Alireza Taheri provides psychoanalytic psychotherapy in private practice in Toronto where he is also actively involved in teaching Lacanian theory at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. Alireza is a permanent faculty member of HamAva Psychoanalytic Institute in Tehran (Iran) where he teaches psychoanalytic theory and practice. He is also engaged in writing articles on philosophy and psychoanalysis and is presently the editor-in-chief and book review editor of Psychoanalytic Discourse (an independent international journal for the clinical, theoretical and cultural discussion of psychoanalysis).
Alireza Taheri's book provides the ultimate proof that a combination of Hegel's dialectics and Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is the best instrument to analyse the madness of our late capitalist modernity. Spectre of Madness is not yet another book on Hegel and Lacan - it is simply a book for everyone who wants to understand how things could have gone so wrong after Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history. - Slavoj Zizek, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London Taheri clearly and perceptively retraces the complexity of modern Western philosophy from Kant onward, using the key concept of Diremption. This book is a precious tool for anyone looking for an up-to-date examination of psychoanalysis through philosophical reflection. - Sergio Benvenuto, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council in Rome In Hegelian-Lacanian Variations on Late Modernity: Spectre of Madness, Alireza Taheri creatively recasts the notion of negativity at the intersection of German idealism and psychoanalysis. On the basis of a Lacanian rendition of Hegelian contradiction, Taheri's book meticulously and insightfully explores a series of irresolvable antinomies both organizing and unsettling human subjects. Kant famously asked 'What may I hope?' Taheri, on the basis of his wide-ranging assessment of the contradictions that make (and unmake) who we are, could be said to confront us with the equally important sobering question: 'For what may I not hope?' - Adrian Johnston, Department of Philosophy University of New Mexico