Comrades

Mikhail Bakhtin

Look, we were not peers, but this innovative Russian theorist had an influence on me from my early school days. His ideas like "heteroglossia" really helped me develop my ideas about intertextuality (see my own "Buzzwords" section). We shared a belief that all language interrelates, and that words have meaning in relation to each other. Some people have gone so far as to say that I "discovered" Bakhtin "for a Western audience" (source). That makes me blush.

Tel Quel Group

Tel Quel was my set of cronies in intellectual deliberation. Connected to an avant-garde literary publication of the same name (1960–1982), Tel Quel included fellow French overachievers like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot, and Bernard-Henri Lévy—better known as BHL. Our publication—Tel Quel— popularized deconstruction, structuralism, and post-structuralism. Oh, and I was married to the journal's editor, Philippe Sollers.

Tel Quel's main interest was digging deep and reassessing the history of literary theories, but of course we made a bunch of earthshaking interventions with an avant-garde spin. We wanted to interpret the meaning of language politically. Oh—we were also associated with French Communism for a while, but we eventually moved on.

Tel Quel was many things to many people; as some writers have asked: "Literary journal, group, movement, ideology?" (source.) My response? Those—and much much more.

Philippe Sollers

My husband, intellectual equal, famous novelist, and fellow Tel Quel member, Philippe and I have had some good chats about politicized interpretations of history, how we can't objectively recount the past, and which of us will pick up cat food on the way home from the seminar on jouissance. He really buoyed me up in the French intellectual scene and got me in eyeballs deep reading Freud and Bataille—writers who inspired my shift from linguistics to psychoanalysis. (That's like changing your major from Physics to Art History.)

Jane Gallop

I can't get into how cool this lady professor and cultural critic is without starting with a visual. She rocks the make-up and isn't afraid to have a come-hither look in a department photograph. (Go ahead, do your own comparison.)

She is known for dressing up for her students to reflect the works she is teaching, and she even wears fishnet stockings and high strappy heels to academic conferences. Sure, being hip in academia is an uphill battle, but she blows away all of those pashmina scarf–swathed women who have purposely bad haircuts (to cultivate that I'm-too-busy-theorizing to "care" about my looks look). And those leather pants?

In her words: I "call into question what a feminist is and should look like" (source). The best part is that she cites me (me!) as her muse of sorts. We don't need to be BFFs for me to feel at one with this feisty feminist. Check out this observation she made regarding seeing me at an academic conference:

She came onstage in brown-leather pants, and she was incredibly powerful because she was so smart and sexy. All the male professors who normally paid no attention to feminists took her more seriously, even though the reigning perception was that if you looked sexy, you would lose power. (source)

Rivals

Some Feminists

It's hard to have formidable rivals when you're at my level. People pretty much clear the way for me when I enter the proverbial room. That's doesn't mean that I don't have my arguments and disagreements. Let's take feminists, for example. Many people have described me as a feminist because I do work on motherhood and the significant developmental bond between child and mother. But slow down: one critic accurately described me as:

[...] hostile towards a feminism that merely rushes after "phallic power," or that merely wants to possess power, and her objection is based on the criticism that such feminist trends cannot work because they start from traditional representations of difference which ensure that difference will always be marginalized. (source).

Before you hang up on me, let me explain. What this astute critic is trying to say is that a lot of feminists have an us (women) vs. them (men) attitude and believe that women should try to gain patriarchal power (a.k.a. "The Law," "phallic power," "The Symbolic," and so on and so forth) because then they will be equal to men.

I say no. Thinking in that way means that you automatically believe that men are superior just because they are possessor of the Phallus (big deal!) and that what they have is something you need in order to stop being secondary. I honor women's power for what it is—they are not the margins of the male norm.

Multiculturalist Accusers

Look, like the description of "Some Feminists" above, here I am trying to convey that my rivals are not necessarily individuals, but entire groups who assemble for witch-hunts to go after female thinkers. In this case, many have accused me of ushering a self-righteous brand of politically correct multiculturalism and identity politics into American universities. Hey, now.

In my own words: ''Many of our American colleagues have taken what we [me and other French thinkers, like Derrida and Foucault] proposed and have simplified it, caricatured it and made it politically correct […]. I can no longer recognize myself" (source).

I sustain that even though I believe that language reveals a lot about oppression, some people ("feminist, gay and ethnic leaders") go nuts with those ideas to get on a soapbox and point a bony finger at everyone else. I am all about defending the individual and the special circumstances and meanings of his or her communication.