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“... is never serious. What is seriousness? It is, Kundera suggests in his introduction to his play Jacques and his Master, what literary critics can’t do without, the ingredient whose absence drives them to panic. ‘Serious is what someone is who believes what he makes others believe.’ A novelist who was serious in this sense would be in bad shape. The ...”

“... is to juxtapose famous ‘literary’ texts with lesser-known, ‘non-literary’ texts, such as Jacques Duval’s Des Hermaphrodits (1603), Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (also 1603) and Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588). He claims that a close study of Harsnett allows a ...”

“... an unhappy dream, the state of foster care in New York and the ‘indecipherable work of Jacques Lacan’. Lucille picks at the same thought. She shows Leo one of her poems (her verbs, according to her husband, are ‘excellent’): A woman sits by the window. She thinks And while she thinks, she despairs She despairs because she is who she is ...”

“... spy. In later years, happy in his relationship with Defert, Foucault remarked to the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan: ‘There will be no civilisation as long as marriage between men is not accepted.’ ‘Later still, visiting New York and San Francisco, he enjoyed the sexual freedom that their gay communities offered, and he also experimented with ...”

“... images. Similar reflections on the infantile development of the corporeal imago had been made by Jacques Lacan in his celebrated paper on the ‘mirror stage’ a decade earlier. In it he likens the achieved ego to a stadium and even a fortress, and in his 1958 lecture Paolozzi also refers to an ‘architectural anatomy’ that guided the making of his ...”

“... acutely conscious of just what a catastrophe human history has largely been – a ‘sewer’, as Jacques Lacan curtly described it. For the most part, the human narrative to date has been one of brutality and injustice, wretchedness and sweated labour. It remains so for many millions in our own time. If it did not, there would be no need to transform ...”

“... of her upbringing. As a young girl, she turned towards her brother, Charles (here called ‘Jacques’), who enjoyed – and, for his sister, represented – a certain freedom from the strictures that their mother sought to impose; but Charles, ‘with his gluttonous and easy ways’, was not someone Laure could truly ‘speak to’. Later, it was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the child with an unfilletted fish. A mirror is propped against the wall in a little homage to Jacques Lacan. The blonde young woman, to the irritation of the invisible piano-player, now puts a record of a sexy dance on the player and pulls the fish-gutter to his feet. The baby doesn’t like this at all and grizzles. When the pair conclude their ...”

“... ecosystem. Theorists have tracked ‘the gaze’ through many phases of European art since Jacques Lacan lent the concept its current complexion. Commonly they salute this conceptual tool as if it were some macho, malevolent dictator, a habit Belting too falls in with. Of the 14th century he writes: ‘The gaze was demanding pictures of the world ...”

“... right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who ...”

“... André Green’s The Tragic Effect. Green is a French psychoanalyst associated with the school of Jacques Lacan. Like Evans, he is a hedgehog: a man dominated by a single, all-embracing idea. For Green, the Oedipus complex lies at the heart of tragic experience, and he pursues it not only through Shakespeare’s Othello, but in ...”

“... him sound more like an existentialist than a materialist. His Lukács is an exotic mixture of Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou, a thinker who breaks with evolutionism for the ‘radical contingency’ of the revolutionary act. If Rees risks taking the novelty out of Lukács, Žižek makes him sound more like an avant-garde Parisian than a Hungarian ...”

“... 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 into the bibliography. We hear ...”

“... it shared significant preoccupations with a new generation of theorists, including Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Both the new novelists and the new theorists detested Balzacian realism and psychological character studies, and embraced a formalist view of language, embedded in an ...”