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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 May 2020
There are many ways to treat the implications of post-structuralist thinking for political pedagogy. Since for the most part I shall be treating its implications for someone — primarily teachers of political science — the appropriate context is a comparison between post-structuralist inquiry and what remains the prevailing approach to political inquiry, the application of the scientific code.1 We can begin with a broad juxtaposition that will establish the tone of the comparison. Modern political inquiry is increasingly oriented toward a particular model of scientific communication, one which promotes a commitment to precision and clarity in the creation of concepts and the development of measurement indices and, by implication, eschews ambiguity and uncertainty.
1 It is controversial whether there exists a separate genre of analysis that could be called poststructuralist. But for the sake of simplicity, I shall be assuming that in general, the modern post-structuralists are those who, influenced by Saussurean linguistics and Nietzschean philosophy, think of linguistic practices as constitutive of the phenomena taken to be the things about which ordinary genres of analysis speak. Given this position, post-structuralists seek not to find the deeper meaning of “texts” — whether we are speaking here of written documents, cultural practices, or any domain of conduct — but to delve into the way that our practices, especially linguistic ones, create and impose form upon things. As a result of a hyper-sensitivity to linguistic mechanisms, post-structuralist writing is especially self-reflective. For general surveys of post-structuralist analysis, see, for example, Young, Robert, ed. Untying the Text (Boston; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)Google Scholar, and Harari, Josue, Textual Strategies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979).Google Scholar
2 Lowell, A. Lawrence, “The Physiology of Politics,” American Political Science Review, 4 (February, 1910), pp. 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Ibid, p. 7.
4 Ibid., p. 9.
5 Man, Paul de, “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau,” in Blindness and Insight 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 102–141.Google Scholar
6 See Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976Google Scholar, and “Plato's Pharmacy,” in Disseminations, trans. Johnson, Barbara (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).Google Scholar
7 Derrida, Jacques, “Limited Inc. A B C,” in Glyph II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 170.Google Scholar
8 Metz, Christian, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, trans. Britton, CeliaWilliams, AnnwylBrewster, Ben and Guzzetti, Alfred (London: MacMillan Press, 1982), p. 14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 A good discussion of the differences between the Anglo-American and the Saussurean approaches to meaning can be found in Jameson, Fredric, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972)Google Scholar, Chapter 1, “The Linguistic Model.“
10 Derrida, Jacques, “The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy Before Linguistics,” in Harari, Josue ed. Textual Strategies, pp. 82–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 Man, Paul de, The Epistemology of Metaphor,” in Sachs, Sheldon ed. On Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 11–28.Google Scholar
12 See for example Ryan's, Michael deconstruction of Hobbes in his Marxism and Deconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 2–6.Google Scholar
13 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, trans. Smith, A.M. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1971), p. xi.Google Scholar
14 Foucault, Michel, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. Smith, A.M. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 120.Google Scholar
15 Ibid.
16 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, trans. Hurley, Robert (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 48.Google Scholar
17 The concept of impertinence applied to challenging metaphors is used by Ricoeur, Paul. See his “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,” Man World, 12 (1979), pp. 132–133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, p. 12.Google Scholar
19 ibid., pp. 88-89.
20 Ibid.
