Page "Ethics" Paragraph 37

Antihumanists such as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault and structuralists such as Roland Barthes challenged the possibilities of individual agency and the coherence of the notion of the ' individual ' itself.

As critical theory developed in the later 20th century, post-structuralism sought to problematize human relationships to knowledge and ' objective ' reality.

Jacques Derrida argued that access to meaning and the ' real ' was always deferred, and sought to demonstrate via recourse to the linguistic realm that " There is nothing outside the text "; at the same time, Jean Baudrillard theorised that signs and symbols or simulacra mask reality ( and eventually the absence of reality itself ), particularly in the consumer world.