page_title: French philosophy
section_title: Poststructuralism and postmodernism
hierarchical_section_title: French philosophy / 20th century / Poststructuralism and postmodernism
caption_attribution_description: Jean-François Lyotard
context_page_description: French philosophy, here taken to mean philosophy in the French language, has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by René Descartes, to 20th century philosophy of science, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, and postmodernism.
context_section_description: The second half of the 20th century saw the rise of so-called postmodern thought. This rise was especially noticeable in France. However, the term is fairly hard to define. In fact, some people maintain that it is nothing but a slur applied to a group of disparate philosophers wrongly grouped together. However, it can also be seen as a critique of traditional western thought, particularly dichotomies and the belief in progress, influenced heavily by structuralism, phenomenology and existentialism.
  Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) defined postmodernism as scepticism toward metanarratives. A metanarrative is a kind of grand arching story that encompasses - and claims to predict - everything. An example is Marxism, which explains the communist as the inevitable historical synthesis of the proletariat and capitalist of modern capitalist class division. Lyotard considered the metanarrative an essential feature of modernity. Hence the postmodern condition is the replacement of metanarratives with a multiplicity of micro-narratives, or to call them the appellation Lyotard gave them, language games. Lyotard maintained that these language games lack any all-embracing structure but were brought about by technological developments in such fields as communication and mass media making metanarratives indefensible.
  Michel Foucault (1926–1984) maintained a similar scepticism about absolutes, such as right and wrong, sane and insane, and human nature. His method was not to deny such notions, but to historicize them, examining what in the supposedly necessary may be contingent, and demonstrating the relationships between knowledge and politics, power and knowledge. His main fields of investigation were psychiatry, medicine and disciplinary institutions. Foucault was anti-Hegelian and anti-teleological in his historical excavations. Through his examinations of psychiatry in Madness and Civilization, he showed that the development of psychiatry was not an obvious improvement on previous treatments of the insane, and that furthermore, the apparent scientific neutrality of psychiatric treatments hides the fact that they are a form of controlling defiance of bourgeois society.
  Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) developed deconstruction as a response to structuralism. Deconstruction takes a text, examines binary oppositions within it from several different interpreting standpoints, and then attempts to show them to be dependent upon one another, unstable, ambiguous and historically and culturally defined. Through showing the fluidity of the dichotomies, deconstruction shows the fluidity of the text. Derrida maintained that no meaning is stable, not even the dichotomies classical philosophers took for granted. Through an internal logic, the text deconstructs itself and hence allows highly original interpretations.
  Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007)  was concerned with the concealment of the fact that there are no truths in a given field. He termed this concealment simulacra. An example he gives is the Borges story of an Empire that creates a map which was so accurate that it laid over and covered the entire city it mapped. The map grew when the Empire grew, and decayed when the empire decayed. When the empire was destroyed, the only object left was the map. For Baudrillard, people live in the map and hence reality crumbles because of misuse. Eventually, the difference between reality and illusion becomes indistinguishable for the consciousness. Baudrillard called this hyperreality. An example of this is reality television, which is dependent on the watcher embracing it to create the illusion that it mirrors reality.
  Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) developed a philosophy of difference which valued the simulacrum higher than the idea and its copy, which is an inversion of Plato’s method, which held the idea and its copy in high esteem and neglected the simulacrum. He saw difference as prior to identity and reason as not all-encompassing, but a little haven built in the duration of difference-in-itself. He likened it to Christianity, where if you accept original s
caption: Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives. Photograph by Bracha L. Ettinger, 1995.
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