The post-structuralism, which designates a broad variety of critical perspectives and procedures, began in 1970 as a reaction against the school of structuralism. Structuralism was a theory proposed by the French philosophers namely Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss. They held the view that there is a centre that organise and regulate the structure and meaning of language and all human endeavours. Though the primary interest of the structuralists is in language, they showed that the social practices, mythical narratives, food habits, dress codes, etc. are combinations of signs that have a set of significance for the members of a particular culture. All that humans say and do make explicit the implicit structure of the individual and society.

The claim of structuralists about the existence of a self-evident foundation that guarantees the validity of all knowledge and truth was refuted by a group of philosophers from France itself. Thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Lacan and Roland Barthes argued that the notion of an ever-active agent which controls the meaning-making system is incoherent. The process of meaning-making itself undermines the meaning due to the endless differential play of internal relationships in the process.

Post-structuralism can be better understood by examining its salient features. One of prominent aspects of post-structuralism is aversion to the primacy of theory. According to the traditional understanding, theory gives us a set of principles, distinctions and categories which help us to identify, classify, analyse and evaluate a work or a product. It is an account of general conditions of signification that determine meaning and interpretation in all domains of human action, production and intellection.

The post-structuralists oppose this inherited way of thinking in all provinces of knowledge.  They question the established ways of thinking and formulating knowledge. They undermine the foundational assumptions, concepts, procedures and findings of discourse in the Western civilization. To them, theory is nothing but a tactic to legitimize the positions and practices of a few individuals.  Their thought pattern prompted the followers to keep an adversarial stance towards the established institutions, class structures and practices of economic and political power and social organization.

Another important feature of post-structuralism is the belief in the death of the subject. According to the traditional view, the human author is endowed with a purpose and initiative, whose design effectuate the form and meaning of a literary work. The post-structuralism is in critic of the controlling power of the subject over its creation. Their argument is that the human being is subjected to the play of external forces and the author is led by several happenings and agents of the particular time and space in which s/he speaks, writes or makes. The subject can be at most granted only the role of trying to master the incessant free-play of several outside agencies. It is in this sense Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes spoke of the “death of the author.”

By this expression these authors did not deny the necessity of an individual link in the chain of the events that result in a discourse or a text. What they denied was the validity of function assigned to a unique author who is conceived as the origin of all knowledge or determiner of the meaning of a text. Such a stand was supported by the findings of certain psychologists who argue that human agent is the product of diverse psycho sexual conditions and uncontrollable workings of the unconscious compulsions.

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