A memorial collection of essays on the philosopher of postmodernity
Afterwords: Essays in Memory of Jean-François Lyotard is an edited collection of essays honoring the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, edited by Robert Harvey. It is a commemorative volume rather than a single sustained treatise, and its cataloging places it among works on twentieth-century modern philosophy and aesthetics, on postmodernism in France, and on Lyotard himself.
Essays Gathered After a Philosopher’s Death
The subtitle states the book’s purpose plainly: its essays were written in memory of Lyotard, which makes the collection a tribute assembled after his death rather than a work composed by him. Its plural form — a set of essays rather than one continuous argument — means the volume does not advance a single thesis of its own. Instead it is a compilation, organized and framed by its editor, in which separate contributions are gathered under the shared aim of commemorating the philosopher. The book thus belongs to the tradition of the memorial volume, in which a thinker’s legacy is addressed piece by piece by those who take up his concerns.
Lyotard’s Philosophy and the Postmodern Context
Cataloging for the volume groups it under Lyotard, under twentieth-century modern philosophy and modern aesthetics, and under postmodernism in France — a set of headings that maps the intellectual terrain its essays occupy. Lyotard, a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist, is best known for his articulation of postmodernism and for his analysis of how postmodernity affects the human condition. The collection’s essays accordingly engage the philosophical and aesthetic questions associated with his name and with the French postmodern setting in which he worked, rather than confining themselves to a single text or episode.
The Editor’s Afterword and the Book’s Apparatus
Robert Harvey’s editorial role is twofold: he assembles the essays, and he supplies the afterword that closes the book, giving the collection a final reflective voice once the contributions themselves are complete. The volume also carries a bibliography, and it is a short book of just over a hundred pages. It was issued by the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook as part of that institute’s Occasional Papers series, which situates it as an institutional occasional publication tied to an academic setting.
Lyotard’s writings are described as largely concerned with the role of narrative in human culture, particularly how that role changed as people left modernity and entered a “postindustrial” or postmodern condition. He argued that modern philosophies legitimized their truth-claims not, as they themselves claimed, on logical or empirical grounds, but on the grounds of accepted stories—or “metanarratives”—about knowledge and the world, comparing these with Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games. He further argued that with the postmodern condition these metanarratives no longer work to legitimize truth-claims. He suggested that, in the wake of the collapse of modern metanarratives, people are developing a new “language-game” that does not make claims to absolute truth but rather celebrates a world of ever-changing relationships among people and between people and the world.
Lyotard’s Postmodern Definition
The Postmodern Condition is identified as the work in which Lyotard defined philosophical postmodernism, with his statement: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards meta narratives….” By metanarrative, the account explains, he means something like a unified, complete, universal, and epistemically certain story about everything that is. Postmodernists reject metanarratives because they reject the conceptualization of truth that metanarratives presuppose. Postmodernist philosophers in general are described as arguing that truth is always contingent on historical and social context rather than absolute and universal, and always partial and “at issue” rather than complete and certain.
Lyotard’s Intellectual Range and Life Dates
Jean-François Lyotard is given the dates 10 August 1924 – 21 April 1998. His interdisciplinary discourse is described as spanning 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 called a key personality in contemporary continental philosophy and is credited with 26 books and many articles; his articulation of postmodernism is placed after the late 1970s.
Catalog Record Details
The catalog record dates the volume to 2000 and gives its ISBN as 0970053207. It lists the editor as Robert Harvey, 1951–, records a height of 21 cm, and specifies the bibliographical references as pages 95–98.
