As discussed in Lecture XIV, structuralism dominated French intellectual life from the 1950s on. The decline in the significance of ‘classical’ structuralism, which set in towards the end of the 1970s, did little to change this. For at least some of the so-called post- or neo-structuralist authors who rose so rapidly to prominence remained very much indebted to the legacy of structuralism. This made it tremendously difficult for non-structuralist humanities scholars and social scientists to make their voices heard within France, particularly because such a stance was generally criticized or even denounced as ‘subjectivism’. It is thus with some bitterness that the authors we are about to consider describe the period of structuralist hegemony. Cornelius Castoriadis, for instance, referred to a ‘linguistic epidemic’, which made clear thinking very difficult as a result of its ‘simplistic pseudo-model of language’ (Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, p. 120). The structuralists' ‘hegemony’ meant that certain nonstructuralist French thinkers were for a long time more influential outside of France than inside it, because their writings did not face such huge (structuralist) barriers to reception in other countries. This has begun to change only recently. French intellectuals are now ready to acknowledge the significance of anti-structuralist thinkers (see also Lecture XX).