Jean-Francois Lyotard: The Later Interviews and Debates

With contributions selected from the last fifteen years of his life, this second volume of Jean-François Lyotard’s interviews and debates includes hard-to-find and previously untranslated material. Taking place between 1984 and 1997 they follow in the wake of Lyotard’s most notable publications, including The Postmodern Condition (1979) and The Differend (1983). Whilst continuing to contest and reconfigure the claims of these writings, Lyotard and his interlocutors help to contextualise the questions raised within the fields of art, philosophy, literature and politics. Discussions in Paris and London include contributions from thinkers such as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Alain Badiou whilst significant interviews elsewhere in Europe, North and South America elucidate the consequences of the varied reception given to his work. The importance of Kant, Freud and Wittgenstein is readily apparent as are the themes now closely associated with Lyotard: the inhuman, infancy and resistance to ‘the system’. These interviews and debates record an evident delight in the activity of thinking which is not about rhetorical flourish or rehashing staid assumptions but of grappling with some of the most important questions confronting thought today.

Table of Contents:
Table of Contents 1. ‘In the wake of The Differend’: An Introduction to The Later Interviews and Debates by Kiff Bamford. 2. ‘About The Différend’: round table at the Centre Georges Pompidou with Introduction by Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Paris, May 1984. 3. ‘From Lotta Poetica (Verona)’. Interview with Alain Arias-Misson, New York, November 1984. 4. ‘Debates on the Postmodern’ with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, London, May 1985. 5. ‘Bearing Witness to The Différend’: debate at the Centre Sèvres, Paris, May 1987. 6. ‘Oral Exam’. Interview with Niels Brügger, Aarhus, Denmark, June 1990. 7. ‘That which resists, after all’. Interview with Gilbert Larochelle, Chicago, February 1992. 8. ‘Spaceship’ by Jean-François Lyotard, September 1993. 9. ‘Nietzsche and the Inhuman’. Interview with Richard Beardsworth, Paris, November 1993. [extracts] 10. ‘Resistances: A Conversation’ with Sergio Benvenuto, Paris, May 1994. 11. Interview with Edgar Garavito and Consuelo Pabón, Bogotá, Colombia, March 1994. 12. ‘Resisting a Discourse of Mastery’. Interview with Gary A. Olson, Atlanta, USA, 1995. 13. Interview with Patricia Dailey, Emory University, Atlanta, April 1996. 14. Interview with María Elena Ramos, Caracas, Venezuela, July 1997. 15. ‘Dear Neverending Architectonic Reflective Wherewithal.’ Correspondence between Jean-François Lyotard & Arakawa and Madeline Gins, 1997. 16. Correspondence between Jean-François Lyotard & Amparo Vega, Colombia and Paris, 1997. Afterword by Dolorès Lyotard. Notes. Select Bibliography.

About the Author :
Kiff Bamford is Professor of Art and Philosophy at Leeds Beckett University. Publications include Lyotard and the ‘figural’ in Performance, Art and Writing (2012), Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Lives (2017), Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates (ed. 2020), Lyotard and Critical Practice (ed. with Margret Grebowicz, 2023) and Lyotard’s Readings in Infancy (ed. with Robert Harvey, 2023).

Review :
Framed by the editor’s perceptive contextual introduction, this carefully curated collection of Lyotard’s later interviews and debates opens exciting avenues into the philosopher’s understanding of his approach to “the differend” and his commitment to mining the political engagement of textual and artistic form. Key is Lyotard’s acknowledgement in these hard-to-find documents of his unintended dialogue between the phrases of The Differend and the technologies of education in The Postmodern Condition that so deeply influenced his teaching, his pioneering Pompidou exhibition, Les Immatériaux and subsequent texts, and his extensive philosophical dialogues with international artists. Readers of this collection will come to embrace Lyotard’s passion for “debate” as the dialogical scene of artistic and political thought par excellence.