Poststructuralism and Critical Theory’s Second Generation ed. by Alan D. Schrift (review)

This book comprises seventeen essays on individual figures and thematic issues relating to the two dominant movements in continental philosophy since the 1960s, both of which ‘post’ a previous generation or movement. The reader is informed in the Series Preface by Alan D. Schrift (who is also the editor of this volume) that continental philosophy is ‘understood historically’ (p. vii) as an essentially twentieth-century response to the critical philosophy of Kant, rooted in the work of Edmund Husserl. Previous volumes in the series follow this broad narrative, focusing on the origins of continental philosophy in the work of Kant, on nineteenth-century philosophy, Bergsonism and science, phenomenology, critical theory, and structuralism. The seventh and eighth volumes, completing the series, address ‘After Poststructuralism’ and ‘Emerging Trends’. The eight volumes are cross-referenced with each other, and the whole series thus constitutes a formidable and relatively coherent contribution to large-scale intellectual history. The present volume follows the logic of the previous one in addressing broadly French (poststructuralist) and German (second-generation critical theory) tendencies and thus, unsurprisingly, includes individual essays on the usual suspects: Althusser, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Irigaray, Lyotard, and Serres. Gadamer and Ricœur are treated together in an essay by Wayne Froman on the legacy of phenomenology, while Cixous, Kristeva, and Le Dœuff form a triple focus in Sara Heinämaa’s essay on ‘three French feminists’. The thematic essays in the volume (as distinguished from the ‘chronologically organized series of “great thinker” essays’, p. viii) focus on ‘French Nietzscheanism’, the ‘linguistic turn’, second-generation critical theory (James Swindal’s essay on members of the Institute of Social Research other than Habermas), psychoanalysis, and the Yale School, while the final essay, in addressing the work of Richard Rorty, focuses on the latter’s attempt to ‘bridge the gap’ (p. 2) between the continental and the analytic traditions. Each of the essays is interpretative rather than straightforwardly informative, but all are nonetheless supported by intricate historical and biographical detail. The volume as a whole is supplemented by an extensive bibliography, and a chronology in which ‘philosophical events’ are plotted against ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ events (pp. 423–41). This division says something about the disciplinary orientation of the volume and indeed of the series; to some extent it rehearses a relatively familiar series of stories about a much-narrated period, but it does so from a quite specific perspective: if structuralism involved an engagement with discourses in the human sciences, poststructuralism saw ‘the reemergence of the value of specifically philosophical thinking’ (p. 6, emphasis original). In disciplinary terms, then, the volume embodies a strong faith in the specificity and the limits of philosophy, and engages with the literary, for example, only to a limited extent. This is a reasonably defensible perspective, but it is a partial one.