It was not long ago that one prefecture of french culture was reinventing the idea of authorship while another one was trying to kill it off. The New Wave movement and post-structuralism, fundamental opposites in almost every respect, emerged at the same cultural moment. Roland Barthcs's Writing Degree Zero (1953) and François Truffaut's seminal essay in Cahiers du cinéma that instated auteur criticism (the first phase of the New Wave) appeared less than a year apart; the appearance of Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1961) coincided with the triumph of New Wave filmmaking; and in the interval between 1966 and 1970, which saw the publication of The Order of Things, Of Grammatology, and S/Z, Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of the New Wave critic-directors, released fourteen feature films, including four masterworks. In its classic phase poststructuralism was fixated on the written word, involved disciplined thought inflected by mainstream Continental philosophy, took on itself the burden of refashioning modern European history along Marxist lines, and could be uncompromisingly rectitudinous. The New Wave spoke the language of images, involved a loose and—except for its radical stylistics—rather tame avant-gardism, valued an aleatory, free-form aesthetic over political commitment, assailed mainstream French culture, and championed alternative forms of cultural production such as American popular movies. Yet the teleologies were similar: to inscribe a unique place in the history of authorship. To supplant the biographical author from the textual site, one of the primary motives of poststructuralism, was to make the collective space available for a higher entity, the philosopher-critic who is the author not of individual texts but of textuality, the social meaning of texts. In the same way, in claiming the textual site for a film author—a radical conception for the time—the auteur critics scripted a role for themselves that they would subsequently occupy as film directors.
NUCLEAR THEORY DEGREE ZERO, WITH TWO CHEERS FOR DERRIDA