Why There Is No Poststructuralism in France: The Making of an Intellectual Generation by Johannes Angermuller (review)

Johannes Angermuller’s book reflects on the differences between late-twentieth-century literary theory in France and in the English-speaking world. While the debates between structuralism and post-structuralism that took place in France in the 1960s and 1970s strongly resonated in North America and in Europe, Angermuller notes that in France these debates drew to a close sooner than elsewhere, and that post-structuralism consequently had less of an impact on French intellectual life. French structuralism was one of several attempts to extend the prodigious growth of the exact sciences, made possible by their reliance on mathematics, empirical evidence, and shared methodological constraints. The question was whether this could be replicated in the humanities and social sciences. The growth, in the nineteenth century, of philology and archival work had increased the precision and reliability of history and literary history, created the new fields of comparative linguistics and comparative religious studies, and influenced the new disciplines of sociology and anthropology. But did philology and archival work truly help scholars understand the human spirit as manifested in these fields? Those who disagreed, like Wilhelm Dilthey, argued that the sciences of the mind were fundamentally different from the sciences of nature. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, in Russia, Central Europe, Denmark, and the United States, philosophers of science, psychologists, linguists, and literary scholars attempted to bring all disciplines under the banner of exact science. In France they were joined in the early 1950s by Lévi-Strauss, who believed that structural linguistics was the best model for a truly scientific anthropology. In his wake, in the 1960s and early 1970s, several French scholars applied the principles of structural linguistics to poetics, film studies, and art history. At the same time, a fresh interest in linguistics triggered a strong, imaginative wave of opposition to scientific and concept-based rationality. This debate, whose most prominent representatives were Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, was magnified by the student movements of the late 1960s and the sudden expansion of academic institutions in France and elsewhere. As Angermuller’s study shows, it was the new critique of rationalism rather than scientifically oriented structuralism that achieved so much success outside France, perhaps because by the time structural linguistics became influential in France, American linguists had already moved on to the generative-transformational grammar of Chomsky and his disciples. By contrast, many American scholars in literary studies and the humanities found Lacan and Derrida’s writings influential because they shared a common thread, yet the latter were spectacularly innovative. Jonathan Culler’s two important books Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975) and On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) clearly distinguish the two stages of French theory, thus playing a major role in the American success of the second stage. As Angermuller argues, in France the distinction was less clear. Both Barthes and Foucault developed a multiplicity of projects difficult to reduce to a single trend. Derrida, who remained faithful to his deconstructive approach, had fewer disciples in France. A powerful sociological interpretation of French theory, inspired by the work of Bourdieu, concludes this valuable and well-documented volume.