Abstract

Our work is entitled The Textual Dimensions of Post-Structuralist Thought. Specifically, it articulates the methodological underpinnings of discourse in French Post-Structuralism. It does so by focusing on the dissolution of conceptual distinctions often drawn between literature and philosophy [or poetic and nonpoetic language], and by identifying the metaphysical scope that language acquires when perceived scientifically as a discursive entity through an adherence to formal linguistics. Moreover, it thus examines the political and aesthetic ramifications of that metaphysic for the survival of that sacred language that we call poetry. ;Critical is an assessment of the counter-interpretative or functional character attributed to textuality in its Post-Structuralist, discursive setting. By looking at the structures of valuation on which selected notions of discourse depend, our work shows how the methodologies that French Post-Structuralism generates, necessarily re-constitute themselves in metaphysical and interpretative terms---this without imposing on them a phenomenological framework. That renders suspect the claim that discourse politically undermines notions of meaning and truth, and the claims that French Post-Structuralist theorizing hence pertains to fiction and illusion alone. ;By emphasizing the textual features of mediaeval notions of language, our work suggests that the discursive focus on language in French Post-Structuralism resides in a comportment of textuality, that is both metaphysical and interpretative. That comportment we identify against deconstruction alone, and for interpretation, as post-structuration. As a result, French Post-Structuralism is unable to address poetry in its ontological standing of poetry qua poetry, especially when philosophical in character, even when written sous rature or under erasure, or dealt with in translation. French Post-Structuralism's inability to properly treat borderline poetry develops out of the manner in which discourse is tied to communicative predication. Within this trajectory, it becomes pertinent, then, to determine what possibilities of poetry, language, and world community remain for us in a technologized, post-nuclear age