Lyotard’s trajectory from communism to metaphysics explains his postmodern fable.

Evidence

The postmodern condition, announced as the death of grand narrative, thus ends with its all but immortal resurrection in the allegory of development. The logic of this strange dénouement is inscribed in Lyotard’s political trajectory. From the seventies onwards, so long as communism existed as an alternative to capitalism, the latter was a lesser evil — he could even sardonically celebrate it as, by contrast, a pleasurable order. Once the Soviet bloc had disintegrated, the hegemony of capital became less palatable. Its ideological triumph appeared to vindicate just the kind of legitimating narrative whose obituary Lyotard had set out to write. Rather than confronting the new reality on a political plane, his solution was a metaphysical sublimation of it. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 82

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that political trajectory drives theoretical position echoes Anderson’s wider thesis in this book — that postmodern theory tracks its authors’ politics. — connects to: Lyotard abandoned revolutionary socialism before writing The Postmodern Condition — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 67