Lacan: The Silent Partners »

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include First as Tragedy, Then as Farce; Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle; In Defence of Lost Causes; Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Living in the End Times, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock; and more.

Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the École normale supérieure and the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works, including Theory of the Subject, Being and Event, Manifesto for Philosophy, and Gilles Deleuze. His recent books include The Meaning of Sarkozy, Ethics, Metapolitics, Polemics, The Communist Hypothesis and Five Lessons on Wagner.

Joan Copjec is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.

The giant of Ljubljana marshals some of the greatest thinkers of our age in support of a dazzling re-evaluation of Jacques Lacan.

Library Journal

Jacques Lacan, who thought of himself as a psychoanalyst, was a much-talked-about, if somewhat mysterious, figure of the Parisian intellectual community from the 1920s until his death in 1980. His rewriting of Sigmund Freud's work, metaphysical speculations, tangled love life, and often stormy relations with other thinkers assured him a place at the top of the gossip list. For sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic iek (The Sublime Object of Ideology) and his 13 contributors, Lacan deserves meticulous attention. Their aim is to reveal the works Lacan drew on but didn't mention. Leading French philosopher Alain Badiou writes about the pre-Socratics; others explore the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry (not William!) James, Hegel, Badiou himself, and many others. The essays are carefully argued, though the prose in some doesn't seem to be quite English. The authors were almost bound to succeed in finding hidden references, for, admit it or not, nearly all philosophers are touched by the major thinkers. As iek and three of the contributors are Slovenian, the book offers a rare glimpse of Slovenian intellectual life. For all libraries with strong holdings in philosophy.-Leslie Armour, Dominican Univ. Coll., Ottawa Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.