Description: An engaging critique of Western misconceptions about the mysterious East. Alain Grosrichard's fascinating survey focuses particularly on portrayals of the Ottoman Empire by Western intellectuals and the supposedly enigmatic structure of the despot's court--the seraglio--with its viziers, janissaries, mutes, dwarfs, eunuchs, and countless wives.
Review Quotes: "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!"--Slavoj iek