- Lived:
- 1924–1998 · Versailles, Paris, Algeria, Nanterre, California
- Tradition:
- French post-structuralism; the philosopher of the postmodern
- The Big Idea:
- The grand stories that modern societies used to justify their knowledge and politics — emancipation, progress, revolution — have lost their credit; what remains is the harder work of doing justice to conflicts that no shared story can settle.
- If you remember one thing:
- The man who named the postmodern was not celebrating "anything goes" — he spent his life trying to invent language for wrongs that the official stories cannot even hear.