The article draws a conceptual distinction the (French) structuralism of the 50’s–60’s and the post-structuralism of the 70’s, which are discussed as overlapping in their intellectual paths; their mutual dynamics is defined as a reaction of the intelligence to the pressure of depersonalized unified schemes within the logic of structuralism against free improvisation and loose interpretation instead of total explanations in the post-structuralism interpretation. The article establishes a conceptual identity of the paradoxical nature between (...) post-structuralism (and deconstructionism, which is homogeneous and identical thereto in a number of aspects), on the one hand, and constructionism with its specific process of language dismantling – social/ideological languages, social group dialects, on the other hand, which naturally leads the authors to the analysis of the paradoxicality principles, defined by post-structuralism (five principles of paradoxicality of Gilles Deleuze – paradox of regress, paradox of sterile reiteration, paradox of neutrality, paradox of absurd, paradox of Levi-Strauss); poststructuralists’ paralogisms are examined through paradoxical denotation; the late Roland Barthes’ phenomenon of paradoxicality, becoming a plot-forming principle of narration, is analyzed. Poststructuralism is conceptualized in the article as the first decisive step of post-modernism; the affinity of post-structuralist and postmodernist commitment to parody, game and irony is stated; the theory of language games in post-modern interpretation is explored; one of those games – a game of carnival – is explored within the diachronic retrospective; the affinity of parody and carnival tradition of post-structuralism and post-modernism to the romantic irony of the XIXth century and its inconsistency with the popular culture of laugh is established. The genesis of poststructuralism and post-modernism is connected with the ideological restart of the Western society before the “very end” of the Resistance ideas and the disappointment of the left European intellectuals in the “great legends” and illusions of Marxism. The blurred concepts of relativism are connected with the mutual disproportion of different layers of historical experience. (shrink)

Colin Hay’s and Vivien Schmidt’s responses to my previous critical engagement with their respective versions of neo-institutionalism raise the issue of how scholars may account for the ideational power of political processes and how ideas may generate both stability and change. Even though Hay, Schmidt, and I share a common philosophical ground in many respects, we nevertheless diverge in our views about how to account for ideational power and for actors’ ability to navigate a social reality that is saturated with (...) structures and meaning. There continues to be a need for an analytical framework that incorporates discourse and a constitutive logic based upon the power in ideas. Post-structural institutionalism (PSI) analyzes discourse as knowledge claims by means of the concept of a constitutive causality, analytically identified in respect to institutions, such that the substantive content of ideas/discourse provides ideational power and generates immanent change. (shrink)

French post-structuralism theory was transformed when taken up in England by the native Marxist tradition; it thus came to intervene across the whole field of the human sciences. Through this fresh exploration of the relation between Marxism, post-structuralism and the theory of the subject, Antony Easthope contrasts the degree to which post-structuralism has made a radical impact on English and American national cultures. The book reprints for the first time an important 1980 interview in (...) which Jacques Derrida discusses the relations between Marxism and deconstruction. -- Back cover. (shrink)

Recent developments in literary theory, such as structuralism and deconstruction, have come under attack for neglecting history, while historically-based approaches have been criticized for failing to take account of the problems inherent in their methodological foundations. This collection of essays is unique in that it focuses on the relation between post-structuralism and historical (especially Marxist) literary theory and criticism. The volume includes a deconstructive reading of Marx, essays that relate history to the philosophical and institutional context, and (...) a number of studies of particular texts, literary and non-literary, which pose the question of history and literary theory with particular force. (shrink)

From a post-structuralist position, it is problematic and seemingly impossible to refer to God as the Trinity. This article describes possibilities for thinking about the Trinity (religion and God) within a post-structuralist context. As an example of such thinking, the 2015 culture-critique film, The Brand New Testament, will be analysed. It is a creative retelling of the Christian story and of the Trinity in a secular and post-metaphysical vein. This ‘Brand New Testament’ reveals God as ‘one’ – (...) as the encompassing love, hope and life which we may experience in this life. The life-giving characteristics of this ‘god’ are surprisingly close to the biblical understanding of the Trinity. In the ‘Brand New Testament’, however, the Trinity is portrayed radically differently than in the Christian tradition. The personae of father, son and spirit are deconstructed in the film, in that a daughter and a mother also form part of the godhead. This deconstruction of the Trinity, which should not be confused with blasphemy, opens up a possible post-structuralist imagining of God. It playfully reveals a powerless god who shares some fundamental characteristics with the Trinity – such as love, joy and life. It allows for the ‘oneness of god’ to include more, and less, than the ‘Holy Trinity’. (shrink)

This paper will apply post-structural semiotic theories to study the texts of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem. I will study the texts’ own articulations of concepts of ‘meaning’, analyze the mechanisms they use to sustain their senses of validity, and point out how the texts depend (without losing their mathematical rigor) on sustaining some shifts of meaning. I will demonstrate that the texts manifest semiotic effects, which we usually associate with poetry and everyday speech. I will conclude with an analysis (...) of how the picture I paint relates to an ethics of mathematical production. (shrink)

Faced with the apologetic and exclusionary tendencies of liberal normativism, there is a marked trend in political theory to recover a more critical conception of justice, which does not adopt the dismissive attitude of traditional Marxism. In this context, the legacy of post-structuralism has been ambivalent. On the one hand, the work of thinkers such as Jacque Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze has helped to shape the direction of the relevant discourse. On the other hand, post-structuralist (...) critiques of political normativism have been often accused of leading to a subsumption of justice to power. Contributing to the ongoing discussion, my article explores the insights of Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze and assembles them into a coherent line of analysis. The main argument advanced is that post-structuralist thought provides a fertile basis for a critical concept of justice, which foregrounds the notion’s material texture without forfeiting its normative and ethical traits. (shrink)

ABSTRACTColin Hay's constructivist institutionalism and Vivien A. Schmidt's discursive institutionalism are two recent attempts to theorize ideas as potential explanations of institutional change. This new attention to the causal role of ideas is welcome, but Hay and Schmidt do not take into consideration the constitutive and structural aspects of ideas. Instead they reduce ideas to properties of individual conscious minds, scanting the respects in which ideas are intersubjectively baked into the practices shared by individuals. This aspect of ideas—arguably, the institutional (...) side of ideas—is developed in post-structuralist thought, which therefore demands a place in ideational research. (shrink)

This book fundamentally challenges the radical credentials of post-structuralism. Though Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze claim to have 'deconstructed' metaphysics, their work has much in common with previous attempts to 'end' the metaphysical tradition, from Kant to Nietzshe and Heidegger, and by sociology in general. Gillian Rose shows that this anti-metaphysical writing always appears in historically specific jurisprudential terms, which themselves found and recapitulate metaphysical categories. She reconsiders post-structuralism in this light and assesses the relationship between deconstruction (...) and the earlier structuralism of Saussure and Levi-Strauss. She argues in conclusion that the choice between post-structuralist nihilism and Hegelian and Marxist dialectic is spurious. (shrink)

The contribution describes the differences between modernism and postmodernism as historical periods of the twentieth century and establishes comparable differences between structuralism and post-structuralism as semiotic approaches. Like modernism, structuralism rejects traditional modes of thought, attempts to reconstruct academic disciplines on the basis of a few fundamental principles and strives to work with reconstructed terminologies and axioms. Like post-modernism, post-structuralism is characterized by the necessity of finding ways to continue research based on the (...) fragmentary results left by structuralist projects. In the beginning of the twentieth century, structuralism itself had responded to materialism, atomism, historicism, and naturalism by introducing its own methodology built around the dichotomies of signified and signifier, paradigm and syntagm, synchrony and diachrony, langue and parole. Rather than rejecting this apparatus, post-structuralism explicated the paradoxes behind these dichotomies and tried to overcome them by under-mining the first concept of each pair. This change of perspective foregrounded the material, processual, and intertextual character of signs as well as the sense-producing function of interpretation. Rejecting rigidly fixed methods as well as general theories, and waiving the distinction between object-signs and meta-signs in favor of their joint reflection, post-structuralist semiotics became an alternative to conventional practices of academic sign analysis and now approaches the status of an art. (shrink)

Introduction -- Marx and postwar French philosophy -- A writer full of affects : Marx through Lyotard -- Messianic without messianism : Marx through Derrida -- The history of the present : Marx through Foucault -- Becoming revolutionary : Marx through Deleuze -- Marx through post-structuralism.

RAULET: How should we begin? I have had two questions in mind. First, what is the origin of this global term, "post-structuralism"? FOUCAULT: First, none of the protagonists in the structuralist movement -- and none of those who, willingly or otherwise, were dubbed structuralists -- knew very clearly what it was all about. Certainly, those who were applying structural methods in very precise disciplines such as linguistics and comparative mythology knew what was structuralism, but as soon as (...) one strayed from these very precise disciplines, nobody knew exactly what it was. I am not sure how interesting it would be to attempt a redefinition of what was known, at the time, as structuralism. (shrink)

This essay argues that Knafo and Teschke fundamentally misread Brenner’s original contribution to the transition debate. They equate his rejection of trans-historical or trans-modal laws of motion with the notion that social-property relations do not have strong rules of reproduction that structure the actions of agents and give rise to ‘developmental patterns’ specific to each form of social labour. Knafo and Teschke’s critique of Brenner’s analysis of capitalist expansion and crisis is also theoretically and empirically questionable.

This article reconstructs and evaluates a new reading of Hegel associated with speculative materialism in contemporary French philosophy, considered as a response to post-structuralism. I present a contemporary Hegelian response to the post-structuralist denial of the Absolute, in both theoretical and practical terms.

Paul Cilliers has developed a novel post-structural approach to complexity that has influenced several writers contributing to the current complexity literature. Concomitantly however, Cilliers advocates for modelling complex systems using connectionist neural networks (rather than analytic, rule-based models). In this paper, I argue that it is dilemmic to simultaneously hold these two positions. Cilliers’ post-structural interpretation of complexity states that models of complex systems are always contextual and provisional; there is no exclusive model of complex systems. This sentiment (...) however appears at odds with Cilliers’ promotion of connectionist neural networks as the best way to model complex systems. The lesson is that those who currently follow Cilliers’ post-structural approach to complexity cannot also develop a preferred model of complex systems, and those who currently advocate for some preferred model of complex systems cannot adopt the post-structural approach to complexity without giving up the purported objectivity and/or superiority of their preferred model. (shrink)

Introduction: Archaeology and Post-Structuralism Ian Bapty and Tim Yates i If it recedes one day, leaving behind its works and signs on the shores of our...

Transcultural dialogue and research are often bedeviled by a range of divergences in the use and resonances of key terms defining the focus of the conversation; social understandings; ways of dealing with the life situations involved; and traditional protocols in relation to the ethical challenges in the areas of research. A simple example from research into genetics will illustrate the problem. A team from two New Zealand universities comprising both Māori and NZ European academics examined indigenous attitudes to genetic technologies. (...) A breakdown of trust became evident such that many of the Māori members of the team felt they could no longer participate because they felt their views... (shrink)

Michael Kelly is the author of 68 entries altogether. The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French is far more than a simple revision of the original Oxford Companion to French Literature, published in 1959, and described by The Listener as the `standard work of reference for English-speaking enquirers into French literature'. As the change in title implies, this completely new work presents an authoritative guide not only to ten centuries of literature produced in the territory now called France, but (...) also to the rich literary output of other French-speaking countries around the world. The scope of the Companion is deliberately open and inclusive, challenging and extending the traditional canon. Literature is understood in a broad sense, ranging from strip cartoon and pamphlet to tragedy and epic, and particular attention is devoted to francophone writing from outside France. Written by an international team of specialists, entries cover individual authors and works - over 3,000 of them - from the troubadours to Césaire, and from La Princesse de Clèves to La Vie mode d'emploi. Each is discussed in detail within their historical, cultural, and intellectual context. Among the new features of the Companion are the substantial essay-entries, reflecting up-to-date scholarship and theoretical debates on topics such as: - literary movements and genres - historical subjects such as chivalry, or Occupation and Resistance in wartime France - movements of thought from Scholasticism to feminism - linguistic topics - the sciences - the arts and media, including opera, cinema, and press. (shrink)

The purpose of the study was to examine post-anarchism as a critique of standard ideologies of power and to assess its potential for social transformation. The study was conducted from September 2024 to February 2025, employing a post-structuralist analysis of power, political identity, and social structures. The findings indicated that post-anarchism conceptualises power not as a fixed hierarchical structure, but as a flexible process shaped through multiple social interactions. Post-anarchist theories demonstrate that the rejection of centralised (...) mechanisms of authority becomes conceivable when alternative forms of social coordination are developed, based on principles of autonomy, mutual aid, and direct democracy. The analysis of contemporary initiatives, including horizontal networks and digital communities, demonstrated that post-anarchist approaches may contribute to the emergence of new models of civic engagement, although they remain vulnerable to latent forms of power arising from cultural and economic dependencies. Several paradoxes within post-anarchist models are identified, particularly the impossibility of completely eliminating power, even within highly decentralised structures. The results confirmed that post-anarchism simultaneously critiques conventional forms of authority while recognising the necessity of certain regulatory mechanisms to maintain social cohesion. The study further showed that in response to the challenges of globalisation and digitalisation, post-anarchism places emphasis on flexible, contextually adaptive forms of political subjectivity that may shift according to situational demands. Limitations of the post-anarchist perspective in addressing social equality were observed, since the absence of universal standards poses risks of newly emerging inequalities, which arise naturally from asymmetries in resources and access to information. Nevertheless, post-anarchism offers valuable opportunities for critical reflection on political freedom and autonomy within contemporary post-structural realities. The conclusions may inform further analysis of the transformative potential of post-structuralist theories of power, the rethinking of political identity models, and the development of strategies aimed at fostering more flexible and open social structures. (shrink)

S(zp,zp) performs an innovative analysis of one of modern logic's most celebrated cornerstones: the proof of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem. The book applies the semiotic theories of French post- structuralists such as Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze to shed new light on a fundamental question: how do mathematical signs produce meaning and make sense? S(zp,zp) analyses the text of the proof of Gödel's result, and shows that mathematical language, like other forms of language, enjoys the full complexity (...) of language as a process, with its embodied genesis, constitutive paradoxical forces and unbounded shifts of meaning. These effects do not infringe on the logico-mathematical validity of Gödel's proof. Rather, they belong to a mathematical unconscious that enables the successful function of mathematical texts for a variety of different readers. S(zp,zp) breaks new ground by synthesising mathematical logic and post-structural semiotics into a new form of philosophical fabric, and offers an original way of bridging the gap between the "two cultures". (shrink)

In tracing the impact of post-structuralist thought not only on literary criticism but on such disciplines as philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, the social sciences, and art, this book will be essential reading for those who want a clear ...

ABSTRACT The technocratic dimension of government—its reliance upon knowledge claims, usually in scientific guise—is of great importance if we wish to understand modern power and governance. In Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy, Jeffrey Friedman investigates the often-overlooked question of the relationship between technocratic knowledge/power and ideas. Friedman’s contribution to our understanding of technocracy can therefore be read as a contribution to governmentality studies, one that introduces the possibility of adding normative solutions to this critical tradition.

In this eloquent collection of essays, Rebecca Martusewicz positions a philosophy of education that relies on what transpires between teachers and learners in various contexts. She thoughtfully analyzes how, in the relationship between teachers and learners, all kinds of ideas, beliefs, interpretations, and meanings are generated as a result of potent generative forces that depend, as she demonstrates using post-structuralist theories, on difference as their fuel. Ultimately she argues that to become educated requires an attention to the welfare of (...) self and others and a willingness to confront and shift one’s own habits, practices, and beliefs for that purpose. This work contains: clear translations of post-structuralist theories such as those of Deleuze, Serres, and Derrida; well-written essays that blend good storytelling, theory, and ethical analysis to reconceptualize education as the means toward social justice; and a clear argument for the drawing together of analyses of difference introduced by post-structuralism with attention to ethics and social justice as they apply to education. (shrink)

Western Marxism, since its Western deviation and theoretical development in the 1920s, developed in diverse ways that has reflected the broader philosophical environment. First, a theory of conscio...

Within the critical humanities there has been a recent return to Marxist and communist thought, which has meant a reckoning with post-structuralism. Thinkers, such as José Muñoz and Jodi Dean, who have been critical of parts of the post-structural legacy, have also held onto certain aspects of that tradition, in particular non-coincidence as a stay against identity, administration, and/or determination. However, they have done so in ways that have left unquestioned a contemporary commonsense around teleology. In this (...) essay I argue this has led to an inability to think or maintain connections between the subject and representation – crucial categories for any materialism. Through a discussion of the work of Cuban poet José Lezama Lima, I cultivate a critical vocabulary for building and sustaining non-coincident relations between the subject and representation, ones which neither collapse these two planes nor render them abyssal. (shrink)

This clear and concise book investigates the relation between materiality and the subject in Marxism, (post-)structuralism, and material semiotics. It introduces the three approaches in an accessible way and serves as an introduction to different kinds of materialism and theories of the subject. For each approach, the modalities of materiality of the respective materialism are defined and the relationship between these multiple materialities and the subject are presented as specific to the theoretical approaches discussed. Beetz argues for a (...) non-reductionist materialism, which conceives of materiality as more than matter or matter in motion. In such a materialism the subject is seen as an effect of material conditions, relations, processes, and practices. He shows how the constitution and decentering of the subject is conceptualized in the approaches presented and highlights the role of material instances in these processes. (shrink)

The article points to similarities between Radical Orthodoxy and the Post-Structuralist critique of rationalistic secularism together with a shared appraisal of aesthecism. However, although the people of Radical Orthodoxy are sympathetic to the modern experience of immanence, they criticize the flattened immanence which seems to result from a post-structuralist perspective, and claim instead that immanence has to be appreciated as creational (and therefore participating in the divine) in order to withstand the threat of nihilism. Thus, Post-Structuralism (...) is only an ally up until the point where it tends to undermine the foot-hold in pre-modern tradition and the commitment to revealed truth. Yet, the way in which Radical Orthodoxy appeals to the better myth (contrary to the ontology of difference pertaining to Post-Structuralism) still carries with it traits of postmodernism and thereby risks the relativism it strives to avoid. (shrink)

The paperback edition of “Neoliberalism, Pedagogy and Human Development”, which was published in 2014, almost coincided with the publication of two book reviews; one kindly written by Fabienne Gfeller and one by Jacob Klitmøller. A third review of “Neoliberalism, Pedagogy and Human Development” has recently been published with Power and Education. As a first response to the discussion, which the book provoked, I try to briefly explore below a central question: Is linking post-structuralist thinking and Vygotskian scholarship meaningful?