ABSTRACT
Certainly, some elements remained quite viable and were incorporated into what has become known as poststructuralism, but other parts of structuralism passed away with the smoldering protests of the late 1960s. Jacques Derrida was a key figure in this turn toward poststructuralism. He had already made a name for himself in structuralist circles and was personally acquainted with Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Louis Althusser. While Lacan has been claimed both by structuralists and poststructuralists, and exhibits characteristics of each, his work becomes the jumping-off point for poststructuralist assessments of contemporary society. In France, while the work of Foucault and Derrida had broad appeal in the social sciences and humanities, Lacanian thought was most fully developed in feminist theory, literary criticism, and psychoanalysis. Rumors of the death of theory have been circulating throughout the past decade, and poststructuralism is implicated quite frequently in its homicide.
