Post-Structuralism
from 1966
The structures turn out not to hold still. Meaning keeps deferring, power has no throne to sit on, and the author is not the origin of the text.
- Active
- from 1966
- Where
- Paris, and then every humanities department
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
If meaning comes from difference, it can never be complete: every term depends on others that depend on others. Structures have no centre outside themselves that could hold them still.
What it held
Post-structuralism accepts Saussure and pushes. If a sign means by differing from others, then its meaning depends on terms that are absent, whose meanings depend on further absent terms — so full presence of meaning never arrives. Derrida calls this différance, both differing and deferring.
Deconstruction is what he does with it. Take a text's governing opposition — speech and writing, nature and culture, presence and absence — notice that one term is privileged, and show from the text's own resources that the privileged term depends on what it excludes. It is not destruction and it is not saying anything goes; the reading has to be demonstrated line by line.
Foucault's project is different and often lumped in. He studies how discourses produce their objects: madness, criminality, sexuality are not natural kinds awaiting description but categories constituted by practices of examining, confining and confessing. Power on his account is not held by a sovereign but distributed through institutions, and it produces rather than only forbids.
Deleuze is the most affirmative, building a philosophy of difference and multiplicity rather than a critique of anything.
How it argued
Close reading against the grain, historical excavation of how categories were formed, and philosophical construction of concepts that resist systematisation.
What it was arguing against
Structuralism's stable systems, phenomenology's self-present consciousness, and what Derrida called the metaphysics of presence running through Western philosophy.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether deconstruction is a method or a mannerism. Whether Foucault's account of power leaves any ground for criticising it — Habermas and Taylor both pressed this and the argument continues.
Common misconceptions
That it says texts mean whatever you want. Derrida insisted deconstruction requires rigorous reading and that a text constrains its readings; his phrase about nothing outside the text is a claim about context, not a denial that anything exists.
How it began
A conference at Johns Hopkins in 1966, at which Derrida delivered a paper dismantling the structuralism the conference had been convened to introduce to America.
What became of it
Living, though the label is now used mostly by opponents. Its methods are absorbed into literary study, history and gender theory.
Lasting influence
Gender theory through Butler, postcolonial theory through Said and Spivak, and the historical study of categories across the humanities.
Why it still matters
Foucault's account of how expert discourse constitutes its objects is directly applicable to current arguments about diagnosis, classification and data.
Put another way
A dictionary in which every word is defined using other words, and there is no last page.
Where to start
Discipline and Punish. It is a history, it is gripping, and the theory arrives through the material.
The surprising bit
Derrida's paper at the conference that introduced structuralism to America argued that structuralism could not work. He was thirty-six and largely unknown.
In their own words
There is nothing outside the text.
Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.
Connections
- Answers
- Structuralism, Phenomenology, Nietzscheanism
- Opposed by
- Structuralism
- Influenced
- Modernity-Coloniality School
The verdict
The most argued-about philosophy of the late twentieth century, and the most misdescribed by people who dislike it.