"In one of its developments, post-structuralism
became a convenient way of evading . . . political questions altogether.
The work of Derrida and others had cast grave doubt upon the classical
notions of truth, reality, meaning and knowledge, all of which could be
exposed as resting on a naively representational theory of language. If
meaning, the signified, was a passing product of words or signifiers, always
shifting and always unstable, part-present and part-absent, how could there
be any determinate truth or meaning at all? If reality was constructed
by our discourse, rather than reflected by it, how could we ever know reality
itself, rather than merely knowing our own discourse? Was all
talk just about talk? Did it make sense to claim that one interpretation
of reality, history or the literary text was 'better' than another?"
(Eagleton, 144).