• Landscape view looking out across a large body of water. Land is just visible on the horizon, there is a line of trees on the shore, and in the immediate foreground there is a rough stone wall.

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.