Sartre wrote volume one of Critique of Dialectical Reason (CDR) between 1957 & 1960, & it was published in France in 1960. The first English edition appeared in 1976. A second, unfinished volume appeared posthumously in 1982.

CDR was a massive attempt to describe the minutiae of human interaction & Sartre's last major philosophical work. Its thesis statement can be drawn from its thematic antecedent, Search for Method: cultural order is irreducible to natural order.

Rhetoric professor Michael McGee (1989) said that CDR was lost in the avant garde reconstruction of Foucault, Lacan, & Gilles DeLeuze. In CDR, life was an endless occasion of totalizations, detotalizations, & retotalizatons on a field of scarcity. We called the temporalization of events "history."

On the other hand, structuralists & their scholarly progeny forever looked for an objective entity called "context" with which to examine their subjects. Sartre insisted that even "context" was reducible to further concerted human effort, which he called "praxis."

Because of the scant attention that CDR has got from professional scholars (except for McGee), it holds a truly grand secret, which is that it was more or less the weapon with which orthodox psychiatric medicine was challenged in the 1960s by R.D. Laing et al. Laing synopsized CDR in 1964's Reason & Violence; terms & elements in CDR fairly drip from Sanity, Madness & Family & The Politics of Experience.

Rebel French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1961) used Sartre's quite original ideas of the pledged group & the terror of the brotherhood to show how violent revolution by oppressed peoples would produce a cultural catharsis & a healthy nationalism.

I know of no other original study, treatise, or even novel that uses the themes & concepts of CDR. A CDR-oriented examination of, say, American domestic relations proceedings might be a worthy endeavor.

Chedzoy does a very good job bring the story of Caroline Norton to life. While very accurate, Chedzoy avoids the common tendency of biographers to dwell on dates and times but focuses instead on Caroline's actual life, which was remarkable. She was born into a family situation which forced her to marry a man which she did not love, and he soon became physically abusive to her. She was close friends with William Melbourne, who became Prime Minister of England, and her husband accused her of "criminal conversation" (a euphemism for adultery) even though he knew very well that this was completely untrue. Caroline's husband eventually took her three children from her and would not allow them to be returned to her until one of them died due to poor medical treatment. In retaliation, Caroline went to Parliament and over the course of a few years reformed the British laws for women. Overall, this was a very good book, and I would certainly recommend it to anyone interested in women's rights, poetry and literature (Caroline wrote many poems and novels-- during her life, she was compared to Byron and thought of as more talented that E.B. Browning), or English history in general.

I read this right after I finished The Distant Lands, inspired to read both books by news of the author's deaath in Paris on August 13. So I have read some 1500 pages of Green since he died. Some of the things in this book were annoying, but if one looks at the whole as painting a picture I believe one can see a reason for the sometimes tedious detail. His characters sure do a lot of kissing, and apparently the central character and her husband were more uxorious than the usual fictional characters, which is saying quite a bit.

This translation--unfortunately the only one of the Sand Child-- misses the mark in conveying an accurate representation of Ben Jelloun's novel. There are a number of glaring errors and omissions of original text. If it is at all possible to read the work in the original, one must. My rating is of the translation, not the original.

If you are interested in the a dynamic world of storytelling read The Sand Child. It takes you through many tales which weave in and out of social constructs. What constructs create a female? What constructs create a male?

When I read this novel it took me through a range of emotions. It took me into arid land and it made me feel as if I was experiencing The Sand Child's world.

This book question gender construction. It has all the makings of a wonderful novel. I loved it and it made me change my perspective on how I view my world.

Tahar Ben Jelloun is a master of the written word, able to weave into his novels issues of social and political concern while at the same time composing sometimes humorous, often lyrical, and always thoughtful story-lines.

An important read for anyone who wants to know how psychoanalysis might be made to deal with cultural interpellation, and the questions of contemporary subjectivity. However, Lacan's language is dense and confusing, and the translation doesn't help.

If you merely dip into Lacan's masterwork, I cannot recommend too highly parts two and three of Function and field. Here's a sample on the ontological roots of the symbolic:

Man's freedom is entirely inscribed within the constituting triangle of the renunciation that he imposes on the desire of the other by the menace of death for the enjoyment of the fruits of his serfdom - of the consented-to sacrifice of his life for the reasons that give to human life its measure - and of the suicidal renunciation of the vanquished partner, depriving of his victory the master whom he abandons to his inhuman solitude.

Of these figures of death, the third is the supreme detour through which the immediate particularity of desire, reconquering its ineffable form, rediscovers in negation a final triumph. And we must recognize its meaning, for we have to deal with it. This third figure is not in fact a perversion of the instinct, but rather that desperate affirmation of life that is the purest form in which we recognize the death instinct.

The subject says 'No!' to this intersubjective game of hunt-the-slipper in which desire makes itself recognized for a moment, only to become lost in a will that is the will of the other. Patiently, the subject withdraws his precarious life from the sheeplike conglomerations of the Eros of the symbol in order to affirm it at the last in an unspoken curse.

So when we wish to attain in the subject what was before the serial articulations of speech, and what is primordial to the birth of symbols, we find it in death, from which his existence takes on all the meaning it has.... To say that this mortal meaning reveals in speech a centre exterior to language is more than a metaphor; it manifests a structure.

As another reviewer remarked, there are doubts as to how faithful translations of Lacan's "Ecrits" are, and I am therefore referring here to the original, published by "Editions du Seuil". These two volumes are a treasure trove of gems, perhaps first and foremost Lacan's treatment of the square root of -1, pp.183-5, volume 2 of the paperback edition, 1970. A tour-de-force indeed: he manages to link the square root of -1 to a phallus, even though, in French, you cannot pun on "root" the way you can in English. Lacan has a marvellous knack for stringing together words which, taken individually, mean something, and yet, once gone through Lacan's logorrhoea, end up devoid of any imaginable, and unimaginable, meaning whatsoever. Thus Lacan replaces the Saussurean sign (signifier and signified) with the Lacanian sign, entirely bereft of any possible signification. His Ecrits, however, suffer from one shortcoming: his venomous threatening innuendoes, usually in footnotes, which remain all too significant. A bitter viper, with the intelligence of a decerebrated viper, that is not even successful at being completely incoherent. Still, 5 stars for trying.

i have studied gide for many years now and have a very large collection of his books as well as books on him....i was greatly disappointed by sheridan's bulky text on gide. unfortunately sheridan has decided to give us an intimate portrait of the life of gide that reads like a tabloid trash article. it is of less importance who gide slept with than the ideas that he puts forth over his lifetime that helped change the face of literature. previous biographies of gide have had to divide their time between the facts of his life and criticism of his books because the two are virtually inseparable. sheridan has opted for more of the former and less of the latter but never really makes a convincing case for doing this. he finds fault with many previous biographers, many of them intimates of gide, but never explains why his interpretation of the facts is better. i would suggest reading germaine bree or jean delay or justin o'brien's books on gide. sheridan's ideas fall from the realm of fact into the realm of fiction.

A biographer has a unique perspective on his subject: he can choose how to present the subject whatever way he likes. In this book, Sheridan has opted to present Gide as an artist who is constantly struggling between his homosexual nature and his Protestant upbringing which does not necessarily agree with the former. Contrary to the former reviewer, I do believe that Sheridan has successfully tied together Gide's works and his real life sexual orientation. In presenting Gide as such, Sheridan has demonstrated time and time again how such a life is reflected very closely in his works. My only wish is that Sheridan can present a much more balance view between Gide's sexual life and his other life. Literaly the first half of the book (300 pages plus), contain very detail sexual life of Gide. Many times it feels too overwhelming. Only when you get to Gide's association with Communist Part and his trip to the USSR (half way in the book), do you get more interesting aspects of Gide's life. I think Sheridan's description of Gide's relationship with his wife (Madelaine) and how Gide's dealt with her death, is superb. But this comes almost at the end of the book. If it is not for it's lack of balance, I would have given this book a 5-star rating.

The extraordinary work and life of one of the twentieth century's most influential authors is brought to vivid life in this magisterial biography. Sheridan has a complete understanding of both the period and the literature; his precis of the novels and diaries &c are succinct and his own written style is elegant and to the point.

Although well researched by P. Petitfils, this biography suffers from an absolutely atrocious translation. Obviously, Alan Sheridan does not know idiomatic English and is a lousy translator. He has translated literally from the French and it is most painful to read, in spite of a fascinating subject.