Introductory Remarks

continuing value for the community, and to construct a collective memory. Many of the contributors to the conference evoked their memories of Malcolm and spoke of their responses to his work; these introductory remarks were designed simply to set that process in motion. The idea of setting up the journal that eventually became Paragraph arose out of the discussions of the Modern Critical Theory Group, which had been formed two years earlier, in 1981, to provide an alternative forum for people interested in theory in all its forms. Malcolm was a prime mover in that initiative, and many of us still remember the extraordinary atmosphere of intellectual excitement and common purpose that was generated at our inaugural meeting in Dave Kelley's smoke-filled room at Trinity College, Cambridge. Malcolm's book Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction opens with an epigraph from Luis Bunuels Mon dernier soupir. 'We were engaged in a struggle to the death as we built our theoretical constructions. The MCTG and Paragraph did arise out of a struggle, although it was a relatively benign one by comparison with events elsewhere. The alternative forum was needed because the French Studies establishment was markedly hostile to theory in the aftermath of May 1968 and everything it stood for, intellectually and institutionally: they seemed to regard it as a kind of axis of evil, with Malcolm somewhere in the barbarous east (the Mile End Road) grooming subversive graduate students and younger colleagues to undermine the edifice of true scholarship. At French Studies conferences, the MCTG was only allowed to occupy the slot that coincided with the conference

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