From the controversy of postmodernity to the Lyotardian "challenges" to the Philosophy of Education

Abstract

The relations between postmodernity and education have been the object of countless researches, and also of some controversy within the philosophy of education, starting with the very conception of postmodernity and extending to the philosophical positions it engenders. In almost every research and controversy, Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition figures as an important reference, although his subsequent works are seldom mentioned, thereby leaving part of his philosophical legacy outside such discussions and, in particular, of his resulting contributions to education. In view of the current state of these studies, the present article seeks to develop an interpretation of the Lyotardian thought more strongly focused on the analysis of the works he published after his controversial book, with the purpose of placing his philosophical project beyond a landmark of postmodernity, and of discussing his contributions to the current philosophy of education. Such interpretation rescues a philosophical project that places before today's philosophy of education "challenges" concerning the move of its epistemological problems to the sphere of aesthetics, nurtured by a thinking capable of illuminating the complex and obscure face of education, its inhuman shadow, and the constitutive contention of teaching, inapprehensible by language and communication. We thus hope that such project can be understood not for the controversy it brings to the philosophy of education, but for the current challenges put to the latter as a rewriting of modernity.