Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) has justly attracted great respect and attention for its account of Western perceptions and representations of the Orient, but the English-speaking world has for too long been unaware of another classic in the same field which appeared in France only a year later. Alain Grosrichard's The Sultan's Court is a fascinating and careful deconstruction of Western accounts of "Oriental despotism" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing particularly on portrayals of the Ottoman Empire and the supposedly enigmatic and opaque structure of the despot's power and his court of viziers, janissaries, mutes, dwarfs, eunuchs and countless wives. Drawing on the writings of travelers and philosophers such as Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, Grosrichard goes further than merely cataloguing their intense fascination with the vortex of capriciousness, violence, cruelty, lust, sexual perversion and slavery which they perceived in the seraglio. Deftly and subtly using a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, he describes the process as one in which these leading Enlightenment figures were constructing a fantasmatic Other to counterpose to their project of a rationally based society. The Sultan's Court seeks not to refute the misconceptions but rather to expose the nature of the fantasy and what it can reveal about modern political thought and power relations more generally.

Concept and Form is a two-volume monument to the work of the philosophy journal the Cahiers pour l'Analyse (1966-69), the most ambitious and radical collective project to emerge from French structuralism. Inspired by their teachers Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, the editors of the Cahiers sought to sever philosophy from the interpretation of given meanings or experiences, focusing instead on the mechanisms that structure specific configurations of discourse, from the psychological and ideological to the literary, scientific, and political. Adequate analysis of the operations at work in these configurations, they argue, helps prepare the way for their revolutionary transformation. This first volume comprises English translations of some of the most important theoretical texts published in the journal, written by thinkers who would soon be counted among the most inventive and influential of their generation: Alain Badiou, Yves Duroux, Alain Grosrichard, Serge Leclaire, Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, and Francois Regnault. The book is complemented by a second volume, consisting of essays and interviews that assess the significance and legacy of the journal, and by an online edition of the full set of original Cahiers texts, produced by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London and accessible at cahiers.kingston.ac.uk.

Concept and Form is a two-volume monument to the work of the philosophy journal the Cahiers pour l'Analyse (1966-69), the most ambitious and radical collective project to emerge from French structuralism. Inspired by their teachers Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, the editors of the Cahiers sought to sever philosophy from the interpretation of given meanings or experiences, focusing instead on the mechanisms that structure specific configurations of discourse, from the psychological and ideological to the literary, scientific, and political. Adequate analysis of the operations at work in these configurations, they argue, helps prepare the way for their revolutionary transformation. Volume One of Concept and Form translates some of the most important theoretical texts from the Cahiers pour l'Analyse; this second volume collects newly commissioned essays on the journal, together with recent interviews with people who were either members of its editorial board or associated with its broader theoretical project. It aims to help reconstruct the intellectual context of the Cahiers, and to assess its contemporary theoretical legacy. Prefaced by an overview of the project's rigorous investment in science and conceptual analysis, the volume considers in particular the Cahiers' distinctive effort to link the apparently incommensurable categories of 'structure' and 'subject', so as to prepare for a new synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis. Contributors include Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Edward Baring, Jacques Bouveresse, Yves Duroux, Alain Grosrichard, Peter Hallward, Adrian Johnston, Patrice Maniglier, Tracy McNulty, Jean-Claude Milner, Knox Peden, Jacques Ranciere, Francois Regnault, and Slavoj Zizek.