Jean-François Lyotard (Critical Lives)
- Submitting institution
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Leeds Beckett University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 2
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Reaktion Books
- ISBN
- 978-1780238081
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Requested to reflect the complexity of the task. Given the absence of reliable secondary research, extensive primary research, often in French, was necessary. This included archive research, correspondence, face-to-face and remote interviews, plus the location of hard-to-find resources. In addition, the synthesis and analysis of a significant quantity of material, both written, visual and aural was undertaken to produce a short, but critical biographical work that took account of both anglophone and francophone contexts.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- How to present the work and life of a thinker as complex as the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard? This is the question addressed by the first critical biography of the thinker, important for both art and philosophy.
Primary research was central to this project. Archival research was undertaken in French at the Lyotard archive in the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Pompidou Centre and the Bibliothèque national de France, Paris. Interviews were undertaken with Lyotard’s daughters and his widow, Dolorès Lyotard, correspondence with whom facilitated introductions, clarifications and access to personal photographs. Further interviews and correspondence with friends, colleagues, translators and former students located in France, Italy, Germany, the United States, Canada, and Brazil broadened the range of research sources available, as did attendance at conferences and events in France and the United States. Translator Roger McKeon writes: ‘Remarkably astute and thoroughly researched … an intellectual biography of this calibre, depth and breadth is hard to come by.’
Following publication Bamford was invited to the United States to speak at the University of Indiana, and Stony Brook University, New York. Translations in Chinese and Turkish are forthcoming.
Reviewing the book in Cultural Politics Professor Robert Harvey writes ‘Bamford masterfully renders the sometimes baffling, but ultimately rewarding complexities of Lyotard’s passage among us […] an invaluable contribution to Lyotard’s legacy and thus to the future of cultural politics.’ Writing on art was central to Lyotard’s work, as Keith Crome notes in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: ‘Bamford’s beautifully written book brings this home with passion, conviction and force, and as a result is likely to exert considerable influence over future responses to Lyotard’s work’. Additional reviews published in: French Studies; H-France Review; The European Legacy; La Quinzaine Littéraire; Zeitschrift für philosophische Literatur; Interpretation; La Vie des Idées.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
