SOURCE: “Never Say Why?” in Diacritics, Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer, 1979, pp. 17-29.

In the following excerpt, Blanchard offers an exegesis critical of Lyotard's Économie libidinale.

If one were to go, one by one, over all the articles in Diacritics that deal with this or that manifestation of Continental philosophical and literary criticism, one would probably put the pile of issues back on the stack and sigh: what next? For it seems that, for the last ten years or so, much of structuralist criticism has been engaged in a constant game of brinkmanship and one-up-manship. Most of the linguistically oriented criticism, based on the work of Jakobson and Levi-Strauss, developed as a reaction against the school of psychological and historical criticism which had established itself in splendid isolation from all related disciplines, including a more recent existential psychology. This stage of structural criticism, which prevailed in France during the sixties...