Abstract

This chapter discusses from the Essex School in Discourse Analysis emanating approach to post-foundational discourse analysis. By elucidating its ontological and epistemological premises, this contribution shows what theoretical perspectives and methodological options PDA opens for empirical discourse research. These premises do not only constitute the foundations of PDA’s research program, but they also apply to the Essex School in general. Moreover, these premises are not only of relevance for those interested in theoretical and methodological discussions, but they constitute also the heuristic framework that instructs discourse analysts about the general logics of discursive structuration of social life and how these logics can be observed and approached in empirical material.