Post-Structuralism

For roughly two decades — from the 1950s to the early 1970s — a single idea reorganized the French human sciences and, by extension, much of Western thought: the idea that the most varied human phenomena (language, kinship, myth, fashion, the unconscious, ideology) must be understood as systems of relations — as structures — and not as collections of isolated things, nor as products of an individual consciousness. This was structuralism: less a unified doctrine than a method and an intellectual climate, exported from linguistics to anthropology, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. This article follows that path, from Saussure to his heirs, up to the post-structuralist turn that pushed it to its limit. ...

Michel Foucault is perhaps the most cited thinker in the human sciences of the past half-century — and also one of the hardest to classify. He built no system, founded no school, and refused the labels “structuralist” and “postmodern.” What he left behind was a body of historical investigations so original that they rewrote the vocabulary of entire disciplines: what we now mean by “power,” “discourse,” “normalization,” and “surveillance” passed, in large part, through his pages. This article traces the core of his thought: the archaeological and genealogical method, the thesis that power and knowledge are inseparable, and the analysis of disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish. ...

There is an experience you may already have had in front of a text by Derrida: the feeling that the words keep slipping away, that the argument folds back on itself, that the author seems more interested in unsettling the ground than in building a thesis. That impression is no accident, nor a failure of exposition — it is, in large measure, the point. Derrida did not want to propose a new doctrine of truth or language to add to the long list philosophy has already produced. He wanted to show that the very ambition of fixing a final meaning, full and present to itself, is the fragile presupposition on which the whole Western tradition was built — and that this presupposition does not hold. ...

Some philosophers build systems, and some demolish the ground on which systems are built. Gilles Deleuze did both at once. His work is, on one hand, among the most ambitious metaphysical undertakings of the twentieth century — an ontology of difference and multiplicity that aims to rewrite the entire history of Western philosophy. On the other, it is a war machine directed against the way Western thought has always pictured itself: against the primacy of identity, resemblance, and representation. Deleuze did not want to add one more doctrine to the catalogue; he wanted to change the very image of what it means to think. And he did so by forging a vocabulary of his own — difference in itself, the virtual, rhizome, body without organs, plane of immanence — that made his books at once fascinating and notoriously difficult. ...

Few contemporary philosophers divide opinion as sharply as Judith Butler. For some, she is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century — someone who revolutionized our understanding of gender, sexuality, and power. For others, she is the ultimate symbol of a philosophy that lost itself in the labyrinth of its own language, producing deliberately obscure texts to mask shallow ideas. To understand why Butler provokes such extreme reactions, we must first grasp what she actually says — and then have the intellectual honesty to identify where the argument falters. ...

Gilles Deleuze French philosopher; created a philosophy of difference and multiplicity that subverts the metaphysical tradition centered on identity. Produced solo works and collaborations with Félix Guattari. Key Concepts Difference in itself (Difference and Repetition, 1968): difference is not derived from identity — it is originary; identity is secondary to difference. Critique of the tradition that always subordinated difference to the Same Rhizome (with Guattari): against the arborescent model (single root, hierarchy, center), the rhizome is horizontal multiplicity without point of origin or destination — connects any point with any other. Metaphor for thought, politics, and culture Lines of flight (lignes de fuite): every social and subjective system contains forces of deterritorialization that escape dominant structures — creation of the new, resistance to control Plane of immanence: reality has no transcendence; everything is immanent to a single plane of forces and intensities — against Platonic dualism and theological transcendence Desire as production (with Guattari): against Freud (desire as lack) — desire is productive, affirmative force; capitalism captures desiring production but it always overflows Body without organs: surface of intensities without prior organization — against the organism as normative model of the body Concept of concept: philosophy creates concepts — it does not represent, contemplate, or communicate; creating concepts is the philosopher’s specific task Influenced by Bergson — duration, multiplicity, creation (Bergsonism, 1966) Nietzsche — will to power, eternal return, affirmation (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1962) Spinoza — immanence and power (Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 1970) Hume — radical empiricism and associationism Influenced Cultural studies and queer theory Cognitive sciences and biology (self-organization) Architecture, contemporary art Post-Marxist political theory Works Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962); Bergsonism (1966); Difference and Repetition (1968); The Logic of Sense (1969); Anti-Oedipus (1972, with Guattari); A Thousand Plateaus (1980, with Guattari); What is Philosophy? (1991, with Guattari). ...

Jacques Derrida Algerian-French philosopher; founder of deconstruction. He subverted the Western metaphysical tradition by showing that it is structured by hierarchical binary oppositions and by the metaphysics of presence. Born in El-Biar, on the outskirts of Algiers, into a Jewish family, Derrida trained at the École normale supérieure in Paris and began his philosophical path with a meticulous reading of Husserl’s phenomenology. His explosive entry into intellectual debate came in 1966, with the lecture delivered at Johns Hopkins University, in which he questioned the notion of structure as something organized around a stable center — a gesture that distanced him from the then-dominant structuralism and opened what would come to be called post-structuralism. The following year he published, almost simultaneously, three works that fixed his vocabulary and his method, establishing deconstruction not as a doctrine but as a practice of reading attentive to the tensions that each text fails to master. ...

Judith Butler American philosopher; central figure in queer theory and gender studies. Gender Trouble (1990) transformed the humanities by proposing that gender is not a fixed identity, but a performance. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1956, Butler completed her doctorate in philosophy at Yale University in 1984 with a dissertation on the French reception of Hegel. Her intellectual formation draws on French existentialism, phenomenology, and post-structuralism — a combination that enabled her to interrogate categories typically treated as natural, such as “sex,” “gender,” and “subject,” in terms of their historical production. The central problem driving her work is: how do cultural norms fabricate bodies and identities that pass as natural? This question places her at the intersection of continental philosophy, feminist theory, and minority politics. ...

Michel Foucault Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers in 1926 and trained at the École Normale Supérieure, where his teachers included Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser. A psychologist by training as well as a philosopher, from 1970 he held the chair of “History of Systems of Thought” at the Collège de France and was a politically engaged intellectual — above all in the struggle for prison reform. He became one of the most cited figures in the human sciences worldwide. He died in Paris in 1984 of an AIDS-related illness. ...

Roland Barthes Roland Barthes (12 November 1915, Cherbourg — 26 March 1980, Paris) was a French literary critic, semiologist, and essayist, one of the central figures of structuralism and of the post-structuralist turn. Marked in youth by tuberculosis, which kept him from a regular academic career, he built an unclassifiable body of work poised between criticism, philosophy, and literature. In 1977 he was elected to a chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France. He died in 1980, weeks after being struck by a van in Paris. ...