Lyotard, Jean-François (1924—98) French philosopher, author of more than twenty-five books on diverse topics, including aesthetics (especially the avant-garde), ethics, justice, and political theory, but undoubtedly best known for his work on postmodernism, La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (1979), translated as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984). In the early part of his career, from 1954—64, Lyotard was actively involved with the group ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ (Socialism or Barbarism), whose membership included Jean Laplanche, Claude Lefort, and Genette, Gérard. Led by its founder Castoriadis, Cornelius, Socialisme ou Barbarie sought to critique Marxism from within, arguing that it was more important to hold to the revolutionary spirit of Marx’s ideas than the exact letter of his writings. In this period, Lyotard also actively campaigned against France’s involvement in Algeria. Although he parted with the group in 1964, Lyotard remained in solidarity with the Left until the failure (as he saw it) of the events of May ’68 led him to break with Marxism altogether. He would come to see Marxism as a discourse of terror, as the vituperative account of the ‘desire called Marx’ in Économie libidinale (1974), translated as Libidinal Economy (1993) makes clear. Written for the provincial government of Quebec’s Conseil des Universités, La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (1979) lifted the term postmodernism out of its relative obscurity as the name for a new stylistic trend in architecture, literature, and the arts, and transformed it into an indictment of the present age. Lyotard’s principal thesis, summed up in the famous phrase that the present age is defined by ‘incredulity towards grand narrative’, is that scientific discourse (knowledge in general) has entered a new phase characterized by the unavailability of its traditional legitimating narratives, namely Revolution (the idea that detecting faults in a particular society will spontaneously give rise to a social movement to correct them) and Enlightenment (the idea that through the sophistication of arts and sciences human society necessarily becomes more humane than it was). In the absence of grand narratives, knowledge today is forced to fall back on highly localized values, or ‘little narratives’, particularly the idea of efficiency. Perhaps Lyotard’s most provocative idea is that these little narratives should be thought of as highly specific and completely incommensurable language games (a term he borrows from intensity). Although Lyotard took care to state that this did not mean that society is in a state of chaotic Brownian motion, nor that language games are the only form of social relation there is, he nonetheless conveyed the strong impression that the absolute relativism (or anti-foundationalism) such a thesis implies should be regarded as a virtue because it means no single language game is capable of either dominating or integrating all the other language games. Lyotard goes so far as to say that political struggle should consist in ‘waging war on totality’, by which he means any form of hegemony discourse. As meagre a notion of freedom as this is, many readers of Lyotard have seen it as hopeful because it seems to betoken the idea that resistance is possible. It is, however, a highly problematic notion of resistance because by definition it lacks any possibility of coordinating individual language games so as to create a genuine social movement. Lyotard never pursued the social implications of his thesis at any great length, although in subsequent works he would argue that it is the incommensurability between language games---the inability of one language game to communicate fully with another---that is the source of what can properly be called injustice. This problematic is a central preoccupation for Lyotard in the latter part of his career and gave rise to what is for many his most important philosophical work, namely Le Différend (1983), translated as The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1988). A differend (which might be loosely translated as a ‘wrong’ or ‘injustice’) arises when a conflict occurs in such a way that the wronged party is unable to find the means of representing their position. Lyotard uses as his case example the extreme relativist position adopted by Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson in which the only person who can testify to the existence of gas chambers is somebody who actually died in one. Lyotard’s last works concentrated on this question of representability. In works such as L’inhumain (1988), translated as The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1991), Lyotard develops an aesthetic around the idea that only what is unrepresentable is the proper subject for art. Accepting that this is a logical impossibility, but arguing that it is nonetheless an aesthetic and indeed epistemological necessity, Lyotard praises postmodernist art for ‘bringing forth’ the unrepresentable, at least in the minds of the beholder, seeing in this a source of hope for future politics. Further Reading: G. Bennington Lyotard: Writing the Event (1988). B. Readings Introducing Lyotard (1991). S. Malpas Jean-François Lyotard (1996). J. Williams Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (1998).