This document provides an overview of post-structuralism and deconstruction. It discusses key thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Kristeva. Some main ideas are that post-structuralism challenged structuralism's focus on structure and meaning, and emphasized contingency, difference, and how identities are shaped through their differences from others. Deconstruction, associated with Derrida, critiques how metaphysical philosophy assumes ideas exist prior to signs. A key concept is "differance", meaning the simultaneous process of temporal deferral and spatial difference that shapes all identities. The document provides sample analyses of how differance undermines concepts like nature/culture and the relation of ideas to signs. It lists

1. Modern
Literary
Studies
Dr. Abdel-Fattah Adel
Part (4)

2. Class (4) Items
Quick Info
Main ideas
Key Terms and Concepts
Sample Analysis
Representative Readings

3. Part (4)
Objectives By the end of this part, you will be able to:
1. Explain the distinctive features of the post-structural and
Deconstruction approaches.
2. Realize the importance of the post-structural and
Deconstruction approaches.
3. Name the main critics in the post-structural and
Deconstruction approaches.
4. Describe the main ideas of the post-structural and
Deconstruction approaches.
5. Define the main concepts and terms used in the post-
structural and Deconstruction approaches.
6. Compare some different aspects of the post-structural and
Deconstruction approaches.
7. Analyze some representative writings of the post-structural
and Deconstruction approaches.
8. Analyze sample analysis of the post-structural and
Deconstruction approaches.

4. 1. Answer the following questions:
1. Who are the main critics of Post-structuralism/Deconstruction?
2. What are the main ideas of Who are the main critics of Post-
structuralism/Deconstruction?
2. Write about the following terms/concepts:-
1. Différance.
3. Explain a sample analysis of:
1. Deconstruction
4. Write about the following critical works:
5. Comment on the following passages from:
1. “The Will to Power” by
2. “Difference” by
3. “Of Grammatology” by
4. “Writing” by
5. “The Newly Born Woman” by
Part (3) Questions

5. Intro
•Structure
•Post-modernism
•Post-structuralism
•Deconstruction

6. Main Ideas

7. Post-
modernism
Post-
structuralism
Deconstruction

8. • Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004)
• Julia Kristeva (1941 - )
• Helene Cixous (1937 - )
• Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924- 1998)
• Jean Baudrillard (1929 – 2007)

9. Post-
Modernism
Challenges
Watch the video from the beginning till the (01.40) minute, to find the answer
for these questions
1. What is the relationship between modernism and post-modernism?
2. What are the main modernist ideas that post-modernism has challenged?

10. Post-Modernism
• In 1979, Lyotard wrote a book called The Post-Modern
Condition that described the contemporary era as one in
which the old "grand narratives" of the world, from
Humanism to Marxism, had lost their validity and been
replaced by a proliferation of "micro" stories.
• Lyotard borrowed the term "Post-Modernism" from US
culture, where it had been used to describe a self-reflexive
style of writing that broke with standard literary
conventions.
• Almost immediately, "Post-modernism" began to be
applied to both the contemporary era and to Post-
structuralism.

11. Post-Structuralism
• Around 1967 in Paris, Structuralism,
which had dominated French intellectual
life for much of the 1960s, was displaced
by a new intellectual movement.
• The new thinking in philosophy,
sociology, and literature that began to
emerge around 1967 is usually referred to
as Post-structuralism because it departed
so radically from the core assumptions of
Structuralism.

12. Post-Structuralism:
The Chain of Signification.
Animating Poststructuralism
Watch the video from the beginning till the (04.00)
minute to find the answer for these questions
1. How were Saussure’s ideas key tents in both
structuralism and post-structuralism?
2. What was the main idea that Derrida took
from Saussure?

13. Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term widely associated with Post-structuralism.
Deconstruction is the name of a method of critique developed by Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher
whose writing is central to the emergence of Post-structuralism.
In 1967, he published three books that effectively put an end to Structuralism and launched a new era in
French intellectual life.
a collection of
essays on
philosophy and
literature
Writing and Difference
a long critical
reading of Levi-
Strauss, Saussure,
and Rousseau
Of Gram-matology
a deconstruction
of the Logical
Investigations of
Edmund Husserl.
Speech and Phenomenon

14. Derrida’s Legacy
Derrida's ideas are central to what happened afterwards in many critical writings.
1
the shift Derrida
engineered away
from the centrality
of consciousness in
philosophical
discussion and
toward a sense
that the world is a
field of
contingency, not
natural order,
2
the identities of
truth that
philosophy takes
for granted are
unstable,
3
the truthful orders
of value we live by
may be rhetorical
acts of linguistic
meaning-making,
rather than
representations of
preexisting truth,
4
the substance of
thought and of
reality conceals
insubstantial
processes that
constitute them.
5
Derrida's move
from substance,
presence, and
identity to
différance.

15. Other
Deconstructionists
Deleuze's move from the
arboresque to the rhizomatic
Kristeva's move from the
symbolic to the semiotic
Lyotard's move from grand
narratives to micro-narratives
Cixous and Irigaray's move from
the phallocentric to the feminine

16. Key Terms and Concepts

17. Différance
• “Différance” is Derrida’s revolutionary idea.
• He found the concept of difference in the work of
Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and
Ferdinand de Saussure.
• By "différance" he meant
a simultaneous process of
deferment in time and
difference in space.
Temporal
Deferment
• Deferment
in time
Spatial
Difference
• Difference
in space

18. Différance
One present moment assumes past present moments as well as
future present moments; to be "present," a present moment
presupposes its difference from other presents.
Future
Present
Past

19. Différance
The presence of an object of conscious
perception or of a thought in the mind is
shaped by its difference from other objects
or thoughts.

20. Différance
If all things are produced as identities by their differences from
other things, then a complete determination of identity would
require an endless inventory of relations to other terms in a
potentially infinite network of differences.
Truth, as a result, will always be incomplete.

21. Différance
Ideas and things are like signs in language;
there are no identities, only differences.

22. Sample Analysis

23. Difference: Nature/Culture
• When philosophers think of a concept like "nature" that
is distinct from "culture," they are in fact using concepts
that could not exist as identities apart from their
difference from one another.
• The difference between the two concepts must preexist
the concepts.
• The concept of nature is simply the concept of culture
differed and deferred.
• Nature is the différance of culture.

24. Metaphysical philosophy: Idea & Sign
• The idea of differance poses a threat to the metaphysical tradition in philosophy
that Plato initiated.
• Metaphysical philosophy founded itself on the assumption that signification was
an external contrivance added on to the substance of reality and to the ideality of
thought.
• Metaphysics assumed especially that ideas exist apart from signs and that
the presence that guarantees truth in the mind exists prior to all signification.
• It is this kind of belief that allowed, for example, the New Critics to claim that
poetry embodies ideas that are universal. The New Criticism assumes that ideas
are of a different ideal order than the physical and technical mechanisms of
signification.

25. Representative Readings

26. 1. Friedrich Nietzsche
2. Jacques Derrida
3. Barbara Johnson
4. Helene Cixous

36. 1. Answer the following questions:
1. Who are the main critics of Post-structuralism/Deconstruction?
2. What are the main ideas of Who are the main critics of Post-
structuralism/Deconstruction?
2. Write about the following terms/concepts:-
1. Différance.
3. Explain a sample analysis of:
1. Deconstruction
4. Write about the following critical works:
5. Comment on the following passages from:
1. “The Will to Power” by
2. “Difference” by
3. “Of Grammatology” by
4. “Writing” by
5. “The Newly Born Woman” by
Part (3) Questions