The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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and its emergence from structuralism and then identify the key strategies employed in the field of religion by some of the above scholars and examine the implications of this method for future studies in religion. Needless to say, in the limits of this presentation, I can only skim the surface of the post-structuralist literature to provide a ‘trace’ of its critique, focusing on a few key ideas from the foundational texts. I will, however, contend that the engagement with post-structuralism is one of the most significant developments in the study of religion, because this critical perspective raises important questions about the legitimacy and authority of knowledge claims in the field.

The complexity of the term: emerging themes in 1960s French thought

Post-structuralism is a difficult term and like all ‘isms’ needs to be used as a marker for a set of ideas and then critically suspended as a term, because it reflects a holding of ideas that are constantly in process and exchange: it is like trying to catch a single point in a moving stream of historical thought. Ideas are constantly in exchange and motion, and only for strategic reasons are terms frozen and thinkers positioned to achieve certain temporary shorthand clarifications or political objectives in the intellectual and social world. Few writers claim to be post-structuralist and are often labelled as such by other writers attempting to identify trends and patterns of thinking, or even simply to dismiss them. It is also true that the specificity of a writer always reveals greater complexity and multiple strands of thought than any one term can convey. Nonetheless, the term post-structuralism can be used to identify a broad set of intellectual patterns of thought emerging from 1960s France, which had major importance on the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century in almost every intellectual discipline.

The term post-structuralism is used in a variety of different ways by its exponents and opponents and it is thus useful to identify a strict and general use. In its strict sense, it is used to identify a number of French intellectuals in the 1960s and their emergence within and development of structuralism. The work of Roland Barthes (1915–1980), Jacques Lacan (1925–1980), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and Julia Kristeva (1941–), who came to France from Bulgaria, are most commonly associated with this theoretical challenge. In its general usage post-structuralism has been used to embrace a wider movement of critical theory and continental philosophy and is often fused – and confused – with postmodernism. Postmodernism is a misleading term that tends to obfuscate the specificity of intellectual thought rather than provide any useful insight. Postmodernism suffers from even greater imprecision than post-structuralism and has more to do with the marketing of a broad set of ideas and thoughts in the late modern Anglo-Saxon world; it is a term of excitement or revulsion that hides the historical specificity of the texts and people it captures. However, it has been employed more effectively in Christian theology to identify partisan affiliations between different stylised positions of pre-modern, modern and latemodern theological thought (Ward 1997).

It is also important to recognise that the term postmodernism is often used by those who wish to assert clear statements of truth and fact from sense experience (positivism) to dismiss certain types of thinking as anti-Enlightenment relativism, which seriously distorts and does great injustice to the specific writers associated with post-structuralism. The reason for this confusion is related to the way French thinkers often associated with postmodernism, such as Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) and Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), are wrongly

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linked with a different set of French thinkers connected to the more strict idea of poststructuralism. On the whole, it is best to separate the specific historical emergence of poststructuralism from the more enigmatic term postmodernism, while being aware that some confusingly use these terms interchangeably to identify wider trends of French intellectual thought. The specificity of post-structuralism will thus allow us to appreciate the historical context of French thought in the 1960s and move the discussion away from simple charges of relativism and anti-modernism. I will maintain that post-structuralism to some extent develops the critique of the Enlightenment – even in its suspicion of such thinking – by extending the critical platform of knowledge to the problem of representation. It arguably rests in the longer philosophical tradition of epistemology.

Structuralism and post-structuralism

It is not possible to understand post-structuralism without some understanding of structuralism and to understand why Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and Kristeva are positioned by both terms at the same time. John Sturrock (1993: 137) rightly argues that post-structuralism is an extension rather than a complete break with structuralism. As he puts it: ‘Post-structuralism is a critique of Structuralism conducted from within: that is, it turns certain of Structuralism’s arguments against itself and points to certain fundamental inconsistencies in their method which Structuralists have ignored.’ The problem here is that structuralism is best understood as an intellectual ‘moment’ in French academic history rather than a clear set of principles and an identified school. In François Dosse’s (1997) comprehensive two volume History of Structuralism it is clear that ‘[w]hat Americans call poststructuralism existed even before the structural paradigm waned. In fact, it was contemporary with its triumph’ (Dosse 1997: 17). At the very moment that structuralism reached its historical pinnacle in France – 1966 – it fragmented. Post-structuralism was thus part of the ‘disparate fabric’ of structuralism (Dosse 1997: xiii). It was embedded in the atmosphere and discourse of the historical context of structuralism and carried over much of its language.

The problematic nature of the situation can be illustrated by considering a famous cartoon by Maurice Henry in the French journal La Quinzaine littéraire in July 1967. The cartoon known as ‘the structuralist picnic on the grass’, depicts four structuralists (Foucault, Lacan, Barthes and Lévi-Strauss) sitting on the ground beneath tropical trees, wearing grass skirts, and having a conversation. The cartoon captured the intellectual moment of 1966 in French thought, with Foucault’s successful Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things), Lacan’s Écrits (Writings) and Barthes’s Critique et vérité (Criticism and Truth), in the context of Lévi-Strauss’s 1958 text Anthropologie structurale (Structural Anthropology); the tropical setting echoes the work on primitive civilisations. However, as the cartoon appeared it also witnessed the artificial positioning of the thinkers. Only Lévi-Strauss would hold on to the term structuralism while the others would seek to distance themselves from it, especially Foucault. Soon after the cartoon the work of Derrida would come to the intellectual foreground and Kristeva would in time also emerge with her own contributions to semiotic theory after her arrival in France in 1965 (see Dosse 1997: 17ff; 54).

It important to note that French linguistic structuralism from the Parisian Left Bank is not the only type of structuralism. As Barthes (1966: 5) correctly asks: ‘What structuralism are we talking about?’ Barthes recognised that the idea had been discussed for a hundred years and it is, therefore, possible to find longer histories of structure. Derrida (1966: 278) makes the same point in his 1966 critical essay decentring the idea of structure in Lévi-

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Strauss’s work by showing it is ‘as old as Western science and Western philosophy’. The idea that there are given structures can be found at all levels of analysis and in different types of knowledge. The post-structuralist linguistic type of structuralism should not obscure the fact that structures have also played a key part in wider scientific thinking, as Jean Piaget’s (1968 [1971]) seminal text, Structuralism, argued. Types of structure can be seen in philosophy from Platonic forms to Kantian a priori synthetic forms and in science from general algebra to Newtonian physics. Piaget pointed out that despite the various types of structuralism there was an underlying synthesis. Although his concern was to explore structuralism within mathematics and social science, he mapped three key features. First, there is the determining feature of wholeness. The various elements always exist within a law or order. Second, these systems of wholeness are ‘transformations’, they are ‘simultaneously structuring and structured’, because in static form they would collapse. Piaget’s third and final form is that structures are ‘self-regulating’. They have a ‘rhythm, regulation’ and ‘operation’ that maintains the system and creates a closure by setting a boundary (Piaget 1968 [1971]: 3–16). Piaget’s general insights allow the linguist Terence Hawkes (1977: 17) eloquently to capture something of the general nature of structuralism by considering the relationship between things. It is, for Hawkes, a ‘way of thinking about the world which is predominantly concerned with the perception and description of structures’. It is a ‘way of thinking’ that does not examine the object itself, because ‘the world is made up of relationships not things …’ [my emphasis]. This structural relationship emerged across all fields of study: anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), psychology (Piaget) and linguistics (Saussure), but it is the Saussurean tradition of structural thinking that leads to the insights of post-structuralism in France.

Saussure and semiotics

Ferdinand de Saussure’s great insight in his 1916 Cours de linguistique générale was to study language from the synchronic rather than diachronic perspective; that is, to study language as a complete system at a given moment rather than its historical changes and variations. Saussure’s first principle, according to Jameson’s (1972: 7, 21) critical reading of the relation of the synchronic and diachronic, is ‘an anti-historical one’ that reacts against the dominant view of the time. This marking out of the underlying feature of language enables Saussure to see language as a ‘system’ with its own intrinsic relations. As Sturrock (1993: 6, 26) indicates, the word ‘system’ carries the meaning of ‘structure’, which oddly does not appear in Saussure and does not emerge until 1928 in the context of phonetics. From this basis of the synchronic, the central parts of language are then analysed. First, according to langue (the system of language) and parole (individual speech acts), something which has its source in Durkheim’s sociological distinction between the collective and the individual (Doroszewski 1933, noted in Jameson 1972: 27, note 23). Language thus exists as a collective reservoir and is appropriated by the individual users who do not have complete assimilation of all its elements. As Saussure ([1916]: 1974 14) writes: ‘For language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity.’ He continues: ‘In separating language from speaking we are at the same time separating: (1) what is social from what is individual; and (2) what is essential from what is accessory and more or less accidental’ ([1916]: 1974 14).

The next major insight that sets the ground for post-structuralism is the marking out of the parts in language. The radical insight of Saussure was to mark out these parts not in terms of words as such, but in terms of signs. The basic element of the sign challenged the natural

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correspondence between words and things and set up the key notion of the arbitrariness of the sign.

The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole that results from associating of the signifier with the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary … The word arbitrary also calls for comment. The term should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker … I mean that it is unmotivated, i.e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified.

(Saussure [1916] 1974: 67, 69)

This famous assertion means that language is not a clear and transparent set of meanings but a system of signs and their structural relation. The sign has two aspects, the concept or signified (signifié) and the sound-image or signifier (signifiant). The relation is arbitrary because there is no natural link between – for example – the signifier ‘cat’ and the concept of the physical animal sitting on the mat (the signified), other than inside the structure of the language. There are two general types of relation between signs, echoing, as Jameson (1972: 37) notes, the diachronic and synchronic. First, the syntagmatic, those held in a time sequence as they are positioned alongside other signs (a ‘horizontal’ link) and, second, the associative or ‘vertical’ link, where there is a link through a shared meaning or sound, such as synonyms. What this technical outline of language indicates is that it is the relation between signs that is important. As Saussure indicates: ‘language is a form and not a substance’ (Saussure [1916] 1974: 122). Language thus depends on the differences and oppositions between signs. Structuralism extends Saussure’s insights to other sign systems, such as myth and ritual.

The relationships between the sign and signified opens a key problem of what shapes, or determines, the relation. Jameson’s (1972: 102, 106) political consciousness jumps on this dimension within linguistic structuralism and not only makes the point that French structuralists were ‘the beneficiaries of a Marxist culture’ but also shows how ideology rests within the ‘idealistic tendencies’ of the relation. As Jameson argues: ‘[I]n practice, all the Structuralists … do tend to presuppose, beyond the sign-system itself, some kind of ultimate reality which, unknowable or not, serves as its most distant object of reference’ (109–110). Here we see what will be a central struggle within structuralism: the relation between history and structure and what determines structure. The post-structuralists expose these tensions and this represents one of the radical extensions of the theory.

Structuralism and constructivism: the shift to post-structuralism

The shift to post-structuralism from within structuralism is a complex one and something obfuscated in Anglo-Saxon commentaries. As Dosse (1997: xiii) shows, the public reception of structuralism occurred at a time when it was already in a ‘period of deconstruction, dispersion and ebb’. This internal shift reflects something of the very nature of structuralist logic. Although Fredric Jameson (1972: ix) tends to dismiss Piaget as appropriating structuralism, Piaget’s wider perspective in the history of ideas surprisingly offers an insight into a more unified extension thesis between structuralism and post-structuralism. He makes the point, from mathematical and scientific domains, that structuralism contains its own

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internal problem that requires an external theory. This point arises when he discusses the work of Foucault. In discussion of Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (1966) he believes that Foucault’s ‘corrosive intelligence has performed a work of inestimable value’ (Piaget 1968 [1971]: 135), one that supports Piaget’s general insight: ‘There is no structure apart from constructivism’ (Piaget 1968 [1971]: 140).

The logical outcome of structuralism is a question about its own formation and the poststructuralists provide various ways of thinking about this problem. Foucault, like other post-structuralists, takes the structure – the given or what we assume is evident – and questions its assumptions through historical knowledge and the limitations of thinking. In a fascinating alignment of ideas, Piaget (Piaget 1968 [1971]: 13, 33, 135) links such ideas with the philosophy of Kurt Gödel and his 1931 critique of formal mathematics, which provided important insights into the limits of knowledge. According to Piaget, Gödel showed that any system of reasoning cannot demonstrate its own consistency or validity, because it requires a higher system of knowledge outside itself to provide its own justification. There was in the end a ‘formally undecidable’ nature to knowledge, and the foundation of mathematics. What this meant was that knowledge was ‘essentially incomplete’ (Piaget [1968] 1971: 33). The link between Gödel and Foucault is an important one in showing how the incompleteness of structure is the ‘construction’ of ‘structure’, which for Piaget ‘is no longer avoidable’ (Piaget 1968 [1971]: 13).

We have already noted in passing that Derrida (1966) was critical of the limitations of the idea of structure. For Derrida contemporary structuralism was an ‘event’ that asserted a metaphysical centre and presence with the idea of structure. He refers to its historical emergence as the ‘structuralist invasion’, but resists the historian making it an ‘object’, because its whole aim was to question how something is perceived and made into an object (Derrida 1963: 3). Derrida reveals the contradictions and tensions inherent not only in metaphysics but also in the metaphysics of structuralist theory. He shows how structuralism privileges the very concepts of sign and structure in a Saussurean displacement of the sign. Derrida’s reading of structure shows his resistance and reconfiguration of structuralism. As he argues in his essay on Rousset:

A structural realism has always been practiced, more or less explicitly. But never has structure been the exclusive term – in the double sense of the word – of critical description. It was always a means or relationship for reading or writing, for assembling significations, recognising themes, ordering constants and correspondences.

(Derrida 1963: 15)

One tactic Derrida employs to undermine the notion of structure is to show how it operates as a metaphor rather than a thing itself. It constructs a relation rather than discovers it. ‘Structuralism’, for Derrida (1963: 26), ‘lives within and on the difference between its promise and its practice.’ For Dosse (1977: 19), Derrida was a paradoxical figure who was both ‘inside and outside’ structuralism. As Dosse went on to argue: ‘But he might just as well have been considered to be the person who pushed the structuralist logic to its limit and toward an even more radical interrogation of all substantification or founding essence, in the sense of eliminating the signified.’

Derrida’s reading of structuralism shows how the language of Saussure persists in poststructuralism and is made more complex as it is interrogated in different ways. Mark Taylor (1999: 106) aptly captures this critical transition: ‘Structures, which seem to be complete, are

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inevitably constituted by processes of exclusion, which render them unavoidably incomplete.’ Derrida, for example, questions the logocentrism of Saussure’s idea of the sign – that is, the assumption that the world presents itself to consciousness in a clear and transparent manner, that it is immediately present. Derrida’s approach is to provide close readings of parts of texts to reveal their incoherence and hidden tensions. He applies his deconstructive reading to the key texts of structuralism (Saussure and Lévi-Strauss), discovering the paradox and limits of their logic and their metaphysic of presence (Derrida [1967] 1976; 1972). In wishing to show how metaphysics holds a ‘defense against the threat of writing’, Derrida ([1967] 1976: 101–102) questions, for example, the phonologism of Lévi-Strauss. Derrida is questioning the priority of speech over writing, because speech gives the illusion of immediacy and presence (from the reality of the spoken word). By showing that speech is a form of writing he questions the opposition of the terms and creates a new set of concepts to explore the implications of this insight. Post-structuralism thus extends structuralism by both pushing and questioning its logic and revealing the inherent construction of structure. Post-structuralist thinking questions the authority of our intellectual assumptions. It extends what Derrida (1963: 3) calls ‘an anxiety of language, within language’ to its philosophical, historical and political formation.

This critical engagement with structure is the mark of post-structuralism. The historical moment of structuralism disappears when the critique of structuralism is located in a wider epistemological critique. The ‘post’ of post-structuralism is an intellectual transformation of the language of structuralism, increased, not least, by the student riots in Paris in May 1968 (historic protests against the traditional education system and employment in France that led to a political rethinking of knowledge). As Lacan famously declared: ‘If the events of May demonstrated anything at all, they showed that it was precisely that structures had taken to the streets!’ (Dosse 1997: 122). The political mutation was already apparent before, in so far as structuralism was always concerned with a hidden logic and relation, but the poststructuralists carry the language of structuralism into wider domains of knowledge. Barthes takes Saussure’s linguistic ideas into ideology and semiotics; Foucault returns structuralism to history and the politics of knowledge; Lacan joins structuralism and psychoanalysis and rethinks the unconscious as language, and Kristeva radicalises structuralism by revealing the semiotics of gender. The post-structuralist literature, as Leonard Jackson (1991: 242) has argued, slowly increased the ‘magnitude’ of the philosophical claims from Saussure’s more limited science.

We can find a way to understand the problem of structuralism and post-structuralism and make sense of post-structuralism in the field of religious studies by framing the discussion in terms of Roland Barthes’ 1963 essay ‘The Structuralist Activity’. Like Derrida, Barthes sees the ‘overworked’ nature of the idea of ‘structure’ and seeks rather to see the idea as an ‘activity’, originated by Saussure, rather than a specific ‘structuralist work’. The structuralist seeks to ‘reconstruct’ the object. For Barthes, the structuralist ‘makes something appear which remained invisible or, if one prefers, unintelligible in the natural object’ (Barthes 1963: 215). Post-structuralism develops this critical ‘activity’ using the structuralist lexicon but embellishes it within other forms of critical awareness of what Foucault called ‘a positive unconscious of knowledge’ (Foucault 1966: xi; 1969: 60). The post-structuralist is therefore engaging language, history and ideology in ways Saussure’s model restricted critique. It reveals the hidden within the normative.

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Post-structuralism and the study of religion

The post-structuralist radicalisation of structuralism provides religious studies with strategies of critique: ways of reading texts (Derrida and Kristeva), ways of exposing ideological structures (Barthes and Foucault), ways of uncovering the historical formation of ideas (Foucault) and ways of revealing hidden desires and the construction of subjectivity (Lacan and Kristeva). The scholars of religion who utilise these strategies – not methods because they are more fragmented – are doing a number of things. First, they are supporting and appealing to the authority of the associated French authors and their ideas, diverse as they may be within the intellectual space of French thought. Second, they are deploying the critical lexicon of these writers to question the assumptions operating in the field. Finally, they are using the ideas to expose the excluded issues within religious studies, not least in the ways we see postcolonial theory appeal to post-structuralism (King 1999a). There are various ways of mapping the critical literature of post-structuralism and the way it pervades scholarship in religious studies but I will map three key domains of this new lexicon for the field of religion: first, language and text; second, history, power and knowledge; and, third, subject and the body.

Language and text: the rethinking of categories

The lexicon of post-structuralism within religious studies is first and foremost an extension of the ‘anxiety about language’ in a post-Saussurean world. It is the concern about signification and representation and the way the text has become destabilised. In the study of religion in the last twenty years there has been increased critical concern with deployment of basic categories such as ‘religion’, ‘Hinduism’ and ‘mysticism’ as essential unchanging referents, which hold some fixed, natural, stable or essential meaning. Post-structuralists, and Derrida in particular, have supported this critical exercise, although the issues related to the philosophy of language are wider than the post-structuralist turn, as can be seen in Timothy Fitzgerald’s The Ideology of Religious Studies (2000), which uses a range of analytical categories to make similar critical claims. This underlines how post-structuralism returns us to wider questions of epistemology.

Derrida provides a way of questioning the normative concepts within religious studies by showing how meaning is not present in the text but rather differed in a chain of signification (différance) and held by assumptions of power. Différance is created from the words ‘differential’ and ‘deferred’; it implies meaning is never fully present in the text. Derrida’s thinking therefore allows a disturbance of certainty. As he states in his 1967 study Of Grammatology, his intention in the book is to ‘make enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the terms “proximity”, “immediacy” and “presence”’ (Derrida [1967] 1976: 70). Ideas are no longer clear or immediate in use and do not present themselves in a metaphysics of presence. Irritating as this may be to those following the dominant systems of knowledge, it has allowed the study of religion to question the hierarchy of meanings and the exclusion of the Other, not least in relation to issues of race, gender and colonialism. In the text we have only what Derrida calls the ‘trace’: no point of origin, an absence, tensions and the elusive nature of the sign. It is important to realise – to the annoyance of those wanting ‘deconstruction’ to be a method – that Derrida’s readings of texts are not fixed procedures but a way of entering into each text on its own terms and finding within the text the points where it unravels itself. To many this is just a form of relativistic

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‘play’ (a word in which Derrida delights), but it presents profound questions to how we assert various claims and the limits of representation. Derrida’s deconstructive reading, as Barbara Johnson (1981: xv) notes, connects what a writer sees to what a writer does not see in their writing. As Johnson continues: ‘The critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal, in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on what follows from them, and that the starting point is not a (natural) given but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself’ (Johnson 1981: xv–xvi).

The appeal to Derrida has allowed the field of religion to suspend critically many of the accepted terms of the phenomenological tradition and the methods of structuralism, but it also raises important questions about translation. This anxiety about translation can be seen within postcolonial studies. As Mandair (2003: 91) recognises from his context of Sikh studies: ‘To invoke the untranslatable is to invoke what Derrida calls the pharmakonomy of deconstruction as a simultaneously destructive/constructive movement.’ The idea of the pharmakon emerges in Derrida’s close reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, or rather the translators of Plato, because it explores the problem of how the Greek word pharmakon can be translated as both ‘remedy’ and ‘poison’. It reflects the fundamental undecidability of the text and in this sense the pharmakon is writing. ‘[T]he pharmakon, or if you will, writing, can only go around in circles: writing is only apparently good for memory, seemingly able to help it from within, through its own motion, to know what is true’ (Derrida [1972] 2008: 105).

Derrida draws attention to the assumptions within the text and reveals the values behind the meaning of terms, concepts and ideas in the history of philosophy. As Grace Jantzen’s (1999: 66) post-structuralist feminist philosophy of religion always makes clear, it requires the critical question of ‘whose interests are being served’ in the ways we stabilise our knowledge, concepts and terms. Such critique reveals the excluded Other – not least the gendered and culturally excluded. Not surprisingly, Derrida’s techniques and his deconstructive approach have also been linked to the limits of knowledge in Buddhist philosophy, negative theology and mysticism (Magliola 1984; Silverman 1989). Since Magliola’s (1984) linking of Nagarjuna’s philosophy with Derridean deconstruction there has been much debate about the kind of correspondence of Derrida’s thinking with Buddhist philosophy. As Coward and Foshay (1992: 227) argue:

What Derrida says about philosophy, that it ‘always re-appropriates for itself the discourse that delimits it’, is equally true of Buddhism. Like all religions, Buddhism includes a strong onto-theological element [a theological philosophy about the nature of being], yet it also contains the resources that have repeatedly deconstructed this tendency.

Foucault’s thinking has also been linked to non-western philosophical traditions, and wider elements of French post-structuralist thinking remain engaged with negative theology (Bradley 2004). Post-structuralism, therefore, offers not only a critical question of categories and method but a philosophical opportunity for cross-cultural philosophy of religion (King 1999b: 230–244).

History, power and knowledge: the will to authority

If Derrida explores the concealed elements of metaphysics through textual analysis, it is Foucault who exposes the hidden elements of ideas in their ‘field of use’ (Foucault 1969:

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100); that is, in the ‘network of institutions’ and social structures where they take on their operational power (Foucault 1970: 217). The use of Foucault within the study of religion has been evident since David Chidester’s (1986) mapping of his key concepts for the subject. Like Derrida, Foucault maintains the structuralist features within his work, even when he is not bound by its governing rules (Carrette 2000: 88). Foucault’s reading of the institutions of madness, medicine and the prison provide various strategies for showing how ‘discourses’ are instruments of social engineering. Discourses are the practices of institutions. They are ‘a body of anonymous historical rules, always determined in the time and space that have defined a given period’ (Foucault 1969: 117). Foucault, following in part Heidegger, explores the historical conditions for the ideas governing our lives. He explores how at different moments of history, problems and issues arise as reflections of the orders of power, although power for Foucault is always mobile and non-hierarchical, because it shifts and always involves forms of resistance (Foucault 1976: 92ff).

Echoing structuralism, Foucault called his approach ‘archaeological’ in the 1960s, to show the layers of historical discourse and the hidden epistemic structures, not unlike Kuhn’s paradigms in scientific knowledge. However, under the renewed influence of Nietzsche, in the 1970s he renamed his approach ‘genealogical’, because he recognised the importance of the ‘non-discursive’, that is how discourse always takes place within institutions and involved a relation of power mapped onto the body (Foucault 1971). Foucault has enabled scholars of religion to show how concepts are deployed in different historical contexts and how they are related to power and the body. For example, he showed how ‘sexuality’ was created through the ‘deployment’ or ‘apparatus’ (dispositifâ) of a ‘subtle network of discourses, special knowledges, pleasures and powers’, including the Christian confessional and psychiatric knowledge (Foucault 1976: 71). The complex emergence of ideas of sexuality has led scholars of religion to show how concepts like religion and Hinduism are shaped through what Foucault called a ‘complex political technology’ (Foucault 1976: 71). Foucault thus breaks the ‘positivity’ of knowledge; that is, the assumption that knowledge has an essential givenness. In this sense, where Derrida finds logocentrism in the text, Foucault finds it in social order. Here we see how the post-structuralist move is to reveal the hidden order of knowledge.

Foucault also allowed scholars of religion to raise suspicion over the construction of its own disciplinary knowledge. He showed how knowledge is bound by rules of utterance and that there is a sense of permitting and restricting ideas within different domains of thought. As he stated in his augural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970: ‘Disciplines constitute a system of control in the production of discourse, fixing its limits through the action of an identity taking the form of a permanent reactivation of the rules.’ The field of religious studies thus becomes a system of regulated statements around the object of ‘religion’. The institutional domains of the study of religion interact to establish a disciplinary history, a nomenclature, a canon of texts, an agreement of interlocking methods and the codes of textbooks around the idea of religion as an object of study. These disciplinary practices, as Foucault continued in his 1970 lecture, ‘exercise a sort of pressure, a power of constraint upon other forms of discourse’ (Foucault 1970: 219).

The link between discourse and power is not far from the work of Roland Barthes and his more overt ideological analysis of semiotics (the science of signs) and his critique of the normative concepts of literary criticism. In his 1966 essay Criticism and Truth, Barthes marked out the constraints on thought in bourgeois criticism. As he declared: ‘What does good taste forbid us to speak of?’ (Barthes 1966: 7). According to Barthes, his form of ‘new’

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criticism ‘produced’ new meanings with a new set of value judgments (Barthes 1966: 32). Barthes’s critique provokes questions of method in the study of religion, but his ideological analysis of signs has also had an influence on thinking about myth, not least because of his influential structuralist text Mythologies published in 1957 (McCutcheon 2000). Even more than Foucault and Derrida, Barthes bridges both structuralism and post-structuralism. For example, in Mythologies we see the same critical lexicon of language, politics and power that Foucault would exploit, but in Barthes there is a distinct Marxist tone.

In Mythologies Barthes examined various cultural phenomena in terms of the ideological codes they carried. One such essay, for example, examined the marketing of the new Citroën D.S. 19 car, the Déesse (the goddess), introduced at the Paris Motor Show in 1955. The car is transformed from matter, from ‘a primitive to a classical’ form, in what Barthes calls a ‘spiritualisation’ of pressed-metal and the ‘exaltation’ of glass. As Barthes explains: ‘We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales’ (Barthes [1957] 1973: 88).

Barthes’s conclusion to this brief essay indicates the way the goddess is ‘mediatised’ from the heavens in exhibition halls, but what is ‘actualised’, for Barthes, is the ‘essence of petit-bourgeois advancement’ (Barthes [1957] 1973: 90). The bridging of spiritualisation, mediatisation and actualisation are key ideological processes in the advertising of an object. Barthes’s association of ideology and spirit in his essay on the Citroën D.S. can be seen as an early critique of marketing and spirituality, which Carrette and King (2005) unfolded in the later context of neo-liberal capitalism. This is another example of how post-structuralism provides a critique of the hidden politic of knowledge in the study of religion.

Subject and the body: the return of the other

Post-structuralist theory in the study of religion has been used to deconstruct texts and expose the alliance of power-knowledge inside institutions, but wrapped inside these critical perceptions is how post-structuralism brings increased awareness to the dynamics that shape subjectivity and the body. These ideas have been explored most powerfully in the post-structuralist feminist theory of Judith Butler (1990) who reveals the important relation between power, subjectivity and agency. Following Butler, Saba Mahmood (2005) uses Foucault’s ‘paradox of subjectification’ – that is, the capacity of power to subject one to authority and create skills of ethical response – to read the ethical-political nature of Muslim women of Egypt. While Foucault’s thinking has had a significant impact on studies of the body and religion (Turner 1991; Boyarin 1997), scholars of religion, in line with feminist writers, have turned to the psychoanalytically informed post-structuralist writings of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva to make sense of the complexity of religious practices.

Jacques Lacan linked Saussure with Freud and inverted Saussure’s signifier and signified to reinvigorate psychoanalytical ideas in France with his claim that ‘what the psychoanalytical experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language’ (Lacan [1966] 1977: 147). While, according to Nobus (2003: 53ffâ), Lacan’s ‘erroneous’ reading of Saussure had more to do with Lévi-Strauss than Saussure, it enabled Lacan to react against egopsychology and unfold a divided subject. Lacanian theory also reshaped psychoanalysis with the concepts ‘Symbolic’ (the order of language, social and cultural symbolism), ‘Imaginary’ (the order of phantasies and images) and the ‘Real’ (the impossible to represent, that which