Structuralism & post-structuralism

Structuralism and post-structuralism are linked, mainly French movements that study meaning as produced by systems of difference in language and culture.

Structuralism grew from Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics, published in 1916, and spread in the 1950s and 1960s through anthropology, literary theory and semiotics, notably with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. From the late 1960s post-structuralists, among them Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, questioned whether such structures are stable, closed or centred. Many thinkers placed under these labels rejected them. On this site the school answers questions on interpretation (5.2.3), the philosophy of language, authorship and power.