Understanding Poststructuralism (review)

This guide to poststructuralist thought is published in Acumen's 'Understanding Movements in Modern Thought' series. The series aims to provide introductions to major movements in philosophy and the history of ideas that are both short and accessible to the undergraduate reader. Despite this potentially restrictive framework, Williams has produced one of the most thoughtful and lucid accounts of poststructuralism available in English. The work describes its principal aim as being to respond to what it characterizes as two 'powerful' criticisms of poststructuralist thought, namely that it is deliberately and irretrievably difficult or obscure, and that it adopts untenable, inconsistent and unsustainable philosophical positions. In order to meet this aim, the overall argument is separated out into seven chapters: the introductory chapter gives a conceptual overview of poststructuralist tendencies; five main chapters discuss specific key texts and the final concluding chapter poses the question of the future of poststructuralism. In his introduction Williams focuses on the role played by a thinking of the limit, and of the limits of knowledge in poststructuralist thought. This allows him both to specify a key idea that poststructuralist thinkers have in common and to situate their thinking in relation to, and critically differentiate it from, Kantian critical philosophy, phenomenology, and structuralism respectively. Despite the breadth and complexity of philosophical material referred to, Williams gives lucid and precise definitions as well as highly accessible summary accounts of complex positions: poststructuralism, then, affirms that 'the limits of knowledge play an unavoidable role at its core' (p. 1), that the limit, 'is a positive thing in its own right' (p. 2), and that this folding into the core of the limit of a structure is not negative or destructive. Rather, it enacts: 'an affirmation of an inexhaustible productive power of limits' (p. 4). This emphasis on affirmation and the positive allows Williams to argue that poststructuralist thought is not just about a destructive questioning of meaning, identity, essence and stable truth. The turning away from absolutes towards anti-foundationalist thinking and the disruption of settled oppositions have a central creative aesthetic, political and social dimension. The emphasis Williams places on poststructuralist thought as process, gesture and creative affirmation dictates his decision to focus the main body of his work on specific major texts written by key thinkers. The second chapter concentrates principally on Derrida's De la grammatologie, the third on Deleuze's Différence et répétition, the fourth on Lyotard's Discours figure, and the final two chapters on Foucault's L'Archéologie du savoir and Kristeva's Révolution du langage poétique, respectively. In each case he gives an exemplary account of the texts in question, highlighting their major lines of argument and general scope of philosophical engagement. Throughout his analyses William's raises a wide range of potential objections to, or criticisms of, the thinkers under discussion. Critical responses to poststructuralist thought from the realm of science, analytical philosophy and positivist thought are all given a fair hearing. In each case though, Williams shows the rigorous ways in which poststructuralist thought might respond to or counter such criticisms. By attending to the textual detail and rhetorical force of these key texts Williams is able to render their apparent difficulty and obscurity accessible to the reader who may be coming to them for the first time. He is also able to mount a rigorous philosophical defence of the positions which they develop. As such his work admirably succeeds in responding to the powerful criticisms he evokes at the very beginning of his discussion. Understanding Poststructuralism is, then, both an indispensable introduction to one of the most influential philosophical and theoretical movements of recent decades, and a significant critical and intellectual achievement in its own right.