The Transition to Postmodernism: From Structuralism to Post-Structuralism
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Crisis of 1968
May 1968 was not merely a political crisis – it was a crisis of structuralism. The students who demonstrated in the streets had read Lévi-Strauss and Althusser – but they acted in ways structuralist theory had not foreseen. They were not “effects of structures,” but agents who called structures into question.
Althusser was criticized by his own students – Rancière, Balibar – for his “theoreticism,” his neglect of practice. Lévi-Strauss’ timeless structures could not explain why 1968 exploded and not 1958 or 1978. Structuralism had no theory of the event.[1]
The Poststructuralist Turn
The answer was not a return to humanism, to the subject, to history – that would have been regression. The answer was the radicalization of structuralism against itself:
Foucault adopted the structural method but historicized it. His “archaeology” analyzes the structures of knowledge – but as historically specific formations that arise, transform, are superseded. His “genealogy” adds the dimension of power: structures are not neutral, but shaped by power.
Derrida radicalized Saussure against Saussure. If meaning arises through difference, then it is never present, never complete, always deferred (différance). The structure has no center – or the center is itself only an effect of the structure. This is deconstruction.
Deleuze discarded structure in favor of difference – but a difference without identity, without negation, without dialectics. Pure affirmation, pure becoming, rhizomatic connections instead of hierarchical trees.
These thinkers will be treated in detail in the following chapter. Here it is only necessary to mark the transition: post-structuralism is not the negation of structuralism, but its internal radicalization. It takes structuralism’s premises (difference, construction, decentering) and drives them to the point where they turn against the structuralist project itself.
The crisis of structuralism after 1968 is analyzed by François Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme, vol. 2: Le chant du cygne (Paris, 1992). ↩︎