Challenging contemporary academic and intellectual culture, Patrick McGee writes experimentally about a series of thinkers who ruptured linguistic and social hierarchies: Marx, Nietzsche, Wilde, Lawrence, Gramsci, Wittgenstein, Bourdieu, Derrida, and Badiou. His method combines analysis, memoir, and polemic and is aimed particularly at students and teachers in the field of cultural studies. Influenced by Alain Badiou's Logiques des mondes, McGee uses his personal relation to theory and its institutions, not excluding his own ressentiment, to explore how thought enters a "common" existence as an event that can transform the individual life by transforming a world. Book jacket.