Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) was educated at the Sorbonne and attended Jacques Lacan’s (1901–1981) psychoanalytic seminars. His The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), which was commissioned by the Québec government, won him worldwide fame, and he taught and lectured widely throughout the United States.

Lyotard sought to articulate the principles of postmodernism as both an intellectual attitude and a condition of contemporary life.