The Thinking of the Master: Bataille between Hegel and Surrealism: Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies

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.