Overall, the critical relation might be said to be towards science conceived as positive sciences (STEMM* subjects) in which the world is made up of ‘objects’ (res extensa) for a subject (res cogitans) as two distinct forms of ‘substance’ with their respective ontologies or modes of existence. Rather than ‘objects’, which can be mastered, controlled and exploited, there are ‘things’ that matter to ‘me’ and to ‘us’, and which trouble 'me' and 'us', even as ‘the I’ and ‘the we’ are articulated in relation to ’the It’ (or 'the Id) and to ‘the they’.
In other words, the world is a field of engagement and struggle which is political through and through, with politics conceived as the possibility of giving voice and action to those who have no voice and that which is deemed incapable of acting, a world whose disagreements and tensions are not simply capable of being resolved by technical solutions in the form of a (universal) consensus. It is instead a polyversity of dissensus, in the which the STEMM university (with its technical discussions and proposals) sits awkwardly and inadequately.
The importance of the thinkers of the mid- to late-20th century in France, such as, for example, Lefebvre, Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Lacan, Barthes, Lyotard, Foucault and Derrida, labelled phenomenologists and poststructuralists or sometimes post-Marxists, is that they re-visit and re-work the thinking of certain key German, Austrian and Jewish thinkers of the 19th century and 20th centuries, e.g. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and Wittgenstein.
Furthermore, these thinkers are important for understanding the major political ideologies of the 20th century, communism, fascism and liberalism, which might permit some insight into an understanding of the socio-political and the socio-economic realities of the 20th century, as it moved from an imperial world through two world wars, to a bipolar world and then to a neo-liberalising or globalising world.
To this grouping must be added the anomalous figure of Hannah Arendt who, but from a very different position, re-thinks the legacies, the limitations and the consequences of Marxism and fascism (considered in their 'totalitarian' dimensions) as well as phenomenology.
