Lyotard has been associated primarily in the English-speaking world with the 'postmodern debate', but his work is of a breadth and importance beyond what this would suggest. This book, the first general introduction to Lyotard's work to appear in any language, presents the arguments which mark the crucial moments of a complex career, taking as its guiding thread Lyotard's preoccupation with the event (perhaps the major concern of recent French thought) through his reflections on desire, production, justice and language. Lyotard's fundamental drive to account for the event takes his work through phenomenology, psychoanalysis, politics and art to a general and ambitious 'philosophy of sentences' which bears comparision with the work of Jacques Derrida. The more obviously 'political' aspects of Lyotard's writing are discussed and situated as integral to Lyotard's view of philosophy as such.