In 1945, France still had the world’s second-largest colonial empire, covering almost one-tenth of the Earth’s surface. Twenty years later, most of it was gone, after two bitter and bloody wars for national independence in Indochina and Algeria.
Many on the French left tried to grasp the significance of the momentous changes that were taking place. One contribution that still remains of interest today was that of Jean-François Lyotard, who combined his theoretical analysis of events in Algeria with dangerous clandestine work in support of its national independence movement.
Today Lyotard is remembered primarily as one of the main thinkers of “postmodernism,” a term that he helped popularize with his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition. Between 1956 and 1963, however, he wrote a series of perceptive articles about the Algerian struggle for independence, drawing on his own experience of the country.
Born in 1924, Lyotard studied philosophy and was then sent to teach in a lycée (secondary school) in Algeria. A legal fiction declared Algeria to be not a colony but an integral part of French territory, though the vast majority of the indigenous Muslim population did not have rights of citizenship and many lived in abject poverty.
Lyotard was radicalized by his experience of colonial racism in Algeria, which he saw as “a whole people of high civilization which had been offended and humiliated.” He became friends with another French teacher, Pierre Souyri, one of whose students was Mohamed Harbi, later to be a leading figure in the Algerian…
Auteur: Ian Birchall
