Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

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fore in the late 1960s and 1970s, and contin-

ued to exert an influence on critical theory and

practice in the 1980s and 1990s.

The history of the reception of

poststructuralism as an intellectual movement

has been international, but as a movement it

remains a thoroughly French phenomenon.

Poststructuralism is associated with the names

of three of the most renowned postwar French

thinkers, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault

and Jacques Lacan, the extent of whose influ-

ence on the numerous disciplines of the hu-

man sciences since the 1960s it is hard to over-

estimate. During the 1960s, these disciplines

had undergone the equally forceful impact of

structuralism, a movement spearheaded by

theorists such as Roland Barthes, Gérard

Genette, A.J. Greimas and Claude Lévi-

Strauss. The following account will look in

turn at the three main areas of intellectual

enquiry on which poststructuralism has had

the greatest impact: the subject; language,

meaning and textuality; and discourse.

Poststructuralist thought makes use of the

term ‘subject’, rather than ‘individual’ or

‘self’, both concepts laden with the presup-

positions of Renaissance and Enlightenment

humanism. The anti-humanist character of

poststructuralism testifies to its continuity

with structuralism’s use of the linguistic

theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose

privileging of ‘langue’ (the language system)

over ‘parole’ (the individual act of language)

relegates the speaking subject to the sidelines

of social, linguistic activity. Although they

concur about and develop this decentring of

the humanist individual or self, Derrida,

Foucault and Lacan displace the subject dif-

ferently.

The writings of Derrida and Foucault con-

tain no ‘theory’ of the subject. They recast sub-

jectivity as, respectively, a metaphysically un-

derpinned structure destabilized by the rest-

less differing and deferral of linguistic mean-

ing (différance), and a product of the Enlight-

enment’s formation of the human sciences un-

dermined, like other of those sciences’ central

concepts, by the anti-humanist thrust of the

philosophy of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and

their successors. According to Foucault, sub-

jectivity, the concept of ‘man’ that is the linch-

pin of the human sciences, is situated amidst

the discontinuities out of which new dis-

courses constantly arise.

The work of Lacan, in contrast to that of

Derrida and Foucault, does contain a theory

of the subject, as one might expect of the lead-

ing figure and theorist of psychoanalysis since

Freud. According to most commentators (a

notable exception is the Slovenian political

theorist Slavoj •i•ek), it is the blend of

Saussurean and post-Saussurean linguistics

with psychoanalytic theory which makes

Lacan a poststructuralist.

The centrality of language to Lacan’s ac-

count of the subject is evident in his concept

of the Symbolic Order, the sociolinguistic do-

main in which every subject must take up a

position, masculine or feminine. In Lacanian

theory the phallus as signifier of loss and

separation is indubitably master in the house

of language that is the Symbolic Order, a mas-

tery Derrida terms ‘phallogocentrism’. A con-

stant of Lacan’s account of subjectivity is the

imperious reign of the phallus as a signifier, a

phenomenon consequent upon the cross-ferti-

lization of Freudian and Saussurean theory

Lacan sets out in his 1957 essay ‘The Agency

of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason

Since Freud’ (‘L’Agence de la lettre dans

l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud’). The

consequences of the two changes Lacan

brings about here—the inversion of the posi-

tions of signifier and signified and the placing

of a bar between them—should not be under-

estimated. It is by means of these swiftly ef-

fected transformations of Saussure’s concep-

tion of the sign that the signifier acquires the

preponderance and autonomy it enjoys in

Lacan’s subsequent work. The superiority

and independence Lacan grants to the

signifier, and the continual demonstration of

these qualities in his own difficult, poetic

prose (a practice of writing Lacan intended to

imitate the infinite slipperiness of the uncon-

scious and of desire) are probably the best jus-

tifications for classing Lacan as a

poststructuralist thinker and writer.

poststructuralism

439

One other theorist who should not be omit-

ted from a summary of poststructuralist think-

ing about the subject is the psychoanalyst and

linguistician Julia Kristeva. Her work makes

use of a concept of the Symbolic Order which

resembles Lacan’s. But, whereas Lacan’s theo-

rization of the subject revolves around the triad

of Symbolic, Imaginary and Real, Kristeva’s is

structured around the dyad of symbolic and

‘semiotic’. The semiotic describes the interrup-

tion and destabilization of symbolic meaning

by the rhythms, stresses and melodies of the

prelinguistic primary processes theorized by

psychoanalysis. Another name Kristeva uses

for this dialectical structuring of subjectivity

and language is the ‘subject in process’.

It is through the exploration of the most

radical implications of Saussure’s theory of the

sign for the issues of language, meaning and

textuality that some of the central ideas of

poststructuralism can be grasped. It would be

an exaggeration and a misrepresentation to

say, as many commentators have done, that

poststructuralism grants total autonomy to the

signifier, thereby somehow mysteriously caus-

ing material objects and reality to dissolve into

a nebulous network of textuality. However

poststructuralism certainly does privilege the

signifier over the signified, a privileging taken

to its extreme in Lacan’s inversion of

Saussure’s diagram of the sign.

The implications of Derrida’s deconstruction

of the sign are arguably even more far-reach-

ing. His reading of Saussure attempts to show

how the bar separating signifier and signified is

a limit which cannot hold. Every signified one

arrives at turns out to be subject to the differing

and deferring play of signifiers that is différance.

In this conception of language and textuality,

fixed, stable meaning is not even a possibility.

Derrida’s insistence on this impossibility of ar-

resting signification, a linguistic restlessness his

own writing can sometimes be seen struggling

with, contrasts starkly with Lacan’s concept of

the quilting point (point de caption), a name

for the point at which meaning is arrested and

stabilized, albeit only temporarily.

Among the most stylish and impassioned

performances of the instability of language

and signification vital to all poststructuralist

thought are the writings of Roland Barthes

which follow his structuralist phase, in

particular S/Z, The Pleasure of the Text (Le

Plaisir du texte) and Roland Barthes par

Roland Barthes. Many ideas central to

poststructuralism can be found in the sense

Barthes gives to the notion of ‘text’, and the

use he makes of this notion. The binary oppo-

sition of theory and practice is deconstructed

in Barthes’s insistence that ‘text’ is only to be

found in a practice of writing and reading.

(This emphasis on the practice of writing was

an idea central to the activities of the Tel Quel

group prominent in France in the late 1960s).

Barthes sums up ‘text’ as follows:

the discourse on the Text should itself be

nothing other than text, research, textual

activity, since the Text is that social space

which leaves no language safe, outside, nor

any subject of the enunciation in position

as judge, master, analyst, confessor, de-

coder. The theory of the Text can coincide

only with a practice of writing.

(Barthes 1977:164)

The change that can be observed in Barthes’s

thinking about the processes of language and

meaning between the 1966 essay ‘Introduc-

tion to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’

(‘Introduction à l’analyse structural du récit’)

and 1970’s S/Z (although commentators disa-

gree about to what extent the latter is a struc-

turalist or poststructuralist book) is perhaps

the best illustration of the continuity and the

seismic shift that exist between structuralism

and poststructuralism.

A phenomenon which should be mentioned

alongside the radical implications of

poststructuralist thought for linguistic and tex-

tual theory is écriture féminine. The feminist

writings of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray,

which are central to this movement, postdate

the 1966 and 1967 publications of Derrida,

Lacan and Foucault which may be said to have

initiated poststructuralism, and convey much

of the flavour of poststructuralist writings on

language and textuality, concentrating in

poststructuralism

440

particular on their relationships to sexuality

and the female body.

Discourse as a poststructuralist concept is

associated above all with the name of Foucault,

who, although called a structuralist by some,

refused this categorization. Foucault was in

many ways using the term ‘discourse’ against

other poststructuralists’ theorization of lan-

guage and textuality: Derrida is clearly impli-

cated in the criticism of ‘the reduction of dis-

cursive practices to textual traces’ Foucault

made in ‘The Order of Discourse’ (‘L’Ordre

du discours’), his 1970 inaugural lecture to the

Collège de France. Saussure’s distinction be-

tween ‘langue’ and ‘parole’ had differentiated

the language system from actual speech acts,

but left room for the fully social definition of

language found in Foucault’s description of

discourses as ‘practices that systematically form

the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault

1989). Discursive practices occupy the same

terrain as all the rules, systems and procedures

which determine, and are determined by, the

different forms of our knowledge. The object

of Foucault’s ‘archaeologies’ was to articulate

these unthought and unspoken rules and pro-

cedures. The shift which may be observed be-

tween these studies and Foucault’s later work

is a shift to the analysis of how discursive rules

are linked to the exercise of power. The con-

figuration of discourses, knowledge and power

can be seen in the way discursive practices se-

lect, exclude and dominate in order to ensure

the continuity of the social system or the insti-

tution, while themselves undergoing reformu-

lation in the process.

Further key terms in Foucault’s work in-

clude ‘genealogy’, his method of studying his-

tory through the analysis of discourses, and

‘episteme’, a name for the open fields of rela-

tionships in which discourses are located. De-

spite observable shifts in his thinking between

his early studies of madness and medical per-

ception and his later work on the relationship

of power and knowledge, with its idea that

power is productive as much as it is repres-

sive, Foucault’s work always stressed differ-

ence, heterogeneity and discontinuity, empha-

ses central to poststructuralism. There is no

space in this account even to summarize the

contribution to poststructuralism of other

thinkers whose work, like Foucault’s, had as

much impact on the social sciences as on liter-

ary criticism and philosophy. It is a testimony

to the importance of poststructuralism as a

movement that its influence was felt, and con-

tinues to be felt, across such a wide range of

disciplines.

KATE INCE