The Thinking of the Master: Bataille between Hegel and Surrealism

Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies

by Peter Bürger, Richard Block (Translation)

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.

Genres: Theory

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992