“... figure who somehow, in ways that remain to be defined, presides over all Žižek’s work. One of Jacques Lacan’s late seminars has the title Les Non-Dupes errent. The joke lies in the homophony of this enigmatic proposition (‘the undeceived are mistaken’) with the oldest formula in the Lacanian book, ‘le nom du Père’, the name of the Father ...”

“... saw them. And no one listened to the Madman. It is 1939 with regard to the world of letters, and Jacques Derrida is telling us to wake up. But we don’t listen. Thus spoke Zarathustra, as I recall, in an aggressively lyrical strain unsoftened on this occasion by any hint of Glas-nost. How odd that Derrida, one of whose democratic themes has been the need ...”

“... women writers, feminist theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis couldn’t avoid Marguerite Duras. Lacan himself had said of Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein that ‘Marguerite Duras turns out to know what I teach without me,’ and I remember dutifully trying to make sense of that novel within the Lacanian framework. I now realise that I was treating the text ...”

“... simple story, but it inspired a whole body of interpretation, most notably the seminar that opens Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits. One of Lacan’s many brilliances was to identify the ways in which everyone in the story repeats the others’ roles: one person intercepts a message, another observes the interception but ...”

“... directed at each other – Lévi-Strauss v. Sartre, Foucault v. Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari v. Lacan, to pick out just a few – the theoretical stakes were high, and the political implications seemed momentous. One could talk, seriously, of the ‘politics of theory’, and many of us distant onlookers did so. But that was a few decades ago; what about ...”

“... states? What’s at stake here? This kind of discourse, in which the ideas of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida and Eric Santner are central, has little to do with animal rights, and whatever bestiality is at issue is entirely our own. (As Derrida points out, animals are not cruel to one another; only ‘man is wolf to man,’ as the ancient saying, revived ...”

“... immersed in the arts. ‘We used to go with the Merleau-Pontys for lunch at Guitrancourt, where Lacan had a country house,’ Lévi-Strauss has recalled. ‘We hardly ever talked about psychoanalysis or philosophy; instead, it was usually art and literature.’ (Fortunately, perhaps, since neither Lévi-Strauss nor Merleau-Ponty understood ...”

“... Anyone reading these notes without knowing me,’ Jacques Derrida wrote in his diary in 1976, ‘without having read and understood everything of what I’ve written elsewhere, would remain blind and deaf to them, while he would finally feel that he was understanding easily.’ If you think you can understand me by reading my diaries, he might have been warning future biographers, think again ...”

“... it more representative than Searle might say). Peter asks Mary, ‘How are you getting on with Lacan?’ and Mary responds by showing him a bottle of aspirin. Her behaviour is not coded: no convention says that displaying a bottle of aspirin means one is having problems with Lacan. Now, although Sperber and Wilson trace ...”

“... name Claude Arrieux. Among Guattari’s enthusiasms, Freud ran a close second to Marx. He attended Lacan’s seminars at Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital and went into analysis with him. In 1955 he began working at the La Borde clinic in the Loire Valley as a committed Lacanian.At La Borde, however, as Dosse reveals, Guattari’s thinking evolved away from ...”

“... evidence’. That’s pretty much what he does in The Seventh Function of Language, in which Jacques Bayard, a tough, right-wing cop, shows up at the hospital with secret orders from his bosses to find out if Barthes’s accident contains the seeds of a scandal they can use to discredit Mitterrand. Bayard is fine with that, but he’s an honest cop ...”

“... the police is no longer what it was, except among poor youth of Arab or African origins,’ Jacques-Alain Miller wrote last month. ‘A thing undoubtedly never seen in the history of France.’ In short, the terrorist attacks achieved the impossible: to reconcile the generation of ’68 with its arch enemy in something like a French popular version of ...”

“... at his home institution in the so-called École de Yale. In 1979, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller, all at the time Yale colleagues, put together a kind of manifesto entitled Deconstruction and Criticism. There were certain affinities among the five but the differences were more striking. On one ...”

“... of marginal places, folds in the map, is that Paul Schrader, the director of a sassy remake of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, admired Penman’s review so much that he invited him over to Los Angeles to talk product. Penman in California was truly the vision of a man who fell to earth, a pale alien in an X Files landscape. Wasn’t that the dream they ...”

“... gear to paddle in the shallows of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer tales. Borges, Barthes, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Robbe-Grillet and Todorov are only some of the weights he clips on his wet suit: but he can dive no deeper than Archer’s facile psychologising. Reading him, even so, I got the bends. As a collection, Essays on Detective Fiction endorses ...”