1966 was the moment of structuralism's media breakthrough, but structuralism should not invade the year, homogenizing it. On the contrary, it's structuralism that needs to be placed in 1966, as it forms part of a larger political and social whole, a kind of cultural revolution of which it is more the symptom than the solution. So let's not let the tree hide the forest.
If the structuralists had anything in common, it was the scientific project they opposed to psychological or phenomenological analysis, their desire to move from experience to concept, or from humanism to specialism. From this perspective, science was understood not as experimentation, but as theory. Foucault wanted to "substitute system for meaning". This system, originating with Saussure and taken up by Lévi-Strauss, formed the common ground, the rallying point for the different specialties. For others, such as François Châtelet, a frequent columnist for the Nouvel Observateur and La Quinzaine littéraire in that year, the term structuralism was invented by his enemies, the Sartreans, but as such did not cover unity.
The rupture can be dated to autumn 1965. In the eyes of the educated public, philosophy had until then been Sartre and existentialism, with the most heated debates pitting Christian humanism against Marxist humanism. Now, Châtelet observes that the philosophies of consciousness, existence and experience "no longer correspond to the demands of the mind today, that we must come to the rigor of the concept". The distance between Foucault and Althusser may be great, but they both testify to the same desire to "consider texts as such, as works constituting culture and not as the products of contingent subjectivities".
The publication in January 1966 of the Russian formalists' anthology, Théorie de la littérature, was one of the major events of the year. This anthology, compiled by Tzvetan Todorov, brings together texts written in 1915 and 1930 by Futurist poets and linguists - notably the prodigious trio Shklovsky, Tynianov, Eikhenbaum - combining science and literature in the fight against symbolism and other literary archaisms. The book was a weapon in the search for a new alliance between science and literature around Tel Quel : it gave a history and a genealogy to structural linguistics, as well as to the poetics and literary theory that drew on it. The Russian formalists served as precursors to the structuralists and the literary avant-garde.
