Postmodern Fabels Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele

An essential collection of moral tales.

This latest offering from one of the founding figures of postmodernism is a collection of fifteen "fables" that ask, in the words of Jean-François Lyotard, "how to live, and why?" Here, Lyotard provides a mixture of anarchistic irreverence and sober philosophical reflection on a wide range of topics with attention to issues of justice and ethics, aesthetics and judgment.

Acerbic, critical, relentlessly ironic, continually burning bridges and burning rubber, always high risk and always in high gear, Postmodern Fables throws down the gauntlet to any and all who idealize comfort. In sections titled "Verbiages," "System Fantasies," and "Concealments," Lyotard unravels and reconfigures idealist notions of subjects as various and fascinating as the French Revolution, the Holocaust, the reception of French theory in the Anglo-American world, the events of May 1968, the Gulf War, academic travelers as intellectual tourists, the collapse of communism, and his own work in the context of others'.

An exciting addition to the oeuvre of this major thinker, Postmodern Fables is a series of self-reflective and intellectually daring essays that speaks to the contemporary American reader in thought-provoking and undoubtedly controversial ways.

Jean-François Lyotard (1925-1998) was one of the principal French philosophers and intellectuals of the twentieth century. His works include The Differend (1989) The Postmodern Condition (1984), Just Gaming (1985), Heidegger and "the jews" (1990), The Postmodern Explained (1992), Political Writings (1993), and Signed, Malraux (1999).

Georges Van Den Abbeele is professor of French and director of the Davis Humanities Institute, the critical theory program, and the humanities program at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Travel as Metaphor (1992) and translator of Lyotard's The Differend.