ABSTRACT
A simple narrative is often rehearsed regarding developments in radical
political philosophy; one that seems especially apposite in relation to French
thought and to the debates that have enlivened post-war feminism. Its main
plot involves a displacement of the existentialist and phenomenological
perspectives that had dominated Continental thinking from the 1940s to the
1960s, by anti-humanist approaches that began with structuralism before
proliferating in various forms of poststructuralism (notably genealogy,
radical constructivism and deconstruction). The freedom and experience emphasised by the former now became objects of profound suspicion: free-
dom was associated with an individual subject capable of reinventing itself
at will, while its experience was perceived as an untrustworthy guide in light
of the latter’s over-determination and saturation by ideological or discursive
forms of power. Social critics accordingly turned their attention to an ana-
lysis of these impersonal structures whose constitutive capacities replaced
those of agents, now conceived merely as their effects.
