Recommendations
Books Like La Condition postmoderne by Jean-François Lyotard
Works that think through the collapse of grand narratives
Lyotard diagnosed the condition of modernity losing faith in its own legitimating stories — the emancipation of humanity through reason, the progress of the Spirit. These works share that same diagnosis: the grand narrative is over, and we are left with the proliferation of local and incommensurable language games.
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Buy on AmazonLe Différend
by Jean-François Lyotard
The Differend — the more serious philosophical statement; differends, language games, and the impossibility of universal judgment; the major Lyotard after La Condition postmoderne
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Buy on AmazonSimulacres et simulation
by Jean Baudrillard
The hyperreality counterpart — Baudrillard's analysis of the simulacrum is the other major French diagnosis of the postmodern condition; the Baudrillard and Lyotard diagnoses are complementary
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Buy on AmazonDe la grammatologie
by Jacques Derrida
The deconstructive counterpart — Derrida's analysis of logocentrism shares the same critique of Western metaphysics' claim to ground knowledge; the post-structuralist parallel to Lyotard's postmodern
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Buy on AmazonThe Society of the Spectacle
by Guy Debord
Debord's Situationist predecessor — the analysis of the spectacle as the accumulated capital of all life; the Marxist diagnosis of the same condition that Lyotard analyzes in terms of knowledge and narrative
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Buy on AmazonPostmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
by Fredric Jameson
The Marxist American response to Lyotard — Jameson's analysis of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism; the essential companion that argues Lyotard's postmodern condition is itself ideological
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Buy on AmazonMythologies
by Roland Barthes
Barthes's demystification of bourgeois myths — the structuralist predecessor to the postmodern; reading Barthes before Lyotard shows the trajectory from structural demystification to postmodern condition
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Buy on AmazonLa Distinction
by Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu's sociology of taste — the empirical counterpart to Lyotard's philosophical diagnosis; both are analyzing the same contemporary France through different methodological lenses
- 8Buy on Amazon
L'Anti-Œdipe
by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
The political counterpart — Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of capitalism and desire shares the same post-1968 disillusionment with grand political narratives that produces Lyotard's postmodern diagnosis
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