Foreword: Derrida and SubStance

There was a time when “French Theory” meant Structuralism. In those years, the late 1960s, the debate that had been raging in France was not very well understood in the US, even though the big names were already familiar to many: Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault… In literature departments, people were interested mostly in the Barthes/Picard polemics and in the conclusions of various conferences that dealt with “nouvelle critique.” The issues were those regarding the very notion of literature, and what should be done to enrich our understanding of how poems and novels actually worked. It was also a matter of importing non-canonical works into the list of reading musts: Sade, Artaud, Bataille, the New Novel and the “new New Novel”—meaning mostly Sollers and his Tel Quel epigones, long before they all turned their backs on “subversion” (a catch-word of fundamental importance at the time).