Post-structuralism encompasses the intellectual evelopments of continental philosophers and critical theorists that wrote with tendencies of twentieth-century French philosophy. The prefix "post" refers to the fact that many contributors such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva rejected structuralism and became quite critical of it. In direct contrast to structuralism's claims of an independent signifier, superior to the signified, post-structuralism views the signifier and signified as inseparable but not united. The Post-structuralist movement is closely related to postmodernism--but the two concepts are not synonymous.