Mastery of many sorts emerges in new configurations in Peter Burger's The Thinking of the Master: as an idea developed by Hegel in the masterslave dialectic in his Phenomenology of Spirit: as a quality embodies in the work of certain twentieth-century maitres de pensee, or "masterthinkers", and, not least, in the expertise of Burger himself, as he negotiates and clarifies a critical intersection of contemporary French and German thought. Author of the classic Theory of the Avant-Garde, Burger here considers what several seminal thinkers--Batille, Blanchot, Barthes, Foucaut, Lecan, Derrida, Heidegger, as well as novelist Michael Tournier--owe to Hegel's dialectic, and measures their accomplishments against the avantgarde project. Succinct, witty, and instructive, each of his essays in this volume stands along as a valuable exposition of a significant strain of postmodern thought. Together, they illuminate much of the landscape of twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history.