• **Alt text:** A man in a dark suit and red tie stands behind a lectern with microphones, delivering a speech outside a black front door set in a brick government building. Iron railings flank the entrance, and an official crest is displayed on the front of the podium.

Jean-François Lyotard: A Sceptic for Our Times

I first encountered Jean-François Lyotard's work in the mid-1980s, after the publication of the English translation of his book The Postmodern Condition. It was a text that created quite a stir in the English-speaking academic world, drawing a lot of both praise and criticism. I was one of those to be critical, as in the first thing I ever wrote about Lyotard, a journal article for Radical Philosophy, where I argued there was a nihilistic quality to his thought.