[Miguel Duclós]

Gostaria de debater, com aqueles que leram, como a obra explica a política e como seria possível ( e seria bom ) aplicá-la nos dias de hoje. Vejo que Maquiavel expõe pontos de vista muito interessantes, que tambem gostaria de discutir.

Só isso já dária um tópico. Será que é possível "aplicar" Maquiavel hoje? O termo aplicar seria adequado, já que o livro se trata de um manual? Maquiavel é conhecido por ter inaugurado a ciência política moderna, ao separar a religião da moral. Há alguns anos, em nosso país, durante o governo FHC, um dos seus defensores, o histórico filósofo uspiano José Arthur Gianotti levantou uma polêmica ao afirmar que existia uma zona de amoralidade na política, sendo portanto plausível aplicar princípios "maquiavélicos" na ética e na política de hoje.Por outro lado, nós temos que tentar entender o problema do contexto do autor, que é particular, específico. Vocês chamaram bem a atenção para esse aspecto de uma análise da obra na discussão, pelo que vi.  Maquiavel é um autor que virou dicionário, com a palavra maquiavélico, infelizmente usada em um sentido pejorativo. Isso é um indicativo de seu uso corrente, que inevitavelmente dá margem à má-interpretação. Como no uso indiscriminado do chavão "os fins justificam os meios" impresso em manuais. Uma corrente histórica contemporânea é a do contextualismo linguístico, em que você busca remontar as características da época, no caso, a Renascença, para entender as influências, as origens e os motivos.Um dos representantes dessa corrente é um dos estudiosos mais eruditos vivos sobre o período renascentista: o filósofo inglês Quentin Skinner. Olha, você está interessado em Maquiavel, aproveite que seu clássico dos clássicos, o magistral "Fundações do Pensamento Político Moderno" foi reeditado e se puder, compre. Gostaria de indicar o artigo de um amigo meu, que chamou-me a atenção para o contextualismo, estudante de graduação (história) na UERN. Ele fez este texto bastante interessante sobre Maquiavel e publicou lá na revista eletrônica Urutágua, da UEM:http://www.urutagua.uem.br/009/09azevedojr.htm

[Miguel Duclós]

Interessante atentar sobre essa ligação com Dostoievski e o cinema, unVolt. Outro filme recente é o Match Point do Wood Allen em que o personagem aparece lendo justamente Crime e Castigo. Mas pelo que vi entre os zelotes uma possível associação com a trama deveria ser feita com muito cuidado, por ser uma leitura particular.Eu não gostei de 21 gramas. Tirei recentemente no DVD para o meu pai assistir e ele gostou. Escreveu um comentário em sua coluna na Internet em http://outubro.blogspot.com/2006/05/dirio-da-fonte-cinema-de-extermnio.html (se Interessar). Eu também escrevi um pequeno artigo expondo minha visão sobre o filme na época que assisti: http://blog.cybershark.net/miguel/7 (se interessar). Mas paro por aqui, ou talvez tenhamos que abrir um tópico sobre filmes, e não livros.Já tentei ler Dostoievski várias vezes antes, e nunca me agradou muito. Talvez porque eram aquelas velhas traduções da Brasiliense. O único que terminei foi o "Memórias", que naquela época eram do subterrâneo, e depois viraram do subsolo.abs

[Miguel Duclós]

Prezado Flag: Bem-vindo ao Fórum Consciência. Está nos termos de serviço que você concordou ao se registrar: evite internetês, escreva o melhor português que você for capaz, como se isso fosse um ambiente de colégio, por favor.Observe a estrutura de tópicos e sub-tópicos para manter um arquivo coeso. O Fórum começou em 2000. Suas mensagens - espera-se - estarão aqui e serão lidas ainda no ano 2011. Você está postando para a posteridade. Você fala "Descartes defende Deus", mas não há nada sobre Deus na sua mensagem. Ela deveria ter sido enviada em Fórum de Filósofos - Descartes.

[Miguel Duclós]

OláEstou lendo Nietzsche e a Filosofia do francês Gilles Deleuze, o segundo volume de Em Busca do Tempo Perdido de Proust, na tradução do Mario Quintana (ed. Globo), À sombra das raparigas em flor e um livro de contos do Borges traduzido pela gaúcha Lygia Averbuck. Quando terminar esse romance, quero pegar finalmente o Crime e Castigo, na tradução de Paulo Bezerra (ed. 34).Todos esses livros são excelentes leituras e recomendo. Espero terminar todos em breve.

[Miguel Duclós]

Atualizados os arquivos de linguagem com a tradução para português do Brasil  ;)

[Miguel Duclós]

Cara Cláudia: Esse é um debate amplo na filosofia contemporânea. Um livro que conheço que apresenta uma abrangente visão do problema da modernidade na filosofia é o de Habermas: Discurso Filosófico da Modernidade (Martins Fontes). A erudição de Habermas é impressionante, ele começa tratando desde Hegel, quando pela primeira vez a modernidade passa a ser tratada pela filosofia, até filósofos contemporâneos, como Bataille, Foucault, Heidegger e Derrida. Ele pega os principais filósofos que desde Nietzsche fizeram a crítica à modernidade. Evidentemente com o intuito de rebatê-los, baseando seu argumento central de que as críticas ao discurso caíram na aporia de terem sido feitas no interior do próprio discurso. A bibliografia citada por Habermas é interessante de ser seguida, embora bem especializada.

[Miguel Duclós]

Cada tópico principal na home tem sua própria movimentação, é essencial observar e atentar para a estrutura, afim de mantermos organização e um índice coeso.Em Questões de Filosofia em geral vão questões clássicas da filosofia, problemáticas perenes tratadas por diversos autores em diversas épocas.Em Fórum dos Filósofos questões específicas sobre um autor específico, comentários, impressões, pressupõe um estudo anterior neste autor.Pedidos de Ajuda foi criado para atender a demanda por ajuda dos usuários. Questões de provas, dúvidas, ajudas para trabalhos etc. Sobre o website Consciência é um canal de comunicação sobre o site e o fórum. Dúvidas sobre funcionamento. Essa mensagem aqui por exemplo devia estar lá.Outros tópicos foi criado movendo-se mensagens que foram criadas em locais inadequados, afim de não deletá-las, e acabou ganhando uma autonomia.

[Miguel Duclós]

Respondendo apenas alguns pontos do seu tópico:O imperativo categórico é uma fórmula para pensar uma ética estritamente racional, ou seja, sem recorrer a discurso unificador metafísico, que coloca como juiz de todos os homens alguma entidade religiosa, como no caso dos mandamentos na cultura judaico-cristã. Uma ética nos limites da simples razão que não seja relativa é um desafio para a filosofia, que perdura até hoje, mesmo com uma asceção do relativismo que  coloca a ética sempre circunscrita a um grupo de pessoas. É preciso ter isso em mente quando pensar no imperativo categórico kantiano.O próprio Kant enumera uma série de exemplo e contra-exemplos em que um ato pode ser ou não considerado ético especialmente na fundamentação da metafísica dos costumes e na Crítica da razão prática. Mas eu discordo que o imperativo não considera o outro concretamente. É uma das primeiras éticas que coloca como central o problema do Outro, já que este é tratado estritamente como fim em si mesmo, e não como um meio, para adquirir o que quer que seja.É certo que existem diferenças entre indivíduos. Mas existem também coisas que são universais à forma humana, atributos pertencentes à nossa essência de seres pensantes e comunicantes. O imperativo ao meu ver trafega nesse pressuposto. Um fio de espírito que passe de uma ponta a outra da humanidade conservando seu enunciado pode ser considerado universal ao homem. Eis o desafio ético e o desafio político. Algo que todos querer? Dou um exemplo: todos querem viver. Não se pode para que uns vivam, outros deixem de viver. O imperativo dá conta satisfatoriamente dessas questões.Bem-vindo ao fórumabs

[Miguel Duclós]

Colo abaixo para uso dos estudantes que lêem em inglês as entradas da Enciclopédia Routledge de Filosofia relacionadas ao nosso tópico: estuturalismo, pós-estruturalismo e pós-modernismo. Achei os resumos bem pertinentes, melhor que em muitos sites que visitei.____StructuralismThe term ‘structuralism’ can be applied to any analysis that emphasizes structures and relations, but it usually designates a twentieth-century European (especially French) school of thought that applies the methods of structural linguistics to the study of social and cultural phenomena. Starting from the insight that social and cultural phenomena are not physical objects and events but objects and events with meaning, and that their signification must therefore be a focus of analysis, structuralists reject causal analysis and any attempt to explain social and cultural phenomena one-by-one. Rather, they focus on the internal structure of cultural objects and, more importantly, the underlying structures that make  them possible. To investigate neckties, for instance, structuralism would attempt to reconstruct (1) the internal structure of neckties (the oppositions - wide/narrow, loud/subdued - that enable different sorts of neckties to bear different meanings for members of a culture) and (2) the underlying ‘vestimentary’ structures or system of a given culture (how do neckties relate to other items of  clothing and the wearing of neckties to other socially-coded actions).Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics, insists that to study language, analysts must describe a linguistic system, which consists of structures, not substance. The physical sound of a word or sign is irrelevant to its linguistic function: what counts are the relations, the contrasts, that differentiate signs. Thus in Morse code a beginner’s dot may be longer than an expert’s dash: the structural relation, the distinction, between dot and dash is what matters.For structuralism, the crucial point is that the object of analysis is not the corpus of utterances linguists might collect, that which Saussure identifies as parole (speech), but the underlying system (la langue), a set of formal elements defined in relation to each other and which can be variously combined to form sentences. Arguing that the analysis of systems of relation is the appropriate way to study human phenomena, that our world consists not of things but of relations, structuralists often claim to provide a new paradigm for the human sciences. In France, structuralism displaced existentialism in the 1960s as a public philosophical movement. Philosophically, proponents of structuralism have been concerned to distinguish it from phenomenology. 1 Development and domainStructural linguistics was developed by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in lectures published as the Cours de linguistique générale (1916), but the term ‘structuralism’ was coined by the Russian linguist and literary theorist Roman Jakobson in 1929. Jakobson was a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle which, between 1926 and 1938, drew upon Saussurian linguistics, Russian Formalist literary criticism, Husserl’s phenomenology and Gestalt psychology to develop Prague Structuralism. Structuralism was opposed to atomism and was presented as a general method for the humanities and social sciences, although most of the  circle’s work focused on language, literature and art. A literary work is a structural whole; to study it is to analyse its internal relations (it is a hierarchically ordered system of structures of different kinds) and its place in the systems of a language and a culture, especially the system of literary genres and conventions.Jakobson himself provided a link between Prague Structuralism and the structuralism which developed in post-Second World War France, first in anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), then in literary and cultural studies (Jakobson, Roland Barthes, Algirdas Greimas, Gérard Genette), psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan), intellectual history (Michel Foucault) and political theory (Louis Althusser). Although these thinkers never formed a school as such, it was under the heading of ‘structuralism’ that their work was exported and read in the UK, the USA and elsewhere in the late 1960s and 1970s, where it was influential first in anthropology and literary studies, and later in historical and cultural analysis.In anthropology, structuralism insists on the reconstruction of underlying systems (of kinship, of totemic and mythic thought) through which a culture orders the world. Within the field of the history of thought it seeks to identify the system of possibilities or formation rules that permit the emergence, in a particular era, of certain disciplines and theoretical objects. In literary studies it promotes a poetics interested in the conventions that make literary works possible, and it seeks not to produce new interpretations of works but to understand howthey can have the meanings and effects that they do. In cultural studies generally it encourages attempts to make explicit the rules and signifying procedures that govern fashion or other cultural practices.According to structuralist theory, the identity of structuralism should come from contrasts within the system of modern thought, from the differences shared by a range of thinkers, rather than from a historical filiation. In fact, the term ‘structuralism’ is generally used to designate work that marks its debts to structural linguistics and deploys a Saussurian vocabulary, including sign, signifier and signified, syntagmatic and paradigmatic. Thereare many writings, from Aristotle to Chomsky, that share the structuralist propensity to analyse objects as the products of a combination of structural elements within a system, but if they do not display a Saussurian ancestry, they are often not deemed structuralist, whatever their affinities with the writings so designated.Once structuralism came to be defined as a movement or theoretical stance based on a set of principles, some theorists began to distance themselves from it. Readers who could see that works by some ‘structuralists’ did not fit certain accounts of structuralism began to regard some of these thinkers (particularly Barthes, Lacan, and Foucault) as post-structuralists, going beyond a  structuralism defined as a project aiming at mastery of objective structures (see Post-structuralism). In fact, many of the views associated with post-structuralism - such as thedifficulty for any metalanguage to escape entanglement in the phenomena it purports to describe, the possibility for texts to create meaning by violating the conventions that structural analysis seeks to delineate, or the inappropriateness of positing a complete system because systems are always changing - are manifest even in the early work of such thinkers as Barthes, Foucault and Lacan who were at the time regarded as structuralists.Post-structuralism involves not so much the demonstration of the inadequacies or errors of structuralism as a turning away from the project of working out what makes cultural phenomena possible and intelligible, and a return to interpreting and narrating (sometimes called ‘historicizing’).It is difficult to distinguish, in a principled way, structuralism from semiotics, the science of signs, which traces its lineage to Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce. However semiotics is an international movement that has sought to adopt a scientific model and to cultivate links with, for example, zoology, while mostly eschewing the philosophical speculation and cultural critique that has marked structuralism in its French and related versions (see Semiotics).2 Shared principlesStructuralism takes many different forms, but there are some general principles that could be identified as structuralist. Most of these are best stated differentially, as contrasts. Structuralism has defined itself against historicism, atomism, mechanism, behaviourism, psychologism, and humanism.Structuralism is not hermeneutics (see Hermeneutics). Structural analysis seeks to understand the conditions of meaning, and in that sense it takes the cultural meaning of objects and events as a point of departure, as what requires explanation. Hermeneutics characteristically seeks to discover the meanings of a text or cultural phenomenon. Linguistic analysis does not try to tell us what sentences mean but to explain how these sequences are constructed and how they can have the meaning they do for speakers of a language. The linguistic model enjoins a concentration on poetics rather than interpretation (Culler 1975).Structuralism is not phenomenology (see Phenomenological movement). Although the intuitions of subjects about the meaning or at least the well-formedness or deviance of cultural phenomena are often its point of departure, structuralism seeks explanation at the level not of structures of consciousness but of unconscious infrastructures, systems of relation that operate through subjects and work to constitute subjects but are not necessarily accessible to them. In Le Visible et l’invisible (1964), Maurice Merleau-Ponty imagined the possibility of linking a phenomenological critique of the distinction between subject and object (both subjectand object are a posteriori constructs, notions derived from a unitary experience rather than experiential givens) to a structuralist account of the differential nature of meaning. Most theorists, however, have insisted on the ffundamental difference in focus and approach between phenomenology and structuralism (Ricoeur 1969).Cultural phenomena have a relational identity. They are defined by their differences from one another, not by any essential features. This basic principle of Saussurian linguistics has wide applicability. The object of analysis is not the phenomena themselves but the underlying system which makes them possible or intelligible. Analysts cannot examine all the texts, artefacts or acts related to a given system, for the system, like a language, may have the capacity to produce an infinite set of objects or events. The goal is to identify the set of contrastive elements which combine, according to rules to be discovered, to produce the cultural forms.Structure, which is not form alone but the formal organization of content, plays a determining role in human affairs. One writer speaks of ‘superstructuralism’ to indicate that, in contrast with Marxism which treats language and culture as a superstructure determined by a material base, structuralism and post-structuralism share the conviction that the structures of language and meaning generally are not direct reflections of economic relations but themselves determine the parameters within which human beings live and act (Harland 1987).The priority of synchronic over diachronic analysis. Saussure distinguishes the study of language as a system (synchronic analysis) from the study of changes in languages over time (diachronic) and argues that describing systems is a condition of understanding changes from one state or system to another. Generally, structuralism has maintained that culture should be studied as a series of synchronic systems, that much ‘historical’ analysis should be seen as synchronic analysis of moments in the past, and that the analysis of change requires priorunderstanding of the systems that change.Structuralism does not narrate. In place of explanation which proceeds narratively, by linking a phenomenon to origins and ends, structural analysis explores conditions of possibility. The critique of structuralism known as post-structuralism often entails, in effect, a return to narrative as a mode of knowledge, but with no confidence in its authority, perhaps because the principled structuralist rejection of narrative explanation has been ignored rather than refuted.For structuralism, the subject or self is a construct that needs to be explained, not a principle of explanation. It is not that the subject ‘man’ and human beings do not exist but that what counts as man or what counts as the subject depends upon a cultural system that requires analysis. Some structuralists (for example, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan) claim to analyse the ‘laws of thought’ but most are agnostic on the question of whether the categories and rules of one system might be universals. Unlike transformational-generative grammar, which posits a rich universal grammar (a human language faculty that strongly constrains the properties of possible human languages), structural linguistics assumes that one language (linguistic system) may differ radically from the next. Nevertheless, most structural analyses treat meaning as the product of hierarchically-ordered sets of binary oppositions and thus, in effect, posit someuniversal principles of signification (see Chomsky, N.).See also: Structuralism in linguistics; Structuralism in literary theory; Structuralism in social science JONATHAN CULLER Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London: Routledge_____________Post-structuralismPost-structuralism is a late-twentieth-century development in philosophy and literary theory, particularly associated with the work of Jacques Derrida and his followers. It originated as a reaction against structuralism, which first emerged in Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on linguistics. By the 1950s structuralism had been adapted in anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Lacan) and literary theory (Barthes), and there were hopes that it could provide the framework for rigorous accounts in all areas of the human sciences.Although structuralism was never formulated as a philosophical theory in its own right, its implicit theoretical basis was a kind of Cartesianism, but without the emphasis on subjectivity. It aimed, like Descartes, at a logically rigorous system of knowledge based on sharp explicit definitions of fundamental concepts. The difference was that, for structuralism, the system itself was absolute, with no grounding in subjectivity. Post-structuralist critiques of structuralism typically challenge the assumption that systems are self-sufficient structures and question the possibility of the precise definitions on which systems of knowledge must be based. Derrida carries out his critique of structuralist systems by the technique of deconstruction. This is the process of showing, through close textual and conceptual analysis, how definitions of fundamental concepts (for example, presence versus absence, true versus false) are undermined by the very effort to formulate and employ them. Derrida’s approach has particularly influenced literary theory and criticism in the USA. In addition, Richard Rorty, developing themes from pragmatism and recent analytic philosophy, has put forward a distinctively American version of post-structuralism.1 StructuralismIn his lectures on linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure proposed a view of language (langue) as a formal structure, defined by differences between systemic elements. According to Saussure, this structure is simultaneously present in and unites the two domains of thought and words. A given linguistic term (a sign) is the union of an idea or concept (the ‘signified’) and a physical word (the ‘signifier’). A language is a complete system of such signs, which exists not as a separate substance but merely as the differentiating form that defines the specificstructure of both signifiers (physical words) and signifieds (ideas). Saussure’s view rejects the common-sense picture of the set of signifiers and the set of signifieds as independent givens, with the signifieds having meaning in their own right and the signifiers obtaining meaning entirely through their association with corresponding signifieds. Saussure denies this independence and instead maintains that signifiers and signifieds alike have meaning only in virtue of the formal structure (itself defined by differences between elements) that they share (see Structuralism in linguistics).Saussure’s structuralist approach was very successful within linguistics, where it was applied and extended by, among others, Jakobson and Troubetzkoy. By the 1950s the approach had been adapted in anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and literary theory (Barthes); and there were hopes that it could provide the framework for rigorous accounts in all areas of the human sciences. Three distinguishing features of this framework were: (1) a rejection of all idealist views of concepts and meanings as derived from the activity of consciousness; (2) an understanding of concepts and meanings as, instead, grounded in the structural relationsamong the elements of abstract systems; (3) an explication of such structural relations solely in terms of bipolar differences (for example, real/unreal, temporal/nontemporal, present/absent, male/female).2 Post-structuralism: terminologyPost-structuralism is obviously closely tied to structuralism, but commentators have characterized the relationship in a variety of mutually inconsistent ways. Some writers make no distinction between structuralism and post-structuralism, applying the single term ‘structuralist’ to the entire range of thinkers from Saussure through to Derrida. More commonly, post-structuralism is distinguished as a separate development, but there is disagreement as to whether it is primarily a reaction against structuralism or an extension of it (as the termNeostrukturalismus, commonly used by Manfred Frank and other German commentators, suggests). Apart from matters of definition, there is even disagreement as to whether major figures such as Barthes, Lacan and Foucault are structuralists or post-structuralists.Michel Foucault’s book, Les mots et les choses (translated under the title The Order of Things) is an instructive example. In one sense it is quintessentially structuralist. The book first uncovers the fundamental epistemic systems (which Foucault calls ‘epistemes’) that underlie and delimit the subjective thought of particular eras. It then goes on to show how the apparent ultimacy of subjectivity is itself just the product of one contingent episteme, that of modernity, which is even now disappearing (the famous ‘death of man’).Nevertheless, Foucault’s essentially historical viewpoint in the work demonstrates the limitation ofstructuralism: its inability to give any account of the transitions from one system of thought to another. Foucault seems to have seen from the beginning that structuralism can not be historical, a fact that explains his constant insistence that he was not a structuralist, in spite of his obvious deployment of structuralist methods and concepts. So, although Les mots et les choses is a structuralist book, it at the same time makes clear the limits of structuralism and prepares the way for Foucault’s later work on power and ethics which is distinctly post-structuralist (see Foucault, M.; Post-structuralism and the social sciences).Despite these ambiguities and disagreements, the concept of post-structuralism is useful, if not essential, for understanding philosophy in France during the latter part of the twentieth century. One fruitful approach is to think of post-structuralism as a philosophical reaction to the structuralism that was such a powerful force during the 1960s in linguistics, psychology and the social sciences. It was neither a simple rejection or extension of structuralism but a series of philosophical reflections on the structuralist programme and achievement.3 Two major post-structuralist thesesAlthough structuralism was never formulated as a philosophical theory in its own right, its implicit theoretical basis was, as noted above, a kind of Cartesianism without the subject. (Hence, the association of structuralism with the notion of the ‘death of the subject’.) Post-structuralist critiques of structuralism are typically based on two fundamental theses: (1) that no system can be autonomous (self-sufficient) in the way that structuralism requires; and (2) that the defining dichotomies on which structuralist systems are based express distinctionsthat do not hold up under careful scrutiny.The first thesis is not understood so as to support the traditional idealist view that systematic structures are dependent on the constitutive activities of subjects. Post-structuralists retain structuralism’s elimination of the subject from any role as a foundation of reality or of our knowledge of it. But, in opposition to structuralism, they also reject any logical foundation for a system of thought (in, for example, its internal coherence). For post-structuralists, there is no foundation of any sort that can guarantee the validity or stability of any system of thought.The second thesis is the key to post-structuralism’s denial of the internal coherence of systems. The logical structure of a system requires that the applications of its concepts be unambiguously defined. (In the formalism of elementary number theory, for example, there must be no question as to whether a given number is odd or even.)As a result, the possibility of a systematic structure depends on the possibility of drawing sharp distinctions between complementary concepts such as odd/even, charged/uncharged, living/non-living, male/female and so on. Post-structuralist philosophers have been particularly concerned with the fundamental dichotomies (or oppositions) underlying structuralist theories in the human sciences. Saussure’s linguistics, for example, is based on the distinction of the signifier from the signified; Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology of myths employs oppositions such as raw/cooked, sun/moon and so on. In each case, post-structuralists have argued that the dichotomy has no absolute status because the alternatives it offers are neither exclusive nor exhaustive.4 Derrida’s critique of logocentrismThis sort of critique was extended to philosophy, particularly by Jacques Derrida, who finds Western philosophical thought pervaded by a network of oppositions - appearance/reality, false/true, opinion/knowledge, to cite just a few examples - that constitute what he calls the system of ‘logocentrism’. This term derives from Derrida’s conviction that at the root of Western philosophical thought is a fundamental distinction between speech (logos) and writing. Speech is privileged as the expression of what is immediate and present, the source, accordingly, of what is real, true and certain. Writing, on the other hand, is derogated as an inferior imitation of speech, the residue of speech that is no longer present and, therefore, the locus of appearance,deceptions and uncertainty. Plato’s devaluation of writing in comparison with living dialogue is the most famous and influential example of this distinction. But Derrida finds the distinction pervading Western philosophy and regards it as not just a preference for one form of  communication over another but the basis for the entire set of hierarchical oppositions that characterize philosophical thought. Speech offers presence, truth, reality, whereas writing, a derivative presentation employed in the absence of living speech, inevitably misleads us into accepting illusions.Derrida’s critiques of the speech/writing opposition - and of all the hierarchical oppositions that attend it - proceed by what he calls the method of ‘deconstruction’  (see Deconstruction). This is the process of showing, through close textual and conceptual analysis, how such oppositions are contradicted by the very effort to formulate and employ them. Consider, for example, the opposition between presence and absence, which plays a fundamental role in Husserl’s phenomenology (and many other philosophical contexts). Husserl requires a sharp distinction between what is immediately present to consciousness (and therefore entirely certain) and what is outside of consciousness (and therefore uncertain). But once Husserl undertakes a closeanalysis of the immediately present, he discovers that it is not instantaneous but includes its own temporal extension. The ‘present’, as a concrete experiential unit, involves both memory of the just-immediately-past (retention, in Husserl’s terminology) and anticipation of the immediate future (protention). Thus, the past and the future, both paradigms of what is absent (not present), turn out to be integral parts of the present.  Husserl’s own account of the presence/absence opposition overturns it.Deconstruction maintains that there is no stability in any of thought’s fundamental oppositions. Their allegedly exclusive alternatives turn out to be inextricably connected; their implicit hierarchies perpetually reversible. As a result, there is an ineliminable gap between the intelligibility of a rational system and the reality it is trying to capture. Derrida expresses this gap through a variety of terms. He frequently speaks of différance (a deliberately misspelled homophone of the French différence) to emphasize, first, the differencebetween systematic structures and the objects (for example, experiences, events, texts) they try to make intelligible, and, second, the way in which efforts to make absolute distinctions are always deferred (another sense of the French différer) by the involvement of one polar opposite in the other. This latter phenomenon Derrida also discusses in terms of the ‘trace’ of its opposite always lingering at the heart of any polar term. He also employs the term ‘dissemination’ to refer to the way that objects of analysis slip through the conceptualnet spread by any given system of intelligibility we devise for it.5 Post-structuralism and literary theoryThus far the discussion has focused on Derrida’s deconstruction of the meaningful structures philosophers purport to find in reality and to express in their philosophical texts. But Derrida’s approach is also readily applicable to literary texts (and the  ‘worlds’ they create). This is because - like philosophical systems - poems, novels and other literary texts are typically thought to embody complete and coherent systems of meaning, which it is the task of literary criticism to extract. Although Derrida himself has dealt primarily with philosophical texts, his approach has been widely adopted by analysts of literature. (Of course, as should beexpected, Derrida and his followers reject any sharp distinction between the philosophical and the literary.)Traditional literary analysis has understood the meaning of a text as the expression of its author’s mind; that is, as thoughts the author intended to convey in writing the text. The first stage of deconstructive criticism is the structuralist one of detaching meaning from authorial intention, locating it instead in the text itself as a linguistic structure. Roland Barthes, for example, showed how to analyse a text by Balzac entirely in terms of the formal codes it embodies, with no reference to what Balzac supposedly ‘meant’. This structuralist move effectsa ‘death of the author’ parallel to the anti-Cartesian ‘death of the subject’. But the post-structuralists take the future step of denying a fixed meaning to even the autonomous text itself. It is not that a text lacks all meaning but that, on the contrary, it is the source of an endless proliferation of conflicting meanings. As deconstructionists delight in showing, any proposed privileged meaning of a text can be undermined by careful attention to the role in it of apparently marginal features. (For example, an orthodox Christian reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost is deconstructed by a close study of certain details in its treatment of Satan.) There isno doubt, of course, that texts are often produced by authors trying to express what they think or feel. But what they write always goes beyond any authorial intention and in ways that can never be reduced to a coherent system of meaning.The deconstructionist’s point can also be understood as an undermining of the distinction between primary text and commentary. On the traditional view, a commentary is an effort to formulate as accurately as possible the content (meaning) of the text. To the extent that it is successful, a commentary expresses nothing more and nothing less than this meaning. But for deconstructionists the meaning in question does not exist, and the commentary must be understood as nothing more than a free elaboration of themes suggested, but not required, by the text. Unable to be a secondary reflection, the commentary becomes as much an independent creation as the text itself.6 Rorty’s post-structuralist pragmatismRichard Rorty’s work is far removed, in both antecedents and style, from that of continental post-structuralists (see Rorty, R.). His critique of Cartesianism, derived more from Dewey than from Heidegger, is aimed at twentieth-century analytic philosophy rather than the structuralist human sciences; and his urbanely lucid prose contrasts sharply with the wilfully playful convolutions of Derrida and his followers. None the less, Rorty’s analyses lead him to a critique of traditional philosophy very similar to that of the post-structuralists.The focal point of Rorty’s critique is the project (called foundationalism) of providing a philosophical grounding for all knowledge. Modern foundationalism originates with Descartes, but Rorty sees it s also the leitmotif of Descartes’ successors, through Hume and Kant down to the logical positivists. Like Derrida, Rorty attacks traditional systematic thought by calling into question some of its key distinctions. Unlike Derrida, however, he does not carry out his attacks through close readings of classic texts but by deploying the results of recent analytic philosophy. He uses, for example, Quine’s critique of the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements to argue that there are no foundational truths about the meaning of concepts. He appeals to Wilfrid Sellars’s undermining of the distinction between theory and observation to reject empirical foundations of knowledge in interpretation-free sense data. He employs Donald Davidson’s questioning of the distinction between the formal structure and the material content of a conceptual framework to reject Kantian attempts to ground knowledge in principles that define the framework of all possible thought.In Rorty’s view the upshot of these various critiques is to cut off every source of an ultimate philosophical foundation for our knowledge. Accordingly, he maintains, philosophy must give up its traditional claim to be the final court of appeal in disputes about truth. We have no alternative but to accept as true what we (the community of knowers) agree on. There is no appeal beyond the results of the ‘conversation of mankind’ so far as it has advanced to date. For us, there is no (upper-case) Truth justified by privileged insights and methods. There is only the mundane (lower-case) truth: what our interlocutors let us get away with saying.It might seem that this rejection of foundationalism is a rejection of the entire tradition of Western philosophy since Plato. Rorty, however, distinguishes two styles of philosophy. First, there is systematic philosophy, the mainline of the Western tradition since Plato, which is defined by the foundationalist goal of ultimate jjustification. But, on the other hand, there is another enterprise, always marginal to the tradition, that Rorty calls edifying philosophy. Whereas systematic philosophers undertake elaborate and purportedly eternal constructions (which are always demolished by the next generation), edifying philosophers are content to shootironic barbs at the systematic thought of their day, exploding its pretensions and stimulating intriguing lines of counter-thought. The tradition of edifying thought can be traced back at least to the ancient Cynics and has been more recently represented by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and the later Wittgenstein. Derrida’s deconstructions are, on Rorty’s view, a prime contemporary example of edifying philosophy.Edifying philosophers, however, are philosophers only because they react against systematic philosophy. They do not differ from other sorts of cultural critics  (novelists, literary theorists, social scientists) because of any distinctively philosophical method or viewpoint. If, in the wake of thinkers such as Derrida and Rorty, systematic philosophy is abandoned, philosophy will be too. The triumph of post-structuralism would, for better or worse, be the end of philosophy as we have known it.See also: PostmodernismGARY GUTTING Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London: Routledge______________________PostmodernismThe term ‘postmodernism’ appears in a range of contexts, from academic essays to clothingadvertisements in the New York Times. Its meaning differs with context to such an extent that it seems to function like Lévi-Strauss’ ‘ floating signifier’(Derrida 1982: 290): not so much to express a value as to hold open a space for that which exceeds expression. This broad capacity of the term ‘postmodernism’ testifies to the scope of the cultural changes it attempts to compass.Across a wide range of cultural activity there has been a sustained and multivalent challenge to various founding assumptions of Western European culture since at least the fifteenth century and in some cases since the fifth century BC: assumptions about structure and identity, about transcendence and particularity, about the nature of time and space. From physics to philosophy, from politics to art, the description of the world has changed in ways that upset some basic beliefs of modernity. For example, phenomenology seeks to collapse the dualistic distinction between subject and object; relativity physics shifts descriptive emphasis from reality to measurement; the arts move away from realism; and consensus politics confronts totalitarianism and genocide. These and related cultural events belong to seismic changes in the way we register the world and communicate with each other.To grasp what is at stake in postmodernism it is necessary to think historically and broadly, in the kind of complex terms that inevitably involve multidisciplinary effort. This multilingual impetus,  this bringing together of methods and ideas long segregated both in academic disciplines and in practical life, particularly characterizes postmodernism and largely accounts for such resistance as it generates.Although diverse and eclectic, postmodernism can be recognized by two key assumptions. First, theassumption that there is no common denominator - in ‘nature’ or ‘truth’ or ‘God’ or ‘the future’ -that guarantees either the One-ness of the world or the possibility of neutral or objective thought. Second, the assumption that all human systems operate like language, being self-reflexive rather than referential systems - systems of differential function which are powerful but finite, and which construct and maintain meaning and value.1 Historical context‘Postmodernism’ is a historical term, indicating something that comes after modernity; so the definition of postmodernism varies depending on what is meant by ‘modern’. When ‘modern’ refers to movements in the arts around the turn of the twentieth century - an efflorescence known as ‘modernism’ - then ‘postmodern’ refers to a fairly local phenomenon of the mid- to late-twentieth century (see Modernism). But when ‘modern’ is used in the historian’s sense, to indicate what follows the medieval - that is, Renaissance culture and its sequels - then ‘postmodern’ refers to a more broadly distributed cultural phenomenon in European and US societies.Given this latter use of the term ‘modern’, postmodernism is what follows and transforms that particular Renaissance (some would prefer to call it Enlightenment) modernity. It is in this broader sense of modernity that the term ‘postmodernism’ takes on its full meaning. Here it signals a revisionary shift in the system of values and practices that have been broadly codified in European life over several centuries. Confusion between these two historical meanings of the term ‘modern’ skews discussion of the crucial philosophical, political and social issues at stake in postmodernism. Such confusion certainly is not relieved by the ahistorical contributions of recent French  philosophy which has taken the demystification of Western metaphysics back to Plato. Known as post-structuralism, this philosophy has been crucial to theoretical discussion of postmodernism, but not identical with it; the historical horizon of post-structuralism occupies a period so vast that it practically ceases to allow for history at all, producing discussions that blot out awareness of postmodernity as a historical event. Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida, for example, take on the foundations of Western philosophy and do not limit their critiques specifically tomodern European culture (see Post-structuralism).Modernity, defined from the vantage point of post-modernity, was a cultural epoch and ‘episteme’ (see §2) founded in a humanistic belief that the world is One. This belief, codified in centuries of realist art, representational politics and empirical science, is tantamount to the assertion that a common denominator can be found for all systems of belief and value: that the world is a unified field, explicable by a single explanatory system. As this belief developed through increasingly secular and materialistic practices it became less secure in its claims to universal applicability. After the Renaissance the ‘totalizing’ claim to universal applicability was increasingly transferred from divinity to infinity: especially the infinity of space and time as they were radically reconstructed by Renaissance art and science. Postmodernism is the condition of coping without these absolute common denominators, especially without the neutral and homogeneous media of time and space which are the quintessential, field-unifying media of modernity. Postmodernism specifically challenges the European culture that took its direction from the Renaissance, developed through the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment, and remains a common discourse for most citizens of Western democratic societies. In philosophy, in the arts, in science, in political theory and in sociology, postmodernism challenges the entire culture of realism, representation, humanism and empiricism. Postmodern critique thus goes to the very foundation of personal, social and institutional definition. Its challenges to knowledge and institutions are felt particularly in universities.2 The role of languageAlready well under way in the nineteenth century, the critique of Enlightenment rationalism found its postmodern turning point in the spreading influence of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss teaching at Geneva whose lectures on linguistics (published in 1916 as Cours de Linguistique Générale) have become a keystone of postmodernism. Saussure’s deceptively simple idea was that the linguistic sign acts reflexively, not referentially. The word, he said, functions not by pointing at the world, but by specifying an entire system of meaning and value in which each word has its function. (Technically, Saussure’s word points to an idea, but that idea is itself linguistic; there is nothing prior to language.) To read or understand even the simplestlinguistic sequence is to recognize difference; it is to perform an incalculably complex and continuous act of differentiation, which becomes more and more balanced and rich the more that linguistic sequence verges towards poetry or other complex usage.In one way this is only common sense. Any speaker of more than one language knows the arbitrariness of the sign: what is ‘dog’ here, is ‘chien’ there. But the more languages one knows, the more obvious becomes the systemic value of any word, the more obvious the fact that it has no exact equivalent elsewhere, either in other languages or in the world. To take the simplest possible example, we understand the English word ‘dog’ not merely because conventionally we have associated it with a creature, but more complexly and largely because we differentiate it by composition and function from other words and functions (for example, from ‘dot’, ‘log’, ‘bog’, and from verbs, adverbs, conjunctions). What is being described in these rather dry terms is the language’s capacity for poetry: its capacity as a living language to provide its speakers with particular alphabets and lexicons of possibility, and to modify, even radically, the usages with which we constitute our worlds.The postmodern moment, as Derrida says, is the moment ‘when language invaded the universalproblematic’; this is the moment when it becomes clear that everything operates by such codes, that everything behaves like language. Body language, garment language, the silent expression of gesture, the layout of a city or a fashion magazine or a university: all these are complex, coded systems of meaning and value in which we function simultaneously in several, even many, at once. Even in humdrum activities we are expert well beyond our conscious measures. Language thus conceived is a model of organization that is both powerful and finite.For describing systems of value that work like language, the terms episteme and discourse have emerged as useful. Episteme suggests the systemic nature of all knowledge (one can speak of the Western episteme); and discourse suggests the systemic nature of all practices (moral, social, domestic, political, reproductive, economic, intellectual). These two terms at least help the mind to find the fulcrum that allows thought to run in directions different from those inspired by terms like ‘reality’ or ‘nature’ (see §3).Postmodernism differs from deconstruction, with which it is sometimes confused. Deconstruction is a methodology with agendas similar to some of postmodernism but with a much more limited capability. Deconstruction is a negative movement by which an interpreter of a code or sign-system (for example a novel or a psychoanalysis) looks for what is not present rather than what is present - looks for the points of crisis and breakdown in a system or a rationalization rather than its more obvious positivities. This methodology has the initial value of opening interpretation to complex reading, but it soon gets lost in circularity; the negative quality of its questioning often limits the creativity of the response. It is almost as though reconstruction is riveted on what it has not got, operating on a kind of nostalgia for the referential view of language that postmodernism revises (see Deconstruction).Postmodernism does not weep for referentiality. If the sign does not refer simply, but instead specifies a system of meaning and value, then interest lies in discovering what systems actually are in play and in seeing what different systems are capable of, whether they be literary texts, political movements or personal lives. This valence of postmodernism can be found not so much in the theoretical texts which have had such extensive recent attention, but in the creative work of artists and scientists who have in many cases anticipated the philosophical critiques of rationalism, and have gone well beyond them to locate their practical implications. Artists andfilm-makers like Magritte and Buñuel, postmodern novelists like Robbe-Grillet and Nabokov, post-Einsteinian scientists interested in quanta and chaos, feminists interested in new acts of personal and political attention, and architects who play with traditional conventions have explored the practical and material implications of postmodernism far more fully than have many of the more theoretical writers. 3 Challenge to the bases of consensus and representationThe view that all systems are self-contained and largely self-referential has a radical implication that either alarms or inspires - the implication that no system has any special purchase on Truth and, in fact, that it is impossible to establish a Truth. This implication goes beyond the recuperable relativism of the nineteenth century to unrecuperable difference in the twentieth. Where relative systems could still cohabit in the single world of modernity, postmodernity involves the recognition that, to a large extent, one’s relative systems construct the world. In short, that the world is not One; that words like ‘truth,’ ‘nature’, ‘reality’ and even ‘human’ are weasel words because they imply, falsely, that an autonomous world of meaning and values exists, and that it transcends all finite and mutually exclusive human systems and somehow guarantees them. Postmodernism denies absolute status to any truth or nature or reality. The question always remains - what truth, which nature, whose reality?While this post-structuralist critique of transcendence goes back to Plato, the postmodern version limits its ambit to the particular forms of transcendence made available in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The discourse of modernity extends to infinity its neutral media of space and time and, in so doing, encourages us to forget finitude and to distribute our energy toward an infinite horizon. The discourse of postmodernity, on the other hand, treats time and space as dimensions of finite systems. This recognition of absolute and unmediateable finitude inspires reflexiveness because activity no longer can be referred to unchanging external  bsolutes. Such reflexiveness always remains experimental or improvisatory, and inaccessible to universal generalization.The disappearance of transcendental reference creates four related crises: the crisis of ‘the subject’ (the irreducible individual, the one that is because it thinks or is conscious); the crisis of ‘the object’ (the ‘things’ - including the individual - that constitute a world that is single, not multiplied); the crisis of ‘the sign’ (the word that refers to the world thus constituted); and, consequently, the crisis of historicism (the temporal humanism that constitutes an uneasy unity in the world by formulating transcendence as The Future). Postmodernism presents a new problematic of negotiation between finite systems of meaning and value where no transcendental reference is possible. This negotiation goes on all the time in complex ways but, in the discourse of modernity, neither philosophy, nor political science, nor indeed any science, nor even much art has attended to it. This new problematic is, in Craig Owens’ words, ‘how to conceive difference without opposition’, and how to translate that problematic, as the Renaissance translated Christian humanism, into social and politicalterms.Where modernity sought the single system, postmodernity plays with the elements of systems, combining them for limited agendas, using what is useful and leaving the rest, refusing responsibility for consistency within this or that totalized explanatory system. This ‘bricolage’ becomes a key value for postmodernism. What one wants to avoid at all costs is something without play, without slack, without the living capacity for movement; one wants play in the line, play in the structure, in the sense of flexibility and variability even to the point of reorganizing the structure.By conceiving all particulars and practices as functions of systems rather than as  emi-autonomous entities, postmodernism poses especially interesting problems for two agendas of modernity that are particularly valuable to twentieth-century social and political function: historicism and individualism. History as a single, universal system of human explanation depends upon a construction of temporality that belongs to humanism and the Renaissance; its very notion of temporality is a kind of single-point perspective in time. Postmodernism puts history in the interesting position of considering its own historicity. The individual subject, sometimes appearing as the Cartesian cogito, does not, despite alarms, entirely disappear in postmodernism into systemic function. But individual identity and agency do have new definitions and functions when all practice is conceived differentially and systemically rather than naturally. Whatever is individual about a life, its unique and unrepeatable poetry, comes not from some ‘natural’ essence but from its particular specification of the complex discourse it inhabits.Given the extent of the reformation implied by postmodernism, it is not surprising to find a flutter of reaction against it, not all of it informed and much of it governed by a desire to rescue particular epistemic investments from devaluation. The emphasis on linguistic reflexiveness, on the power of a system of signs to constitute meaning and value, has been taken by some commentators as an expression of inward-looking narcissism, a flight from ‘reality’ and, even, a threat to morality and order: it is as if the social, political and epistemic problems towhich postmodernism responds were created by it, rather than by the entire culture of modernity. Postmodernism does not spell the end of meaning and value, still less the end of humanist meaning and value, but it does spell the end of certain hegemonies, especially those vested in what Alain Robbe-Grillet calls ‘habitual humanism’. In any case, Saussure’s idea of the reflexivity, rather than the referentiality of language has by no means yet been fully explored.The postmodern critique, amid clatter and confusion, is only just under way. There is no responsible way to anticipate its full implications or trajectory. One can see, however, that postmodernism offers both a new freedom and a new constraint. The emphasis on the constructed nature of all knowledge and projects means that, because they have been invented, they can be changed; there is, morally or socially speaking, no ‘nature’ of things. On the other hand, the fact that with our languages we inherit so much of our beliefs and values ready-made meansthat we are much less original and autonomous than modernity suggested, and we express agency more locally, more collectively and less heroically than modernity allowed.See also: Foucault, M.; Phenomenology, epistemic issuesELIZABETH DEEDS ERMARTH Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London: Routledge

[Miguel Duclós]

Colo abaixo para uso dos estudantes que lêem em inglês as entradas da Enciclopédia Routledge de Filosofia relacionadas ao nosso tópico: estuturalismo, pós-estruturalismo e pós-modernismo. Achei os resumos bem pertinentes, melhor que em muitos sites que visitei.____StructuralismThe term ‘structuralism’ can be applied to any analysis that emphasizes structures and relations, but it usually designates a twentieth-century European (especially French) school of thought that applies the methods of structural linguistics to the study of social and cultural phenomena. Starting from the insight that social and cultural phenomena are not physical objects and events but objects and events with meaning, and that their signification must therefore be a focus of analysis, structuralists reject causal analysis and any attempt to explain social and cultural phenomena one-by-one. Rather, they focus on the internal structure of cultural objects and, more importantly, the underlying structures that make  them possible. To investigate neckties, for instance, structuralism would attempt to reconstruct (1) the internal structure of neckties (the oppositions - wide/narrow, loud/subdued - that enable different sorts of neckties to bear different meanings for members of a culture) and (2) the underlying ‘vestimentary’ structures or system of a given culture (how do neckties relate to other items of  clothing and the wearing of neckties to other socially-coded actions).Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics, insists that to study language, analysts must describe a linguistic system, which consists of structures, not substance. The physical sound of a word or sign is irrelevant to its linguistic function: what counts are the relations, the contrasts, that differentiate signs. Thus in Morse code a beginner’s dot may be longer than an expert’s dash: the structural relation, the distinction, between dot and dash is what matters.For structuralism, the crucial point is that the object of analysis is not the corpus of utterances linguists might collect, that which Saussure identifies as parole (speech), but the underlying system (la langue), a set of formal elements defined in relation to each other and which can be variously combined to form sentences. Arguing that the analysis of systems of relation is the appropriate way to study human phenomena, that our world consists not of things but of relations, structuralists often claim to provide a new paradigm for the human sciences. In France, structuralism displaced existentialism in the 1960s as a public philosophical movement. Philosophically, proponents of structuralism have been concerned to distinguish it from phenomenology. 1 Development and domainStructural linguistics was developed by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in lectures published as the Cours de linguistique générale (1916), but the term ‘structuralism’ was coined by the Russian linguist and literary theorist Roman Jakobson in 1929. Jakobson was a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle which, between 1926 and 1938, drew upon Saussurian linguistics, Russian Formalist literary criticism, Husserl’s phenomenology and Gestalt psychology to develop Prague Structuralism. Structuralism was opposed to atomism and was presented as a general method for the humanities and social sciences, although most of the  circle’s work focused on language, literature and art. A literary work is a structural whole; to study it is to analyse its internal relations (it is a hierarchically ordered system of structures of different kinds) and its place in the systems of a language and a culture, especially the system of literary genres and conventions.Jakobson himself provided a link between Prague Structuralism and the structuralism which developed in post-Second World War France, first in anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), then in literary and cultural studies (Jakobson, Roland Barthes, Algirdas Greimas, Gérard Genette), psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan), intellectual history (Michel Foucault) and political theory (Louis Althusser). Although these thinkers never formed a school as such, it was under the heading of ‘structuralism’ that their work was exported and read in the UK, the USA and elsewhere in the late 1960s and 1970s, where it was influential first in anthropology and literary studies, and later in historical and cultural analysis.In anthropology, structuralism insists on the reconstruction of underlying systems (of kinship, of totemic and mythic thought) through which a culture orders the world. Within the field of the history of thought it seeks to identify the system of possibilities or formation rules that permit the emergence, in a particular era, of certain disciplines and theoretical objects. In literary studies it promotes a poetics interested in the conventions that make literary works possible, and it seeks not to produce new interpretations of works but to understand howthey can have the meanings and effects that they do. In cultural studies generally it encourages attempts to make explicit the rules and signifying procedures that govern fashion or other cultural practices.According to structuralist theory, the identity of structuralism should come from contrasts within the system of modern thought, from the differences shared by a range of thinkers, rather than from a historical filiation. In fact, the term ‘structuralism’ is generally used to designate work that marks its debts to structural linguistics and deploys a Saussurian vocabulary, including sign, signifier and signified, syntagmatic and paradigmatic. Thereare many writings, from Aristotle to Chomsky, that share the structuralist propensity to analyse objects as the products of a combination of structural elements within a system, but if they do not display a Saussurian ancestry, they are often not deemed structuralist, whatever their affinities with the writings so designated.Once structuralism came to be defined as a movement or theoretical stance based on a set of principles, some theorists began to distance themselves from it. Readers who could see that works by some ‘structuralists’ did not fit certain accounts of structuralism began to regard some of these thinkers (particularly Barthes, Lacan, and Foucault) as post-structuralists, going beyond a  structuralism defined as a project aiming at mastery of objective structures (see Post-structuralism). In fact, many of the views associated with post-structuralism - such as thedifficulty for any metalanguage to escape entanglement in the phenomena it purports to describe, the possibility for texts to create meaning by violating the conventions that structural analysis seeks to delineate, or the inappropriateness of positing a complete system because systems are always changing - are manifest even in the early work of such thinkers as Barthes, Foucault and Lacan who were at the time regarded as structuralists.Post-structuralism involves not so much the demonstration of the inadequacies or errors of structuralism as a turning away from the project of working out what makes cultural phenomena possible and intelligible, and a return to interpreting and narrating (sometimes called ‘historicizing’).It is difficult to distinguish, in a principled way, structuralism from semiotics, the science of signs, which traces its lineage to Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce. However semiotics is an international movement that has sought to adopt a scientific model and to cultivate links with, for example, zoology, while mostly eschewing the philosophical speculation and cultural critique that has marked structuralism in its French and related versions (see Semiotics).2 Shared principlesStructuralism takes many different forms, but there are some general principles that could be identified as structuralist. Most of these are best stated differentially, as contrasts. Structuralism has defined itself against historicism, atomism, mechanism, behaviourism, psychologism, and humanism.Structuralism is not hermeneutics (see Hermeneutics). Structural analysis seeks to understand the conditions of meaning, and in that sense it takes the cultural meaning of objects and events as a point of departure, as what requires explanation. Hermeneutics characteristically seeks to discover the meanings of a text or cultural phenomenon. Linguistic analysis does not try to tell us what sentences mean but to explain how these sequences are constructed and how they can have the meaning they do for speakers of a language. The linguistic model enjoins a concentration on poetics rather than interpretation (Culler 1975).Structuralism is not phenomenology (see Phenomenological movement). Although the intuitions of subjects about the meaning or at least the well-formedness or deviance of cultural phenomena are often its point of departure, structuralism seeks explanation at the level not of structures of consciousness but of unconscious infrastructures, systems of relation that operate through subjects and work to constitute subjects but are not necessarily accessible to them. In Le Visible et l’invisible (1964), Maurice Merleau-Ponty imagined the possibility of linking a phenomenological critique of the distinction between subject and object (both subjectand object are a posteriori constructs, notions derived from a unitary experience rather than experiential givens) to a structuralist account of the differential nature of meaning. Most theorists, however, have insisted on the ffundamental difference in focus and approach between phenomenology and structuralism (Ricoeur 1969).Cultural phenomena have a relational identity. They are defined by their differences from one another, not by any essential features. This basic principle of Saussurian linguistics has wide applicability. The object of analysis is not the phenomena themselves but the underlying system which makes them possible or intelligible. Analysts cannot examine all the texts, artefacts or acts related to a given system, for the system, like a language, may have the capacity to produce an infinite set of objects or events. The goal is to identify the set of contrastive elements which combine, according to rules to be discovered, to produce the cultural forms.Structure, which is not form alone but the formal organization of content, plays a determining role in human affairs. One writer speaks of ‘superstructuralism’ to indicate that, in contrast with Marxism which treats language and culture as a superstructure determined by a material base, structuralism and post-structuralism share the conviction that the structures of language and meaning generally are not direct reflections of economic relations but themselves determine the parameters within which human beings live and act (Harland 1987).The priority of synchronic over diachronic analysis. Saussure distinguishes the study of language as a system (synchronic analysis) from the study of changes in languages over time (diachronic) and argues that describing systems is a condition of understanding changes from one state or system to another. Generally, structuralism has maintained that culture should be studied as a series of synchronic systems, that much ‘historical’ analysis should be seen as synchronic analysis of moments in the past, and that the analysis of change requires priorunderstanding of the systems that change.Structuralism does not narrate. In place of explanation which proceeds narratively, by linking a phenomenon to origins and ends, structural analysis explores conditions of possibility. The critique of structuralism known as post-structuralism often entails, in effect, a return to narrative as a mode of knowledge, but with no confidence in its authority, perhaps because the principled structuralist rejection of narrative explanation has been ignored rather than refuted.For structuralism, the subject or self is a construct that needs to be explained, not a principle of explanation. It is not that the subject ‘man’ and human beings do not exist but that what counts as man or what counts as the subject depends upon a cultural system that requires analysis. Some structuralists (for example, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan) claim to analyse the ‘laws of thought’ but most are agnostic on the question of whether the categories and rules of one system might be universals. Unlike transformational-generative grammar, which posits a rich universal grammar (a human language faculty that strongly constrains the properties of possible human languages), structural linguistics assumes that one language (linguistic system) may differ radically from the next. Nevertheless, most structural analyses treat meaning as the product of hierarchically-ordered sets of binary oppositions and thus, in effect, posit someuniversal principles of signification (see Chomsky, N.).See also: Structuralism in linguistics; Structuralism in literary theory; Structuralism in social science JONATHAN CULLER Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London: Routledge_____________Post-structuralismPost-structuralism is a late-twentieth-century development in philosophy and literary theory, particularly associated with the work of Jacques Derrida and his followers. It originated as a reaction against structuralism, which first emerged in Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on linguistics. By the 1950s structuralism had been adapted in anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Lacan) and literary theory (Barthes), and there were hopes that it could provide the framework for rigorous accounts in all areas of the human sciences.Although structuralism was never formulated as a philosophical theory in its own right, its implicit theoretical basis was a kind of Cartesianism, but without the emphasis on subjectivity. It aimed, like Descartes, at a logically rigorous system of knowledge based on sharp explicit definitions of fundamental concepts. The difference was that, for structuralism, the system itself was absolute, with no grounding in subjectivity. Post-structuralist critiques of structuralism typically challenge the assumption that systems are self-sufficient structures and question the possibility of the precise definitions on which systems of knowledge must be based. Derrida carries out his critique of structuralist systems by the technique of deconstruction. This is the process of showing, through close textual and conceptual analysis, how definitions of fundamental concepts (for example, presence versus absence, true versus false) are undermined by the very effort to formulate and employ them. Derrida’s approach has particularly influenced literary theory and criticism in the USA. In addition, Richard Rorty, developing themes from pragmatism and recent analytic philosophy, has put forward a distinctively American version of post-structuralism.1 StructuralismIn his lectures on linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure proposed a view of language (langue) as a formal structure, defined by differences between systemic elements. According to Saussure, this structure is simultaneously present in and unites the two domains of thought and words. A given linguistic term (a sign) is the union of an idea or concept (the ‘signified’) and a physical word (the ‘signifier’). A language is a complete system of such signs, which exists not as a separate substance but merely as the differentiating form that defines the specificstructure of both signifiers (physical words) and signifieds (ideas). Saussure’s view rejects the common-sense picture of the set of signifiers and the set of signifieds as independent givens, with the signifieds having meaning in their own right and the signifiers obtaining meaning entirely through their association with corresponding signifieds. Saussure denies this independence and instead maintains that signifiers and signifieds alike have meaning only in virtue of the formal structure (itself defined by differences between elements) that they share (see Structuralism in linguistics).Saussure’s structuralist approach was very successful within linguistics, where it was applied and extended by, among others, Jakobson and Troubetzkoy. By the 1950s the approach had been adapted in anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and literary theory (Barthes); and there were hopes that it could provide the framework for rigorous accounts in all areas of the human sciences. Three distinguishing features of this framework were: (1) a rejection of all idealist views of concepts and meanings as derived from the activity of consciousness; (2) an understanding of concepts and meanings as, instead, grounded in the structural relationsamong the elements of abstract systems; (3) an explication of such structural relations solely in terms of bipolar differences (for example, real/unreal, temporal/nontemporal, present/absent, male/female).2 Post-structuralism: terminologyPost-structuralism is obviously closely tied to structuralism, but commentators have characterized the relationship in a variety of mutually inconsistent ways. Some writers make no distinction between structuralism and post-structuralism, applying the single term ‘structuralist’ to the entire range of thinkers from Saussure through to Derrida. More commonly, post-structuralism is distinguished as a separate development, but there is disagreement as to whether it is primarily a reaction against structuralism or an extension of it (as the termNeostrukturalismus, commonly used by Manfred Frank and other German commentators, suggests). Apart from matters of definition, there is even disagreement as to whether major figures such as Barthes, Lacan and Foucault are structuralists or post-structuralists.Michel Foucault’s book, Les mots et les choses (translated under the title The Order of Things) is an instructive example. In one sense it is quintessentially structuralist. The book first uncovers the fundamental epistemic systems (which Foucault calls ‘epistemes’) that underlie and delimit the subjective thought of particular eras. It then goes on to show how the apparent ultimacy of subjectivity is itself just the product of one contingent episteme, that of modernity, which is even now disappearing (the famous ‘death of man’).Nevertheless, Foucault’s essentially historical viewpoint in the work demonstrates the limitation ofstructuralism: its inability to give any account of the transitions from one system of thought to another. Foucault seems to have seen from the beginning that structuralism can not be historical, a fact that explains his constant insistence that he was not a structuralist, in spite of his obvious deployment of structuralist methods and concepts. So, although Les mots et les choses is a structuralist book, it at the same time makes clear the limits of structuralism and prepares the way for Foucault’s later work on power and ethics which is distinctly post-structuralist (see Foucault, M.; Post-structuralism and the social sciences).Despite these ambiguities and disagreements, the concept of post-structuralism is useful, if not essential, for understanding philosophy in France during the latter part of the twentieth century. One fruitful approach is to think of post-structuralism as a philosophical reaction to the structuralism that was such a powerful force during the 1960s in linguistics, psychology and the social sciences. It was neither a simple rejection or extension of structuralism but a series of philosophical reflections on the structuralist programme and achievement.3 Two major post-structuralist thesesAlthough structuralism was never formulated as a philosophical theory in its own right, its implicit theoretical basis was, as noted above, a kind of Cartesianism without the subject. (Hence, the association of structuralism with the notion of the ‘death of the subject’.) Post-structuralist critiques of structuralism are typically based on two fundamental theses: (1) that no system can be autonomous (self-sufficient) in the way that structuralism requires; and (2) that the defining dichotomies on which structuralist systems are based express distinctionsthat do not hold up under careful scrutiny.The first thesis is not understood so as to support the traditional idealist view that systematic structures are dependent on the constitutive activities of subjects. Post-structuralists retain structuralism’s elimination of the subject from any role as a foundation of reality or of our knowledge of it. But, in opposition to structuralism, they also reject any logical foundation for a system of thought (in, for example, its internal coherence). For post-structuralists, there is no foundation of any sort that can guarantee the validity or stability of any system of thought.The second thesis is the key to post-structuralism’s denial of the internal coherence of systems. The logical structure of a system requires that the applications of its concepts be unambiguously defined. (In the formalism of elementary number theory, for example, there must be no question as to whether a given number is odd or even.)As a result, the possibility of a systematic structure depends on the possibility of drawing sharp distinctions between complementary concepts such as odd/even, charged/uncharged, living/non-living, male/female and so on. Post-structuralist philosophers have been particularly concerned with the fundamental dichotomies (or oppositions) underlying structuralist theories in the human sciences. Saussure’s linguistics, for example, is based on the distinction of the signifier from the signified; Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology of myths employs oppositions such as raw/cooked, sun/moon and so on. In each case, post-structuralists have argued that the dichotomy has no absolute status because the alternatives it offers are neither exclusive nor exhaustive.4 Derrida’s critique of logocentrismThis sort of critique was extended to philosophy, particularly by Jacques Derrida, who finds Western philosophical thought pervaded by a network of oppositions - appearance/reality, false/true, opinion/knowledge, to cite just a few examples - that constitute what he calls the system of ‘logocentrism’. This term derives from Derrida’s conviction that at the root of Western philosophical thought is a fundamental distinction between speech (logos) and writing. Speech is privileged as the expression of what is immediate and present, the source, accordingly, of what is real, true and certain. Writing, on the other hand, is derogated as an inferior imitation of speech, the residue of speech that is no longer present and, therefore, the locus of appearance,deceptions and uncertainty. Plato’s devaluation of writing in comparison with living dialogue is the most famous and influential example of this distinction. But Derrida finds the distinction pervading Western philosophy and regards it as not just a preference for one form of  communication over another but the basis for the entire set of hierarchical oppositions that characterize philosophical thought. Speech offers presence, truth, reality, whereas writing, a derivative presentation employed in the absence of living speech, inevitably misleads us into accepting illusions.Derrida’s critiques of the speech/writing opposition - and of all the hierarchical oppositions that attend it - proceed by what he calls the method of ‘deconstruction’  (see Deconstruction). This is the process of showing, through close textual and conceptual analysis, how such oppositions are contradicted by the very effort to formulate and employ them. Consider, for example, the opposition between presence and absence, which plays a fundamental role in Husserl’s phenomenology (and many other philosophical contexts). Husserl requires a sharp distinction between what is immediately present to consciousness (and therefore entirely certain) and what is outside of consciousness (and therefore uncertain). But once Husserl undertakes a closeanalysis of the immediately present, he discovers that it is not instantaneous but includes its own temporal extension. The ‘present’, as a concrete experiential unit, involves both memory of the just-immediately-past (retention, in Husserl’s terminology) and anticipation of the immediate future (protention). Thus, the past and the future, both paradigms of what is absent (not present), turn out to be integral parts of the present.  Husserl’s own account of the presence/absence opposition overturns it.Deconstruction maintains that there is no stability in any of thought’s fundamental oppositions. Their allegedly exclusive alternatives turn out to be inextricably connected; their implicit hierarchies perpetually reversible. As a result, there is an ineliminable gap between the intelligibility of a rational system and the reality it is trying to capture. Derrida expresses this gap through a variety of terms. He frequently speaks of différance (a deliberately misspelled homophone of the French différence) to emphasize, first, the differencebetween systematic structures and the objects (for example, experiences, events, texts) they try to make intelligible, and, second, the way in which efforts to make absolute distinctions are always deferred (another sense of the French différer) by the involvement of one polar opposite in the other. This latter phenomenon Derrida also discusses in terms of the ‘trace’ of its opposite always lingering at the heart of any polar term. He also employs the term ‘dissemination’ to refer to the way that objects of analysis slip through the conceptualnet spread by any given system of intelligibility we devise for it.5 Post-structuralism and literary theoryThus far the discussion has focused on Derrida’s deconstruction of the meaningful structures philosophers purport to find in reality and to express in their philosophical texts. But Derrida’s approach is also readily applicable to literary texts (and the  ‘worlds’ they create). This is because - like philosophical systems - poems, novels and other literary texts are typically thought to embody complete and coherent systems of meaning, which it is the task of literary criticism to extract. Although Derrida himself has dealt primarily with philosophical texts, his approach has been widely adopted by analysts of literature. (Of course, as should beexpected, Derrida and his followers reject any sharp distinction between the philosophical and the literary.)Traditional literary analysis has understood the meaning of a text as the expression of its author’s mind; that is, as thoughts the author intended to convey in writing the text. The first stage of deconstructive criticism is the structuralist one of detaching meaning from authorial intention, locating it instead in the text itself as a linguistic structure. Roland Barthes, for example, showed how to analyse a text by Balzac entirely in terms of the formal codes it embodies, with no reference to what Balzac supposedly ‘meant’. This structuralist move effectsa ‘death of the author’ parallel to the anti-Cartesian ‘death of the subject’. But the post-structuralists take the future step of denying a fixed meaning to even the autonomous text itself. It is not that a text lacks all meaning but that, on the contrary, it is the source of an endless proliferation of conflicting meanings. As deconstructionists delight in showing, any proposed privileged meaning of a text can be undermined by careful attention to the role in it of apparently marginal features. (For example, an orthodox Christian reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost is deconstructed by a close study of certain details in its treatment of Satan.) There isno doubt, of course, that texts are often produced by authors trying to express what they think or feel. But what they write always goes beyond any authorial intention and in ways that can never be reduced to a coherent system of meaning.The deconstructionist’s point can also be understood as an undermining of the distinction between primary text and commentary. On the traditional view, a commentary is an effort to formulate as accurately as possible the content (meaning) of the text. To the extent that it is successful, a commentary expresses nothing more and nothing less than this meaning. But for deconstructionists the meaning in question does not exist, and the commentary must be understood as nothing more than a free elaboration of themes suggested, but not required, by the text. Unable to be a secondary reflection, the commentary becomes as much an independent creation as the text itself.6 Rorty’s post-structuralist pragmatismRichard Rorty’s work is far removed, in both antecedents and style, from that of continental post-structuralists (see Rorty, R.). His critique of Cartesianism, derived more from Dewey than from Heidegger, is aimed at twentieth-century analytic philosophy rather than the structuralist human sciences; and his urbanely lucid prose contrasts sharply with the wilfully playful convolutions of Derrida and his followers. None the less, Rorty’s analyses lead him to a critique of traditional philosophy very similar to that of the post-structuralists.The focal point of Rorty’s critique is the project (called foundationalism) of providing a philosophical grounding for all knowledge. Modern foundationalism originates with Descartes, but Rorty sees it s also the leitmotif of Descartes’ successors, through Hume and Kant down to the logical positivists. Like Derrida, Rorty attacks traditional systematic thought by calling into question some of its key distinctions. Unlike Derrida, however, he does not carry out his attacks through close readings of classic texts but by deploying the results of recent analytic philosophy. He uses, for example, Quine’s critique of the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements to argue that there are no foundational truths about the meaning of concepts. He appeals to Wilfrid Sellars’s undermining of the distinction between theory and observation to reject empirical foundations of knowledge in interpretation-free sense data. He employs Donald Davidson’s questioning of the distinction between the formal structure and the material content of a conceptual framework to reject Kantian attempts to ground knowledge in principles that define the framework of all possible thought.In Rorty’s view the upshot of these various critiques is to cut off every source of an ultimate philosophical foundation for our knowledge. Accordingly, he maintains, philosophy must give up its traditional claim to be the final court of appeal in disputes about truth. We have no alternative but to accept as true what we (the community of knowers) agree on. There is no appeal beyond the results of the ‘conversation of mankind’ so far as it has advanced to date. For us, there is no (upper-case) Truth justified by privileged insights and methods. There is only the mundane (lower-case) truth: what our interlocutors let us get away with saying.It might seem that this rejection of foundationalism is a rejection of the entire tradition of Western philosophy since Plato. Rorty, however, distinguishes two styles of philosophy. First, there is systematic philosophy, the mainline of the Western tradition since Plato, which is defined by the foundationalist goal of ultimate jjustification. But, on the other hand, there is another enterprise, always marginal to the tradition, that Rorty calls edifying philosophy. Whereas systematic philosophers undertake elaborate and purportedly eternal constructions (which are always demolished by the next generation), edifying philosophers are content to shootironic barbs at the systematic thought of their day, exploding its pretensions and stimulating intriguing lines of counter-thought. The tradition of edifying thought can be traced back at least to the ancient Cynics and has been more recently represented by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and the later Wittgenstein. Derrida’s deconstructions are, on Rorty’s view, a prime contemporary example of edifying philosophy.Edifying philosophers, however, are philosophers only because they react against systematic philosophy. They do not differ from other sorts of cultural critics  (novelists, literary theorists, social scientists) because of any distinctively philosophical method or viewpoint. If, in the wake of thinkers such as Derrida and Rorty, systematic philosophy is abandoned, philosophy will be too. The triumph of post-structuralism would, for better or worse, be the end of philosophy as we have known it.See also: PostmodernismGARY GUTTING Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London: Routledge______________________PostmodernismThe term ‘postmodernism’ appears in a range of contexts, from academic essays to clothingadvertisements in the New York Times. Its meaning differs with context to such an extent that it seems to function like Lévi-Strauss’ ‘ floating signifier’(Derrida 1982: 290): not so much to express a value as to hold open a space for that which exceeds expression. This broad capacity of the term ‘postmodernism’ testifies to the scope of the cultural changes it attempts to compass.Across a wide range of cultural activity there has been a sustained and multivalent challenge to various founding assumptions of Western European culture since at least the fifteenth century and in some cases since the fifth century BC: assumptions about structure and identity, about transcendence and particularity, about the nature of time and space. From physics to philosophy, from politics to art, the description of the world has changed in ways that upset some basic beliefs of modernity. For example, phenomenology seeks to collapse the dualistic distinction between subject and object; relativity physics shifts descriptive emphasis from reality to measurement; the arts move away from realism; and consensus politics confronts totalitarianism and genocide. These and related cultural events belong to seismic changes in the way we register the world and communicate with each other.To grasp what is at stake in postmodernism it is necessary to think historically and broadly, in the kind of complex terms that inevitably involve multidisciplinary effort. This multilingual impetus,  this bringing together of methods and ideas long segregated both in academic disciplines and in practical life, particularly characterizes postmodernism and largely accounts for such resistance as it generates.Although diverse and eclectic, postmodernism can be recognized by two key assumptions. First, theassumption that there is no common denominator - in ‘nature’ or ‘truth’ or ‘God’ or ‘the future’ -that guarantees either the One-ness of the world or the possibility of neutral or objective thought. Second, the assumption that all human systems operate like language, being self-reflexive rather than referential systems - systems of differential function which are powerful but finite, and which construct and maintain meaning and value.1 Historical context‘Postmodernism’ is a historical term, indicating something that comes after modernity; so the definition of postmodernism varies depending on what is meant by ‘modern’. When ‘modern’ refers to movements in the arts around the turn of the twentieth century - an efflorescence known as ‘modernism’ - then ‘postmodern’ refers to a fairly local phenomenon of the mid- to late-twentieth century (see Modernism). But when ‘modern’ is used in the historian’s sense, to indicate what follows the medieval - that is, Renaissance culture and its sequels - then ‘postmodern’ refers to a more broadly distributed cultural phenomenon in European and US societies.Given this latter use of the term ‘modern’, postmodernism is what follows and transforms that particular Renaissance (some would prefer to call it Enlightenment) modernity. It is in this broader sense of modernity that the term ‘postmodernism’ takes on its full meaning. Here it signals a revisionary shift in the system of values and practices that have been broadly codified in European life over several centuries. Confusion between these two historical meanings of the term ‘modern’ skews discussion of the crucial philosophical, political and social issues at stake in postmodernism. Such confusion certainly is not relieved by the ahistorical contributions of recent French  philosophy which has taken the demystification of Western metaphysics back to Plato. Known as post-structuralism, this philosophy has been crucial to theoretical discussion of postmodernism, but not identical with it; the historical horizon of post-structuralism occupies a period so vast that it practically ceases to allow for history at all, producing discussions that blot out awareness of postmodernity as a historical event. Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida, for example, take on the foundations of Western philosophy and do not limit their critiques specifically tomodern European culture (see Post-structuralism).Modernity, defined from the vantage point of post-modernity, was a cultural epoch and ‘episteme’ (see §2) founded in a humanistic belief that the world is One. This belief, codified in centuries of realist art, representational politics and empirical science, is tantamount to the assertion that a common denominator can be found for all systems of belief and value: that the world is a unified field, explicable by a single explanatory system. As this belief developed through increasingly secular and materialistic practices it became less secure in its claims to universal applicability. After the Renaissance the ‘totalizing’ claim to universal applicability was increasingly transferred from divinity to infinity: especially the infinity of space and time as they were radically reconstructed by Renaissance art and science. Postmodernism is the condition of coping without these absolute common denominators, especially without the neutral and homogeneous media of time and space which are the quintessential, field-unifying media of modernity. Postmodernism specifically challenges the European culture that took its direction from the Renaissance, developed through the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment, and remains a common discourse for most citizens of Western democratic societies. In philosophy, in the arts, in science, in political theory and in sociology, postmodernism challenges the entire culture of realism, representation, humanism and empiricism. Postmodern critique thus goes to the very foundation of personal, social and institutional definition. Its challenges to knowledge and institutions are felt particularly in universities.2 The role of languageAlready well under way in the nineteenth century, the critique of Enlightenment rationalism found its postmodern turning point in the spreading influence of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss teaching at Geneva whose lectures on linguistics (published in 1916 as Cours de Linguistique Générale) have become a keystone of postmodernism. Saussure’s deceptively simple idea was that the linguistic sign acts reflexively, not referentially. The word, he said, functions not by pointing at the world, but by specifying an entire system of meaning and value in which each word has its function. (Technically, Saussure’s word points to an idea, but that idea is itself linguistic; there is nothing prior to language.) To read or understand even the simplestlinguistic sequence is to recognize difference; it is to perform an incalculably complex and continuous act of differentiation, which becomes more and more balanced and rich the more that linguistic sequence verges towards poetry or other complex usage.In one way this is only common sense. Any speaker of more than one language knows the arbitrariness of the sign: what is ‘dog’ here, is ‘chien’ there. But the more languages one knows, the more obvious becomes the systemic value of any word, the more obvious the fact that it has no exact equivalent elsewhere, either in other languages or in the world. To take the simplest possible example, we understand the English word ‘dog’ not merely because conventionally we have associated it with a creature, but more complexly and largely because we differentiate it by composition and function from other words and functions (for example, from ‘dot’, ‘log’, ‘bog’, and from verbs, adverbs, conjunctions). What is being described in these rather dry terms is the language’s capacity for poetry: its capacity as a living language to provide its speakers with particular alphabets and lexicons of possibility, and to modify, even radically, the usages with which we constitute our worlds.The postmodern moment, as Derrida says, is the moment ‘when language invaded the universalproblematic’; this is the moment when it becomes clear that everything operates by such codes, that everything behaves like language. Body language, garment language, the silent expression of gesture, the layout of a city or a fashion magazine or a university: all these are complex, coded systems of meaning and value in which we function simultaneously in several, even many, at once. Even in humdrum activities we are expert well beyond our conscious measures. Language thus conceived is a model of organization that is both powerful and finite.For describing systems of value that work like language, the terms episteme and discourse have emerged as useful. Episteme suggests the systemic nature of all knowledge (one can speak of the Western episteme); and discourse suggests the systemic nature of all practices (moral, social, domestic, political, reproductive, economic, intellectual). These two terms at least help the mind to find the fulcrum that allows thought to run in directions different from those inspired by terms like ‘reality’ or ‘nature’ (see §3).Postmodernism differs from deconstruction, with which it is sometimes confused. Deconstruction is a methodology with agendas similar to some of postmodernism but with a much more limited capability. Deconstruction is a negative movement by which an interpreter of a code or sign-system (for example a novel or a psychoanalysis) looks for what is not present rather than what is present - looks for the points of crisis and breakdown in a system or a rationalization rather than its more obvious positivities. This methodology has the initial value of opening interpretation to complex reading, but it soon gets lost in circularity; the negative quality of its questioning often limits the creativity of the response. It is almost as though reconstruction is riveted on what it has not got, operating on a kind of nostalgia for the referential view of language that postmodernism revises (see Deconstruction).Postmodernism does not weep for referentiality. If the sign does not refer simply, but instead specifies a system of meaning and value, then interest lies in discovering what systems actually are in play and in seeing what different systems are capable of, whether they be literary texts, political movements or personal lives. This valence of postmodernism can be found not so much in the theoretical texts which have had such extensive recent attention, but in the creative work of artists and scientists who have in many cases anticipated the philosophical critiques of rationalism, and have gone well beyond them to locate their practical implications. Artists andfilm-makers like Magritte and Buñuel, postmodern novelists like Robbe-Grillet and Nabokov, post-Einsteinian scientists interested in quanta and chaos, feminists interested in new acts of personal and political attention, and architects who play with traditional conventions have explored the practical and material implications of postmodernism far more fully than have many of the more theoretical writers. 3 Challenge to the bases of consensus and representationThe view that all systems are self-contained and largely self-referential has a radical implication that either alarms or inspires - the implication that no system has any special purchase on Truth and, in fact, that it is impossible to establish a Truth. This implication goes beyond the recuperable relativism of the nineteenth century to unrecuperable difference in the twentieth. Where relative systems could still cohabit in the single world of modernity, postmodernity involves the recognition that, to a large extent, one’s relative systems construct the world. In short, that the world is not One; that words like ‘truth,’ ‘nature’, ‘reality’ and even ‘human’ are weasel words because they imply, falsely, that an autonomous world of meaning and values exists, and that it transcends all finite and mutually exclusive human systems and somehow guarantees them. Postmodernism denies absolute status to any truth or nature or reality. The question always remains - what truth, which nature, whose reality?While this post-structuralist critique of transcendence goes back to Plato, the postmodern version limits its ambit to the particular forms of transcendence made available in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The discourse of modernity extends to infinity its neutral media of space and time and, in so doing, encourages us to forget finitude and to distribute our energy toward an infinite horizon. The discourse of postmodernity, on the other hand, treats time and space as dimensions of finite systems. This recognition of absolute and unmediateable finitude inspires reflexiveness because activity no longer can be referred to unchanging external  bsolutes. Such reflexiveness always remains experimental or improvisatory, and inaccessible to universal generalization.The disappearance of transcendental reference creates four related crises: the crisis of ‘the subject’ (the irreducible individual, the one that is because it thinks or is conscious); the crisis of ‘the object’ (the ‘things’ - including the individual - that constitute a world that is single, not multiplied); the crisis of ‘the sign’ (the word that refers to the world thus constituted); and, consequently, the crisis of historicism (the temporal humanism that constitutes an uneasy unity in the world by formulating transcendence as The Future). Postmodernism presents a new problematic of negotiation between finite systems of meaning and value where no transcendental reference is possible. This negotiation goes on all the time in complex ways but, in the discourse of modernity, neither philosophy, nor political science, nor indeed any science, nor even much art has attended to it. This new problematic is, in Craig Owens’ words, ‘how to conceive difference without opposition’, and how to translate that problematic, as the Renaissance translated Christian humanism, into social and politicalterms.Where modernity sought the single system, postmodernity plays with the elements of systems, combining them for limited agendas, using what is useful and leaving the rest, refusing responsibility for consistency within this or that totalized explanatory system. This ‘bricolage’ becomes a key value for postmodernism. What one wants to avoid at all costs is something without play, without slack, without the living capacity for movement; one wants play in the line, play in the structure, in the sense of flexibility and variability even to the point of reorganizing the structure.By conceiving all particulars and practices as functions of systems rather than as  emi-autonomous entities, postmodernism poses especially interesting problems for two agendas of modernity that are particularly valuable to twentieth-century social and political function: historicism and individualism. History as a single, universal system of human explanation depends upon a construction of temporality that belongs to humanism and the Renaissance; its very notion of temporality is a kind of single-point perspective in time. Postmodernism puts history in the interesting position of considering its own historicity. The individual subject, sometimes appearing as the Cartesian cogito, does not, despite alarms, entirely disappear in postmodernism into systemic function. But individual identity and agency do have new definitions and functions when all practice is conceived differentially and systemically rather than naturally. Whatever is individual about a life, its unique and unrepeatable poetry, comes not from some ‘natural’ essence but from its particular specification of the complex discourse it inhabits.Given the extent of the reformation implied by postmodernism, it is not surprising to find a flutter of reaction against it, not all of it informed and much of it governed by a desire to rescue particular epistemic investments from devaluation. The emphasis on linguistic reflexiveness, on the power of a system of signs to constitute meaning and value, has been taken by some commentators as an expression of inward-looking narcissism, a flight from ‘reality’ and, even, a threat to morality and order: it is as if the social, political and epistemic problems towhich postmodernism responds were created by it, rather than by the entire culture of modernity. Postmodernism does not spell the end of meaning and value, still less the end of humanist meaning and value, but it does spell the end of certain hegemonies, especially those vested in what Alain Robbe-Grillet calls ‘habitual humanism’. In any case, Saussure’s idea of the reflexivity, rather than the referentiality of language has by no means yet been fully explored.The postmodern critique, amid clatter and confusion, is only just under way. There is no responsible way to anticipate its full implications or trajectory. One can see, however, that postmodernism offers both a new freedom and a new constraint. The emphasis on the constructed nature of all knowledge and projects means that, because they have been invented, they can be changed; there is, morally or socially speaking, no ‘nature’ of things. On the other hand, the fact that with our languages we inherit so much of our beliefs and values ready-made meansthat we are much less original and autonomous than modernity suggested, and we express agency more locally, more collectively and less heroically than modernity allowed.See also: Foucault, M.; Phenomenology, epistemic issuesELIZABETH DEEDS ERMARTH Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London: Routledge

[Miguel Duclós]

FelixA dialética é um desses conceitos de filosofia que toma diversas acepções ao longo da história e dependendo do autor. Por isso, para se ambientar, é recomendável você ler o verbete dialética de alguns bons dicionários de filosofia: Ferrater Mora, Lalande, Abbagnano.No contexto grego, platônico, a dialética é uma palavra que está na mesma raiz da palavra diálogo. Era um 'jogo' de perguntas e respostas que, segundo os comentadores, era praticado em toda a sociedade ateniense, desde a marcenaria e medicina até a filosofia.No método socrático, a dialética é fundamental. É o percurso das perguntas e respostas entre dois interlocutores, normalmente um mestre e um discípulo em que se propõe uma "tese" (ato de colocar um existente no mundo).  A investigação consiste em uma proposta para um objetivo que é asserida ou não pelo interlocutor. Uma vez admitido um passo da dialética, é necessário também admitir suas implicações e consequências, por mais absurdas que elas possam parecer. Se, nesse percurso, se verificar um erro, é necessário voltar na cadeia de argumentação até indentificá-lo e aí prosseguir. Os diálogos platônicos são dialéticos, como você pode verificar na leitura. Geralmente Sócrates está desmontando uma hipótese  de algum interlocutor ou propondo ele mesmo provar sua visão, sua hipótese.Mais do que isso, a dialética ascendente é assim chamada porque ocupa lugar central na metafísica platônica. Isso se verifica na República. Através da dialética, o filósofo pode se desligar do mundo sensível e partir para o inteligível (noeisis), numa ascese que permitira a contemplação da idéia. Cito um trecho da  da República na edição da Calouste:"O método da dialética é o único que procede, por meio da destruição de hipóteses, a caminho do autêntico princípio, a fim de tornar seguros seus resultados, e que realmente arrasta aos poucos os olhos da alma da espécie de lodo bárbaro em que está atolada e eleva-os às alturas, utilizando como auxiliares para ajudar a conduzir as artes que analisamos." (VII - 533 c-d)Essa ascese é a dialética ascendente que se dá por etapas, por degraus, desde conhecimento sensível até o vislumbre das Formas, que não são transitórias, mas eternas. Isso é explicado na alegoria da caverna.Mas o filósofo, uma vez que se liva dos grilhões e contempla a fonte do Bem, ao invés de viver nesse estado contemplativo, se vê obrigado a voltar e tentar alertar seus iguais, seus companheiros, ainda acorrentados. Se a dialética ascendente é metafísica, a dialética "descendente" é política. A tarefa política do filósofo, que é tratada na República, é justamente tentar criar, no mundo sensível, uma polis que esteja de acordo com o Bem. O diálogo começa na conjecturação de como seria uma cidade justa. Os diálogos-chave para essa "obrigação" do filósoso, além da República, são o Críton e o Protágoras.

[Miguel Duclós]

Favor vasculhar o arquivo de respostas que estão num thread com esse mesmo título em http://www.consciencia.org/forum/index.php/topic,152.0.html

[Miguel Duclós]

Vai demorar um tempo, creio, até você se familiarizar com o que significa uma pesquisa acadêmica. Em anexo alguns ebooks que talvez possam ajudar no trabalho.

[Miguel Duclós]

Por favor, envie suas mensagens apenas uma vez, e no tópico adequado.

[Miguel Duclós]

HericaÉ uma questão complicada, uma vez que inicialmente, Foucault não nega a ligação com o estruturalismo, e admite sua influência. Esta negação se deu num momento posterior, quando já estava saturado de levar a pecha. Habermas aponta essa oscilação de Foucault como um problemática no seu campo teórico, como vemos no Discurso Filosófico da Modernidade: "Tão problemática quanto a proximidade com Heidegger é a com o estruturalismo. Em As Palavras e as Coisas Foucault quisera tratar com uma gargalhada filosófica libertadora todos "aqueles que não querem formalizar sem antropologizar, que não querem mitologizar sem desmitificar" e, em geral, " todos os advogados da reflexão da esquerda e esquerdizante". Com esse gesto que evova o riso de Zaratustra, quer arrancar do sono antropológico aqueles que não "querem pensar sem pensar imediatamente que é o homem que pensa". Eles devem esfregar os olhos e perguntas simplesmente se o homem, na verdade, existe. Evidentemente, neste  momento, Foucault considerava que só o estruralismo contemporâneo, a antropologia de Lévi-Strauss e a psicanálise de Lacan eram capazes de "pensar o vazio do homem desaparecido". O subtítulo de Arqueologia do Estruturalismo, originalmente previsto para o livro, não tinha em absoluto uma intenção crítica. Mas foi preciso desfazer essa perspectiva assim que se tornou claro que o estruturalismo já havia oferecido secretamente o modelo de representacionismo semiótico para a descrição da forma clássica do  saber. Uma superação estruturalista do pensamento antropocêntrico não significaria, então, uma suplantação da modernidade, mas apenas a renovação explícita da forma de saber proto-estruturalista da época clássica".Dois textos indicados nas notas de Habermas podem ser importantes:

O que significa Neo-Estruturalismo, de M Frank , lições 9 e 10. ( infelizmente creio que não há tradução).

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