These essays are critical explorations of different societal and cultural themes and phenomena, including love, life, worldviews, the human subject, time, politics, woman’s desire, art, cinema, architecture and literature. The various topics are approached from critical-philosophical, psychoanalytical and poststructuralist perspectives, in the process engaging with thinkers such as Plato, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, Kristeva and Ranciere. Their aim is to shed light on some areas where human experience and theoretical scrutiny converge, and to do so at a time when critical philosophical thinking is waning in the face of the superficiality that all too often marks communicational exchanges on social media.
Bert Olivier’s brilliantly argued compilation of essays is replete with penetrating insights into a wide panorama of critical concerns. Considerations of the deleterious consequences of neo-liberal capitalism on what Snyder (2004) calls the living dead in Psychoanalysis and social change are afforded as much painstaking attention as the plight of voiceless women in The Piano: What a woman wants. It is precisely Olivier’s ability to enter into and engage with the lived experiences of both men and women that makes his writing so compelling - and relevant to our times. Moreover, his depth of insight into a wide and diverse range of thinkers such as Plato, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, Kristeva and Ranciere evinces prodigious erudition and a master of the craft at work. Not only is Olivier’s book a tour de force of intellectual acumen, it is also a visceral delight as evident in The pleasure of food and the spiritual: Eat, Pray, Love and Babette’s Feast. From this we can infer that, far from being an abstruse, anaemic intellectual exercise, Olivier’s book is eminently readable, and is bound to appeal to both specialists in his field as well as informed readers.
When viewed as a whole, Olivier’s project resonates with Foucault’s (1977) view of the intellectual as something akin to a strategist the intellectual’s task is to make things more fragile so as to clear a path for others to engage in resistance against certain aspects of the regime of truth, if they choose and in ways they choose for themselves. Olivier more than fulfils this mandate in Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Culture and Society. N.A. Denis
