Comrades

Jacques Derrida

Although we were schoolmates at the École Normale Supérieure, we didn't become tight until later, when I hooked him up with a teaching post at Le Mans. I did the full court press with the school's headmaster.

I also had to give advice that likely rubbed Jackie the wrong way—like when I told him to drop all of that philosophical gobbledygook (it's too threatening to the status quo) and get down with administering exams and getting results out of his students. In other words, I told him to get dull so he could be gainfully employed.

Obviously, old Jacques didn't take that advice, and when he got a better gig at the Sorbonne, he snatched it up. Well, no hard feelings; we would continue to be friends and collaborators on such exhilarating tasks as administering oral exams for the École de Haute Études Commerciales. What riotous times we had.

Hélène Cixous

Excessively clever French theorists stick together. Hélène was definitely one of my people. We started the journal Poetics together, and she appointed me to an important advisory council for the University of Paris. In fact, she threw such academic bones to Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze as well. She knew how to build a network.

But enough about cronyism. Cixous took a liking to my idea of the pre-text, which is all of those Post-Its, notebooks, drafts, and slips of paper that get tacked to a corkboard and eventually form a narrative.

Tzvetan Todorov

Tzvetan and I shared a wild passion for narratives. Sure, we loved a good read, but it was really the narrative structure that floated our collective boat. Over a nice bottle of Côtes du Rhône, this Bulgarian literary theorist and I would pick apart plot structure, focusing on the minutiae of sequence, flashbacks, foreshadowing, and other issues of time and narrative. We once killed an entire platter of charcuterie just discussing the role of in medias res in narrative structures.

Oh, and credit where credit is due: it was Tzvetan who came up with the word "Narratology."

Roland Barthes

I had a real bromance with this fellow admirer of Saussurean linguistics. We were both firmly under the umbrella of Structuralism, but we had an "open relationship," so to speak. We both loved discussing the all-important triumvirate of story-narrative-narrating, but Barthes stood out for believing that these three entities had a hierarchical order, whereas I just saw them as a great stew of ideas.

Rivals

You may find this enormously disappointing, but I did not have rivals, so to speak. I don't know if people were afraid to critique me because I was a member of what may be considered the Sopranos of Structuralism, or because my ideas just weren't that threatening, or because Post-Structuralism just undertook a bloodless coup of Structuralism. It's anybody's guess.

I will say that the Post-Structuralists really muscled in on the theory scene, sort of pushing us Structuralists aside and turning us into the old guard. They were never our rivals, through. In fact, a lot of Structuralists—Foucault, Baudrillard, and my good buddy Roland Barthes—"converted" to Post-Structuralism, and it was all very benevolent. There was still maximum respect between the two theoretical camps.

It's important to point out that our ideas weren't exactly aligned, however. We Structuralists believe that all systems have a coherent meaning, whereas Post-Structuralists believe that systems exist but identify them all as incoherent and ambiguous. We think that systems can provide meaning; they say that meanings are multiple—there is never just one. We believe in universal truths; they believe in difference, multiplicity, and contradiction. We agreed to disagree.