Lyotard borrowed the postmodern term directly from Ihab Hassan

Evidence

The first philosophical work to adopt the notion was Jean-François Lyotard’s La Condition Postmoderne, which appeared in Paris in 1979. Lyotard had acquired the term directly from Hassan. Three years earlier, he had addressed a conference at Milwaukee on the postmodern in the performing arts orchestrated by Hassan. … The immediate occasion of La Condition Postmoderne, however, was a commission to produce a report on the state of ‘contemporary knowledge’ for the university council of the government of Quebec, where the nationalist party of René Levesque had just come to power. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 63

Categorization

• XREF: The Quebec commission origin is a striking institutional contingency behind the foundational postmodern text — connects to debates about how much theory is commissioned vs. spontaneous.
• SEED: Article angle: La Condition Postmoderne as a government consultancy report — the irony that the foundational critique of grand narratives began as bureaucratic knowledge-policy for a nationalist government.