 Lyotard’s intellectual milieu is one that crossed major events in French philosophy and, of course, in global history. His writings would encounter the dominant Marxism of the French political and academic milieu, while also, over a long career, he would debate with writers in existential phenomenology, structuralism, and eventually post-structuralism, the latter being the moniker under which his works are commonly placed. Lyotard’s first book, Phenomenology (1954), demonstrated the import of that movement on his early thought. Husserlian phenomenology, by way of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), was dominant in the era’s existentialist movements, and Lyotard’s work attempts to find a place for phenomenology in light of the Marxism dominant on the left, especially in the human sciences (e.g., sociology, history, and linguistics). Like Sartre, who attempted to wed his existentialist emphasis on the irreducibility of subjective experience and Marxian analyses, which led to his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), Lyotard wanted to understand if there was a way to take up the era’s dominant phenomenological bent in French philosophy in terms of the Left’s adherence to Marxian analyses. Ultimately, he argues for phenomenology’s place to speak to experiences beyond what is articulable in language, while also following its founder, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), in arguing that it could provide the sciences with their grounding in the essence of their areas of study: what is the meaning of history for the historical sciences? What is the social for the sociologist? For Lyotard, these questions cannot be answered from within these sciences themselves.