Poststructuralism for beginners

 Poststructuralism emerged in the late 1960s,could be understood as a blanket term used to represent those radical theories, which opposed structuralism. Structuralism puts forward that there is a structure of meaning below the surface level of signs; poststructuralist reject the possibility of any single determinate meaning.

 Influenced by the concept of deconstruction (exposes the deep-seated contradictions in a work by delving below its surface meaning), poststructuralism tried to formulate new theories concerning interpretation and meaning. The notion of deconstruction was based on three books, Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

 According to Derrida, all notions of the existence of an absolute meaning in language are incorrect. Signifiers often do not point to a signified, but to other signifiers. Even binary oppositions can not yield fixed meanings, only relative ones. Thus, while structuralism looks upon structures and patterns as providing the key to meaning. Poststructuralism looks upon all structures with deep mistrust and declares the quest for a fixed meaning as illusory and misleading. Apart from Derrida other poststructuralist theorists include  Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillad and Judith Butler.