A presentation copy, inscribed by the author incorporating the printed title ‘pour Maurice de Gandillac, [Discours, figure] et reconnaissance de JF Lyotard I. VII. 71’ in black ink to the half title. Some occasional pencilled marginal highlighting and annotations by Gandillac.
The recipient, Maurice de Gandillac (1906-2006), was Professor of History of the Middle Ages and Renaissance philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1946 to 1977, where he exercised considerable influence over Lyotard’s generation of philosophers; indeed, his list of students reads almost as a ‘who’s who’ of post-structuralist philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser, amongst others.
Lyotard’s first major work, preceded only by a short book on phenomenology published in 1954, being the published version of his State Doctorate thesis written under the supervision of Mikel Dufrenne. Discours, Figure builds upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Jacques Lacan’s respective advances in phenomenology and psychoanalysis to identify and distinguish the fields of the discursive (the written) and the figural (the visual). In doing so, Lyotard is able to identify that which escapes the discursive in the figural, thereby identifying the limits of a then-popular structuralist methodology aiming to collapse all meaning into signification. Surely less bracing and acerbic than the Lyotard’s later works such as Libidinal Economy, Discours, Figure nevertheless stands as a subtly and extensively confrontational work of modern French thought from one of the country’s most important contemporary philosophers.
