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Poststructuralisme
La Bibliotheque Connexions (Editon francais)

Clicking on the title of an item takes you to the bibliographic reference for the resource, which will typically also contain an abstract, a link to the full text if it is available online, and links to related topics in the subject index. Particularly recommended items have a red Connexions logo beside the title.

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  1. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2006
    An argument against what Collini calls the 'declinist thesis', the belief that contemporary intellectual life is getting increasingly dumbed down and stagnant. Declinists, Collini suggests, are in denial of reality and ignorant of history. Collini also skewers those who, like Edward Said, represent themselves as 'outsiders' while basking in the glamour of in-group recognition.
  2. Against Post-Modernism 
    A Marxist Critique
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1982
    Callinocos argues that the relativism preached by post-modernists leaves us with no objective criteria by which to reject those who would falsify the past.
  3. An Annotated Bibliography of Nonsense
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1998
    Academic critics today not only question the impact of science upon society, but they also question the very idea of scientific rationality.
  4. Bad Marxism
    Capitalism and Cultural Studies
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2004
    Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. After an introduction critiquing the so-called 'Marxism' of the academy, Hutnyk provides detailed critical analyses of the approaches and theorists of cultural studies.
  5. Break Their Haughty Power 
    Resource Type: Website
    Articles on capitalism, socialism, and revolution, from a left-Marxist perspective.
  6. Chomsky on Post-Modernism 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1995
    What I find in the writings of the post-modernists is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish.
  7. Culture of Complaint
    The Fraying of America
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1993
    Propaganda-talk, euphemism, and evasion are so much a part of American usage today that they cross all party lines and ideological divides. The art of not answering the question, of cloaking unpleasant realities in abstraction or sugar, is so perfectly endemic that we expect nothing else.
  8. Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1988
  9. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1982
  10. Descent into Discourse 
    The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1990
    Critique of postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches in history.
  11. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1997   Published: 1998
    The authors criticize postmodernism in academia for its misuses of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics: (1) The incompetent and pretentious usage of scientific concepts by a small group of influential philosophers and intellectuals; (2) the problems of cognitive relativism, the idea that "modern science is nothing more than a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction' among many others". The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general...[but] to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism," and in particular to "deconstruct" the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and difficult ideas. "If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing." The book includes long extracts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard who are considered by some to be leading academics of Continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences. Sokal and Bricmont set out to show how those intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly. The extracts are intentionally rather long to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context.
    Published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles and in the United Kingdom as Intellectual Impostures.
  12. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1994
    Describes attacks on science, and on concepts of truth and rationality, in areas of the humanities.
  13. The Illusions of Postmodernism 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1996
    Eagleton explores the origins and emergence of postmodernism, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. His primary concern is less with the more intricate formulations of postmodern philosophy than with the culture or milieu of postmodernism as a whole. Above all, he speaks to a particular kind of student, or consumer, of popular "brands" of postmodern thought.
  14. In the Tracks of Historical Materialism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1984
  15. Logics of Disintegration
    Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1987
    Essays summarizing and critiquing post-structuralism. According to Dews, for all its posture of radicality, post-structuralist thought is itself bound to certain vulnerable assumptions. Dews argues that the fatal philosophical fault of post-structuralism is its failure to preserve the proper dialectical distinction between the subject and the object.
  16. Marxism and "Subaltern Studies" 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2013
    A review of Vivek Chibber's book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital.
  17. Multiculturalism or World Culture? 
    On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1991   Published: 2000
    Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
  18. Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1992
    An explanation of the foundation of recent post-modern theory which also criticises the misogynist and patriarchal work of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
  19. On Describing the Other
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2012
    My criticism is not primarily about Judith Butler’s style; it is principally about the substance of her arguments and, more broadly, of poststructuralist arguments. I am not opposed to ‘difficult’ writing. There are many philosophers with whom it repays to work through the difficulties, the obscurities and the obtuseness; Hegel, for instance, even Heidegger in parts. Butler, in my eyes at least, is not such a philosopher.
  20. Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social 
    Deconstruction and Deindustrialization
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2001
    We have today legions of people with a smattering of knowledge turning out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) produced by a computer program, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest humanities program or academic conference. Everyone these people don't like is trapped in a "gaze"; everyone "constitutes" their "identity" by "discourse"; to the fuddy-duddy "master narratives" that talk about such indelicate subjects as world accumulation these people counterpose "pastiche" and "bricolage", the very idea of being in any way systematic smacking of "totalitarianism"; it is blithely assumed that everyone except heterosexual white males now and for all time have been "subversives" (one wonders why we are still living under capitalism); a crippling relativism makes it somehow "imperial" to criticize public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or cliterodectomy practiced on five-year old girls in the Sudan.
  21. The Origins of Post-Modernity
    Resource Type: Book
    Perry Anderson's book outlines the cultural changes that have accompanied the victory of global capitalism.
  22. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2013
    Against the thesis that Western subalterns are made of different stuff, Chibber argues that human beings are, at their core, not that different across contexts. The winds of history and culture may change many things, but not human constitutions. His defense of this argument sets the stage for a deliberate, careful explication of the key tenets of historical materialism. This argument is that humans, everywhere, take an interest in defending their well-being and their dignity.
  23. Postcolonial Thought's Blind Alley 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2014
    Throughout the 20th century, the anchor for anti-colonial movements was, at least for the left, a belief that oppression was wrong wherever it was practised, because it was an affront to basic human needs for dignity, liberty, wellbeing. But now, in the name of anti-Eurocentrism, postcolonial theory has resurrected the cultural essentialism that progressives rightly viewed as the ideological justification for imperial domination. What better excuse to deny peoples their rights than to impugn the idea of rights, and universal interests, as culturally biased? No revival of an international and democratic left is possible unless we clear away these ideas, affirming the universalism of our common humanity, and of the threat to it from a universalising capitalism.
  24. Postmodern Disrobed
    Review of Intellectual Impostures
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1998
    An admirable job of exposing the daffy absurdity of postmodernism intellectuals.
  25. Postmodernism and the Left
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1997
    Barabara Epstein provides an overview of the approach and subculture of postmodernism and how they relate to, or conflict with, leftwing ideas.
  26. Postmodernism Generator 
    Resource Type: Website
    First Published: 2000
    A computer program written by Andrew. C. Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text. Each time you click on the page, it generates a brand-new postmodernist essay, completely meaningless, but superficially plausible, just like 'real' postmodernist essays.
  27. Postmodernism: Paralysed by postmodernism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    A great deal of "theory" in the humanities and social sciences -- and not just postmodern theory -- involves the creating of a kind of conceptual landscape filled with curious kinds of abstract objects -- "language", "power", "justice", "state", "culture", "government", "the polity", "the economy" and a host of others, which are viewed "theoretically" from somewhere way "outside" or "above" them. But it is just this way of looking at things -- from "on high" -- that makes it so difficult to see how people in the landscape are able to create and re-create the world in which they live, and are not simply trapped or formed by it. In fashionable postmodernist treatments of identity or subjectivity, language, as the ultimately hollow and imprisoning object, is put together with the notion that anybody who uses words must be committed to the standard definition of those words, to produce the conclusion that "language" determines the meaning of "identity" words such as man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, natural, normal -- and thus "constructs" (as it is said) human identity or subjectivity itself.
  28. Postmodernism, the Academic Left, and the Crisis of Capitalism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2013
    Over the past fifty years, postmodern theory — an umbrella term generally used to refer to such diverse theoretical movements and paradigms as post-structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and others — has generally dominated most fields in the humanities and some in the social sciences. But the economic meltdown in 2008 and the subsequent chronic crisis in capitalism have dealt a fatal theoretical blow to the varied and nearly ineffable assemblage of perspectives that are often grouped under the rubric of “postmodernism.” postmodernism was indeed tragedy. It was tragedy for the massive amounts of “cultural capital” that it wasted; it was tragedy for the defrauding of intellectual integrity that it represented; it was tragedy for the abandonment of reality that it recommended. Further, like the financial fiasco, it was criminal.
  29. Socialist Register 1995
    Volume 31: Why Not Capitalism?
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 1995
  30. Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1996
    Alan Sokal submitted this parody of postmodernism, poststructuralist theory, deconstruction, and political moralism to the journal Social Text. The editors failed to spot the hoax and published it as a serious article. The hoax caused a fierce debate between the postmodernists and those who consider postmodernism reactionary nonsense.
  31. The Trouble with Theory
    The Educational Costs of Postmodernism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    Postmodern theory has engaged the hearts and heads of the brightest students because of its apparent political and social radicalism. Yet Kitching writes: "At the heart of postmodernism is very poor, deeply confused, and misbegotten philosophy. As a result even the very best students who fall under its sway produce radically incoherent ideas about language, meaning, truth, and reality."
  32. Vanguard of Retrogression 
    "Postmodern" Fictions as Ideology in the Era of Fictitious Capital
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2001
    When one probes the terms of the debate, what is truly amazing is that the ostensibly anti-Eurocentric multiculturalists are, without knowing it, purveying a remarkably Eurocentric version of what the Western tradition really is. The ultimate theoretical sources of today's multiculturalism are two very white and very dead European males, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
  33. Where Do Postmodernists Come From?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1995
    Eagleton argues that left intellectuals have adopted postmodernism out of a sense of having been badly defeated, a belief that the left as a political tendency has little future. Culturalism, he argues, involves an extreme subjectivism combined with a deep pessimism, a sense that it isn't worth the effort to learn about the world, to analyze social systems, for instance, because they can't be changed anyway.
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