Latour, Kristeva, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc

[The Stranger]

As I see it the job of philosophy is probably best explained by referring to the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which a bunch of philosopher's let Deep Thought decide the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything. When presented with the result they are disappointed and Deep Thought asks them whether they are sure what their question means. Next, they promptly commission the construction of an even bigger computer to compute the question to the answer to the question itself.

That is all backwards. It's the job of the philosophers to shape the questions and analyse the answers (in the context of the questions). Post structuralism is exactly that backwards approach: content to apply Deep Thought to the task (of the meaning of words) and leave it at that. It doesn't really bother with formulating questions outside the process of its own analytical Deep Thought on hidden assumptions. But those questions are precisely where true philosophy begins; the precise meaning of words is merely a means to an end, an analytical side-show and not even a particularly interesting one at that. That's my objection to post structuralism.

but you are kinda forgetting the context and time in which many of these works were written, most of them are negative works which criticize other works which posited a positive truth or depiction of reality. They often, atleast in the case of Derrida, tried to show that what these people wanted to do, was not possible and that the reason of why their endeavour failed was already embedded in the their work itself. They go into language so deeply because the people they were criticizing had pretty much enthroned language and attributed to it all kinds of powers that according to the post structuralists were not as straightforward and unproblematic as those people would have wanted everyone to believe.

as the name already implies, i think its a mistake to regard post structuralism as something independent.