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History of English Literature

Notes Some have argued that the term “post-structuralism” arose in Anglo-American academia as a
means of grouping together continental philosophers who rejected the methods and assumptions
of analytical philosophy. Further controversy owes to the way in which loosely-connected thinkers
tended to dispense with theories claiming to have discovered absolute truths about the world.
Although such ideas generally relate only to the metaphysical (for instance, metanarratives of
historical progress, such as those of dialectical materialism), many commentators have criticized
the movement as relativist, nihilist, or simply indulgent to the extreme. Many so-called “post-
structuralist” writers rejected the label and there is no manifesto.
Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as an antinomian movement critiquing
structuralism. According to J.G. Merquior a love–hate relationship with Structuralism developed
amongst many leading French thinkers in the 1960s.
The period was marked by political anxiety, as students and workers alike rebelled against the
state in May 1968, nearly causing the downfall of the French government. At the same time,
however, the support of the French Communist Party (FCP) for the oppressive policies of the
USSR contributed to popular disillusionment with orthodox Marxism. As a result, there was
increased interest in alternative radical philosophies, including feminism, western Marxism,
anarchism, phenomenology, and nihilism. These disparate perspectives, which Michel Foucault
later labeled “subjugated knowledges,” were all linked by being critical of dominant Western
philosophy and culture. Post-structuralism offered a means of justifying these criticisms, by exposing
the underlying assumptions of many Western norms.
Two key figures in the early post-structuralist movement were Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes.
In a 1966 lecture “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Science”, Jacques Derrida
presented a thesis on an apparent rupture in intellectual life. Derrida interpreted this event as a
“decentering” of the former intellectual cosmos. Instead of progress or divergence from an identified
centre, Derrida described this “event” as a kind of “play.”
Although Barthes was originally a structuralist, during the 1960s he increasingly favored post-
structuralist views. In 1968, Barthes published “The Death of the Author” in which he announced
a metaphorical event: the “death” of the author as an authentic source of meaning for a given text.
Barthes argued that any literary text has multiple meanings, and that the author was not the prime
source of the work’s semantic content.

Notes The “Death of the Author,” Barthes maintained, was the “Birth of the Reader,” as the
source of the proliferation of meanings of the text.
Post-structuralist philosophers like Derrida and Foucault did not form a self-conscious group, but
each responded to the traditions of phenomenology and structuralism. Phenomenology, often
associated with two German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, rejected previous
systems of knowledge and attempted to examine life “just as it appears” (as phenomena). Both
movements rejected the idea that knowledge could be centred on the human knower, and sought
what they considered a more secure foundation for knowledge.
In phenomenology this foundation would be experience itself; in structuralism, knowledge was to
be founded on the “structures” that make experience possible: concepts, and language or signs.
Post-structuralism, in turn, argued that founding knowledge either on pure experience
(phenomenology) or systematic structures (structuralism) was impossible. This impossibility was
meant not to be a failure or loss, but a cause for “celebration and liberation.”

32.2 Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of
Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply
Martin Heidegger’s concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading. Heidegger’s term referred
to a process of exploring the categories and concepts that tradition has imposed on a word, and the
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