Цитаты из книги Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction

Deconstruction Poststructuralism claims that the conventional antithesis between subjective and objective doesn't hold, because the subject is produced outside itself. It does not make sense to isolate the subjective, since the subject originates nothing, and we cannot, therefore, appeal to the subject as the absolute origin of its own views. Views are learned from somewhere, even if we cannot remember where or when, and even if we are the very first person to bring together separate views to make a new one. At the same time, there is no purely objective knowledge, because knowledge is necessarily the property of a subject. A fact may exist for ever, even if the human race dies out, but knowledge of it doesn't go on without a subject there to do the knowing. What is outside the subject constitutes subjectivity; the subject invades the objectivity of what it knows.

If you’ve followed that argument this far, you have just carried out the process that Jacques Derrida identifies as deconstruction, analysis of the inevitable invasion of the other into the selfsame.

Throughout the 20th century new theoretical developments, including sociology, ethnology, and psychoanalysis itself, combined to indicate that beliefs might be the effect of motivations we do not necessarily recognize.

The issue here is not what exists, but what we can accurately say exists. Faithful to Saussure, poststructuralism is concerned with what goes on in language. Truths (or otherwise) are told in language. Poststructuralists don't (normally) doubt that there is a world: their anxiety concerns what we can claim to know about it with any certainty.

The Cartesian cogito played a major part in promoting the scientific and rational development of the Enlightenment in the 18th century. These days, most philosophers would have some reservations about Descartes, but his famous phrase has become part of current Western common sense. Its effect is to conflate the self with what thinks. ‘I’ become primarily a consciousness, and that ess, in turn, is seen as the origin of ‘my’ ideas and values.

Poststructuralism, I have already suggested, questions the view that consciousness is an origin, treating it rather as an effect of signification: I owe to the big Other the meanings and differences that permit me to think at all. Psychoanalysis deepens the scandal by redoubling consciousness with unconscious processes that exercise other determinations, according to an agenda we don't even recognize. The free individual is no longer either individual or free.

Jacques Lacan, 1901–81 Psychoanalyst who radically reinterpreted Freud in the light of linguistics and anthropology. His Écrits (1966) are extraordinarily elusive, cryptic, and dense at first reading. Lacan's annual Seminars, conducted in Paris from 1953–4 onwards, have been gradually appearing in print, first in French and then in translation. These are less obscure, but only marginally so.

The writings and these oral deliveries were addressed to psychoanalysts, whose job it was, Lacan believed, to listen extremely attentively to what their patients said. The role of the analyst is to hear the voice of the unconscious, which makes itself audible through the censorship of consciousness in riddles, allusions, elisions, and omissions. Lacan's own riddling manner mimics the utterances of the unconscious.

For his admirers, the style makes his texts themselves into objects of desire. ‘This time,’ I always think, ‘I'm going to get it straight.’ If only.

But it becomes easier. And it is worth it. Lacan was enormously well read and highly intelligent. His incidental comments on painting, architecture, tragedy, for instance, are often worth whole volumes of more ponderous scholarship.

Among Foucault's most influential propositions was the argument put forward in the first volume of The History of Sexuality that homosexuality did not exist until the 19th century.

But surely the Greeks practised homosexuality? Not exactly, Foucault would reply. Certainly, men had sexual relations with boys or men, just as they have done in many other cultures. But they were not in consequence classified as homosexuals, invested with a subjectivity that was seen as the origin of their sexual practices, and regarded as deviant or perverse. The Greeks did not consider themselves in any way defined by their sexual habits.

And in an example that perfectly anticipates semiology, Marx and Engels point out that under feudalism we hear a good deal about ‘honour’ and ‘loyalty’, but when capitalism takes over, ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ (of opportunity, presumably) rapidly take their place.

Moreover, they argue, in order to represent its own interests as the shared values of all members of the society in question, the ruling class has to invest its views with the character of inevitability and convince everyone that these ideas are the only serious option, the one way of understanding the world that is genuinely sensible and valid.