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poststructuralism

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poststructuralism

a widely influential intellectual movement in France from the 1960s onwards, deriving from STRUCTURALISM but reinterpreting the latter's main assumptions about LANGUAGE and society as signifying systems. As such, poststructuralists utilized while also challenging the ascendancy of key structuralist theorists including SAUSSURE and LÉVI-STRAUSS. In the course of a root-and-branch questioning of traditional modes of philosophical and linguistic theorizing, they also challenged other major social theories, notably MARXISM. The major theorists most usually associated with poststructuralism are DERRIDA and FOUCAULT (see also LACAN). Central aspects of previous linguistic theory ‘deconstructured’ by poststructuralism, especially by Derrida, include:
  1. a questioning of the implications of linguistic conceptions of DIFFERENCE, seen especially in Derrida's challenge to what he regards as SAUSSURE's still ‘metaphysical’ presuppositions about the SUBJECT and LANGUAGE, the priority given to speech‘ over ‘writing’ – see DECONSTRUCTION;
  2. a view that writing, too (see TEXTS), is also questionable as a source of any ‘grounding’ for objectivity or culture, the major reason for this being that, in addition to the ‘arbitrary’ connection between SIGNIFIER AND SIGNIFIED (as for Saussure), the relation between signifiers (via ‘differences’) is equally suspect, given that signifiers are always 'slipping under other signifiers‘, with no final definition possible.
Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2000
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For example, feminist critics such as Martha Nussbaum have argued that post-structuralism functions as a pernicious and corrupting influence on feminism, with Butler's work seen as epitomising these effects, by refusing to found itself upon a general subject category of 'woman'; claiming to eschew normative criteria; interrupting linear or teleological visions of feminist progress; and valorising theory, language, and representation over politics, activism, and material issues (Nussbaum 1999; see also Herstein 2010; Thomas-Williams 2008; Wiegman 2010).
One way of characterising the move from post-structuralism to post-post-structuralism is a move from the split and fragmented to the scattered and diffuse.
Since then, however, much of the anarchist 'canon' has been re-read as not necessarily essentialist and at times prefiguring post-structuralism. Now, Rousselle seeks to bring this process to fruition by recovering the anarchic negativity which has explicitly or implicitly driven anarchist discussions of ethics, universalism and the subject.
Focusing on the post-structuralism of Judith Butler, the postmodernism of Donna Haraway, and the posthumanism of Katherine Hayle, Kroker (political science, U.
This allows us to discern a motif that is found in much of his criticism of more or less contemporary scholars, from those of the various formalisms to those of structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction.
While Post-Structuralism is certainly not the only way to analyze discourse, it should at least be addressed in more than two footnotes.
Drawing on the critiques of identity politics, post-structuralism and post-colonialism, the authors take a very strong position that social change is a political responsibility of individuals, especially those with access to networks, financial capital and social resources, regardless of their geographic location.
In a sense, his narrative is as much about comparison as transmission; a comparison of the period in which Durkheimianism consolidated a precarious intellectual and institutional influence (roughly 1895 to 1915), and that in which French post-structuralism underwent an analogous development, between the 1950s and 1980s.
It is a veritable minefield for applications of psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structuralism, neo-historicism, hermeneutics and reader response theory.
Baudelaire's Prose Poems appeared in 1990, when the field of literary studies was still benefiting from the methodological rigor introduced by structuralism while also enjoying the interpretative freedom encouraged by post-structuralism. Being both reflexive and reflective in its approach, post-structuralism carried with it a certain philosophical resistance to the act of interpretation itself.
Post-structuralism is able to move "beyond" emancipation in a manner that resists such difficulties, through a "genealogical, deconstructive approach" that firmly grasps the discursive knowledge dimensions of considering peace, and provides the space for "multiple ontologies of peace as discourse ...
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