poststructuralism
n. a broad intellectual movement that developed from French structuralism in the late 1960s and 1970s. It is represented by the work of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) in philosophy and criticism, Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) in philosophy and psychoanalysis, Michel Foucault (1926–1984) in the history of ideas, and Hélène Cixous (1937– ) and Julia Kristeva (1941– ) in feminist theory, among others. Although these thinkers are diverse, they share a starting point in the structuralist account of language given by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), which holds that linguistic signs acquire meaning only through structural relationships with other signs in the same language system. Poststructuralism endorses the arbitrariness of the sign, but from this basis it proceeds to question the whole idea of fixed and determinate meaning. In the
deconstruction of Derrida, structures and systems of meaning are found to be unstable, contradictory, and endlessly self-subverting. This skepticism extends to the idea of personal identity itself; according to Derrida, the self is merely another “text” to be deconstructed. In psychology, poststructuralism is mainly significant because of its influence on the radical psychoanalytical theories of the 1960s and 1970s. Lacan, who trained and practiced as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, rejected the idea of a stable autonomous ego and reinterpreted the Freudian unconscious in terms of Saussure’s structural linguistics. His unconventional ideas and methods led to his exclusion from the International Society of Psychoanalysts in 1963. Both Kristeva (another practicing psychoanalyst) and Cixous were deeply influenced by Lacan’s ideas of sexuality, consciousness, and language, which are given a radical feminist
twist in their writings. The best known work of Foucault, who worked in a psychiatric hospital as a young man, is his Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961; translated as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, 1965), which gives a tendentious history of Western attitudes to insanity, arguing that the categories of madness and reason are themselves oppressive. —poststructuralist
adj.