The Thinking of the Master

Book excerpt: Mastery of many sorts emerges in new configurations in Peter Burger's book: as an idea developed by Hegel in the master-slave dialectic in his Phenomenology of Spirit; as a quality embodied in the work of certain 20th century master-thinkers; and, not least, in the expertise of Burger himself, as he negotiates and clarifies a critical intersection of contemporary French and German thought. Burger here considers what several seminal thinkers - Bataille, Blanchot, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Heidegger, as well as novelist Michel Tournier - owe to Hegel's dialectic, and measures their accomplishment against the avant-garde project. Each of his essays in this volume stands alone as a valuable exposition of a significant strain of postmodern thought. Together, they illuminate much of the landscape of 20th-century intellectual and cultural history.