Most Famous Post-Structuralism Philosophers
Post-structuralism is a broad current of late 20th-century continental philosophy and theory that emerged in France in the 1960s and 1970s, in critical engagement with the structuralism of Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and others. Its leading figures include Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Julia Kristeva, though many of these thinkers rejected the label. Post-structuralism is characterised by suspicion of stable meaning, the unmasking of conceptual oppositions, attention to the entanglement of knowledge and power, and an interest in the historical conditions and exclusions of dominant discourses. The movement decisively shaped subsequent literary theory, gender and queer theory, postcolonial studies, and political philosophy. Despite its origins in continental philosophy, it has had global influence.
Philosophers in this tradition
-
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille was a French philosopher, novelist, and librarian whose work occupied a singular position at the edges of surrealism, sociology, and the history of religions. A...
-
Judith Butler
Judith Butler is an American philosopher whose Gender Trouble made the performative theory of gender central to contemporary feminism, queer theory, and political thought. Drawi...
-
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a 20th-century French philosopher, born in French Algeria, who developed the influential approach to philosophical, literary, and political analysis known as...
-
Friedrich Kittler
Friedrich Adolf Kittler was a German literary scholar and media theorist and one of the principal architects of the German tradition of media philosophy. After studies at Freibu...
-
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze was a 20th-century French philosopher, one of the most influential figures of post-structuralist continental philosophy. His early monographs on Hume, Bergson, Sp...
-
Jean-Francois Lyotard
Jean-Francois Lyotard was a 20th-century French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist, one of the leading figures of post-structuralism and a central exponent of postm...
-
Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, a former student of Louis Althusser, and one of the leading figures of post-Maoist French philosophy. His Being and Event grounds an auster...
-
Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude Levi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and philosopher and the founder of structural anthropology. Influenced by Roman Jakobson's structural linguistics and his own fie...
-
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault was a 20th-century French philosopher, historian, and social theorist, one of the most influential figures of post-war continental philosophy. His major works, i...
-
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, semiotician, and essayist. His Mythologies submitted the codes of everyday French life to a structural reading, while Elements of ...
-
Gianni Vattimo
Gianteresio Vattimo, known as Gianni Vattimo, was an Italian philosopher and politician and the principal architect of what he called pensiero debole, weak thought. A pupil of L...
-
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Emile Lacan was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose return to Freud through structural linguistics reshaped psychoanalytic theory and exerted a wide infl...
-
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han is a Korean-born German philosopher and cultural theorist, professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, whose short and aphoristic books have become widely rea...
-
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour was a French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist of science, and one of the principal architects of actor-network theory and the field of science and techn...
-
Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher whose Homo Sacer project, begun in 1995, has reshaped contemporary political philosophy through a radical genealogy of sovereignty, bar...
-
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist and philosopher and one of the most provocative voices of late twentieth-century social theory. After early work on consumer society in...
-
Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio was a French philosopher, urbanist, and cultural theorist whose work made speed the central category of contemporary politics. Trained as an architect and shaped by...
-
Slavoj Zizek
Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural critic, and one of the most prominent public intellectuals working in the broadly Hegelian and Lacanian tradition. The Sublime ...
-
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco was an Italian philosopher, semiotician, novelist, and one of the most widely read public intellectuals of his time. A Theory of Semiotics and The Role of the Reader...
-
Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway is an American philosopher of science, biologist, and feminist theorist who has been one of the most influential voices in late-twentieth and twenty-first century ...
-
Sara Ahmed
Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian feminist philosopher and independent scholar, formerly professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, whose work has shaped contemporary femin...
-
Felix Guattari
Pierre-Felix Guattari was a French psychoanalyst, political activist, and philosopher and the long-time collaborator of Gilles Deleuze. After training as a psychoanalyst at the ...
-
Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and linguist, and one of the most influential feminist thinkers of the late twentieth century. Speculum of the...
-
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian-American literary theorist and philosopher, professor at Columbia University, and one of the founding figures of postcolonial studies. He...
-
Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, and psychoanalyst whose work has shaped semiotics, feminist theory, and contemporary continental philosophy. R...
-
Bernard Stiegler
Bernard Stiegler was a French philosopher of technology, a former pupil of Jacques Derrida, and one of the most original thinkers of digital culture in the late twentieth and ea...
-
Boris Groys
Boris Groys is a Russian-born German philosopher, art critic, and media theorist, professor at New York University, whose work has reshaped the philosophy of contemporary art an...
-
Catherine Malabou
Catherine Malabou is a French philosopher, a former student of Jacques Derrida, and the leading thinker of plasticity in contemporary philosophy. From The Future of Hegel onward...
-
Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Luc Nancy was a French philosopher whose work extended the heritage of Heidegger and Derrida into an original thinking of community, the body, and shared existence. After t...
-
Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, literary theorist, and philosopher whose work occupies a singular place in twentieth-century French thought. After early right-wing politic...
-
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was a French philosopher, literary theorist, and translator, a long-time colleague of Jean-Luc Nancy at the University of Strasbourg, and a major interp...
-
Pierre Klossowski
Pierre Klossowski was a French philosopher, novelist, translator, and visual artist, the elder brother of the painter Balthus, and one of the strangest figures of mid-twentieth-...
-
Rosi Braidotti
Rosi Braidotti is an Italian-Australian philosopher, distinguished university professor at Utrecht University, and one of the leading figures of contemporary feminist philosophy...