"The nihilism of the imaginary, as it is elaborately anatomized in The Family Idiot, is [not] a mere nineteenth-century curiosity or a local feature of some specifically French middle-class culture; nor is it a private obsession of Jean-Paul Sartre himself. Turning things into images, abolishing the real world, grasping the world as little more than a text or sign-system–this is notoriously the very logic of our own consumer society, the society of the image or the media event . . . [The Family Idiot] may well speak with terrifying immediacy [today]."–Fredric Jameson, on the unabridged edition "New York Times"