Linguistic Idealism as a Weapon of Poststructuralist/Postmodernist Politics

This is the follow up to my essay ‘Poststructuralism and Deconstruction as Forms of (Linguistic) Idealism’. My last essay was about Catherine Belsey’s poststructuralism, and how it’s strongly reliant (if implicitly) on linguistic idealism. (Belsey was a literary critic and academic.) This essay, on the other hand, attempts to show how Belsey and other poststructuralists/postmodernists use the philosophical position of linguistic idealism (if without using that term) as a means to further various political goals and causes.

A critical (or biased) commentator may say that poststructuralists and postmodernist philosophers make words mean whatever they want them to mean.

Catherine Belsey herself was aware of this criticism.

Firstly, Belsey quoted a few words from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’”