让-弗朗索瓦·利奥塔

让-弗朗索瓦·利奥塔（法语：Jean-François Lyotard，1924年8月10日—1998年4月21日）是法国哲学家、社会学家和文学理论家。他的跨学科著述涵盖了认识论和传播学、人体、现代艺术和后现代艺术、文学和批判理论、音乐、电影、时间和记忆、空间、城市和景观，崇高以及美学和政治之间的关系等主题。他最著名的是在20世纪70年代后期阐述了后现代主义，并分析了后现代性对人类状况的影响。他是由雅克·德里达、弗朗索瓦·夏特雷、让-皮埃尔·费伊和多米尼克·勒古创立的国际哲学院的院长。

利奥塔1950年至1952年在法属阿尔及利亚的君士坦丁中学任教，1955年参加阿尔及利亚社会主义团体，抨击法国殖民。后任教于巴黎第八大学。他1979年出版的著作《后现代状况》是“后现代主义”的定名之作，书中认为现代科学的特点是排斥或压抑建立于叙事之上的合法性形式，强调叙事的节奏形式能够固定和容纳自然时间的无规律性。

Jean-François Lyotard (French: [ʒɑ̃ fʁɑ̃swa ljɔtaʁ]; 10 August 1924 – 21 April 1998) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as epistemology and communication, the human body, modern art and postmodern art, literature and critical theory, music, film, time and memory, space, the city and landscape, the sublime, and the relation between aesthetics and politics. He is best known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. Lyotard was a key personality in contemporary continental philosophy and authored 26 books and many articles. He was a director of the International College of Philosophy founded by Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Dominique Lecourt.

Biography

Early life, educational background, and family

Jean François Lyotard was born on 10 August 1924, in Versailles, France, to Jean-Pierre Lyotard, a sales representative, and Madeleine Cavalli. He went to school at the Lycée Buffon (1935–42) and Louis-le-Grand, Paris. As a child, Lyotard had many aspirations: to be an artist, a historian, a Dominican friar, and a writer. He later gave up the dream of becoming a writer when he finished writing an unsuccessful fictional novel at the age of 15. Ultimately, Lyotard described the realization that he would not become any of these occupations because of "fate", as he describes in his intellectual biography called Peregrinations, published in 1988.

Lyotard served as a medic during the liberation of Paris in the Second World War, and soon after began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in the late 1940s, after failing the entrance exam to the more prestigious École normale supérieure twice. His 1947 diplôme d'études supérieures (roughly equivalent to an M.A. thesis) was Indifference as an Ethical Concept (L'indifférence comme notion éthique). It analyzed forms of indifference and detachment in Zen Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism, and Epicureanism. He studied for the agrégation at the Sorbonne alongside fellow students Gilles Deleuze, François Châtelet and Michel Butor; in 1949 whilst waiting to retake the oral examination, he left Paris to teach at l'École militaire préparatoire d'Autun. Having gained the agrégation in 1950, Lyotard took up a position teaching philosophy at the Lycée d'Aumale (now Lycée Ahmed Reda Houhou) in Constantine in French Algeria but returned to mainland France in 1952 to teach at the Prytanée National Militaire in La Flèche, where he wrote a short work on phenomenology, published in 1954.

In 1959, Lyotard moved to Paris to teach at the Sorbonne: introductory lectures from this time (1964) have been posthumously published under the title Why Philosophize? Having moved to teach at the new campus of Nanterre in 1966, Lyotard participated in the events following March 22 and the tumult of May 1968. In 1971, Lyotard earned a State doctorate with his dissertation Discours, figure under Mikel Dufrenne—the work was published the same year. Lyotard joined the Philosophy department of the experimental University of Vincennes, later Paris 8, together with Gilles Deleuze, in the academic year 1970–71; it remained his academic home in France until 1987. He married his first wife, Andrée May, in 1948 with whom he had two children, Corinne and Laurence, and later married for a second time in 1993 to Dolorès Djidzek, the mother of his son David (born in 1986).