Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes

The legitimacy of the West is contested by the very skepticism it holds so dear.

Intellectuals resist faith longer because they can: where ordinary people are helpless before the light, intellectuals are clever enough to spin webs of darkness around their minds and hide in them. That's why only Ph.D.s believe any of the 100 most absurd ideas in the world such as Absolute Relativism, or the Objective Truth of Subjectivism, of the Meaningfulness of Meaninglessness and the Meaninglessness of Meaning, which is the best definition of Deconstructionism I know.

The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.

In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.

I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.

Critics and academics often employ theories and philosophers in order to help them understand and dissect movies and books.

The wisest man preaches no doctrines.

The more one-dimensional an explanation of something complex and far reaching, the greater the grounds for skepticism.

Philosophy has degenerated into ideology.

what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

Of all the weaknesses little men rail against, there is none that they are more apt to ridicule than the tendency to believe. And of all the signs of a corrupt heart and a feeble head, the tendency of incredulity is the surest. Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.

Would there be any truth in saying that psychology was created by the sophists to sow distrust between man and his world?

Post-modernism was the worst thing that could have happened to our democracy. The idea that you have to deconstruct and destroy all grand narratives is not a good one.

Foucault is the Cagliostro of our time.

As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs , then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.

As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith

My work...is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself.

I have earned my disillusionment.

At the very moment when someone is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world believes the opposite.

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

In philosophy, when we make use of false principles, we depart the farther from the knowledge of truth and wisdom exactly in proportion to the care with which we cultivate them, and apply ourselves to the deduction of diverse consequences from them, thinking that we are philosophizing well, while we are only departing the farther from the truth; from which it must be inferred that they who have learned the least of all that has been hitherto distinguished by the name of philosophy are the most fitted for the apprehension of truth.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.