versailles, France, into a humble family. He attended the Lycée Buffon primary school and, later, the Lycée Louis le Grand, both located in Paris.
As a child he had the most diverse 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 since, at the age of 15, he finished publishing a fiction novel that turned out to be unsuccessful. As for the friar thing, he decided to reject this idea because, according to himself, he loved women too much.
University education
He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne University in the late 1940s He had interrupted his studies at the outbreak of World War II, serving as a first aid volunteer for the French army and participating in the fight to liberate Paris in August 1944. Witnessing so much destruction made him attracted to the early promises of socialism, becoming into a devout Marxist at the end of the conflict.
In 1947 he completed his studies, presenting his thesis L’indifférence comme notion éthique (Indifference as an ethical concept), where he analyzed the forms of indifference and detachment in different traditional currents of thought, including Zen Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism and Epicureanism. Upon graduation he obtained a position at the French National Center for Scientific Research.
His youth was very vindictive. He was active in left-wing groups and his thinking developed within what has been called critical Marxism, although he is rather classified as a Freudo-Marxist. He was a student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which made him interested in phenomenology and motivated the publication of his first book on this topic in the collection “Que sais-je”, providing a clear and global vision of the purpose of said philosophical current of the twentieth century.
But later he moved away from Marxism, and An evolution towards postmodernism began in the 1960s, in which the development of an original thought can already be seen. At this time he focused on the theme of desire as a search for the impossible, using terms very close to those of psychoanalysis, especially that of Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan.
During this same period he made important forays into the world of art, analyzing the pictorial work of such important figures as Paul Cézanne. This aesthetic analysis is done by Lyotard taking a perspective typical of the Freudian conception of art. Lyotard sees in Cézanne a kind of reinvestment of the meaning of said Freudian conception of art, relating it to unconscious impulses of the libido.
The experience in Algeria
In 1950 Lyotard accepted a position teaching philosophy at the lycee in Constantine, Algeria. In 1971 he obtained a state doctorate with his dissertation speech, figure under the mentorship of Mikel Dufrenne. He dedicated a period of his life to socialist revolutions, an issue that was evident in his writings that focused largely on left-wing politics. It was at that time that he became interested in the Algerian War of Independence, which he experienced while there
Lyotard exhibited in Le Differend 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) and Au juste: Conversations (1979) criticized contemporary literary theories and encouraged an experimental discourse devoid of interest in truth.
Lyotard criticized traditional discourses, both on a philosophical, religious and economic level, like the Christian, the enlightened, the Marxist or the capitalist. All these metadiscourses were, in the opinion of Jean-François Lyotard, incapable of leading to liberation. Postmodern culture is characterized by disbelief in these metanarratives, invalidated by their practical effects. It is not about proposing an alternative system to the current one, but about 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 before becoming professor emeritus. For the next two decades he taught classes outside France especially as a professor of critical theory at the University of California at Irvine and also as a visiting professor at universities around the world.
Among the most prominent international universities we can find 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 council of the International College of Philosophy in Paris
Last years of life
Among the latest works of Jean-François Lyotard we have those referring to the life of the French writer, activist and politician André Marlaux. One of them is a biography “Signé, Malraux”. Another of Lyotard’s late works is “La Confession d’Augustin” (The Confession of Augustine), a study in the phenomenology of time. This work remained unfinished, since he died during its writing, although it would be published posthumously the same year as his death.
In these years he repeatedly returned to the notion of postmodernism in his essays “Postmodernity Explained to Children”, “Towards the Postmodern”, and “Postmodern Fables”. He wanted to further expound his views in a conference he was preparing in 1998, titled “Postmodernism and Media Theory,” but sadly 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
Jean-François Lyotard’s political life is intense, not only highlighting his important struggle during France occupied by the Nazis, but also because, once the conflict was over, he mobilized for the socialist struggle. In 1954 He joined the group “Socialism or Barbarism,” a French political organization formed in 1948 around the inadequacy of critical Trotskyist analysis
The organization’s main objective was to criticize Marxism from within, during the Algerian war of independence. Lyotard’s writings while in Algeria refer mainly to far-left politics. After disputes with Cornelius Castoriadis in 1965, Lyotard abandoned Socialism or Barbarism and joined the well-finished group to form “Pouvoir Ouvrier” (Workers’ Power), leaving just two years later.
He actively participated in the May 1968 revolution, although he distanced himself from revolutionary Marxism by publishing his work “Libidinal Economy” (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.
