If you, like me, wished to read a book that would invite you into an unfinished story of collective human expression in the making, wait no more. Here is that book, written by Aristides Gazetas, and published by Peter Lang which just became available. This remarkable volume is a creative and intellectual effort that has been worth the wait and is more than its worth its weight.

The insights of the author Gazetas present startling new modes of understanding passions and thoughts through ways social processes are reinforced and challenged. The book may be read at many levels. A film-buff will enjoy this as a chronicle of how cultural identities are influenced through film narratives and how they mediate as creative reflectors of social identities challenging one other. A scholar may appreciate the subtle sensitivity with which multiple metonymies may be understood through the looking glass of `self/other' (Baudrilland),`power/knowledge' (Foucault),`presence/absence' (Derrida), `realism/illusion' (Lacan) and `fact/fiction' (Lyotard). A policy maker could draw inferences on management of differences and diversity in the design of educational curricula within post-modern paradigms. The book is a powerful reminder of how illusions of identities are mistaken for real.

This pioneering work strands together, for the first time, five different post-structural perspectives, without deconstructing any of them. The author's bias favouring Lacan and Foucault does seap through from time to time but I do not mind that. The political nature of representation is recognised. The wealth of images that visual media both enable and pervade in human conciousness are examined from the perspective of lived worlds and also from the meanings that arise from this endeavour in an evolutionary and discontinuous perspective.

Surprisingly, the author does not discuss fantasies as specific self-level coping responses nor distinguish them from manifestations of collective defences. Yet, the struggle between representation and illusion comes through in all of the discourses. The language is terse, at times demanding. Precision has clearly been at a premium in penning this work. I believe, this book, apart from being one of the most intellectually stimulating reads of the new millenium, is a significant contribution to the understanding of narrative discourses within politics of representation.

If you enjoyed Kaja Silverman's `Threshold of the Visible World', with her collage of images from still photography, this is a journey that takes the reader way beyond that..beyond celluloid itself. I expect this book to soon be and remain on the best sellers' list for a long time.