This innovative book charts and challenges the bruising impact of post-Saussurean thought on the categories of experience, self-presence and subjectivity. It attempts a new analysis of the category of lived experience in dialogue with poststructuralist thinking. Following the insight that linguistically-mediated subjectivity need not mean alienated selfhood, Fionola Meredith forwards a new postmetaphysical model of the experiential based on a dialogue between 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.Meredith's work is clear and lucid in an area notorious for obscure and difficult writing. Not only does she provide a coherent through the maze of poststructuralist thought, but she also offers a fresh, imaginative yet rigorous approach to the vexed issue of lived experience.