ABSTRACT
In the perspective of structuralism, language is form, not substance. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst who has had a major impact upon the development of social theory and whose work the author examines in the chapter, put the argument that meaning is always somehow suspended, divided and dispersed, a displaced outcrop of the endless productivity and play of signifiers. The unconscious, writes Lacan, represents ‘the sum of the effects of the parole on a subject, at the level where the subject constitutes itself from effects of the signifier’. In various forms of social theory, particularly among feminist, queer, post-colonial and Afro-American critics, Derrida’s application of linguistic models in the context of post-structuralism has powerfully influenced the explication of social and cultural phenomena. Post-structuralism, especially the deconstructive theory advanced by Derrida, has exerted considerable influence over the development of post-colonial analyses of identity, culture, race, gender and the broader struggles of the Third World against the oppressions of our modern age.
