Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernism

Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, by all accounts, is an important and influential statement about the condition of knowledge at the end of the twentieth century and about what this means for the state of knowledge at the beginning of the twenty-first. The text's penetrating expression of and insight into what IS now referred to as postmodern certainly warrants careful consideration. In this essay I will thus provide a brief summary of Lyotard's report, will present Merleau-Ponty's philosophy as a valuable alternative to postmodernism, and will offer a variety of criticisms of postmodernism from the point of view of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. My purpose here is not to engage Lyotard's work with Merleau-Ponty's but to more generally address the issues of postmodernism as they have been mused by Lyotard.Journal ArticleFinal article publishe