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What Is Neostructuralism?

By Manfred Frank

Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 482 Pp. $45.00 ($19.95 Pb).

Manfred Frank is a professor of philosophy at the University of Tubingen, Germany, and for a time was a professor of literature at the University of Geneva. He is the author of some sixteen books in hermeneutics, linguistics, and literary theory, as well as being an expert on Schelling and Schleiermacher. This book offers a lengthy description and evaluation of deconstructionism from a hermencutical point of view, covering five contemporary French representatives of deconstructionism: Jacques Lacan, Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. He considers three major issues: historiography, subjectivity, and semiotics (sign, meaning, and interpretation).

The term "neostructuralism" was coined by Frank to describe a structuralism that has been reformulated in light of the criticisms and insights of deconstructionism. He painstakingly reconstructs the theories and arguments of the deconstructionists, restating his own position on the possibility of interpretations, the value of

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the individual, and the connection with our tradition.

The book is not as forbidding as I have made it sound. A thirty-six page foreword by Martin Schwab reviews the history of structuralism-deconstructionism, placing Frank's book and thesis in the context of this history. Frank himself writes clearly, though he assumes the reader has a sound working knowledge of Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel and an interest in the intellectual development of Western culture. The book is certainly at the center of the recent controversies concerning the rationality of all intellectual work because of a realization of the effect of social context. Anyone who wants to know of this controversy, which is spilling over into academic theology, cannot do better than to read this book.

Diogenes Allen, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, N.J.