Conservatism of Poststructuralism

Poststructuralism likes to think itself radical, but Stephen Prickett (Words and the Word) points out that it excludes the possibility of novelty. Barthes says that a text is “a tissue of quotations drawn from the unnumerable centres of culture.” And Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality, on Prickett’s reading, encloses a text “within a sealed system from which the possibility of the ‘new’ is seemingly excluded by definition.” Prickett recognizes that this is linked with poststructuralism’s anti-theological stance: “The idea of the new is an inherent quality of the divine prerogative to which Barthes here stands so resolutely opposed.”