School · 24 thinkers
Structuralism & Poststructuralism
24 thinkers of Structuralism & Poststructuralism on the Agora star map, from Ferdinand de Saussure to Saba Mahmood, in chronological order.
- 1857–1913Ferdinand de Saussure
Words get their meaning not from the things they name but from their differences to all the other words in the language.
- 1901–1981Jacques Lacan
The unconscious is structured like a language, and the ego is formed when a child first recognises itself in a mirror image.
- 1908–2009Claude Lévi-Strauss
Myths, kinship rules and customs across cultures follow the same deep patterns, because the human mind everywhere thinks in pairs of opposites.
- 1915–1980Roland Barthes
Everyday culture is full of hidden myths that make the man-made look natural – and a text belongs to its readers, not its author.
- 1917–1992Algirdas Julien Greimas
Meaning arises from differences: beneath every story lie a few roles – subject and object, sender and receiver, helper and opponent – and a small set of logical relations that semiotics can make visible.
- 1922–1993Yuri Lotman
Culture is a system of sign systems and the memory of a community; every text lives in a semiosphere whose boundaries translate the foreign, and cultures change both gradually and through unpredictable explosions.
- 1924–1998Jean-François Lyotard
Nobody believes the grand stories of progress and liberation anymore – knowledge today is many small language games with no master narrative.
- 1925–1995Gilles Deleuze
Reality is difference and constant becoming, not fixed identities – think like a spreading root network rather than a tree with one trunk.
- 1926–1984Michel Foucault
Knowledge and power are intertwined: prisons, schools and clinics shape how we think and behave, and what counts as truth changes with history.
- 1929–2007Jean Baudrillard
In media society signs no longer point to reality but only to other signs, so copies without originals become more real than the real.
- 1930–2004Jacques Derrida
For Derrida, every text undermines the oppositions it relies on, like speech over writing, and meaning is always deferred, never fully present.
- b. 1930Luce Irigaray
Western thought has treated woman only as a mirror of man; a genuine difference between the sexes has still to be thought and spoken.
- 1932–2016Umberto Eco
Every work is open: it invites many readings and needs the reader’s cooperation; yet it is not infinitely open, because the text itself, its codes and its intention set limits that an interpretation can miss.
- 1935–2003Edward Said
The West invented an image of the Orient as exotic and backward, and that image served to justify ruling over it.
- 1939–2017Tzvetan Todorov
To understand others is to recognise them as equals without denying their difference; neither the ethnocentric universalism of conquerors nor a relativism that leaves every culture to itself does justice to human beings.
- b. 1941Julia Kristeva
Beneath the orderly structure of language works a bodily rhythm of drives, and the self forms by expelling what disgusts it.
- b. 1942Giorgio Agamben
Modern power rests on the ability to declare emergencies and reduce people to bare life that can be excluded or killed without consequence.
- b. 1942Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
The most oppressed people cannot make themselves heard, because even those who speak for them impose their own categories.
- b. 1948Dipesh Chakrabarty
European ideas are indispensable but inadequate for understanding the rest of the world – and climate change forces historians to think of humans as a force of nature.
- b. 1949Philippe Descola
Descola argues that peoples differ not only in culture but in how they identify beings: comparing interiorities and physicalities yields four ontologies – animism, totemism, analogism, naturalism; the modern split between one nature and many cultures is one of these, not anthropology’s neutral ground.
- 1950–2009Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Sedgwick held that the modern Western distinction between homosexual and heterosexual, fixed around 1900, structures far more than sexuality: secrecy and disclosure, knowledge and ignorance, private and public; the closet is the defining figure of this order, and bonds between men are shaped by it.
- b. 1951Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Viveiros de Castro argues that for many Amerindian peoples animals and spirits see themselves as humans and humans as animals; what is shared is culture, the personal point of view, while bodies differ – a multinaturalism that makes anthropology a permanent decolonisation of thought.
- b. 1956Judith Butler
For Butler, gender is not something we are but something we do – it comes into being through acts, repeated under social norms, until it seems natural.
- 1962–2018Saba Mahmood
Agency is not only resistance to norms: women in the Cairo mosque movement exercise it by cultivating virtues, and secular feminism has to understand this before judging it.