The poststructuralist paradigm has become one of the dominant modes of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences, to the extent that, as Francoise Dosse explains, ‘it is no longer even possible to think without taking the structuralist revolution into account’. This is not to say that it has been universally accepted. Among mainstream theorists, poststructuralism is often associated with contradiction, hyperbole, lack of clarity and vacuity. Although it is true that poststructuralist writers are unlikely to win any praise for their writing style, a large part of this is due to the challenge that these writers set themselves; namely, to contest many of the foundational assumptions upon which much mainstream Western (political) philosophical thought is and has been based. To do so, they do not simply reconfigure pre-existing concepts, but go further by disrupting and undermining the concepts, categories and ways of thinking that have long dominated. For those trained in and focused on traditional forms of thought, this can be too much. One of the sub-aims of this book, however, is to show that if we are willing to delve patiently into the works of various poststructuralist thinkers, not only is their position subtle and developed, but it tends to be able to provide a sophisticated response to many of the queries and questions raised against them.

As its name suggests, post structuralism developed out of debates taking place within 1960s French structuralism, itself a development from linguistics and, in particular, Ferdinand de Saussure's General Course in Linguistics, published posthumously by his students in 1916. Saussure's linguistic theory is complicated, but the pertinent point for us is the emphasis it places on the relationships inherent in the generation of meaning. Rather than hold that meaning is ahistoric, tied substantially to each signifier, or simply representative of an external object, Saussure argues that meaning is generated from the relations between two signifiers and, crucially, that this relation is not grounded in a third mediating moment.