This is a short but dense book that presents three successive lectures that the New Left Review editor Perry Anderson gave on what he calls French "critical theory" but which nowadays we usually call (post)structuralism, which across chapters organized thematically touches on all the major players associated with this current, including Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, and provides an overall critique of their tendency from a Marxist point of view. (Habermas is also included, which I guess explains why Anderson opted for the more general term "critical theory").
One way that I definitely don't think this book should be used (though I did kinda use it this way anyway) is as a general introduction to poststructuralism, for which I'd instead recommend Perry's friend Fredric Jameson's The Years of Theory, which is a bit more conversational but does a good job outlining the basic "deal" of the same players plus some others. Anderson, on the other hand, is engaged in a more focused and interpretive project of trying to assess the overall import of the postructuralist current, which he ultimately judges as inadequate in ways partly tied to its attempt to recast social relations within the paradigm of language.
