lyotard

This conversation is with Margret Grebowicz and Kiff Bamford, editors of a new collection of essays entitled Lyotard and Critical Practice, published in late-2022 by Bloomsbury. Margret teaches political theory at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is the author of a number of scholarly and popular media pieces, ranging from French critical theory to reflections on mountain climbing and the social-cultural meaning of dogs in contemporary life. Margret is the author of six books: Why Internet Porn Matters (2013), Beyond the Cyborg (co-authored with Helen Merrick in 2015), The National Park to Come (2015), Whale Song (2017), Mountains and Desire (2020), and Rescue Me: Dogs and Their Humans (2021). Kiff is a Reader in Contemporary Art at Leeds Beckett University in England. He is the author of Lyotard and the ‘figural’ in Performance, Art and Writing (2012) and Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Lives (2017), as well as the editor of Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates (2020). In this conversation, we discuss the meaning of Lyotard’s legacy, the place of the postmodern in contemporary theory, and the tasks and labor of editing a collection on a critical yet all-but-forgotten late-twentieth century thinker.

There is a French post-modern philosopher who writes,

“I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”

By that is meant, there is no large story – no history of humanity as such – into which our private stories, the novellas and anecdotes that make up our lives, can fit.


Abigail L. Rosenthal is Professor Emerita of Philosophy, Brooklyn College of The City University of New York.  She is the author of A Good Look at Evil, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, now appearing in an expanded second edition and as audiobooks.  Dr. Rosenthal writes a weekly column for “Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column,”  where she explores the situation of women. She thinks women’s lives are highly interesting. She’s the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by her father, Henry M. Rosenthal.  She’s written numerous articles that can be accessed at Academia.edu .