How the French Read

For a long time, French intellectuals set the agenda for Anglophone critics' understanding of reading. In the 1960s, the journal Tel Quel, led by Philippe Sollers, could count on the collaboration of intellectuals and writers such as Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida. Finely attuned to the most innovative intellectual movements of its time, Tel Quel set an ambitious intellectual agenda: to develop a radically modern theory of texts and textuality. In its pages, linguists and literary critics allied themselves with Marxists and other philosophers and with psychoanalysts to show us that the world had become word. The task of the critic was no longer to be the simple decoding of literary meaning, but to follow the slipstream of the forever elusive signifier, and thus to grasp the production of meaning in every medium.

What came to be known as "French theory," or simply as "theory," exploded the traditional boundaries of literary criticism and prepared the ground for new kinds of critical interventions in new kinds of meaning making not just in literature but across media and technologies. Paradoxically, then, a revolutionary movement that began with writers and literary critics, and which took for granted that certain writers (Lautréamont, Mallarmé) had anticipated the new theoretical insights into the nature of language and signification, contributed to the undoing of the hegemony of literature and literary criticism in the humanities.

All over the world, literary intellectuals followed the siren call from France. The old editors, philologists, and biographers in their elbow-patched tweed jackets and sagging corduroys were no match for the latest French haute culture. If 1966, which saw the publication of Foucault's The Order of Things and Lacan's Ecrits, remains the annum mirabilis of the new movement, 1967 runs a close second, for in that year Derrida published Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena.

When did it all come to an end? Was it with the news that Althusser had strangled his wife (1980)? With the death of Barthes (1980), Lacan (1981), and Foucault (1984)? With the publication of Kristeva's Black Sun (1987)? Even Deleuze, who died in 1995, had published his major works by 1980. While each intellectual has his or her own specific trajectory, it is safe to say that by 1990, "French theory" had reached middle-age: still handsome, perhaps, but no longer an incandescent youth.

In the English-speaking world, the legacy of "theory" lingers on, not just in the dominance of "critique" and the hermeneutics of suspicion, but in the widespread rejection of any mention of the acting and intending subject. Many critics remain persuaded that the subject is to be banished (the author is dead!), or if not entirely banished, then understood as a more or less performative effect of discourses or of the signifier or simply as an ideological illusion. For such critics, texts are not intentional acts or utterances, but simply effects of a specific logic of signification, or of the "materiality of the signifier." That there is a considerable tension between such views and the widespread Anglo-American investment in identity politics is obvious. For if the subject is dead, what does it matter whether the writer (or the reader) is a woman or a black American or a white bourgeois male?

Of late, such beliefs have come under pressure. Gone are the days when Anglophone literary critics could take for granted that their task was to perform some form of ideological unmasking through close reading. We are now in the middle of a veritable revolution of ideas about reading. Dissatisfaction both with the paradigm of critique, in which the critic always appears as more knowing than the author, and with the paradigm of close reading, emerged already in 1997 when Eve Sedgwick contrasted the old "paranoid" with a new "reparative" reading.¹ In 2000, Franco Moretti rejected the essentially canonizing "theological exercise" of close reading, defined as a "very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously." Literary historians and critics faced with large quantities of data, he argued, should take up "distant reading": instead of reading the literary...