The Poststructuralist Project

Abstract

The main aim of this book is to explore the way poststructuralists endeavour to problematize and resolve some key dilemmas in modern social and political theory. But to address these challenges I need first to flesh out my conception of the poststructuralist style of theorizing. This requires an engagement with the founder of the structuralist problematic — Ferdinand de Saussure — and the way his ideas have been systematized by later structuralist theorists like Roman Jakobson, Louis Hjelmslev, Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes into a fully fledged programme for the social sciences. I shall then consider the way poststructuralists have sought to extend the initial contours of the structuralist project. Here I focus on Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive readings of structuralist thinkers like Saussure and Levi-Strauss, which he couples with his interpretation of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, so as to develop an alternative conception of grammatology or generalized writing. These classical poststructuralist themes and manoeuvres prepare the ground for the more substantive problems in social theory that are addressed in the rest of the book.