This book gives an introduction to Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) as
an educational thinker whose philosophical encounters with politics and
art offer a radical reconsideration of the aims of education and the
nature of pedagogy. The book approaches Jean-François Lyotard's
contributions to educational thought by placing his changing
intellectual career within its thematic and pedagogical context. Central
chapters deal with Lyotard's key concepts utilised throughout different
phases of his intellectual career, providing new openings and
perspectives to an affective form of pedagogy that questions the
conditions and perimeters of the educational endeavour as a learning and
teaching event. Within these discussions, Lyotard's ideas about
aesthetics and politics receive close attention. The book positions
Lyotard's pedagogical focus within key theoretical concepts traversed in
his political and aesthetic writings, exploring his work on the
political as an ethical activity, art as resistance, and his later work
on childhood and infancy as a state of openness and receptivity.