Jean-François Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard (Versailles, August 10, 1924-Paris, April 21, 1998) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. His interdisciplinary discourse includes topics that cover epistemology, communication, the human body, modern and postmodern art, literature and theoretical criticism, music, cinema, time and memory, space, the city and the landscape., the sublime, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. He is known for his formulation of postmodernism after the 1970s and analysis of the impact of postmodernism on the human condition. He was a co-founder of the International College of Philosophy (Collège International de Philosophie) along with Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet and Giles Deleuze.

Among the many influences he had throughout his career are: Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Giles Deleuze, whose works not only framed Lyotard's work, but also served as a guide for his critical thinking on many occasions.

Biography

He was the son of Jean-Pierre Lyotard, a sales representative, and Madeleine Cavalli. He attended the Lycée Buffon primary school and later the Lycée Louis le Grand, both in Paris. As a child he had many aspirations, such as becoming an artist, historian, Dominican friar, and writer. Later, he gave up on the dream of being a writer, when he finished writing an unsuccessful fictional novel at the age of 15. Lyotard described how he realized that none of these occupations had become his "destiny" in his autobiography called Peregrinations (1986).

He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in the late 1940s. At the outbreak of World War II, Lyotard interrupted his studies. He served as a first aid volunteer for the French army and took part in the fight to liberate Paris in August 1944. No doubt influenced by the destruction and devastation he had witnessed during the war and attracted by the early promises of socialism, he became a a devout Marxist in the years after World War II. For this reason, he finished his studies in 1947 with a DES thesis (diplôme d´études supérieures) entitled Indifference as an ethical concept (L&# 39;indifférence comme notion éthique), where he analyzed forms of indifference and detachment in Zen Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism and Epicureanism. After graduation he obtained a position at the French National Center for Scientific Research.

During the first stage of his life he was active in left-wing groups, and his thought developed within what could be called critical Marxism. As a student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he also became interested in phenomenology and published his first book on this subject (essentially informative) in the Que sais-je collection, providing a clear and global vision of the role of said philosophical current in the XX century.

Later, however, he moved away from Marxism and began an evolution towards postmodernism during the 1960s in which the development of original thought can already be seen. He focused during this time on the theme of desire as a search for the impossible, in terms very close to those defended by psychoanalysis, especially within the psychoanalytic current represented by Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan. With this, the role of criticism and analysis of language becomes extremely important in his philosophy. On the other hand, and during this same period, he made important incursions into the field of aesthetics, specifically in the analysis of the pictorial work, which he sees as a determining field in the position of desire.

His studies of the work of Paul Cézanne in relation to the Freudian conception of art are particularly noteworthy. For Lyotard, Cézanne's work exemplifies a kind of reinvestment of the meaning of said conception, as his painting is produced from the flow of the unconscious impulses of the libido. Said flow is reflected in the painter's ability to create spaces analogous to those of the unconscious, which produce in those who contemplate his work states of restlessness and disturbance.

In 1950, Lyotard accepted a position teaching philosophy at the Lycée de Constantine, in Constantine, Algeria. In 1971 he obtained a state doctorate with his dissertation Discourse, figure under the supervision of Mikel Dufrenne, a work that was published that same year. He dedicated a period of his life, after the end of World War II, to socialist revolutions, an issue that was evident in his writings, as they focused largely on left-wing politics. During this period, Lyotard became particularly interested in the Algerian War of Independence, which he experienced in person while teaching there.

He married Andree May in 1948, with whom he had two children, Corinne and Laurence, and later married his second wife in 1993 to Dolores Djidzek, mother of his son David, born in 1986.

Lyotard argued in Le Différend that human discourse occurs in a varied but discrete number of immeasurable domains, none of which have the privilege of passing or passing value judgments on the others. Thus, in Libidinal Economics (1974), The Postmodern Condition (1979) and Au juste: Conversations (1979) he criticized contemporary literary theories and it incited an experimental discourse devoid of interest in the truth. In this sense, he considered that the time of great stories or & # 34; meta-stories & # 34; who tried to make sense of the march of history.

Lyotard criticized the current postmodern society for the realism of money, since it accommodates all trends and needs as long as it has purchasing power. Likewise, he criticized the meta-discourses: the Christian, the enlightened, the Marxist, the capitalist. According to Lyotard, these are incapable of leading to liberation. Postmodern culture is characterized by incredulity regarding metanarratives, invalidated by their practical effects. Faced with them, it is not a question of proposing an alternative system to the current one, but of acting in very diverse spaces to produce concrete changes.

Political life

In 1954 he joined the Socialism or Barbarism group, a French political organization formed in 1948 around the inadequacy of Trotskyist analysis to explain the new forms of domination in the Soviet Union. The organization aimed to carry out a critique of Marxism from within during the Algerian liberation war. His writings in this period mainly concern far-left politics, especially in relation to the Algerian situation, which he witnessed firsthand while teaching philosophy in Constantine. He also wrote essays full of optimism, hope and encouragement towards the Algerians, which were later reproduced in political writings. Lyotard hoped to encourage an Algerian struggle for independence from France and a social revolution.

After disputes with Cornelius Castoriadis in 1964, Lyotard left Socialism or Barbarism and joined the newly formed group Workers Power (Pouvoir Ouvrier), which he abandoned in 1966. Although Lyotard took an active part in the May 1968 revolution, he distanced himself from revolutionary Marxism with his Libidinal Economics (1974). He later distanced himself from Marxism because he felt that it had a rigid structuralist approach and imposed the "systematization of desires" through a strong emphasis on industrial production as a fundamental culture.

Academic career

He taught at the Lycée de Constantine (Algeria) from 1950 to 1952. In 1972 he began teaching at the University of Paris VIII, where he taught until 1987, when he became professor emeritus. Over the next two decades he taught outside of France, primarily as a professor of critical theory at the University of California at Irvine and as a visiting professor at universities around the world. Some of these universities were Johns Hopkins University, the University of California Berkeley, Yale University, Stony Brook University, the University of California, San Diego in the United States, the Université de Montréal in Quebec (Canada) and the University from São Paulo in Brazil. He was also founding director and board member of the International College of Philosophy (Collège International de Philosophie) in Paris. Before his death, he divided his time between Paris and Atlanta, where he taught at Emory University, as Woodruff Professor of Philosophy and French.

Works

The philosophical works of Jean François Lyotard developed between 1954 and 1998. His first work The Phenomenology (1954) establishes a series of criteria to analyze the contribution of phenomenology to the thought of the century XX, and his latest work, Agustín's Confession (1998), reflects one of his deepest religious concerns of his youth.

Lyotard's work is characterized by a persistent opposition to universalities, metanarratives, and generality. He is fiercely critical of many of the "universalist" claims that the world has made. of the Enlightenment, and several of his works serve to undermine the fundamental principles behind these broad claims.

In his writings of the early 1970s he rejects what he considers to be the theological foundations of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud: "In Freud, he is Judaic, darkly critical (forgetful of the political); in Marx he is Catholic. Hegelian, reconciling (...) in one and in the other the relationship of the economic with meaning is blocked in the category of representation (...) Here a politics, there is a therapeutic, in both cases a secular theology, at the peak of arbitrariness and roaming of forces". Consequently, he rejected the negative dialectic of Theodor W. Adorno because he considered it as the search for a "therapeutic solution within the framework of a religion", in this case, the religion of history. In "Libidinal Economics", Lyotard encouraged us to "discover and describe different social modes of inversion of libidinal intensities".

The postmodern condition

Lyotard was a skeptic of modern cultural thought. In this sense, his work & # 34; The Postmodern Condition & # 34; provoked skepticism about universalizing theories. Lyotard argues that we have outgrown our need for grand narratives due to the advancement of techniques and technologies since World War II: he argues against the possibility of justifying narratives that bring together disciplines and social practices, such as science and culture: "the narratives we tell to justify a single set of laws and bets are inherently unfair". His loss of faith in metanarratives affected the way we view science, art, and literature. Small narratives have become the appropriate way to explain social transformations and political problems. Lyotard argues that this is the driving force behind postmodern science. As metanarratives fade, science suffers from a loss of faith in its search for truth and must therefore find other ways to legitimize its efforts. Connected to this scientific legitimacy is the growing dominance of information machines. Lyotard argues that one day, for knowledge to be considered useful, it will have to be turned into computerized data. This led him, years later, to write The Inhuman , published in 1988, in which he illustrates a world in which technology dominates the world.

Lyotard calls "legitimation" to the "process by which the legislator is authorized to enact a law as a norm". A statement must present a set of conditions to be accepted as scientific. In this case, legitimation is the process by which a legislator, who deals with scientific discourse, is accredited to prescribe the agreed conditions, generally of internal consistency and experimental verification, so that a statement forms part of that discourse and can be considered valid by the scientific community.

In this way, he points out that, since Plato, the question of the legitimacy of the sciences is strongly related to that of the legitimation of the legislator. Likewise, the right to decide what is true is intertwined with the right to decide what is fair. There is a bond of similarity between the type of language that we call science and that other that we call ethics and politics, both come from the same Western tradition.

On the other hand, Lyotard allows us to see how science has become the form of legitimization of stories and meta-narratives in postmodern society, since it questions the production of scientific knowledge. These have come to be established as a kind of legitimizing discourse on the part of those who promote science: “the State can spend a lot so that science can present itself as an epic, through it it becomes credible, it creates assent public that its own decision-makers need", pointing out that even knowledge has become an object of use and an object of exchange in order to be consumed and valued in a specific way. Thus, within the current statute of scientific knowledge, Lyotard ensures that the question of double legitimacy, far from being diluted, is posed with greater vigor. In this way, knowledge and power are the two sides of the same coin: "Who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what should be decided? The question of knowledge in the information age is more than ever the question of government".

According to Lyotard, the truth is not as important as the effectiveness of the information. That is why science and law in post-industrial societies are legitimized by their efficiency, and every system is regulated by the optimization of their actions. Thus, unifying knowledge is lost and a type of fragmentary knowledge appears, an explosion of small systems that swim in eclecticism and that characterize what he himself called "a frozen age of overwhelming postmodernism", in which all the utopias of the XX century are diluted. As a means of achieving conciliation within this heterogeneous knowledge and establishing communication links between differences, Lyotard notes the relevance of the role that language games play in guaranteeing the existence of a society consolidated.

The collapse of the “grand narrative” and the value of “language games”

In “The postmodern condition: report on knowledge” (La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir) (1979), he proposes what he calls an extreme simplification of "postmodern" as a "disbelief towards metanarratives". These metanarratives, considered as "grand narratives", are great theories about the world: the progress of history, the knowability of everything by science and the possibility of absolute freedom. Lyotard argues that we have stopped believing that narratives of this kind are adequate to represent and contain everyone. He points out that no one seems to agree on what is real (if anything is) and everyone has their own perspective and story. We have become sensitive to difference, to diversity, to the incompatibility of our aspirations, beliefs and desires, and that is why postmodernity is characterized by an abundance of micronarratives. For this concept, Lyotard draws on the notion of "language games" found in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In Lyotard's works, the term "language games," sometimes also called "phrase regimes," denotes the multiplicity of communities of meaning, the innumerable and immeasurable systems separate spaces in which meanings are produced and rules for their circulation are created. This implies, for example, an incredulity towards the metanarrative of human emancipation. That is, the story of how the human race has freed itself, which brings together the game of scientific language, the language of human historical conflicts and human qualities in the general justification of the constant development of human beings in terms of wealth. and moral well-being. According to this metanarrative, the justification of science is related to wealth and education. The development of history is seen as a steady progress towards civilization or moral well-being.

The language game of human passions, qualities and guilt is seen as constantly shifting in favor of our qualities, while science and historical developments help us conquer our guilt in favor of our qualities. The point is that any event must be able to be understood in terms of the justifications for this metanarrative; whatever happens can be understood and judged according to the discourse of human emancipation. For example, for any new social, political or scientific revolution we could ask the question: "Is this revolution a step towards the greater well-being of all human beings?" For Lyotard It should always be possible to answer this question in terms of the justification rules of the metanarrative of human emancipation.

This becomes more crucial in Au juste: Conversations (1979) and Le Différend (The Difference) (1983), which develop a postmodern theory of justice. The atomization of human beings implied by the notion of micronarrative and language play might seem to suggest a collapse of ethics. Universality has often been thought of as a condition for something to be an appropriate ethical statement: "thou shalt not steal" is an ethical statement in a way that "thou shalt not rob Margaret" is not. The latter is too particular to be an ethical statement, since it is worth asking what is special about Margaret? It is only ethical if it is based on a universal statement: "You shall not steal from anyone". However, universals are inadmissible in a world that has lost faith in metanarratives, so it would seem that ethics is impossible. Justice and injustice can only be terms within language games, and the universality of ethics would be left out.

Lyotard argues that notions of justice and injustice do in fact remain in postmodernism. The new definition of injustice is using the rules of the language of a "phrase regime" and apply them to another. Ethical behavior consists in remaining alert precisely in the face of the threat of this injustice, in paying attention to things in their particularity and not enclosing them within abstract conceptuality. One must bear witness to the "differend". In another case, there is a conflict between two parties that cannot be resolved fairly. However, the act of being able to bring the two together, and understanding the claims of both parties, is the first step towards finding a solution.

La Différend

In "Le Différend", drawing on Immanuel Kant's views on the separation of understanding, judgment, and reason, Lyotard identifies the moment when the language fails explained in terms of difference, and he explains it like this: "[...] the unstable state and instant of language in which something that should be able to put into sentences cannot yet be. [...] Human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication, learn through the feeling of pain that accompanies silence (and the pleasure that accompanies the invention of a new language)". Lyotard undermines the common view that the meanings of sentences can be determined according to what they refer to (the referent). The meaning of a sentence - an event (something that happens) - cannot be fixed by appealing to reality (what really happened). Lyotard develops this view of language by defining "reality" in an original way, as a complex of possible meanings linked to a referent through a name.

The correct meaning of a sentence cannot be determined by a reference to reality, since the referent itself does not fix the meaning, and reality itself is defined as the complex of competing meanings attached to a referent. Therefore, the phrase, as an event, remains indeterminate.

Lyotard uses the example of Auschwitz and the demands of the revisionist historian Faurisson to prove the Holocaust, to show how "le différend" operates as a double bind (a dilemma or circumstance from which there is no escape due to mutually conflicting or dependent conditions). Faurisson will only accept proof of the existence of gas chambers from eyewitnesses who were victims of the gas chambers. However, these witnesses are dead and unable to testify. Either there were no gas chambers, in which case there would be no eyewitnesses to produce evidence, or there were gas chambers, in which case there would still be no eyewitnesses to produce evidence, because they would be dead. Since Faurisson will not accept any evidence for the existence of gas chambers, except the testimony of actual victims, he will conclude, regarding both possibilities (the gas chambers existed and the gas chambers did not exist), that the gas chambers they did not exist. The two alternatives lead to the same conclusion: there were no gas chambers. The case is considered an example of "différend" because the harm done to the victims cannot be presented in the judgment criteria held by Faurisson.

The Sublime

Lyotard was a frequent writer on aesthetics. He was, despite his reputation as a postmodernist, a great promoter of modernist art. Lyotard saw postmodernism as a latent trend in thought over time and not as a clearly delimited historical period. He favored the puzzling works of the modernist avant-gardes. In them he found a demonstration of the limits of our conceptualization, a valuable lesson for anyone fully convinced of the confidence conveyed by the Enlightenment. Lyotard also wrote extensively on some contemporary artists: Valerio Adami, Daniel Buren, Marcel Duchamp, Bracha Ettinger and Barnett Newman, as well as Paul Cézanne and Wassily Kandinsky.

He developed these themes from the point of view of the "sublime". This is a term from aesthetics that refers to the experience of pleasurable anxiety one experiences when confronted with wild and threatening landscapes, such as a huge craggy mountain, black against the sky, looming before the vision. The sublime is, then, the conjunction of two opposite sentiments, which makes it more difficult to see it as injustice or as a solution.

Lyotard found the explanation of the sublime offered by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (sometimes Critique of the Power of Judgment) particularly interesting. In this book, Kant explains this mixture of anxiety and pleasure in the following terms: there are two types of "sublime" experience. In the sublime 'mathematically', an object strikes the mind in such a way that we find ourselves unable to take it in as a whole. More precisely, we experience a clash between our reason (which tells us that all objects are finite) and imagination (the aspect of the mind that organizes what we see and which sees an object incalculably larger than ourselves and feels infinite).. In the 'dynamic' sublime, the mind recoils from an object so immeasurably more powerful than ourselves, whose weight, force, and scale could crush us without the remotest hope of resisting it. Kant stresses that if we are in real danger, our feeling of anxiety is very different from that of a sublime feeling, which is an aesthetic experience, not a practical feeling of physical danger. This explains the feeling of anxiety.

What is profoundly disturbing about the mathematically sublime is that the mental faculties presenting visual perceptions are inadequate to the concept that corresponds to it. In other words, what we ourselves are capable of making ourselves see cannot fully coincide with what we know is there. We know it's a mountain, but we can't take the whole “whole” into our perception. Our sensibility is incapable of facing such visions, but our reason can affirm the finitude of representation. With the dynamic sublime, our sense of physical danger must awaken the awareness that we are not only material but also moral beings and therefore, in Kant's terms, noumenal. The body can be dwarfed by its power, but our reason cannot. This explains, in both cases, why the sublime is an experience of both pleasure and anxiety.

Lyotard is fascinated by this admission, from one of the philosophical architects of the Enlightenment, that the mind cannot always rationally organize the world. Some objects are simply unable to be carefully associated with concepts. For Lyotard, in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, but based on his argument of the "différend", this is a good thing. Generalities, as concepts, do not pay due attention to the particularity of things. What happens in the sublime is a crisis where we realize the insufficiency of imagination and reason together. What we are witnessing, says Lyotard, is in reality the "différend", the tension of the mind at the limit of itself and at the limit of its capacity to conceptualize.

Libidinal Economy

In one of Lyotard's most famous books, Libidinal Economics (Économie libidinale), he offers a critique of "false consciousness" of Marx and asserts that the working class of the 19th century enjoyed being part of the industrialization process. Lyotard claims that this is due to libidinal energy. The term "libidinal" It comes from libido, a concept referring to unconscious desires that are not accessible from consciousness, in psychoanalytic theory. Lyotard's writings in Libidinal Economics show an achievement in our attempts to live with the rejection of all religious and moral principles through an undermining of the structures associated with it. The structures hide the libidinal intensities, while the intense feelings and desires force us to move away from the established structures. However, there can be no intensities or desires without structures either, because there would be no dream of escaping repressive structures if they do not exist. "Libidinal energy comes from this disruptive intervention of external events within structures that seek order and self-containment." This was the first of Lyotard's writings that he had actually criticized the Marxist point of view. It was this particular issue where he really took issue with the views of Karl Marx.

Later life and death

Some of the last works that Lyotard worked on before he died were about the French writer, activist and politician, André Malraux. One of them is a biography, Signed, Malraux (Signé Malraux). Lyotard was interested in the aesthetic views of society that Malraux shared. Another of Lyotard's late works was The Confession of Augustine (La Confession d'Augustin), a study in the phenomenology of time. This unfinished work was published posthumously the same year of his death.

Lyotard returned repeatedly to the notion of the postmodern in collected essays in English such as "Postmodernity Explained to Children", "Towards the Postmodern", and " 34;Postmodern Fables". In 1998, while preparing for a conference on Postmodernism and Media Theory , he died unexpectedly of rapidly advancing leukemia. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

After his death, a collective tribute was organized by the International College of Philosophy (Collège International de Philosophie), chaired by Dolores Lyotard and Jean-Claude Milner, director of the Collège at the time. The proceedings were published by the French University Press (PUF) in 2001 under the title Jean-François Lyotard, l'exercice du différend.

Lyotard's work remains important in politics, philosophy, sociology, literature, art, and cultural studies. To commemorate the tenth anniversary of Lyotard's death, an international symposium on Jean-François Lyotard was held in Paris from January 25 to 27, 2007, organized by the Collège International de Philosophie, under the directed by Dolores Lyotard, Jean-Claude Milner and Gerald Sfez.

Lyotard Bibliography

• Phenomenology. Bring. Aida Aisenson from Kogan. Ed. Paidós, Barcelona, Spain, 1989. (La Phénoménologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954). ISBN: 9788475095332.
• Speech, Figure. Bring. Josep Elías. Ed. Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, Spain, 1979. (Discours, figure. Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). ISBN: 9788425209130.
• Libyan economy. Bring. Tununa Mercado. Ed. Economic culture fund, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1990. (Économie libidinale. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974). ISBN: 9505571003.
• Duchamp's TRANS/formers. Trans. Ian McLeod. California: Lapis Press, 1990 (Les transformteurs Duchamp. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1977) ISBN 978-0932499639.
• Just Gaming. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985 (Au juste: Conversations. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1979) ISBN 9780816612772.
• Postmodern condition. Bring. Mario Antolin Rato. Ed. Chair, 7th edition, Madrid, Spain, 2000. (La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979). ISBN 8437604664.
• Pacific Wall. Trans. Bruce Boone. California: Lapis Press, 1989 (Le mur du pacifique. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1979). ISBN-10: 0932499643.
• Difference. Trad. Alberto Bixio. Ed. Gedisa, Madrid, Spain, 2009. (Le Différend. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983). ISBN: 9788474323153.
• The Assassination of Experience by Painting – Monory. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. London: Black Dog, 1998 (L’Assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory. Bègles: Castor Astral, 1984). ISBN-10: 9058678814.
• Driftworks. Ed. Roger McKeon. New York: Semiotext(e), 1984. (Essays and interviews dating from 1970 to 1972). ISBN-10: 0936756047.
• The Enthusiasm. Trad. Alberto Bixio. Ed. Gedisa, second edition, Barcelona, Spain, 1994. (L'enthousiasme, la critique kantienne de l'histoire. Paris: Galilée, 1986). ISBN 8474322782.
• Postmodernity explained to children. Bring. Enrique Lynch. Ed. Gedisa, first edition, Barcelona, Spain, 1987. (Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants: Correspondance, 1982–1985. Paris: Galilée, 1986). ISBN 8474322669.
• The inhuman: talks about time. Trad. Ed. Manantial, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1998. (L’Inhumain: Causeries sur le temps. Paris: Galilée, 1988). ISBN 9875000183.
• Heidegger and the Jews. Bring. Alexander Kaufman and Veronica Weiss. Ed. La Marca, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1995. (Heidegger et ‘les juifs.’ Paris: Galilée, 1988). ISBN: 9789508890139.
• The Lyotard Reader. Ed. Andrew Benjamin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
• Pilgrimages, law, form, events. Bring. Maria Coy. Ed. Chair, Madrid, Spain, 1992. (Pérégrinations: Loi, forme, événement. Paris: Galilée, 1990). ISBN: 9788437611051.
• Lessons on the analytics of the sublime. Review. University of Puerto Rico. Humacao. http://www.uprh.edu/humanities/ libromania/lyotard/. (Leçons sur l’‘Analytique du sublime’: Kant, ‘‘Critique de la faculté de juger,’’ paragraphes 23–29. Paris: Galilee, 1991).
• The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999 (Un trait d’union. Sainte-Foy, Quebec: Le Griffon d’argile, 1993). ISBN-10: 1573926353.
• Political Writings. Trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. (Political texts composed 1956-1989). ISBN-10: 0816620458.
• Posmodern Moralities. Trad. Augustine Left. Ed. Tecnos, Madrid, Spain, 1996. (Post-modern architecture. Paris: Galilee, 1993). ISBN. 8430928170.
• Toward the Postmodern. Ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993. [Essays composed 1970-1991]. ISBN-10: 1573925853.
• Signed Malraux. Ed. Taurus, Mexico, 2001. (Signé Malraux. Paris: B. Grasset, 1996). ISBN. 9789681907006.
• Agustin's confession. Bring. Maria Gabriela Mizraje and Beatriz Castillo. Ed. Losada, Madrid, Spain, 2002. (La Confession d’Augustin. Paris: Galilée, 1998). ISBN: 9788493271206.