Postmodern
Lexicon
deconstruction: the strategy of textual interpretation
advocated by Jacques Derrida and followed by Paul de Man, Jonathan Culler and
countless others. It focuses on showing what the text omits or represses: how
it collapses in on itself or displays its own contingency etc. It was far more
popular in literature than in philosophy departments in the English-speaking
academy.
differance: Derrida's mysterious misspelling of
'difference.' The notion derives
from Saussure's insight that language is a system of differences. "Now,
how am I to speak of the a
of differance? It is clear that it cannot be exposed. . . . if differance is (I also cross
out the is) what
makes the presentation of being-present possible, it never presents itself as
such. . . Any exposition would expose it to disappearing as a
disappearance."
genealogy: a history of concepts or truths, coined
by Nietzsche in his book Genealogy of Morals, which showed how Western moral notions
emerged from resentment toward the healthy and powerful. The greatest
practitioner of genealogy was Foucault.
hermeneutics: the study of textual interpretation.
'Hermeneutics' at one time was used mainly with regard to Biblical
interpretation (especially the 19th-century work of Schleiermacher).
It has also come to indicate a kind of mellow pomo or post-Heidegger philosophy
associated with Hans-Georg Gadamer that took textual interpretation as a model
for how we experience the world as a whole.
meta-narrative: a narrative is a story, more or less.
In Lyotard's influential treatment of post-modernism, a meta-narrative is a big
story used to organize history or culture as a whole, as in the inevitable
march of freedom or the story of class struggle ending in utopia etc.
Other: the apparently empty category that
defines the positive category by exclusion: woman, the primitive, etc.
semiotics or semiology: the study of signs, especially
linguistic signs. Probably coined by C.S. Peirce, but associated by
post-modernism with the linguistics of Saussure.
simulacrum: an item that is a simulation or model
of another, as a picture, for example. The plural is simulacra. In the thought of Baudrillard, the
post-modern era is the era of the "precession of simulacra" in which
all originals have disappeared and we live in an infinite circulation of signs
without originals.
structuralism: an approach to the human sciences that
focuses on intra-cultural conceptual systems rather than on, say, sheer
adaptation of organism to environment etc. The approach is especially
associated with the anthropology of Levi-Strauss, and focuses on such things as
the structure of kinship and linguistic systems. The philosophy especially of
Derrida and Foucault came to be called post-structuralism: it was influenced by structuralism, but
took its insights in radical directions, often exposing the contradictions or
tensions in these systems, or "deconstructing" them.
sub-altern: oppressed or subordinated, in virtue of
one's membership in or assignment to a group.