Introduction

A series of damaging allegations is repeatedly made against post-war French thought, and more specifically poststructuralism and postmodernism. They celebrate a ‘decentring of the subject’ or ‘death of man’ which denies human agency and freedom; their anti-foundationalism condemns them to a sterile relativism; they are nihilistic and irrationalist; they can provide no basis for an ethics because they do not accept the universality of any values; they are concerned with the abstractness of ‘theory’ to the point that they allow no place for ‘practice’ and no conceivable application to the world which common sense tells us we inhabit; they denigrate and undermine all knowledge, belief and serious intellectual endeavour; they are elitist, stylistically baroque and intellectually shallow; politically, they are ineffectual and reactionary; and their rhetorical and terminological complexity only serves to mask their lack of real substance. French theory is too hard to read and too trivial to bother with. It has more to do with fashion than serious intellectual enquiry, and it is of more interest to literary critics than to real philosophers.