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Pirouette on a Sixpence

Christopher Prendergast: Untranslatables, 10 September 2015

Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon 
edited by Barbara Cassin, translated by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood.
Princeton, 1297 pp., £44.95, February 2014, 978 0 691 13870 1
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... 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 ...

Lacan’s Mirrors

Edmund Leach, 2 July 1981

The Talking Cure: Essays in Psychoanalysis and Language 
edited by Colin MacCabe.
Macmillan, 230 pp., £20, February 1981, 0 333 23560 6
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... 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 ...

Homelessness

Terry Eagleton, 20 June 1996

States of Fantasy 
by Jacqueline Rose.
Oxford, 183 pp., £20, March 1996, 0 19 818280 5
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... 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 ...

First Impressions

Fredric Jameson: Slavoj Žižek’s Paradoxes, 7 September 2006

The Parallax View 
by Slavoj Žižek.
MIT, 434 pp., £16.95, March 2006, 0 262 24051 3
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... 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 ...

Episteme, My Arse

Christopher Tayler: Laurent Binet, 15 June 2017

The Seventh Function of Language 
by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor.
Harvill Secker, 390 pp., £16.99, May 2017, 978 1 910701 58 4
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... 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 ...

Secretly Sublime

Iain Sinclair: The Great Ian Penman, 19 March 1998

Vital Signs 
by Ian Penman.
Serpent’s Tail, 374 pp., £10.99, February 1998, 1 85242 523 7
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... 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 ...

Paul de Man’s Proverbs of Hell

Geoffrey Hartman, 15 March 1984

... 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 Work 
by Peter Brooks.
Harvard, 325 pp., £39.95, May 1993, 0 674 07724 5
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... 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 ...

English Words and French Authors

John Sturrock, 8 February 1990

A New History of French Literature 
edited by Denis Hollier.
Harvard, 1280 pp., £39.95, October 1989, 0 674 61565 4
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... 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 ...

Normal People

Sheila Fitzpatrick: SovietSpeak, 25 May 2006

Everything Was For Ever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation 
by Alexei Yurchak.
Princeton, 331 pp., £15.95, December 2005, 0 691 12117 6
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... 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 ...

Peas in a Matchbox

Jonathan Rée: ‘Being and Nothingness’, 18 April 2019

Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenology and Ontology 
by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Sarah Richmond.
Routledge, 848 pp., £45, June 2019, 978 0 415 52911 2
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... 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 ...

Dégringolade

Perry Anderson: The Fall of France, 2 September 2004

La France qui tombe 
by Nicolas Baverez.
Perrin, 134 pp., €5.50, January 2004, 2 262 02163 5
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La Face cachée du ‘Monde’: Du contre-pouvoir aux abus de pouvoir 
by Pierre Péan and Philippe Cohen.
Mille et Une Nuits, 631 pp., €24, February 2003, 2 84205 756 2
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... 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 ...

Palestinianism

Adam Shatz, 6 May 2021

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said 
by Timothy Brennan.
Bloomsbury, 437 pp., £20, March 2021, 978 1 5266 1465 0
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... fuel misperceptions. While he praised the work of Orientalist scholars, including Louis Massignon, Jacques Berque and Maxime Rodinson, he also sometimes implied that the entire tradition of Orientalist scholarship was a corrupted form of power-knowledge. But then what distinguished an eminent figure like Berque from Lewis or from a vulgar propagandist such as ...

Union Sucrée

Perry Anderson: The Normalising of France, 23 September 2004

Le Rappel à l’ordre: Enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires 
by Daniel Lindenberg.
Seuil, 94 pp., €10.50, November 2002, 2 02 055816 5
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Esquisse pour une auto-analyse 
by Pierre Bourdieu.
Raisons d'Agir, 142 pp., €12, February 2004, 2 912107 19 9
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La République mondiale des lettres 
by Pascale Casanova.
Seuil, 492 pp., €27.50, March 1999, 2 02 035853 0
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... were, in one way or another, marked by time in the colony: Braudel, Camus, Althusser, Derrida, Nora – Bourdieu developed work along two major lines, study of the mechanisms of inequity in education, and of stratification in culture. These were the inquiries – Homo Academicus, La Distinction, Les Règles de l’art – that made him ...

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