THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL DISCOURSE MARC ANGENOT McGill University Ihave been asked to write a few pages to introduce my work, which is almost entirely published in French, to my English-speaking and English-teaching colleagues. I regard this as an exciting opportunity to discuss with readers coming from a different intellectual tradition and whom I cannot expect to be at all familiar with some of the theses, concepts, and paradigms I have developed in my recent work. I also find it somewhat embarrassing, if challenging, to do so. Not only because, as they say in French, “le moi est haïssable,” but it is often hard to disentangle a number of impersonal paradigms that one has been working with, from ideas and analyses that one narcissistically considers one’s own. I shall not endeavour to summarize the content of my latest books; instead, I will try to do something that might prove more useful. I would like to make a few (modest) proposals about what is to be done today, in my opinion, in cultural criticism, and what avenues could or should be explored. In order to do this, I still need to state quite candidly from what standpoint I am speaking, and out of what kinds of interests and intellectual traditions the concepts originate that I shall now present. Social Discourse in the Year 1889 I shall first present what has been my problematics of research over the last ten years or so, indicating from what theoretical filiations it derives and the aims and designs it is supposed to accommodate. In my last four or five books since Le Cru et le faisandé (1986) — “The Crude and the Gamey,” a book that was supposed to tell you whatever you wanted to know about Victorian sex but did not dare to ask— I have been working within a heuris tic paradigm where notions such as intertextuality, discursive topography, and hegemony play a central part. This project aimed at setting up a the ory of social discourse.1 I will expose the general framework of this research within social discourse, but I will have to restrict myself to stating general assumptions and hypotheses. Theoretical constructs are by the very nature of things, at least from the outset, the result of a kind of eclectic tinkering with ideas and proce dures coming from different horizons, but refashioned following specific aims. l Hence, the reader will notice without a doubt, en passant in the next few pages, a number of intellectual debts I owe to Gramsci, Bakhtin, Walter Ben jamin, Raymond Williams, Foucault, or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; as well as to thinkers less known to English-speaking audiences such as the Argentinian-born semiotician Luis J. Prieto, the philosopher and historian of Fascism Jean-Pierre Faye, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose major works — including Distinction — have recently been translated into English, the somewhat eccentric cultural theoretician Charles Grivel from Mannheim, Germany, and several others. Between 1986 and 1990,1published four or five books that can be lumped together as the endproducts of a single research project entitled Eighteeneighty -nine: A State of Social Discourse. It is the underlying logic of this research that I will now clarify. After Eighteen-eighty-nine, my interests shifted to contiguous or related issues, such as the analysis of the discur sive production emanating from the European labour movement under the Second and Third International, the theory of political propaganda, the pro duction of Great Narratives ( Grands Récits) in Modern Times, the histori cal analysis of the Utopian components in Revolutionary Socialist activism throughout this century. Finally, and most recently, I will try to expose and clarify the logic of resentment (perhaps one should say in English as did Nietzsche himself, en français dans le texte, «ressentiment») in today’s ideological production.2 The Eighteen-eighty-nine project was based on the analysis of an extensive sampling of printed materials as a whole produced in French over the course of one year, 1889. This sampling dealt with a synchronic stretch encompass ing not only books and booklets, but also newspapers and periodicals, all kinds of posters, pamphlets, etc. — everything that was...