French poststructuralist ascendancy accompanied the Rightward political consolidation after Algeria.

Evidence

While the labour movement itself had gradually been tamed through the 1950s, facilitated further by the French Communist Parry’s convergence with its own bourgeoisie on the colonial question, the defeat in Indochina and the bloody combat in co/on-dominated Algeria served to move large sections of the French population, including substantial sections of the intelligentsia, into the Right’s embrace. The settlement of the Algerian War then paved the way for full-scale consolidation of High Gaullism. It was at this point that the ascendancy of structuralism and then of semiotics beganfirst in fairly radical variants, in keeping with the temper of the times, and then in increasingly formalist, domesticated directions. … In the course of the decade following 1968, Paris was at length normalized. Many of the more strident members of the generation of ‘68, from Kristeva to Glucksmann, then passed into the ultra-Right of the ‘New Philosophers’, and the voices that came to dominate French intellectual life - Derrida and Foucault, Lyotard and Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari - quire comfortably announced ‘the death of the subject’, ‘the end of the social’, and so on. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 248

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s research on strategic essentialism: Ahmad is dating poststructuralism’s formalist turn to the post-Algerian consolidation of Gaullism, a material-political context for discourse theory’s later dominance. — connects to: French structuralism’s rise followed decolonization defeats and masked rightward political drift — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 249
• QUESTION: Does Ahmad elsewhere explicitly date Spivak’s strategic essentialism (early 1980s) within this same post-Gaullist, discourse-hegemonic Parisian moment?

Broader Connections

• French structuralism’s rise followed decolonization defeats and masked rightward political drift #corroborates (0.88) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 249