Poststructuralism: WTF? Derrida, Deconstruction and Poststructuralist Theory Explained

Derrida, deconstruction and poststructuralism can all be sources of much confusion. In today’s episode of What the Theory?, I provide an overview of poststructuralism including the work of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler and other key figures in poststructuralist theory.

I begin by comparing structuralism and poststructuralism to see how structuralist modes of literary and cultural analysis might have informed poststructuralism. Where structuralism recognised that language was a human invention and thus flawed, it tended not to question this fact too much. Poststructuralism, however, is expressly interested in how the flaws and biases in language itself might effect our analysis and interpretation of literary, filmic and other cultural texts.

By look at the essay The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, I explain how this notion came to be central to poststructuralism and then explore how a similar observation came to inform the work of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction, his methodology for analysing literary and philosophical texts which seeks to draw out the binaries of meaning on which they rely in order to “deconstruct” them.

After seeing how deconstruction (which, in short, might be considered “poststructuralism in practice”) can be used to analyse a film with reference to Get Out by Jordan Peele, I finally take a brief look at poststructuralist feminism to see how the work of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction in particular has informed, for example, the work of Judith Butler in her book Gender Trouble.

Further Reading

Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida
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Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton
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Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction by Catherine Belsey
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