 Born in Vincennes, France on August 10, 1924, Jean-François Lyotard was the son of Jean-Pierre Lyotard, a salesman. As he reports in an autobiographical essay that opens Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (1988), while schooling in Paris lycées, he had dreams of becoming a Dominican monk, a novelist, a painter, or even a historian. During the second world war, he acted as a medic during the liberation of Paris and he became a father soon after studying literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne University in Paris (he failed entrance twice into the more prestigious École Normale Supériour), which certainly cut off any dreams of becoming a monk. As for being a novelist or artist, he says he had an “unfortunate lack of talent”, and an “obvious weakness of memory” meant he could never be a good historian (Peregrinations, 1–2). He met Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) while studying at the Sorbonne and his work would later influence Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974). Lyotard produced an M.A. dissertation, “Indifference as an Ethical Notion”, whose central belief in indifference he would spend his career repudiating. In 1954, he would publish a study on phenomenology (a textbook treatment that would go through some ten editions) and became a philosophy professor at a lycée in Constantine, the capital of the French department of East Algeria, having passed the agrégation that enabled him to do so (Peregrinations, 2). Lyotard came to Algeria at a propitious time: near start of the Algerian revolution that would ultimately liberate the country from France in 1962, the colony had a revolutionary air that he inhaled in full. After his arrival, Lyotard immersed himself in the works of Marx while updating himself on the Algerian situation. As the revolution began in 1954, Lyotard joined Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism), which also included Claude Lefort (1924–2010) and Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997), important political thinkers in their own right. Lyotard became an astute and strident political militant over the next fifteen years, writing works that would later be collected in Political Writings (1993). He edited and wrote for Socialisme ou Barbarie’s journal as well as leaflets given to protesters and union workers, and this work left him little time for academic philosophy (“Resisting a Discourse of Mastery”, 174). He returned to Paris in 1959, becoming until 1966 a maître-assistant at the Sorbonne, when he finally gained a position in the philosophy department at the University of Paris X, Nanterre. In 1964, he broke with Socialisme ou Barbarie, joining Pouvoir Ouvrier (Worker’s Power), quitting that splinter group two years later and, as often happens on the French left, losing many of his closest friends along the way as his distance from Marxism became clear. Around the same time, he began to attend the seminars of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981). This was an important moment as Lyotard lost faith in the all-encompassing philosophy of Marxism, which offered, especially in the variant of the French Communist Party, a single key to history and its end. This loss of faith in Marxism’s “metanarrative” would expand to encompass all those available in modernity, a fact that would come to mark all his remaining writings. This didn’t keep him from participating in the events of May 1968, helping to organize the March 22 movement in Nanterre. Three years later he would publish Discourse, Figure (1971), earning him the degree of doctorat d’état. In light of the revolts of 1968, the French government set up a radical university in Vincennes, which Lyotard would join, becoming maître de conferences. Two years later, he published a work he later dubbed “my evil book”, Libidinal Economy (Peregrinations, 13). This work remains an important thinking of immanence and what a body politic would be like if reduced only to its libidinal pleasures and the blockages that make institutions possible. That Lyotard would later repudiate this difficult and complex work should say much to those who would reduce him to advocating a postmodern pastiche where any pleasure is good as long as it provides some intensity of feeling. In 1979, he would publish The Postmodern Condition, which was instantly taken as emblematic of what was underway in the West, right or wrong. Many would take up his call, as he put it in the book, to “wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name” (Postmodern Condition, 82). The work was both descriptive of what we today would dub neoliberalism’s functionalization of knowledge—what can be known has value only insofar as it can increase the future economic productivity of the researcher or student—and prescriptive that the loss of metanarratives should be underway. With the fame gained from this book, Lyotard would go on to lecture all over the world, while acting as a major contributor to the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. In 1979 and 1983, he published Au juste (translated as Just Gaming) and The Differend, respectively, two works that remain important to anyone thinking a postmodern politics. His later works, such as The Inhuman (1988) and Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-aesthetics (1998), concentrated on aesthetics, an enduring theme as early as the 1970s, but always while extending conclusions he reached in The Differend. In April 1998, Lyotard died of leukemia in Paris.