ABSTRACT
Post-structuralism is best thought of as the more or less sustained questioning of central structuralist assumptions or motifs, notably in French writings after about 1965. Structuralism is a well-defined research programme in the human and social sciences, spanning linguistics, anthropology and analytical studies of all the arts. The reaction to structuralist realism is strongly marked in the scepticism and relativism of Derrida. But other aspects of post-structuralism can be read not as reactions but as more radical versions and sometimes inversions of structuralist claims. For Sartre, human beings made themselves what they were, though they might in bad faith try to hide the fact, their responsibility, from themselves. For the post-structuralists, human beings are made what they are by family and society, though they also have the illusion that they arc free and responsible agents who have created themselves.
