Luce Irigaray

[Leanne]

That does not mean that all of post-structuralist thought was bs. Of course that would make life easier for some people less inclined to make use of their frontal lobes if not absolutely neccessary.

Not subscribing to post-structuralism does not make one less intelligent. I generally subscribe to a lot of the theories that came out of that era and those schools of thought influence me because they resonate with what I already knew -- although not all, and a good deal of that has to do with the fact that those were the theorists most privileged by universities at the time that I did my Bachelors. It is now recognised -- thank heavens -- that post-structuralism is not the be-all and end-all when it comes to reading a text and that many different criticisms are equally valid. For example, when I was first studying, many of the definitive papers on postcolonialism were yet to be written or widely accepted -- when I went back to teaching, I found that this type of criticism was now one of the canon I was expected to teach (fortunately, not a tricky one since it makes a truckload of sense).

When I first started at university I was told that my writing was influenced by Sartre. I had never read Sartre (obviously I have remedied that lack now) -- though I quickly found that the writing and ideas that attracted me most were considered existentialist. Does that make me exclusively existentialist? Hardly. I also love Bacon (and bacon) and Descartes. I read widely among the Doctors of the Church: St Augustine (probably my favourite), Thomas Aquinas, Therese de Lisieux (my confirmation saint) and St John of the Cross in particular. Yet I am not a practicing Catholic, nor remotely religious.

To label someone according to the theories they most subscribe to is to ignore the fluidity of thought and trends of thought.