Jean-François Lyotard

This book gives an introduction to Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) as an educational thinker whose philosophical encounters with politics and art offer a radical reconsideration of the aims of education and the nature of pedagogy. The book approaches Jean-François Lyotard’s contributions to educational thought by placing his changing intellectual career within its thematic and pedagogical context. Central chapters deal with Lyotard’s key concepts utilised throughout different phases of his intellectual career, providing new openings and perspectives to an affective form of pedagogy that questions the conditions and perimeters of the educational endeavour as a learning and teaching event. Within these discussions, Lyotard’s ideas about aesthetics and politics receive close attention. The book positions Lyotard’s pedagogical focus within key theoretical concepts traversed in his political and aesthetic writings, exploring his work on the political as an ethical activity, art as resistance, and his later work on childhood and infancy as a state of openness and receptivity.