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).

While US campuses were busy with Structuralism, a select group of initiates were laboring in France to understand what a new voice was getting at under the term "grammatology," and why the strange insistence on "différance." To become a structuralist, it had been enough to get acquainted with Saussure and linguistics, but in order to get a glimpse of what grammatology meant, it became necessary to embark on a difficult voyage through the thick of modern philosophy, especially Heidegger. To convert to post-structuralism (soon to be known as "deconstruction"), one had to labor a lot, learn German and ancient Greek, etc. This was exciting, and the perfect challenge for normaliens who didn't know what to do with their classical training.

It was thus only natural that when we started SubStance in 1971, we wanted to convey as much as we could of what then bore the most esoteric appeal, and could provoke the old guard into the heated challenges that we—young as we were—relished. If for our first issue we had asked for the patronage of Barthes, Crews and Faye (who obliged in a most forthcoming way) we quickly turned our attention to Derrida.¹ With the hubris so typical of those years of emphatic theoretical preaching, we dedicated a full section of our issue no. 4 (1973) to him under the title: "Literature and Philosophy? The Dessemination of Derrida."² We were obviously delighted when the opportunity arose in 1974 to publish an important excerpt from Gayatri Spivak's translation of On Grammatology,³ [End Page 3] for which Derrida expressed his gratitude, saying "Je lis aussi SubStance avec beaucoup d'intérêt et j'ai été heureux que vous y ayez publié un chapitre de De la Grammatologie."

This was all part of the "French Theory" saga that François Cusset has recounted with much intelligent detail. It should be said however, that at SubStance, even though we remained very much interested in Derrida in the ensuing years, we did not espouse what was to establish for more than a decade a crushing monopoly under the label "deconstruction"—a term that Derrida himself encouraged, while well aware of its shortcomings. Our interests comprised a variety of philosophical and epistemic works that we tried to present to the intellectual public in the US throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with Deleuze and Serres at the forefront. A post-modern synthesis was impossible, as everybody realized, and Derrida reigned unchallenged.

It remains to distinguish in this heritage what provoked truly creative advances, and what was mere froth atop the wave. The present issue of SubStance, true to its founding principles, attempts to do just that. This is our way or echoing, with much respect, the forceful appeal of Derrida, a major thinker who helped shape our own times, and whose work will now be read in a new light, its provocative creativity intact.