Continental · 1966 – today
Post-structuralism
Structures of meaning and knowledge are never closed or neutral: they shift, exclude and exercise power, so no foundation escapes critique.
Can any system of meaning or knowledge be stable, neutral or final?
By the mid-1960s structuralism dominated Paris, and its promise of a science of culture met the upheavals of decolonisation and May 1968. Thinkers trained in it, and in Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud, began asking what structuralism itself assumed: a fixed centre, a neutral observer, an order outside history.
If meaning arises from differences, it is never fully present in any sign but always deferred to other signs (Derrida’s différance), so texts undo their own oppositions. Foucault argued that what counts as knowledge, madness or normality is produced by historical practices bound up with power. The task, then, is not to find the true foundation but to show how apparent necessities were made and could be otherwise.
- Meaning is always deferred and never fully present.
- Knowledge and power produce each other.
- Grand narratives of progress deserve incredulity.
It reshaped literary studies, gender and queer theory, postcolonial studies and the history of science, and remains a lightning rod in debates about truth and relativism.
Thinkers
1926–1984Michel FoucaultFrench historian of madness, prisons and sexuality1930–2004Jacques DerridaAlgerian-born French philosopher who founded deconstruction1925–1995Gilles DeleuzeFrench philosopher of difference, desire and becoming1924–1998Jean-François LyotardFrench philosopher who defined the postmodern conditionKey texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofStructuralismPost-structuralists took Saussure’s point that meaning comes from difference and turned it against the idea of closed, stable structures.Reacted against
PhenomenologyDerrida’s early work deconstructed Husserl’s reliance on meaning made present in the living voice.Reacted against
MarxismFoucault and Lyotard rejected Marxism’s grand narrative of history and its view of power as held by a class or the state.
What it led to
Carried on byFeminist philosophyButler drew on Foucault and Derrida to argue that gender is produced by repeated norms.Carried on by
Postcolonial thoughtSaid built Orientalism on Foucault’s idea of discourse, and Spivak translated Derrida.