Abstract
The intellectual landscape of the humanities has since the 1960s been
overshadowed by the question of identity and difference – political and national
identity, ethnic and racial identity, gender identity, and, in philosophy, the
question of the identity of the self and of the knowing, acting and desiring subject.
This is partly due to the social, cultural and political upheavals experienced in
different parts of the globe at the time, for example, the movement of
decolonization in Sub‐Saharan Africa, the Civil Rights Movement in the US, or
second wave feminism. It is also due to the emergence of a new intellectual
orientation in French philosophy in the 1960s. Suspicious, on the one hand, of the
claim made by the philosophies of the subject (particularly by existentialism and
phenomenology) that the identity of the subject, although not given or natural, is
self‐constituted, and of the claim made by structuralism in linguistics,
anthropology and psychoanalysis that there are invariable structures that govern
human life, on the other, a certain unity of perspective or commonality of outlook
emerged among various French thinkers such as Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault,
to name but a few, which overturned one of the most long‐standing beliefs in
Western thought.