Post-structuralist philosophy rejected lived experience and active human subjects

Evidence

Lévi-Strauss had written that a philosophy based on personal experience was ‘shop-girl metaphysics’. The goal of the human sciences was ‘to dissolve man’, he said, and apparently the goal of philosophy was the same. These thinkers could be stimulating, but they also turned philosophy back into an abstract landscape, stripped of the active, impassioned beings who occupied it in the existentialist era. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 88

Although each of these movements disagreed with each other, most were united in considering existentialism and phenomenology the quintessence of what they were not. The dizziness of freedom and the anguish of existence were embarrassments. Biography was out, because life itself was out. Experience was out; in a particularly dismissive mood, the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had written that a philosophy based on personal experience was ‘shop-girl metaphysics’. The goal of the human sciences was ‘to dissolve man’, he said, and apparently the goal of philosophy was the same. These thinkers could be stimulating, but they also turned philosophy back into an abstract landscape, stripped of the active, impassioned beings who occupied it in the existentialist era. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 88

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what structuralism/post-structuralism rejected about existentialism — useful for orienting to the movement by contrast.
• XREF: Connects to the existentialism-vs-structuralism fracture that Lévi-Strauss and Sartre argued over, relevant to postwar French intellectual history. — connects to: Behaviorist accounts of persons fail by omitting their transcendence-transcended principle; The Frankfurt School rejected philosophical anthropology and eternal human essence — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 226; Phenomenology rediscovers philosophy by describing lived things rather than questioning reality — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 12 (+8 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 88

Broader Connections

• Postmodernism replaced temporality with space and rejected phenomenological perception #corroborates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 331
• The account of postmodernism originally lacked any social agency #corroborates (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 24
• Postmodernist thinkers rejected existentialism as outdated and overly human-centered #complicates (0.78) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 916
• Structuralism inverts culturalism’s claim by making experience an effect of categories #qualifies (0.72)