The Twentieth Century to Today · School
Structuralism & Post-structuralism
Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze dismantled fixed structures of subject, meaning and power; the dominant French current of the later twentieth century.
Representative figures · 9
Claude Lévi-Strauss列维-斯特劳斯
Founder of structural anthropology: kinship, myth and totemism all obey unconscious rules like those of language, the savage mind is as rigorous as the scientific, and the final goal of the human sciences is not to constitute man but to dissolve him.
Jean-François Lyotard利奥塔
The postmodern condition: incredulity toward grand narratives, knowledge turned into information commodity, incommensurable language-games between which lie differends no tribunal can settle, and philosophy's task to bear witness to the unpresentable.
Gilles Deleuze德勒兹
Difference and repetition, desiring-machines, the rhizome, becoming, the plane of immanence: philosophy is the creation of concepts, and with Guattari he turned it into a machine against every hierarchy.
Michel Foucault福柯
Histories of madness, prison and sexuality: knowledge is a form of power, power produces as well as represses, the subject is a historical product, and 'man' will be erased like a face drawn in sand.
Jacques Derrida德里达
Deconstruction: Western metaphysics rests on the privilege of 'presence', and every text is undone by its own difference, différance and supplement; 'there is nothing outside the text'. The most controversial and most cited philosopher of the later twentieth century.
Richard Rorty罗蒂
Philosophy is not the mirror of nature: no representation, no foundations, only conversation and solidarity. Leaving analytic philosophy behind, he turned pragmatism into an ironic liberalism that annoyed every camp.
Alain Badiou巴迪欧
Mathematics is ontology; event, truth and the subject's fidelity: with set theory he rebuilt a Platonism, insisting on truth and the communist Idea when 'postmodernity' had declared truth finished.
Slavoj Žižek齐泽克
Lacan plus Hegel plus Hollywood: ideology is the fantasy we act out knowingly, enjoyment is the core of politics, and with jokes, films and obscenities he brought German idealism back into the public square.
Judith Butler朱迪斯·巴特勒
Gender is performative: there is no identity behind the performance, only norms repeatedly cited. Gender Trouble transformed feminism and queer theory, and she then turned to vulnerability, mourning and non-violence.