François Wahl is a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 editor and structuralist

Structuralism

Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...

.

Biography

François Wahl was editor at the Éditions du Seuil

Éditions du Seuil

Éditions du Seuil is a French publishing house created in 1935, currently owned by La Martinière Groupe. It owes its name to this goal "The seuil is the whole excitement of parting and arriving...

, a publishing company in Paris. He was the editor of Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...

 and Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...

, among others.

He was involved in the publication of Tel Quel

Tel Quel

Tel Quel was an avant-garde magazine for literature, founded in 1960 in Paris by Philippe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier.-Overview:...

. and he became friends with Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes

Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...

 and Philippe Sollers

Philippe Sollers

Philippe Sollers is a French writer and critic. In 1960 he founded the avant garde journal Tel Quel , published by Seuil, which ran until 1982...

. He was Severo Sarduy

Severo Sarduy

Severo Sarduy was a Cuban poet, author, playwright, and critic of Cuban literature and art.-Biography:...

's partner until the latter's death. He also taught French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 to Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel

Sir Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBE; born September 30, 1928) is a Hungarian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and...

 in 1947.

In 1987, Wahl, acting as Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes

Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...

's literary executor, published his essays Incidents

Incidents

Incidents is a 1987 collection of four essays by Roland Barthes. It was published posthumously by François Wahl, Roland Barthes's literary executor.-Summary:...

, which tells of his homosexual bouts with Morrocan young men, and Soirées de Paris, which chronicles his difficulty to find a male lover in Paris. Wahl met with controversy, compounded by the fact that he refused to publish more of Barthes's seminars.