Results by title

23 books match the query 'Structuralism'

cover of After Poststructuralism: Transitions and Transformations

After Poststructuralism

Transitions and Transformations

Edited by Rosi Braidotti

University of Chicago Press, 2010

From Kant to Kierkegaard, from Hegel to Heidegger, continental philosophers have indelibly shaped the trajectory of Western thought since the eighteenth century. Although much has been written about these monumental thinkers, students and scholars lack a definitive guide to the entire scope of the continental tradition. The most comprehensive reference work to date, this eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy will both encapsulate the subject and reorient our understanding of it. Beginning with an overview of Kant’s philosophy and its initial reception, the History traces the evolution of continental philosophy through major figures as well as movements such as existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. The final volume outlines the current state of the field, bringing the work of both historical and modern thinkers to bear on such contemporary topics as feminism, globalization, and the environment. Throughout, the volumes examine important philosophical figures and developments in their historical, political, and cultural contexts.

The first reference of its kind, A History of Continental Philosophy has been written and edited by internationally recognized experts with a commitment to explaining complex thinkers, texts, and movements in rigorous yet jargon-free essays suitable for both undergraduates and seasoned specialists. These volumes also elucidate ongoing debates about the nature of continental and analytic philosophy, surveying the distinctive, sometimes overlapping characteristics and approaches of each tradition. Featuring helpful overviews of major topics and plotting road maps to their underlying contexts, A History of Continental Philosophy is destined to be the resource of first and last resort for students and scholars alike.

[more]
cover of Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media

Algorithmic Desire

Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media

Matthew Flisfeder

Northwestern University Press, 2021

In Algorithmic Desire, Matthew Flisfeder shows that social media is a metaphor that reveals the dominant form of contemporary ideology: neoliberal capitalism. The preeminent medium of our time, social media’s digital platform and algorithmic logic shape our experience of democracy, enjoyment, and desire. Weaving between critical theory and analyses of popular culture, Flisfeder uses examples from The King’s Speech, Black Mirror, Gone Girl, The Circle, and Arrival to argue that social media highlights the antisocial dimensions of twenty‑first-century capitalism. He counters leading critical theories of social media—such as new materialism and accelerationism—and thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, proposing instead a new structuralist account of the ideology and metaphor of social media. Emphasizing the structural role of crises, gaps, and negativity as central to our experiences of reality, Flisfeder interprets the social media metaphor through a combination of dialectical, Marxist, and Lacanian frameworks to show that algorithms may indeed read our desire, but capitalism, not social media, truly makes us antisocial. Wholly original in its interdisciplinary approach to social media and ideology, Flisfeder’s conception of “algorithmic desire” is timely, intriguing, and sure to inspire debate.
 

[more]
cover of Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy's Perpetual War

Althusser and His Contemporaries

Philosophy's Perpetual War

Warren Montag

Duke University Press, 2013

Althusser and His Contemporaries alters and expands understanding of Louis Althusser and French philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s. Thousands of pages of previously unpublished work from different periods of Althusser's career have been made available in French since his death in 1990. Based on meticulous study of the philosopher's posthumous publications, as well as his unpublished manuscripts, lecture notes, letters, and marginalia, Warren Montag provides a thoroughgoing reevaluation of Althusser's philosophical project. Montag shows that the theorist was intensely engaged with the work of his contemporaries, particularly Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lacan. Examining Althusser's philosophy as a series of encounters with his peers' thought, Montag contends that Althusser's major philosophical confrontations revolved around three themes: structure, subject, and beginnings and endings. Reading Althusser reading his contemporaries, Montag sheds new light on structuralism, poststructuralism, and the extraordinary moment of French thought in the 1960s and 1970s.
[more]
cover of Critical Theory to Structuralism: Philosophy, Politics, and the Human Sciences

Critical Theory to Structuralism

Philosophy, Politics, and the Human Sciences

Edited by David Ingram

University of Chicago Press, 2010

From Kant to Kierkegaard, from Hegel to Heidegger, continental philosophers have indelibly shaped the trajectory of Western thought since the eighteenth century. Although much has been written about these monumental thinkers, students and scholars lack a definitive guide to the entire scope of the continental tradition. The most comprehensive reference work to date, this eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy will both encapsulate the subject and reorient our understanding of it. Beginning with an overview of Kant’s philosophy and its initial reception, the History traces the evolution of continental philosophy through major figures as well as movements such as existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. The final volume outlines the current state of the field, bringing the work of both historical and modern thinkers to bear on such contemporary topics as feminism, globalization, and the environment. Throughout, the volumes examine important philosophical figures and developments in their historical, political, and cultural contexts.

The first reference of its kind, A History of Continental Philosophy has been written and edited by internationally recognized experts with a commitment to explaining complex thinkers, texts, and movements in rigorous yet jargon-free essays suitable for both undergraduates and seasoned specialists. These volumes also elucidate ongoing debates about the nature of continental and analytic philosophy, surveying the distinctive, sometimes overlapping characteristics and approaches of each tradition. Featuring helpful overviews of major topics and plotting road maps to their underlying contexts, A History of Continental Philosophy is destined to be the resource of first and last resort for students and scholars alike.

[more]
cover of Emerging Trends in Continental Philosophy

Emerging Trends in Continental Philosophy

Edited by Todd May

University of Chicago Press, 2010

From Kant to Kierkegaard, from Hegel to Heidegger, continental philosophers have indelibly shaped the trajectory of Western thought since the eighteenth century. Although much has been written about these monumental thinkers, students and scholars lack a definitive guide to the entire scope of the continental tradition. The most comprehensive reference work to date, this eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy will both encapsulate the subject and reorient our understanding of it. Beginning with an overview of Kant’s philosophy and its initial reception, the History traces the evolution of continental philosophy through major figures as well as movements such as existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. The final volume outlines the current state of the field, bringing the work of both historical and modern thinkers to bear on such contemporary topics as feminism, globalization, and the environment. Throughout, the volumes examine important philosophical figures and developments in their historical, political, and cultural contexts.

The first reference of its kind, A History of Continental Philosophy has been written and edited by internationally recognized experts with a commitment to explaining complex thinkers, texts, and movements in rigorous yet jargon-free essays suitable for both undergraduates and seasoned specialists. These volumes also elucidate ongoing debates about the nature of continental and analytic philosophy, surveying the distinctive, sometimes overlapping characteristics and approaches of each tradition. Featuring helpful overviews of major topics and plotting road maps to their underlying contexts, A History of Continental Philosophy is destined to be the resource of first and last resort for students and scholars alike.

[more]
cover of From the New Criticism to Deconstruction: The Reception of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism

From the New Criticism to Deconstruction

The Reception of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism

Art Berman

University of Illinois Press, 1988

From the New Criticism to Deconstruction
  traces the transitions in American critical theory and practice from the 1950s
  to the 1980s. It focuses on the influence of French structuralism and post-structuralism
  on American deconstruction within a wide-ranging context that includes literary
  criticism, philosophy, psychology, technology, and politics.
 
[more]
cover of Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard

Heterology and the Postmodern

Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard

Julian Pefanis

Duke University Press, 1991

In Heterology and the Postmodern, Julian Pefanis presents a new view of the history of poststructuralism (heterology) and the origins of postmodernism by analyzing three important French theorists, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-François Lyotard.
Beginning with the introduction of Hegel in French postmodernist thought—largely but not exclusively through the thought of Georges Bataille—Pefanis argues that the core problematics of postmodern aesthetics—history, exchange, representation, and writing—are related to Bataille’s reconceptualization of the Hegelian framework. Pefanis explores how Bataille was influenced by Hegel, Marcel Mauss, Freud, and Nietzsche, and traces the effects of this influence on the analyses and critiques of later postmodernists, most notably Lyotard and Baudrillard. Finally, employing these postmodernists along with Freud and Jacques Lacan, Pefanis discusses discourse on postmodernism and its relation to Freud’s concept of the death drive.
This intellectual history makes valuable contributions to the debates over what the “postmodern” may mean for intellectual and political activity.
[more]
cover of History of Structuralism: Volume 1: The Rising Sign, 1945-1966

History of Structuralism

Volume 1: The Rising Sign, 1945-1966

Francois Dosse

University of Minnesota Press, 1998

The first comprehensive history of one of the most influential intellectual movements of the twentieth century.

Structuralism has had a profound impact on disciplines ranging from literary theory to sociology, from anthropology to philosophy, from history to psychoanalysis. François Dosse tells the story of structuralism from its beginnings in postwar Paris to its culmination as a movement that would reconfigure French intellectual life and reverberate throughout the Western world. This first volume of his study, The Rising Sign, 1945–1966, cogently maps the dizzying array of personalities and ideas of the early structuralist movement, paving the way for later developments.

[more]
cover of How to Read Barthes' Image-Music-Text

How to Read Barthes' Image-Music-Text

Ed White

Pluto Press, 2012

Roland Barthes remains one of the most influential cultural theorists of the postwar period and Image-Music-Text collects his most influential essays. Ed White provides students with a clear guide to this essential but difficult text.

As students are increasingly expected to write across a range of media, Barthes' work can be understood as an early mapping of what we now call interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary study. The book's detailed section-by-section readings makes Barthes' most important writings accessible to undergraduate readers.

This book is a perfect companion for teaching and learning Barthes' ideas in cultural studies and literary theory.

[more]
cover of Inscriptions: After Phenomenology and Structuralism

Inscriptions

After Phenomenology and Structuralism

Hugh J. Silverman

Northwestern University Press, 1997

Positioning itself within the Continental tradition, Inscriptions is an interwoven set of investigations into the differences between phenomenology and structuralism, and a cohesive and thoroughgoing inquiry into the contemporary status of Continental philosophy.

In Inscriptions, Hugh J. Silverman investigates two divergent yet related philosophical movements: phenomenology from the later Husserl through Sartre and Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty, and structuralism from de Saussure through Levi-Strauss and Lacan to Barthes. This reading of the tradition culminates in an assessment of Derrida and Foucault. From this foundation, Silverman moves beyond structuralism and phenomenology, and develops his own philosophical position in the context of semiotics, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. A new preface by the author updates this classic text.
[more]
cover of Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan

Jonathan Scott Lee

University of Massachusetts Press, 1991

Originally published as part of Twayne's World Authors Series, Jacques Lacan offers a comprehensive and rigorous introduction to the life and work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, one of the most influential and challenging thinkers of the twentieth century. Written by a philosopher with a deep engagement in both continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Jonathan Scott Lee traces the development of Lacan's theoretical project from his early psychiatric writings through the landmark Écrits and the renowned seminars that Lacan delivered over more than two decades.

Lee's approach is distinctive in its philosophical clarity, making complex Lacanian ideas available to readers in the humanities and social sciences. His careful analysis of the mirror stage, the role of the Other, and Lacan's three fundamental registers—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real— provides new insight into the ways they structure human subjectivity, language, and desire. This book situates Lacan within the broader intellectual currents of twentieth-century French thought, drawing connections to structuralism, post-structuralism, and the philosophical traditions that shaped and were shaped by Lacan's radical "return to Freud."

Widely cited in scholarly literature across disciplines, including literary criticism, philosophy, theology, film studies, and cultural theory, Jacques Lacan remains a valued introduction for students, scholars, and general readers seeking a careful and comprehensive guide to one of the most formidable intellectual figures of the modern era.

[more]
cover of Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis

Ellie Ragland-Sullivan

University of Illinois Press, 1986

This volume is the first clear and comprehensive critical analysis of Jacques Lacan's thought for the English-speaking world.  With Jacques Lacan and the philosophy of Psychoanalysis Ellie Ragland-Sullivan not only fills that gap but also provides the foundation upon which all future studies of Lacan must build. Working principally from the legendary but seldom-analyzed Seminars, Ragland-Sullivan clarifies and synthesizes Lacan's major concepts.  Using empirical data as well as Lacan's texts, she demonstrates how Lacan's teachings constitute a new epistemology that goes far beyond conventional thinking in psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics.
 
[more]
cover of Madness, Language, Literature

Madness, Language, Literature

Michel Foucault

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Newly published lectures by Foucault on madness, literature, and structuralism.
 
Perceiving an enigmatic relationship between madness, language, and literature, French philosopher Michel Foucault developed ideas during the 1960s that are less explicit in his later, more well-known writings. Collected here, these previously unpublished texts reveal a Foucault who undertakes an analysis of language and experience detached from their historical constraints. Three issues predominate: the experience of madness across societies; madness and language in Artaud, Roussel, and Baroque theater; and structuralist literary criticism. Not only do these texts pursue concepts unique to this period such as the “extra-linguistic,” but they also reveal a far more complex relationship between structuralism and Foucault than has typically been acknowledged.
[more]
cover of Postmodernism and a Sociology of the Absurd: Absurd And Other Essays on the "Nouvelle Vague" in American Social Science

Postmodernism and a Sociology of the Absurd

Absurd And Other Essays on the "Nouvelle Vague" in American Social Science

Stanford Lyman

University of Arkansas Press, 1997

In the fifth volume in the Studies in American Sociology Series, Stanford M. Lyman offers commentaries on and critiques of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction, posing questions concerning theoretical and epistemological problems arising from what appears to be a “nouvelle vague.”

Postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism are interrelated aspects of the newest theoretical development in sociology and the social sciences. This new wave of thought challenges virtually all paradigms currently in use. In this, his fifth volume in the Studies in American Sociology Series, Stanford M. Lyman offers commentaries on and critiques of this new perspective, posing questions concerning theoretical and epistemological problems arising from what appears to be a nouvelle vague.

Among the basic themes and issues explored are the allegation that modernity has defaulted on the promise of the Enlightenment; the question of whether the rational basis for knowledge and action is still valid; the controversy over the place of metanarratives and macrosociological outlooks; and newer concerns over race, gender, sexual preferences, the self, and the “Other.”

Professor Lyman provides empirically based and historically specific analyses of the relation of the race question to the problem of otherness and to the legal construction of racial identity in American court proceedings. Focusing on the issues of citizenship affecting European, Middle Eastern, and Asian immigrants; African Americans; and the special cases of the Chinese and Native Americans, he relates major public problems to the modern as well as the postmodern perspectives on justice. The debate over assimilation and multiculturalism, the dynamics of gender-specific emotions as expressed in six decades of Hollywood films, and the postmodern approach to deviance are each examined. He also offers proposals for a social science attuned to, but critical of, postmodernism and poststructuralism. Such a sociology might offer a perspective that treats the drama of social relations in the routine as well as the remarkable aspects of everyday life. Professor Lyman provides not only a new understanding of postmodernism but also a program of how to proceed with respect to its challenges.

[more]
cover of Poststructuralism and Critical Theory's Second Generation

Poststructuralism and Critical Theory's Second Generation

Edited by Alan D. Schrift

University of Chicago Press, 2010

From Kant to Kierkegaard, from Hegel to Heidegger, continental philosophers have indelibly shaped the trajectory of Western thought since the eighteenth century. Although much has been written about these monumental thinkers, students and scholars lack a definitive guide to the entire scope of the continental tradition. The most comprehensive reference work to date, this eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy will both encapsulate the subject and reorient our understanding of it. Beginning with an overview of Kant’s philosophy and its initial reception, the History traces the evolution of continental philosophy through major figures as well as movements such as existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. The final volume outlines the current state of the field, bringing the work of both historical and modern thinkers to bear on such contemporary topics as feminism, globalization, and the environment. Throughout, the volumes examine important philosophical figures and developments in their historical, political, and cultural contexts.

The first reference of its kind, A History of Continental Philosophy has been written and edited by internationally recognized experts with a commitment to explaining complex thinkers, texts, and movements in rigorous yet jargon-free essays suitable for both undergraduates and seasoned specialists. These volumes also elucidate ongoing debates about the nature of continental and analytic philosophy, surveying the distinctive, sometimes overlapping characteristics and approaches of each tradition. Featuring helpful overviews of major topics and plotting road maps to their underlying contexts, A History of Continental Philosophy is destined to be the resource of first and last resort for students and scholars alike.

[more]
cover of Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn

Systems We Have Loved

Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn

Eve Meltzer

University of Chicago Press, 2013

By the early 1960s, theorists like Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Barthes had created a world ruled by signifying structures and pictured through the grids of language, information, and systems. Artists soon followed, turning to language and its related forms to devise a new, conceptual approach to art making. Examining the ways in which artists shared the structuralist devotion to systems of many sorts, Systems We Have Loved shows that even as structuralism encouraged the advent of conceptual art, it also raised intractable problems that artists were forced to confront.
 
Considering such notable art figures as Mary Kelly, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, and Rosalind Krauss, Eve Meltzer argues that during this period the visual arts depicted and tested the far-reaching claims about subjectivity espoused by theorists. She offers a new way of framing two of the twentieth century’s most transformative movements—one artistic, one expansively theoretical—and she reveals their shared dream—or nightmare—of the world as a system of signs. By endorsing this view, Meltzer proposes, these artists drew attention to the fictions and limitations of this dream, even as they risked getting caught in the very systems they had adopted. The first book to describe art’s embrace of the world as an information system, Systems We Have Loved breathes new life into the study of conceptual art.
[more]
cover of The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness

The Barbara Johnson Reader

The Surprise of Otherness

Barbara Johnson

Duke University Press, 2014

This Reader collects in a single volume some of the most influential essays written by Barbara Johnson over the course of her thirty-year career as a pioneering literary theorist and cultural critic. Johnson achieved renown early in her career, both as a brilliant student of the Yale School of literary criticism and as the translator of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination. She went on to lead the way in extending the insights of structuralism and poststructuralism into newly emerging fields now central to literary studies, fields such as gender studies, African American studies, queer theory, and law and literature. Stunning models of critical reading and writing, her essays cultivate rigorous questioning of universalizing assumptions, respect for otherness and difference, and an appreciation of ambiguity.

Along with the classic essays that established her place in literary scholarship, this Reader makes available a selection of Johnson's later essays, brilliantly lucid and politically trenchant works exploring multilingualism and translation, materiality, ethics, subjectivity, and sexuality. The Barbara Johnson Reader offers a historical guide through the metamorphoses and tumultuous debates that have defined literary study in recent decades, as viewed by one of critical theory's most astute thinkers.  
 
[more]
cover of The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit": Graduate Thesis in Philosophy, 1949

The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit"

Graduate Thesis in Philosophy, 1949

Michel Foucault

University of Chicago Press, 0

The first English translation of Foucault’s previously lost master’s thesis, itself an original contribution to the study of Hegel’s philosophy.

On June 11, 1949, a twenty-three-year-old Michel Foucault defended his master’s thesis in philosophy at the Sorbonne entitled The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit.” Long considered a lost holy grail of French philosophy, the thesis was only recently rediscovered, and it is presented here in English for the first time. 

In his master’s thesis, Foucault offers an original reading of Hegel that understands “absolute knowing,” the famous but enigmatic final figure of experience in the Phenomenology, as inextricably bound to time, language, and historical experience. Indeed, readers will discover how many of Foucault’s famous later concepts—the historical a priori, the episteme, and the limit-experience—are intimately rooted in his early, intense engagement with Hegel’s philosophy.

An introduction and critical apparatus provided by Hegel scholar Christophe Bouton traces previously unknown connections between the thesis and Foucault’s later masterpieces, particularly History of Madness and The Order of Things. Introducing a fundamental shift in our understanding of Foucault’s intellectual trajectory, this book is an essential text for anyone interested in Foucault, Hegel, and the dramatic evolution of twentieth-century continental philosophy.

[more]
cover of The Fate of Law

The Fate of Law

Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1993

For law and legal theory the end of the twentieth century is a time of contradiction; while the newly emerging politics of Eastern Europe seek to establish a new rule of law, voices in this country proclaim the "death of law." For the former, law provides hope for stability and fairness. For the latter, the fundamental values that provide a grounding for legality seem no longer secure or satisfying. The Fate of Law is a collection of five original essays, each of which discusses the problems and prospects of law in the late twentieth century. The essays pay particular attention to the impact of broad intellectual and political movements, especially feminism and postmodernism, on law and legal theory.

The Fate of Law investigates what happens under the critical scrutiny of those movements and in an era of growing skepticism about law's central claim to objectivity, neutrality, and reason. It describes the struggles that ensue and the responses that are made. Each of the essays that comprise this books is written in its own style and voice; each makes it own judgments and assessments.

[more]
cover of The History of Continental Philosophy

The History of Continental Philosophy

Edited by Alan D. Schrift

University of Chicago Press, 2010

From Kant to Kierkegaard, from Hegel to Heidegger, continental philosophers have indelibly shaped the trajectory of Western thought since the eighteenth century. Although much has been written about these monumental thinkers, students and scholars lack a definitive guide to the entire scope of the continental tradition. The most comprehensive reference work to date, this eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy will both encapsulate the subject and reorient our understanding of it. Beginning with an overview of Kant’s philosophy and its initial reception, the History traces the evolution of continental philosophy through major figures as well as movements such as existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. The final volume outlines the current state of the field, bringing the work of both historical and modern thinkers to bear on such contemporary topics as feminism, globalization, and the environment. Throughout, the volumes examine important philosophical figures and developments in their historical, political, and cultural contexts.

The first reference of its kind, A History of Continental Philosophy has been written and edited by internationally recognized experts with a commitment to explaining complex thinkers, texts, and movements in rigorous yet jargon-free essays suitable for both undergraduates and seasoned specialists. These volumes also elucidate ongoing debates about the nature of continental and analytic philosophy, surveying the distinctive, sometimes overlapping characteristics and approaches of each tradition. Featuring helpful overviews of major topics and plotting road maps to their underlying contexts, A History of Continental Philosophy is destined to be the resource of first and last resort for students and scholars alike.

[more]
cover of The New Century: Bergsonism, Phenomenology, and Responses to Modern Science

The New Century

Bergsonism, Phenomenology, and Responses to Modern Science

Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson and Alan D. Schrift

University of Chicago Press, 2010

From Kant to Kierkegaard, from Hegel to Heidegger, continental philosophers have indelibly shaped the trajectory of Western thought since the eighteenth century. Although much has been written about these monumental thinkers, students and scholars lack a definitive guide to the entire scope of the continental tradition. The most comprehensive reference work to date, this eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy will both encapsulate the subject and reorient our understanding of it. Beginning with an overview of Kant’s philosophy and its initial reception, the History traces the evolution of continental philosophy through major figures as well as movements such as existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. The final volume outlines the current state of the field, bringing the work of both historical and modern thinkers to bear on such contemporary topics as feminism, globalization, and the environment. Throughout, the volumes examine important philosophical figures and developments in their historical, political, and cultural contexts.

The first reference of its kind, A History of Continental Philosophy has been written and edited by internationally recognized experts with a commitment to explaining complex thinkers, texts, and movements in rigorous yet jargon-free essays suitable for both undergraduates and seasoned specialists. These volumes also elucidate ongoing debates about the nature of continental and analytic philosophy, surveying the distinctive, sometimes overlapping characteristics and approaches of each tradition. Featuring helpful overviews of major topics and plotting road maps to their underlying contexts, A History of Continental Philosophy is destined to be the resource of first and last resort for students and scholars alike.

[more]
cover of The Spell of Language: Poststructuralism and Speculation

The Spell of Language

Poststructuralism and Speculation

Thomas G. Pavel

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Originally published as Le Mirage linguistique, this book remains the definitive study of the role of linguistics in structuralism and poststructuralism. Thomas Pavel examines recent French thought through the work of luminaries such as Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida. The "spell of language" for Pavel consists of three things: the promise that linguistics seemed to represent for the humanities and social sciences; the distortions, misunderstandings, and willful neglect incumbent upon the "linguistic turn"; and, above all, the break with traditional humanism. He isolates three modes of thought-moderate structuralism, scientific structuralism, and speculative structuralism-and shows how even as they diverge from each other, they all advocate an antihumanist point of view.

In this spirited book, Pavel shows that structuralism's flawed use of linguistic theory has rendered hollow the philosophical core of a whole generation of work in the human sciences.

[more]
cover of The Structural Allegory: Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought

The Structural Allegory

Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought

John Fekete, EditorIntroduction by John Fekete

University of Minnesota Press, 1984

The Structural Allegory was first published in 1984. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The radical questions raised by Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, and others have had an enormous impact on Anglo-American literary and cultural studies over the past twenty years. John Fekete argues that we can see this strategic development of French thought in terms of what he calls "the structural allegory." Structuralism proper has given way to the currently dominant model of post-structuralism, yet we remain uncertain of the practical orientations favored by thinkers associated with both phases of the movement.

With the aim of uncovering the legacy of the structural tradition, the essays in this volume survey key French thinkers, including some not well known in the Anglo-American context &#8212 Baudrillard and Castoriadis. The essays are reconstructive, not deconstructive, in character, scholarly in method, and ecumenical in spirit. While the structural allegory emerges from this critical analysis as an inescapable intellectual paradigm (analogous to the transformations in quantum physics and modern biology), the authors argue that it merits admiration and reservation in equal measure.

[more]