Dancing with Fire's definitions

Ibn Al-Khattab

He was a Muslim guerilla fighter and financier working with Chechen Mujahideen in the First Chechen War and the Second Chechen War.

Ibn Al-Khattab was falsely reported dead when Guantanamo captive Omar Mohammed Ali Al Rammah faced the allegations that he witnessed Khattab being killed in an Ambush in Duisi, a village in the Pankisi Gorge of Georgia on 28 April 2002. Khattab later survived a heavy-calibre bullet wound to the stomach and a landmine explosion. He was killed during the night of March 19-20, 2002, when a Dagestani messenger hired by the Russian FSB gave Khattab a poisoned letter. Chechen sources said that the letter was coated with "a fast-acting nerve agent, possibly sarin or a derivative." The messenger, a Dagestani double agent known as Ibragim, was reportedly tracked down and killed a month later in Azerbaijan on Shamil Basayev‘s orders. Ibn Al-Khattab was succeeded by Emir Abu al-Walid.

by Dancing with Fire October 3, 2011

Jacques Lacan

It would be fair to say that there are few twentieth century thinkers who have had such a far-reaching influence on subsequent intellectual life in the humanities as Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s “return to the meaning of Freud” profoundly changed the institutional face of the psychoanalytic movement internationally. His seminars in the 1950s were one of the formative environments of the currency of philosophical ideas that dominated French letters in the 1960s and’70s, and which has come to be known in the Anglophone world as “post-structuralism.”

Both inside and outside of France, Jacques Lacan’s work has also been profoundly important in the fields of aesthetics, literary criticism and film theory. Through the work of Louis Pierre Althusser (and more lately Ernesto Laclau, Jannis Stavrokakis and Slavoj Zizek), Lacanian theory has also left its mark on political theory, and particularly the analysis of ideology and institutional reproduction.

by Dancing with Fire October 4, 2011