Jean-Francois Lyotard - (Hardcover)

About the Book

A collection of interviews and debates with French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, focusing on his later work and the period from 1984 to 1997.

Book Synopsis

With contributions selected from the last fifteen years of his life, this second volume of Jean-François Lyotard's interviews and debates includes hard-to-find and previously untranslated material.

Taking place between 1984 and 1997 they follow in the wake of Lyotard's most notable publications, including The Postmodern Condition (1979) and The Differend (1983). Whilst continuing to contest and reconfigure the claims of these writings, Lyotard and his interlocutors help to contextualise the questions raised within the fields of art, philosophy, literature and politics.

Discussions in Paris and London include contributions from thinkers such as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Alain Badiou whilst significant interviews elsewhere in Europe, North and South America elucidate the consequences of the varied reception given to his work. The importance of Kant, Freud and Wittgenstein is readily apparent as are the themes now closely associated with Lyotard: the inhuman, infancy and resistance to 'the system'.

These interviews and debates record an evident delight in the activity of thinking which is not about rhetorical flourish or rehashing staid assumptions but of grappling with some of the most important questions confronting thought today.

Review Quotes

"Framed by the editor's perceptive contextual introduction, this carefully curated collection of Lyotard's later interviews and debates opens exciting avenues into the philosopher's understanding of his approach to "the differend" and his commitment to mining the political engagement of textual and artistic form. Key is Lyotard's acknowledgement in these hard-to-find documents of his unintended dialogue between the phrases of The Differend and the technologies of education in The Postmodern Condition that so deeply influenced his teaching, his pioneering Pompidou exhibition, Les Immatériaux and subsequent texts, and his extensive philosophical dialogues with international artists. Readers of this collection will come to embrace Lyotard's passion for "debate" as the dialogical scene of artistic and political thought par excellence." --Timothy Murray, Cornell University

About the Author

Kiff Bamford is Professor of Art and Philosophy at Leeds Beckett University. Publications include Lyotard and the 'figural' in Performance, Art and Writing (2012), Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Lives (2017), Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates (ed. 2020), Lyotard and Critical Practice (ed. with Margret Grebowicz, 2023) and Lyotard's Readings in Infancy (ed. with Robert Harvey, 2023).