More, Later, out now: A new publication by Professor Kiff Bamford

So, what is this book?

It's a collection of existing interviews, recorded debates, some correspondence and a short essay - either by or about the work of the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard. Lyotard was one of the most important French philosophers of the Twentieth Century, a colleague of Gilles Deleuze and a friend of Jacques Derrida. Lyotard worked on questions of politics, art, literature, on ethical questions, technology and language. But he was particularly attuned to art, which is why I feel most at home with his thought: seduced and alarmed in equal measure.

Why 'Later?'

The collection features Interviews and debates from the last 15 years of his life – from 1984 to 1997, just before his death the following year. I look at this period because it follows the publication of his most popular book The Postmodern Condition and his most philosophical - The Differend. The debates that are published here in English for the first time allow us to look again at these works and get an insight into how they were received in France at the time. But there is also a focus on later work which is less well known, and this is where the experience of working in archives and corresponding with former colleagues and students help to bring new aspects of his work to light. This includes evidence of his visits to Bogota, Colombia in 1994 and 1995, and to Caracas, Venezuela in 1996 and 1997, and the cross-over between these visits and what he was teaching elsewhere at the time, especially in the United States, opens new lines of enquiry. In fact, it was in the United States where I found what was perhaps the most exciting discovery.

Unexpected finds...

It happened before COVID, before I'd started working on this book, when as part of a British Academy small grant I was visiting the University of California, Irvine for a conference. Lyotard had taught at Irvine, and I arranged to look at anything they had in the critical theory archives related to his time there. Here I found a video cassette, simply labelled 'P. Dailey (Columbia) 4/9/96 Emory' which I hoped was a forgotten interview; I asked if they could digitise it for me, but then COVID happened...

I only picked the trail up again in 2022 when I was now starting to think about this volume. It was quite easy to find that P. Dailey, who had been a PhD student when she interviewed Lyotard (yes, it was a videotape of an interview), is now Professor Patricia Dailey, still at Columbia University, New York. Fortunately, she had previously digitised a copy which she was able to share and from which I was able to make a transcription of the interview which is now chapter 13 in the collection; as far as I know hasn’t been disseminated before.

Anything else?

In addition to the fifteen chapters of interviews and debates, chapter 1 is an introduction by me, chapter 17 is an afterword by Lyotard's widow, Dolorès Lyotard, then right at the back is the hidden work, in the form 18 pages of endnotes. Added to each piece they give contextual information and details found by working from the original manuscripts in the archives, sources for future researchers and readers.