The Thinking of the Master - Bataille between Hegel and Surrealism

Mastery of many sorts emerges in new configurations in Peter BÜrger's The Thinking of the Master: 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 twentieth-century maÎtre-penseurs, or "master thinkers"; and, not least, in the expertise of BÜrger himself as he negotiates and clarified a critical intersection of contemporary French and German thought. The author of the classic Theory of the Avant-Garde, BÜrger here considers what several seminal thinkers--among them Bataille, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida--owe to Hegel's dialectic and measures their accomplishments against the avant-garde project. Succinct, witty, and instructive, each of his essays stands alone as a valuable exposition of a significant strain of postmodern thought.