ABSTRACT
I Post-structuralism has often been attacked for its seeming commitment to a ‘textualist’ position which fixes an insuperable gulf between language and reality. This charge has come from various quarters. It is pressed most frequently by Marxist critics, irate at what they see as an attempt to claim ‘radical’ status for a theory quite devoid of political force or effectivity.1 Post-structuralism can then be written off as a last desperate ploy of that irrational strain in bourgeois ideology which had always sought to drive an idealist wedge between subject and object, knowledge and the real. On the other side similar accusations are heard from defenders of a robust commonsense empiricism, anxious not so much to change the world as to keep it solidly there for all practical purposes.2 If the Marxist and the bourgeois empiricist agree on nothing else, at least they are united in condemning poststructuralism as a species of self-serving mystification, a theory marooned in metaphysical problems of its own wilful creation.
