Experiencing the Postmetaphysical Self

Book excerpt: This book charts and challenges the bruising impact of post-Saussurean thought on the categories of experience and self-presence. It attempts a reappropriation of the category of lived experience in dialogue with poststructuralist thinking. Following the insight that mediated subjectivity need not mean alienated selfhood, Meredith forwards a postmetaphysical model of the experiential based on the interpenetration of poststructuralist thinking and hermeneutic phenomenology. Since poststructuralist approaches in feminist theory have often placed women's lived experiences 'under erasure', Meredith uses this hermeneutic/deconstructive model to attempt a rehabilitation of the singular 'flesh and blood' female existent.