Discourse, Figure was his dissertation that made him professor of philosophy at Vincennes University, France. This text exhibits a profound kinship with Nietzschean forces of affirmation and intensities, wherein he develops a philosophy of politics of desire. Discourse, Figure begins Lyotard's polemic against theoretical discourse and contains his first systematic attempt to develop new theoretical perspectives. Describing his work as a "defense of the eye", he rejects the textualist approach which privileges text and discourses over experience, the senses and images. He valorizes sense and experience and privileges them over text and discourse. Criticizing the devaluation of the senses in western philosophy since Plato, he attempts to clear the obscurity of senses being understood as something which sided with falsity, skepticism, rhetorician, the painter, the libertine, the materialist. He pursues Derrida's critique of philosophy as something being organized into binary oppositions, with a hierarchical structure amongst those oppositions and, like Derrida, seeks to defend the devalued member of the binary set. Strongly opposing the primacy of language advocated in many semiotic theories of the time, he valorizes figure, form and image or art imagination over theory. .
While the first half is a polemic against imperialistic semiotics and Hegelian theory, the second half presents the first sketch of his philosophy of desire which champions bodily forces, intensities and what he calls "energetics". It draws heavily on Freud to develop a philosophy of desire, a position that would later be developed in more Nietzschean terms. His concept of desire is what makes this text a precursor to his later texts. Desire, he explains, is a dual edged sword. Negative, disruptive and transgressive force which subverts reality to gain its end and a more positive, affirmative force which affirms words, sounds, colors, forms and objects.