Meaning, force and truth in post-structuralism: a critical presentation of recent French philosophies

Abstract

This thesis is a critical presentation of the work of some of the leading French thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s belonging to the tradition known as 'post-structuralism'. It examines in detail the thought of Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard and Foucault, offers an interpretation of the logic of development of post-structuralism as a whole, in terms of the relations between the concepts of meaning, force and truth, and suggests the reasons for the impasse at which post-structuralism arrived in the late 1970s. Chapter One is concerned with the work of Jacques Derrida, as the first thinker to develop a widely-accepted post-structuralist critique of structuralism. It examines the nature of this critique, assesses the parallels and divergences between Derrida's work and that of Heidegger, and concludes with some suggestions on the way in which Derrida's thought can be seen as reviving the 'philosophy of identity' of German Idealism. In the first section of Chapter Two Jacques Lacan's work is considered in its relation to Freud, and in its development from an initial concern with psychosis in the 1930s. In a second section of this chapter Lacan and Derrida are compared, and Lacan is found to have a more sophisticated theory of the interrelations of language, meaning, intention and reference than can be found in Derrida's work. Chapter Three presents the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard as marking the transition to a second phase of post-structuralism, in which language is no longer given absolute primacy, and problems of meaning are displaced by the problem of forces. Lyotard's criticisms of the Lacanian conception of the unconscious as 'structured like a language', and the reasons for the evolution of his thought, from the dualism of Discours, Figure, to the libidinal monism of Economie Libidinale are examined. In Chapter Four the work of Michel Foucault, whose concept of power is seen as complementary to Lyotard's concept of desire, is discussed. A first section traces the development of Foucault's views on the relation between power and subjectivity, and a second deals with his account of the relation between power and knowledge. It is argued, in both cases, that the philosophers of the Frankfurt School have a more philosophically coherent conception of these relations. A final chapter deals with the Nietzsche-inspired assault on the concept of truth which is a central feature of much post-structuralist thought, and points to the political and moral difficulties to which this attack leads. In the Conclusion the internal logic of development which forces the post-structuralists into this attack is traced, and again it is argued that the tradition of Critical Theory preserves what is of value in the post-structuralist position, without engaging-in a self-defeating assault on truth and reason as such.

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