Jean-François Lyotard

Lyotard was born in Versailles to a salesman's family and as a boy wanted to be a monk, a painter or a historian. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne alongside Deleuze, passed the agrégation in 1950, and taught two years in a lycée in Constantine in French Algeria, where he saw colonial rule at first hand. In 1954 he joined Socialisme ou Barbarie, the far-left group founded by Castoriadis and Lefort that analysed the Soviet Union as bureaucratic capitalism; he handled the Algerian question and wrote analyses for twelve years, leaving in 1966 after losing faith in the revolutionary subject.

His first book, Phenomenology (1954), was a slim introduction. His doctoral thesis, Discourse, Figure (1971), used Freud and Merleau-Ponty against structuralism, arguing that beneath the discourse of language lies a visual, desiring 'figural' dimension irreducible to any system of signs. Libidinal Economy (1974), his wildest book, pushed Marx and Freud toward a philosophy affirming the intensities of desire; he later called it 'my evil book'. He taught at Vincennes alongside Deleuze and Badiou.

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), commissioned by the government of Quebec, made him famous worldwide. Modernity, it argued, legitimated knowledge and institutions by 'grand narratives', the Enlightenment story of emancipation, Hegel's story of Spirit, Marx's story of revolution, and the postmodern is 'incredulity toward metanarratives'. In the computer age knowledge becomes saleable information, and legitimacy can come only from local 'little narratives' and from 'paralogy', the rule-breaking invention within language-games. The book gave postmodernism its definition and drew Habermas's criticism.

The Differend (1983) is the book he considered his most important philosophical work: when two parties to a dispute speak by different rules, any judgement wrongs one of them, and that is a 'differend'; the Holocaust denier's demand that victims produce evidence is the paradigm, and philosophy's task is to find new phrases for wrongs that existing phrases cannot express. In his last years he wrote on the Kantian sublime, the inhuman, childhood, Malraux and Augustine, taught at Irvine and Emory, and died of leukaemia in Paris in 1998.