The canonical Lyotard-Habermas debate originated from mutual ignorance of each other’s work.

Evidence

However, a misunderstanding has traditionally been attached to his text. Widely read as a response to Lyotard’s work, because of the proximity of dates, in fact it was probably written in ignorance of the latter. Habermas was reacting rather to the Venice Biennale exhibition of 1980, the show-case for Jencks’s version of postmodernism42 — just what Lyotard, for his part, had been unaware of when producing his own. An ironic chasse-croisé of ideas stood at the origin of these exchanges. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 83

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s Jameson-periodization project: the ‘debate’ that anchors postmodern theory was an accident of dates, which complicates standard intellectual-history narratives. — connects to: Lyotard rejects Habermas’s consensus ideal as totalizing and terrorist — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 38
• SEED: A piece on how canonical intellectual debates get retroactively constructed — the chasse-croisé here as case study of accidental polemics.
• DEFINE: Clarifies that the Lyotard/Habermas opposition so central to the postmodern debate was a post-hoc construction rather than a real exchange.

Broader Connections

• Lyotard rejects Habermas’s consensus ideal as totalizing and terrorist #expands (0.85) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 38