18 - Structuralism and the Return of the Symbolic

Summary

There is an intrinsic difficulty in attempting to pin down a definition of structuralism, either as a conceptual enterprise or as a label applied to thinkers as diverse as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, or Michel Foucault. Although these scholars read and often discussed each other’s works, they remained politically, intellectually, and disciplinarily extremely different. Furthermore, ever since its development in the postwar period, structuralism seems to have been attacked more than it was actually defined. Critics have accused structuralism of being apolitical in a time of great engagement; of being complicit with Gaullism, capitalism, or managerialism; of contributing to the death of history and historical analysis; of evacuating agency and destroying the subject; of championing positivism, relativism, anti-humanism, and presentism; and, most importantly, of lacking normative foundations. At various times, structuralism has been conflated with deconstruction, postmodernism, new criticism, formalism, and post-structuralism.