ABSTRACT
The ideas of the authors discussed in the preceding chapter influenced post-structuralism’s treatment of rationalism as continent and logocentric. Structuralism’s rejection of words as standing for thought relates to anti-humanism and its rejection of the orthodox understanding of both the human subject and the transcendental subject. Denying objective knowledge undermines epistemology and its relationship between subject and object, leading to a semantics involving substantialist and subjectivist illusions. Language is treated as autonomous. Meaning no longer resides in individual words or sentences, but in the relations that constitute language. The human subject is no longer the source of meaning, the guarantor of the relation between word and object, the secure foundation of thought and the world.
Such ideas led to French Discourse Analysis, constructed around the work of Foucault and Althusser. Its integration of Culioli’s enonciative linguistics provides the basis for an innovative from of discourse analysis.
