The Lyotard Reader

by Andrew Benjamin

Jean-Francois Lyotard was one of the founding members of the College Internationale de philosophie. Ha has taught at Vincennes, Saint Denis and is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Irvine. Several of his books have appeared in English, notable The Postmodern Condition, Just Gaming and The Dirrerend.

The Lyotard Reader is a collection of Jean-Francois Lyotard's most important and significant papers to date. While they are all written from within philosophy, they seek to address subjects as wide-ranging as film, painting (Adami, Francken, Newman), psychoanalysis, Judaism and politics. The originality of Lyotard's work means that it can not be readily situated within any one philosophical tradition. Instead he returns philosophy itself to debates across a range of areas and, in so doing, redefines the philosophical enterprise.

A number of chapters in The Lyotard Reader appear for the first time in English. This is the most comprehensive collection available of Lyotard's work, work has profoundly influenced debates on the Enlightenment, on modernity, on postmodernity, on the transmission f information, on literary theory and on philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Art

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found but two of the essays of this dense and chewy book helpful. That said, the two were quite good on the topics they presented; the challenge that the 'negative dialectic' presents for the project of modernism represented by the event of Auschwitz, and a second writing by Lyotard on aesthetics dynamics in the use and uses of dramatic space. The essays in this reader are translated from Lyotard's original works.
I will attmempt to essay further on these topics for this review at a later date.