'Poststructuralism' tag archive

The Spirit of Modernity and its Fate: JOrgen Habermas Nick Smith Jurgen Habennas’s ongoing opus is organised around distinctive conceptualisations of ‘modernity’, ‘crisis’, and critique’. * The Theory of Communicative Action (2 volumes, Boston, 1984 & 1987), in which these internally related concepts are articulated into a theory of rationality, was written by Habennas to […]

6being overlooked should we fail to keep abreast of new theoretical fashions; or unable to admit the tensions and contradictions of past attachments. A small band of feminist historians, mostly in the USA, who are trying to recapture the diversity of the movement in which they participated, declare that they cannot recognize themselves, or others, […]

At first glance, Deleuze and Guattariʼs What is Philosophy? may appear to confirm the mainstream critical opinion that poststructuralism has gone astray. [1] What was once a radical agenda questioning the legitimacy of social institutions and the nature of modern subjectivity has now become, in the words of one reviewer, a matter of doing ʻphilosophy […]

Nous sommes tous néokantiens.Michel Foucault1In the 1980s and early 1990s, when poststructuralism set the agenda in cultural theory and shaped the way in which theorists from other traditions were received, the work of the Bakhtin Circle was often seen as anticipating contemporary concerns to a quite uncanny extent. While some adopted Bakhtin as a poststructuralist […]

News Cloudy, with sunny intervals Political Studies Association Annual ConferenceLondon School of Economics, 10–13 April 2000The organizers of the PSAʼs fiftieth annual conference noted the appropriateness of choosing the LSE as its venue, since the Association had been founded there. Perhaps they also reflected on the appropriateness of hosting a conference whose theme was ʻThe […]

One of the rarely noticed historical ironies of the twentieth century was the effort of societies located on the capitalist periphery – outside of Euro-America – to resort to a philosophy which had no place for them in order to explain their entry into and experience of capitalist modernization. Japan led the way in this […]

In the invitation to speakers for the conference From Structure to Rhizome, we suggested that talks might set out by re-examining (and hence ‘re-founding’) texts that we qualified – in far too rapid and expeditious a fashion – as ‘founding’. But we did not make this suggestion without being conscious of the difficulty involved in […]