ABSTRACT
The ‘first generation’ of poststructuralist theorists was enthusiasts with a missionary zeal. These French intellectuals of the late 1960s believed that a synthesis of linguistics, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and ideological critique would help to foment political revolution. Poststructuralism provided a fillip for a discipline which for decades had subsisted on a diet of close reading supplemented by pedestrian ‘old’ historicism. There remains an anti-theory faction in many English departments today, but the old opposition between theorist and anti-theorist is breaking down. The power of difference to ‘interven’ in the matter of metaphysical oppositions depends upon Jacques Derrida’s assertion that the difference of difference is neither purely sensible nor purely intelligible. Difference’s primary claim to undermine oppositions is to destabilize the conventional hierarchical relations between terms; however, deconstructing hierarchies tends to involve the construction of new hierarchies. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
