Book excerpt: Includes twenty-two interviews--many appearing here for the first time in English and one conducted expressly for this volume. These provocative discussions with key figures in contemporary arts and letters touch upon topics as diverse as the American literary academy, Proust, neuroscience, and the American Left. The interviews elucidate such difficult ideas as abjection, intertextuality, the semiotic and the symbolic, and the effect of aesthetic revolution on social change.