An influential movement (albeit one whose membership is ambiguous) in critical theory that came into being as the result of an internal critique of the movement that preceded it, namely structuralism, with which it shares a number of crucial characteristics, particularly the latterâs anti-humanist de-privileging of the individual conscious and the subject. Its principal characteristic is scepticism (to the point of irrationality according to its critics) towards any form of completeness of either knowledge or understanding. It rejects all transcendental and/or idealist ontologies and epistemologies and accepts only those theories of being and knowledge that are premised on the final unknowability of these things. Post-structuralism is generally thought to have emerged at a conference held at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 to celebrate the achievements of structuralism and showcase it to American academics. A young scholar by the name of Derrida, Jacques presented a paper criticizing the conferenceâs keynote speaker and one of the founding fathers of structuralism, LĂ©vi-Strauss, Claude, entitled âLa structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humainesâ, translated as âStructure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciencesâ (1978). In what would become well known as his style of thinking, Derrida shattered the illusion at the heart of structuralism, namely that language could be frozen long enough to identify its universal characteristics. But, Derrida argued, language is a continuous process, and as such, its structures (i.e. its internal rules) are subject to constant variation. What we recognize as post-structuralist thinking today is the extension of this idea to virtually every aspect of human thought, with the effect that it has become a doctrine that no idea, concept, thought, or thing is ever fully what we think it is. Derrida uses the word diffĂ©rance to name this state of affairs. Post-structuralism is a very loosely applied term. It is often treated as a synonym for postmodernism, but this is misleading because whereas postmodernism concerns changes at the level of the world-historical, post-structuralism refers only to an intellectual position. Similarly, it is often used as a synonym for deconstruction, but this is also imprecise because although Derrida is credited with initiating this particular intellectual position, he has his own project which does not coincide on all points with post-structuralism as it is generally understood. Along the same lines, it is often said to include authors as diverse as utopia, hysteria, Derrida, Deleuze, Gilles, actual, anomie, and Lyotard, but this is also misleading inasmuch as it makes it seem that the work of these authors has something more in common than the general agreement that structuralism was inadequate in several important respects. In the hands of its critics, like Habermas, JĂŒrgen, and Frank, Manfred, post-structuralism is simply a code word for irrational and irresponsible philosophy. Thus it is a term that should be used with considerable caution. Further Reading: C. Belsey Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (2002). J. Williams Understanding Poststructuralism (2005).