“... but Empson himself would have none of it. When Christopher Norris sent him some writings by Derrida and others, Empson said he thought ‘those horrible Frenchmen’ were ‘so very disgusting, in a simple moral or social way, that I cannot stomach them’. He also managed, perhaps unintentionally, to invent a new Frenchman: ...”

“... French intellectuals and the cultured French public need new toys every ten or 15 years.’ When Jacques Lacan drew on his ideas to argue that the unconscious was ‘structured like a language’, he recoiled. Lacan had been a friend – he had introduced Lévi-Strauss to his third wife, Monique, his partner for the rest of his life – but he claimed not to ...”

“... recent feminist writing has been crucially influenced by male theorists like Foucault, Barthes, Derrida and Lacan. Then again, further back, there is the shining example of Mill’s great essay ‘The Subjection of Women’, one sentence from which – quoted by Juliet Mitchell – makes exactly the point that Ruthven is stressing. ‘What is now called the ...”

“... some of the French, but not an intraduisible in sight. As for the achievement of Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood in orchestrating the English edition, that qualifies as heroic. The French and English differ in certain important respects concerning both the choice of terms and the word order. The English has ‘philosophical lexicon’ where ...”

“... organised by Dr MacCabe in 1976-7 which sought to evaluate the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Despite their title, the authors are not concerned with therapy, but with the philosophical status of Lacan’s arguments as providing a model of the mind.Now Lacan, by far the most obscure of all the Parisian intellectuals who, willingly or ...”

“... on the notion of justice, which once more draws politics and psychoanalysis together. Whereas Derrida has somewhat peremptorily pronounced justice the only concept immune to deconstruction (why not then mercy as well?), Rose stubbornly refuses to disentangle it from fantasy. In a quasi-Nietzschean critique of Kantian ethics, she seeks to restore the ...”

“... on obscure points of Lacanian doctrine; polemics with various contemporary theorists (Derrida, Deleuze); comparative theology; and, most recently, reports on cognitive philosophy and neuroscientific ‘advances’. These are lined up in what Eisenstein liked to call ‘a montage of attractions’, a kind of theoretical variety show, in which a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a species of enthusiasm. The modern polemical phase, it should be said, did not begin with de Man, Derrida, and the movement of deconstruction. The storm broke because of the surprising inroads of the New Criticism into the academy. We may consider the New Criticism rather tame, and appreciate it for introducing a tougher pedagogical stance, but traditional ...”

“... body is constructed in language, and knows too that it will never entirely be at home there, For Jacques Lacan, the body articulates itself in signs only to find itself betrayed by them. The transcendental signifier which would say it all, wrap up my demand and deliver it whole and entire to you, is that imposture known as the phallus; and since the phallus ...”

“... the once seductive vitalism of Bergson is missing, and there is no proper account of the ideas of Derrida, who deserved better, having done more than anyone else to try and erase the ancient boundaries dividing the philosophical from the literary. But of all these other, near-literary disciplines it is, and rightly, historiography which does best for ...”

“... a person. But the disguise is heavy. Homi Bhabha, Claude Lefort, Slavoj Žižek, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, Tzvetan Todorov, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler: an extraordinary range of theorists is included. Derrida, Bourdieu, Habermas, De Certeau and Althusser are not forgotten, and even Freud (though not Marx) makes it ...”

“... a team of contributors that included Alain-Fournier, Paul Claudel, Jean Giraudoux, Valery Larbaud, Jacques Rivière, Jean Schlumberger and Paul Valéry. Gide then proposed that they branch out into publishing ‘beautiful books’. Neither he nor his colleagues had the means to run a publishing house, but their friend Gallimard had time on his hands and plenty ...”

“... default – ‘the sinister continuity between the 14 years of François Mitterrand and the 12 of Jacques Chirac, united by their talent for winning elections and ruining France’ – by Nicolas Baverez, an economist and historian of the centre-right. Rebuttals, vindications, rejoinders, alternatives have proliferated. Baverez looks at first glance like a ...”