Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism encompasses the intellectual developments of certain continental philosophers and sociologists who wrote within the tendencies of twentieth-century French philosophy. The movement is difficult to define or summarize, but may be broadly understood as a body of distinct responses to structuralism (hence the prefix "post").
Many contributors, most notably Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva, either inverted structuralist principles or set out to reject them outright.
In direct contrast to the structuralist claim of an independent signifier superior to the signified, post-structuralism generally views the signifier and signified as inseparable but not united; meaning itself inheres to the play of difference.