When I go to academic conferences, I'm usually struck by how incredibly polite everyone always is. Even the most mediocre papers get complimented for their "contribution" and the speakers are thanked and asked to elaborate on their ideas. There are exceptions to this rule of academic politeness, based on age: on the one hand, the cocky graduate student who thinks they already know pretty much everything that is worth knowing, on the other, the cantankerous older (inevitably male) professor whose contempt for newfangled ideas impresses itself on every line he utters. While I was probably the former type in my youth (I hope that I have learned some much-needed humility since), Raymond Tallis is definitely the latter.

If you read Tallis's earlier works, such as In Defence of Realism or Not Saussure, there is already an oppositional, iconoclastic tone on display. In those works, however, it is somewhat counterbalanced by the fact that Tallis has a reasonable point to make about the shortcomings of theory. Theorrhoea and After, by contrast, has stripped away much of that adventurous sense of critique and instead turned into an unadulterated diatribe of anger and resentment.

A lot of what Tallis includes in this volume he has published elsewhere. I mostly read this book for its chapter on Jacques Lacan - "The Strange Case of Jacques L." - which merely restates the points from Not Saussure about the problems of the mirror stage, together with complaints about Lacan's "unreadable" style and accusations that he is only famous because he hoodwinked people with his personal charisma. You know what? Both those things are true, Prof. Tallis, but there is even *more* to Lacan than that, as a number of recent groundbreaking works inspired by Lacanian ideas have shown.

Tallis's position, though, is that if he doesn't like or understand it, then no one should. There is so much arrogance and self-righteousness in both his rhetorical style and his grumpy-old-man opinions, many of which are as baseless and subjective as the positions he attacks, that it becomes impossible to take him seriously. I mean, just look at his title: "theorrhoea," a combination of "theory" and "diarrhea"? That kind of arrogant contempt tells you everything you need to know about the man and his work. ( )