Madan Sarup
In a clear and lively fashion, Madan Sarup presents in this book an introduction to the three most influential figures in post-structuralist criticism-Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Examining their individual and collective impact on the way we think about literature, culture, philosophy, and politics, he traces the rise of a manner of thought radically opposed to the Enlightenment tenets of progress and scientific truth that have driven Western society for two centuries.

Placing post-structuralist thought in its philosophic context, Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism locates the true precursor to Derrida's and Foucault's radically anti-scientific thought in Friedrich Nietzsche, whose works rejected the Hegelian view of history as progress, celebrating instead the metaphorical and the subjective. While Lacan's psychoanalytic thought holds the potential for reconciliation with Hegel and Marx, the works of Derrida and Foucault are hostile to any notion of discernible truth or historical process. Examining the work of a younger generation of postmodernists who have followed in the wake of Derrida and Foucault-among them Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, and "new philosophers" such as Bernard-Henri Lévi-he finds, in the place of any belief in progress and total systems, a sterile fascination with the fragmentary, the marginal, and the irrational.

Post-structuralism, Sarup suggests, has been a powerful neoconservative force in Western society. Tracing the impact of post-structuralist thought not just on literary criticism but on such discourses as philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, the social sciences. and art, Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism is a cogent exploration of the tenets and implications of a complex theoretical movement whose impact on society has already reached far beyond academia.