后结构主义是20世纪六十年代以来率先在法语世界崛起的一股学术思潮,亦是欧洲大陆哲学中最重要的流派之一。它有两个特点:一是强调对二元对立的结构进行解构,揭示社会结构的不同要素之间相互依存,相互建构的辩证关系;二是认为身份认同不是先验的和僵化的,而是在复杂的社会过程中被不断重新定义与再生产的。从这两大基本观点出发,本文对两位法国后结构主义代表学者米歇尔·福柯与亨利·列斐伏尔的哲学理论进行评述与总结,提示后结构主义对空间科学的意义,认为后结构视角在空间科学之中的应用需要建立在一个全新的空间观之上。

This review article summarizes the works of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre from the perspective of poststructuralism. It shows that poststructuralism is an epistemological approach emerging first amongst Francophone social theorists and aiming at overturning the bounded understandings of subjects, objects, identities and relations. This perspective is undergirded by two analytical tools: the technique of deconstruction which is employed to dismantle binary oppositions; and the re-conceptualization of identity which rejects pre-established categories and highlights the contingency and fluidity in the construction of meanings and identifications. Poststructuralist thinking contends that different domains in a social or cultural structure are mutually constitutive and mutually productive. It also rejects universal discourses, à priori categories and bounded identities which haunt structuralist analyses. With such a theoretical framework in mind, this article attempts to show how poststructuralism informs the works of Foucault and Lefebvre and helps them to open up the vision of a dynamic, complex and fluid web of social relations and cultural meanings. Both Foucault and Lefebvre reject neo-Kantian and Neo-Cartesian ways of thinking which are committed to the pursuit of absolute truths and favour the separation of self-identity from the social world. In Foucauldian terms, power is not a possession to which the access is determined by a pre-established hierarchy of social identities. Rather it is dispersed in a capillary system and constitutes a micro-physics of power. Dominant knowledge defines social identities and shapes human subjectivities. Furthermore, the capitalist relations of production also produce new configurations of spatial relations. It produces differentiated urban spaces to buttress the circulation of commodities and the accumulation of capital. This article concludes by advocating a new imagination of space and spatial relations informed by the insights from existing poststructuralist analyses.