Jean-Francois Lyotard

Matter asks no questions, expects no answers of us. It ignores us. It made us the way it makes all bodies—by chance and according to its laws.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

The body might be considered the hardware of the complex technical device that is human thought.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

There’s a necessity for physical experience and a recourse to exemplary cases of bodily ascesis to understand and make understood a type of emptying of the mind, an emptying that is required if the mind is to think. This obviously has nothing to do with tabula rasa, with what Descartes (vainly) wanted to be a starting from scratch on the part of knowing thought.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

On the other hand, in a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an issue, it is clear that language assumes a new importance.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

Here is the question: is a legitimization of the social bond, a just society, feasible in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific activity? What would such a paradox be?

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

…Scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to, and in competition and conflict with, another kind of knowledge, which I will call narratives in the interest of simplicity.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new product.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

The moment knowledge ceases to be an end in itself—its realization of The Idea or the emancipation of men—it’s transmission is no longer the exclusive responsibility of scholars and students.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

True knowledge, in this perspective, is always indirect knowledge; it is composed of reported statements, that are incorporated into metanarratives of a subject that source their legitimacy.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable, let us activate the different and save the honor of the name.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter the postmodern age.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard

The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will be increasingly tend to, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume--that is, the form of knowledge.

— Jean-Francois Lyotard