The Lyotard Reader

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.

Foreword by Jean–Francois Lyotard. Und So Weiter : In Lieu of an Introduction. Acknowledgements. 1. The Tensor. 2. The Dream–Work Does Not Think. 3. Passages from Le Mur du Pacigique . 4. Figure Foreclosed. 5. One of the Things at Stake in Women′s Struggles. 6. Lessons in Paganism. 7. Beyond Representation. 8. Acinema. 9. Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity. 10. The Sublime and the Avant–Garde. 11. Scapeland. 12. Anamnesis of the Visible, or Candour. 13. Newman: The Instant. 14. The Story of Ruth. 15. Analysing Speculative Discourse as Language–Game. 16. Levinas′ Logic. 17. Universal history and Cultural Differences. 18. Judiciousness in Dispute, or Kant after Marx. 19. Discussions, or Phrasing ‘after Auschwitz′. 20. The Sign of History. Select bibliography of English Translations of Lyotard′s Writings. Index.

Andrew Benjamin is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Translation and the Nature of Philosophy: A New Theory of Words (1989) and, with C. Norris, What is Deconstruction? (1989). He is the editor of several books, including Poststructuralist Classics (1988) and Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin (1988).

‘Andrew Benjamin asks me for a short – very short – foreword for this Lyotard Reader , nothing much, only four or five pages. Just like that , quite casually. As though it was the most natural thing in the world. But there&apos;s nothing natural at all about this Lyotard Reader , or about the idea that Lyotard himself should write a foreword for the Reader . You say foreword. Let him say a word before you read his words. A key word that gives the Reader , a key to the words in the Reader ...′ Jean– Reader Francois Lyotard from the foreword <!––end––>