Argumentative essay: Post-structuralism
First of all, what is Poststructuralism? Post-structuralism is a movement that recognizes the
power of discourse to shape reality (both perceptions of reality and the concrete reality that is
perceived). We must understand that post-structuralist texts are rejecting the traditional view
of a coherent identity and are instead supporting an illogical and decentered self, a self full of
contradictions and paradoxes. Long story short: is a school of thought that responded
negatively to structuralism's insistence on frameworks and structures as access points to truth.
The approach of poststructuralism, regarding which I find as a key element the thesis of the
dissolution of the subject and the appearance of new subjectivities, which in the field of art
and, particularly in literature, will be expressed in the rethinking of the study of signs and the
linguistic problem, not only as a question of meaning, signifier and referent, but precisely by
emphasizing the question of meaning.
For example, Giles Deleuze will pose, in Proust and signs, the following: "From worldly
signs to sensitive signs, the relationship between the sign and the meaning is increasingly
intimate. It is drawn what the philosophers would call an ascending dialectic. But only at the
deepest level, at the level of art, the essence is revealed: as a reason for this relationship and
its variations"[1].
On the other hand, in Jacques Derrida and his proposal of deconstruction, one of the greatest
criticisms of the "conventionally traditional" ways of carrying out literary criticism is found,
since in his vision of things, it should begin, at least at the end of the century XX, as a
reflection on the crisis of the book as such, as an object, but also as a reference to the
meaning of writing.
Post-structuralism and deconstruction, as a method, will then differ from structuralism,
precisely on the question of the decentralization of the world; in a revolt of the sign against
the sign, to locate itself in the plurality of meaning and meaning.
Finally, It is worth mentioning Derrida: "If one day withdraw, abandoned to his works and his
signs on the beaches of our civilization, the structuralist invasion would become a matter for
the historian of ideas. Maybe even an object.
But the historian who came to mind something like that would be wrong: by the very gesture
of considering it as an object, it would forget their sense, and that it is first of an adventure of
the look, of a conversion in the way of questioning , first of all object. Before historical
objects (yours), in particular. And among them one very unusual, the literary thing"[2].
