Correspondence on postmodernity for younger readers
Letters to Young Philosophers
The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982–1985 is a collection of letters by Jean-François Lyotard addressed to young philosophers. Some of the recipients were children of Lyotard’s colleagues, which gives the correspondence a personal as well as a philosophical character. The French title presents the project as an explanation of the postmodern to children, but the book is not a children’s primer: its audience is younger people beginning to engage with philosophy. As a correspondence, it belongs with Lyotard’s shorter writings on the postmodern rather than with a systematic treatise.
The Postmodern as Lyotard Understood It
The subject announced by the title is the postmodern as Lyotard had made it central to contemporary debate. In his account, the postmodern condition is marked by incredulity toward grand narratives—large, unifying stories that claim to explain history, knowledge, or human emancipation as a single process. Such narratives had supplied legitimacy to science, politics, and ethics; when they lose credibility, knowledge and social practice appear as a plurality of language games, each with its own rules and criteria. The letters are part of Lyotard’s effort to make this position intelligible to younger readers rather than to present it as a closed system.
Between The Postmodern Condition and The Differend
The collection is framed as illuminating the trajectory of Lyotard’s thinking around The Postmodern Condition and The Differend. The earlier work is associated with the diagnosis that universalizing theories have lost credibility; the later work turns to the problem of the differend, a conflict in which a wrong cannot be stated in the idiom of the party that judges it, so that the injured party is deprived of the means to argue. The correspondence belongs to the period in which these concerns were being worked out, and it helps show how Lyotard’s account of postmodern knowledge connects to his later questions about language, justice, and difference. It is a companion to that movement of thought, not a substitute for the major treatises.
Translation and Afterword
The English-language volume was edited by Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas, with translations by Don Barry and others, and it includes an afterword by Wlad Godzich. These editorial features accompany the letters in the English-language edition.
Catalog metadata gives the first publication as 1992. The North American edition was published in Minneapolis by the University of Minnesota Press in 1993. Bibliographic records describe it as x, 141 pages, 24 cm, with the uniform title Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants. English; the New York Public Library record gives the ISBN 0816622116. Catalog subject headings include Correspondence, Philosophers, Postmodernism, Postmodernisme, Philosophers, and France.
Catalog Characterization
A Duke University catalog summary states that Lyotard originally introduced the term “postmodern” into current discussions of philosophy.
Author Profile
Jean-François Lyotard was born on 10 August 1924 and died on 21 April 1998. He was a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. His interdisciplinary discourse spans topics including 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. He 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.
