Positioning: Why a Separate Chapter on Structuralism?
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The following Chapter 18 deals with the “postmodern turn” – Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard. But these thinkers did not spring from nowhere. They all react to an intellectual movement that dominated French thought in the 1950s and 60s: structuralism. Without Saussure there is no Derrida, without Lévi-Strauss no Foucault, without Althusser no post-Marxist critique.
Structuralism is at once the last great systematic movement before postmodernism – and the bridge to it. It shares with postmodernism the critique of the subject, of humanism, of the philosophy of history. But it still believes in science, in structures, in knowledge. Postmodernism will deconstruct these last remnants of systematicity.
For the reception of Hegel, structuralism is decisive: it represents the most radical alternative to dialectics that the twentieth century produced. Where Hegel sees mediation, process, sublation, structuralism sees difference, synchrony, invariance. The dispute between structuralism and dialectics runs through postwar French philosophy – and it is not yet settled.
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