Alain Grosrichard is Professor of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Literature at the University of Geneva and was a member of the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne. He has published widely on psychoanalysis and the history of literature.

What Said's Orientalism achieves in breadth, The Sultan's Court provides in depth: the precise outline-the elementary formula-of the sexual-political fantasy of 'Oriental Despotism' which structures our perception of the Muslim countries from the seventeenth century to our own times, and on to which Western ideology projects its own inconsistencies and repressed traumas. Combining French elegance and clarity of style with the highest conceptual stringency, this immensely readable book demonstrates the extraordinary potential of Lacanian pyschoanalysis for social analysis. A classic of the theory of ideology, to be ranged with the greatest achievements of Adorno, Foucault or Jameson!

Alain Grosrichard is Professor of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Literature at the University of Geneva and was a member of the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne. He has published widely on psychoanalysis and the history of literature.

What Said's Orientalism achieves in breadth, The Sultan's Court provides in depth: the precise outline-the elementary formula-of the sexual-political fantasy of 'Oriental Despotism' which structures our perception of the Muslim countries from the seventeenth century to our own times, and on to which Western ideology projects its own inconsistencies and repressed traumas. Combining French elegance and clarity of style with the highest conceptual stringency, this immensely readable book demonstrates the extraordinary potential of Lacanian pyschoanalysis for social analysis. A classic of the theory of ideology, to be ranged with the greatest achievements of Adorno, Foucault or Jameson!

Alain Grosrichard is Professor of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Literature at the University of Geneva and was a member of the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne. He has published widely on psychoanalysis and the history of literature.

What Said's Orientalism achieves in breadth, The Sultan's Court provides in depth: the precise outline-the elementary formula-of the sexual-political fantasy of 'Oriental Despotism' which structures our perception of the Muslim countries from the seventeenth century to our own times, and on to which Western ideology projects its own inconsistencies and repressed traumas. Combining French elegance and clarity of style with the highest conceptual stringency, this immensely readable book demonstrates the extraordinary potential of Lacanian pyschoanalysis for social analysis. A classic of the theory of ideology, to be ranged with the greatest achievements of Adorno, Foucault or Jameson!