Post-structuralism

What does "post"-structuralism come after?

What swept French intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s was structuralism. Starting from Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics, which held that a word's meaning comes not from correspondence with a thing but from its differences from other words, structuralism extended the idea to myth and kinship (Claude Lévi-Strauss), the unconscious (Jacques Lacan), literature and even the reading of Marx (Louis Althusser). Invisible structures working beneath them, rather than individual consciousness or intention, decide meaning.

Post-structuralism took over structuralism while shaking its foundations. If structures decide meaning, what fixes the structures themselves? Post-structuralists held that systems of meaning never close and always slip, and that the binary oppositions that make up structures (speech/writing, male/female, reason/madness) hide hierarchy and exclusion. As the German Wikipedia puts it, their common premise is that language does not merely reflect reality but produces it through its categories and distinctions.

When did it arise, and from whom?

Its symbolic beginning is the 1966 colloquium "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. At this event, meant to introduce structuralism to America, Jacques Derrida's lecture "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" pointed to structuralism's limits and proposed a thought without a centre. The next year, 1967, Roland Barthes declared in "The Death of the Author" that a text's meaning does not come from its author's intention and that the birth of the reader is paid for by the death of the author. In the same year Derrida published Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference.

The current is usually said to include Barthes, Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard and Julia Kristeva, but most of them rejected the label "post-structuralist". As Angermuller, cited in the French Wikipedia, points out, post-structuralism is less a name used within France than one produced by the reception of "French Theory" in the United States and Germany. The name hardened as literary theory, feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory in American universities took up these ideas in the 1970s and 1980s.

What place does Nietzsche hold?

Post-structuralism's most important philosophical source was Nietzsche. Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) read Nietzsche as a philosopher of difference and affirmation opposed to Hegelian dialectics and opened the French Nietzsche renaissance. Foucault took up Nietzsche's genealogy and rewrote the history of truth and knowledge as a history of power, and Derrida drew the motive for deconstruction, stressing the fluidity of language over fixed forms, largely from Nietzsche. Nietzsche's view that truths are a mobile army of hardened metaphors, and perspectivism, which denies any objective fact beyond perspectives, became their shared resources.

Unlike Germany, where Nietzsche had been read as a philosopher of the political right, this French generation read him as a thinker of liberation and subversion. That reading was intertwined with the French edition of the Colli–Montinari critical edition, whose general editors were Foucault and Deleuze. In the history of Nietzsche's reception the French Nietzsche was the great current that overturned the image of Nietzsche made by the German Nietzsche Archive and the Conservative Revolution.

How does it relate to Marxism?

The German Wikipedia records that when post-structuralism arose, Sartrean humanism and Marxism were in vogue in France, but both seemed inadequate in face of the totalitarian structures of Soviet socialism and Stalinism, the disappearance of the working class as revolutionary subject, social-democratisation, and the rise of new movements, of women, Black people and gay people, that refused to be treated as "secondary contradictions". The experience of May 1968 also divided this generation. Instead of the grand narrative of the working class and the seizure of state power, post-structuralism put forward a politics of everyday life, bodies, discourse and micro-level power.

The relation was not only hostile. Foucault and Derrida had been under Althusser's influence at the École normale supérieure, and in the interviews collected as Positions (1972) Derrida said his work could be inscribed under the heading of a "critique of idealism": "nothing in dialectical materialism, at least insofar as it carries out this critique, arouses the slightest reluctance on my part". But he added that the articulation with Marxism could not be given immediately.

Il va donc de soi que rien, dans le matérialisme dialectique, du moins en tant qu'il opère cette critique, ne suscite de ma part la moindre réticence et à cet égard je n'en ai jamais formulée.

Criticism was fierce as well. Jürgen Habermas argued in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) that the critique of reason running from Nietzsche through Heidegger to Derrida and Foucault loses the normative ground of its own critique, and in Germany Manfred Frank analysed the current under the name "neo-structuralism". The French Wikipedia notes that even within Marxism, Althusser's France and Habermas's Germany were two currents that did not touch. The fact that a 1985 report of the American CIA welcomed the work of Foucault and others for demolishing Marxist influence in the social sciences has fed the debate about what political effects these ideas had, whatever their authors intended.