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Post-structuralism

Explanations > Critical Theory > Post-structuralism

Description | Discussion | See also

Description

Post-structuralism holds that the notion of structuralism is too simplistic.

It challenges hierarchies and binary opposites in favor of more analog understandings.

It seeks to re-interpret and understand afresh historic works from Marx, Freud, and others.

Discussion

Post-structuralism emerged in the 1960s, largely in France, as a challenge to structuralism in the humanities.

There is no single cohesive work on post-structuralism. Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and Lévi-Strauss, along with others, all contributed.

It has also been used in a political sense, associating structuralism with Western excesses and depravity.

Post-structuralism is often included as an element of postmodernism.

Much thought happened in French psychoanalysis on this, where the human Subject is subverted and overturned. The person is de-centered through the dominance of language, mirror images and unstoppable desire.