A book that lives …

… Campus Week: The Brilliant French Catholic Literary Critic Who Revealed My Judaism – Tablet Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Haven’s lucid account of the theoretical throw-weight mustered by the symposium’s list of thinkers—not to mention the style points attributable to their egos and eccentricities—reveals a great deal of insight-in-hindsight, spiced occasionally with refreshing snark. (Jacques Lacan, for example, insisted that his silk underwear be hand laundered because “they were ‘fancy’ and ‘special,’” which elicited a gesture of scorn by the managers of the laundry, who were spotted “wadding them up and throwing them on the floor” by the graduate student who’d been charged with delivering said underwear.)