History of Structuralism

Volume I: The Rising Sign, I945-I966

Franois Dosse
Translated by Deborah Glassman
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial
assistance provided by the French Ministry of Culture for the translation of
this book.
Copyright 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Originally published as Histoire du structuralisme, 1. Le champ du signe,
1945-1966. Copyright ditions La Dcouverte, Paris, 1991.
AlI rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dosse, Franois, 195-
[Histoire du structuralisme. English]
History of structuralism / Franois Dosse; translated by Deborah
Glassman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: v. 1. The rising sign, 1945-1966-v. 2. The sign sets,
1 967-present.
ISBN 0-8166-2239-6 (v. 1 : hc : alk. paper).-ISBN 0-8166-2241-8
(v. 1 : pbk. : alk. paper).-ISBN 0-8166-2370-8 (v. 2: hc : alk.
paper).-ISBN 0-8166-2371-6 (v. 2 : pbk. : alk. paper).-ISBN
0-8166-2240-X (set: hc : alk. paper).-ISBN 0-8166-2254-X (set:
pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Structuralism-History. 1. Title.
B84I.4D6713 1997
I49'96'09-dc21 96-51477
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
To Florence, Antoine, Chlo, and Aurlien
Structuralism is not a new method, it is the awakened and trou bled
consciousness of modern thought.
Michel Foucault
Contents
Translator's Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part J. The Fifties: The Epie Epoeh
Xlll
xvii
xix
1. The Eclipse of a Star: Jean-Paul Sartre 3
2. The Birth of a Hero: Claude Lvi-Strauss 10
3. Where Nature and Culture Meet: Incest 18
4. Ask for the Program: The Mauss 26
5. Georges Dumzil: An Independent 32
6. The Phenomenological Bridge 37
7. The Saussurean Break 43
8. Roman Jakobson: The Man Who Could Do Everything 52
9. A Pilot Science without a Plane: Linguistics 59
ix
x Contents
10. At Alexandria's Gates
67
II. The Mother Figure of Structuralism: Roland Barthes
7
1
12. An Epistemic Exigency
7
8
13. A Rebel NamedJacques Lacan
9
1
14
Rome CaUs (1953): The Return to Freud
99
15
The Unconscious: A Symbolic Universe III
16. Real/Symbolic/Imaginary (RSI): The Heresy
II9
17
The CaU of the Tropics 126
18. Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work
14
2
19
Marxism in Crisis: A Thaw or the Deep Freeze Again?
158
20. The French School of Economics Takes a Structural Path 166
21. Get a Load of That Structure!
173
Part II. The Sixties: I963-I966, La Belle poque
22. Contesting the Sorbonne: The Quarrel of the Ancients and
the Moderns
191
23
1964: The Semiological Adventure Makes a Breakthrough 202
24. The Golden Age of FormaI Thinking 210
25
Great Confrontations
223
26. Signifying Chains
239
27
Mythology's Earth Is Round
25
28. Africa: The Continental Divide of Structuralism
26
4
29
Reviews
273
3
Ulm or Saint-Cloud: Althusser or Touki?
28
4
Contents xi
31. The Althusserian Explosion 293
32. Marxism's Second Wind 309
33. 19
66
Annum mira bile (1): A Watershed Year for Structuralism 316
34. 1966
Annum mirabile (II): Foucault Sells like Hotcakes 330
35. 1966
Annum mirabile (III): Julia Cornes to Paris 343
Part III. A Hexagonal Fever
36. The Postmodern Hour Sounds
351
37. Nietzschean-Heideggerian Roots
38. Growing Pains
Appendix: List of Interviewees
395
Notes
41
Bibliography
437
Index
449
Translator's Preface
Franois Dosse's History of Structuralism has created quite a stir since
its publication in I991. This book, written by a historian, weaves
together a rich range of materials-interviews, books, journals, news-
paper articles and television programs, disciplinary histories and con-
temporary contexts-to produce a denselysaturated and highly read-
able account of a productive, prolific, and energetic moment in French
intellectuallife when the social sciences exploded and a new paradigm
arose.
Because the question of whether such a history is possible, and in-
deed whether structuralism was itself a movement whose history can
be written, Dosse rightly claims the Frenchness of the phenomenon
and lays out, with varying intensity, the roles played by the major con-
tributors to the phenomenon, the pioneers present at the "structuralist
banquet," and their students or other participants. He looks at their
works, strategies, institutions, and instruments invested in the effort
to establish institutionallegitimation in an academic setting governed
by the venerable Sorbonne and the classical humanities, which were
more than reticent about any theoretical reinvigoration.
If Dosse is right to insist on the Frenchness of structuralism, our
interest in this history is even greater on this side of the Atlantic,
where structuralism left an indelible mark on American universities,
particularly in French departmerits. Minor mirror struggles were
waged between the ancients and the moderns, between purveyors of
xiii
xiv Translator's Preface
literary history and philology and more texrually bound readers
attuned to the subtle nuances of language and more readily at home
in this new, semiological, adventure. And much ta the consternation
of more traditional humanists, history and context were largely left
to other disciplines as the enthusiasm of a new perspective caught the
imagination of a younger generation. Other humanities have been
invigorated by the energies of the structural approach-art history,
comparative literature, literature, cinema studies-as have been, if to
a lesser degree, the social sciences, which were already better anchored
in American universities than they were in parallel French institutions
during the fifties, sixties, and seventies.
More than an approach to reading has changed. Structuralism has
brought with it-or is already a piece of that larger movement of
which we are now struggling to take the measure-a shift in perspec-
tive that listens to many whose voices have long been stifled, assigned
to what Foucault calls the underbelly of reason, the place to which
reason consigns its nether side. The repressed of history in their sin-
gular manifestations and in the major manifestations of social life
attracted all the pioneers of structuralism-Saussure, Foucault, Al-
thusser, Lvi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes. Even as they looked to scientific
knowledge as an ideal in their polemical engagement with the institu-
tions that resisted the presence of these new disciplines, these early
structuralists sought out the unconscious structures and logics appar-
ent in language, madness, social relations, neurosis, and myth. Struc-
turalism was therefore a movement that in large measure reversed the
eighteenth-century celebration of Reason, the credo of the Lumires, a
movement who se multiple threads and echoes in the works, work,
and lives of the major players and on the disciplines shaped our vision
of a world. A vision that can never be the same after structuralism,
argues Franois Dosse.
Volume l, The Rising Sign, covers the first years of the structural-
ist phenomenon, ending in 1966, a crowning year for structuralism.
Volume 2 chronicles the waning years of the phenomenon.
Franois Dosse is a lively writer whose verve drives his verb. 1
have tried to let this energy inform the translation, even if it is gener-
ally impossible to reproduce the puns, alliterations, and rhythms of
his writing. Many longer sentences were shortened; but if clarity has
often sobered style, the consolation might be that English readers can
Translator's Preface xv
fully appreciate the immense efforts involved in bringing together so
many pieces of the paradigm.
The question of citations and bibliography has been a vexing one.
AlI titles mentioned in the text have been rendered into English;
the original French title is given in a note. Where well-known titles
are mentioned in passing without any reference to specifie citations or
bibliographical adumbration (Sartre's Being and Nothingness, for ex-
ample), there is no accompanying note.
The case of citations is somewhat more complicated. 1 have quoted
extant translations of those authors for whom something resembling
standard translations exist-Nietzsche, Foucault, Lacan, Lvi-Strauss.
ln the case of ambiguities or variations (where the English translation
varies from the French original, is incomplete, or realigns volumes, for
example), 1 have indicated the original source and given my own
translation. For works where no standard translation exists or where 1
had no access to one, 1 have provided my own translations and given
the original source in the note. In the Appendix, the reader will find a
list of interviewees and their institutional affiliations.
Acknowledgments
1 would like to thank all those who were kind enough to agree to be
interviewed. These interviews were entirely transcribed and their con-
tribution was absolutely fundamental to the project of writing this
history of French intellectuallife. The specifics of the area and current
affiliation of each of the interviewees are to be found in the Appendix.
Marc Abls, Alfred Adler, Michel Aglietta, Jean Allouch, Pierre
Ansart, Michel Arriv, Marc Aug, Sylvain Auroux, Kostas Axelos,
Georges Balandier, tienne Balibar, Henri Bartoli, Michel Beaud, Daniel
Becquemont, Jean-Marie Benoist, Alain Boissinot, Raymond Boudon,
Jacques Bouveresse, Claude Brmond, Hubert Brochier, Louis-Jean
Calvet, Jean-Claude Chevalier, Jean Clavreul, Claude Cont, Jean-
Claude Coquet, Maria Daraki, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Philippe Des-
cola, Vincent Descombes, Jean-Marie Dolmenach, Jol Dor, Daniel
Dory, Roger-Pol Droit, Jean Dubois, Georges Duby, Oswald Ducrot,
Claude Dumzil, Jean Duvignaud, Roger Establet, Franois Ewald,
Arlette Farge, Jean-Pierre Faye, Pierre Fougeyrollas, Franoise Gadet,
Marcel Gauchet, Grard Genette, Jean-Christophe Goddard, Maurice
Godelier, Gilles Gaston-Granger, Wladimir Granoff, Andr Green,
Aigirdas Julien Greimas, Marc Guillaume, Claude Hagge, Philippe
Hamon, Andr-Georges Haudricourt, Louis Hay, Paul Henry, Fran-
oise Hritier-Aug, Jacques Hoarau, Michel Izard, Jean-Luc Jamard,
Jean Jamin, Julia Kristeva, Bernard Laks, Jrme Lallement, Jean La-
planche, Francine Le Bret, Serge Leclaire, Dominique Lecourt, Henri
xvii
xviii Acknowledgments
Lefebvre, Pierre Legendre, Gennie Lemoine, Claude Lvi-Strauss,
Jacques Lvy, Alain Lipietz, Ren Lourau, Pierre Macherey, Ren
Major, Serge Martin, Andr Martinet, Claude Meillassoux, Charles
Melman, Grard Mendel, Henri Mitterand, Juan-David Nasio, Andr
Nicola, Pierra Nora, Claudine Normand, Bertrand Ogilvie, Michelle
Perrot, Marcelin Pleynet, Jean Pouillon, Jolle Proust, Jacques Ran-
cire, Alain Renaut, Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, lisabeth Roudinesco,
Nicolas Ruwet, Moustafa Safouan, Georges-Elia Sarfati, Bernard
Sichre, Dan Sperber, Joseph Sumpf, Emmanuel Terray, Tzvetan To-
dorov, Alain Touraine, Paul Valadier, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Marc Ver-
net, Serge Viderman, Pierre Vilar, Franois Wall, Marina Yaguello.
Others were contacted but were not interviewed: Didier Anzieu,
Alain Badiou, Christian Baudelot, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu,
Georges Canguilhem, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hlne Cixous, Serge
Cotte, Antoine Culioli, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Louis Du-
mont, Julien Freund, Luce Irigaray, Francis Jacques, Christian Jambet,
Catherine Kerbrat-Oreccioni, Victor Karady, Serge-Christophe Kolm,
Claude Lefort, Philippe Lejeune, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Franois
Lyotard, Grard Miller, Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner,
Edgar Morin, Thrse Parisot, Jean-Claude Passeron, Jean-Bertrand
Pontalis, Paul Ricoeur, Jacqueline de Romilly, Franois Roustang,
Michel Serres, Louis-Vincent Thomas.
1 would also like to thank aIl of those whose difficult task it was
to read this manuscript in its early stages and whose comments and
suggestions made it possible for me to carry out this undertaking:
Daniel and Trudi Becquemont, Alain Boissont, Ren Gelly, Franois
Gze, and Thierry Paquot.
Lastly, for having given me the print runs of a certain number of
works of the period, 1 would like to thank Monique Lulin at ditions
du Seuil, Pierre Nora at ditions Gallimard, and Christine Silva at
ditions La Dcouverte.
Introduction
Structuralism's success in France during the 1950S and 1960s is with-
out precedent in the history of the inteHectual life of this country.
There was such widespread support for structuralism among most of
the intelligentsia that the resistance and minor objections put forth
during what we can calI the structuralist moment were simply moot.
We can better understand how so many intellectuals could be at home
in the same program if we understand the context .. There were two
fundamental reasons for this spectacular success. F i r ~ t , structuralism
promised a rigorous method and sorne hope for making decisive
progress toward scientificity. But even more fundamentaHy, it was a
particular moment in the history of thought, which we can character-
ize as a key moment of critical consciousness; for the structuralist pro-
gram attracted a particularly broad range of enthusiasts, including the
trainer of the national football team who, in the sixties, announced a
"structuralist" reorganization of his te am in order to win more games.
The triumph of the structuralist paradigm is therefore first of aH
the product of a particular historical context, characterized since the
.end of the nineteenth century, and particularly since 1945, by the
West's progressive slide toward what Lvi-Strauss called a cooler tem-
porality. But it is also the product of the remarkable growth in the
social sciences, which ran up against the hegemony of the aged ?or-
bonne, bearer of scholarly legitimacy and dispenser of the classical
humanities. The structuralist program was a veritable unconscious
.,
xix
xx Introduction
strategy to move beyond the academicism in power, and it served the
twofold purposes of contestation and counterculture. In the academic
realm, the structural paradigm successfully cleared the ground for
proscribed knowledge that had long been kept at bay, in the margins
of the canonical institutions.
Structuralism was contestatory and corresponded to a particular
moment in Western history. It expressed a certain degree of self-
hatred, of the rejection of traditional Western culture, and of a desire
for modernism in search of new models. Antique values were no
longer glorified; structuralism demonstrated an extreme sensitivity to
everything that had been repressed in Western history. Indeed, it is no
accident that the two leading sciences of the period-anthropology
and psychoanalysis-privilege the unconscious, the nether side of
manifest meaning, the inaccessible repressed of Western history.
The structuralist period was also a time when linguistics was a
pilot science guiding the steps of the social sciences as a whole toward
scientificity. In this respect, structuralism was the banner of the mod-
erns in their struggle against the ancients. As the disillusionment of the
second half of the twentieth century grew, structuralism also became
an instrument of de-ideologization for many politically committed in-
tellectuals. A specific political moment characterized by disenchant-
ment and a particular configuration of knowledge requiring a revolu-
tion in order to successfully carry through a reform made it possible
for structuralism to become the rallying point for an entire generation.
This generation discovered the world behind the structuralgrid.
The important quest for a solution to existential confusion pro-
duced a tendency to ontologize structure that, in the name of Science
and Theory, became an alternative to traditional Western metaphysics.
Ambitions were boundless during this period in which boundaries
were being redefined and the limits of imposed figures extended. Many
struck outalong the newest paths opened up by the flowering of the
social sciences.
Suddenly, however, everything changed. Tragedy struck struc-
turalism...J!uhebeginnin.s of the eighties. In the same fell swoop, mosf
of the French heroes of this international epic left the stage of the liv-
ing, as if the theoreticians of the end of humanity had all allowed
themselves to be carried off simultaneously in a spectacular death.
Nicos Poulantzas killed himself by leaping from his window on Octo-
ber 3, I979, just after having justified his refusaI to betray Pierre
Introduction xxi
Goldmann; his suicide was concrete punishment for a purely imagi-
nary crime. After lunching with Jacques Berques and Franois Mitter-
rand, then chairman of the Socialist Party, Roland Barthes was run
clown by a dry cleaner's truck on the rue des coles. Barthes suffered
only a slight cranial trauma, but, according to the witnesses who vis-
ited him at the Piti-Salptrire Hospital, he let himself decline, and
died on March 26, 1980. During the night of November 16, 1980,
Louis Althusser strangled his faithful wife, Helen. The eminent repre-
sentative of the most rigorous rationalism was judged not to be re-
sponsible for his act, and was hospitalized at Sainte-Anne, a Pari sian
psychiatrie hospital, before being admitted to a private clinic in the
Paris area, thanks to the help of his former philosophy teacher, Jean
Guitton. The man of words, the great shaman of modern times,
Jacques Lacan, died on September 9, 1981, aphasie. Barely a few
years went by before the ill wind of death carried off Michel Foucault.
At the height of his popularity and completely immersed in his work
on a history of sexuality, Foucault was struck with the new scourge of
the century, AIDS. He died on June 25,1984.
So many dramatic and proximate deaths reinforced the impression
of the end of an era. Sorne went so far as to theorize the coincidence of
these tragedies as the revelation of the impasse of a common way of
thinking popularly called structuralism. In this view, the break between
speculative thinking and the real world leads to self-destruction. Such
a juxtaposition is even more artificial than the mediatized glorification
of the sixties, when the structuralist banquet rose to the heights of its
glory, and along with it, the four musketeers, who were five at the
time: Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan,
and their common father, Claude Lvi-Strauss.
This collective shipwreck nonetheless remains a milestone on
the French intellectual landscape. The disappearance of the master
thinkers, and Jean-Paul Sartre must be counted among them, opened
up a new period of doubt. Nostalgia was already in the air at the be-
ginning of the 1980s, when it was fashionable to evoke these figures
with an ambivalent mixture of awe and fascination heightened by
their unusual fates, which had transformed them into something re-
sembling heroes. While sorne took pleasure in signing the death certifi-
cate of structuralism, the body was still alive and kicking hard, accord-
ing to the survey published in Lire in April 1981. When hundreds of
writers, journalists, professors, students, and politicians were asked,
xxii Introduction
"Who are the three living intellectuals of the French language whose
work seems to you to have the greatest and most profound influence
on philosophy, letters, arts, and sciences, etc.?" they answered: Claude
Lvi-Strauss (101), Raymond Aron (84), Michel Foucault (83), and
Jacques Lacan (SI).
The concept of structuralism has stirred as much enthusiasm as
opprobrium. From the Latin struere, derived from structura, the term
"structure" initially had an architectural meaning. Structure de sig-
nated "the manner in which a building is constructed" (Trvoux
Dictionary [1771]). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
meaning was modified and broadened by analogy to include living
creatures. Fontenelle saw the human body as a construction; Vaugelas
and Bernot saw language as a construction. The term came to describe
the way in which the parts of a concrete being are structured into a
whole, and it could apply to a variety of structures-anatomical, psy-
chological, geological, mathematical. It was only later that the struc-
tural approach appropriated the social sciences. For Spencer, Morgan,
and Marx, the term described an enduring phenomenon linking the
parts of a whole together, in a complex manner, and in a more ab-
stract way. The term "structure"-nowhere to be found in Hegel and
only infrequently in Marx, with the exception of the preface to the
Critique of Political Economy (I859)-was established in 1895 by
Durkheim, in The Rules of Sociological Method. Between 1900 and
1926, structure gave birth to structuralism, which Andr Lalande, in
his Vocabulaire, calls a neologism. For psychologists, structuralism is
born at the beginning of the century, by opposition to functional psy-
chology. But the true origins of the practice, in its modern sense, and
on the scale of all the human sciences, cornes from developments in
the field of linguistics. Saussure used the term "structure" only three
times in his Course on General Linguistics. Later, the Prague school
(Trubetzkoy and Jakobson) generalized the use of the terms "struc-
ture" and "structuralism." The Danish linguist Hjelmslev claimed to
make reference to the term "structuralism" as a founding program, a
tendency made explicit by his activity. In 1939, he founded the review
Acta linguistica, and its first article addressed "structurallinguistics."
From this linguistic kernel, the term produced a veritable revolution in
all the social sciences that were at the core of the twentieth century,
and each in its turn believed that it received a scientific baptism.
Miracle or mirage? The history of science is nothing more, after
Introduction xxiii
aIl, than the history of the graveyard of its theories. This is not at aIl to
say that each of the stages left behind is no longer effective, but simply
that any program loses its productivity and necessarily undergoes
methodological renewal. With structuralism, however, the changes
risked falling into the same traps that the previous method had
avoided. Whence the necessity of illuminating the richness and pro-
ductivity of structuralism before seizing upon its limits. This is the ad-
venture that we will undertake here. Notwithstanding the dead ends
into which structuralism has run on occasion, it has changed the way
we consider human society so much that it is no longer even possible
to think without taking the structuralist revolution into account.
The structuralist moment is a piece of our intellectuai history that
opened up a particularly fertile period of research in the social sci-
ences. Reconstructing its history is complicated because the contours
of the "structuralist" reference are particularly vague. In order to
understand the principal positions of the period, we have to recon-
struct its many methods and personalities, while at the same time, and
without being reductionist about it, seeking sorne coherent centers. Be-
yond the multiplicity of objects and disciplines, these centers reveal the
matrix of a procedure. Different levels are to he sorted out and the
many structuralisms underlying the term "structuralist" differenti-
ated. We can clarify the fundamental intellectuai issues, which are as
theoretical as they are disciplinary, and explore the wealth of individ-
ual trajectories, which cannot be summed up in a group history. As it
presents the contingencies of fortuitous but essential meetings, this his-
tory proposes to amalgamate bodies and hring many explanatory fac-
tors to bear without in any way reducing them to any single causality.
The social sciences appropriated structuralism in a numher of
ways. But heyond the interplay of borrowed ideas, analogies, and a
contiguity that we will he obliged to sketch out, as Barthes counseled
the future historians of structuralism to do, we can make a distinction
that does not coincide with disciplinary boundaries. stru<:-
turalism is represented in particular hy Claude Lvi-Strauss, Aigirdas
Julien Greimas, and Jacques Lacan, and simultaneously involved an-
thropology, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. Contiguous with this search
for the Law was a more supple, undulating, and shimmering struc-
turalism to he found particularly in the work of Roland Barthes,
Grard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov, and Michel Serres, and which we
might call semiological structuralism. There is also, finaIly, a histori-
XXIV introduction
cized or The work of Louis Althusser, Pierre
Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Vernant,
and, more broadly, the third generation of the Annales faUs into this
group. Beyond these distinctions, however, we can identify a commu-
nit y of language and goals that sometimes gives the impression that
we are reading the same book despite the variations in style and dis-
cipline that distinguish a Barthes from a Foucault, a Derrida, or a
Lacan. Structuralism was the koine of an entire inteIlectual genera-
tion, even if there is no doctrinal solidarity and even less a school or a
battle among its various representatives.
It is no less difficult to reconstruct the history of this moment th an
it is to periodize the structuralist moment. Thefifties clearly saw an
irresistible increase in structural phenomena that in the sixties became
a veritable structuralist mode that most inteIlectuals adopted. Until
1966, structuralism was in an ascending phase and its growth seemed
unstoppable. The year 1966 is a central point of reference. This was
the year structura li st activity beamed forth most forcefuIly in intel-
lectual life and the intensity of the mixture of a universe of signs
shone forth beyond aIl established disciplinary frontiers. Nineteen
sixty-seven, however, saw the beginning of the ebb, of criticisms, of
distantiation from the structura li st phenomenon, which was every-
where showered with praise by the press. If the ebb was latent in
1967, it began before 1968, when the four musketeers endlessly took
their distance from the structuralist phenomenon.
There was another temporality, however, that was lessaffected by
changes in inteIlectual fashion. University research continued to thrive
even as the body was about to be buried. This research was like so
many weIlsprings of a program that had lost in media glamour what it
had gained in pedagogical effectiveness. Not that there was a single
academic temporality, for there are always numerous lag times among
the humanistic disciplines. For linguistics, sociology, anthropology, or
psychoanalysis, for example, structuralism offered an adaptable scien-
tific model. Other disciplines, which were better rooted in the univer-
sity and better sheltered from epistemological turbulences, such as his-
tory, would only be transformed la ter, and adopt the structuralist
program at the moment when its wane was becoming general. Tempo-
ral lags and disciplinary uncertainties in these inteIlectual exchange
games notwithstanding, structuralism made many conversations pos-
sible, multiplied the numbers of fruitful colloquia, generated much re-
Introduction xxv
and an interest in the work and progress related
disciplines. This was an intense period enlivened by thinkers who
were seeking, in the main, to harmonize their research and their lives.
Our vision of the world is still shaped by this veritable revolution.
Sorne caU ours the era of emptiness and others caU it postmodern;
in either case it invites an approach to man in which a binary opposi-
tion, every bit as iUusory, is played out between the human dissolution
proferred by structura lis m, and in reaction, the divinization of man.
Man the creator, beyond the constraints of his time, is a mirror image
of the death of man. Humanity, the lost paradigm of the structural ap-
proach, burst forth again in its narcissistic image of the era of the pre-
social sciences. The great structural wave carried the social sciences
toward shores on which historicity was a stranger. But we are at an
important turning point, expressed as a return to an ancient form of
writing in the name of a decline in thinking, a 105s of values, and a
reliance upon our heritage. The old sawhorses are back: the discreet
charms of a Vidalian landscape, the heroes of Lavissian history, the
masterpieces of the national literary patrimony in Lagarde and
Michard. Beyond this return to a very particular nineteenth century is
a particular eighteenth-century vision of man perceived as an abstrac-
tion, free from temporal constraints and master of the legal-political
system bodying forth his rationalism.
Can we, however, reflect upon man as if the Copernican-Galilean
revolution, the Freudian and Marxist fractures, and the progress of
the social sciences had not taken place? Pointing out the shortcomings
of structura li sm does not imply returning to the golden age of the
Enlightenment. To the contrary, it means moving forward toward a
future in which a historical humanism can be established. It is impor-
tant that the faise convierions and the true dogmatisms as weU as the
reductionist and mechanistic procedures be clearly pointed out, and
the validity of transversal concepts used across disciplines by the so-
cial sciences questioned. Not in order to establish a catchaU procedure
or a shapeless flow, but to wre5t from the Brownian motion the prole-
gomena of a science of man wrought from a certain number of con-
cepts and operational structuring levels.
We caU upon the advances made in the social sciences to answer
to the emergence of a humanism of the possible, perhaps around the
transitory figure of a dialogic man. Moving beyond structuralism re-
quires returning to it in order to examine the method that was broadly
xxvi Introduction
adopted by all the social sciences, sketching out the stages of its hege-
monie conquest, valorizing the processes that made it possible for a
single method to be adopted by the many humanistic disciplines, and
understanding the limits and impasses in which the vitality of this at-
tempted renewal waned.
In order to give an account of this French intellectual chapter of
the fifties and sixties, we have asked authors and disciples to comment
upon the major works of the period; members of other schools and
supporters of other trends have also been asked to cast a critical eye
upon these works. A great many interviews with philosophers, lin-
guists, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and
economists have been incorporated into these pages, and they raise
the question of structuralism's importance for their own work and re-
search, and the ways of moving beyond it. This two-volume inquiry
reveals the centrality of the structuralist phenomenon, despite and be-
yond the diversity of viewpoints, and makes it possible to periodize. *
That form of criticism that tries to go ever further in deconstruct-
ing Western metaphysics and penetrating the fissure in the founda-
tions of semiology, to empty out every signified and all meaning so
that the pure Signifer can circulate more effectively, belongs to a mo-
ment in the Western history of self-hate that we have left behind,
thanks to a progressive reconciliation between the intelligentsia and
democratic values. But it is not possible, in moving beyond a period
denominated by the critical paradigm, to simply return to what pre-
ceded. A return is nonetheless necessary in order to better understand
this period whose contributions have irrevocably changed our under-
standing of humankind.
*This inquiry is organized in two volumes, corresponding to the two major phases of
the structuralist adventure: the ascension (vol. 1, The Rising Sign, I945-I966), and the
decline (vol. 2, The Sign Sets, I967-Present).
Part 1
The Fifties: The Epie Epoeh
One
The Eclipse of a Star: Jean-Paul Sartre
The law of tragedy requires a death before a new hero can come on-
stage. The reign of structuralism required a death, therefore, and the
death was that of the postwar intellectual tutelary figure, Jean-Paul
Sartre. Since Liberation, Sartre had had an exceptional following as he
brought philosophy to the streets. But from the streets, slowly, began
to echo the persistent rumor of new themes. The rising generation
would slowly but surely cast Sartre to the sidelines.
Sartre experienced a series of interpersonal breaks during the de-
cisive decade of what was later called the structuralist phenomenon,
and these were as painful as they were dramatic for him. With the
years, Sartre was increasingly isolated despite his undiminished popu-
larity with the public. He was partly responsible for his painful eclipse
because of his own desire to erase the years of his apoliticism and
blindness. During the thirties and despite the rising horrors of
Nazism, Sartre had remained true to the long-standing khgne
1
tradI-
tion of remaining closed off from the world outside, of remaining deaf
and dumb, inattentive and indifferent to the social struggles going on
around him. His own personal history came back to poison him after
the war, and he tried to compensate by closely allying himself with the
French Communist Party (PCF) in 1952, at the height of the Cold
War, a time when an entire generation of intellectuals was beginning
to leave the party because of the ongoing revelations about Stalinism
in the Soviet Union. The grand unit y that had reigned at the time of
3
4 The Eclipse of a Star: Sartre
the Democratie Revolutionary Union that, on December 13,
I948, saw Andr Breton, Albert Camus, David Rousset, Jean-Paul
Sartre, and many other intellectuals
2
come together in the same con-
cert hall (Salle Pleyel) around the theme "Internationalism of the
Mind" fell apart.
This was the beginning of a number of breaks for Sartre. Cold
War disturbances were to affect the te am of Les Temps modernes and
Sartre would pay dearly for "Don't let Billancourt despair!" 3 In 1953,
in a bitter polemic, he let Claude Lefort, a linchpin in his editorial
team, leave the review.
4
Two other important breaks followed. The
first was with Camus and then Etiemble, and the second with Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, one of Sartre's close st friends and one of the founding
members of the editorial board of Les Temps modernes. The Sartre-
Merleau-Ponty relationship had been so harmonious until that point
that the two men "were even, briefly, practically interchangeable." 5
But in the summer of 1952, Merleau-Ponty left Les Temps modernes
and shortly thereafter, in 1955, he published The Adventures of the
Dialectic in which he denounced Sartre's ultra-Bolshevist tendencies.
Other adventures were to unfold without Sartre, but the younger
generation continued to be fascinated with him. Rgis Debray writes
that "for many of us in my high school in the fifties, Being and
Nothingness quickened our pulse."6 Yet Existentialism came under
fire. The oratory joust pitting Sartre against Althusser at the cole
Normale Suprieure (ENS) on the rue d'Ulm
7
in 1960, at which Jean
Hyppolite, Georges Canguilhem, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were in
attendance, ended, according to Debray, who was preparing his phi-
losophy agrgation
8
at the time, in favor of Louis Althusser. Despite
his glory, Sartre came to represent outmoded values and to incarnate
the disappointed hopes of the Liberation. This unshakable image
would cling to him and he would be its first victim.
The Sartrean star was eclipsed because of political issues, but it
was also affected by what was beginning to take shape in the intellec-
tuaI world. The rise of social sciences was forcing the issue of an insti-
tutional existence, so there needed to be a middle ground between the
traditional humanities, primarily literature, and the hard sciences. As
a result, questions were being asked differently and Sartre, faithful to
his position as a philosopher and absorbed in making up for his politi-
cal past, was left behind. His status as philosopher had warranted
thanks and recognition, but he remained a foreigner to the changes
The Eclipse of a Star: Jean-Paul Sartre 5
taking place. If Sartre asked What 1s Literature? in I948, it was in
order to dwell on the relationship between an author, the reasons for
writing, and the public. The existence of literature and its singularity
were givens for him. But by the end of the fifties, this assumption
came under question and was contested.
The collapse of the tutelary figure that Sartre incarnated created a
moment of uncertainty and doubt regarding philosophers who turned
to the ascending social sciences to sharpen their critical questioning.
Sartrean man exists only by virtue of the intentionality of his con-
scious mind; he is condemned to freedom because "existence precedes
essence," and only alienation and bad faith clutter the paths of free-
dom. Roland Barthes, for example, who defined himself as a Sartrean
immediately following the war, progressively abandoned this philoso-
phy in order to fully embark upon the structuralist adventure. Exis-
tentialism, as a philosophy of subjectivity and of the subject, came
under attack and the subject and conscience gave way to rules, codes,
and structure.
Jean Pouillon: The Man of the Middle Ground
One figure symbolized both this evolution and an attempt to reconcile
apparent contradictions: Jean Pouillon. He was Sartre's intimate
friend and became the sole link between Les Temps modernes and
L'Homme, which is to say between Sartre and Claude Lvi-Strauss.
Jean Pouillon had met Sartre very early on, in I937, and the two men
were to enjoy an untroubled friendship to the end, despite their differ-
ent intellectual paths. Pouillon's career was unusual, to say the least.
l had been a philosophy professor during the war and then, in I945,
Sartre asked me: Do you like doing philosophy? l answered that l en-
joyed clowning in front of a class but the problem was the home-
work, which had to be corrected, and the low salary. So he told me
to go and see a friend of his from Normale Suprieure who had dis-
covered something that still exists, the analytic report of the Na-
tional Assembly. Given the separation of powers, the legislature was
particularly generous in approving the budget of its own administra-
tion, which was better paid than were teachers and usually had six
months' vacation a year. l took the test and at the same time l was
doing what l wanted to be doing, writing for Les Temps modernes.
It was doubtless because of that that Claude Lvi-Strauss asked me
to join the team at L'Homme in 1960; l was not on a career path, l
threatened no one, and no one was jealous of me.
9
6 The Eclipse of a Star: Jean-Paul Sartre
At that point, Jean Pouillon knew nothing at aIl about ethnology.
But when Tristes Tropiques was published in I9 5 5, Sartre liked the
book and asked Pouillon, as a member of the editorial board of Les
Temps modernes, to review it. "Why not you?" But rather than sim-
ply writing up a review acclaiming the book, Pouillon decided to take
things a step further and undertook an in-depth study of the evolution
of Claude Lvi-Strauss's thinking, and not just of its culmination in
Tristes Tropiques. He therefore read everything that Lvi-Strauss had
published, including The Elementary Structures of Kinship and the ar-
ticles that were to be published in I958 as Structural Anthropology.
More than a simple inventory, Pouillon tried to evaluate Lvi-Strauss's
work and, in I956, he published his article in Les Temps modernes
entitled "L'uvre de Claude Lvi-Strauss."l0
What had at first seemed to be a gratuitous detour or exotic ad-
venture in foreign climes became, for Pouillon and for an entire genera-
tion, a lifelong engagement, an existence turned toward new and more
anthropological questions, and an abandonment of classical philoso-
phy. Pouillon discovered the investigation of alterity: "It is as essen-
tially other that the other must be seen."11 He joined in the structural-
ist enterprise, which goes beyond empiricism, description, and lived
For Pouillon, Claude Lvi-Strauss provided a rigorous
model allowing the logical construction of "mathematizable relation-
ships."12 Pouillon completely supported Lvi-Strauss's priority of the
linguistic model in order to move beyond the scoria of the narrow
relationship between observer and observed: "Durkheim used to say
that social facts had to be treated like things .... To paraphrase
Durkheim, therefore, we must treat them like words."13
In the mid-fifties, then, we witness a veritable conversion, with
this small reservation that Jean Pouillon adopted Claude Lefort's ar-
guments regarding Lvi-Strauss's relegation of historicity to a sec-
ondary position. Here he remained faithful to Sartre's positions on the
historical dialectic, opposing the diachronic logic of a bridge game to
the synchronic logic of a chess game. But his double allegiance to
structuralism and to anthropology was absolute, and from this point
on Jean Pouillon attended Claude Lvi-Strauss's seminars at the Fifth
Section of the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes.
14
A book review led
to a choice about existence and Jean Pouillon could not resist the calI
of the tropics. He obtained sorne funding and, on the advice of Robert
The of a Star: Jean-Paul Sartre
who described Chad as an as yet unexplored territory the
ethnologist, he left in 1958.
Was Sartre aware that he was undermining himself? Absolutely
not, according to Pouillon. Sartre was wrong about the import of
Tristes Tropiques, which he had liked because it valorized the ob-
server's presence in the observation and the communication estab-
lished with members of the indigenous population. 15 Pouillon's
greater sensitivity to an ethnology that was more encompassing than
explanatory led to his conversion. As he himself put it so well, this
was an example of the "fecundity of misunderstandings." ln Chad,
Pouillon studied seven or eight groups of a maximum of ten thousand
members each, identifying an ever-varying organization of political
and religious roles. By contrast, however, "the vocabulary, the lexicon
was always the same, identical."16 ln order to understand the se differ-
ences, it was necessary to have recourse to a structure not as it was
concretized in the daily life of this or that group, but as it offered the
possibility of permutations, like the logic of a grammar that lets us
fa thorn different possible expressions.
ln 1960, when the first volume of Critique of Dialectical Reason
was published, Claude Lvi-Strauss invited Jean Pouillon to give a
presentation in his seminar. Pouillon was the best specialist on Sartre's
thinking, and he devoted three two-hour-Iong lectures to a reading of
this work. Typically, the se lectures attracted no more than about
thirty people, but on this occasion they were transformed into a
"dense crowd invading the lecture hall, and among whom 1 saw
people like Lucien Goldmann," 17 which gives sorne idea of how much
interest Sartre continued to exert. If Jean Pouillon tried to reconcile
Sartre and Lvi-Strauss, he was undoubtedly disappointed by the pub-
lication, at the end of 1962, of Lvi-Strauss's response to Critique of
Dialectical Reason. His attack at the end of The Savage Mind, and to
which we will come back, was violent, but Pouillon was not disco ur-
aged and in 1966 he compared the two books in L'Arc, arguing that
they were complementary but incommensurable. He still maintains
this position today. "It is pleasant to read one or the other of these
works without any visual interference: when one is present, the other
one is not." 18
If Jean Pouillon was converted to the promising human science of
anthropology, Sartre remained quirc distant from the many challenges
of the different social sciences. As a philosopher of consciousness, of
8 The of Star: Sartre
the subject, considered linguistics to be a min or science and
avoided it practically systematically. Psychoanalysis does not square
weIl with Sartre's theory of bad faith and of individual freedom, and
in Being and Nothingness he considered Freud to be the instigator of a
mechanistic doctrine. But Sartre was forced to enter the Freudian
labyrinth altogether by accident. In 1958, John Huston asked him to
write a screenplay on Freud. This order from Hollywood meant that
Sartre had to read aIl of Freud's work, as weIl as his correspondence.
On December 15, 1958, Sartre sent Huston a ninety-five-page synop-
sis, and a year later he fini shed the screenplay. But the two men ar-
gued; Huston found the screenplay long and boring and wanted Sartre
to trim it. Sartre lengthened it instead, and ended up withdrawing his
name from the film credits of Freud, passion secrte. Sartre therdore
knew Freud's work by the end of the fifties, but if psychoanalysis came
to interest him little by little, he remained closed to its central tenet of
the unconscious. Sartre continued to support the idea that humans
can be entirely understood through their praxis, as he tried to demon-
.strate in his unfinished work on Flaubert. It was clearly not possible
to bring together "these two cannibals"19-Sartre and Claude Lvi-
Strauss-without running the risk that one would devour the other.
For want of a place, history allowed a man, Jean Pouillon, to thwart
any effort at anthropophagia.
The Cri sis of the Militant Intellectual
Sartre was challenged on a third front as weIl for his notion of the en-
gaged intellectual, which belongs to a French tradition going back to
the Dreyfus Affair. Sartre embodied the tradition quite magnificently
until such time as the intelIectual was no longer alIowed to give an
opinion in every realm and was forced to limit remarks to his or her
are a of expertise. The intellectual's critical enterprise became increas-
ingly limited and confined to specifie events, but it gained in perti-
nence what it lost in freedom of intervention. This retreat in the name
of rationality also corresponded to a disinvestment, and even a re-
fusaI, of history in the large sense. "Structuralism appeared ten years
after the end of the war, but the war had ldt us in a frozen world.
Nineteen forty-eight threatened another outbreak, the two blocs faced
off, the one crying Liberty and the other crying Equality. AlI of this
contributed to a denegation of history. "20
Two important structuralist figures clearly expressed this with-
The Eclipse of a Star: Jean-Paul Sartre 9
drawal from Sartrean engagement: Georges Dumzil and Claude Lvi-
Strauss. When asked if he ever felt any sympathy for the tradition of
the committed intellectual, Georges Dumzil answered, "No, 1 even
felt a sort of revulsion for those who played this role, and for Sartre in
particular. "21 This disengagement cornes from a fundamentally reac-
tionary approach that no longer holds out any hope for the future and
considers the world with incurable nostalgia for the most distant pasto
"It seemed, and continues to seem, to me preferable that not just a
monarchie principle but a dynastie principle preserve the country's
highest position from caprice and ambition, rather than to live with
general elections, as we have done since the Revolution and Bona-
parte. "22 We see this same hesitation in Claude Lvi-Strauss before he
takes any position on current events or takes sides. To the same ques-
tion regarding commitment, Lvi-Strauss answered, "No, 1 consider
that my intellectual authority, insofar as 1 am considered to have any,
rests on my work, on my scruples of rigor and precision."23 And
he contrasts a Victor Hugo, who could imagine himself able to solve
his epoch's problems, to our own period with problems that are too
complex and diverse for any single man to be able to find his bearings
and be committed. The figure of the philosopher as the questioning
subject who problematizes the world in its diversity faded, and Sartre
along with it. The classifying and often determinist social sciences had
free range.
Two
The Birth of a Hero:
Claude Lvi-Strauss
Structuralism quickly became identified with one man: Claude Lvi-
Strauss. In an era in which the division of intellectuallabor limited a
researcher to increasingly fragmented knowledge, Lvi-Strauss sought
to balance the material and the intelligible. Torn between a desire to
restore the internaI logic of material reality and a poetic sensibility
that strongly tied him to the natural world, Lvi-Strauss forged impor-
tant intellectual syntheses in much the same way as one writes musical
scores.
Born in 1908, Lvi-Strauss was constantly exposed to artistic
creation in his family milieu: a violinist great-grandfather, a father and
uncles who were painters. As an adolescent living in the city, he spent
aIl his free time in antique stores and only discovered the intense plea-
sure of exotic nature when his parents bought a house in the moun-
tains in the Cvennes, in southeast France. There, he regularly wan-
dered the countryside for ten to fifteen hours a day. Art and nature
were his two passions and they marked him as he straddled two
worlds: his thinking broke with precedents, yet his work remained
fundamentally aesthetic in its ambitions. Lvi-Strauss rejected the
spell of his own sensibility, and, without renouncing it, sought to con-
tain it by constructing broad logical systems. His unwavering attach-
ment to his initial structural program is apparent here, despite the
changes in style.
From the time he was quite young, Lvi-Strauss was also inter-
ID
The Birth of a Hero: Claude Lvi-Strauss II
ested in social issues. As soon as he was in high school, he joined the
socialist movement. At seventeen, thanks to Arthur Wanters, a young
Belgian socialist who had been invited to the family home one sum-
mer, Lvi-Strauss read Marx. "Marx immediately fascinated me .... 1
very soon read Capital."l But it was especially in khgne, in the
socialist studies group and under Georges Lefranc's influence, that
Lvi-Strauss acquired a solid basis for his political involvement. He
was increasingly vocal, giving lectures and speaking publicly so often
that in 1928 he was elected secretary-general of the Federation of
Socialist Students. During the same period, he became secretary to
Georges Monnet, a socialist deputy, but had to give up these time-
consuming responsibilities two years later in order to prepare his agr-
gation in philosophy, about which he was lackluster. His professors-
Lon Brunschvicg, Albert Rivaud, Jean Laporte, Louis Brhier-were
fundamentally unsatisfying. "1 went through that period a bit like a
zombie."2 He nonetheless passed his exams brilliantly in 1930, third
in his class.
Lvi-Strauss's socialist engagement quickly came to an end be-
cause of a minor accident, and a much-awaited letter that never ar-
rived. Although he was a pacifist, the trauma of the French defeat at
the beginning of the "drle de guerre," as Marc Bloch called it,
quickly ended his political involvement. He concluded that it was dan-
gerous "to enclose political realities within the framework of formaI
ideas."3 Lvi-Strauss never recovered from this disappointment and
never again became politically involved in any way, even if, beyond
what he espoused, his position as an ethnologist had a political dimen-
sion to it. But this turning point was important: rather than 100 king
ahead to the world to come, Lvi-Strauss turned, nostalgically, to the
pa st at the risk of appearing anachronistic and out of step like his
childhood idol, Don Quixote.
The CalI of the Sea
Lvi-Strauss's career as an ethnologist began, he tells his reader in
Tristes Tropiques, one autumn Sunday in 1934 when Clestin Bougl,
director of the cole Normale Suprieure called him up to propose
that he apply for the sociology professorship at the University of So
Paulo. Clestin Bougl naively thought that the outskirts of So Paulo
were filled with Indians and suggested that Lvi-Strauss spend his
weekends there. So Lvi-Strauss left for Brazil, not in se arch of exoti-
I2 The Birth of a Hero: Claude Lvi-Strauss
cism hate traveling and explorers")4 but to abandon speculative
philosophy and be definitively converted ta this new and as yet very
marginal discipline, anthropology. He had already seen one example
of such a conversion in Jacques Soustelle. When he returned, Lvi-
Strauss organized an exhibit in Paris of what he had been able to col-
lect during his two years there and was granted enough money to
organize an expedition to the Nambikwara. His work began to be
noticed by a small circle of specialists, particularly Robert Lowie and
Alfred Mtraux. He was forced to leave France in 1939 and seek
refuge from the German occupation. Invited to New York by the New
School for Social Research as part of an immense plan to save Euro-
pean scholars organized by the Rockefeller Foundation, Lvi-Strauss
crossed the Atlantic on the Captain Paul-Lemerle, a ship of hope on
which he was accompanied by what the police considered rabble:
Andr Breton, Victor Serge, Anna Seghers.
At the New School in New York, he discovered that he had to
change his name so as not to be confused with the blue jeans, Levi's.
Henceforth he would be known as Claude L. Strauss: "Never a year
goes by without an order for Levi's, usually from Africa."
5
Beyond
these amusing problems, New York became the definitive site for
working out a structural anthropology, thanks to a decisive meeting at
the New School with a colleague in linguistics, Roman Jakobson.
Jakobson, like Lvi-Strauss, was exile d, and taught courses in French
on structural phonology. Their meeting proved to be particularly rich,
intellectually as well as affectively, and the amicable collaboration
that took hold from the beginning never faltered. Jakobson came to
Lvi-Strauss's lectures on kinship and Lvi-Strauss attended Jakob-
son's courses on sound and meaning: "His classes were dazzling."6
The symbiosis of their respective research gave birth to structural an-
thropology. Moreover, it was Jakobson who, in 1943, advised Lvi-
Strauss to begin writing the the sis that would became The Elementary
Structures of Kinship.
Back in France again in 1948, Lvi-Strauss took on sorne tempo-
rary assignments as a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique (CNRS), and then as assistant director of the Muse de
l'Homme. He was finally elected, thanks to Georges Dumzil's influ-
ence, to the chair of "Religions of Primitive Peoples" in the Fifth Section
of the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes. He quickly changed the name
of the chair after sorne discussions with black students to the chair for
The Birth of a Hero: Claude Lvi-Strauss I3
"Religions of Peoples without Writing Systems." "People coming to
talk with you at the Sorbonne could not be called uncivilized!"7
Scientiflc Ambitions
Structural anthropology did not, however, burst forth spontaneously
from an erudite mind. It was the product of the specific situation of a
nascent anthropology, and, more broadly, of the rise of the concept of
science in the realm of the study of societies. In this respect, and even
if Lvi-Strauss did take his distance and innovate, structuralism fol-
lowed on the positivist tradition of Auguste Comte and his scientism.
Which is not to say that structuralism shared Comte's optimistic view
of a history of humanity progressing by stages toward a positive age.
But Comte's idea that knowledge is only interesting if it borrows from
a scientific model or manages to transform itself into a science or a
theory had made sorne headway: "In this respect, traditional philoso-
phy is avoided,"8 which was characterististic of Lvi-Strauss's devel-
opment. The other aspect of Comte's influence is his aspiration to-
ward "holism,"9 his desire to totalize. Comte condemned psychology
just as Lvi-Strauss would later. In sociology as it was taking shape at
the beginning of the twentieth century, Durkheim inherited Comte's
aspiration to totalize, limiting his object to the social sciences. Even if
Lvi-Strauss was converted to ethnology and left for Brazil in revoIt
against Durkheim, who did no fieldwork, he could not have escaped
Durkheim's influence in the thirties. Raymond Boudon is right to say
that "anthropologists took in a bit of holism along with their mother's
milk."10
For Durkheim, just as for Auguste Comte, society is a whole that
cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. This would be the basis on
which sociology would be constructed. The increasingly popular no.-
tions of system and then of structure came to be tied to an ensemble of
scientific changes in linguistics, economics, and biology at the turn of
the century, particularly insofar as the se disciplines could explain the
interdependence of elements constituting their specific objects. Lvi-
Strauss, therefore, could not avoid setting himself in Durkheim's lin-
eage. Did he not explicitly reiterate Franois Simiand's 1903 challenge
to historians in 1949? And yet, Lvi-Strauss and Durkheim took com-
pletely different paths. When he was writing The Ru/es of Method,
Durkheim favored written sources, which are the historian's tools,
and mistrusted information gathered by ethnographers. At the time,
I4 The Birth of a Hero: Claude Lvi-Strauss
historie al positivism was in full force and it was only later, around
I9I2, that Durkheim placed history and ethnography on the same
plane, a change in orientation hastened by the founding of L'Anne
sociologique. Conversely, for Lvi-Strauss, who had begun his
painstaking fieldwork in Brazil, observation preceded any logical con-
struction or conceptualization. Ethnology is first and foremost an
ethnography. "Anthropology is above all an empirical science ....
Empirical study determines access to the structure."ll Observation is
not an end in itself, certainly-and Lvi-Strauss crossed swords with
empiricism-but it is a first, and indispensable stage.
Against Functionalism and Empiricism
Lvi-Strauss's first important object of study, the incest taboo, gave
him the opportunity to distance himself from Durkheim's position on
the same topic.1
2
Given an explanation relegating the incest taboo to
an archaic mentality, to a fear of menstrual blood, to outmoded be-
liefs, and therefore to a heterogeneous relationship to our modernity,
Lvi-Strauss, who refused a definition limited to a single geographical
area and temporal era, sought the atemporal, univers al roots of this
interdiction that would shed sorne light on its permanence. Lvi-
Strauss's intellectual forebears were Auguste Comte, mile Durkheim,
and Marcel Mauss, but Marx's influence must not be forgotten. And,
as we have already seen, his early and profound knowledge of Marx
influenced his entire militant period; Marx was one of his "three mis-
tresses,"13 along with Freud and geology. From Marx, Lvi-Strauss re-
tained the principle that manifest realities are not the most significant
but that the researcher must construct models allowing to reach be-
yond material appearances and accede to the bases of reality: "Marx
established that social science is no more founded on the basis of
events than physics is founded on sense-data."14
Loyal to Marx, and strictly orthodox in his Mar;x:ism, Lvi-
Strauss made it clear that he refused to occult the determining role of
infrastructures, even if his intention was to construct a theory of
superstructures. "We in no way intend to insinuate that ideological
transformations engender social transformations. Only the reverse
is true. "15 Of course, over the years this Marxist influence, along
with the underlying dialogue with Engels, was to disappear com-
pletely. But at the beginning in Brazil, Lvi-Strauss clearly seemed to
present himself first of all as a Marxist. Apropos of this, he remarked
The Birth of a Hero: Claude Lvi-Strauss IJ
to Didier ribon that the Brazilians were disappointed to see a non-
Durkheimian sociologist. What could anyone be at the time but a
Durkheimian? "My bet is that he was a Marxist. He was on the road
to becoming the official philosopher for the Section Franaise de
l'Internationale Ouvrire.1
6
Clearly, something happened in Brazil
that meant that what he was when he got there was not what he was
later; it must have been his encounter with the field, but not only
that."17
Confronted with anthropological terrain, Lvi-Strauss refused the
only two possible directions for research in this domain: evolutionism
or diffusionism, and functionalism. Of course he admired the quality
of Malinowski's fieldwork, his studies of sexuallife in Melanasia and
on the Argonauts, but he denounced his cult of empiricism as wellJls
his functionalism: "But the idea that empirical observation of a single
society will make it possible to understand universal motivations ap-
pears continually in his writings, weakening the significance of data
whose vividness and richness are well known. "18 ln Lvi-Strauss's
eyes, Malinowski's functionalism fell into the trap of discontinuity, of
singularity. Spcial structures and visible social relations were confused
and the analysis therefore remained superficial, missing what is essen-
tial in social phenomena. With respect to the incest taboo, Mali-
nowski never got beyond biological considerations of the incompati-
bility of parental feelings and love relationships. Slightly closer to a
structuralist approach, Radcliffe-Brown had already used the idea of
social structure in his study of Australian kinship systems, seeking a
systematic way of classifying each system, and then of making valid
generalizations for all human societies. "The analysis seeks to reduce
diversity (from two or three hundred kinship systems) to a single
order, whatever it might be."19 But Lvi-Strauss considered Radcliffe-
Brown's methodology too descriptive and empirical, and it shared
with Malinowski a functionalist interpretation that goes no deeper
than the surface of social systems.
Leaving Anglo-Saxon empiricism behind, Lvi-Strauss found his
masters in anthropology among those descendants of the German his-
torical school who had left history, proponents of cultural relativism:
Lowie, Kroeber, and Boas, "authors to whom 1 willingly proclaim my
debt."20 ln Robert H. Lowie he saw the initiator who, as early as
1915, opened the promising path to the study of kinship systems.
"The very substance of social life can sometimes be rigorously ana,-
I6 The Birth of a Hero: Claude Lvi-Strauss
lyzed as a function of the mode of classification of parents and
allies."21 After arriving in New York, Lvi-Strauss immediately sought
out Franz Boas, who at the time dominated American anthropology
and whose range of interests and study was limitless. Lvi-Strauss was
even present at the death of the great master during a lunch given by
Boas in honor of Rivet's visit to Columbia University. "Boas was very
gay. In the middle of the conversation, he violently pushed himself
away from the table and fell backward. 1 was sitting next to him and
rushed over to lift him up. Boas was dead. "22 Boas's major contri-
bution and his influence on Lvi-Strauss were to underscore the un-
conscious nature of cultural phenomena and to have considered that
the laws of language were central for understanding this unconscious
structure. Here was the linguistic thrust coming from anthropology as
of 19II, and it was auspicious for the fruitful meeting between Lvi-
Strauss and Jakobson.
Importing the Linguistic Model
Lvi-Strauss innovated in the true sense of the word here, by import-
ing the linguistic model into anthropology, which had been linked in
France until then with the natural sciences: physical anthropology
had dominated during the entire nineteenth century. Lvi-Strauss had
easy access to these models of natural science. Back in France again in
1948, he became associate director of the Muse de l'Homme. But
this was not the approach that he took. He looked, rather, for a
model of scientificity in the social sciences, and in particular in lin-
guistics. Why this detour, which proved to be fundamental? "1 have
my own little answer, which 1 will give you. Biological, physical an-
thropology had been so compromised by aH kinds of racism that it
was difficult to borrow from this discipline in order to establish the
mirage of a kind of general science, a general anthropology integrat-
ing the physical as weIl as the cultural. The historical liquidation of
physical anthropology had made theoretical debate unnecessary.
Claude Lvi-Strauss arrived on the spot that history had prepared
for him."23
The break that Lvi-Strauss represented was aIl the more spectac-
ular given the general prevalence of the naturalist and biologist rela-
tionship in French anthropology. Anthropology designated the search
for man's natural foundations, and it was based on an essentially bio-
The Birth of a Hero: Claude Lvi-Strauss I7
logical determinism. The war had swept things clean, however, and
Lvi-Strauss could reappropriate the term "anthropology" without
any ideological risk. He therefore raised French anthropology to the
rank of a semantic field of Anglo-Saxon anthroplogy by establishing it
on the pilot discipline of linguistics.
24
Three
Where Nature and Culture Meet:
Incest
Back in France in 1948, Claude Lvi-Strauss defended his thesis, The
Elementary Structures of Kinship and his complementary thesis, The
Social and Family Life of the Nambikwara, before a jury composed of
Georges Davy, Marcel Griaule, mile Benveniste, Albert Bayet, and
Jean Escarra. The publication of his the sis the following year was one
of the major events of postwar intellectual history and a touchstone
for the founding of the structuralist program.1 FQ!!y_ years l a t ~ r , . an-
thropologists continue to consider this event as an advent. "What
seems most important and most fundamental to me is The Elementary
Structures of Kinship, by the will to scientificity it introduced in the
analysis of social multiplicity, by its que st for the most encompassing
model to account for phenomena that do not appear, initially, to be
part of the same categories of analysis, and by the transition from the
question of filiation to one of alliance."2
The French school of anthropology experienced a veritable episte-
mological revolution with the publication of Lvi-Strauss's thesis;
other groups, including, of course, philosophers, were also dazzled.
Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, a young agrg in philosophy, was one of
these: "This was an important, decisive moment. 1 had just been as-
signed to the high school in Lille after my agrgation in philosophy in
1948, and it was fundamentally enlightening. At the time, 1 saw a con-
firmation of Marx in The Elementary Structures of Kinship."3 The
shock waves extended beyond the small circle of anthropologists and
IB
Where Nature and Culture Meet: Incest 19
continued to have their eHeet. Ten years after its publication, a young
normalien discovered The Elementary Structures of Kinship with
equal dazzlement as soon as he got to the cole Normale Suprieure in
1957. Emmanuel Terray was a philosopher who was already attracted
to anthropology and who needed ta leave a France fully embroiled in
a colonial war that he condemned and against which he militated. At
the time, his friend Alain Badiou lent him The Elementary Structures
of Kinship because it was difficult to find. "Alain lent me the book
and 1 copied one hundred pages from it by hand, which 1 still have.
And wh en 1 finished copying the pages, given the effort it had taken,
Alain could not but give me the book. That is how 1 have the first edi-
tion. For me, at the time, and 1 still hold this opinion, the progress this
book reprsented was comparable, in its field, to Marx's Capital or to
Freud's Interpretation of Dreams."4 Once again, our young philoso-
pher was seduced by giving some or der to an area where apparently
total incoherence and total empiricism reigned. His admiration con-
firmed his choice of career and a way of life in anthropology.
The Universal Constant
ln search of constants that would take into account the univers ais of
social practices, Lvi-Strauss found the incest taboo, which remains
unchanged beyond the diversity of human societies. He made a funda-
mental shift in the traditional approach, which usually considered in-
cest in terms of moral interdictions without taking its social positivity
into account. Lewis Henry Morgan, for example, saw the incest taboo
as the species' means of protecting itself against the baneful effects of
intermarriage. For Edward Westermarck, the incest taboo could be ex-
plained by the wearing effects of daily routine on sexual desire, a thesis
completely refuted by Freud's oedipal the ory. The Lvi-Straussian revo-
lution consisted in debiologizing the phenomenon and removing it.
from the simple structure of consanguinity and from ethnocentric
moral considerations. The structuralist hypothesis effected a shift here
thanks to which the taboo's char acter of transaction, or communica-
tion established by matrimonial alliances, was reasserted. Lvi-Strauss
considered kinship to be the principal basis for social reproduction.
ln order not to get lost in the labyrinth of the multitude of matri-
monial practices, Lvi-Strauss made a reduction, in the mathematical
sense of the term, by defining a limited numbei of possibilities as ele-
mentary kinship structures: "Elementary structures of kinship are ...
20 Where Nature and Culture Meet: Incest
those systems which prescribe marriage with a certain type of relative
or, alternatively, those systems which, while defining aIl members of
the society as relatives, divide them into two categories, viz. possible
spouses and prohibited spouses."5 Based on a nomenclature, these ele-
mentary structures allow the circle of relatives and that of relations by
marriage, to be determined. Thus, in this type of structure, marriages
between sisters, brothers, and first cousins are proscribed whereas
marriages between cousins by marriage, and sometimes more specifi-
cally between crossed matrilinear cousins, are prescribed. Societies are
therefore divided into two groups: the group of possible spouses and
that of prohibited spouses. This same system is found among the Aus-
tralians in the kariera system and the aranda system studied by Lvi-
Strauss. In the kariera system, the tribe is divided into two local
groups, each of which is subdivided into two sections; membership in
local groups is transmitted patrilineally, but the son belongs to the
other section. There is, therefore, first a generational alternation and a
marri age system established by the female bilateral crossed cousin (the
cousin is bilateral because she is both the daughter of the father's sister
and of the mother's brother). The aranda system is similar, but in
matrimonial groups. Here Lvi-Strauss groups symmetrical marriages
together as restricted exchanges as opposed to other systems, which
are also elementary but have an indefinite number of groups and uni-
lateral marriages, in which case there are generalized exchanges:
"Whereas a bilateral marriage system can function with two lines of
descendants, at least three are necessary for a system of unilateral al-
lianceto operate. If A takes ms wives from B, he must give his wives to
a third line, C, which can later give its wives to B, closing the circle."6
Unlike those elementary kinship systems that try to keep the marriage
within the family framework, other, semicomplex structures, such as
the Crow-Omaha systems, seek to make marriage and family links in-
compatible. In this case, one cannot marry into a clan that has, for as
long as can be remembered, already given a spouse to one's own clan.
Lvi-Strauss abandoned an analysis made in terms of filiation or
blood ties in order to demonstrate that the joining of the sexes is the
of a socially regulated transaction: the transaction is a 'social
_ cultural fct. Prohibition is no longer therefore perceived as a
purely negative fact, but, on the contrary, as a positive fact engender-
ing social links. The kinship system can be analyzed as part of an arbi-
trary system of representation, much like Saussure's arbitrary sign.
Where Nature and Culture Meet: Incest ZI
By breaking with the naturalism surrounding the notion of the in-
cest taboo, and by making it the reference for the passage from nature
to culture, Lvi-Strauss brought about a major shift. social order
is born of the organization of an exchange around the incest taboo,
which therefore becomes a founding element: "Considered from the
most general viewpoint, the prohibition of incest expresses the transi-
tion from the natural fact of consanguinity to the cultural fact of al-
liance."7 The incest taboo is the decisive intervention in the birth of
the social order. Because of its centrality and its aspect as a basic prin-
ciple, it cannot be considered to be only a part of the natural order,
even if it shares a universal and spontaneous quality, nor only a part
of the cultural order, characterized by norms, specific laws, and a re-
strictive quality. The incest taboo belongs to both realms at once; it is
the meeting point between nature and culture, the indispensable arbi-
trary rule that man substitutes for the natural order. There are specific
rules in the incest taboo, as weIl as a normative code (culture) and a
univers al character (nature). "The incest prohibition is at once on the
threshold of culture, in culture and, in one sense, as we shall try to
show, culture itself."8 Fundamental structures resulting from this in-
terdiction are not to be considered as natural facts that can be ob-
served, but as "a grid for deciphering or, in Kantian terms, a design in
which aIl the terms or aIl the aspects need not be present for it to oper-
ate smoothly."9 With this exemplary study, freed anthro-
pology from the nat!l:.ral sciences and placed it immediately and exclu-
sively on cultural grounds.
Meeting Jakobson
The model making this shift possible for Lvi-Strauss was drawn from
structural linguistics. In this respect, the birth and developments in
phonology created an upheaval in the thinking in the social sciences.
For Lvi-Strauss himself, borrowing the model represented a veritable
Copernican-Galilean revolution. "Phonology cannot help but play the
same renovative role with respect to the social sciences that nuclear
physics, for example, has played for aIl of the hard sciences."l0 The
growing successes of the phonological method proved the existence of
an effective system from which anthropology should draw sorne basic
principles in order to apply them to the complex social domain. Lvi-
Strauss therefore adopted its founding paradigms, virtually on a term
for term basis. Phonology sought to go beyond the stages of conscious
22 Where Nature and Culture Meer: Incest
Considering the specificity terms was not
enough; the goal was to understand them in their interrelationships,
and phonology therefore introduces the notion of system in an effort
to construct generallaws. The entire structuralist method is embodied
in this project.
Lvi-Strauss's exchanges in New York with Roman Jakobson
were clearly the source of this contribution. "At that time, 1 was a
kind of naive structuralist. 1 was doing structuralism without even
knowing it. Jakobson showed me the corpus of a doctrine that had al-
ready been constituted in linguistics, and that 1 had never studied. It
was an illumination for me."ll Lvi-Strauss did not limit himself to
adding a new realm of knowledge to his expertise, however, but incor-
porated it into his method and, as a result, his general perspective was
fundamentaIly changed. "Like phonemes, kinship terms are elements
of meaning; like phonemes, they acquire meaning only if they are inte-
grated into systems."12 Lvi-Strauss attended Jakobson's classes in
New York, and wrote a preface for their publication in 1976.13
The two important lessons Lvi-Strauss retained for anthropology
were, on the one hand, the search for constants beyond the multitude
of identifiable variations, and, on the other, avoiding aIl recourse to
the consciousness of a speaking subject, whence the prevalence of the
structure's u n c o n s c i o u ~ phenomena. For him, these two princip les
held as much for phonetics as for anthropology. The two disciplines,
however, do not for aIl that lose touch with concrete reality by favor-
ing a systematic formalism. Invoking the Russian phonologist Nicolai
Trubetzkoy, Lvi-Strauss remarks: "Current phonology does not limit
itself to declaring that phonemes are always elements of a system, it
shows concrete phonological systems and brings their structure to the
fore."14 The structural anthropologist must therefore foIlow the lin-
gui st along a path established by structurallinguistics, which has re-
jected a diachronic explanation of linguistic evolution in favor of
identifying the differential variations between languages. Breaking
down the complex materials of a language into a limited number of
phonemes is supposed to help the anthropologist in his approach to
the systems at work in primitive societies; he must deconstruct in the
same fashion, reduce observable reality by being attentive to a number
of variables, which are also limited. This would be the case for matri-
monial systems organized around the relationship between the law of
filiation and that of residence, a relationship every bit as arbitrary as
Where Nature and Culture Meet: Incest
the Saussurean sign. as his Lvi-
Strauss made the Saussurean break his own.
While Lvi-Strauss reiterated Saussure's most famous distinction
between signifier and signifie d, he adapted it to his own field. Saussure
opposed sound and meaning, but for Lvi-Strauss structure became
the signifier and meaning the signified. While the model was modified
in this respect, when it came to the linguistic perspective on the rela-
tionship between synchrony and diachrony, Lvi-Strauss adhered to
Saussure's priority of synchrony. This move bore within it the future
polemics against history. Having adopted the phonological model,
"Claude Lvi-Strauss began the critique of the efficacy of a historical
approach, or of consciousness, for a scientific expIa nation of social
phenomena." 15
Fascinated by the success of their model, Lvi-Strauss joined the
linguists:
We should like to learn from the linguists how they succeeded in
doing it, how we may ourselves in our own field, which is a complex
one-in the field of kinship, in the field of social orgahization, in the
field of religion, folklore, art, and the like-use the same kind of rig-
oro us approach which has proved to be so successful for linguistics.
16
But to imagine that the anthropologist would simply give up, once he
found his master in the linguist, is to not know Lvi-Strauss. On the
contrary, his gesture must be seen in a comprehensive perspective inte-
grating linguistics into a more general scheme in which the anthropol-
ogist would be the prime mover. Interpreting social structures would
be the product of a three-tiered "theory of communication":17 the
communication of women between groups, thanks to kinship rules,
the communication of goods and services, thanks to economic rules,
and the communication of messages, thanks to linguistic rules. These
three levels were incorporated into Lvi-Strauss's comprehensive an-
thropological project in which the analogy between the two methods
remained a constant. "The kinship system is a language."18 "If a sub-
stantial identity were assumed to exist between language structure
and kinship systems, one should find, in the following regions of the
world, languages whose structures would be of a type comparable to
kinship systems. "19 Lvi-Strauss thereby elevated linguistics to the
rank of a pilot science, of an initial model, basing anthropology on the
cultural and social, rather than on the physical. Thanks to Jakobson,
24 Where Nature and Culture Meet: Incest
Lvi-Strauss understood this strategie role very early on, and we must
therefore disagree with Jean Pouillon's reductive evaluation of the im-
portance of linguistics for Lvi-Strauss as the simple idea that "mean-
ing is always positional meaning. "20 The two major thrusts of the
structuralist paradigm are present as early as The Elementary Struc-
tures of Kinship, and come from linguistics and mathematics, the for-
malized language by definition. Lvi-Strauss benefited from the ser-
vices of structural mathematics of the Bourbaki group thanks to a
meeting with Simone Weil's brother, Andr Weil, who wrote the math-
ematical appendix to the book. In this mathematical transcription of
his discoveries, Lvi-Strauss found the continuation of a displacement
that was analogous to a shift made by Jakobson: from an attention to
the terms of a relationship ta the importance of the relationships
themselves between these terms, independent of their content.
This double fecundity, rigor, and scientificity, brought to the soft
belly of a social science still in its' infancy, could only nourish the
dream of having at last reached the final stage of a scientificity equal
to that of the hard sciences. "We give the impression that the social
sciences will become full-fledged sciences like Newtonian physics.
There is that in Claude Lvi-Strauss .... Scientism becomes credible
because linguistics seems like something scientific in the sense of the
natural sciences .... This is basically the key to success. "21 A fertile
path, certainly, but also the key to the dreams and illusions that, for
twenty years, hung over the community of researchers in the social
sciences.
A Resounding Event
The publication of The Elementary Structures of Kinship had an im-
mediate resounding effect. Simone de Beauvoir took up her pen to re-
view it in Les Temps modernes, whose wide readership of intellectu-
aIs, in the broadest sense, could immediately make the voluminous
thesis well known beyond the limited circle of anthropologists with-
out anyone having to read it. Jean Pouillon, for example, only read
Lvi-Strauss when Tristes Tropiques was published. It was paradoxi-
cal that this highly structuralist work be first noticed by a review that
was the organ of expression of Sartrean existentialism. Simone de
Beauvoir, who was the same age as Lvi-Strauss and had known him
since just before the war from their agrgation teacher-training class,
was in the process of finishing The Second Sex.
Where Nature and Culture Meet: lncest 25
Simone de Beauvoir had heard from Michel Leiris that Lvi-
Strauss was going to publish his thesis on kinship systems. Interested
in the anthropological point of view on the question, de Beauvoir
asked Leiris to contact Lvi-Strauss on her behalf and ask him to send
her the proofs, before finishing her own book. "To thank Claude Lvi-
Strauss, she therefore wrote a long review in Les Temps modernes. "22
The article was particularly positive about the value of Lvi-Strauss's
theses. "French sociology had been dormant for quite sorne time, until
now."23 De Beauvoir agreed with Lvi-Strauss's methods and conclu-
sions, and encouraged readers to read him, but at the same time she
drew his w o r ~ into the Sartre an purview by giving it an existentialist
thrust; clearly she had misread or was trying to co-opt Lvi-Strauss.
Remarking that Lvi-Strauss did not say where the structures whose
logic he described come from, she gave her own, Sartrean answer:
"Lvi-Strauss did not allow himself to venture onto philos op hic al
grounds, and he never gives up his rigorous scientific objectivity; but
his thinking is clearly inscribed within a broad humanism according
to which human existence brings its own justification with it. "24
In early I95I, and once aga in in Les Temps modernes, which con-
tributed considerably to the renown of Lvi-Strauss's work, Claude
Lefort wrote an article in which he criticized Lvi-Strauss for setting
the meaning of experience outside experience itself and giving priority
to a mathematical mode! presented as more real than reality. "We
would reproach Mr. Lvi-Strauss for perceiving rules rather than be-
havior in society."25 In I956, Jean Pouillon answered Lefort's criti-
cism, which he considered unfounded, when he was preparing an arti-
cle on Lvi-Strauss's work. For Pouillon, Lvi-Strauss neither confused
reality with its mathematical expression nor differentiated between
them in order to give priority to the second. The mode! was not ontol-
ogized since "this mathematical expression of reality is never confused
with reality. "26 In the mid-fifties, there was broad support for the
structura li st method, but it soon drew criticism from the Anglo-Saxon
and French sides when the paradigm became vulnerable, particularly
in May I968.
Four
Ask for the Program: The Mauss
Where Lvi-Strauss focused on kinship, a specifically anthropological
concern, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, his Introduction ta
the Work of Marcel Mauss (1950) was different.
1
Rather than simply
presenting the work of one of the Durkheimian masters of French an-
thropology, he used the preface to define his own structuralist pro-
gram, and to present a rigorous methodology. Oddly enough, what ini-
tially appeared as a modest and ritual preface became something of
moment: the first definition of a unified program proposed for aIl the
social sciences since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when
Destutt de Tracy and the ideologues had attempted to define a vast sci-
ence of ideas, a project left unfinished. Another surprising fact was that
Georges Gurvitch, a sociologist who la ter became quite hostile toward
Lvi-Strauss's theses, had asked him to write this introduction for a
collection that he had launched at the Presses Universitaires de France.
Georges Gurvitch immediately understood the differences separat-
ing him from Lvi-Strauss and he added a postscript to express his
reservations, qualifying Lvi-Strauss's interpretation as a very particu-
lar reading of Mauss's work. "Things began to sour at that point."2
Algirdas Julien Greimas was right about the importance of this text.
In Alexandria at the time, and hungry for inteIlectual nourishment,
he had come upon the Introduction ta the Work of Marcel Mauss,
which, along with other works, encouraged him in his project of forg-
ing a comprehensive methodology for the social sciences. "Perhaps it
26
Ask for the Program: The Mauss 27
was at that point, if books count, that one was going to play the most
important role. Structuralism, after aIl, is the encounter between lin-
guistics and anthropology."3 Lvi-Strauss relied, therefore, on Marcel
Mauss's authority to ground anthropology theoreticaIly and thus open
theory up to a model able to account for the meaning of facts observed
in the field. Whence the use made of linguistics, presented as the best
me ans to make the concept adequate to its object. Lvi-Strauss initiaIly
had a position similar to that of modern linguistics: there are only con-
structed facts in anthroplogy and the natural sciences. Linguistics
therefore became a tool that could lead anthropology toward culture,
and the symbolic, by etiminating its old naturalist or energist models.
Here again, Lvi-Strauss drew attention to himself with this methodo-
logical program with respect to the French ethnological context, by
distancing anthropology from technology, and from museums, and by
orienting it toward a concept and toward theory. "Everything begins
with the museum and everything returns to it. However, Lvi-Strauss
leaves the museum in order to invent anthropology theoreticaIly."4
Lvi-Strauss saw Marcel Mauss as the spiritual father of struc-
turalism. But, as with aIl choices, this one had an arbitrary and unfair
quality about it, which Jean Jamin emphasized when he exhumed
Robert Hertz from forgotten memory. Jamin considered that when it
came to the archaeology of structuralism, Hertz more than Mauss was
the founder of the structuralist paradigm. Robert Hertz died in I9I5,
during the First World War, and left sorne texts that are, "to my min d,
the founders of structuralism, so much so that the British ethnologist
Needham devotes an entire book, Right and Left, to pay homage to
Robert Hertz's memory."
5
In one of these texts, we do indeed find
structural binarity. "Right-handed preeminence"6 is the discovery of
the religious polarity between a sacred right and a sacred left. Robert
Hertz demonstrated how lateralization, which may have a biological
basis, has above aIl a symbolic basis opposing the pure and auspicious
right to the impure and evil left. "This discovery became even more
important than is generaIly thought, since Michel Leiris, Georges
Bataille, and Roger Caillois would take up this polarization of the sa-
cred again in the Collge de Sociologie."7
The Unconscious
Lvi-Strauss, however, based himself on Mauss, emphasizing his
"modernity."8 Mauss had understood and opened up anthropological
28 Ask for the Program: The Mauss
inquiry to the other human sciences, and in doing so, had laid out a
prolegomena for future rapprochements. Ethnology and psycho-
analysis, for example, discovered a common object of analysis in the
symbolic field, which included economic as well as kinship or reli-
gious systems. Here again, Lvi-Strauss referred to Mauss who, in
I924, defined sociallife as "a world of symbolic relationships."9 Lvi-
Strauss carried on in the same vein, citing his own work in which he
compared the shaman in a trance with a neurotic.
lO
Lvi-Strauss
clearly aspired to what Mauss had expressed in The Gift ll_to study
the total social facto Totality only exists, however, once things have
moved beyond social atomism and it has become possible to incorpo-
rate all the facts inta "an anthropology, that is, a system of interpre-
tation accounting for the aspects of all modes of behavior simulta-
neously, physical, physiological, psychical, and sociological."12 The
human body is at the center of this totality, an apparent sign of nature
but entirely cultural, in facto However, Mauss introduced "an archae-
ology of body positions,"13 a program that Michel Foucault adopted
and developed further.
Lvi-Strauss stressed the overarching importance of the uncon-
scious at the heart of the body; this position would become a principal
characteristic of the structuralist paradigm. He understood Mauss's
intention of giving it a fundamental importance. "So it is not surpris-
ing that Mauss ... referred constantly to the unconscious as providing
the common and specifie character of social facts. "14 However, it is
only through the mediation of language that we can reach the uncon-
scious. For this, Lvi-Strauss mobilized modern, Saussurean linguis-
tics, which situates the facts of speech at the level of unconscious
thought; "it is the same kind of operation which in psychoanalysis al-
lows us to win back our most estranged self, and in ethnological in-
quiry gives us access to the most foreign others as to another self."15
Lvi-Strauss established the fundamental alliance between two guid-
ing sciences of the structuralist period, anthropology and psycho-
analysis, both of which were based on linguistics, that other pilot sci-
ence offering a veritable heuristic model.
Another characteristic of this period, which Lvi-Strauss had al-
ready expressed in this text-manifesto and which Jacques Lacan in
particular developed, was to take up the Saussurean sign once again,
but pushing it toward an emptying of the signified, or in any case di-
minishing its importance with respect to the signifier. "Like language,
Ask for the Program: The Mauss 29
the social is an autonomous same one, moreover);
are more real than what they symbolise, the signifier precedes and
determines the signified."16 The totalizing project was defined for ail
the social sciences, which are summoned to create a vast semiological
program whose driving force would come from anthropology as the
only discipline able to synthesize the work of the others. Beyond Lvi-
Strauss's definition of the prospect of interdisciplinarity, structural-
ism's canonical the sis that the code precedes and is independent from
the message, and that the subject is subjected to the signifier's law, was
clear at this point. Indeed, it was the heart of the structural under-
taking. "The definition of 'a code is to be translatable into another
code. This property defines it and is ca lied structure." 17
The Debt to Marcel Mauss
If Lvi-Strauss was a bit forced when he credited Marcel Mauss with
being at the origin of his structuralist program, he nonetheless paid his
debt this way, since Mauss was his principal source of inspiration for
the central thesis of The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Mauss's
The Gift was a model, in this respect, along with his the ory of reci-
procity, which Lvi-Strauss extended and systematized in his work on
kinship. The rule of reciprocity, and its triple obligation of giving,
receiving, and returning, establish the economy of matrimonial ex-
changes. The gift and countergift made it possible to see the network
of connections, equivalences, and alliances extending beyond the ma-
terial gift by virtue of the universality of its rules. The incest taboo be-
came intelligible at this level, as did its universality, which made it a
fundamental key for understanding ail societies. "The incest taboo,
like exogamy, which is its extended social expansion, is a rule of reci-
procity. The sole function of the incest taboo is not to forbid; it is set
in place to ensure and found an exchange, directly or indirectly, imme-
diately or not."18
Exchange, therefore, plays a central role in the phenomenon of
the circulation of women in matrimonial alliances and constitutes a
veritable structure of communication that enables groups to establish
their relationship of reciprocity. It is not moral reprobation that
makes incest illicit, nor a murmur of the heart, but the exchange value
establishing a social relationship. Marrying one's sister made no sense
to Margaret Mead's informants, the Arapesh, because it would me an
depriving one self of a brother-in-Iaw, with whom one would go hunt-
30 Ask for the Program: The Mauss
or "The of incest is it is
morally culpable. "19 A new era with the The Gif t, which Lvi-
Strauss, who absorbed aU of its lessons, compared to the discovery of
combinatory analysis in modern mathematical thought. "The prohibi-
tion of incest is Jess a rule prohibiting marriage with the mother, sister
or daughter than a rule obliging the mother, sister or daughter to be
given to others. It is the supreme rule of the gift."20 The Introduction
to the Work of Marcel Mauss brilliantly restored an obvious fecundity
and filiation. In addition to the Maussian point of view, Lvi-Strauss's
program included phonology's decisive contributions-the work of
Trubetzkoy and Jakobson, whose notions of secondary and combina-
tory variations, group names, and neutralization made possible the
necessary condensations of empirical mate rial. Lvi-Strauss clearly
defined the structuralist pro gram here. "For me, structuralism is the
theory of the symbolic in Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss:
the independence of language and of kinship rules shows that the sym-
bolic, the signifier, are autonomous. "21
A Form of Kantianism
Lvi-Strauss left the philosopher's territory for other continents of
knowledge, but Kantian philosophy has nonetheless left its mark, al-
beit inexplicit, on the substructure of the structura li st program in its
determination to tie all social systems to constituent categories that
operate like noumenal categories. For Kant, thinking is controlled by
these a priori categories, which are brought appropriately to bear in
different societies. The spirit, however, remains present in each case.
Lvi-Strauss borrowed this Kantianism more from phonology than
from philosophy; in his definition of the symbolic value zero, he
adopted Jakobson's definition of the zero phoneme term for term. For
Jakobson, the zero phoneme resembles no other phoneme because it
has no differential character and no constant phonetic value whose
specifie function is to allow the presence of a phoneme. For Lvi-
Strauss, the system of symbols defines any given cosmology. "It would
simply be a symbolic value zero, a sign indicating that a symbolic con-
tent, in addition to the one which the signifier already bears, is needed,
but which can be any value. "22
Like Gurvitch, who considered that Lvi-Strauss's appropriation
of Mauss's work deformed its truth, Claude Lefort, in his I951 article
in Les Temps modernes, attacked The Elementary Structures of Kin-
Ask for the Program: The Mauss 3 l
ship and the Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. He de-
nounced the program's will to mathematize social relationships and
the consequent loss of meaning implied by it. For Lefort, reducing so-
cial phenomena to symbolic systems "seems foreign to his inspiration:
Mauss aims at meaning, not at symbols; he wants to understand the
immanent intention of behavior without leaving the realm of experi-
ence, not to establish a logical order in which concrete reality is seen
simply as appearances. "23 Lefort criticized the scientism underlying
Lvi-Strauss's program, his belief in a deeper reality lying beneath
mathematical reality. Underlying the term "unconscious," he also dis-
cerned traces of Kantian idealism that basically meant transcendental
consciousness in Kant's sense; expressions such as "unconscious cate-
gory" or "category of collective thinking"24 reveal this. Lefort re-
versed Lvi-Strauss's idealism by asserting that the empirical behavior
of subjects cannot be deduced from a transcendental consciousness
but, to the contrary, is established through experience. Both the
proclamation of a program and Claude Lefort's critiques provided
the rational kernel for all the debates and polemics that developed in
the fifties and sixties around the structuralist banquet.
Pive
Georges Dumzil: An Independent
On June 13, 1979, Georges Dumzil was received into the ranks of the
Acadmie Franaise.! Welcomed into the Academy, he was invited ta
give an overview of his work by none other th an Claude Lvi-Strauss.
The choice was no accident, and resulted from their similar, if obvi-
ously distinctive, projects. Dumzil, of course, had always been mis-
trustful of any assimilation of his work to a model with which he did
not agree. He would not, for example, have accepted being included
in a history of structuralism, which was foreign to him. "1 am not, 1
do not have to be or not to be, a structuralist."2 His position was un-
equivocal and he went so far as to refuse any reference to the word
"structure" in arder to avoid any form of co-optation. Burned by his
youthful enthusiasm for abstract systems, Dumzil kept himself safely
removed from the tumult and confined his work to philology.
Dumzil obviously had a special place. The different influences
that had given ri se to his work, like his legacy, took a course that is
difficult to define. Unlike Lvi-Strauss, he was not the master of any
school, nor did he carry a programma tic banner for any particular dis-
cipline. He was removed from traditional disciplinary fields that he ig-
nored and that ignored him. Georges Dumzil was like an ingenious
and independent innovator, the veritable herald of comparative
mythology, which he alone shaped. He renewed and inspired much re-
se arch without any concern for either appropriating it or seeking insti-
tutionallegitimation. Given this, can we go against his will and evoke
3
2
Georges Dumzil: An Independent 33
sorne of the innovations of this adventurer in Indo-European mythol-
ogy in the context of the development of the structuralist paradigm?
Yes, and as he received him in the Academy, Lvi-Strauss was right in
saying that the word "structure," or "structural," would have come
immediately to mind had Dumzil not refused it in 1973.
The intellectual complicity between these two men dated back to
weIl before Dumzil's membership in the French Academy. They had
met in 1946 and Dumzil had played a decisive role, first in Lvi-
Strauss's election to the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes and then in
his election to the Collge de France in 1959. Their relationship was
not, however, based only on career moves. Lvi-Strauss had discov-
ered Dumzil's work while preparing his agrgation, but this was only
a fortuitous initial contact. Later, after the war and as an ethnologist,
lengthy meditation upon his discoveries convinced Lvi-Strauss that
Dumzil "was the pioneer of the structural method."
3
The two men
had, moreover, two common masters: Marcel Mauss, whose impor-
tance we saw for Lvi-Strauss and whose courses Dumzil took, and
Marcel Granet, who, as Lvi-Strauss recalled, was instrumental in his
decision to study kinship relationships. He had come across Marcel
Granet's work Matrimonial Categories and Proximate Relationships
in Ancient China at his high school in Montpellier. Dumzil was even
more influenced by Granet's work because he had taken his courses at
the cole des Langues Orientales from 1933 to 193 5. "Listening and
watching Granet at work provoked a kind of indefinable metamor-
phosis or maturation in me."4
Looking at the structuralist sphere of influence, Dumzil has a
place apart that explains his reluctance to be assimilated into the cur-
rent: Ferdinand de Saussure, the obligatory reference for every struc-
turalist work, is absent from his. Dumzil always considered himself a
philologist and as such his work is part of a legacy that precedes the
Saussurean "break"; he is in the tradition of nineteenth-century com-
parative philology, especially the work of the Schlegel brothers,
Friedrich and August Wilhem, of August Schleicher, and particularly
of Franz Bopp, who brought to light the lexical and syntactic relation-
ships between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Slavic.
5
Dumzil belonged
therefore, more to this historicallinguistic current that, as early as the
beginning of the nineteenth century, held that different languages with
a common root shared a mother language, Indo-European. Dumzil
also drew his fundamental notion of transformation from this branch
34 Georges Dumzil: An
historical philology, which was essential for birth of a science of
language. The ide a met with a ringing success and quickly became the
center of most structuralist works. Here again, Lvi-Strauss consid-
ered Dumzil to be a pioneer. "With the idea of transformation, which
you were the first among us to use, you have provided them [the social
sciences] with their best tool."6
Dumzil, of course, did not remain aloof from modern linguistics.
If he was basically unaware of Saussure's work, he was nonetheless fa-
miliar with that of one of his disciples, Antoine Meillet, and especially
that of mile Benveniste, who strenuously supported him in a difficult
batde for election to the Collge de France in 1948. AlI the propo-
nents of tradition opposed this bothersome pioneer: Edmond Faral,
the medievalist, Andr Piganiol, the specialist on Rome, and the Slav-
ist Andr Mazon. But the fight led by mile Benveniste, together with
the support of Jules Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Louis Massignon, Alfred
Ernout, and Jean Pommier, succeeded and he was elected. Dumzil
embodied at one and the same time both the Durkheimian will, ex-
pressed by Marcel Mauss, for a total social fact, and the idea that so-
ciety, mythology, and religion are to be thought of as a whole; this nat-
uraUy led him to use the idea of structure. He also shared with the
other structuralists a view of language as the essential vector for com-
prehensibility, for transmitting tradition, for incarnating the invari-
able, ma king the perception of the permanence of ideas underlying
words possible. In order to understand the variations of the model,
Dumzil used the notions of difference, of resemblance, and of value
opposition, so many instruments of a method that can be caUed com-
parative or structuralist.
Trifunctionalism
The real bomb with which Georges Dumzil shook up traditional cer-
tainties dated from 1938, although it exploded only after the war. If
an epistemological break existed in his many publications that began
in 1924, it occurred then. After having groped around in a compari-
son between a group of Indian and Roman artifacts, he found an ex-
planation for the three principal Roman priests serving Jupiter, Mars,
and Quirinus in their paraUel with the three social classes of Vedic
India: priests, warriors, and workers. Dumzil's hypothesis that aU
Indo-Europeans have a common tripartite and trifunctional ideology
dates from this discovery and he continued to work on it until his
Georges Dumzil: An lndepenaent
35
death. He thus the archaeologist of the lndo-European imagi-
nation and, despite what he said about it, this discovery in fact placed
him among the pioneers of structura li sm because his entire reading
of Western history was organized around this plan, which he first
called a cycle, then a system, and finaUy a structure, and which was
trifunctional. For Dumzil, this plan was common to the mental rep-
resentations of Indo-Europeans, and took root during a very broad
cultural are a and era stretching between the Baltic and the Black Seas
and between the Carpathian and Ural Mountains at the end of the
third millennium B.e. Dumzil disagreed with Lvi-Strauss; for him,
the phenomenon was indeed unique, but could not be tied to the uni-
versallaws of the human mind. His method resembled a structura li st
method insofar as he did not believe that the trifunctional invariant
resulted from successive borrowings from an original kernel. On the
contrary, he favored a method of genetic comparison that eliminated
the thesis of borrowed elements. In an approach that he termed
"ultrahistorical" because it took myths as its object, Dumzil system-
aticaUy compared the elements of the Veda and th en of the Mahab-
harata with those of the Scythians, the Romans, and the Irish. For
him, aU of these societies and periods could be cast into a common
structure differentiating between the functions of sovereignty and of
the sacred (Zeus, Jupiter, Mitra, Odin), of the warrior (Mars, Indra,
Tyr), and, finally, of the (re)productive and nourishing (Quirinus,
Nasatya, Njordr).
Dumzil's relative isolation can also be attributed to the difficul-
ties he encountered in adapting his model, which is not to say that his
work had no impact. But having restricted his organizational model to
a specifie era made it immediately less available for the generalizing
extrapolations that blossomed during the structuralist heyday. More-
over-and in this way he also set himself apart from the structuralist
phenomenon-Dumzil placed his method midway between a quest
for explanatory elements that are exogenous to myths, and a quest for
an independent internaI structure to which myths refer. Dumzil was
between the nineteenth-century comparatist philologists and the
structuralist method by his integration of both the articulation of con-
cepts between themselves in their own structure and the aspects of the
uni verse dealt with in myths. His hybrid nature and his concern for
history ("1 would like to define myself as a historian'')7 inspired enor-
mous amounts of work by historians of the third generation of the
36 Georges Dumzil: An Independent
Annales who continued along the same lines of his discoveries. Even if
the trifunctional plan was unimportant for the Hellenist world, spe-
cialists of ancient Greece-Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jean-Pierre Vernant,
and Marcel Dtienne-changed their approach to the Pantheon on the
basis of Dumzil's work, and medievalists like Jacques Le Goff and
Georges Duby, when considering a society divided into three orders,
could not help but wonder about the bases of its tripartite division.
But these consequences came in the 1970s, and we will come back to
them when we address that period.
Dumzil's lessons did not disappear with him, therefore, when he
died at the Val-de-Grce hospital in Paris on October II, 1986, at the
age of eighty-eight. He was honored in Le Monde by the linguist
Claude Hagge, whose article was entitled "La cl des civilisations":
"After Dumzil, the science of religions can no longer be what it was
before him. Reason gave order to chaos. In place of the charms of a
vague notion of religiosity, he substituted the illuminating clarity of
structures of thought. This is one of his important lessons."8 The
word "structure" clearly stuck to Dumzil despite his wishes, even
after his death, but the meaning of a work does not necessarily con-
form to the wishes of its author. Georges Dumzil was an initiator, a
herald of a structuralist epic.
Six
The Phenomenologie al Bridge
French philosophy was dominated by phenomenological concerns in
the 1950s. Consonant with and in the tradition of Husserl's work, the
issue was a return to "things themselves," with its coroIlary of inten-
tional consciousness oriented always toward things. Phenomenology
is very attentive to experience, therefore, to description, and to the
concrete, and subjectivity clearly receives priority. Husserl's ambition
was to see philosophy evolve from an ideology to a science. The phe-
nomenological undertaking was not based on facts, however, but on
the essences that constituted the original basis of the meaning of the
possibilities of consciousness, correlatively with its object.
At the time of Liberation, French phenomenology was above aIl
Sartrean, and it emphasized a consciousness able to know itself. Mau-
rice Merleau-Ponty, for his part, resumed Husserl's project but ori-
ented it more toward the dialectic played out between proffered
meaning and the meaning revealed in things. This led him to a dia-
logue that was increasingly close to the social sciences, which were
rapidly expanding at the time. Merleau-Ponty took up Husserl's idea
of purging the givens of experience available to the phenomenologist
of aIl the elements inherited from scientific thinking, to which philoso-
phy had capitulated. Whence the formula, "Phenomenology is first of
aIl the disavowal of science." But he was far from repudiating science,
and clearly hoped to reappropriate it into philosophical thinking. As
early as the war, Merleau-Ponty had began to carry out this work with
37
38 The
respect to biology, and above al! with respect to psychology, cntl-
cizing their reifying and mechanistic character.
1
He was equally criti-
cal of the idealism of a pure consciousness and therefore increasingly
interested in the structures of signification that the new social sciences
offered him. These were so many centers of regional ontologies that
the philosopher could reappropriate by assembling their overlapping
perspectives and renewing their meaning. His ability to do so resulted
from the philosopher's position as a subject conceived as transcen-
dence toward the world in its entirety. "Merleau-Ponty had the very
ambitious project of entertaining a kind of complementarity between
philosophy and the social sciences. He therefore tried to keep up with
aIl the disciplines."2
The Phenomenological Program
Signs was published in 1960 by Gallimard. In a text that was funda-
mental for an entire generation, Merleau-Ponty introduced philoso-
phers to modern linguistics and to the progress of anthropology, com-
ing back to a lecture that he had given in 1951 in which he had shown
how important Saussure's work was for inaugurating modern lin-
guistics.
3
"Saussure taught us that individually, signs do not signify
anything; it is not so much that each sign expresses a meaning but that
each one marks a difference in meaning between itself and other
signs."4 In the same work, he also dealt with the relationship between
philosophy and sociology, deploring the barriers separating them, and
calling for a common enterprise. "The separation which we are fight-
ing against is no less harmful to philosophy than ta the development
of knowledge."5 Merleau-Ponty considered it the philosopher's re-
sponsibility to define the range of possibilities and to interpret the em-
pirical work do ne by the social sciences; through his hermeneutic ef-
forts, the question of meaning is brought to the work of each one.
Moreover, the philosopher needs the positive sciences because his
thinking must be based on what is known and validated by scientific
procedures.
The other link that Merleau-Ponty built in this area was aimed at
Lvi-Strauss's anthropology. Merleau-Ponty had drawn doser to Lvi-
Strauss after his break with Sartre. Elected to the Collge de France in
1952, Merleau-Ponty suggested to Lvi-Strauss two years later that he
seek election, which meant sacrificing "three months of a life whose
thread was so soon going to break."6 Merleau-Ponty devoted the
The Phenomenological Bridge 39
fourth chapter of his book to anthropology-"De Marcel Mauss
Claude Lvi-Strauss"-and ardently defended the program estab-
lished in 1950 by Lvi-Strauss in his Introduction to the Work of Mar-
eel Mauss. "Social f a c t ~ are neither things nor ideas; they are struc-
. - 1
tures. . . . Structure takes nothing away from a society's depth or
breadth. It is itself the structure of structures."7 A true friendship was
born of this intellectual association and Merleau-Ponty's photograph
always sat on Lvi-Strauss's desk.
But what was Merleau-Ponty seeking in these many dialogues?
Did he think that he had to surrender the philosopher's arms to the so-
cial sciences? Certainly not, but he believed that the phenomenologi-
cal philosopher should appropriate the works of Mauss, Lvi-Strauss,
Saussure, and Freud, not so much in order to provide epistemological
bases for each of these disciplines as to subject them to a thorough-
going phenomenological renewal, which would redefine them philo-
sophically, assuming of course that the philosopher accepted the valid-
ity of the specialists' information, which he could not verify. The
phenomenologist was like an orchestra leader drawing together all the
objective results produced by the social sciences and assigning them a
meaning, a value in terms of subjective experience and of total mean-
ing. "1 remember his class on Lvi-Strauss, where he presented him as
the algebra of kinship in need of completion by the meaning of the
familial for humans: paternity, filiation."8
Reversing the Paradigm
The rapprochement Merleau-Ponty attempted to create in the fifties
between philosophy and the social sciences was a forerunner of the
paradigm's later reversaI. It was no longer anthropology that was try-
ing to situate itself with respect to philosophy, as when Marcel Mauss
borrowed the notion of a total social fact from his philosophy profes-
sor, Alfred Espinas. On the contrary, it was philosophy, and Merleau-
Ponty in this case, that was positioning itself in relationship to anthro-
pology, linguistics, and psychoanalysis while the work of Michel
Leiris and Claude Lvi-Strauss was being published in Les Temps
modernes. Merleau-Ponty therefore opened up sorne very promising
horizons when he wrote, "The task is therefore to broaden our reason
in order to make it capable of understanding what it is in us and in
others that precedes and exceeds reason."9 He opened philosophy up
to the irrational through the twin figures of the madman and the sav-
40 The Phenomenological Bridge
age. Anthropology and psychoanalysis would thus hold positions of
major importance, and indeed they held them in the sixties.
But why did philosophy lose its footing here? Why did the phe-
nomenological project come up short so quickly? rhefirst answer
would be biographical: phenomenology's failure would be the result
of Merleau-Ponty's premature death on May 4, 1961, at the age of
fifty-four. The man who incarnated the phenomenological enterprise
left behind him a construction site where the work had barely been
begun, as weIl as nUlllerous orphans. But a more fundamental reason
exists, and Vincent Descombes's answer is edifying: "This philosophi-
cal project was bound to fail for a very simple reason. The scholarly
disciplines were already active in their own conceptual development
and did not need Merleau-Ponty or any other philosopher to interpret
their discoveries. They were aIl already at work on both levels."10 Re-
cuperating the social sciences became a trap for philosophy in the
grips of its own doubts, and soon left behind in favor of the promis-
ing, young social sciences.
Merleau-Ponty played an important role for an entire generation
of philosophers whom he awakened to new problems, and they aban-
doned philosophy weIl armed to become either anthropologists, lin-
guists, or psychoanalysts. This paradigmatic reversaI dominated the
entire structuralist period of the sixties. The anthropological land-
scape was substantially changed and, with few exceptions, such as
Lucien Lvy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss, Jacques Soustelle, and Claude
Lvi-Strauss, who came from philosophy, ethnologists came from very
different backgrounds, an effect of fusion rather than of filiation:
ll
Paul Rivet came from medicine, as did most of the other researchers;
Marcel Griaule, who was an aviator first, came from Langues Orien-
tales; 12 Michel Leiris came from poetry and surrealism, Alfred M-
traux from the cole des Chartes,13 where he was a student with
Georges Bataille. It was not a uniform milieu; ethnologists "do not
~ m h r a c e a triballogic."14
It was above aIl thanks to Merleau-Ponty that an entire generation
of young philosophers flocked toward these modern sciences. While
studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1952-53, Alfred Adler dis-
covered Merleau-Ponty's work. "Through Merleau-Ponty, we became
interested in psychoanalysis, in child psychology, and in the theoreti-
cal problems of language." 15 This awakening and the evolution of the
political situation complemented each other and by the beginning of
The
Adler ln
Arriv reconfirmed important roie. "Merleau-Ponty
was an eminent mediator; it is very certainly thanks to him that Lacan
read Saussure."16 That Jacques Lacan discovered Saussure thanks to
Merleau-Ponty is an entirely plausible hypothesis, because they often
saw each other privately at the beginning of the fifties along with
Michel Leiris and Claude Lvi-Strauss. Merleau-Ponty's text on Saus-
sure dates from 1951 and Lacan's Rome Report from 1953. Aigirdas
Julien Greimas accords him the same importance.
The real send-off came from Merleau-Ponty's inaugural lecture at
the Collge de France (1952) when he said that we would see that
Saussure and not Marx invented the philosophy of history. It was a
paradox that made me think of the fact that, before doing the his-
tory of events, it would be necessary to construct the history of sys-
tems of thought and of economic systems and only afterward to try
and understand how they evolve.17
The philosopher Jean-Marie Benoist, a close friend of Lvi-Strauss and
author of The Structural Revolution (1975), also confirmed that he had
come to read Lvi-Strauss through Merleau-Ponty, whom he read dur-
ing his khgne, in 1962. "Merleau-Ponty acted like a precursor phase
conditioning the reception of the richness of the structura li st labor."J8
These conversions provoked a veritable hemorrhage from which
philosophy would have sorne difficulty recovering and which was only
the beginning. One of philosophy's own prodigal children, Michel
Foucault, dealt a final blow to the phenomenological project and to
the pretensions of a philosophy sitting somewhere above the tus sIe of
the empirical sciences. Foucault's critique came only during the sixties,
but it developed above aB out of his dissatisfaction with the phenome-
nological program dominating philosophy while he was writing his
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity between 1955 and
1960. He blamed philosophy for being tao strictly academic, and for
systematicaBy avoiding Kant's question of knowing what our current
reality is. Foucault opened his inquiry up to new objects and displaced
the phenomenological perspective of an interiorized description of
lived experience, to which he preferred bringing problematized social
practices and institutions to light. "Everything that happened around
the sixties clearly sprang from this dissatisfaction with the phenome-
nological the ory of the subject."19 Foucault changed directions as
much with respect to the phenomenological problematic as to Marx-
42 The
ism. However, been for
philosophical inquiry by emphasizing that man is not known, but the
knower, and that it is therefore impossible for the knower ta accede ta
self-knowledge without a play of reflections ma king quite apparent
the invisible split between the face and its representation.
Jacques Lacan broadened this point of view before the war in "Le
stade du miroir," seeking to bypass biological reductionism, and hop-
ing the phenomenologists would help him. Foucault himself began
The Order of Things py discussing the famous painting Las Meninas,
in which the subject-king is in the painting only thanks to his reflec-
tion in the mirror.
20
But phenomenology could not, or was not able to,
rip itself from the anthropological cirde and Michel Foucault, in
proposing to go further, was therefore proposing a fundamental shift:
It is probably impossible to give empirical contents transcendental
value or to displace them in the direction of a constituent subjectiv-
ity without giving rise, at least silently, to an anthropology-that is,
to a mode of thought in which the rightful limitations of acquired
knowledge (and consequently of ail empirical knowledge) are at the
same time the concrete forms of existence, precisely as they are given
in that same empirical knowledge.21
The phenomenological investigation, with its internaI tension be-
tween the empirical and the kept apart but equally
targeted in the notion of experience, had to he shlfted in order to ask
whether man really exists or if he is not the site of the lack of being
that Western humanism ignored with utter impunity. Notwithstand-
ing the ambition of dedaring itself able to stand within and outside of
its own perceptual and cultural field, phenomenology ended up in a
dead end because of its will to found the unthought within man him-
self, whereas for Foucault, it lies in his shadow, in the Other, in an
irrevocable alterity and dualism. The lining must be rent in order to
make way for that which escapes the primacy of the "Ego" in the liv-
ing, speaking, and working subject and, beyond the empiricism of
lived experience, that which allows the sciences of language and of
psychoanalysis to blossom. Foucault's goal was to explore the palpa-
ble consistency of that which speaks in man, more than of what he
means to say. The phenomenological subject is quite dearly elimi-
nated from such a project, which soon thereafter would become one
of the most important and most highly debated aspects of structura li st
philosophy.
Seven
The Saussurean Break
The term "structuralism" applies to a very diversified phenomenon,
which is more than a method and less than a philosophy. But its
central core, its unifying center, is the model of modern linguistics and
the figure of Ferdinand de Saussure, presented as its founder. Whence
the period's prevailing theme of returning to Saussure as part of a
more general movement of "returns," and including Marx and Freud.
The program that sought to incarnate modernity and the rationality
that had finallt in the human sciences needed to mo-
bilize the pasto Between the two moments of the initial break and of a
rediscovery, it would seem that something had been lost.
Saussure appeared as the founding father figure, even if many
researchers knew his work only secondhand. Saussure offered his
solution to the ancient question raised in Plato's Craty/us in which
Hermogenes and Cratylus debate two opposing views of the nature-
culture relationship. Hermogenes argues that culture arbitrarily as-
signs words to things, while Cratylus considers that words copy
nature in a fundamentally natural relationship. Saussure's position in
this ancient and recurrent debate was to agree with Hermogenes' no-
tion of the arbitrary nature of the sign. Vincent Descombes humor-
ously evokes the "revolutionary" nature of this discovery and cites
Molire's philosophy master in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (act 2,
scene 5) as the originator of the structuralist method.1 The plot is fa-
miliar: Monsieur Jourdan writes prose without realizing it, and wants
43
44 The Saussurean Break
ta write letter ta a Marquise ta l am
dying for love of your beautiful eyes." This simple declaration
ri se to five successive alternatives that are broken down into 120 pos-
sible permutations and that allow for as many connotations of the
same denotation.
But the birth of modern linguistics had to wait for the publication
of the Course on General Linguistics (CGL),2 which, as we know, was
the transcription of students' notes of Saussure's lectures between
1907 and 19II, collected, analyzed, and organized along with the
rare written documents left by the master. Charles Bally and Albert
Schehaye, two professors from Geneva, published the CGL after
Saussure's death in 19 l 5. The heart of his demonstration is to estab-
lish the arbitrariness of the sign, showing that language is a system of
values established neither by content nor by experience, but by pure
difference. Saussure's interpretation of language firmly places it in ab-
stract terms in order to better rem ove it from empiricism and from
psychologizing. Saussure established linguistics as a new discipline
that claimed autonomy from the other human sciences. Once its own
rules were established, linguistics was to rally aH the other disciplines
by virtue of its rigor and high degree of formalization, and make them
adopt its program and methods.
The CGL's destiny is rather paradoxical. Franoise Gadet traced
its history, showing that when it first c ~ m e out the CGL had rela-
tively little effect compared to that of the last thirty years.
3
The num-
ber of translations and reprints increased as a function of the rising
wave of generalized structuralism: five translations between 1916 and
1960 compared with twelve during the twenty years between 1960
and 1980. Two events were decisive for this success making the CGL
the little red book for hard-core structuralists. After the First World
War, the Russians and the Swiss came to dominate linguistics, wrest-
ing the discipline from the Germans who had dominated it until then
but who had essentially defined it as comparative philology. As of the
First International Congress of Linguists at The Hague in 1928, an
important alliance was established that was to have a brilliant future.
"The propositions presented by the Russians (Jakobson, Karcevski
and Trubetzkoy), on the one hand, and by the Genevans (BaHy and
Schehaye), on the other, made common reference,to Saussure in their
description of language as a system."4 Geneva and Moscow were
therefore at the beginnings of the definition of the structuralist pro-
The Saussurean Break 45
gram. Moreover, this was the first time that the term "structuralism"
was actuaIly employed. And it was Jakobson who used it, whereas
Saussure had only used the term "system," which he repeated I38
times in the three hundred pages of the CG L.
The second event that determined the future of the CGL occurred
in France. This was the publication in I9 S 6 of Greimas's article,
"L'actualit du saussurisme" in Le Franais moderne (no. 3, I9S6).
"In this paper, 1 showed that while linguistics was invoked every-
where-by Merleau-Ponty in philosophy, by Lvi-Strauss in anthro-
pology, by Barthes in literature, by Lacan in psychoanalysis-nothing
was going on in linguistics itself, and it was high time that- Ferdinand
de Saussure be put in his right place."s Greimas's article was not the
only one on Saussure, and it is clear that during the fifties and sixties,
the evolving definition of a total semiological program reaching be-
yond linguistics and encompassing aIl the human sciences in a com-
mon project, which was the great ambition of the period, was justified
and encouraged by Saussure's definition of semiology as the "science
that studies the life of signs at the heart of sociallife."
The Theme of Rupture
ln order to understand the structuralist paradigm, therefore, we have
to begin with the Saussurean break, since an entire generation read
and considered the CG L to be the founding moment. This alone
makes the hypothesis of a break plausible, even if, according to sorne,
it was basicaIly a myth. Nonetheless, and in order to better under-
stand its influence, we can ask whether or not there reaIly was a break
between pre- and post-Saussurean linguistics. Answers vary with the
linguist, and nobody is naive enough to believe that linguistic thinking
could spring fuIl-blown from a single individual's mind, but sorne in-
sist more on the discontinuity of Saussure's thinking, whereas others
emphasize a more progressive shift.
Franoise Gadet argued in favor of a very clear break between
"the ideas of the pre-Saussurean period" and those of the period that
opens with Saussure.
6
The descriptive approach, the prevalence of the
idea of system, the concern for going from constructed and explicit
procedures back to elementary units, Saussure's new orientation of-
fered aIl of this and would bec orne the lowest common denominator
for the entire structuralist movement. Saussure represented the verita-
ble birth of modern linguistics for Roland Barthes as weIl. "There is
46 The Saussurean Break
an epistemological change with Saussure: anal ogy
ism, imitation replaces derivation."7 Barthes, in his enthusiasm, even
presented Saussure as the harbinger of a democratic mode! thanks to
a homology between the social contra ct and the linguistic contract.
An entire lineage here refers to structuralism's enduring rootedness.
Poetry, according to the Schlegel brothers, was supposed to be a Re-
public an discourse,8 and there is indeed a debt to German Romanti-
cism, which had argued for a notion of art as a structure freed of
mlmeS1S.
Claudine Normand, a linguistics professor at Paris X who c a m ~
to linguistics starting from the idea of the Saussurean break, saw a
break, but not where it was usually situated. "It is difficult to place:
the Saussurean discourse is very unclear because it is part of the posi-
tivist discourse of the period."9 Saussure's essential contribution was
not to discover the arbitrary nature of the sign; all linguists were al-
ready convinced of this by the end of the nineteenth century, and all
the comparative work had already adopted the conventionalist argu-
ment and rejected the naturalist model. However, "he did something
else with it; he attached it to the semiological princip le, which is to
say, to the theory of value, which allowed him to say that in language
there are only differences without any oppositional sign."10 The break
would therefore essentially be at the leyel of the definition of a theory
of value, in the principles allowing a generalization of the description,
and in the project's abstraction. Saussure's idea of system expressed
the construction of an abstract, conceptual procedure because a sys-
tem cannot be observed, even though each linguistic element depends
on it. For Claudine Normand, the diachrony/synchrony distinction
was already in the making prior to Saussure, especially in the work
being done in dialectology, where synchrony would quite naturally
receive precedence in the collection of dialects, for want of written
traces. On this matter, Saussure would have only "systematized things
that were already being said and done." 11
Jean-Claude Coquet, on the other hand, takes things back to the
nineteenth century and even to the end of the eighteenth century, to
the important movements that established contemporary linguist\cs.
The idea of system predated Saussure. "It is first of aIl a taxonomic
idea and we therefore see the first successful efforts among biologists.
This is the period of Goethe and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. "12 Saussure
only consolidated the idea of system, thereby reducing its field of
The Saussurean Break
ta the system in order ta it the greatest
bie impact, but abandoning the historical panchronic aspects.
Like Michel Foucault, Jean-Claude Milner sees in Bopp's work the
basic foundation for a grammar that leaves the world of the elassi-
cal age and of representation behind. Saussure would have simply
eleaned up the fundamental principles needed by the linguistics of his
period, which is to say, historical linguistics. But historical linguists
had needed general linguistics since the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, and needed to renew its links with a time wh en generallinguis-
tics existed before being repressed by the historicism of philological
research. "There is therefore no reason to prefer the argumentl of
discontinuity," since general linguistics is a term that we begin ta
find as of the 1880s.
13
Andr Martinet, who contributed consider-
ably to Saussure's being read and known, nonetheless considers that
Saussure yielded to pressure from sociology by distinguishing between
language and speech, and "failed in his plan ta study the linguistic
phenomenon in itself and for itself. "14 For Martinet, a program
truly establishing structura li sm was defined only with the advent of
the Prague Cirele and phonology. "1 am a Saussurean, and 1 say this
with the greatest admiration for Saussure: he is not the founder of
structuralism." 15
Synchrony Prevails
Andr Martinet criticized above all the fact that the important problem
of the regularity of phonetic changes, raised during Saussure's time,
went unanswered in the CCL. In order to aecount for this phenome-
non, structure needed to remain diachronic rather than being limited to
synchrony, which is statie: "A structure is something that moves."16
Saussurean categories served, however, as epistemic tools for general-
ized structuralism even if different works took sorne liberty with Saus-
sure's text in order to adapt it to the specificity of their field. The princi-
pal inflection gave priority to synchrony and Saussure illustrated this
and its corollary, the insignificance of historicity, with the metaphor of
a chess game that is well played when the situation and possible combi-
nations of the pieces on the board are visible. "It is altogether unimpor-
tant that one get there by one path or another."17 Studying the recipro-
cal combination of discrete units reveals the internallaws regulating a
language. That the synchronic investigation be independent in order to
gain access to the system breaks with the methods of both comparatists
48 The Saussurean Break
and ciassical philosophers, who sought the successive borrowings in
the different layers of languages as they were taking shape.
In this radical change of perspective, diachrony becomes a simple
derivative and linguistic evolution is seen as the passage from one syn-
chrony to another. Foucault's epistemes come to mind even if the ref-
erence to Saussure is not really explicit. Linguistics was freed from the
historian's tutelage through this power play, which encouraged its sci-
entific autonomy, but at the high price of ahistoricity, resulting in an
amputation that may have been necessary to break with the evolution-
ism of the time, but that led to aporias because the links between dia-
chrony and synchrony were not set in any dialectical relationship.
Saussure made it possible to show that the laws of change for a lan-
guage and a society differ, and that language is not therefore the sim-
ple expression of a racial particularity, as nineteenth-century linguists_
believed as they reconstructed the history of Indo-European s()cieties
through known and recognized languages.
Linguistic Closure
The other fundamental aspect of the Saussurean approach was to see
language as hermetic. The linguistic sign does not join a thing with its
name, but a concept with an acoustic image whose link is arbitrary;
reality, or the referent, is therefore placed ontside the field of study in
order to define the linguist's perspective, which is limited, by defini-
tion. The Saussure an sign only concerns the relationship between the
signified (the concept) and the signifier (the acoustic image), and ex-
ciudes the referent. Signs differ from symbols, which retain a natural
link in the signifiedlsignifier relationship. "Language is a system that
knows only its own order." "Language is form and not substance."18
Therefore, the linguistic unit, by virtue of its phonic and semantic
character, always points to all the other units in a purely endogenous
combinatory activity.
The referential function, otherwise known as denotation, is re-
pressed. Referentiality is located in the relationship between sign and
referent. Saussure. gave no priority to the signifier over the signified,
since both were, for him, as indissociable aithe two sides of a piece of
paper, but he defill-the-signifier by its material presence, whereas the
signified is characterized by its absence: "The sign is both a mark and
a lack: dual from the beginning."19 Jacques Lacan, in particular, ad-
dressed this unequal relationship in signification, and reduced the sig-
The Saussurean Break 49
nified in of the signifier in a twist that further accentuated the
immanent quality of this approach to language. By his immanent ori-
entation, Saussure limited his project and escaped any correlation
between two of his propositions, "the proposition according to which
language is a system of signs and the proposition according to which
language is a social facto "20 He enclosed his linguistics within a restric-
tive study of the code and thereby cut language off from the condi-
tions of its appearance and signification.
Saussure chose the ~ i g n rather than meaning, which he banished
to the metaphysical past, a choice that came to characterize the struc-
turalist paradigm. Such a formalization made it possible to go quite
far in describing languages, but rather than a means, formalization be-
came an end; as such, it often served to occult, if not to mystify. Two
ways of dividing the internaI combinatory of language made it com-
prehensible: the linear relationships of contiguity, called syntagmatic,
and the relationships that are in absentia, and which Saussure called
associational and later encompassed in the notion of paradigm.
Saussure was restrictive by definition, but his project of construct-
ing a general semiology integrating all those disciplines concerned
with the life of the signs at the core of sociallife was very ambitious:
"Linguistics is only one part of this general science. "21 But by its impe-
tus, linguistics became the pilot science at the heart of the structura li st
project, which clearly participates in the realization of this ambitious
program wherein all the sciences of the sign converge around the same
paradigm. Buttressed by a method that had already yielded results, it
was the melting pot of all the human sciences.
The exception al and innovative character of this configuration on
the French intellectuallandscape should be nuanced when compared
with a similar situation prevailing in Germany in the nineteenth cen-
tury, at a time when philology and comparative grammar were the
first disciplines to become institutionalized as modern sciences. The
number of university chairs, of research money, and of reviews con-
firms their anteriority. "1 think that comparative grammar had a
larger budget than physics in nineteenth-century Germany. "22 Saus-
sure's descendants therefore basically equated Saussure with the CCL,
but it was only one aspect of his personality; his systeniaticity and for-
mali sm were developed like a program even if he lectured in unwritten
improvisations, or as a bit of paper folded in fours, according to his
students.
50 The Saussurean Break
Two Saussures?
Saussure's binarism is apparent in' his personal interests and even in
his personality. He frequently traveled to Marseilles from his native
Geneva, taking with him small note books that he filled with medita-
tions on Vedic and Saturnine texts of Indian and Roman sacred po-
etry. Two hundred such notebooks were filled up on anagrams and in
a cabalistic search for hidden proper names that would reveal both for
whom the texts were intended and their ultimate meaning.
Disturbed by his discoveries, Saussure even became interested in
spiritist sances between 1895 and 1898. In 1898, he was called in by
Fleury, a psychology professor in Geneva, to consult on a case of glos-
solalia. Miss Smith, under hypnosis, announced that she spoke San-
skrit, and Saussure, professor of Sanskrit, deduced that "it was not
Sanskrit, but there was nothing that went against Sanskrit. "23 Not that
Saussure was the only sC,ientist with a spiritual dimension. We need
only recall Newton, who wrote thousahds of pages on alchemy while
writing his Principia; the founder of c1assical mechanics and of West-
ern rationality was also seeking the philosophers' stone. The second
Saussure, as Louis-Jean Calvet called him,24 thought that a language
existed beneath language, that a conscious or unconscious encoding
of words existed beneath words. However, n.o trace of his search for
latent structures appears in the official Saussure of the CCL.
Saussure's note books were all carefully kept secret by his family
and it was only in 1964 that Jean Starobinski was able to partially
publish the anagrams.
25
The discovery opened up an entirely new and
different line of research, in the mid-sixties, especially with Julia Kris-
teva's work. We can, together with Jakobson, speak about a long-
repressed "second Saussure an revolution."
The Absent Subject
This second filiation would allow a return of the subject, which had
been explicitly reduced to insignificance, if not to silence, in the CCL
with its critical distinction ~ t w e e n language and speech. This opposi-
tion inc1uded the distinction between the social and the individual, be-
tween the concrete and the abstract, between the contingent and the
necessary, and linguistic science as such had to limit itself to language,
which was the only object that could be scientifically explained. Con-
sequently, the speaking subject, the man of words, was eliminated:
The Saussurean Break 5 l
"Language is not a function of the speaking subject, but the product
that the individu al passively records. . . . Language, distinct from
speech, is an object that can be studied separattilir. "26 Linguistics only
acquires the status of a science for Saussure on condition that its spe-
cific object-Ianguage-is clearly determined. The dross of speech, of
the subjt!ct, and of psychology had to be eliminated. Banished from
the Saussurean scientific perspective, the individual becomes the vic-
tim of a formalist reduction in which he no longer has his place.
This negation, which was already the blind spot on the Saus-
sure an horizon, would also become an essential element of the struc-
turalist paradigm elsewhere than in linguistics. Ir drives into parox-
ysms a formalism that, after having eliminated meaning, excludes the
speaker so that "everything happens as if no one were speaking."27
With its initial negations as weil as their consequences, we can see that
modern linguistics had to paya heavy price in order to establish itself.
But once again, Saussure's singularity has to be seen in relation to
nineteenth-century Germany comparatists who sought out true lin-
guistic structures, which they considered destroyed by the activity of
speaking. According to this current Of thought, the structure of lan-
guage was independent of what was done with it and needed to be re-
stored. So Saussure, once again, was only systematizing something
that had predated him.
Behind this language/speech opposition, Oswald Ducrot sees Saus-
sure as mixing two levels, "and it would be interesting to distinguish
them clearly, which is what 1 tried to dO."28 The opposition between
language and speech can be considered first like the distinction be-
tween what is given (speech) and what is constructed (language). This
indispensable methodological or epistemological distinction remains
valid; indeed, it is even the very condition of the scientific enterprise,
although it does not presuppose Saussure's second, and arguable, op-
position between an abstract linguistic system where the subject has
been removed from speech activity, between an objective code and the
use made of it by subjects. But the whole Saussurean current of the six-
ties revisited the confusion between these two levels, generating the
themes of the death of man and of theoretical antihumanism. Scientific
hopes were fanned to great heights as the speaking subject was finaily
eliminated.
Eight
Roman Jakobson:
The Man Who Could Do Everything
Among other things, the success of structuralism in France was the
product of a particularly fruitful meeting in New York in 1942 be-
tween Claude Lvi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson. Their friendship,
born of a misunderstanding-Jakobson thought he had found a
drinking partner in Lvi-Strauss-never waned and, on the eve of his
death, Roman Jakobson sent his friend an offprint of an article dedi-
cated to "My brother Claude." This friendship culminated in the
unit y and reciprocal integration of their respective work: Lvi-Strauss
borrowed the phonological model into which Jakobson initiated him
and Jakobson opened linguistics up to anthropology. They shared
methodology, ideas, and dynamism.
"The Common Language of Linguists and Anthropologists" is a
programmatic chapter in General Linguistics in which Jakobson em-
phasized the important roles played by the mathematical theory of
communication and information theory for advancing linguistics since
Saussure and his contemporary, Peirce'! It was now time for linguis-
tics to concern itself with meaning and for the game of hide-and-seek
between sign and signification to come to an end. "We are facing the
important task of incorporating signification into the science
of language."2 A vast and common research program opened up for
linguists and anthropologists in which the codes of one language
could be substituted for those of the other thanks to the isomorphism
of internaI structures. Jakobson, like Lvi-Strauss, sought universals:
52
Roman Jakobson: The Man Who Could Do Everything 53
"The moment has come to address the question of the universallaws
of language."
3
He was clearly determined to anchor linguistics in the
modernity of the hard sciences and compared recent developments in
general linguistics-its transition from a genetic to a descriptive ap-
proach-to the transformation of classical mechanics into quantum
mechanics: "Structurallinguistics, like quantum mechanics, gains in
morphic determinism what it loses in temporal determinism."4
Jakobson was already quite receptive to anthropology before
meeting Lvi-Strauss, however, for he was in the double line of Euro-
pean linguistics and ethnolinguistics, a branch of American linguistics
based on Sapir's and Boas's work on Amerindian languages. This tra-
dition had explored paths different from those taken by Saussure, but
it had also emphasized the description of languages and the funda-
mental importance of linguistic structure. Learning about the coher-
ence of Amerindian languages was an urgent enterprise because they
were rapidly disappearing.
Before coming to settle in America, Roman Jakobson had had an
unusual pasto A veritable globe-trotter of structuralism, his pivotaI po-
sition and influence were the products of an itinerary that took him
from Moscow to New York by way of Prague, Copenhagen, Oslo,
Stockholm, and Uppsala-not to mention his very frequent trips to
Paris. Retracing his steps amounts to following the international path
of the nascent structuralist paradigm.
The Linguistic Circle of Moscow
Jakobson was particularly receptive to everything having to do with
modernity, in the arts as well as in science. Born in Moscow on Octo-
ber II, 1896, he became interested in folktales when he was quite
young and, by the time he was six, was already a "voracious reader."5
He learned French and German when he was very young and discov-
ered the poetry of Pushkin and Verlaine and then Mallarm when he
was only twelve! ln 1912, he joined the new and particularly creative
futurists, and read the poetry of Velimir Khlebnikov and then that of
Vladimir Mayakovski, with whom he became friends, as he did with
the painter Cazimir Malevich. "1 grew up in a milieu of painters."6
Like Lvi-Strauss, Jakobson lived close to painting, which was for him
the most intense aspect of creative culture.
ln 1915, on J akobson's initiative, the Linguistic Circle of Moscow
came into being and assigned itself the task of promoting poetic lin-
54 Roman The Man Who Could Do
guistics. The first was held in the room of Jakobson's
parents' home but it was difficult ta take charge of the Grele at the
height of the war un der the czarist regime, and Jakobson quickly
joined the Dialectology Committee of the Academy of Sciences. The
formalists and futurists therefore were essentially responsible for this
push in the direction of linguistics; Saussure came only later, when
Jakobson came upon the CCL in 1920, in Prague. As early as
1914-15, however, he made the acquaintance of Prince Nicolai Tru-
betzkoy, who spoke to him about the work being done in France
under Meillet. Their encounter was decisive.
According to Antoine Meillet, Trubetzkoy was the mastermind of
modern linguistics and responsible for its definitive renewal, through
phonology. The friendship that took hold between Trubetzkoy and
Jakobson, especially after 1920, and until Trubetzkoy's death in 1938,
was so strong that Jakobson says that, given their very frequent and
fruitful impassioned exchanges, he can no longer clearly distinguish
between his own thinking and that of his friend. "It was a surprising
collaboration; we needed one another."7 He read Husserl, whose Log-
ical Quests "had, perhaps, the greatest influence on my theoretical
work."8 In early 1917, Jakobson participated in the creation of
Opoyaz, a Saint Petersburg society for the study of poetic language.
He continued to develop the relationship between theory, poetics, and
practice, while frequenting poets including Eikhenbaum, Poli va nov,
Yakoubinsky, and Chlovsky. "The linguistic aspect of poetry was de-
liberately emphasized in all of these enterprises."9
During that period, Jakobson argued for the immanence of the
study of the literary texts and of an internaI coherence ma king the
whole greater th an the sum of its parts. Jakobson hoped that linguis-
tics would allow him to successfully bridge creation and science, and
at the same time he wanted to see linguistics reach the level of a nomo-
thetic science. Poetic language offered him a good starting point be-
cause, unlike daily language, which is shaped by elements external to
its own logic and is heterotelic, poetic language is fundamentally au-
totelic. But this formalist enterprise did not square well with Stalin-
ism, which was crashing down on Russia in the twenties and thirties.
The Prague Circle
Unlike his friend E. Polivanov, who stayed behind in Russia, Jakobson
left. He went first to Czechoslovakia, where he worked as an inter-
Roman Jakobson: The Man Who Could Do Everything 55
preter for the Soviet Red Cross Mission in Prague. "It was an accident
of history, which gave rise to the development of structuralism in the
West."10 In fact, structuralism could have developed in the Soviet
Union and the Soviets could have been in the forefront of linguistic re-
search. Linguists like Polivanov who remained in Russia were liqui-
dated, along with their work, by the Soviet authorities. Ironically, this
repression proved, a contrario, the formalist theses claiming that liter-
ature is its own end independent of any historical context and quite
clearly showed that writing has political stakes. Jakobson became
the Soviet cultural attach to the Prague embassy, thanks to Ambas-
sador Antonov, who had taken the Winter Palace in October I9I7
under Trotsky, a crime for which he too was liquidated somewhat
later. "Antonov was called back with the entire embassy. They were
gunned down from A to Z, ineluding the office boys and the eleaning
woman."ll
But Jakobson was bored in Prague. He began frequenting Czech
poets and translating Russian poets into Czech at their meetings at a
time when Russian culture was considered to be that of n enemy
country. They improvised translated readings of Gorky and Maya-
kovski which provoked impassioned debates and led to an important
realization for Jakobson, who
suddenly discovered the difference in musicality between these two
languages, the difference in tonality between Russian and Czech,
two languages that are very close because of their roots and lexical
bases, but that had made completely different phonological choices
that were nonetheless similar enough that a listener could grasp the
fact that only very slight changes would suffice for the pertinent dif-
ference to change.
12
Structural phonology was born of this interaction between
natural, cultural, and poetic languages. Jakobson also again met
Prince Nicolai Trubetzkoy, whom he had known since I9I5 and
who had fled the Russian Revolution and taken refuge in Vienna. On
October I6, I926, at the initiative of the Czechs Wilm Mathesius,
Makarovsky, and J. Vachek, and the E-ussians Nicolai Trubetzkoy,
Roman Jakobson, and Serge Karcevsky, the Linguistic Cirele of
Prague was born. Its publications began appearing as of I929, and
they defined an explicitly structuralist program: "It [the Cirele] took
the name of structuralism because its fundamental concept was the
structure, conceived as a dynamic ensemble."13 The Prague Cirele was
56 Roman Jakobson: The Man Who Could Do
in line with thinking of Saussure, Russian formalism, Husserl,
and of the Gestalt, and created ties with the Vienna Grele. hs "1929
theses" were the equivalent of a program for several generations of
linguists. These theses strictly distinguished between internaI and
manifest language: "In its social role, language has to be defined ac-
cording to the relationship that exists between it and extralinguistic
reality. Either it has a communication function, which is to say that it
is directed toward a signified, or a poetic, function, which is to say
that it is directed toward the sign itself."14 The Prague Grcle intended
to devote itself essentially to the study of poetic language, which had
been neglected until then.
Jakobson was vice president of the Grcle and professor at Brno
University until 1939. He helped diffuse the Circle's structura li st pro-
gram in the West. The first Congress of General Linguistics held at
The Hague April 10-15, 1928, also helped. The Prague Grcle came to
this congress with its modernist theses carefully prepared beforehand.
Given its influence, the first two days were devoted to theoretical
questions: "For the first time, we have used the term 'structural and
functionallinguistics.' We have posed the question of structure as cen-
tral, for without it nothing in linguistics can be considered."15 Jakob-
son also had an excellent relationship with the Copenhagen Grcle,
which had been created in 1939 by Louis Hjelmslev and Viggo Bron-
dal, both of whom were invited to present their work to the Prague
Grcle. In fact, Jakobson was published inActa linguistica, the Co pen-
hagen Grcle's journal, despite dis agreements particularly with Hjelm-
slev, who, in Jakobson's view, wanted to go too far in eliminating all
phonic and semantic mate rial from the study of language.
But the collaboration between the Prague and Copenhagen Cir-
cles was aborted for historical reasons. Following the 1939 Nazi inva-
sion of Czechoslovakia, Jakobson fled first to Denmark and then to
Norway and Sweden. But with Nazi troops advancing farther and far-
ther West, he had to leave Europe in 1941 to seek refuge. He came to
the New School for Social Research in New York. A Linguistics Grcle
of New York had been established in 1934 and Jakobson therefore
landed on receptive ground. He joined the editorial board of Ward,
the review founded by the Grcle in 1945. Ward's first issue gave a
condensed version of the structuralist program, dealing with the ap-
plications of structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology. And
since the review sought to consolidate "cooperation between Ameri-
Roman Jakobson: The Man Who Could Do Everything 57
can and European linguistics of different schools,"16 it is elear that
Jakobson was once again in an excUent position.
The 1920S and 1930S in Prague were the most productive and
foundational years. Even if the 1929 theses of the Prague Cirele had a
Saussurean bent, the Cirele had at the same time put sorne distance
between itself and Saussure on a number of fundamental issues. It
defined its conception of language as a functional system; however,
"the adjective functional introduces a teleology that is foreign to him
[Saussure], since it is inspired by Bhler's functions."17 In addition,
the theses were less radical with respect to Saussure's break between
diachrony and synchrony, which was not considered to be an un-
breachable barrier. Jakobson refused this line of division on several
occasions, preferring the notion of dynamic synchrony. "Synchronie
does not equal static."18 The rational kernel of structuralism was to
come less from a linguistic model than from structral phonology, the
model of models.
In Prague, Nicolai Trubetzkoy was the best specialist in phonol-
ogy. His 1939 Princip/es of Phon%gy became a elassic. In it, he de-
fined the phoneme by its place in the phonological system. His method
consisted of locating phonie oppositions by taking account of four
distinctive traits: nasality, the point of articulation, labialization, and
aperture. The Saussurean principle of pertinent difference is elear
here, as is the search for minimal pertinent units: in this case, the
phoneme. Trubetzkoy adopted both Saussure's position of keeping the
referent at a distance and his search for the internallaws of the lin-
guistic code. Phonology is removed from aU extralinguistic reality, and
attempts to describe sonorous material. This culminated in Jakobson's
table of aH pertinent traits, organized using twelve oppositional pairs,
which were supposed to account for all the oppositions in all the lan-
guages in the world. The structuralists' dream of universality would
thus be realized.
19
The phonologist's central quest remained that of
the invariable underlying the variable.
Jakobson considered that from the outset, as far back as early
childhood, the phonematic code was binary, like formaI, mathemati-
cal language. Binarism is at the heart of-the phonological system,
where once again we find Ferdinand de Saussure's dichotomous think-
ing. The sign's dualism between signifier and signified, between the
sensible and the intelligible, finds its echo in the binarity of the phono-
logical system.
58 Roman The Man Who Could Do
Receptivity ta Psychaanalysis
Thanks to Jakobson's studies on aphasia, the application of the phono-
logical model was broadened, particularly to psychoanalysis. His dis-
tinction between two types of aphasia made it possible to examine the
mechanisms of language acquisition and its specifie laws, and to draw
sorne clinical conclusions about two types of dysfunction. Jakobson
differentiated between the combination of signs among themselves
and their selection, or the possibility of substituting one sign for an-
other. In so doing, he adopted the Saussurean opposition between syn-
tagma and association, which made it possible for him to distinguish
two types of aphasia. "For aphasies of the first type (selection defi-
ciency), the context is the indispensable and decisive factor .... The
more his utterances are dependent on the context, the better he copes
with his verbal task .... Thus, only the framework, the connecting
links of the communication, is spared by this type of aphasia at its
critical stage. "20 This type of aphasia is contrasted with another in
which, rather th an suffering from a deficiency with respect to the con-
text, the patient has a problem of contiguity, which produces an
agrammatism, or a heap of words. Jakobson linked the two phenom-
ena to two important rhetorical figures-metaphor and metonymy.
Metaphor is impossible in the first type of aphasia, where there is a
problem of similarity, and metonymy is impossible where there are
difficulties of contiguity.
Jacques Lacan met Jakobson in 1950 and became his close friend.
He adopted this distinction and shifted it onto Freud's ideas of con-
densation and displacement in order to explain how the unconscious
operates. "Phonology became a model for disciplines having sorne
relationship with language; so many disciplines had rather weak for-
malization. Phonology offered them a system of formalization by
pairs of oppositions that were both simple and seductive, because they
were exportable; it was structuralism's central element. "21 The phono-
logical model was perfected at the end of the twenties, but it only en-
joyed a veritable expansion as of the Second World War and had to
wait for the end of the sixties in France before becoming institutional-
ized. In or der to understand this lag time, we have to take a look at
the situation of linguistics in France in the fifties.
Nine
A Pilot Science without a Plane:
Linguistics
The same linguistic effervescence that arose in Europe in the thirties
spread to France relatively quickly, but there was a particular d i s t o r ~
tion. Institutional sluggishness braked the integration of modern lin-
guistics into the university; the discipline laid siege to the fortress of
the Sorbonne, but it lost. A veritable strategy of encirclement was nec-
essary but the undertaking was aIl the more difficult because the man-
darins were weIl established.
Antoine Meillet was the grand master of French linguistics, which
had its Society for Linguistics and a Bulletin, and kept itself abreast of
the ongoing revolution. But although the information may have got-
ten through, it remained somewhat removed from the concerns of re-
searchers who were profoundly influenced by their classical training
and trapped in the sluggishness of the classical Greco-Latin tradition.
It was therefore rather difficult for the modern structural methods to
make any significant headway. And at the same time, the discipline
was receptive and counted such disciples of Saussure as Antoine Meil-
let, G-fammont, and Vendrys, although they were more deeply influ-
enced by the comparatist Saussure of the end of the nineteenth century
than by the Saussure of the CCL.
The university, by contrast, was completely cut off from these
concerns, and its sIum ber would continue uninterrupted for quite
sorne time, despite the repeated assaults. Linguistics in France in the
thirties was already heavily centralized, a characteristic that would
59
60 A Pilot Science without a Plane: Linguistics
bring the structure crashing down in 1968. Antoine Meillet's author-
ity appears to have gone unchallenged at the time and, with few ex-
ceptions, the training and therefore the orientation of scholars was
classical. Linguists were for the most part grammar agrgs who held
a very traditional view of linguistics. There were atypical cases, of
course, such as Guillaume, who attracted many disciples from that
enclave of modernity, the cole des Hautes tudes: "Guillaume's case
is interesting. He worked in a bank. He had thought about linguis-
tic problems on his own. Meillet ha'd him named as a lecturer in
I9I9-20 at the cole des Hautes tudes."l There was also Georges
Gougenheim's very innovative I939 work, Systme grammatical de la
langue franaise. But those who took the traditional path leading to
the agrgation generally sidestepped the structuralist phenomenon
that was being born in linguistics.
If modernity had sorne difficulty establishing itself in the prewar
period, what was the situation in the fifties? France lagged increas-
ingly behind and the Sorbonne remained completely removed from
the few places where linguistic research was being carried on. Andr
Martinet, who could have dynamized the situation, was in the United
States, and he only returned to France in I95 5. Moreover, Meillet's
death in I936 and that of douard Pichon in I940 further accentu-
ated the difference between France and the rest of Europe and the
United States. Robert-Lon Wagner's nomination to the Sorbonne
might have provided sorne hope for renewal if he hadn't been given a
chair in Old French. Wagner deplored the situation: "It is obviously
abnormal that France be the country in Europe where students of
French linguistics are the least well considered by those whose func-
tion was or will be to teach French."2 There were a few scholars here
and there whose work indicated signs of renewal, but they were still
quite isolated. Marcel Cohen, for example, taught Ethiopian at
Langues Orientales and at the cole des Hautes tudes: "As early as
before I950, [Marcel Cohen] was the linguist who showed the most
interest in what was new .... Cohen was a very important guide, and
one who considerably encouraged me."3
Most of those who were to impose a change at the end of the six-
ties were in the middle of their studies at the time, and, for the most
part, in very classical disciplines. They were French students in the
main, including grammar agrgs like Jean-Claude Chevalier, Jean
Dubois, and Michel Arriv who discovered modern linguistics late
A Pilot Science without a Plane: Linguistics 6 l
because their courses had completely ignored it. Jean Dubois, for ex-
ample, had passed the grammar agrgation in 1945, but he only heard
of Saussure in 1958! His courses in philology had been totally cut off
from generallinguistics: "Classical students, like me, who took courses
leading to the grammar agrgation, could very easily not know what
linguistics was."4
By contrast, the non-French students, who were further removed
from a very traditional curriculum, could more easily discover modern
linguistics at the Collge de France, the cole des Hautes tudes, or
the Institut de Linguistique, as was the case for Bernard Pottier and
Antoine Culioli. These enclaves were marginalized with respect to uni-
versity structures, but they laid the foundations of the future revolu-
tion. "1 wanted to be a linguist from the outset .... 1 began with
Fouch in experimental phonetics at the Sorbonne, but it was above aU
at the cole des Hautes tudes that 1 got my training: 1 started there
in 1944 and was there on and off until 1955."5 Bernard Pottier was
active in linguistic activities and publications rather early, and it was
because he was a student in Spanish. Similarly, Antoine Culioli came to
linguistics through his training as an Anglicist, like Andr Martinet.
ln the mid-fifties, a young generation of linguists was beginning
to take its place in the university, but it was still at the periphery,
with the exception of Jean-Claude Chevalier, who in 1954 became the
youngest assistant at the Sorbonne, thanks to Antoine Culioli. Bernard
Pottier became a lecturer in Bordeaux in 1955, Jean Perrot was named
charg d'enseignement in Montpellier, and Antoine Culioli and Jean
Dubois joined the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Andr
Martinet returned from the United States and replaced Michel Lejeune
at the Sorbonne. But the certificate in generallinguistics, for which he
was responsible, was only offered as one of the options at the end of a
bachelor's in foreign languages.
The Periphery Encircles the Center
. Given the situation in Paris, the winds of change blew from the prov-
inces, and the countryside progressively surrounded the Sorbonne, the
linchpin of the French university structure. The adplinistration pro-
vided a certain dynamism in this strategy of conquest, in the person of
Gaston Berget, the director of the postsecondary educational sector,
who in 1955-56 created the fust center for linguistic research within
the university.
Pilot Science without Plane: Linguistics
Berger created the Center for Romance ln Ir
was here that 1mbs and later Georges Straka organized numerous
international colloquia, making it possible for French linguists to keep
up with the most up-to-date research and to make their own research
known through colloquia proceedings. As early as 1956 a veritable
international community came together in Strasbourg around the re-
se archers of the center on the theme "current tendencies in structural
linguistics," and included Georges Gougenheim, Louis Hjelmslev,
Andr Martinet, and Knud Togeby. \
ln the mid-fifties, director Gaston Berger created a lexicology cen-
ter in Besanon, where the lexicologist Bernard Qumada had been
in residence since 1950. Qumada made Besanon a particularly dy-
namic center, expanding beyond lexicology by creating a center for
language learning, and then a center for applied linguistics at which
"as many as 2,200 summer trainees, often for eight weeks," came to-
gether.
6
This training center made it possible not only to diffuse new
methods, but also to obtain supplementary funding and therefore to
increase the numbers of roundtables. Bernard Qumada invited the
entire generation of young linguists to Besanon: Henri Mitterand
became his assistant, Aigirdas Julien Greimas, Jean Dubois, Henri
Meschonnic, Guilbert, Wagner, Roland Barthes at the moment when
Mythologies was pubiished-all came. The Sorbonne, of course, knew
nothing of this intense activity, but it was beginning to be weIl known
through its publications. Qumada took over the Cahiers de lexicolo-
gie in Besanon in 1959, which addressed itself to a broad readership
from the outset; fifteen hundred copies of its first issue were printed.
"1 was convinced that lexicology was a crossroads discipline that
did not much interest linguists but did hold interest for many other
disciplines-literature, history, philosophy, the military ... "7
Bernard Qumada was a talented broker for structurallinguistics.
In 1960, he began the tudes de linguistique applique based on his
activities in Besanon.)t too had a first printing of fifteen hundred
copies, subsidized by Didier, a national editor. Berger's ide a of circum-
venting the Sorbonne-which had refused to create these research
centers-gained ground and made it possible for the young assistant,
Jean-Claude Chevalier, to feel less isolated in the aged Sorbonne by
participating in the many work groups that were forming. He met the
linguists and Communist Party members Jean Dubois, Henri Mit-
terand, and Antoine Culioli at the CERM, and his trips to Besanon
A Pilot Science without a Plane: Linguistics 63
became more frequent: "We aU met there during vacations-there was
Barthes, Dubois, Greimas-and we also had news from our American
cousins."8
While linguistics was rather effervescent, literature remained mis-
trustful. Structural methods did not easily penetrate the heart of the
university organization of the classical humanities, where any mention
of logic or science in the field of literature was profoundly incongru-
ous. "Paradoxically, we might say that the systematic overvalorization
of literature as a privileged subject in the high-school and university
curriculum, taught only as literary history, made it impossible to truly
renew theoretical thinking before 1955-60."9
Of course, we do find once again sorne isolated innova tors in lit:
erary analysis, such as Pierre Guiraud, who, at the 1960 colloquium
on modern literature in Lige, presented a paper entitled "For a Semi-
ology of Poetic Expression." Leo Spitzer, who also participated in this
colloquium, gave three reasons to explain why France lagged behind:
first, the fact that the French university was closed in on itself and uni-
versity professors were unfamiliar with the work of the Russian for-
malists, with Anglo-Saxon New Criticism, or with German research;
second, the prevalence of studies of genesis, of traditional literary
history; third, the French tradition of the scholarly, didactic practice
of textual analysis. Philippe Hamon added a fourth reason: "A quasi-
total misunderstanding of linguistics as an autonomous discipline. "10
A renewed approach to literature had to wait for the authority of
linguistics to be accepted, which did not happen before 1960.
There were sorne individual but important exceptions like Roland
Barthes, who linked literature and linguistics and met with immediate
and spectacular popularity. "1 remember conversations with Roland
Barthes in the fifties when he said that it was absolutely necessary to
read Saussure."l1
The French Breach: Andr Martinet
Even if he was in the United States until 1955, Andr Martinet
nonetheless dominated linguistics in France. Martinet was a grammar
agrg, and, as early as 1928, he took advantage of n interesting
proposaI made by Vendrys to translate Jespersen's Language. The
translation led Martinet to Denmark, where he met Jespersen and
Hjelmslev. Martinet had published his first article in 1933 in the Bul-
letin de la socit de linguistique and had already introduced innova-
64 A Pilot Science without a Plane: Linguistics
tions in phonology, which later became his He published in
the Work of the Linguistic Cirele of Prague in I936, and worked with
Trubetzkoy. Martinet actively participated in the renewal of European
linguistics that was going on in the thirties, and in I937 he was elected
to a new chair in phonology created specifically for him at the cole
des Hautes tudes.
The war, however, forced Martinet into exile, but not in I94I like
Jakobson. In I946, the Liberation paradoxically forced Martinet to
leave, not because of his own had even been a German
prisoner-but because he had married a Swedish woman who had col-
laborated with the Germans. He was therefore forced to abandon his
familial as weil as his national roots. It was Jakobson who welcomed
the exiled Martinet to New York, where he took on sorne particularly
important duties as editorial director of Word, the periodical of the
New York Linguistic Cirele and the most important linguistics journal
in the United States. Martinet was particularly lucky in having been in
Europe when Europe was in the avant-garde and then, at Jakobson's
side, where he could build bridges between European and Anglo-Saxon
linguistics since he taught and directed the linguistics department at
Columbia University in New York from I947 to I955. When he re-
turned to France in I9 5 5, his fame among linguists was worldwide and
yet the reception he met with in France made elear just how marginal
linguistics was at the time. "He was in a difficult situation when he ar-
rived in France. 1 remember it quite well. 1 was an assistant at the Sor-
bonne at the time and he appeared to the literature professors and the
historians as a fearful and sc andalous reformer, an antihumanist who
had to be pushed out."12 Despite his notoriety, Martinet had to get
angry and threaten to resign unless he was given a tenured professor-
ship at the Sorbonne. In the same year, I95 5, his major theoretical
work, Economy of Phonetic Changes, appeared and was elearly in the
line of the Prague Cirele. In it, he argued for an approach to linguistics
that appeared more dynarric than Saussure's and that took up the
Prague Cirele's emphasis on the communication function of language:
That cornes from Prague. The important idea is the notion of perti-
nence. Every science is based on pertinence. A science cannot de-
velop independently of a metaphysics unless it concentrates on a sin-
gle aspect of reality .... Yet, it is because linguistics is useful for
communication that we can know what the linguist must seek .... It
is senseless to do linguistic structuralism if it is not functional.
13
A Pilot Science without a Plane: Linguistics 65
Martinet therefore focused his study on the choices that language
makes possible. His approach was first of all syntagmatic-inventory
the possibilities to be established-before it was paradigmatic. Mar-
tinet introduced a social dimension into linguistic research by con-
sidering the communication function as having its own identity.
However, Martinet defined the singularity of linguistic research-in
studying language for and through itself-so restrictively that it cut
him off from other social sciences and shut him up in the strict de-
scription of linguistic function. His goal was to determine the bound-
aries of distinctive basic units of language, which he called monemes
(first articulation units) and phonemes (second articulation units). He
codified these rules of description in what became the international
best-seller of the sixties, Elements of General Linguistics.
An Untraditional Path: Andr-Georges Haudricourt
Andr-Georges Haudricourt was another great French linguist. Essen-
tially an autodidact, his rather disconnected path and permanent mar-
ginalization bear witness to the difficulties linguistics had in establish-
ing itself in France and the meanders it had to take in order to go
forward. In I939, the Prague Circle published an article on phonology
by Haudricourt, who, in contrast to the classical grammarians, was a
very curious personality. He first set foot in school only at the age of
fourteen, and lived removed from urban life on a family farm in
Picardy, in northern France. Haudricourt learned to write thanks to
the teacher's widow in the neighboring town, and he passed the bac-
calaurat on his seventh try. He went on to study agronomy and be-
came an agronomist in I93I, but he was revolted forever by agron-
orny. Three individuals counted considerably for him: Marcel Mauss,
"who tamed me," Marc Bloch, who published his mst article in I936
in the Annales, and Marcel Cohen, his teacher become friend.
14
When
Cohen joined the Resistance, he gave Haudricourt his library in order
to save it from the Germans: "'Go get the books that interest you.' 1
went to Viroflay with wicker baskets, to get the books. "15 Our future
linguist was going to get his supplies.
At that moment Haudricourt gave up botany for linguistics and
changed his specialty within the Centre National de la ltecherche Sci-
entifique. Haudricourt is in Antoine Meillet's line: "Linguistics, 1
learned it with Meillet."16 But he grants no scientific recognition
either to Saussure-"that poor alcoholic Swiss who died of delirium
66 A Pilot Science without a Plane: Linguistics
tremens, it's grotesque!" -or to Jakobson, "that clown from Moscow,
very pleasant but who spouted just about any nonsense."1? Haudri-
court remained a comparatist, by contrast; his historical approach
was very close to that of Meillet.
Haudricourt, like Andr Martinet, had a functionalist and dia-
chronie view of language. If Martinet supervised a great many theses
on African languages, Haudricourt, for his part, made it possible to
restore a number of Asian languages. From his interest in botany and
linguistics, he adopted a concrete approach to language and rejected
logico-mathematical formalism, which was eut off from the social
realm. He was a very unusual personality; he considered himself to be
the inventor of phonology: "Martinet would be furiously angry but,
you see, 1 invented phonology myself."18 Linguistics does not lack for
pilots in France, but it nonetheless remained very marginal during the
fifties for want of sufficiently solid scholarly and institutional legiti-
mation. This lag explains the feverish activity that followed, as well as
a certain ingenuity regarding the discovery of theories, which were
presented as the expressions of the latest modernity when in fact they
were often already in the process of being outmoded.
Ten
At Alexandria's Gates
The Sorbonne remained a fortress, like the Bastille, and was untake-
able in the fifties. The paths of renewal were to be sinuous, therefore,
and it was necessary to go to the Middle East, to Alexandria, to find
one of the essential poles for defining the structuralist paradigm. We
meet Aigirdas Julien Greimas, an important linguist, in Alexandria.
Born in I9I7 in Lithuania, he had gone to Grenoble to study philoso-
phy before the war with professors who upheld the standards of classi-
callinguistics and were hostile to Saussure an theses. His professor, Du-
raffour, went so far as to compare Trubetzkoy to Tino Rossi in I939,
in order to explain to his audience, many of whom were Americans,
the meaning of the adjective "idiot." Greimas remembers acquiring
the methods of nineteenth-century linguistics with fondness, however.
He was forced to return to his native Lithuania, where he spent the
war years, first under Russian and then under German occupation, be-
fore finding his way back to France in I945 to get his doctorate. He
bitterly observed the lack of linguistic dynamism in Paris and turned
away from most of the teaching that was going on in order to devote
himself to his thesis on the vocabulary of style under the direction of
Charles Bruneau. Immediately following the war, a small group was
already forming in Paris that included Greimas, Georges Mator, and
Bernard Qumada and that discovered and worked on Saussure's
work with the intention of creating a new discipline: lexicology.
In I949, Greimas became a lecturer in Alexandria. "It was a big
68 At Alexandria's Gates
disappointment, 1 thought that we would find the Library, and there
was nothing!"l But the Egyptian desert became the birthplace for a
dynamic group around Greimas and Charles Singevin. For want of
books, about ten European researchers met at least weekly from 1949
to 1958, around a botde of whiskey.
What can you talk about together when you have a philosopher, a
sociologist, a historian, and a linguist? The only common theme was
to think about epistemology. 1 remerv-ber having thrown out the
word, because they made fun of me at first, not really knowing very
well what it entailed. Phenomenology was in style and they were
doing the phenomenology of whatever.
2
Another decisive encounter took place in Alexandria and it too
proved to be the beginning of a deep friendship and rich collabora-
tion. Greimas and the man who would become the structuralist star,
Roland Barthes, met in Alexandria, where Greimas suggested that
Barthes, who had come to Egypt at the same time, read Saussure and
Hjelmslev. For his part, Barthes had Greimas read the beginning of the
manuscript that was to become his Michelet by Himsel(.3 "'It's very
good,' commented Greimas, 'but you could use Saussure.' 'Who is
Saussure?' asked Barthes. 'But one cannot not know Saussure,' an-
swered Greimas, peremptorily."4 Barthes could not stay in Alexandria
any longer because of pulmonary problems, but he had gotten a push,
and when Greimas saw him in Paris, where he returned every summer,
he maintained the valuable contact with his friend Barthes. In speak-
ing of Greimas's considerable influence, Charles Singevin commented
that "Barthes found the route to Greimas like Saint Paul found the
route to Damascus."
5
Greimas, however, had already been converted
to modern linguistics and he saw himself as heir to Saussure. This per-
spective made the work of the Linguistic Cirde of Copenhagen partic-
ularly seductive, and especially the work of Hjelmslev, whom he pre-
sented as the only loyal heir to the teaching of the Genevan master:
"The true and perhaps only successor of Saussure who has been able
to make his intentions explicit and formulate them definitively."6
The Hjelmslevian Filiation
Greimas saw Hjelmslev as the veritable founder of modern linguistics
for a number of reasons: his very restrictive conception of language
reduced to an essence, his emphasis on the Saussurean break with an
At Alexandria's Gates 69
even more axiomatic method, and his desire to broaden a
method into a vast semiotic field extending beyond strictly linguistic
terrain. Hjelmslev defined a new discipline that he called glossematics,
in keeping with the Saussure;m tradition. He emphasized the margin-
alization of aIl extralinguistic reality and freed the linguist to concen-
trate on a se arch for an underlying structure to the internallinguistic
order, independent of aIl reference to experience.
Hjelmslev defined his project in 1943 in the Prolegomena to a
Theory of Language. The work was only translated in France in 1968,
by Minuit. Between 1943 and 1968, then, it was essentially Barthes
and Greimas who diffused Hjelmslev's work. Saussure's terms were
slightly modified: signifierlsignified was expressed as (signifier)/content
(signified). These semantic slippages corresponded to a desire to disso-
ciate the two levels of analysis so that the structure could be conceived
as separate from what it structures, and therefore to force it to a
purely formaI level: "Only through typology does linguistics ri se to
quite general points of view and become a science."?
The mathematical model was even more central for Hjelmslev in
his quest for scientificity than it was for Saussure. The structure sub-
tending every linguistic sequence had to be found by abstraction based
on a code combining associations and commutations. Glossematics
took theories of logic as its model at the risk of ma king linguistics sur-
reptitiously slip like a general epistemology, a particular case of a
comprehensive logical approach, toward an ontologization of the sub-
tending structures: "It is not altogether elear whether this algebra be-
longs to the hypothetico-deductive phase of research or whether it is
part of the way in which language itself functions."8 The princip les of
logical reduction perfected by Hjelmslev helped formalism succeed in
Europe: in Germany with the discovery of the baroque; in France,
Focillon's discovery of the Romanesque in art; in Russia with Vladimir
Propp. The same episteme tied this formaI research together. And
Hjelmslev was also well known in France, where the "linguistic mi-
rage" and the ambition of scientificity were particularly lively in the
social sciences during the sixties. From its culminating conceptualiza-
tion in the Vienna Cirele with Rudolf Carnap and Ludwig Wittgen-
stein, a possible mathematization of the whole of the human sciences
quickly seemed conceivable. Hjelmslev helped give form to this some-
what illusory hope by his increasingly mathematical reduction of lin-
guistic givens. "The postulation of objects as something different from
70 At Alexandria's Gates
the terms of relationships is a superfluous axiom and consequently a
mataphysical hypothesis from which linguistic science will have to be
freed."9 Hjelmslev took the logic of abstraction as far as he could,
constructing a self-enclosed scholasticism. This was the orientation
that clearly gained the upper hand.
There were other possibilities, however, in the Copenhagen Cir-
cleo At the same time, Hjelmslev's elder enemy brother, Viggo Brondal,
offered a slightly different linguistic orientation, which, although just
as rigorous and as concerned with stnkture, was "at the same time,
open to history and to movement: there was a dynamic aspect to
Brondal, who held that the facts of language should be understood as
they developed and not within a closed system."10 A language's sys-
tem of internaI relations was not enough, according to Brondal, who
agreed with Benveniste. However, "there are periods during which the
most strict ideas carry the day, and that was the case for Hjelmslev
and Brondal. "11 If Greimas was undisputably Hjelmslev's successor by
taking glossematics as his starting point, Andr Martinet also knew
Hjelmslev as early as the beginning of the thirties, when he had gone
to see Jespersen in Copenhagen. "We remained in touch until his
death." 12 Initially their ties were rather close. At the 1935 Phonetics
Congress in London, Martinet advised Hjelmslev, who was presenting
his thesis as "phonematics," to change its name: "1 told him, no, old
boy, it can't he phonematics since we are not interested in substance.
There can't be any 'phone.' . . . And the following year, he called it
glossematics .... 1 read his work after the war and sweated hlood try-
ing to understand it."13
Martinet was the successor to the Prague school, whereas Hjelm-
slev, who hated Trubetzkoy, tried to create a different theory; but
Martinet could not accept these antifunctionalist theses. He presented
Hjelmslev's theses nevertheless at the Sorbonne, where they were
unknown until their tardy translation. Paradoxically, Martinet also
contributed significantly to making Hjelmslev's work known, even
though he did not in the least accept it. "The Prolegomena were trans-
lated late. We only had access to a French version of them in 1968. 1
first encountered this book through Martinet's presentation of it,"14
remarks Serge Martin, who applied Hjelmslevian principles to the
semiotics of music.
15
Principles eliminated any transcendent element
and constructed superposed hierarchies of classes, which constitute a
comprehensive structure.
16
Eleven
The Mother Figure of Structuralism:
Roland Barthes
In 1953, a book received unanimous acclaim and quickly became the
symptom of new literary demands, a break with tradition and the ex-
pression of a profound confusion nourished by Camus's The Stranger:
Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero.
1
Since his meeting with
Greimas in Alexandria, Barthes was no longer the Sartrean that he
had been in the immediate postwar period, but he was not yet the lin-
guist he would become at the end of the fifties. We can already discern
those qualities that drew the largest numbers of foHowers to him, his
mobility, his flexibility with regard to theories: quick to embrace
them, Barthes was just as quick to disengage from them.
A mythic figure for structuralism, Roland Barthes was a subtle and
supple incarnation of it wrought of moods rather than of rigor. He was
structuralism's best barometer, just as able to sense the disturbances of
the moment as those to come. Barthes's extreme sensitivity found the
means of expressing itself within the framework of structures, how-
ever, although his was a shimmering structure, more a cosmogony
incarnating the fusional universe of his relationship with a maternaI
image than the implacable mechanism of a binarized structure. Barthes
was a weather vane for structuralism. Within him, through a subtle
intertextuality, aH the voices and paths of the paraligm came into
play. A veritable magnet among the diverse structuralisms, Barthes
was loved because he expressed more than a methodological program.
He was a receptacle for the multiple variations of values of the period.
7
I
72 The Mother Figure of Structuralism: Roland Barthes
Indeed, we need only examine references to his works to discern his
position at the intersection of voices and values. The empire of signs
continued on in him as an empire of the senses, and it is useful to jux-
tapose the mother figure he incarnated with its binary other, struc-
turalism's severe father figure: Jacques Lacan.
Degree Zero
Barthes joined in the formalist current with Writing Degree Zero, fa-
voring an ethics of writing freed from Il constraints: "What we hope
to do here is to sketch out this connection and to affirm the existence
of a formaI reality independent of language and style."2 Barthes ad-
hered to the Sartrean theme of freedom conquered through the act of
writing, but he innovated, no longer situating the commitment repre-
sented by writing in the content but' rather in the form. Language
became a finality identified with reconquered freedom. Literature,
however, was at a zero point to be reconquered. It had degenerated
through its dissolution in a daily language made up of habits and pre-
scriptions, and through stylistics, which leads to an autarkic mode, to
an ideology in which the author acts as if he were eut off from society
and reduced to a splendid isolation.
Barthes recalls the theme that is specifie to modern linguistics and
to structural anthropology, of the fundamental importance of ex-
change, of the primitive relationship that must begin at a nodal or zero
point and be defined not by its empirical content but by the fact that it
allows content to establish itself relationally. We find the same search
for a zero degree of familial relationships in Lvi-Strauss, for a zero de-
gree of the linguistic unit in Jakobson, and for a zero degree of writing
in Barthes: the search for a pact, an initial contract establishing the
writer's relationship to society. In 1953, however, Barthes did not yet
have a solid structuralist foundation. He was certainly receptive to
Greimas's advice and already knew Brondal and Jakobson somewhat,
but these remained for him curiosities among others. He was princi..,
pally motivated by tracking down the ideological masks worn by liter-
ary expression, a concern that remained constant in his work.
Writing Degree Zero was successful because it participated in a
new literary sensibility, which the New Novel would incarnate with a
new stylistics beyond traditional novelistic norms. Barthes's remiuks
have a manifesto quality to them, but there was also a desperation to
his quest for a new writing eut off from aIl language of value, appar-
The Mother Figure of Structuralism: Roland Barthes 73
ently expressing the impasse of aU forms of writing coming after the
novel's high point, which was Marcel Proust. In fact, the work that
Seuil published in 1953 was consecrated by the critics. Maurice
Nadeau devoted eight pages to it in Les Lettres nouvelles, ending his
article by celebrating the young author whom he had discovered in
1947: "An oeuvre whose beginnings must be saluted. They are re-
markable. They announce an essayist who stands out from aU the oth-
ers today."3 In Les Temps modernes, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis heralded
above aU the birth of a writer: "There is a great writer among us and
he is more than period furniture, an economic organization, or even
an ideology."4
Barthes examined aU alienated forms of writing in his work: polit-
ical discourse "can only conf1rm a police universe," inteUectual writ-
ing is condemned to being a "paraliterature";5 the novel, with its pre-
tensions to universality, is the characteristic expression of bourgeois
ideology, which collapsed in the middle of the nineteenth century, al-
lowing a plurality of forms of writing by which the writer positions
himself in relation to the bourgeois condition. But this plurality, this
deconstruction of the universal, is never more than the expression of a
period no longer carried forward by the historical dialectic: "What
modernity shows us in the plurality of its writings, is the impasse of its
own history."6 Insofar as the creator must disrupt the established
order and can no longer do so simply by adding his score to the or-
chestra already poised to receive him, he can only break, write from
and around the lack, the silence: "To create white writing."7 Barthes
pursued and shifted Proust's quest for lost time, seeking instead a
nowhere place in literature: "Literature becomes the utopia of lan-
guage."8 From this was born both a new aesthetic and, for Barthes,
the realization of the impossibility of writing like a writer, as well as
the beginnings of a theorization of the writing/writer as a writer of
modernity.
Itinerary
While Roland Barthes was theoreticaUy in search of a site that existed
nowhere, he was quite deeply rooted in his own childhood, spent en-
tirely with his mother in southwest France, in the Basque city of Bay-
onne. This very dense period unfolded around his absent (ather, who
had died during the First World War, less than a year after Barthes was
born. Barthes compensated for this absence by overinvesting in the
74 The Mother Figure of Structuralism: Roland Barthes
maternaI image: "We always simulate in the affective relationship,
whether amicable or amorous, a certain maternaI space that is a secure
place, the space of a gift."9 At the age of ten, Roland Barthes "came
up" to Paris, to the Latin Quarter, where he went to Montaigne and
Louis-le-Grand high schools and in 1935 began to study classicalliter-
ature at the Sorbonne. At the same time, he was active in the theater,
and together with Jacques Veille created the classical theater of the
Sorbonne, which presented, among other things, Aeschylus's Perseus
on May 3, 1936, the day of the Popular Front's victory. But Barthes
spent the war in bed, in a sanitorium in Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet, near
Grenoble. By the war's end, he was both a Sartrean-"We discovered
Sartre with a passion"10-and a Marxist. At the sanitorium, he had
met a Trotskyist typographer, Georges Fourni, a friend of Maurice
Nadeau, and Fourni initiated him into Marxism. Barthes's pulmonary
illness and its treatment made it impossible for him to take the agrga-
tion examination, but he lost the opportunity to pursue a traditional
university career. He took up journalism, thanks once again to Mau-
rice Nadeau, who asked him to write literary articles for Combat.
Barthes took a double detour. Since a traditional university career
was not possible, he left France for Romania in 1948, then for Egypt
in 1949. When he returned to Paris in 1950 he no longer had any tra-
ditional university affiliation and the consequences were significant.
First of all, he had met Greimas in Alexandria, as we have seen, but he
also developed a lifelong resentment toward the university. Barthes
ceaselessly demonstrated his desire for university recognition, a desire
made all the keener because he badly tolerated having only a Li-
cence.!1 He only felt truly legitimated on the day in 1976 when he was
elected to the Collge de France.
12
Until that point, he endlessly strug-
gled with himself and confided to Louis-Jean Calvet, "You know, each
time 1 publish a book, it's a thesis."13 Here again, Barthes's enduringly
tenuous institutional affiliation made his a full participation in the
structuralist adventure. Like most of the structuralists, he had to cir-
cumvent the old Sorbonne in order to find a place.
Mythologies
Monthly from 1954 to 1956, Barthes sent Maurice Nadeau an article
for Les Lettres nouvelles. He continued to strip contemporary myths
and make an ideological critique of mass culture, which, thanks to
the reconstruction of the postwar years (the "thirty glorious years,"
The Mother Figure of Structuralism: Roland Barthes 75
I946-76), began to become a part of French daily life. Barthes mocked
petit-bourgeois ideology expressed in the tastes and values of the
media, whose role was growing. For him, the ideology under attack
masked an essentially ethical meaning, as Flaubert understood it, a
concept that was at one and the same time social, ethical, and esthetic
and included "everything that nauseates me in the average, the
middle-road, the common, the mediocre, and most of aIl, the world of
the stereotype." 14
Against the passive acceptance of naturalized values that have be-
come unquestioningly accepted stereotypes, Barthes systematically
undertook to dismantle and demystify; his project was to demonstrate
how a myth functions in contemporary society. Drawing concrete ex-
amples from daily IHe, he grouped together fifty-four short studies in
what became one of the major works of the period: Mythologies, pub-
lished by Seuil in I957. The studies were theorized only in the second
part of the book, in the final essay entitled "My th Today." Here,
Barthes defined a comprehensive semiological program, which clearly
showed his recent linguistic training; he had just read Saussure and
discovered Hjelmslev in I956.
Formalization therefore followed the studies of myths of contem-
porary daily life in which the petite bourgeoisie was the designated
adversary: "1 have already demonstrated the petite bourgeoisie's
predilection for tautological reasoning."15 These were the false truths
that Barthes wanted to upset by stripping them of their artifices. One
by one, he took on a number of popular "cult" images, including
wrestling, the advertisement for Astra margarine, Garbo's face, steak
and french fries, Michelin's Blue Guides, the new Citron, and litera-
ture according to Minou Drouet.
"Myth Today" owed a double debt. To Saussure (whom Barthes
cites twice) for the notions of signifier/signified he uses, and to Hjelm-
slev (whom he does not cite) for the distinctions between denotation
and connotation and between a language-object and a metalanguage.
ln his biography of Barthes, Louis-Jean Calvet points out that Barthes
still hesitated about assimiliating Saussurean notions. In the preface to
Mythologies, he writes that "myth is language," while at the end of
the theoretical essay, the formula is "Myth is a kind of speech."16
Barthes had not yet entirely adopted Saussure's fundamental distinc-
tion between language and speech, although by the time he wrote
"My th Today," his conversion to linguistics was complete, and that
76 The Mother Figure of Structuralism: Roland Barthes
represents in 1957 an essential tuming point in his work, and more
generally: "He definitively entered linguistics the way one enters the
orders."17
Fascinated by formalism, Barthes saw in semiology the means of
elevating his work to a science. He could set content aside in favor of
formallogic. He adopted Saussure's synchronic study as weIl, and as a
result, aIl of his work took on a spatial rather than a temporal perspec-
tive: "The way in which a form is present is spatial."18 Writing Degree
,
Zero represented yet another break, therefore, for it offered a dia-
chronic approach to the relationship to writing. A myth is a particu-
lady suitable object for applying Saussurean principles: "A myth's func-
tion is to eliminate reality"; "A myth is constructed by the loss of the
historical quality of things."19 Barthes could therefore use Saussure's
valorization of synchrony as weIl as the referent's marginalization.
Barthes's form of writing, his dis crete use of a code within an ac-
cessible discourse, and his openness toward science and its critical
corollary aIl contributed to his immense popularity and success and
guaranteed him a favorably disposed reading public. Mythologies was
so successful that it went weIl beyond a normal printing run in the
social sciences: 29,650 copies were printed in the collection "Pierres
vives" and, as of 197,35,000 copies in Points-Seuil. Even the most
diverse intellectual milieus were affected, which furthered disciplinary
rapprochements. The psychoanalyst Andr Green was very interested
in Mythologies and reviewed it in Critique. He met Barthes on the
occasion of his review in 1962, although they already knew each
other through their mutual involvement in the theater in the classical
theater group at the Sorbonne. Barthes was a director of studies at the
cole des Hautes tudes
20
and asked Green to give a presentation on
Jacques Lacan in his seminar.
Which is what 1 did; it was my Lacanian period, and afterward we
had a drink in a nearby caf. Barthes leaned over toward me and
sai d, "You see those two over there, they come to aIl my seminars,
they torture me, they argue with me in a completely unpleasant way,
they want to rip me apart." He was referring to Jacques-Alain Miller
and Jean-Claude Milner.
21
A New Aesthetic
During the fifties, Barthes was also actively involved in a drama review,
Thtre populaire. He frequently saw Jean Duvignaud, Guy Dumur,
The Mother Figure of Structuralism: Roland Barthes
Bernard Dort, and Morvan Lebesque and supported Jean Vilar's Peo-
ple's National Theater, helping Vilar to attract the widest possible
public. It was within the context of this drama criticism that Barthes
saw and was impressed by a Berliner Ensemble production of Brecht's
Mother Courage at the Theater of Nations in I955, and it was a
shock. Barthes saw Brecht as the pers on who did in the a ter what he
wanted to do with literature or with contemporary myths. Brechtian
distantiation and Brecht's aestheticism completely won him over:
"Brecht rejects ... aH the sticky or participa tory theatrical styles that
lead the spectator to completely identify with Mother Courage, to be-
come lost in her."22 Barthes saw in Brecht's theater the outline of a
new ethics governing the relationship between playwright and public,
a school of responsibility, a shift from psychological pathos to a real
understanding of situations. Where the playwright showed in his rev-
olutionary, avant-garde art that it was less a question of expressing
than of implying reality, Barthes saw the very realization of the semio-
logical and critical method.
The structura li st project took off with Barthes. His influence was
unparalleled during this period, even if he took a fair bit of liberty
with respect to strict Saussurean principles or linguistic canons. But he
was more an "outsider to structuralism, fundamentally a rhetori-
cian."23 Georges Mounin considered Barthes's semiology to deviate
from Saussure, who established the rules of a semiology of commu-
nication, whereas Barthes only made a semiology of signification:
"What Barthes always wanted to do was make a symptomatology of
the bourgeois world. "24 For Georges Mounin, Barthes confused signs,
symbols, and indices. It is true that, at the time, Barthes gave the no-
tion of sign a rather broad sense, which induded everything that had
any meaning. He sought the latent content of meaning, which is why
Mounin considered it more legitimate to speak about a social psychol-
ogy or a psychosociology th an about semiology.
Even if professional linguists no longer recognized their object,
Barthes's very extensive view of language would considerably con-
tribute to the success of the linguistic model and to its role as a pilot
SCIence.
Twelve
An Epistemic Exigency
On December 4, I95I, Martial Guroult, an important historian of
philosophy, entered the Collge de France. His candidacy was given
precedence over that of Alexandre Koyr, a preference that was symp-
tomatic of the period. Koyr's philosophical project resembled that of
the Annales historians and he kept up regular contact with Lucien
Febvre. The project he submitted in his candidacy for the Collge de
France emphasized the link between the history of science and the his-
tory of mentalits, embodied at that time by Lucien Febvre in his work
on Martin Luther and Franois Rabelais, around the notion of mental
equipment: "The history of scientific thought, as 1 understand and try
to practice it, ... makes it essential to resituate works in their intellec-
tuaI and spiritual contexts, and to interpret them as a function of the
mental habits, preferences, and aversions of their authors."l Guroult,
however, proceeded less by opening a philosophical text onto a com-
prehensive historical context than by limiting himself strictly to the
mental realm. His success at being elected to the Collge de France
therefore "clearly underscores how limited the recognition of a prob-
lematics of thehistoricization of truth was during the fifties."2
Martial Guroult had been working since the thirties, removed
from media lights and unknown to the general public. In I9 5 I, he suc-
ceeded tienne Gilson to the chair of the history and technology of
philosophical systems. Beginning with his inaugural lecture (called a
lesson), Guroult argued in favor of the fundamental importance and
An Epistemic Exigency 79
a history of philosophy, des pite the perceptible
between history, presented as and philosophy, which ap-
pears, by contrast, as eternal and atemporal. Fusing the historian's
skepticism with the philosopher's dogmatism, however, made it pos-
sible for the historian of philosophy to move beyond this apparent
heterogeneity.
Martial Guroult proposed a solution that preserved the history
of philosophy by absorbing it as a simple auxiliary science in psychol-
ogy, sociology, and epistemology. He hoped that with the method-
ology of the historian he could reach and restore "the presence of a
certain real substance in each philosophy .... While ma king systems
worthy of a history, it is philosophy itself that lifts them out of histori-
cal time."3 His historical project sought to negate temporality, dia-
chrony, the se arch for relationships, and the genesis of systems. One
of the characteristic aspects of the structuralist paradigm is apparent
in the attention given essentially to synchrony, even if Guroult owed
nothing to Saussure. Guroult justified his inter est in monographs this
way, arguing that they make it possible to grasp the singular structure
of an author and of an opus in their internaI coherence. Guroult
abandoned the search for a structure of structures, but worked at
"fin ding out how each doctrine is constructed through and by means
of the intricacies of its architectonie structures."4
Guroult's Method
Take a specifie philosophical work, imagine it eut off from its roots
and from its polemical nature in order to better describe its internaI
logic, the links between its ideas, single out the lacunae and the con-
tradictions. This was the method Guroult applied to Fichte, Descartes,
and Spinoza. "One of the ways of penetrating the notion of structure
seems to me to come from Martial Guroult."
5
He had only a limited
number of followers and never established a school, but Guroult
could count several admirers, such as Gilles Gaston-Granger who was
his friend, and a few disciples, such as Victor Goldschmidt.
His method, however, corresponded to the spirit of the times and
came to constitute the very foundations of the philosophical training
of many philosophers. This was true for the young generation at the
end of the sixties. Marc Abls took Guroult's philosophy c1ass at
the cole Normale Suprieure in Saint-Cloud: "Guroult taught us to
read texts in a perspective that could be called structural. However,
80 An Epistemic Exigency
one someone was joking and his viewpoint structuralist. He
adamantly denied any similarity, considering himself to be a tradi-
tionai professor, a true historian of philosophy."6 His teaching was
supposed to make students limber for significant intellectual gymnas-
tics, and at Saint-Cloud they were subjected to "the little Guroult ex-
ercise." Beginning with a philosophical proposition, the exercise con-
sisted in demonstrating that the demonstration could have been done
another way, and more expediently. "Guroult's method was fascinat-
ing for the work done on the text, an consisted in always supposing
that it was possible to virtually reconstruct it."7 Guroult's didactic
contribution affected an entire period.
Another parameter of the structuralist paradigm that we see in
Guroult was his preference for immanence freed from causalities ex-
ogenous to the philosophical discourse, such as psychosociological
causes. Guroult therefore eut philosophical systems off from any rep-
resentational function, just as Saussure had eut the sign off from the
referent, granting these systems a fundamental autonomy from exter-
nal reality. Their interest did not lie in what he called their "intellec-
tive mission," because "what is strictly philosophical is precisely the
alitonomous reality of the work's structures."8 The historian under-
stands philosophical discours es as so many "philosophical monu-
ments insofar as they possess this intrinsic value ma king them inde-
pendent of time."9 The document becomes a monument and Michel
Foucault would later address the question of implicit architectural
analogy. Restoring a work's internaI coherence requires an exhaustive,
totalizing approach that is in harmony with and very sympathetic to
the author's theses, the architectonies of his work, and his argumenta-
tion. Guroult, in a word, defended "a holistic doctrine regarding a
work."10
Defining a philosophical work as hermetic presupposes a view of
the history of philosophy as discontinuous. Michel Foucault knew
Guroult's work well and pushed this notion in spectacular ways.
Guroult defined his methodological choices for establishing and legiti-
mating an interest in the history of philosophy in his foreword to the
work on Descartes.!l Relativism and skepticism had to be avoided,
des pite the contradictions among the systems themselves. "The histo-
rians can dispose of two techniques for this purpose: criticism, strictly
speaking, and the analysis of structures." 12
An Epistemic Exigency 8r
Guroult's Response to Modernity
Guroult's viewpoint fully reflected a period that sought meaning in
the depths of subtending structures. If critique is a necessary stage, its
task was lirnited to preparing the discovery of the structure bearing
the text's ultimate truth. Guroult therefore responded to the chal-
lenges of the social sciences and the injunction of modernity when it
shelved earlier philosophical systems based on outmoded scientific
postulates. He refused to believe that philosophy had accomplished its
task; philosophical structuralism, which defended the autonomous
reality of philosophical systems, served as a breakwater against phi-
losophy's dissolution in the social sciences. Later, others would be
bolder and take their inspiration from the same method, but they
came from the nascent human sciences and did not barricade them-
selves behind philosophicallegitimation. This was the primary reason
for the scarcity of Guroult's direct disciples. Structuralism's ringing
success had drawn his potential students to other shores; Guroult's
ambition had been strictly philosophical, echoing Fichte and Kant,
"to realize, thanks to this methodological structuralism, the Coperni-
can revolution that they had not been able to accomplish."13 He criti-
cized these two philosophers for having remained prisoners of realities
and their representations, and he proposed, by contrast, philosophical
self-sufficiency. His approach recalled the formalism of the period:
"The philosophical objective applied to the objects of the history of
philosophy . . . is a way of envisaging the material of this history,
which is to say the systems as objects that have a value in themselves,
a reality that belongs only to them and can be explained by them
alone."14 To the linguists' hermetically closed text, Guroult answered
with the closure of the philosophical system on itself.
The other link between Guroult and the structuralist phenome-
non is the insignificance of the philosophical personality behind the
system: intentionality, intersubjectivity, the dialogue begun by the
creation of an oeuvre are aIl eliminated in the same way that Saussure
and Hjelmslev eliminated the consciousness of the speaking subject
from their linguistics. In a certain sense, and even if Guroult succes-
sively exarnined Fichte, Descartes, and Spinoza, "we no longer read
philosophers, there is no longer any community or intersubjectivity
with thern." The relationship is one of discontinuity and of a maxi-
mum distantiation from a logic whose coherence-internaI to the au-
82 An Epistemic Exigency
thor and external ta the reader-must be restored. Decentering
subject made it possible ta undertake sorne particularly productive re-
search that defines the manner in which concepts are constituted and
validated. Here again, we can recaIl the importance of this philosophi-
cal orientation for Michel Foucault.
Epistemology Above AlI
This impetus gave epistemology a broader meaning. From a strict re-
flection on scientific procedures it came to consider the social realm
and to establish a real dialectic with ideology. The structuralist period
was also one of epistemological reflection. Disciplines questioned their
objects and the validity of their concepts and scientific ambitions;
scholars tended to abandon philosophy for the social sciences, as Lvi-
Strauss had done, and he was not alone. One of the great epistemolo-
gists of the period, Jean Piaget, also abandoned philosophy: "The unity
of science, our common goal, ... can only take place at the expense of
philosophy .... The sciences have aIl dissociated themselves from phi-
losophy, from mathematics at the time of the Greeks to experimental
psychology toward the end of the nineteenth century."15 Sorne seemed
to think that being freed of philosophy's tutelage was necessary to put
the social sciences on an equal footing with the exact sciences. Piaget
proposed to eliminate aIl questioning from the social sciences, beyond
their specific objects, which would produce something like meta-
physics. The sole criterion was to increase knowledge in a given realm.
Piaget did, however, distinguish himself from the general paradigm by
his interest in the historicity of ideas, and his structura li sm can there-
fore be caIled genetic, as in his theory of the evolution of infantile per-
ception, which, he argued, goes through several stages that he saw as
so many systems of transformation aIlowing the child to assimilate
new patterns and new perceptual structures.1
6
Each of these stages in-
cluded a moment of equilibrium.
Epistemological thinking in the social sciences depended on the
changes occurring in the hard sciences, where the same formalist
inflection was evident. The most striking example is the evolution in
mathematics with the Bourbaki group's creation of the famous mod-
ern math of the fifties and sixties. Mathematics was applied to groups
of elements of an unspecified nature, and was deduced from axioms of
the mother structures. The prototype was algebraic structure, the
group was the ordering structure, and finally, there was the topologi-
An Epistemic Exigency 83
structure. These structural models were as present in Lvi-
Strauss's work, through the mediation of Andr Weil, as in Jacques
Lacan's work in the topology of Borromean knots and his graphs. But,
in a more broadly metaphorical manner and as a scientific condition,
the social sciences were nourished by a logico-mathematical discourse
that made it possible to generalize and to explain processes of self-
regulation beyond the examples in question. Other disciplines also
contributed: biology, and experimental psychology with its Gestalt
theory, and cybernetics, which permits the perfect regulation and
therefore preservation of a structure.
But the most important intellectual epistemological phenomenon
of the thirties occurred elsewhere. The connection between the for-
malism of the hard sciences and logical positivism was being elabo-
rate d, on the one hand, with the Vienna Cirele, around Moritz Schlick
and Rudolf Carnap, and on the other hand, at Cambridge, England,
around Bertrand Russell, as well as with the work of Ludwig Wittgen-
stein, who was tied as much to the Vienna Cirele as to Bertrand Rus-
sell, whom he joined in Cambridge in 1911. These logicians argued
for a unified and coded science, based on formallogic, using a purely
deductive method. They proposed a formalization that offered a com-
mon goal for all the sciences, integrating mathematics as one among
other languages. Since logic has no particular content, it could provide
a common framework to account for the uni versa lit y of structures.
The Vienna Cirele favored language insofar as the first philosophical
problem lies at the level of meaning: logic would bec orne its tool and
language its essential object. The legacy of this double logical and lin-
guistic thrust was called analytic philosophy.
This renewal of logic together with an effervescent theorizing in
Europe left France on the sidelines. "France was blocked by the com-
bined actions of Poincar and Brunschvicg."17 Whence a lag in the
teaching of logic, which was not ineluded in schools of letters, nor in
the teaching of philosophy, contrary to what was going on elsewhere.
Bearing this in mind, semiotics in the sixties can be seen as an ersatz of
this logic that escaped the French.
Cavaills: Philosophy of the Concept
There was, however, a French philosopher, an epistemologist, whose
object of predilection was mathematics and who was associated with
the beginnings of the Vienna Cirele: Jean Cavaills. But history would
84 An Epistemic Exigency
interrupt the course of his work and his life very and brutally.
Cavaills died a hero of the Resistance un der Nazi fire in I944 at age
fort y-one. Science was for him demonstration, which is to say logic,
and he called this the philosophy of the concept. This notwithstand-
ing, Cavaills did not adhere to the Vienna Cirele's extreme formalism
and ambition of constructing a grand logic in which mathematics
would find its problems resolved. His project was to understand the
operation/object dichotomy, the gesture that created the linking of
mental operations and that he called ''-the idea of the idea." The fate
of his thought, however, would suffer the consequences of his brutal
demise. Cavaills's theses were dramatically resuscitated twenty years
after his death by the success of the structura li st paradigm, and he can
be credited with having laid the theoretical bases for the conceptual
structuralism of the sixties.
In the work that he was writing while a German prisoner of war,
and which came out after the war, Cavaills introduced the concept of
structure.1
8
His idea of structure was already the same as the ide a of
structure that triumphed after the existentialist parenthesis. Cavaills
favored structure to radically contest philosophies of consciousness.
Inspired by Spinoza, Cavaills sought to construct a philosophy with-
out a subject, and he already faulted Husserl's phenomenology for
giving too much importance to the cogito. Here again we see the for-
mali st orientation that allowed science, according to Cavaills, to
escape the reign of the ambient world and common experience. The
structure's truth can only be given by the very rules governing it; there
is no structure of structure, no metalanguage. If exogenous elements
are to be eliminated from structural analysis, the autonomous and
original movement of science unfolding its own laws must be found.
And this elosure, this strict autonomization of science, which cons id-
ers only its discursive coherence, must be observed. Here aga in we see
the parallel with Guroult's approach to philosophical texts as well as
to semiological formalism.
Bachelard and the Rupture
Despite Cavaills's death, epistemological reflection continued in the
immediate postwar period, thanks to Gaston Bachelard, who was
profoundly influential for a very wide public. Bachelard explored the
possibility of constituting a science of science by following the proce-
dures and respecting the laws that constitute the sciences themselves.
An Epistemic Exigency 85
An entire realm of reflection thus became available to epistemology,
but sorne of its investment in the human subject, in experience, and in
life must be relinquished. Here, closure is presented as an epistemo-
logical rupture that is necessary to make way for the very procedures
of rigorous thought.
Bachelard attacked evolutionism and proposed relativism. Rela-
tivism made it possible to restore a view of scientific development as a
long progression, full of inventions as well as mistakes and mistaken
paths. In a postwar period that was essentially existentialist, Bachelard
remained rather isolated, but his idea of an epistemological rupture
had considerable impact later. Louis Althusser adopted and reinforced
it in his reading of Marx, and Michel Foucault used it in his discontin-
uous notion of history.
Canguilhem's Seminal Role
The man who succeeded Bachelard at the Sorbonne in 1955 was less
well known. Georges Canguilhem was, however, to play a major role
in the epistemological thinking of the period. Bachelard's legacy of
reflection on the sciences became his and he directed the Institut
d'Histoire des Sciences at the University of Paris. The contrast be-
tween the two men was striking, however. "Bachelard was a wine-
grower from Burgundy who overflowed with vitality, whereas Can-
guilhem was hard, a man of high interior tension, a Cathar by virtue
of his rigor."19 Admitted to the cole Normale Suprieure in 1924,
Georges Canguilhem was a student of Alain. From 1936 on, he taught
at a high school in Toulouse where he was in charge of the khgne.
"When 1 got to Canguilhem's class in Toulouse, in 1940,1 wanted to
study classics. Canguilhem was giving a class on the Copernican
revolution throughout history, starting with Kant. When 1 discovered
this guy, 1 said to myself, 1 don't give a damn about literature, 1 want
to study philosophy. "20 During that period, Canguilhem began to
study medicine. He was a pacifist, first, and therefore a loyal disciple
of Alain, but he understood the danger represented by Hitler in
1934-35, and had renounced his pacifism, with the "realization that
Hitler could not be tolerated."21 He immediately made an important
choice in favor of the Resistance. In a France that was essentially pro-
Ptain in 1940, Canguilhem refused aU allegiance to the Vichy govern-
ment. "1 did not pass the philosophy agrgation to teach Work, Fam-
ily, Country,"22 he immediately told Robert Deltheil, the rector of the
An Epistemic Exigency
Acadmie de Toulouse. He joined the Resistance and worked actively
for the Liberation-South network. He was very much affected by the
Second World War, but the battle he waged did not encourage his op-
timism and he maintained and transmitted a profound pessimism. His
was a "tonic pessimism," however, which did not prevent him from
taking action.
23
The road toward pro of was fiIled with trials and death stole dou-
bly near. During the war and in the medical studies Canguilhem
undertook, he was led to think about the proximity between health
and illness, life and death, reason and madness. Defending his thesis,
"An Essay on Problems concerning the Normal and the Pathologi-
cal,"24 in 1943, he became the epistemologist of medical knowledge:
"The present work is an effort ta integrate sorne medical methods and
advances into philosophical speculation. "25
He questioned the notion of the normal, and demonstrated the
fragility of the limits between rational and irrational, arguing that it
was useless ta seek a founding moment for the norm, even in sorne
Bachelardian break. Canguilhem ta ok a Nietzschean perspective, re-
jecting aIl evolutionist views of the continuaI progress of science and
reason. In place of the historicist discourse on the construction of
medical knowledge, he proposed a search for the conceptual and insti-
tutional configurations that made it possible to delineate between nor-
mal and pathological. His project led him, therefore, to reject any di-
alectical, Hegelian vision. "Canguilhem could not stand Hegel."26 The
idea of historical progress was foreign to him, and was the basis of the
pessimism in his philosophy. If the trauma of the Second World War
lay at the root of his historical despair, Canguilhem had reason for this
shaking up of the idea of progress, the consequences of the invention
of the steam engine, the principles of energy loss, and therefore
Carnot's principle: "Fire's motor force ... has contributed to the deca-
dence of the idea of progress by importing concepts developed by the
founders of thermodynamics into philosophy .... One quickly saw
death on the other side of energy loss. "27
The same princip le illustrated Canguilhem's method and led him
to cross disciplinary boundaries and to seek out epistemic coherence
within the same period. His transversal cuts established what Michel
Foucault later caIled epistemes. Foucault was a direct heir to Canguil-
hem, who recognized him as such when he reviewed The Order of
Things for Critique. At the end of his presentation of Foucault's work,
An Epistemic Exigency 87
Canguilhem asked what Cavaills meant when he caUed for a philoso-
phy of the concept, and he wondered if structuralism might not be an
answer. Although he referred to Lvi-Strauss and to Dumzil, Michel
Foucault was, for him, the philosopher of the concept for the future.
Michel Foucault, for his part, emphasized the importance of Can-
guilhem's teaching for him and for aU the philosophers of his period:
"Take away Canguilhem and you will no longer understand much
about a whole series of discussions that took place among the French
Marxists, nor will you see the specificity of sociologists such as Bour-
dieu, Castel, Passeron ... You will miss an entire aspect of the theo-
retical work being done in psychoanalysis, and particularly by the
Lacanians. "28
The Sites of Scientific Discourse
Canguilhem fundamentally changed the traditional inquiry about the
question of origins, which became a way of asking about the site or
the institutional setting of a discourse. He established a correlation be-
tween a discourse and the institutional setting that both made it possi-
ble and constituted its legitimacy. Canguilhem's research on determin-
ing the conditions making the enunciation of scientific knowledge
possible oriented Michel Foucault's work on asylums, prisons, and
madness.
Canguilhem also broke with the notion of cumulative scientific
progress. He argued for a discontinuist approach within which the in-
ternaI frontiers of scientific knowledge were constantly displaced, suc-
cessively recast, and reorganized. The history of science was no longer
the progressive elucidation or step-by-step unveiling of truth, but was
rather marked by aporias and failures. "For Canguilhem, error is the
permanent accident around which the history of man's life and his fu-
ture are wound. "29 Through his search for the bases of the validity of
concepts, Canguilhem opened up a vast field of study and brought to
light the relationship between the ways in which different sciences
constructed their knowledge and their institutional and social reali-
ties. As a result, there was a fruitful opening in philosophical to socio-
historical concerns. Canguilhem's influence was also very important
for the Althusserian movement. Of course, the attempt to revivify
Marxist concepts was rather removed from reflections on pathology,
but in both fields of study the issue was the status of science and the
validity of its ide as.
88 An Epistemic Exigency
Pierre Macherey wrote the first in-depth study of Canguilhem's
work in January 1964 and correctly evaluated its importance.3
0
Louis
Althusser himself introduced Macherey's article and welcomed this re-
newal of epistemological thought that broke not only with descrip-
tive, scientific chronicles but also with the idealist approach to the his-
tory of scientific progress, whether mechanistic (d'Alembert, Diderot,
Condorcet) or dialectical (Hegel, Husserl). Canguilhem represented a
revolution in the history of science, which Pierre Macherey enthusias-
tically saluted: "With the work of G._Canguilhem, we possess, in the
strong sense of the term, and not according to the specialized meaning
that Freud gave it-which is to say, in its objective and rational mean-
ing-the analysis of a history."31
Canguilhem's antipsychologist positions reinforced the Lacanian
rupture in psychoanalysis as well. He essentially made war on psy-
chology and attacked its positivism by deconstructing its disciplinary
edifice to demonstrate that there were many psychologies,32 He tried
to destabilize psychology as a discipline by showing that its knowl-
edge was not cumulative and that it brought incompatible paradigms
together. Later, in the name of an archaeology and in an analogous
way, Michel Foucault took on history itself. Georges Canguilhem also
challenged the ethics of psychology by asking whether it was in the
service of science or of the police. This mix of questioning, sociologi-
cal as well as from the point of view of the history of science and
moral consciousness, resulted in a productive French historical epis-
temology, but "you have to see that Canguilhem's reflections on psy-
chology are not epistemological as epistemology is understood every-
where else in France. "33 Georges Canguilhem was an important
initiator of a specifically French critical project and we see his influ-
ence in the work done during the structuralist period, even if he pre-
ferred to remain in the shadows of the paradigm to whose birth he
greatly contributed.
Michel Serres's Loganalysis
This philosophy of the concept, as Cavaills wished it to be named,
underwent a spectacular renewal with Michel Serres's work. Cavail-
ls's and Canguilhem's thinking converged in Serres, who sought out
the characteristic epistemic models of a period regardless of discipli-
nary boundaries. The history of science became a series of stages, of
synchronic cuts: the paradigm of the fixed point and Leibniz's har-
An Epistemic Exigency 89
monics was followed by the modern age in which thermodynamics
served as a model not only for all the sciences, but also for mentalits,
for literature, and for all visions of the world that are completely per-
meated by the dominant models. Serres could therefore see the princi-
pIes of thermodynamics in Zola's Rougon-Macquart. As a result, an-
other division became possible. Rather than being divided, scientific
knowledge and fiction could be joined by their support for the domi-
nant paradigm of the period. Mythology encountered science just as
the pathological intersected the normal for Canguilhem: "Myths are
full of knowledge and knowledge full of dreams and illusions."34
Error once again became consubstantial with truth.
Michel Serres was doubtless the first philosopher to have de-
fined a comprehensive and explicitly structuralist program in philos-
ophy, as early as 196I.35 What he discerned in the critical use of a
notion of structure imported from mathematics was the end of a sec-
ond revolution in the twentieth century. For Serres, the symbolist
nineteenth century culminated in Gaston Bachelard and the substi-
tution of archetypal elements-fire, water, earth-for archetypal he-
roes. Structuralism opened a new era and Serres baptized its method
"logoanalysis." 36
Logoanalysis sought to purify structure of all meaningful content,
cutting it off from any semantic content. "A structure is an opera-
tional group with an indefinite meaning, bringing together any number
of elements with an unspecified content, and a finite number of rela-
tionships of an unspecified nature but whose function and certain re-
sults concerning the elements are defined."37 Structural analysis would
be located above meaning, contrary to a symbolic analysis, which
would be crushed beneath it; whence a Kantian notion of structure to
which Michel Serres adhered by distinguishing between structure and
model, as Kant distinguished between noumenon and phenomenon.
This 1961 text promised a very ambitious philosophical program, for
although the method came from modern mathematics, it was ex-
portable to all other problematic fields. A common paradigm, which
Serres called loganalysis, based on cultural accumulation and disper-
sion, could therefore encompass all realms of knowledge, from myths
to mathematics. For Serres, this conceptual advance also made it pos-
sible to once again renew ties with classicism's abstraction and to
"understand suddenly the Greek miracle of mathematics and the
delirious flowering of their mythology,"38 thanks to the disappearance
90 An Epistemic Exigency
of the seholastic partition separating letters from science, ta
the universality and the historie transversality of the projeet.
In 1960, Merleau-Ponty was defining his phenomenological pro-
gram, and in 1961, Michel Serres was preparing to send the struc-
turalist program into orbit. It would really take off in the sixties.
Thirteen
A Rebel Named Jacques Lacan
Where Roland Barthes evokes the shimmering image of structuralism,
Jacques Lacan is the abrupt other face of the binary framework char-
acterizing the structuralist paradigm, an incarnation of the severe
father ever tending toward greater scientificity in order to defend ana-
lytic practice. Lacan's influence during the sixties was already spec-
tacular even before the major part of his work was written, for the
Jacques Lacan readers discovered in his crits of I966 had already
been engaged in a rupture begun in the early fifties.
The unconscious was at the center of the structuralist paradigm,
but not only because of the spread of psychoanalytic therapy. It was
present in Lvi-Strauss's anthropology as weIl as in Saussure's distinc-
tion between language and speech. The unconscious enjoyed an im-
portance during this period that favored its expanding influence, and
Lacan benefited from this situation.
Lacan was born into a Catholic family but renounced his faith
rather early on. To symbolize the break, he dropped part of his first
name: Jacques-Marie became known simply as Jacques. Later, it be-
came clear that this change did not suffice for breaking with a
Catholic tradition that suffused a good part of his rereading of Freud.
This was the first of many ruptures for Lacan, however, as he moved
through different areas of knowledge that nourished his chosen field
of specialization-initiaIly neuropsychiatry, and later psychoanalysis.
As early as the beginning of the thirties, Lacan embraced aIl forms
92 A Rebel Named Jacques Lacan
of modernity, dadaism in the arts to Hegelian thinking in poli ti-
cal philosophy. He took Kojve's dasses at the cole des Hautes
tudes. "Kojve's teaching exerted an influence over Lacan in the lit-
erai sense of the word."l Lacan retained a number of Kojve's lessons
on the Hegelian dialectic, particularly on the master/slave relation-
ship, and above all his reading of Hegel, emphasizing man's decenter-
ing as well as that of consciousness, Hegel's critique of metaphysics,
and the priority given to the notion of desire. This notion of desire
was particularly dear at the heart of Lacanian theory, which reflected
Kojve's reading of Hegel accoiding to which "human history is the
history of desired desires."2 Thanks to Kojve, Lacan could daim that
to desire is not to des ire the other, but to des ire the desire of the other.
If Hegel's teaching informed Lacan's rereading of Freud, his altogether
singular mode of writing resulted above all from his interest in and as-
sociation with the surrealists. He was a friend of Ren Crevel, had met
Andr Breton, saluted the surrealist renewal in Salvador Dali, and, in
1939, he began to live with Georges Bataille's first wife, Sylvia, whom
he married in 1953.
As early as 1930, Lacan was already quite attentive ta the study
of writing in his psychiatrie practice. He describes the case of a certain
Marcelle, a thirty-four-year-old erotomaniac and paranoid teacher
who believed she was Joan of Arc and imagined that her mission was
to rein vigo rate the morals of her time. In or der to de scribe the struc-
ture of her paranoia, Lacan began by examining the semantics and
style of her letters.3 Later, his analysis of Aime established a decisive
change because, as a student of Clrambault, he refused to integrate
Freudian theory into psychiatry's organicism, and thus reversed the tra-
ditional relationship between psychiatry and psychoanalysis. He in-
troduced "the primacy of the unconscious in dinical study."4 The case
of the psychotic Papin sisters again underscored the idea of the un-
conscious as the constituent structure of the Other, as a radical alterity
of oneself.
In 1932, Lacan defended his doctoral thesis, "On Paranoia in its
Relationship with Personality,"5 which wou Id have a resounding im-
pact well beyond psychiatrie cirdes. Georges Bataille and Boris Sou-
varine immediately noticed and discussed it in La Critique Sociale.
6
Lacan broke with all forms of organicism, and integrated paranoia,
whose structure he defined, into Freudian categories. Structure, how-
ever, cannot be the product of a phenomenologie al approach to per-
A Rebel NamedJacques Lacan 93
sonality: "The specifically human meaning of human behavior is
never as clear as when it is compared to animal behavior."7 As early as
his thesis, we can discuss Lacan's return to Freud. He did not return in
order to repeat Freud's lessons, but rather to develop them, particu-
larly concerning an are a that Freud had given up: psychosis. Because
for Lacan, psychoanalysis could only be useful if it could account for
psychosis.
The Lacan of the the sis was not yet the author of the crits, how-
ever, in his geneticism. Influenced by Hegel, Lacan believed that a per-
sonality is constituted in successive stages until it reaches what he
called the complete personality. This progressive construction resem-
bles the transparency of the triumph of rationality at the end of his-
tory for Hegel. This moment was therefore still very much a "tribu-
tary of geneticism; . . . the first important Lacanian doctrine is an
absolutely genetic doctrine."8 In Marienbad in I936, Lacan had the
opportunity to express this genetic perspective at the Fourteenth Inter-
national Psychoanalytic Congress, with his "The Mirror Stage."9 At
that point, Lacan was influenced by the psychologist Henri Wallon,
with whom he would later part ways.
At the beginning of the thirties, Wallon held that a qualitative
stage existed in the child's transition from the imaginary to the sym-
bolic, a process Lacan also described, but which he shifted to the un-
conscious. This process entails a fundamental moment in which the
child discovers the image of his own body, an identification making it
possible for the ego to be structured and for the child to move beyond
the prior stage of a fragmented body. Psychotics do not make this
transition but remain mired in a state of subjective dispersion, forever
disintegrated. Like the Hegelian dialectic, the child's mirror stage,
which occurs between the age of six and eight months, has three mo-
ments. First, the child sees his image reflected in the mirror as that of
another that he attempts to understand; here he remains in the imagi-
nary. Second, "the child is suddenly led to discover that the other in
the mirror is not a real being, but an image."10 Finally, the child real-
izes his primordial identification in a third moment, when he realizes
that this image he recognizes is his own. But this passage is premature
for the child to come to know its own body: "This is nothing more
than an imaginary recognition."l1 As a result, the subject will consti-
1
tute his identity on the basis of an imaginary alienation, the victim of
the traps of his spatial identification.
A Rebel Named Jacques Lacan
In I936 moment was presented as a stage, or in the Wal-
lonian, genetic sense. Lacan addressed it again in his lecture at the
International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zurich, in I949, but this
time his reading was more structura li st than genetic. Indeed, if Lacan
kept the term "stage" ("The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Func-
tian of the Ego as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience"),12 he no
longer saw it as a moment in a genetic process but as a founding
matrix of identification, of the relationship established by the subject
between exteriority and interiority sesulting in a "configuration that
cannot be superseded."13 "Stage" therefore no longer corresponded
to what Lacan described. Through this imaginary identification, the
child was already structured for the future, trapped by what he be-
lieved to be his identity, which rendered any future attempt for the
subject to gain access to itself impossible. The image of an ego refers
to another self.
As of the postwar period, therefore, Lacan emphasized the split
between the conscious and the unconscious, based on two registers
with the one exterior to the other: one's own being inevitably eludes
being, the world, and consciousness. This stage became the key mak-
ing the split between imaginary and the symbolic possible, the first
milestone along the path of the subject's alienation. "We can see in
Jacques Lacan's 'Mirror Stage' a veritable structuralist crossroads. "14
There is a discernible double influence in this new approach. On the
one hand, structural linguistics and Saussure, whom Lacan had dis-
covered just after the war thanks to Lvi-Strauss, and, on the other,
Heideggerian themes, which took up where Hegelian dialectics left
off. The future post-Mirror Stage construction of the ego, always in-
creasingly eluding the forever decentered subject, corresponded to
Heidegger's essence of Being, lost a little bit more each day as Being is
forgotten: "The progressive discordance between the ego and being
will be emphasized throughout the psyche's history."15
As of I949, therefore, Lacan was part of the structuralist para-
digm even before his explicit reference to Saussure in 1953; the Mirror
Stage, presented as an initial and irreversible structure that can no
longer function other than by its own laws, eluded historicity. Pro-
gressing from one structure to another was impossible; it was possible
only to live with the structure. As of this point, Lacan completely
abandoned any Hegelian notion of a possible complete personality
that knows itself, which he had articulated in his thesis. The initial
A Rebel Named Jacques Lacan 95
structure can never be surpassed by any possible dialectic. The uncon-
scious escapes historicity in the same way that it leaves the cogito and
self-consciousness in the illusions of the imago. Lacan once more took
his distance from the Hegelian dialectic of desire as desire for recog-
nition, which for him belonged to the imaginary, and therefore to
demand rather than to desire, which only finds its proper place in
the unconscious. Lacan adopted Freud's notion of a divided subject,
developing its implicit critique of the Hegelian notion of absolute
knowledge, considered illusory. "1 would even say that from begin-
ning to end, Lacan makes a critique, and the most use fuI possible, of
Hegelianism." 16
ln 1956, Lacan took issue with his master and the representative
of Hegelianism, Jean Hyppolite, by presenting psychoanalysis as the
possible successor not only of Hegelianism, but of philosophy. Hyp-
polite had given a presentation in Lacan's seminar at the beginning of
the fifties, which was published with Lacan's answerP At issue was
the translation of the concept of denegation, or Verneinung. Hyppo-
lite refused the underlying psychologism, which presupposes a judg-
ment made in the internaI tension between affirmation and denial. His
reading aimed at integrating Freudianism as a constituent stage of
logos, of the Spirit as Hegel saw it in history; he "wanted, finally, to
show how Freud's work could be included in a phenomenology of
the contemporary mind. He was ingeniously constructing a new figure
of the mind, that of a denegating consciousness. "18 For Lacan, Freud
was Hegel's future.
Scansion
19
Lacan innovated theoretically and clinicaily. But the step he took
made him a rebel, a psychoanalyst broken off from the official organi-
zation, the Socit Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). He spoke before
the SPP on a number of occasions in the early fifties to justify his prac-
tice of varying the length of his sessions. The issue was to dialectize
the transferential relationship by interrupting the session by a scan-
sion, or pointed break, listening for the patient's meaningful word and
using it to end the session, rather abruptly.
These sessions quickly came to scandalize, ail the more so be-
cause, as the SPP pointed out, they varied in length but were more
often short, and ev,en very short. Lacan's practice became the golden
apple of discord with the official psychoanalytic institution. In this re-
96 A Rebel Named Jacques Lacan
spect, Lacan completely participated in the structuralist of
breaking with the academicisms in power. Of course, with these very
short sessions he could earn a maximum amount of money in a mini-
mal amount of time. Analysis became more lucrative than being a
company president, which was one way among others of legitimating
the profession socially and making it possible for analysts to earn a
fortune. Lacan's taste for money became legendary: "If you went out
to the movies with Lacan, you had to go ta Fouquet's and have caviar.
Why caviar? Because that was the mostexpensive thing on the menu,"
remarks Wladimir Granoff with a smile.
20
(As a Russian, he preferred
whole caviar.) In a period of Taylorism, Lacan had a very highly devel-
oped sense of an hourly wage. Sorne, however, believed this to be a
particularly revealing principle of Lacan's thinking, one of the mas-
ter's most important contributions: "Scansion, punctuation, that's
what allows an utterance to be structured. What is punctuation? It is
the other's time. It is what makes the intervention fundamental, in
that it is articulated with the other's time. Without punctuation, the
patient talks aH by himself. "21
These short sessions also had the advantage of letting Lacan mul-
tiply the number of patients he saw. He wanted to gain a following
outside of the school and train a generation of analysts, ma king them
loyal disciples to his didactic teaching by involving them in a transfer-
ential relationship of total affective dependency on him. So short ses-
sions had a market value and provided the means of consolidating the
Lacanian rupture. This practice, moreover, goes back to the analytic
cure as Freud himself understood it. Freud did not listen to patients in
the same way that Lacan did; indeed, there is no mention of the idea
of scansion, but "he let certain therapies last three or six months ... ,
which amounts to the same idea, that of the head of a school who
launches his theory on the market."22 Lacan would later be excluded
from the SPP because of this practice, and would thus find himself the
head of a school. Freud and Lacan therefore shared the sense of a need
for a certain proselytism. Long sessions for a short time or short ses-
sions for a long time, the goal is more or less the same. Today, even
outside the cole de la Cause Freudienne (ECF), sorne grant the prin-
ciple of scansion sorne legitimacy, considering that the unconscious is
structured like a language. "We can altogether agree that a well-
placed scansion intervenes in what the patient is saying, and points to
something while at the same time momentarily stopping his speech in
A Rebel Named Jacques Lacan 97
the analytic session," Jol Dor remarks, while regretting that this weU-
founded and fruitful idea of sessions of varying length was system-
aticaUy transformed into extremely short sessions because of unac-
knowledged financial reasons.
23
Others, like Wladimir Granoff, believed that the only thing re-
sponsible for the practice was Lacan's experience shortly after the war
of being unable to resist the desire to put a patient out. Lacan later re-
proached himself for having yielded to his impatience and worried
about whether or not his patient would return. At the appointed hour,
the patient was on his couch. "On that day, the world changes. It
changes in the same way each time an analyst does something that
transgresses. "24 Lacan then began to shorten his sessions, seeing each
time that nothing incited his patients to leave him at aU. Beyond this
personal experience, these short sessions as a therapeutic doctrine
"were not at aIl interesting, they harmed no one, they never helped
anyone, and are not a crime. "25
Rereading Freud
The results were impressive. An entire generation of analysts was pro-
foundly influenced by Lacan, not only by his seminars, but also, and
even more so, by their time on his couch. Short sessions were in-
dispensable if Lacan was to have such a wide influence and was to
intensify the transferential relationship. In I947, at a moment of
great moral distress, Jean Clavreul began an analysis with Lacan. "He
was the only one who could listen to me in the way 1 needed. He was
someone who metaphorized problems. "26 Serge Leclaire met Franoise
Dolto, who sent him to Lacan, and he began an analysis in I949 that
lasted until I953. Leclaire thus became "the first Lacanian in his-
tory. "27 If sorne began a relationship with Lacan on the basis of a
transferential relationship, others ended up on his couch after having
gone to his seminars. Claude Cont is one such example. He was in
training in psychiatry but was dissatisfied as much by psychiatry as by
the way in which Freud was being read. He discovered Lacan in I957
and took his seminars. From that point on, he reread Freud and, like a
whole generation, returned to Freud in the way that Lacan was advo-
cating. He then spent ten years on Lacan's couch, from I959 to I969.
Reading/rereading Freud was one of Lacan's major contributions.
Freudian thinking regained its notoriety and a second wind at a time
98 A Rebel Named Jacques Lacan
ln the fifties when "it was fashionable to consider Freud as a re-
spectable ancestor, but he was no longer read. "28
Lacan, therefore, made the return to Freud possible. He took the
place of the Father who pronounces his Law thanks to his charisma,
his distribution of sinecures, and his beknighting of vas saIs at the risk
of transforming sorne of his loyal followers into simple mimetic repro-
ductions of himself. But at the same time, Lacan ensured the une on-
tested success of psychoanalytic discipline in France, for at that point,
it entered something of a golden age.
Fourteen
Rome CaUs (19 5 3 ):
The Return ta Freud
If General de Gaulle became a politician thanks to his rallying cry of
June 18, 1940, Lacan was consecrated by his Rome address of Sep-
tember 1953. But we too often forget that Lacan was initially a psy-
chiatrist, and in this respect the positions he took need to be set in the
discipline's epistemological context. In the thirties an important de-
bate on cerebral topology in aphasia was being carried on between
those who held that the are a of the brain responsible for the language
problem could be determined and those who disagreed, arguing that
the brain had to be considered as a whole. Psychiatry was at stake.
1
Goldstein, using the theses of Gestalttheorie, rejected the reduction-
ism of what for him amounted to functionally localizing a problem
within the brain. He took a structural stance according to which neu-
ronal changes affect aU cerebral operations. The debate continued
beyond the psychiatric world. In 1942, Merleau-Ponty published The
Structure of Behavior,2 in which he defended Goldstein's position. The
idea of structure, though unlike the one used during the structuralist
period, was thus already a central topic in the context where Lacan, a
young psychiatrist, was working.
Psychiatry remained important for Lacan, not only because of his
early training, but also because of his very strong friendship with
Henri Ey, who became the pope of psychiatry. Ey worked in hospitals,
and became the chief doctor responsible for psychiatric hospitals. He
accepted a position near Chartres, in the old abbey of Bonneval,
99
IOO Rome CaUs (1953): The Return ta Freud
which he transformed into a forum for important theoretical encoun-
ters. Ey organized regular colloquia where psychiatrists and psycho-
analysts met. He was, moreover, responsible for training an entire
young generation of psychiatrists. "He had considerable moral weight
as a result, and became the man behind the idea of structure in psychia-
try. The rest of us, young psychiatrists at the time, therefore became
completely familiar with structural thinking at a time when structural-
ism was ta king off, only the structuralism that was attracting all the
attention had nothing to do with that."!
Claude Dumzil, the son of Georges, is a symptomatic example of a
conversion from psychiatry to psychoanalysis in the mid-fifties. A stu-
dent both of Henri Ey and of Daniel Lagache, Dumzil was dissatisfied
with psychiatry, which was caught between phenomenological con-
cerns, a psychologizing discourse, and a pharmacological wing. Feeling
that he was at an impasse, he discovered Lacan's seminars at Sainte-
Anne in 1954: "His was really a discourse that stood out from the oth-
ers."4 As a result, he began reading Freud's complete works. Lacan's
words had the effect of "a strong mental aphrodisiac; it got you work-
ing."5 Not only was Lacan's discourse theoretically valuable, but it was
also consistent with his clinical experience as a practitioner. For his au-
dience, it played the role of free association and interpretation. This cir-
cularity also allowed Lacan to control the transferential relationship
with his public. His words had an impact beyond their meaning, some-
thing that he could theorize. A neophyte at the time, Claude Dumzil
remarks: "When 1 got to Lacan's seminar in 1954-55, he was already
speaking about the name of the father and 1 heard the father's no.
6
1
understand nothing about the issues, but even then 1 was completely on
target."7 50 much so that he began an analysis with Lacan shortly there-
after, in 1958. But when Dumzil was on the couch, he discovered a dif-
ferent dimension of Lacan. "It was horrible; suddenly the brilliant char-
acter became as mute as a carp, the seductive man ripped off your
dough. It was no longer theoretical; 1 was being bled."8 Lacan's rejec-
tion of psychologism made his discourse seductive, but it was also re-
sponsible for the cross he had to bear and for his definitive conversion to
psychoanalysis. The same was true for many psychiatrists of the period.
A N ecessary Lea p
But what was happening in psychoanalysis during the mid-fifties?
Freudian thinking seemed to be going in a direction that imperiled its
Rome CaUs (1953): The Return to Freud IOI
own identity. "The Freudianism we had in 1950 was a sort of medical
biological mixture."9 This tendency toward biologizing the psycho-
analytic break was rooted in Freud's work itself, and could be based
on his phylogeneticism, but Freud remained a prisoner of the posi-
tivism of his period in that respect. Nonetheless, the dominant reading
of Freud in France in the fifties equated drive with instinct, desire with
need. Freud was acknowledged as a good doctor who took care of
neurotics with acknowledged skill. There was a double risk, therefore:
psychoanalysis could lose its object, the unconscious, to a dynamic
psychology, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, every kind of
pathology could become a medical problem and psychoanalysis could
be absorbed by psychiatry. Lacan's intervention, therefore, created a
leap of almost GauIlian dimensions: "His arrivaI on the scene was
without a doubt eminently salutary. He stopped a sort of tide of
sludge, of illiterate imbecilities in which the official French school of
analysis was slogging around."10
Wladimir Granoff illustra tes the state of perdition of analytic
thinking in the grips of mortal metastases, with an example of a post-
war rule in analytic practice according to which missed sessions had
to be paid for. The principles determining this practice were not at
aIl secondary, however, but on the contrary, they had an axiomatic
value.
Just after the war, 1 began a supervisory analysis with someone in
whom Parisian society had invested its greatest hopes, Maurice
Bouvet. 1 was part of the first generation of his supervisees. During
one group supervision, a colleague described the case of a patient
who was sick at the moment and was therefore not coming to his
sessions. What to do? Bouvet, this great theoretician, after having
thought it over carefully, answered: we can make him pay up to
a temperature of 101 degrees, but not beyond. Obviously, it was a
probe, a thermometer in the discipline's ass. Bouvet was, however,
a worthy representative of the discipline, convincing and eminent.
ll
Here, as elsewhere, Lacan's intervention was salutary because, in
addition to his theoretical inspiration, he brought solid scientific guar-
antees to analytic practice, strict operational rules that aIlowed him to
argue for the scientific autonomy of psychoanalysis with a procedural
clarity that validated its degree of scientificity. Cleaning up psycho-
analytic thinking and practice was significant for changing the social
image of the psychoanalyst, who until that point had been seen a little
I02 Rome Calls (I953): The Return tG Freud
bit as a dangerous and was going ta be considered from
then on as a man of science:
At the time, when a psychoanalyst went out at night and invited a
woman to dance, he heard, "My God, you are psychoanalyzing me!"
Analysts felt like that. Yet, they began at that time to feel as if they
were part of a broader activity, the way scientists feel. This was
a new identity that was opening up for them at that point.
12
This scientific jolt happened at the right time. The world situation in
fact favored it; it no longer offered any redible prospect of mobilizing
for collective social change, and that encouraged an inward social atti-
tude and a return to oneself. Psychoanalysis became the new "Eldo-
rado"13 at the end of the fifties.
The Break
The key moment of the Lacanian break came in 1953 during an inter-
naI rebellion of the Socit Psychanalytique de Paris against Sacha
Nacht, who intended to acknowledge only doctors as analysts in the
new Institut de Psychanalyse. Sacha Nacht was ousted as director, and
Lacan was elected as the new head. But Lacan did not seek the schism;
on the contrary, he did everything he could to preserve the unit y of the
French school. He was very quickly obliged to resign as director and
relinquish his place to Daniel Lagache; Lagache was responsible for
the break. Lacan was in the minority and had ta obey; he also re-
signed from the SPP. It was in this context of overt crisis that Lacan
made his 1953 "Rome Report."
Lacan had to cut an attractive French path, therefore, toward the
unconscious. In order to do so, he needed to find sorne institutional
and theoretical backers. He sought solid supporters in the two popu-
lar organizations of the time, the French Communist Party (PCF) and
the Catholic church. He gave a copy of his Rome speech to Lucien
Bonnaf, a member of the PCF, so that the party leadership could pay
attention to the theses he was developing,14 and he sent a long missive
to his brother Marc-Franois, who was a monk, and whom he asked
to intercede on his behalf with Pope Pius XII, hoping that the pope
wou Id grant him a private audience. The pope refused, despite the
trinitary order in which Lacan had just redefined Freudianism. These
two failed attempts both demonstrate Lacan's concern for giving
psychoanalysis a second wind, for putting an end to the crisis by an
offensive and dynamic strategy of alliance.
Rome CaUs (I913): The Retum ta Freud 103
AU Roads Lead to Rome
The Rome Report is a return ta Freud through Hegel, Heidegger, and
Lvi-Strauss, and with a touch of Saussure. Lacan had already widened
his sphere of influence by that date, since he was one of the most visi-
ble of the psychoanalytic figures in France, and he moved his lectures
from his wife Sylvia's home to the lecture hall at Sainte-Anne Hospi-
tal. To define this new doctrine of a renovated Freudianism ta king
shape in the new Socit Franaise de Psychanalyse (SFP), Lacan used
the structura li st paradigm, this time explicitly, as the very expression
of modernity in the social sciences. He asked that the meaning of
the psychoanalytic cure be rediscovered, and aspired to see psycho-
analysis attain the level of a science. "To this end, we can do no better
than ta return to the work of Freud." 15 This meant first of all putting
sorne distance between French psychoanalysis and the fate of Ameri-
can psychoanalysis, which had gotten lost in pragmatism. Lacan de-
nounced the behaviorism that had affected American psychoanalysis
this way, and whose goal, as the work of Erich Fromm and Sullivan
indicated, was to ensure that individuals adapt to social norms, and
ensure as well that order and normalization be restored. For Lacan,
the basis of the return to Freud lay in a particular attentiveness to lan-
guage: "Psychoanalysis has only one medium: the patient's speech.
That this is obvious is no excuse for our neglecting it."16 Here, Lacan
justified his practice of scansion in sessions; arguing that chronometrie
halts according to a stopwatch would he better replaced with the in-
ternaI logic of the patient's speech. He quite clearly and strenuously
asserted the overarching priority of language: "Ir is the world of
words that creates the world of things."17 Lacan again addressed the
break he had established in his 1949 conference in Zurich on the Mir-
ror Stage, hetween the imaginary and the symbolic. Far from a conti-
nuity between the two registers, the symbolic allows the subject to
distance himself from his captive relationship with the other. In an an-
alytic cure, symbolization occurs thanks to a transferential relation-
ship toward the analyst, whom the patient invests doubly, attributing
him the position of the imaginary other and the symbolic other, of the
one who is supposed to know. Analysis therefore satisfies this sym-
bolic function, and Lacan bases himself on Lvi-Strauss's Elementary
Structures of Kinship: "The primordial Law is therefore that which, in
regulating marri age ties, superimposes the kingdom of culture on that
104 Rome CaUs (1953): The Return to Freud
of a nature abandoned to the law of mating. The prohibition of incest
is merely its subjective pivot. . . . This law, then is revealed clearly
enough as identical with an order of language." 18
ln an approach that borrows from Heidegger, Lacan considered
that the notion of science had been lost since the Theaetetus, that po si-
tivism had accentuated the slow degradation that had made the
human sciences inferior to the experimental sciences. As early as
I953, Lacan considered that linguistics would make it possible to
return to the source, and would thus clearly fulfill its role as pilot
,
science: "Linguistics can serve us as a guide here, since that is the role
it plays in the vanguard of contemporary anthropology and we cannot
possibly remain indifferent to it."19 The reference to Lvi-Strauss is
explicit and in Lacan's eyes-and we will come back to this-Lvi-
Strauss had made more h ~ a d w a y , even regarding the Freudian uncon-
scious, than had professional psychoanalysts. The key to his success
lay in the implications of the structures of language, and especially
phonological structures, for the laws of marriage.
Lacan rereads Freud through Saussure, giving priority to syn-
chronicity: "Finally, the reference to linguistics will introduce us to the
method which, by distinguishing synchronic and diachronie structur-
ings in language, will enable us to understand better the different
value that our language assumes in the interpretation of the resis-
tances and the transference. "20 ln this way, Lacan also fully partici-
pated in the structuralist paradigm and encouraged a new reading of
Freud in whieh the theory of successive stages is no longer the core
concern; he refers them to a basic oedipal structure that is character-
ized by its universality and made autonomous with respect to all tem-
poral and spatial contingencies. This structure is already in place
before any history begins. "What was very important about Lacan's
contribution was that he introduced this synchronic perspective in
place of a diachronie perspective. "21 Unlike Saussure, whose privi-
leged object was language, Lacan privileges speech, a displacement
made necessary by psychoanalytic practice. However, this does not
mean that speech represents the expression of a conscious subject who
is master of what he says. Quite to the contrary: "1 identify myself in
language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. "22 Speech is
forever cut off from aU access to reality and only uses signifiers that
refer to each other. Man only exists by his symbolic function and it is
through this function that he must be grasped. Lacan therefore radi-
Rome CaUs (1953): The Return to Freud 105
cally reverses the idea of a subject conceived as the product or the ef-
fect of language; this is what gives rise to the famous formula accord-
ing to which "the unconscious is structured like a language." There is
no point in looking for a human essence elsewhere than in language.
That is what Lacan meant when he asserted that "language is an
organ"; or "the human being is characterized by the fact that his or-
gans are outside of him." In his Rome Report, Lacan contrasted this
symbolic function, which establishes man's identity, with the language
of bees, which is valid only for the stability of the relationship with
the reality it signifies. For Lacan, the Saussurean sign cut off from its
referent is the quasi-ontological kernel of the human condition: "If we
wanted to characterize this doctrine of language, we would have to
say, finally, that it is overtly creationist. Language is a creator."23
Human existence has no other site for Lacan than this symbolic level,
and he therefore naturally concurs with Saussure and Lvi-Strauss in
the precedence of language, culture, exchange, and the relationship to
the other.
In Rome, Lacan therefore clad himself in and seized upon linguis-
tic scientificity. "He was very happy to be able to ground himself in
something that had a scientific basis. That was part of the plan of ac-
counting for psychoanalysis in a scientific mode."24 Thanks to Lacan,
psychoanalysis could defy philosophy by coming to resemble it, by
demedicalizing the approach to the unconscious, and by arguing for
an approach to it as discourse. It was a renovated, revitalized psycho-
analysis, claiming to be the continuation of philosophical discourse,
that raised this new challenge to philosophy.25
The Return to Freud by Way of Saussure
In I953, Lacan knew Saussure primarily through Lvi-Strauss. After
I953, he delved into Saussure directly by working on the Course on
General Linguistics. This second reading provided Lacan with an en-
tirely new vocabulary, which he appropriated and used brilliantly in
I957 in "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious." In this major
text, Lacan based himself completely on structural linguistics, citing
Saussure as fervently as he did his friend Jakobson, who came to see
him regularly in Paris, where he stayed in Lacan's wife Sylvia's apart-
ment. At that point, Lacan positioned himself within Saussurean con-
cepts, which he accepted with sorne modification: "What the psycho-
analytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure
106 Rome Calls (1953): The Retum to Freud
of language."26 He took Saussure's algorithm, which, for estab-
lished linguistic scientificity-"This sign should be attributed to Ferdi-
nand de Saussure"27-although Lacan imposed a certain number of
changes on the Saussurean algorithm that he considered very signifi-
canto He changed the symbolization, writing "Signifier" with a capital
"s" and relegating "signified" to a lowercase "s." ln the same spirit,
the Signifier gets placed above the bar- ~ -contrary to its position in
Saussure's work.
Lacan removed the arrows that, in'the CCL, indicated the insepa-
rable reciprocity between the two sides of the sign, like the right and
wrong sides of a piece of paper. Finally, while Saussure's bar remains,
Lacan does not see it as establishing a relationship between Signifier
and signified, but rather as "a barrier resisting signification. "28
Linguists are justifiably perplexed when they see how Lacan uses
Saussure, but we clearly understand his point of view, which once
again fully belongs to the structuralist paradigm. Lacan eliminates the
referent even more radically than Saussure had, and relegates the sig-
nified to a secondary position in which it is subjected to the signifying
chain in a movement in which Lacan introduces "the notion of an in-
cessant sliding of the signified under the signifier. "29 The subject is un-
centered as a resuIt and becomes the effect of the signifier referring to
another signifier, the product of the language that speaks in him. The
unconscious thus becomes an effect of language, of its rules and code:
"It is nonetheless true that the philosophical cogito is at the center of
the mirage that renders modern man so sure of being himself even in
his uncertainties about himself .... 1 think where 1 am not, and there-
fore 1 am there where 1 do not think." 30
This new vision of an uncentered and split subject is aItogether
consonant with the notion of the subject in other structuralist areas of
the human sciences of the period. This subject is in a certain way a fic-
tion that exists only through its symbolic dimension, through the sig-
nifier. Even if the signifier takes precedence over the signified, its elimi-
nation is not an issue. "The analytic phenomenon is incomprehensible
with the essential duality of the signifier and the signified." 31 What re-
mains is the interaction between these two different levels that Lacan
attributes to Freud's discovery of the unconscious; for Lacan, Freud
was the first structuralist. The signifier imposes a sort of passion on
the signified. As we can see, Lacan twists a certain number of Saus-
Rome CaUs (1953): The Return to Freud ID7
surean concepts, and if Saussure would have found the idea of the sig-
nified's slippage beneath the signifier completely meaningless, the idea
of the unconscious similarly eluded him. Lacan adopted the two
major rhetorical figures of metaphor and metonymy, which Jakobson
had already used, to account for the way in which discourse unfolds,
and he assimilated these two procedures to the operations of the un-
conscious. Since the unconscious is structured like a language, it is
completely isologous with the rules of these procedures.
The Unconscious Structured like a Language
Freudian condensation can be assimilated to metaphor and displace-
ment relates to metonymy. Metaphor functions like a significant sub-
stitution, thereby revealing the autonomy and supremacy of the signi-
fier with respect to the signified. Jol Dor's enlightening example of
the metaphoric use of the term "plague" to de scribe psychoanalysis,
an adjective Freud used when he got to the United States, illustrates
the phenomenon:
32
SI
sI
S2
s2
acoustic image: "psychoanalysis"
idea of psychoanalysis
acoustic image: "plague"
idea of a plague
The metaphoric figure will establish a significant substitution of S2 for
S1:
rill

SI
-;t
@J
This substitution puts S1 under the bar of meaning, which becomes
the new signifier and in so doing expels the old signified: s2 (the ide a
of illness, the concept of plague). With the figure of metaphor, Lacan
showed that the signifying chain determines the order of the signifieds,
and in I956 in his seminar, he used Edgar Poe's novella The Purloined
Letter to demonstrate how the signifier takes precedence, "the realis-
tic imbecility," and the fact that "the signifier's displacement deter-
mines the subjects in their actions, in their destiny, in their refusaI, and
IOS Rome CaUs (1953): The Return to Freud
in their blindnesses."33 In Poe's novella, each of the authors-the
King, the Queen, Dupin-is duped in turn and in their respective posi-
tions while the letter circulates unbeknownst to any of them. Each of
the actors is acted upon by the signifier's (the letter) circulation with-
out knowing the signified, its contents. Moreover, in this quest for the
letter, the truth is always hidden and Lacan takes up the Heideggerian
theme of truth as althia. The signifier, the letter, glitters in its absence.
Metonymy is another rhetorical procedure employed by the un-
conscious. Metonymie transfer can take a number of forms: substitut-
ing the container for the contained ("1 drink a glass"), the part for the
whole, the cause for the effect, or an abstract term for a concrete one.
Let us again take Jol Dor's example, with the metonymic expression
"to have a couch" to signify "to be in analysis."34 The metonymy im-
plies a relationship of contiguity with the previous signifier for which
it is substituted:
S1
s1
S2
s2

acoustic image: "analysis"
the idea of being in analysis
acoustic image: "couch"
the idea of a couch
......
s1
@J
Here, unlike in metaphor, the signifier that has been displaced does
not slip beneath the bar of signification, while the signified s2 (the idea
of a couch) is eliminated: "The notions of metaphor and metonymy
are, from Lacan's perspective, two of the fundamental pieces of the
structural conception of unconscious processes."35
By their homology with condensation and displacement, these
two tropes support Lacan's hypothesis of the unconscious being struc-
tured like a language. As a result, he counseled analysts to take pa-
tients literally; he is faithful in this to Freud's remarks about an ana-
lyst's floating attention to what the patient says. The literality of what
is said reveals the signifying chain, the thread of the unconscious. We
can understand how the formalist aspect of structuralism is effective
Rome CaUs (I953): The Return to Freud I09
in an analysis. And Lacan counsels analysts to familiarize themselves
with linguistics: "If you want to know more, read Saussure, and since
a clock tower can block even the sun, 1 would add that 1 am not refer-
ring to the signature to be found in psychoanalysis, but to Ferdinand,
who can truly be said to be the founder of modern linguistics."36 It is
the very structure of language itself therefore that gives its status to
Lacan's notion of the unconscious, and thereby makes its objectifica-
tion possible, its operation accessible. Freud had already said that the
dream was a rebus, and Lacan takes Freud literally. But the quest for
the final meaning of the rebus is always deferred by the signifying
chain, which forever veils the truth, beginning with points de capiton,
those elements of a patient's discourse that stop the slip of the signifier,
arrest the analyst's attention, and that can of course be observed in the
relationships between signifiers and signifieds, but that radically miss
the incommensurable and impossible dimension of the Real.
Lacan drew his vocabulary from another linguist as well, the
grammarian douard Pichon, who had already emphasized the divi-
sion between the ego and the "me." Lacan adopted this distinction by
separating-and this time radically-the me, condemned to the imagi-
nary, and the ego, the subject of the unconscious, which is itself split
because of a double structuration forever cutting it off from any ac-
cess to the subject of desire, just as Heidegger's Being is inaccessible to
being. In 1928, Pichon had introduced the concept of forclusion,
which was to become a key concept for Lacan. The issue was to name
the failure of the original repression. While the process of repression
lets the neurotic work on the return of repressed, "forclusion, on the
contrary, never preserves anything that it rejects: forclusion simply
and purely eliminates it, or draws a line through it."37 The forclusion
that results in psychosis has to do with confusing the signified and the
signifier. Using the linguistic sign differently therefore establishes the
pathology of the psychotic: "The schizophrenic lives as of that mo-
ment in a world of multiple symbols and what changes is the dimen-
sion of the imaginary, of concepts. For the pers on who raves, on the
other hand, a single signifier can designate any signified. The signifier
is not tied to any defined concept."38
When we observe how central the signifying order is for Lacan,
we cannot agree with the linguist Georges Mounin when he sees a
simple synonym for "meaning in the banal sense of the term"39 in
no Rome CaUs (1953): The Return to Freud
Lacan's use of the notion of signifier. For Mounin, Lacan was a late-
comer to linguistic contagion, the victim of "the typical enthusiasm of
those who come to things late."40 Lacan, who, in 1956, summing up
the situation of psychoanalysis and evaluating the effects of the struc-
turalist phenomenon, once again suggested that when listening to
their patients analysts be particularly attentive to their phonemes,
phrases, pronouncements, pauses, scansions, cuts, sentences, and par-
allels. What really makes Lacan a structuralist, therefore, are the
structured linguistic underpinnings of analysis: "J. Lacan is a struc-
turalist. He emphasized this in interviews. He even signed his name to
the arrivaI of psychoanalysis into this current of thought."41
The role Lacan assigned to language allowed the issues of psycho-
analysis to shift from what they had been in the mid-fifties-from
medicalization to the fundamental importance of the analytic disci-
pline at the center of the human sciences challenging philosophy and
leading many philosophers astray because of their attraction to the
conversion of psychoanalysis to structuralism, an attraction so power-
ful that they abandoned their own discipline to convert to psycho-
analysis. But Lacan did not base himself only on Saussure and Jakob-
son. To consolidate the success of his enterprise of seduction and his
goals of scientificity, he also used structural anthropology and there-
fore Lvi-Strauss.
Fifteen
The Unconscious:
A Symbolic Universe
In his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss ln 1950, Lvi-
Strauss quoted Lacan to support his theses:
For, strictly speaking, the pers on whom we cali sane is the one who
is capable of alienating himself, since he consents to an existence in a
world definable only by the self-other relationship (note 13): The
note reads: That seems to me to be the conclusion that emerges from
Dr. ]. Lacan's profound study, "Aggression in psychoanalysis," in
the Revue Franaise de Psychanalyse, no. 3, ]uly-September 1948.1
Lvi-Strauss used Lacan's work very early on, even before the Rome
Report, but the influence was especially clear in the other direction.
Lacan broadly and quite explicitly borrowed from structural an-
thropology as inspiration for rereading Freud: "We use the term struc-
ture in a way that we believe Claude Lvi-Strauss's use of the term
authorizes us tO."2 Lvi-Strauss's anthropological structuralism be-
came the basis of Lacan's postwar rupture. Their convergence was
such that Lacan constantly appealed to Lvi-Strauss (see the crits
[1966]) and used him as the scientific guarantee for his approach to
the unconscious.
Lvi-Strauss's success in effecting a shift from physical to cultural
anthropology by valorizing the linguistic model resembled Lacan's
goal of demedicalizing, or debiologizing, Freudian discourse. Lacan
used the search for structural in kinship links to extract the
unconscious as a structure from psychologizing, behaviorist theories.
III
II 2 The llnconscious: A Universe
This intellectual symbiosis occurred aga in st a backdrop of friendly
complicity: "We were very dose friends for several years. We lunched
at the Merleau-Pontys' house in Guitrancourt."3 We can be somewhat
skeptical about Lvi-Strauss's frequent daims of not understanding
Lacan's work, even though it is true that Lacan's baroque writing style
quite dearly offended Lvi-Strauss's classicism. More fundamentally,
it is certain that although Lvi-Strauss did not need Lacan's rather in-
flammatory guarantee, Lacan leaned very heavily on Lvi-Strauss in
order to win currency for his theses apd to broaden the intellectual
range of psychoanalytic thinking.
Lvi-Strauss and Freudianism
What can we say about the relationship between Lvi-Strauss and
psychoanalysis? Three levels need to be distinguished in order to un-
derstand a certain evolution. In the first place, with respect to his
training, Lvi-Strauss discovered Freud's work quite early. The father
of a classmate at Janson High School
4
was a psychiatrist who worked
closely with Marie Bonaparte and was one of the first in France to in-
troduce Freud. Thanks to this classmate, Lvi-Strauss became immedi-
ately aware of the existence of psychoanalysis. "Between I925 and
I930 1 read what had been translated of Freud until then, and this
therefore played a very important role in shaping my thinking."
5
The second level is the teaching of Freudian thinking for anthro-
pology. Here Lvi-Strauss saw a broadening of the frameworks of the
old rationalism, the possible understanding of phenomena that until
then seemed to resist any logical interpretation, and the fact that the
most obvious realities were neither the most profound nor the most
edifying. At this level, Lvi-Strauss remained faithful to Freudian
teaching.
But there is a third level in which the two disciplines of anthro-
pology and psychoanalysis competed in their approach to the human.
Yet their relationship was too close, and could only lead to a conflict,
especially since Lvi-Strauss had sorne very serious doubts about the
effectiveness of psychoanalytic therapy. With respect to the growing
success of analysis, therefore, Lvi-Strauss tended to consider Freud's
work to be the construction of a singular Western mythology whose
logic he could decipher because he, studied myths, and whose strength
he could therefore evaluate. "What Freud really did was to construct
grand myths."6 The logic of disciplinary confrontation therefore led
The Unconscious: A Symbolic Uni verse r 13
Lvi-Strauss ta "harden" (a term he used in 1962 in Tatemism Taday)?
his judgment of psychoanalysis, whereas he had initially been fasci-
nated by its approach to the unconscious and had been engaged in a
constant dialogue with Freud's work. As early as The Elementary
Structures of Kinship in 1949, Lvi-Strauss had criticized Totem and
Taboo, considering that Freud had developed a myth. But, above
all, he wrote two articles on the unconscious during the same year
that had the greatest influence on psychoanalysts in general and on
Lacan in particular: "The Sorcerer and His Magic" and "The Effec-
tiveness of Symbols." These articles were la ter reprinted in Structural
Anthropology.8
Lvi-Strauss described the healing activity of the shaman and the
relationship he establishes with his audience. In order to de scribe the
shaman's gesture, he used the psychoanalytic term of "abreaction," a
process that resembles what happens in therapy when the analyst
helps the patient to rel ive a traumatic situation that is at the origin of
his or her neurosis. Lvi-Strauss borrowed a psychoanalytic structure
as an interpretative tool in order to better understand primitive soci-
eties, but he nonetheless put some distance between himself and psy-
choanalysis as a discipline: "But the distressing trend which, for sev-
eral years, has tended to transform the psychoanalytic system from a
body of scientific hypotheses that are experimentally verifiable in cer-
tain specifie and limited cases into a kind of diffuse mythology inter-
penetrating the consciousness of the group, could rapidly bring about
a parallelism."9 Lvi-Strauss compared the shamanistic cure to the
psychoanalytic cure to show that the parallel between them does not
me an that they are similar and that although the terms of the two
types of practice are both present, their positions are reversed.
The Symbolic Unconscious
Lvi-Strauss deeply influenced Lacan with this comparative study; he
gave his own definition of the unconscious as not being the refuge of
the particularities of a purely singular, individual history, but by de-
historicizing the unconscious and affirming its link to the symbolic
function: "[The unconscious] is reduced to a term by which we desig-
na te a function: the symbolic function."10 Moreover, Lvi-Strauss
called for a clearer distinction between the subconscious, the reser-
voir-site of specifie memories, and the unconscious, which "is always
empty, or more exactly, is as foreign to images as the stomach is ta the
l I4 The Unconscious: A Symbolic Universe
food which transits through it. The organ of a specific function, it lim-
its itself to imposing structural laws."11 The Lvi-Straussian un-
conscious is therefore foreign to individu al affects, to content, and to
historicity. It is this empty site where the symbolic function takes
place. We once again find the familiar hierarchies of the structural
paradigm: precedence is given to an invariant over its variations, to
form over content, to the signifier over the signified. As we will see,
Lacan adopted this approach to the unconscious, allowing him to es-
tablish "the bases of a signifying algebra"12 for psychoanalysis in the
same way Lvi-Strauss ha:d done for anthropology. In his Introduction
to the Work of Marcel Mauss, Lvi-Strauss laid out his definition of
the unconscious because he borrowed it at that time principally from
Mauss. Defined by its exchange function, the unconscious was the me-
diating term between self and other rather than the subject's private
garden. In this major text, Lvi-Strauss defined a path that Lacan
would take, the path of symbolic autonomy: "Symbols are more real
than what they symbolize, the signifier precedes and determines the
signified." 13
The Mind
There is cause for misunderstanding here, for the anthropologist's un-
conscious is very much removed from the Freudian unconscious, de-
spite the analogies we can see between the semantic decoding of myths
and psychoanalytic interpretative techniques. For Lvi-Strauss, "the
unconscious is the site of structures,"14 and is therefore defined as
a system of logical constraints, a structuring whole, "the absent cause
of these effects of structure that are kinship systems, rituals, forms of
economic life, symbolic systems." 15 This purely formaI, empty un-
conscious, this pure container, is a far cry from Freud's unconscious,
which is defined by a certain number of privileged contents. In
Totemism Today, Lvi-Strauss again cast aside contents and affects
in his criticism of the psychoanalytic use of affectivity, emotions, and
drives that correspond to the least clear level in humans and cannot
lend themselves to scientific explanations. Lvi-Strauss justified the
distinction between these two levels by explaining that the intellect
can only account for something that is of a similar nature, and that
this therefore excludes emotion. This notwithstanding, he claimed the
unconscious as the specifie object of anthropology: "Ethnology is first
The Unconscious: A Universc IIJ
of aH a "16 whose goal, for him, is to restore universal
laws governing the operations of the human mind.
Of Freudian theory, which unfolds in two dimensions-the one
topical in which different strata of the psychic apparatus are differen-
tiated, and the other dynamic, of conflicts, reversaIs, and the evolution
of forces set into play in the phenomena of repression, condensation,
displacement, and censorship-Lvi-Strauss retained only the topical
dimension. As a good structuralist, he held on to that dimension "that
has to do with the system of sites defining the topology of the psychic
apparatus."17 The unconscious makes it possible to localize the sym-
bolic function and, at the same time, the universality linking it to the
mind. This function is therefore freed of spatiotemporal contingencies
and becomes a purely autonomous, abstract, and formai entity. When
asked why he avoided the dimension of desire in his notion of the un-
conscious, Lvi-Strauss answered: "Is this the fundamental dimension
of the unconscious? 1 am not in the least convinced";18 and he consid-
ered Freud's argument that dreams are the realization of a des ire a sin-
gularly narrow view, a simple mask, a ridiculous smoke screen for
hi ding our ignorance of biological reality.
Rivalry: Psychoanalysis versus Anthropology
In The Jealous Patter, Lvi-Strauss returned to his uninterrupted dia-
logue with psychoanalysis, anddearly announced the stakes: the ri-
valry between two disciplines that are both working on the uncon-
scious. The "jealousy" in the title refers to the anthropologist as he
observes the psychoanalyst, who can examine a circumscribed object,
an individual therapy, and enjoy his place in the social body. It was
therefore Lvi-Strauss himself who set the tone of the discussion by
placing himself in the realm of jealousy: "The myths that are analyzed
in The Jealous Patter, especially those of the Jivaro, are particularly
striking in that they prefigure psychoanalytic myths. Having psycho-
analysts daim them for some legitimation had to be avoided."19 He
reiterated the criticism he had made of Freud-that he deciphered
only according to a single code-and drew a parallel between the psy-
chic life of savages and that of psychoanalysts. According to Lvi-
Strauss, analysts have simply adopted the anal and oral traits that
primitive societies had already discovered: "At almost every step we
have encountered perfectly explicit notions and categories-such as
the oral char acter and anal character-that psychoanalysts will no
n6 The Unconscious: A Symbolic Universe
longer be able to daim they have discovered; they have only rediscov-
ered them."20
According to Lvi-Strauss, Freud is therefore to be given a place
alongside myths but does not even warrant being credited with invent-
ing the idea since he only recycled it in a preexisting symbolic uni-
verse. The institution al stakes underlying this debate/fight for anteri-
ority were even more clear: "Can we see in psychoanalysis anything
other than a branch of comparative ethnology, applied to the study
of the individu al psyche?"21 Lvi-Strauss even ended his book sar-
castically by comparing Sophocles' Oedipus Rex with Labiche's An
Italian Straw Hat, in order to grasp the same myth in two different
registers. "It is a question of making psychoanalysts eat their hat,"22
Andr Green quite correctly pointed out while addressing a group of
anthropologists.
Lacan Appropriates the Unconscious according
to Lvi-Strauss
Lacan would, in his own words, use Lvi-Strauss as his defense. He
quoted him in "The Mirror Stage" in 1949, and later even more so, as
his many references in the crits attest. However, Lacan did much
more than simply use Lvi-Strauss as a scientific guarantee; we might
even wonder how far he went in borrowing his anthropological ap-
proach to the unconscious and whether or not this influence repre-
sented a decisive turning point with respect to Freud.
Grard Mendel sees in this appropriation a shift away from
Freud's notion of the unconscious toward an intellectual reduction
emptying the unconscious of all contents and naturalizing it. The
Freudian unconscious is composed of primary processes where repre-
sentations and fantasies are played out and momentarily activated or
repressed, unlike Lvi-Strauss's notion, which Lacan adopted, of a
contentless unconscious: "Believing that he is speaking about the un-
conscious, Lvi-Strauss never speaks about anything other than the
preconscious .... What is negated here-as it was later in Lacan-is
the very existence of a specific unconscious, Freud's decisive contribu-
tion."23 In the name of the father Freud, Lacan, in the return of which
he so often boasted, imperceptibly slid the unconscious beneath the
signifying bar of the structuralist paradigm. Lacan paid a high price
for his dialogue and anthropological guarantee: psychoanalysis's spe-
The Unconscious: A Symbolic Universe II7
cific object, the basis its scientific identity-the unconscious. "What
1 believe and have always believed is that Lacan thought he was work-
ing on the unconscious, but he was working on the preconscious ....
It is completely justifiable to say that the preconscious is structured
like a language. "24
Nearly ten years later, Franois Roustang, an ex-Lacanian, re-
examined the same problem by arguing that Lacan's symbolic uncon-
scious was only the transcription of Lvi-Strauss's ide a transplanted to
psychoanalysis.
25
Borrowing the symbolic was a decisive moment in
Lacan's development for he had initiaIly focused on the imaginary
when studying specular images in "The Mirror Stage." He then used
Lvi-Strauss to assert the irreducibility, the exteriority, of an uncon-
scious that man cannot understand and whose intemallogic would be
his to explain. "This exteriority of the symbolic with respect to man is
the very notion of the unconscious. "26 Any historical process becomes
illusory because of this heteronomy. There is a chain that traps man
from as early as before his birth and after his death making him some-
thing "like the pawn in the signifier's game. "27 The symbolic order can
no more be attributed to an individual than to the social order; it is
empty, like Lvi-Strauss's ide a of it, an exchange function.
Franois Roustang saw this borrowing as the need for a new dis-
placement. Abandoning the underpinnings of the social, "Lacan is
forced to substantiate speech and give it sorne power ... in a word, to
restore the theology of creation through the word."28 Lacan was tom
between metaphysical sirens, between Saint John the Evangelist,
whom he cited in an exergue to his discourse, and the model of the
hard sciences, including mathematics and physics: "How much should
we approach the ideals of the natural sciences, by which 1 mean such
as they have developed for us, in other words, physics? WeIl, it's with
respect to the se definitions of signifier and structure that the appropri-
ate limits can be established. "29 Lvi-Strauss was therefore a model
for psychoanalytic discourse in conquering scientificity, and Lacan en-
vied him the symbiosis he was able to forge between ethnology, lin-
guistics, mathematics, and psychoanalysis.
If Lacan undeniably borrowed the fundamental category of the
symbolic from Lvi-Strauss and displaced it from anthropology ta
psychoanalysis, hypostasizing and radicalizing it with respect to Lvi-
Strauss's use, analysts are not unanimous in arguing that Lacan oblit-
erated Freud's notion of the unconscious. "It would be completely
II 8 The Unconscious: A Symbolic Universe
aberrant to say that Lacan could not reach the unconscious in a sys-
tem that goes no farther than the first topiC."30 For Jol Dor, the un-
conscious as a signifying chain does not invalidate the two Freudian
topics but, on the contrary, clarifies them and moves beyond them.
Lacan was a student of Lvi-Strauss's rigor, but he displaced the in-
struments he borrowed. He adopted the idea of a structure, and of a
circuit of exchange as a basis for the social dimension, but "he intro-
duces the idea that Lvi-Strauss is mistaken in thinking that women
are exchanged between tribes; it's the Rhallus that is exchanged."31
Despite these displacements, a common theme ran through Lvi-
Strauss and Lacan in the fifties. Both strove for universality and scien-
tificity, for antievolutionism, and for legitimation. Lacan said of his-
tory, for example, that it was "this thing he detests for the best of
reasons."32 His radical rejection of historicity, which also posed a sig-
nificant problem for the analytic use of remembering, made it possible
to participate in the structuralist paradigm because synchrony was
given precedence. Even if we agree that Lacan reached the Freudian
unconscious, we cannot ho Id that his reference to Lvi-Strauss is sim-
ply a "support rather than a key that would have allowed him to open
this or that secret door."33 Furthermore, Lacan was influenced not
only by Lvi-Strauss but also by Monique Lvi-Strauss, a debt he pub-
licly acknowledged. He in fact appropriated the formula she threw at
him one day and that became a classic of his thinking: "the sender gets
his message back, in reverse. "
Through his symbiosis with Lvi-Strauss's work, Lacan also
sought to include the progress of psychoanalysis within the general
anthropological project of reflecting upon the dividing line between
nature and culture. Whence the important theme of the Other for
Lacan, his thinking about alterity, on what eludes reason, on the site
of the lack, on the decentering of errant desire. Where Lvi-Strauss
sought out these figures of alterity among the Nambikwara, Lacan de-
veloped the power of the forever inaccessible Other, of an eternallack
of being. Between Lvi-Strauss and Lacan there was more than a
friendly encounter; the two intellectual projects of the fifties share a
common kernel of understanding, a common theoretical policy, the
same strategy despite the different objects of these two disciplines.
Sixteen
Real/Symbolic/Imaginary (RSI):
The Heresy
Quite paradoxically, one of Lacan's important discoveries goes un-
mentioned in his Rome Report even though it preceded the lecture by
two months: the famous trilogy of the Real, the Symbolic, and the
Imaginary, which in July 1953 was announced as the Symbolic, the
Imaginary, and the Real. "To my mind this is Lacan's great find."1
Lacan called this his theriac, the name of the best-known medication
in antiquity, which long sustained the hope of finding a panacea. This
was also his ternary, and later, simply RSI, or his heresy with respect
to Freud. "1 think that this idea is the fruit of his use of linguistics.
He was engaged at the time in a battie and he needed a policy on
theory."2 The innovation therefore dates from 1953, a period dur-
ing which Lvi-Strauss's influence was quite important. That the sym-
bolic was at this time the first element in the tertiary order is therefore
noteworthy.
The structuralist influence was quite apparent in this dominant
and valorized third or der, set between the Real and the Imaginary.
Linguistic binarism became a triadic order, consonant with the struc-
ture of Hegelian dialectics and with the Freudian topic separating the
id, the ego, and the superego, even if this subdivision had another
meaning for Lacan. Lacan reversed Freud; the symbolic governed the
structure whereas the id, which Lacan assigned to the Real, was at the
core of the drives for Freud. This was the major shift, both in lan-
guage and in structure; the unconscious was no longer assigned to a
II9
I20 (RSI): The Heresy
sort interred Hel! from which it had ta be driven out, but could be
grasped at the surface of words and in slips of the tongue.
Whence the precedence that Lacan attributed ta linguistic meth-
ods in Rome in 1953, even if he did not announce his discovery. In his
initial topology, the Symbolic was followed by the Real, which was
not to be confused with reality for it was the hidden, inaccessible side
of reality; the Lacanian Real is impossible. In the same way that
Heideggerian Being was absent from being, the Lacanian Real was the
lack of being of reality. The Imaginary was assigned to the dual rela-
tionship of the Mirror Stage and condemns the ego, beclouded by its
affects, to that which is illusory. In the subject, this triad was articu-
lated in an indefinite signifying chain around the initiallack of an in-
accessible Real. Lacan's temary order was radically opposed to any
empirical perception of desire reduced to the expression of needs. De-
sire, for Lacan, was determined by the encounter with the des ire of the
Other, with the mas ter signifier that once again pointed to the lack
and clarified the demand.
In the early fifties, Moustafa Safouan, a young philosopher con-
verted to psychoanalysis, was treating a hysterical patient abandoned
by his father at the age of four. Safouan was losing hope of under-
standing why the image of the father continued to come up in analysis
whereas the patient had never really known his father. Safouan was on
the verge of giving up and retuming to philosophy when Lacan invited
him to participate in the seminar he was giving at his home on the rue
de Lille, where he met Didier Anzieu, Pierre Aubry, Serge Leclaire, and
Octave Mannoni and began to grasp Lacan's distinction between the
Imaginary, Real, and Symbolic father. This in tum helped him better
understand his patient and the disastrous effects of his superego,
his self-punishing behavior, and his avoidances. "These distinctions
changed the way 1 listened, as an analyst, and gave new life to the
manner in which 1 responded to what was communicated."3
This new light definitively convinced Safouan that psychoanalysis
could be effective and that Lacan's reading was well founded. He
himself began a supervisory analysis with Lacan for fifteen years. The
Lacanian trilogy begins with the postulate that the subject always
signifies more than he is aware of, and that there are signifiers that are
uttered without in any way illustrating the subject's mastery over
meanmg.
RealiSymbolic/lmaginary (RSI): The Heresy UI
Is Lacan a Structuralist?
The year 1953 was important for two reasons: Lacan's important in-
novation of the triple order and his use of the linguistic model in the
Rome Report. Eisewhere he had acknowledged the existence of a be-
fore and an after: "Y. G. W. O. 1. A. B. L." which has to be read as
"You got working on it a bit late."4 As of this point, Jacques-Alain
Miller wondered, "Is Lacan a structuralist?"5 and his answer is full of
contrasts. Lacan was part of the structuralist phenomenon since his
notion of structure came from Jakobson through Lvi-Strauss, but
he dissociated himself from structuralism since the structuralists'
structure "is coherent and complete whereas the Lacanian structure is
paradoxical and uncompleted."6 Unlike hermeneutics, in which the
hidden place of structure was to be discovered and decoded, Lacan's
structure was in the visible world by the way it undertook to seize the
living body in which it speaks, unbeknownst to that body. Unlike
Saussure's structure, which established itself by opposition and was
defined by the completeness of the signifier and the signifie d, the sub-
ject of the unconscious in Lacanian structure remained fundamentally
inaccessible, forever split, always beyond any grasp on it, a lack of
being, always elsewhere. "In this respect, it seems to me to be an alto-
gether peculiar structuralism because it is a the ory that, in the end,
takes into account the fact that there is something that cannot be
grasped, something that the theory leaves ungrasped."7
We can distinguish between a structuralism based on complete-
ness and Lacan's structuralism, based on incompleteness, although
both eliminate the subject from the field of investigation. Saussure
and Lvi-Strauss reduced the subject to insignificance whereas Lacan
overvalorized it, but because it was forever inaccessible, if not eradi-
cated, the subject was avoided. Whether organic or social, the world
of things remained at a distance .
. There was no longer anything organic about the desire of Lacan's
subject; it was disconnected from any physiological reality in the same
way that the linguistic sign is cut off from any referent. Pierre Fougey-
rollas, a Marxist sociologist, rejected this notion: "Freud knew that
we desire sexually because we exist as human animaIs and he would
have considered the ide a that we exist because we des ire a paranoid
whim."8 From Fougeyrollas's point of view, Lacan reinforced Saus-
sure's break between signifier/signified and proposed a personal ver-
122 (RSI): The Hercsy
sion of linguistic which Franois George humorously
dubs "father-version."9
Lacan wanted ta see psychoanalysis accepted as a science on a par
with the hard sciences and, more precisely, a science modeled on the
physical sciences. In 1953, he refused the factious opposition between
the ha rd sciences and the social, or conjectural, sciences. Lacan re-
called the problematic relationship between the experimental, formal-
ized sciences, including physics, and nature, their anthropomorphism,
and consequently the unfounded distiuction between the hard sciences
and the soft sciences. Having removed this separating wall, Lacan
could aspire to scientificity in psychoanalysis based on the model of
the more formaI sciences: "We see how the mathematical formaliza-
tion that inspired Boole's logic and even set the ory, can bring to the
science of human action this structure of intersubjective time, which
psychoanalytic conjecture needs in or der to assure its rigor." 10
Bonneval: The Un-conscious
The schism within the cole Psychanalytique Freudienne required that
psychoanalysis have a solid base with scientific aspirations and that
this be part of its theoretical position. In 1960, after the Rome Report,
Henri Ey, a psychiatrist and friend of Lacan, decided to organize a
colloquium on the unconscious at Bonneval. The colloquium made
it possible not only to bring together the two camps in French
psychoanalysis-the Socit Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP), repre-
sented by Serge Lebovici, Ren Diatkine, Andr Green, and Conrad
Stein, among others, and the Socit Franaise de Psychanalyse, repre-
sented by Serge Leclaire, Jean Laplanche, Franois Perrier, and Jean-
Bertrand Pontalis-but also philosophers, including Paul Ricoeur,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Lefebvre, Jean Hyppolite, and psychi-
atrists, the most frequent participants in Henri Ey's work groups.!l
For Lacan, it was a question of demonstrating the scientificity of
psychoanalysis to both the International Psychiatric Association (IPA)
and phenomenologists by unsettling their convictions about the cen-
trality of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty, while open to psychoanalytic
thinking, as he demonstrated elsewhere in 1960, in Signs, disagreed
with Lacan's conclusions: "1 am rather uncomfortable when 1 see that
the category of language occupies so much space."12 At this collo-
quium devoted entirely to the unconscious, psychoanalysis's own ob-
ject, many psychiatrists gave up psychiatry in favor of psychoanalysis,
Hll;',,"l'''} (RSI): The Heres)' T23
seduced Lacanian discourse, which proposed to most
modern and the mst rigorous, and for which linguistics and anthro-
pology served as a double guarantee.
Two of Lacan's disciples, Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire, gave
the most important talks at Bonneval. They coauthored a text in
which the critical part was written by Laplanche and the more clinical
part by Leclaire. Leclaire offered an extremely subtle analysis of the
dream of a thirty-year-old Jewish patient (today we know that this
was his own dream), intended to completely renovate the traditional
treatment of dreams, limited to attempts at remembering and seeking
the hidden meaning of what goes unsaid. The unicorn dream, as it was
called, let him demonstrate the work and priority of the signifier.
"Psychoanalysis proves therefore to be the practice of the letter ....
the literaI expression is what gives the representation its particular im-
portance."13 His dream illustrated Lacan's theory according to which
the unconscious is structured like a language. There was a single point
of divergence about which he had hoped for some discussion, which
never occurred, regarding the notion of original repression: "At Bon-
neval, this discussion took place with Stein, but not with Lacan. Yet
the view 1 put forward differed from Lacan's, but at the time, our di-
vergence went unnoticed."14
Jean Laplanche, on the other hand, remained in the Lacanian
camp, but was somewhat reserved about Lacan's essential formula.
That Jean Laplanche, an ex-militant of the Socialisme ou Barbarie
group, evoked a certain criticism of this structuralist orientation was
not surprising for he reiterated Claude Lefort's criticism of Claude
Lvi-Strauss at the beginning of the fifties, although in another con-
text. Together with Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, Laplanche
had been a founding member of this postwar group and had begun to
be interested by psychoanalysis in the United States in I946. In New
York, he had met Loewenstein, who suggested that he take classes
in psychoanalysis at Harvard, and when he came back to France,
Laplanche went to visit his ex-khgne professor, Ferdinand Alqui, to
ask him for the name of a psychoanalyst in order to begin an analysis.
Alqui told him that there was a regular series of extremely interesting
lectures given by a certain Jacques Lacan.
He was speaking about the Mirror Stage at the time, of identification
between doves, pigeons, and pilgrim crickets. l introduced myself
I24
(RSI): The Heresy
and began an analysis with him. l therefore knew Lacan as a psycho-
analyst for years but during that time did not allow myself to go to
his seminar in order ta avoid the confusion that he often made be-
tween his teaching and his analyses.
15
Laplanche was therefore in an ambiguous and frustrating situa-
tion at Bonneval because he was Lacan's disciple with respect to the
SPP, but, on the other hand, he wanted to voice a certain number of
criticisms. Because they were not discussed, however, these reserva-
tions were sacrificed to the logic of ,the different camps. Laplanche
adopted the Freudian definition of the unconscious in its topical
meaning, as different from the conscious as the preconscious. He ar-
gued in favor of the idea of a second structure to account for Freud's
distinction between the representation of a thing and of a word, the
primary and secondary processes, thus giving a first nonverballevel of
language for the representations of things and a second verbalized
level for the representation of words. Laplanche deduced that "the un-
conscious is the condition of language,"16 reversing Lacan's position
and giving metaphoric and metonymic operations a secondary posi-
tion, without exhausting the reality of the unconscious: "What slips,
what is displaced, is the energy of the drive in its pure, unspecified
state."17
Laplanche therefore rejected Lacan's use of linguistics as a model
from the beginning. Later, he emphasized his disagreement by stating
that the unconscious is not structured as a language, as Lacan would
have it: "It is undeniable that there are elements of language in the
unconscious, but repression de-structures rather than structures the se
elements."18 Today, Laplanche distances himself even further from
Lacan's dictum that the unconscious is structured like a language, and
asserts even more radically than he did in 1960 first that language is
not as structured as it is said to be by reducing it to a binary structure,
and that in addition the unconscious is not made of words but of
traces of things, and that its operation is completely opposed to struc-
ture:
19
"The absence of negation, the coexistence of contraries, the ab-
sence of judgment, no retention or maintenance of investments. "20 To
Lacan's formulation he prefers "the unconscious is a like-a-language
but not structured."21
Lacan, in fact, rejected Laplanche's juncture between thought and
language and argued for a radical break in Saussure's algorithm. It
was doubtless strategically important for Lacan to anchor psycho-
ReallSymbolic/lmaginary (RSI): The Heresy I25
analysis in the discoveries of modern linguistics and to consider that
"the hum an is language. "22 Given his epistemological ambitions,
Lacan saw in this idea the only possibility for having psychoanalysis
be part of the general semiological adventure that was taking off at
the beginning of the fifties. But he refused to discuss Laplanche's text
at Bonneval because unit y was supposed to reign under his aegis for
tactical reasons. Lacan developed another idea, that the unconscious
is an effect of language, of a cogito split between truth and knowl-
edge, but only gave voice to his disagreement with his disciple in I969
in a preface written for Anika Lemaire's thesis on him.
23
Lacan also presented a paper at Bonneval, which he later re-
worked considerably for the crits in I966 with the tide "Position of
the Unconscious." In it, he denounced the illusions of a Carte sian
cogito and of classical philosophy and its reference to an absolute
knowledge la Hegel. Consciousness is entirely absorbed by the ego's
specular reflection and therefore assigned to the "function of mis-
understanding, which remains attached to it. "24 Lacan saw the Carte-
sian cogito as a first moment, a presupposition of the unconscious.
The signifier has priority over the subject, which becomes a subject
insofar as a signifier represents a subject for another signifier. The sec-
ond moment is one of separation or of resplitting, and he illustrated
this by the newborn's birth. A newborn is not separated from its
mother, as is often and mistakenly said, but from a part of itself, for
when the cord is cut, the newborn loses its anatomical complement:
"Breaking an egg makes a man but also an omelet."25 This initial
break is ceaselessly reiterated in later life, and limits are necessary in
order for this little man not to spread out in all directions and destroy
everything in his path. This break makes the Real inaccessible and
gives a deathlike dimension to the drive that refers back to the Real
and is virtually a death drive.
The unconscious, on the other hand, refers to the symbolic, and is
composed of phonemes and of groups of phonemes: language is its
basis. This is what allowed Lacan to say in I966: "Linguistics is surely
the science on which the unconscious is based. "26 The Letter sup-
plants Being:
27
this i"s the triumphant hour of the structural paradigm
in psychoanalysis.
Seventeen
The CaU of the T ropies
In the six years between the two conferences addressing the nonalign-
ment of the emerging postcolonial countries, the New Delhi Confer-
ence of 1949 and the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung of 1955, a
new and increasingly clear set of demands was being articulated. The
traditional East-West split was being redefined; nonalignment was
being asserted as a third path. The South was demanding that people
of color be recognized with a dignity equal to that enjoyed by Western
civilization. It was during this period of decolonization that UNESCO
asked Claude Lvi-Strauss to write an essay for a collection addressing
the issues of race and modern science, published as "Race and His-
tory" in 1952.
This decisive text was a major contribution to the theorization of
the phenomenon of emancipation that was under way. Lvi-Strauss
attacked racial prejudices and his argument made it possible to bring
anthropology to bear on debates on society as Paul Rivet had already
done before the war, and to make the shift from physical to social an-
thropology quite palpable. Lvi-Strauss criticized a historical teleol-
ogy based on the reproduction of the same, and proposed a different
notion about the diversity of cultures and the irreducibility of differ-
ence. By attacking the foundations of a Eurocentrism that was already
being significantly jolted by tricontinental revolts of peoples of the
third world in the process of shaking off their colonial yoke, he funda-
mentally revolutionized the thinking on the subject. After him it was
I26
The Cali of the Tropics l 2 7
impossible ta continue to in terms of or
the hier arc hic al mold of a Western society proposed ta serve as a
model to the rest of the world was broken; Western values were re-
jected and their underbelly was explored. By contesting evolutionism,
Lvi-Strauss remained true to the Maussian tradition without falling
into the trap of localism, in which every society was contained within
the little universe of its own particularities. To the contrary, Lvi-
Strauss believed that each society was the expression of a concrete
universal. Not only was he a guide opening the West to an under-
standing of the Other, but he also made it dear that this Other could,
in exchange, help the West learn something about itself, help trans-
form it insofar as it was a meaningful piece of universal humanity.
The structuralist approach became a beginning for understanding
the Other through the idea of the intercommunicability of codes. AIl
systems can communicate between themselves at the level of the tran-
sition from one code to another, but "a direct dialogue cannot take
place. Incomprehension cornes from the inability to go beyond one's
own system. If anyone contributed to this universal humanism, it was
Lvi-Strauss."l Western-centered dosure was opened up to a much
larger universe based on cultural polymorphism, enriching the under-
standing of what is human.
Lvi-Strauss distinguished two kinds of relationship to historicity,
contrasting the cumulative history of the major civilizations to the will
to dissolve every innovation perceived as a threat to a primitive equi-
librium. The West was not alone in this view of a cumulative history,
which also operated in other dimes. Moreover, Lvi-Strauss rejected
any hierarchy that considered one civilization to be more advanced
th an another. Ali considerations of this order became relative by ex-
amining the criteria. Western civilization was dearly advanced if tech-
nology was the principal criterion, but if other criteria were brought
to bear, those civilizations that seemed primitive or that Westerners
considered to be the cradles of the world appeared in fact more inge-
nious than the West: "If we had used the criterion of how apt a civi-
lization is at conquering hostile geography, there is no doubt that the
Eskimos and the Bedouins would win hands down. "2
The West lost on all but technological grounds in this game of
variables. The same was true for spirituality, or for the relationship
between the body and the mind, where the Orient is ahead "by many
millennia"3 in its practical exercise of spirituality. In this multiple-
uR The Cali of the Tropics
criteria list Australians won the for complexity
of kinship relationships, and Melanesians for aesthetic daring. Lvi-
Strauss drew a double lesson: the evaluation of any given society is
relative with respect to given criteria; human enrichment can only
come from a process of coalescence of these diverse experiences, the
source of new discoveries: "The only fatality, the single defect that can
afflict a hum an group and prevent it from fully realizing its nature, is
to be isolated."4
Lvi-Strauss spectacularly theorizecl the practice of rejecting colo-
nial values. By the some token, he reappropriated those societies from
the alterity in which the West had placed them, as much with respect
to what we know about them as how we think about them. But differ-
ence was not only the expression of the Other's irreducibility; it was
also an ideological concept that lent itself to analysis. In this respect,
the structuralist paradigm weakened the bases of the West's philoso-
phies of totality-Vico, Comte, Condorcet, Hegel, and Marx. We can
see the return of a form of thinking born with the discovery of the
New World in the sixteenth century. "Western thinking was being fis-
sured; Montaigne had seen that its foundations were ruined by a com-
pletely heterogeneous element. This has been a constant in the West
since the Greeks; power is never exercised without being based on a
universal."5 Montaigne had already said that we hastened the ruin of
the nations of the New World, and he deplored the fact that the so-
called civilizers had been unable to establish a fraternal and compre-
hensive relationship between themselves and the Indians. "Race and
History" once again voiced this regret. This major essay quickly be-
came the breviary for antiracist thinking.
The Polemic: Caillois versus Lvi-Strauss
Lvi-Strauss's article nevertheless provoked bitter cntlClsm from
Roger Caillois.
6
Paradoxically, it was Caillois who would accept Lvi-
Strauss into the Acadmie Franaise in 1974, when he succeeded
Montherlant. Caillois did not hi de the virulence of the polemic: "The
tone of your answer was so abundantly vehement, and your polemical
approach so unusual in the debate of ideas, that 1 was speechless."7 As
Caillois suggested, Lvi-Strauss's answer was of an unequaled vio-
lence, such that he never reprinted "Diogne couch" in any other col-
lections of articles.
8
What were the issues of the polemic?
Roger Caillois drew an extremely interesting parallel between the
The Call of the Tropics I29
emergence of certain philosophies and their periods. What he ob-
served was not that philosophy reflected its period but that it fulfilled
something that was lacking. Dntil Hegel, Western philosophy had es-
sentially conceived of history as linear and universal, whereas the rela-
tionship between the West and its empires was still incomplete and
precarious. These philosophies saw a single causallink between human
evolution and its effects, and exaggerated this view of singular causal-
ity, whereas human evolution included very different realities. With
the First World War, history truly became global; scholarly research
and collective sensibilities valorized plurality and the irreducibility of
differences, while at the same time this plurality was evaporating. For
Roger Caillois, "Race and History" was the scholarly substance of
this second position giving value to plurality, and also expressed the
premonition of Western decadence. He reproached Lvi-Strauss for
having attributed exaggerated virtues to peoples who had been ig-
nored in the past, and he generally criticized his relativism. Caillois
pointed to Lvi-Strauss's own contradictions. On the one hand, he
considered aIl cultures to be equivalent and incomparable ("Progress
in one culture cannot be measured by the references of another. . . .
This position can be justified"), while, on the other hand, he claimed
that the East was thousands of years ahead of the West in terms of the
mind-body relationship.9 Lvi-Strauss's relativism took him too far
afield, and Caillois contrasted the superiority of Western civilization,
which for him lay in its constant curiosity about other cultures,
whence ethnography, and which other cultures never felt the need to
invent. "Contrary to what the proverb says, it is not that Lvi-
Strauss's eye can't see his shortcomings .... The position is a noble
one, but a researcher should spend his time seeing his own shortcom-
ings and those of others where they really are."lO
Lvi-Strauss's answer was not long in coming and it was brutal.
Paradoxically, Sartre's Les Temps modernes again became the forum
for developing his theses. The tone was clear from the outset: "Dio-
genes proved that movement existed by walking. Mr. Roger Caillois
lies down in order to avoid seeing it."ll Lvi-Strauss basically re-
peated the major points of his argument without in any way granting
any points to Caillois's critique. In response to the allusion to canni-
balism, Lvi-Strauss answered that morality was not to be located in
the kitchen, and that in terms of the number of people killed, we
outdo the Papuans. But it was the violence of the polemic that was
I30 The CalI of the Tropics
surprising: "Mr. Caillois indulges in an exercse that begins with the
antics of the head table, continues with the declarations of a preacher,
and ends with the lamentation of a penitent. His style is that of the
cynics and we can count him among their numbers."12 "America had
its McCarthy and we have our McCaillois."13 Despite the polemical
tone, this remained a major pie ce in the batde against racial prejudice
in the early fifties. What's more, Caillois's intuition was right: pes-
simism was gaining ground in a Europe that was in the grips of an ap-
parendy inexorable decline.
A Book That Made Its Mark: Tristes Tropiques
14
According to Lopold Sdar Senghor, one of the leaders of Afro-
Asianism at the time, the 1955 Bandung Conference was like a global
thunderclap. At the same time, civil aeronautics was ta king Western
tourists to the most distant cultures. A veritable frenzy of exoticism
took hold of the Old World; travel agencies were offering a range of
packages for exotic trips for every taste. The gurus of the tourist in-
dustry implanted themselves everywhere like so many extraterritorial,
self-enclosed islands. Club Med was soon cutting up continents and
offering the discovery of the Other for less, behind the fences of its
camps, weIl hidden from the natives. It was during this period of shift-
ing intellectual interests that Tristes Tropiques-the book event of
1955-appeared. Lvi-Strauss's triumph demonstrated how com-
pletely he satisfied the collective sensibilities of the period. He made
the spectacular breakthrough he had hoped for in anthropology and
for the structuralist agenda, by casting both fully into the glare of the
French intellectual world. At the same time, he changed his own
image from that of an inhuman scientist. "1 was sick of seeing myself
labeled in universities as a machine without a soul, good only for
putting men into formulas."15
Curiously enough, Tristes Tropiques resulted from a double fail-
ure. Lvi-Strauss had wanted above aIl to write a novel using his
ethnographer's experience, but he gave up after thirty pages; the only
remaining traces include the tide and a magnificent sunset. The other
failure involved his first two attempts to be elected to the Collge de
France; he was beaten in 1949 and aga in in 1950. At the time he was
convinced that he would never be able to have a university career and
so he began writing Tristes Tropiques, "which 1 never would have
dared to publish if 1 had been applying for any university job whatso-
The Cali of the T ropics I3 l
ever."16 This episode was symptomatic of a time when the power and
the innovation of the structuralist program lay in the ability to cir-
cumscribe the university and to find other avenues of legitimation.
Thanks to this detour, Lvi-Strauss could intervene at a more oppor-
tune moment, as a travel philosopher. He looked at things with a mix-
ture of scientificity, of literature, of nostalgia for lost origins, of guilt,
and of redemption that made it impossible to classify his work.
The subjectivity of his story demonstrated the link between the
se arch for identity and the discovery of the Other, by virtue of the no-
tion that ethnography gives us access to the sources of humanity, and,
as Rousseau also believed, to a truth about man, who "never creates
anything truly great except at the beginning."17 There is a nostalgia
for origins in this outlook that only sees human history as the pale
repetition of an authentic and forever lost moment of birth. "We will
accede to that nobility of thought that consists ... in taking as the
starting point of our reflections the indefinable grandeur of man's be-
ginnings."18 In this celebration of beginnings, there is sorne measure
of expiation for the West and its genocides, of which ethnography was
clearly a part. Once a participant in missionary enterprises during the
glorious periods of colonization, the ethnographer pleaded his mea
culpa at the moment when Western values were being rejected; in ban-
daging sorne moral wounds, he became part of the ebb. The tropics
were so sad not only because of their acculturation, but also because
of the nature of ethnography, whose very object was undeniably be-
coming extinct, particularly in the area explored by Lvi-Strauss.
Moreover, these civilizations were in the process of being trans-
formed, demanding their own identity as they cast off their colonial
identity, but also leaving their own traditions behind in order to be-
come societies in ferment.
Decolonization paradoxically assured the triumph of Tristes
Tropiques and created a crisis for the book's orientation, which was
based on immobile societies caught up in the tension between conser-
vation and extinction: "The world began without man and will end
without him."19 Third-world cultures, however, were not trapped in
this reductionism and could open up possible channels of change,
which clearly required that their identities be reforged. The social ef-
fectiveness of anthropology lay not in offering an additional opening
that could be inscribed in the program of package tours, but to partici-
pate in its era by bringing a scientific perspective to bear on the situa-
I32 The Cal! of the
tion. This was Lvi-Strauss meant when, after the French defeat
at Dien Bien Phu, he said that "fifty years of modest and unprestigious
research undertaken by adequate numbers of ethnologists could have
found solutions in Vietnam and North Africa like the one England
managed in India. "20
If the anthropologist could counsel politicians, Lvi-Strauss de-
fined a position as early as 1955 from which he never deviated: a sci-
entist rejects all partisan struggles because he is committed to science.
He withdrew from action and consideJ:ed his withdrawal to be an in-
tangible rule of professional ethics, something like a monk who takes
orders and withdraws from society. The ethnographer's function "will
be simply to understand these other societies,"21 and in order to do so
he had to accept a certain number of renunciations, of mutilations.
"To understand or to act, one must choose"-such would seem to be
the motta for this man who found ultimate comfort in "the medita-
tion of the sage at the foot of the tree. "22 Lvi-Strauss invited us to a
veritable dusk of humankind, and he even offered to convert anthro-
pology into "entropology," a science that studies the processes of dis-
integration. His disengagement in no way excluded the ethnologist's
expression of sensibilities as he describes the Other, of course. Lvi-
Strauss's sensibility and his extreme receptivity received unanimous
critical acclaim and contributed to the immense popularity of Tristes
Tropiques.
Lvi-Strauss made it possible for us to participate in his enthusi-
asm at every step of his discoveries, but, above aU, he went beyond the
vogue for exoticism by restoring the underlying logic of the behavior
he observed. The observer remained a man of science in search of the
laws by which a society functions, requiring him to step outside of
himself, despite his involvement in the field. This decentering fasci-
nated the inteUectual public and the human sciences embarked on the
new adventure of structuralism. Rousseau was still the model here,
and Lvi-Strauss vigorously praised him: "Rousseau, our master,
Rousseau, our brother, whom we have shown such ingratitude. "23 Ac-
cording to Lvi-Strauss, Rousseau was a precursor for having an-
swered the Cartesian cogito, "1 think, therefore 1 am," with a question
whose answer was unclear: "What am I?" And the ethnologist foUows
him in rejecting the evidences of the self in order to become receptive
to the Other's discourse: "In truth, 1 am not myself, but the weakest,
the most humble of others. This was the discovery of the Confes-
The Cali of the Tropics I33
sions. "24 In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau had
already called for the discovery of societies that were unknown to the
West, not for reasons of material wealth but in order to discover other
customs that might shed light on our way of life: "Rousseau did not
limit himself to foreseeing ethnography: he founded it."25 When he
wrote his confessions in Tristes Tropiques, Lvi-Strauss also placed
the observer who reflects upon himself and his doubts and ambitions
back into a context.
A Resounding Success
The reverberations of Lvi-Strauss's work were spectacular for a book
in the human sciences. It was an unclassifiable hybrid accessible to an
exceptionally broad public. Until then, only literary or philosophical
works could hope to have such an effect by addressing sorne of the
major philosophical questions. This had been the case with Sartrean
Existentialism, especially in its literary and theatrical versions. Sartre's
influence was still important, in fact, and Lvi-Strauss published sorne
excerpts of his book in Les Temps modernes.
26
But the response to the
book consecrated his emancipation and that of the structuralist pro-
gram. Journalists, scholars from aIl disciplines, as weIl as intellectuais
of aIl political persuasions took up their pens to salute the event.
In Le Figaro, Raymond Aron applauded this "supremely philo-
sophical"27 book, which resumes the tradition of the philosopher's
journey as he confronts difficulties, following in the tradition of The
Persian Letters. For Combat, Lvi-Strauss had "the stature of a Cer-
vantes," while Franois-Rgis Bastide saluted the birth of a poet and a
new Chateaubriand.
28
In I:Express, Madeleine Chapsal spoke about
the writings of a seer: "It has been sorne ten years since a book has
come out that speaks to us so directIy. "29 The philosophy columns of
Le Monde, written by Jean Lacroix, were devoted to Tristes Tropiques
and suggested the paradox in Lvi-Strauss's thinking: "He denounces
progress yet no one does better justice to the progress of our culture
than he."30 Many commentators were seduced by his reflections on a
researcher's involvement and investment in his object, in a quest that
has nothing exotic about it: "He invites us first of aIl to find our-
selves."31 "The reader of this book, will find above aIl a man. Isn't
that what he's looking for, after all?"32 Claude Roy, the literary critic
who wrote for Libration, made an exception to the rule of reviewing
only literary works and wrote about Tristes Tropiques: "The most in-
'34 The Cali of the Tropics
teresting book the week i5 not a It is the work of an ethnog-
rapher, M. Claude Lvi-Strauss."33 Le Canard enchan (Oerober 3I,
I956) ev en spoke about the "refreshing tropics."
More substantial surveys were published in the Annales and the
Philosophical Review written by Jean Cazeneuve. Lucien Febvre had
planned to speak about the work himself beeause it had completely
fascinated him, but he died before doing so. Georges Bataille, the di-
rector of Critique, wrote a long article entitled "A Human Book, a
Great Book," in which he described the displacement of literature to-
ward more specialized activities.
34
It was true that Lvi-Strauss's
work, like that of Alfred Mtraux,35 was part of this new sensibility,
this new relationship between writing and scientificity that goes be-
yond the traditional opposition between the work of art and scientific
discovery: "From the beginning, Tristes Tropiques presents itself as a
work of art, not as a work of science." 36 Its literariness came not only
from the fact that it was first of all the expression of a man, his feel-
ings, and his style, but also that its general spirit was guided more by
what attracted and seduced its author than by the simple transcription
of a logical order.
This shift of literature toward an ethnographie genre was so mueh
an issue that the Goncourt brothers even published a communiqu
saying that they regretted being unable to award their prize to Tristes
Tropiques. In a long pie ce on Lvi-Strauss's work, Ren Etiemble saw
in him a brother, a born heretic. Tristes Tropiques "is a book that you
either take or leave. For my part, 1 take it and keep it in the treasury of
my library, deeply within me."37 Etiemble agreed with Lvi-Strauss's
critical perspective on Western modernity, referring to Gilberto Freyre's
work describing how the French, and after them the Portuguese, dis-
eovered what would later become Brazil and the physieal and moral
degradation of the native populations that followed. "They did not
civilize, but there are indications that they syphilized Brazil rather
well," recounted Freyre, himself a Brazilian.
38
The enthusiasm was so widespread and so unanimous that certain
misunderstandings were inevitable. Sorne were satisfied with a dose of
exoticism, although that was what Lvi-Strauss repudiated, while oth-
ers, who saw the book as the expression of an individual's sensibili-
ties, were rather quickly unbalanced by the future celebration of the
death of man, who is simply an ephemeral figure, "a passing efflores-
cence." The most famous quid pro quo was the prize given to Lvi-
The Cali of the Tropics 13)
Strauss on November 30,1956, the for Golden Pen,
rewards travel and exploration books. Tristes Tropiques barely won
(by a vote of 5 to 4 against Jean-Claude Berryer's In the Land of the
White Elephant), although the book opens with the famous \ine "1
hate traveling and explorers" and continues with "The first thing we
see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face
of mankind."39 Lvi-Strauss refused the prize, which earned him a
flattering, new \iterary comparison: "The new Julien Gracq. An In-
di an specia\ist turns down the Golden Feather. "40
In this concert of praises, the few discordant notes had a difficult
time making themselves audible. Maxime Rodinson, for example,
published a critique of Tristes Tropiques
41
in which he refused Lvi-
Strauss's relativism and argued in favor of a historical dialectic: "Ac-
cording to this view of total relativism, nothing permits us to say that
knowing Archimedes' principle is more important than knowing
about our genealogy. "42 Etiemble's article, which basically praised
Lvi-Strauss, made sorne criticisms. Lvi-Strauss went too far in seeing
in the birth of writing the means of facilitating servility, a conclusion
he drew from his observations of the Nambikwara. Etiemble replied
that Hitler and Poujade began by speaking at meetings. As for turning
anthropology into entropology, he observed: "Oh, no, not at aIl. ...
Lvi-Strauss gives a bit too much importance to cybernetics. "43
Lvi-Strauss answered Rodinson, Andr-Georges Haudricourt,
and Georges Granai in his seminar at the Muse de l'Homme on Octo-
ber 15, 1956. He accused them of falsely attributing intentions to him
for he did not want to construct a model of models, but sim ply to
come to sorne partial and limited conclusions.
Is there anything here, as Rodinson daims, to reduce Billancourt to
desperation? ... Neither in "Race and History" nar in Tristes
Tropiques did l intend to dis parage the idea of progress; rather l
should like to see progress transferred from the rank of a universal
category of human development to that of a particular mode of exis-
tence, characteristic of our own society.44
Here, Lvi-Strauss took a defensive position, which he always
adopted aga in st any criticism of his ahistoricism. He claimed not to be
the bearer of a general philosophy but only of a partieular seientifie
method. This answer remained unsatisfaetory, however, beeause it
clearly veiled the undeniable philosophie al postulate of the struetural-
I36 The Cali of the Tropics
ist program. But the moment was not yet ripe in I9 5 5 for the great
philosophical debates that would take place in the sixties. Lvi-Strauss
was, at the time, at the height of the triumph of a new discipline:
anthropology.
The Conversion of the Philosophers
The response to Lvi-Strauss was not limited to the media. He gener-
aUy shook up the inteUectual world, but even more profoundly, he led
a number of philosophers, historians, and economists who had bro-
ken with their original discipline to the tropics, to answer the caU of
foreign dimes. The young generation was aU the more attracted to
this concern for reconciling one's own sensibility with a rational study
of a living society with which one interacts in that the West no longer
seemed to require the same kind of political commitments that it had
in the pasto Tristes Tropiques was something like the symptom of a
new state of mind in this respect, a wiU to understand the vanishing
points without abandoning the rigors of Reason, but by applying
them to new objects.
Lvi-Strauss was the raUying point for many "converts." Luc de
Heusch, an ethnologist already working in the Belgian Congo, today's
Zaire, was one of these. A student of Marcel Griaule at the Sorbonne,
he had been disappointed not to find his master's grand symbolic con-
structions. He returned to France in I9 5 5 and discovered Tristes
Tropiques. Although he had only cursorily glanced at The Elementary
Structures of Kinship before leaving for Africa, he came back to Lvi-
Straussland and adapted the methods used in Indian societies to the
Bantus of Central Africa, comparing aU the variations of myths in
order to understand African symbolic thinking.
Lvi-Strauss's stunning success compensated for ethnology's weak
incursion into the university system. The Institut d'Ethnologie had ex-
isted since I925 at the Muse de l'Homme, but there was only one de-
partment, and a group of teachers whose sole audience was composed
of students who had come to earn the only certificate that was both
literary and scientific, without any intention of becoming ethnologists.
It was above aU an opportunity for philosophers needing a scientific
certificate in order to earn their Licence degree to take courses directly
linked to their interests. Michel Izard remembered his dissatisfaction.
Of course there were clearly defined areas like cultural technology,
physical anthropology, or prehistory, "but the rest seemed to us to be
The Call of the Tropics I37
completely impoverished. "45 Teaching ethnology was divided either
geographicaUy into the large regions of the world or thematicaUy,
without any kind of organization. Therefore, the media's impact was
essential for convincing the young generation that there was a viable
alternative to a traditional career, that an anthropological breach
could be made outside the citadel of the Sorbonne. The situation was
very similar in linguistics at the same time, and this had a clear effect
on their common destiny.
In the mid-fifties, Tristes Tropiques and Alejo Carpentier's Le
Partage des eaux resonated for Michel Izard like "a caU from else-
where. "46 Lvi-Strauss was not proposing a journey to the promised
land, however, but to disenchantment. It was the quest for a discovery
that bore within it its own failure: "1 was sensitive to the pessimism,
to this end-of-the-road aspect."47 Michel Izard therefore converted
in the middle of the fifties from philosophy, at the Sorbonne, where
he had already learned of Lvi-Strauss thanks to the prestige of Les
Temps modernes, in which several of his major texts had already ap-
peared. But ethnology was quite marginal in the training he received
at the Sorbonne. His professors-Jean Hyppolite, who continued
Hegel, Jean Wahl, Maurice de Gandillac, and Vladimir Janklvitch-
were not interested in this new field of study. Entire areas were being
ignored in this way, including analytic philosophy, epistemology, and
linguistics in general. Ethnology was practically nonexistent, with a
few exceptions. "We had Mikel Dufrenne as our assistant. His com-
plementary thesis had to do with basic personality and he gave a
course on American cultural anthropology. Later, and late for me,
there was Claude Lefort, a young assistant who had been writing
about Lvi-Strauss's work since 1951-52 "48
Michel Izard found epistemology more attractive. He read Georges
Canguilhem and Gaston Bachelard and, on the advice of his friend
Pierre Guattari, known as Flix, he took the exams for the certificate
in ethnology during the year that he was working on his degree under
Jean Wahl. At the Institut, he met Olivier Herrenschmidt, who had
chosen history and was undergoing his conversion, thanks to a mix of
anthropology, linguistics, and the history of religions. Michel Izard
also met philosophers who were coming to anthropology, such as
Michel Cartry. The year 1956 was supposed to be just a passing diver-
sion for him, but what had started out as a detour suddenly took on
I38 The Call of the Tropics
an altogether different meaning: "By the end the year, 1 had U'A_iU'_U
to give up philosophy in arder to do anthropology. "49
If Tristes Tropiques had a real effect on Michel Izard and led him
to look toward ethnology for its research possibilities, The Elemen-
tary Structures of Kinship helped him to decide to break with philoso-
phy. The book's modelization, the promises of scientificity held out by
the structuralist program, together with his will to "turn my back on
the West, to go elsewhere, beyond our history, the history that pro-
duced US,"50 aU contributed. Izard therefore took Lvi-Strauss's semi-
-nars in the Fifth Section of the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes
(EPHE), as well as classes from Jacques Soustelle and Roger Bastide,
with the intention of becoming a professional. At the end of 1957,
Lvi-Strauss offered him two research options: he could either work
in Khartoum, at the Sudan Museum of Antiquities, in order to create
exhibits on the black animist south, although his dossier was not yet
substantial enough, or work at the Institute for Applied Human Sci-
ences, which was looking for an ethnologist and a geographer to do a
study in Upper Volta. Our apprentice ethnologist was involved for a
year's time in a study on African territory and his conversion became
definitive.
The goal of the African expedition was to study a problem of
population displacement created by a plan to construct a dam on one
of the tributaries of the Volta. The mission was to discover why the
area where the displaced population was to be sent had remained so
unpopulated. "It was intelligent to ask ethnologists and geographers
to study the question, because it was one of the first rimes that un-
authorized displacements were being considered and that there was an
attempt to understand people's reasons."51 No geographer could be
found to accompany Michel Izard, so Franoise Hritier, a historian,
joined him. Hritier came from a discipline that was even more eccen-
tric with respect to anthropology. As a history student at the Sorbonne
between 1953 and 1957, she had considered studying ancient history
but her contact with philosophy students, and particularly with Michel
Izard, led her to anthropology. So, in 1957, she began to take Lvi-
Strauss's courses in the Fifth Section of the EPHE. "It was clear that
for someone who had studied history and geography and who was
preparing to take the agrgation, these things were absolutely new." 52
Franoise Hritier experienced the triple shock of discovering societies
who se very existence was unknown to her, of encountering unimag-
The Cali of the Tropics I39
ined rational practices, and an altogether new way of thinking. She
was enthusiastic, and went on to take the ethnology certificate. She
married Izard during their time in Africa.
The Indianist Pole
The year 1955 was clearly an important one for anthropology. Louis
Dumont returned to France from Oxford and began his course at the
EPHE; Fernand Braudel and Clemens Heller began the area studies
program in the Sixth Section of the EPHE, which was supposed to
bring many disciplines together, including anthropology, to focus on
common objects. Dumont's return radically changed Olivier Herren-
schmidt's plans. He had been at the Sorbonne and was specializing in
the history of religions, and began his training not only in ethnology
and linguistics, but with a speciality in Indian studies. Andr Martinet
had just returned from America and Herrenschmidt took his courses
at the Sorbonne, those of Lvi-Strauss's in the Fifth Section of the
EPHE, and those given by Louis Dumont in the Sixth Section. This
meeting between the study of Sanskrit, linguistics, and structural an-
thropology gave him a second wind and a different sense of Indian
studies, which went beyond the stage of monographs based on field-
work. A group took shape around Louis Dumont that included the
philosopher and Brahman specialist Madeleine Biardeau, who was
appointed to the EPHE in 1960, Daniel Thorner, an American econo-
mist, and Robert Lingat, a Sanskritist appointed in 1962 to a chair in
Southeast Asian law and institutions. "It was a small, highly qualifie d,
multidisciplinary team that was marginal to the French Indianist
milieu."53
Of course this Indianist pole did not draw huge numbers because
it was very demanding, and when Louis Dumont one day found him-
self in front of twenty-five people, he immediately assumed that the
students had made a mistake: "You are mistaken, 1 am not Ren
Dumont, but Louis Dumont." 54 Indian studies remained a bit marginal
in anthropology because, more than the other branches of research,
they came under the authority of Sanskrit philologists. The breach
that Dumont opened was contemporary with the one created by Lvi-
Strauss and around the same programmatic axis, allowing the Indian-
ists to get out of their ghetto and encouraging contacts with specialists
in other cultural areas.
I40 The Cal! of the Tropics
Leroi-Gourhan and the Technical Pole
A third pole contributed to anthropology's success in the mid-fifties.
Andr Leroi-Gourhan was nominated in 1956 to the only chair of eth-
nology at the Sorbonne, following Marcel Griaule's death. A second
chair was created in 1959 and held by Roger Bastide, and a certificate
of prehistoric archaeology was created in 1960-6I. Andr Leroi-
Gourhan, who represented the archaeological and technical side of
ethnology, was responsible for this program, and in this respect his
contribution complemented Lvi-Strauss's cultural orientation. Indeed,
in a colloquium in 1987, Lvi-Strauss recognized the similarity in the
methodology of their undertakings.
55
One of Leroi-Gourhan's important innovations was also to privi-
lege synchrony, not as Lvi-Strauss di d, based on Saussure's model,
but in his method of excavation, which had ta be horizontal. This led
to an important controversy at the end of the forties between horizon-
talists and verticalists. Leroi-Gourhan had clear ideas about uncover-
ing, and argued that it was necessary that "the earth be removed in
order to let things speak horizontally." 56 The same totalizing ambition
that was characteristic of the structuralist program was also present
here. Leroi-Gouran's notion of ethnographie culture had as its object
not so much singular cultural events as the relationships between their
different branches. Coherence appeared once the pieces were assem-
bled. Hlne Balfet, a student of Andr Leroi-Gourhan who gave
courses on technology at the Muse de l'Homme when Leroi-Gourhan
was named to the Sorbonne in 1956, clearly represented this bridge
between the two poles of the anthropological universe since she was
following Lvi-Strauss's work at the same time.
These two orientations in anthropologie al research were to re-
main separate, however, as they diverged according to their defini-
tion of the relationship between work and language. Andr Leroi-
Gourhan explained both by the upright position, which freed the
hands and allowed them to specialize in work and prehension, leaving
the mouth free for speech. However, there is no work without lan-
guage, as Marx showed in his famous text on the bee and the archi-
tect at the beginning of Capital. What characterized and distinguished
the architect's activity is that he constructed his house mentally before
building it in reality. But where was the break to be placed? Work or
language? The answer differed according to Lvi-Strauss's viewpoint
The Call of the Tropics I4I
emphasizing language, or Leroi-Gourhan's viewpoint giving priority
to praxis.
But despite their differences, these two poles dynamized and de-
fined the directions of anthropological research for the next thirty
years. The structuralist ambition seemed to bring together a commu-
nity of researchers from a variety of disciplines and with a range of
personalities. The context was that of a third-world pathos, against
the backdrop of the beginning of the Aigerian war, the end of the war
in Indochina, and the Bandung Conference, in a France that had long
refused to address the colonial question and that was suddenly discov-
ering a critical reality that so profoundly affected consciousness that it
created a fundamental bad conscience. All of this was more than an
invitation to travel, a call of the tropics for a young generation un-
comfortable in its own society. In the structuralist program, this gen-
eration was offered an ambitious and rigorous program that seemed
to hold out the promise of reconciling a sensibility disenchanted with
reason.
Eighteen
Reason Raves:
Michel Foucault's Work
While anthropology was addressing the question of the Other in the
West by disinterring primitive societies from the ignorance to which
Eurocentric thinking had long relegated them, a philosopher was writ-
ing a history of madness that looked at the unseemly side of Western
reason. Beneath the triumph of reason, Michel Foucault hunted the
repressed, placing himself from the outset at the edges of Western
thinking and of its history.
The timing was striking. Michel Foucault began to write Madness
and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason in 1956,
shortly after Tristes Tropiques was published and the Bandung Con-
ference had taken place. The book came out in 1961, shortly before
the vian Conference and Aigerian independence. The coincidence of
the se political and cultural events is completely fortuitous since
Michel Foucault was not a third-world militant at the time. And yet,
Madness and Civilization quickly became the symptom of a break
with a certain kind of history of the Western subject. Foucault pre-
sented a picture of madness, the forgotten and repressed double of
reason, which he elevated from its position of exclusion.
Pierre Nora had just published The French of Algeria,l and he
quickly understood the parallel between his own critique of French
ethnocentricity in North Africa and Foucault's critique of the ethno-
centricity of reason, for as Aigerians were leaving the French political
framework, they carried with them the mark of their own history of
Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's \X1ork l 4 J
Nora immediately wrote Foucault expressing his enthusi-
asm and later published him at Gallimard. The old war horses were
tired and no longer heralded, the damned were no longer glorified.
The dialectic was caught in its own entanglements in 1956 while Fou-
cault emphasized the forgotten and repressed in the work of reason,
and he sought a new historical sensibility, forging it by giving voice ta
that which history forgot, by following the tracks of reason's opera-
tion. He "opened up new horizons by transforming the prison and the
madhouse into grounds for reflection ... as sa many theoretical and
political issues."2
Just as Lvi-Strauss was making it possible ta consider primitive
societies as different by drawing them back into the purview of ratio-
nal thought and reflecting upon them, Michel Foucault was on the
heels of a similar adventure in which madness forces us ta rethink rea-
son, clearly exposing its strengths and weaknesses. Foucault thus
hunted the work of repression in the fabrication of artificial rational-
izations for the apparently unintelligible; he sought out the travesties
of meaning and eut through the masks of power underlying knowl-
edge, marvelously illustrating the spirit of his time. "The life that is
missing in our lives is ta be found at the geographic extremities (exoti-
cism) or heroic horizons (the adventurous past or even the future of
science fiction), or in the heights or depths of life." 3
Michel Foucault offered the philosopher a new adventure, by
pushing th in king ta its limits and reflecting upon the boundaries, and
for this he quickly came ta have an important place in the nascent
structura li st galaxy. His role was due in part ta his prestige as a
philosopher and ta his capacity ta historicize his abject. Foucault
made it possible ta historicize structuralism in a way that Lvi-Strauss
had not imagined when he set the primitive paradigm into place.
Georges Canguilhem saw in Michel Foucault the philosopher of
the concept weIl positioned for drawing together the disciplines of
structuralism even if in 1961 Foucault did not yet place himself in the
structuralist lineage. This was a new, and at the time uncategorizable,
exigency that seemed ta disrupt disciplinary boundaries and end the
phenomenological phase of the history of philosophy in France.
Where did it come from? Michel Foucault, this exploder of prejudices
and of consumer thinking, incessantly sought out truth even if it
meant passing for a contrabandist of knowledge. His proposaIs were
resolutely mode st; far from presenting himself as the spokesman of
"44 Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work
the correct way of thinking, he sim ply tried to sketch the contours of
the thinkable. In his journey to the nether side of reason, Foucault was
also a travel philosopher of sorts, and, like Nietzsche, a "rummager of
the gutters" of our civilization.
Foucault was a unique philosopher who clearly insisted on being
seen as such, derisively rejecting all labels and vigilantly eschewing
any attachments, much like a Gidean protagonist. Like Nathanael,
this constantly shifting rebel can only be understood if each of the
stages of a life that he constructed much like an artwork is examined
in order to root his thinking as it evolved. Restoring what made
Michel Foucault so unique lets us demonstrate both how he belonged
to and how he diverged from the structuralist paradigm, not by reduc-
ing his thought to a common mold but by showing how it was articu-
lated with it.
A Star Is Born
Michel Foucault often evoked the difficult relationship between writ-
ing and biography. He never revealed much about himself, for which
Jean-Paul Aron reproached him shortly before he died of AIDS. He
was born Paul-Michel Foucault on October 15, 1926, to a good, con-
servative Catholic bourgeois family of doctors who were well estab-
lished on both his parents' sides, in Poitiers. His father was a well-
known surgeon at the Hospitaliers clinic and his mother, Anne
Malapert, came from the Vendeuvre-du-Poitou, about twenty kilome-
ters from Poitiers, where she owned a magnificent house called "the
chteau." Like Jacques-Marie Lacan, Foucault dropped half his name
"because the initiaIs read PMF, like Pierre Mends-France, said Mme
Foucault";4 but, more seriously, it would seem that Foucault, who
was given his father's first name, changed it out of opposition to the
Name of the Father.
This biographical detail sheds sorne light on the philosopher-son's
later positions and his "constant denial of the dimension of paternity,
of the name, one of the keys to his subjective position."5 Whence a
complicated and conflictual history with psychoanalysis in general
and with Lacan in particular, for Foucault did not agree that speech
was one of the sites for the subject's truth. Foucault's fascination with
crossing out, with the oxymoron as a rhetorical figure (amorous birds
of prey often exemplifying this rhetorical figure), seems ta compul-
sively repeat the paternal horizon that he wanted to destroy, without
Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work I45
fully succeeding. He insisted constantly on the illusion no one
speaks behind his voice, and that no one authors his texts, and in this
he fully adhered to the structuralist negation of the author as weIl as
the attempt at literary renewal undertaken by Georges Bataille, Mau-
rice Blanchot, and Pierre Klossowski. The name of the father was thus
a burden with which Foucault broke quite quickly, "a break that was
difficult in this milieu. He often said to me that if he did not bec orne a
doctor he had to at least be a professor at the Sorbonne."6
Foucault did not bec orne a doctor, but the medical model became
a prism through which to understand the human sciences, by using
their visible traces and differences negatively, by looking at their
underside, much like a doctor who tries, in healing the sick and restor-
ing them to health, to understand pathology. In this respect, Michel
Foucault created a veritable "medical paradigm in the human sci-
ences."7 Foucault had no problems in his high school, Henri IV,
in Poitiers until he was about fifteen, at which point his parents put
him in Saint-Stanislaus, a Catholic school, in order to finish secondary
school and discipline his min d, which was increasingly critical, not to
say caustic. "He was incredibly impressive, he was quite corrosive,
and cast doubt on all our beliefs."8
This was another key moment in Foucault's biography, one that is
essential for understanding how deeply his work was affected by the
war. Foucault was given very little to confiding and never revealed his
feelings in public, but later he spoke about this period in a very confi-
dential context of a Canadian Indian review that preached silence and
of which probably no more than ten copies were published. He con-
fided what he remembered of his adolescence, in which the war and
death were always present:
What strikes me when 1 try to remember my impressions is that
practically all my emotional memories are linked to the political
situation .... 1 think that the childhood of girls and boys of my gen-
eration was shaped by these important historie events. The threat of
war was always at our doorstep; it shaped our existence. And then
the war came .... Perhaps this is why 1 am fascinated by history and
by the relationship between personal experience and the events in
which we are caught up. 1 think that that was the beginning of my
desire for theory.9
Thinking about war was fundamental for Foucault; it was the
basis for a central paradigm in his work involving notions of strategy,
I46 Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work
power tactics, breaks, and power relations. In his approach to govern-
ing and to every individual's ability to influence others' behavior at aIl
levels of social and private activity, the problematization of war was
something like an essential moment since it is where the confrontation
with death was played out. This was the area on which he worked at
the Collge de France at the end of the seventies and to which he had
decided to devote himself after the History of Sexuality.10 He alluded
to this future research in the interview he gave when he was invited to
the Catholic University at Louvain: "If God grants me life, after mad-
ness, crime, and sexuality, the final thing 1 would like to study would
be the problem of war and the institution of war in what we might calI
the military dimension of society." 11
The young Michel Foucault began his hypokhgne in Poitiers,
and began preparing for the entrance examinations for the cole Nor-
male Suprieure (ENS) on the rue d'Ulm in Paris. He was almost ad-
mitted the first time around and then decided to move to Paris to pre-
pare for the exams there. In I945 he found another Henri IV High
School, in the heart of the city, and met Andr Wormser, Franois
Bdarida, Robert Mausi, and Franois Furet, among others.
Thanks to Jean Hyppolite's introducing his khgne students to
Hegel, it became clear to Foucault that his field would be philosophy.
Foucault found Hyppolite later at the ENS and even succeeded him
at the Collge de France. "Those who were in khgne after the war
remember Mr. Hyppolite's classes on Phenomenology of Mind: in
that voice that never stopped starting and stopping as if it were medi-
tating within its own movement, we not only saw the voice of a pro-
fessor but we heard something of the voice of Hegel."12 Jean Hyppo-
lite had translated Phenomenology of Mind and his courses gave
Hegel's thinking the modernity that had been occulted behind his rep-
utation as a Romantic philosopher. He had defended his thesis, "Gen-
esis and Structure of the Phenomenology of Mind"13 in I947, and it
was greeted in Les Temps modernes as a major event that restored
Hegelianism's fundamental position in postwar philosophical think-
ing, in the legacy of the teaching of Jean Wahl and Alexandre Kojve.
Even as late as I975, Foucault sent Jean Hyppolite's wife a copy of
The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception,14 and
dedicated it "To Madame Hyppolite, in memory of him to whom 1
owe everything."15 One of Foucault's major texts, "Nietzsche, Ge-
nealogy, and History,"16 was written for a collective work in honor of
Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work I47
Jean Hyppolite. Contributors included Georges Canguilhem, Martial
Guroult, Jean Laplanche, Michel Serres, and Jean-Claude Pariente.17
Mental Illness
In I946, Foucault entered the ENS on the rue d'Ulm with honors,
fourth in his class. Success did not bring psychological stability, how-
ever, and in I948 he attempted suicide. It was not easy to live one's
homosexuality comfortably at the time and Foucault contacted a psy-
chiatrie institute. He had read Freud very early on thanks to a doctor
correspondent of Freud in Poitiers, Dr. Beauchamp, and did not stop
at taking courses at Ulm. But in addition to the courses at the ENS, he
attended a number of Parisian institutes and took courses at Sainte-
Anne. He was passionate about psychology and specialized in psycho-
pathology. "Madness seemed to hold a certain fascination for him and
he brought back innumerable anecdotes from his hospital visits about
the world of the confined,"18 recalls Jacques Proust.
Foucault's training extended beyond the normal curriculum and
content of classical speculative philosophy, and brought him into con-
tact with a specifie field that was both theoretical and practical and
that also prepared his later and rather rapid shifts, since his very first
book, Mental Health and Personality,19 dates from I954 and is de-
voted to psychopathology, to psychoanalytic concepts, and to the
reading of social representations of madness. He wrote this work at
the request of Louis Althusser for the collection "Initiation philoso"
phique" directed by his friend Jean Lacroix at Presses Universitaires
de France (PUF). Michel Foucault also took courses at the Sorbonne
with Daniel Lagache, Jean Hyppolite, named to the Sorbonne in
I949, Jean Beaufret, who dealt with Heidegger, Jean Wahl, and Jean-
Toussaint Desanti, "but of course, it was Merleau-Ponty's courses that
most strongly impressed the young students. "20
In Se arch of the Mind's Limits
At the ENS itself, Michel Foucault was most influenced by Louis Al-
thusser, the caman
21
of philosophy there since I948. At the beginning
of the fifties, Marxism was the important thinking machine and
Althusser introduced his audience, including Foucault, to Marx. He
even introduced Foucault to the F r e n ~ h Communist Party. "Impulse
or adherence, then retreat, 1 no longer remember very weIl," remarked
his party comrade Maurice Agulhon, while his colleague in Lille,
I48 Reason Raves: Michel Foucau/r's Work
Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, remembers having seen Foucault crying
upon learning of the death of the "little father of the people," Stalin,
in I953.
22
This was the period when the ENS was in fact divided
between the "go-tos" (those who go to Mass) and the communists,
many of whom were left-wing Christians who took the outstretched
hand and joined the French Communist Party.
Everyone at the school expected Foucault to pass the agrgation
in I950 with flying colors, but he failed the oral exams after having
passed the written exam. He had to prepare for the exams again the
following year and his second attempt was something like a milestone
righting his path on the road to his own destiny. The oral question he
selected was unusual-sexuality-and Jean Hyppolite, who was on
the committee, had to fight to get it through. The luck of the draw was
inspired, for this would become Foucault's major area of work.
Having passed the exam, Foucault escaped the purgatory of
teaching in a high school because, after a year at the Thiers Founda-
tion, he was named a teaching assistant in psychology at the Univer-
sity of Lille. He continued to live in Paris and taught at Ulm thanks to
Louis Althusser, and became the philosophy caman. Foucault became
friends with a group of communists who had been at the ENS-
Grard Genette, Jean-Claude Passeron, Paul Veyne, Maurice Pinguet,
Jean Molino-who nicknamed him "le Fuchs" (German for fox) be-
cause Foucault was slyer than the others and because foxes dig more
deeply than others. In I953, "he went to Sainte-Anne every week for a
new seminar of an unknown Dr. Lacan whom Foucault admired
tremendously. He sometimes alluded to the specular image and to the
Mirror Stage, which at the time was the ultimate subtlety. "23 His
friend Maurice Pinguet recalls how important the discovery of Nietz-
sche was for Foucault in I953:
Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Freud: in I953, these were his points of ref-
erence until he met Nietzsche .... 1 see M. Foucault reading the Con-
sidrations intempestives in the sun on the beach at Civitavec-
chia .... From I953 on, the generallines of a global project were
beginning to take shape: an ethical decision inspired by Nietzsche's
thinking crowned a genealogical critique of morality and science.
24
In the early fifties, Foucault was also an avid reader of literature
and was particularly fascinatecl by Maurice Blanchot's writing, which
left his mark on Foucault's style, especially in his systematic use of the
Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work I49
oxymoron. As Foucault confided to Paul Veyne, "At the time, 1
dreamed of being Blanchot. "25 His literary sensibility drew him to
Samuel Beckett, Georges Bataille, Raymond Roussel, and Ren Char.
A veritable fascination with reflecting upon the outside and upon lim-
its also took hold then, and his literary influences translated his funda-
mental anxiety about death, which was no less calmed by his work in
psychoanalysis, to which he always remained a stranger.
Foucault, who was quite precocious in his knowledge of Freud
and Lacan, was counseled against hospitalization at Ulm by Louis
Althusser, and Daniel Lagache later suggested to him that he begin
analysis. He did, but he spent no more than three weeks. His relation-
ship to psychoanalysis was always ambivalent, a mix of fascination
and rejection. But it was thanks to Michel Foucault that a department
of psychoanalysis was created in 1968 at Paris VIII-Vincennes, even
though he ridiculed those who earned their living by "renting out their
ears."26
Exile
The search for limits and for thinking the outside led Michel Foucault
beyond France in 1955. He chose to leave for Uppsala in August,
thanks to Georges Dumzil whom he did not yet know but who had
to recommend someone to his Swedish friends for a position as a
French reader, a position he himself had held in the thirties. Dumzil
had lost touch with the ENS and turned to Raoul Curien for advice;
Curien told him about Michel Foucault, whom he called "the smartest
person 1 know."27 Georges Dumzil offered the position to Foucault,
who accepted it and spent three years in Sweden. When the two men
met later, an intellectual complicity and a friendship were born "that
never changed until his death. "28
Foucault's participation in the structuralist adventure is due, cer-
tainly, to Georges Dumzil. Until then, Foucault had not really found
direction in his constant search for an enterprise that would calm his
existential anxiety. He was still uncertain as he stood at the crossroads
of philosophy, literature, and psychology. Stalin's death in 1953 had
been a shock, and the discovery of Nietzsche a substitute. But he was
still without the base for the genealogy that he wanted to construct
and his meeting with Dumzil-a meeting whose importance he would
always reiterate-brought him an answer. In his preface to Madness
and Civilization, he wrote, "1 owe a debt to all those who helped me in
I50 Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work
this rather solitary task, and most of all to Mr. Georges Dumzil, with-
out whom 1 would not have undertaken this work. "29 He told Le
Monde that Georges Dumzil had been the most important of the in-
fluences on him, "thanks to the idea of structure. As Dumzil had done
for myths, 1 have tried to discover the structured norms of experience
whose shape can be found, with sorne modifications, at different lev-
els. "30 Foucault wrote his thesis in the elsewhere of Sweden, seeking
the manifestations of madness in the Carolina Rediviva library, where
he found a very rich collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
medical works that a collector had left to the library. This collection
served him well in giving voice to the world of silence.
The Thesis
On Saturday, May 20, I96I, a major event took place in the Louis-
Liard Hall of the Sorbonne, the sanctuary where important theses are
consecrated in an immutable ritual. Michel Foucault came to defend
his thesis on madness, quite an incongruous object in this temple of
the academy. Georges Canguilhem, his director, had told his students,
"You must go."31 Pierre Macherey was in attendance with many oth-
ers in a room that was packed for the occasion. Foucault was com-
pletely unknown to Macherey when he walked into Louis-Liard, but
he left it completely and permanently dazzled by this university cere-
mony. From then on, he bought each of Foucault's books the day they
came out. "Something completely unheard of took place: the mem-
bers of the jury were overwhelmed,"32 a jury composed of august pro-
fessors including its president, Henri Gouhier, a Sorbonne professor
since I948 and a well-known historian of philosophy, Georges Can-
guilhem, thesis director, and Daniel Lagache, Jean Hyppolite, and
Maurice de Gandillac. "To speak about madness requires the talents
of a poet," concluded Michel Foucault. "But you do possess those tal-
ents, sir," answered Canguilhem." 33
Michel Foucault raised the problem of the claim to truth of a par-
ticular scientific discourse, namely, psychiatry. He studied the condi-
tions of its validity and possibility, deliberately planting his probe in
the heart of Western history in order to question triumphant reason.
"In the case of a science as doubtful as psychiatry, couldn't we more
clearly perceive the tangle between the effects of power and of knowl-
edge?"34 ln order to displace traditional boundaries, Foucault began
with the taboo object of madness, the repressed of Western reason, the
Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work r 5 l
of its Other, He described and how the pronouncements
of nascent and uncertain psychiatrie knowledge were validated, which
led him to privilege the historicization of his object. For him, his-
torical analysis was an "instrumental position"35 within a political
sphere, a means of not sacralizing science. The historicized discourse
must ask what gives science its power, discerning everything in it that
is not scientific, and look at "how, in our society, the truth effects of
science are at the same time the effects of power."36
Madness, his research subject, was to be freed from the many dis-
courses holding it captive. Scientific knowledge, whether legal, med-
ical, or belonging to the police, was called to the witness stand to
examine its contribution to the birth of this figure of the Other of
reason. This quest for an object removed from the dredges of sedi-
mented discourses corresponds completely to the structura li st theme,
which at the time was taking the form of research into the different
zero degrees-of writing, of language, of kinship, and of the uncon-
scious. The Foucauldian project took its place in it by proposing to
"find in history the zero degree of the history of madness, where it is
an undifferentiated experience as yet undivided by division itself. "37
This work on the obscure limits of Reason aimed at restoring a life
and voice to madness itself, behind the discourses with rationalist pre-
tensions. "1 did not want to make a history of this language, but
rather an archaeology of this silence."38
Giving Voice to Silence: Madness
Michel Foucault constructed his history like a fiction based on sorne
founding myths. "His histories are novels,"39 in which positive affir-
mations, critical and even nihilistic critiques of canonical fields of
knowledge confront the newly defined boundaries. He retraced a
path leading us onto the medieval ship of fools, as much a mythical
theme borrowed from the Argonauts as a reality of a medieval city
that rids itself of its fools by placing them in the hands of boatmen,
and up to the eighteenth-century world of asylums. The status of mad-
ness changes over time; first an object of exclusion, it later becomes an
object of confinement.
Foucault discerned a reversaI. During the Renaissance, the figure
of the fool was inseparable from Reason. Erasmus discovered the im-
manent madness of Reason, and Pascal wrote that "men are so neces-
sarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of mad-
I52 Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work
ness. "40 In the century, rationalism claimed an ability ta
chaase its abjects and, in the new rules of methad as Descartes had
defined them, excluded madness by relegating it ta error, ta the nega-
tive, to an illusory dream. Eliminated from the realm of the rational
and born as a negative figure, apart, madness even became the decisive
divide between the world of reason and unreason, picking up where
the old division between Good and Evil had stopped. Madness was a
world of non-sense that had to efface itself so that rational thought
could prevail. Reduced to silence, immured in a carceral universe, the
madman does not yet have his own place, for he is initially interned
with paupers. The seventeenth century of Reason reacted by locking
up the fear of madness that continued to haunt it. Madness became a
menace and the madman's disappearance the condition for the reign
of Reason. It thus found itself caught up in the important movement
toward confinement whose beginnings Foucault placed with the royal
edict of April 27, 1656, which created the Hpital Gnral in which
paupers were received and put to work. "The walls of confinement ac-
wally enclose the negative of that moral city of which the bourgeois
conscience began to dream. "41 In this, he perceived a discontinuity in
discursive practices that led to a new relationship to madness as well
as to kinship. Whereas until that time, paupers had been included in a
spiritual positivity as a possible object of redemption and as a condi-
tion of wealth, they were henceforth banished to negativity, as sources
of disorder, the mark of divine punishment. The pauper became soci-
ety's damned and therefore had to bec orne invisible, like the madman.
Michel Foucault remained on the periphery of the social without
ever engaging in a social history that wou Id seek sorne general coher-
ence in Western society. He was thus already on structuralism's terrain
of predilection in which discourse enjoys a maximum degree of auton-
orny with respect to social contingencies. He refused to integrate the
discursive reversaI that he perceived into a general explanatory frame-
work in which he might have established a relationship between the
phenomenon of repression described and the historical change of a
society in transition from the primarily religious to the ethical-
economic, rooted in the mental structures and institutional practices
of the modern era.
In the classical age, madness was a legal concern and was not yet
a me di cal issue. Confinement was thus a legal act. The madman was
located "at the meeting point between the social decree of confine-
Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work lB
ment and legal knowledge that determines the capacities of legal
subjects.
42
Of course, the madman was not a prisoner like the others;
he was not a beggar, but his bizarre behavior was considered ta be a
symptom of a profound animal nature (repressed in the man of rea-
son), at the lower limits of humanity. Madmen were therefore chained
by their jailers and even displayed in the loggias of Bictre Asylum.
The eighteenth century saw a decisive break in the perception of
madness and the asylum was born as a specifie institution reserved ex-
clusively for those who were mad-a specifie site of madness, a figure
finaUy defined and removed from the shapeless heap it had been in the
Hpital Gnral. This institutional shift preceded the view of the mad-
man as someone ill and in need of care: "A new dimension had to be
established that would create a new space and something like another
solitude so that in the middle of this second silence, madness could
finally speak. "43 Mad speech was examined for signs of this or that
clearly defined pathology and an entirely new field of knowledge was
taken in hand by the medical world. "This was the apotheosis of the
medical figure .... Since the end of the eighteenth century, a medical
certificate had become almost obligatory for committing mad people.
But within the asylum itself, the doctor's role was the most important
insofar as he organized it as a medical space. "44 Its transition from an
undifferentiated malady to madness, its situation within time, the con-
sideration of a new perspective as well as of the new practices implied
by the birth of madness as a specifie figure, the dialectized relationship
between knowledge and power, the substitution of medical for judicial
power-aU of these were the major lines of Foucault's approach,
which went beyond a simple genealogy of madness to a more com-
prehensive view of the transition in a culture from power based on
Law to a system relying on a norm that has become the criterion of di-
vision among individuals: this implies a completely different discur-
sive economy.
The medicalization of the social body was one response to this
process of normalization dividing normal and pathologie al. The new
king was therefore the doctor at the center of the division whose lim-
its he establishes. Problematizing such different perceptions of the
boundaries between the normal and the pathologie al clearly echoed
Georges Canguilhem's work, for he had already established the foun-
dations of a structural history of science. Michel Foucault's theses re-
markably and brilliantly demonstrate the fruitfulness of this method.
I54 Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work
Madness and Unreason
In order to be defended at the time, a thesis had to be published, but in
order to get it published, Foucault had ta find an editor willing to ac-
cept a manuscript that was nearly one thousand pages long. He asked
Brice Parain if he was willing to publish it at Gallimard and was
rather hopeful since Parain had already published Georges Dumzil.
However, we must remember that Claude Lvi-Strauss had had to
take refuge at Plon after Brice Para in refused to publish The Elemen-
tary Structures of Kinship. Foucault met with the same categorical
rejection. At that point, Jean Delay suggested his collection at PUF,
but Foucault "had specifically wanted to avoid the thesis ghetto"45
and do as Lvi-Strauss had do ne with Tristes Tropiques, getting be-
yond the circle of specialists in order to reach a broader intellectual
readership.
Foucault therefore went to Plon, where he knew Jacques Belle-
froid, who passed his thesis on to Philippe Aris, the historian in
charge of the collection "Civilisations d'hier et d'aujourd'hui." This
was to be the first in a long series of contacts bringing philosophy and
history together, yielding much fruitful collaboration, but also sorne
misunderstandings and dead-end discussions. In I96I, however, the
decisive meeting with Philippe Aris was absolutely incongruous.
Michel Foucault was a de-fuser of prejudices, a Nietzschean nihilist,
whereas Philippe Aris was an ultraconservative, royalist, ex-member
of Action Franaise. What made a common ground possible was their
shared sensitivity to the phenomena of mentalits. Aris, the author of
The Family and the Child in the Ancien Rgime,46 also valorized the
premodern period, and had a certain nostalgia for the fetal world
prior to the disciplinary partition in which madmen and reasonable
men, young and old, would have cohabitated on the basic levels of so-
ciability and conviviality.
Madness and Civilization was published therefore at Plon thanks
to Aris, to whom Foucault would later pay homage. "A thick manu-
script came ta my attention: a philosaphy thesis on the relationship
between madness and unreason in the classical age, written by an au-
thor whom 1 did not know. 1 was dazzled but 1 had to work extremely
hard to get it published. "47
When Michel Foucault was writing his thesis in the land of the
midnight sun, he twice invited Roland Barthes to visit and enjoyed
Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work
V1Slts him on each of his trips to Paris. Barthes hailed this
work as the first application of structuralism ta history: "Michel Fou-
cault describes a structural history that is doubly structural: its analy-
sis is structural and the project itself is structural. "48 Roland Barthes
quickly saw the link between Lvi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and his
own work, although none of them had collaborated in any way. For
Barthes, Foucault's work illustrated the conquest of modern ethnol-
ogy, and at the same time Foucault had successfully shifted nature to
culture by studying what had been considered until then to be a purely
medical concern. Just as Lvi-Strauss had analyzed kinship relations
as marriage phenomena and Lacan had described the unconscious as
being structured like a language, literary writing in the new literary
critique became part of an apprenticeship or production of a form
of writing that had nothing at all to do with any creative genius.
Foucault "refused to con si der madness as a nosographie reality."49
Barthes read Foucault's work essentially as part of a general semiol-
ogy constructing vast "smantmes" whose primary goal was to study
forms, and in this respect, madness would never be more than an
achronic form to be discerned but purified of all substance and tran-
scendent content.
Maurice Blanchot similarly hailed Foucault's work, in which he
saw his own experiment with a form of writing that explored limits
and defined a new literary space: "To prepare, beyond culture, a
relationship with what culture rejects: the voice of confinement, an
outside of writing. Let us read and reread this book bearing this in
mind."50
Michel Foucault finally met with a positive reception by the liter-
ary avant-garde, which counted a few historians
51
and epistemolo-
gistS.
52
But for the most part, Foucault's work did not enjoy the popu-
lar success that had been expected and the book did not really get
much response from philosophers (neither Les Temps modernes nor
Esprit reviewed it), nor from psychiatrists, who considered it a simple
exercise in literary style and metaphysics. Madness and Civilization
had a fairly modest print run and it was not until The Order of
Things
53
that Foucault's work elicited an excitement that never waned
from that point on. Three thousand copies were initially printed in
May 1961, followed by a modest second printing of twelve hundred
copies in February 1964.54 The book missed its intended mark the first
time around since the psychiatrie world in no way felt concerned by
IJ6 Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work
this philosopher, "Ir was thus only in a nonpractical way that Fou-
cault's work had an impact." 55 According to Robert Castel, Foucault
had a double impact: his work provoked an epistemological break,
and it infused mental illness, which had become a positivist concept
once again, with its alterity as the other of reason. Foucault's work
was consecrated as an original but academic thesis in I96I, but it
would have another fate thanks to two events: May I968 and the
lively interest it elicited among the Anglo-Saxon antipsychiatrists
Ronald Laing and David Cooper. At the end of the sixties, the book fi-
nally found a receptive collective audience and a demand for a change
in clinical practice; at that point, it became an inspiration to the move-
ments protesting the practices of the asylum.
Exclusion or Integration?
Michel Foucault's structural method was founded on the loss of the
substance of madness itself, a figure held prey to captive and fluctuat-
ing discourses. Madness loses all substance and consistency in this
perspective and disappears within the folds of oppressive reason.
Later, in I980, Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain proposed a differ-
ent thesis, thanks to an argument based on a very careful and detailed
study of historie al facts.
56
They looked at the chronology Foucault
had proposed and argued that confinement did not really begin in the
seventeenth century in France, but rather in the nineteenth century.
But, above all, they saw the dynamic of modernity not as alogie ex-
cluding madness and alterity but rather as a logic of integration.
Foucault's diagnostic error gave rise to the illusion that the pre-
modern period was a tolerant, undifferentiated society in which all
difference was accepted. However, Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain
showed that if the madman was accepted at the time, it was only inso-
far as he was considered to be the expression of a subhuman species:
"In the cultural framework, defined by princip les of inequality and
natural hierarchy, absolute difference does not exclude proximity." 57
If madness creates a problem within the framework of modernity and
is confined within the asylum, it is not because it is rejected but be-
cause the madman is considered an alter ego resembling Reason: "In
the modern period, to the contrary, identity is a right and distance is
only de facto.
58
The history of madness in modern democratic society seems to be
more a history of integration than a history of exclusion. Marcel
Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work I57
Gauchet also a danger in numbers of
but, unlike Foucault, considered this to be a problem of normaliza-
tion, of an integrative utopia, more than a practice of exclusion. Fou-
cault, in 1961, completely disagreed with a view of Reason as progres-
sive. To the contrary, deconstructing Reason was supposed to enable a
magnified image of the enigmatic figure of its Other to burst forth and
fundamentaHy weaken the reign of the Lumires in order to better un-
veil its oppressive and disciplinary substructures.
The issue here is one of a radical critique of modernity and its
categories. Madness and Civilization was above aH the symptom of an
era, the first step toward a new structural approach adapted to West-
ern history, and a valorization of the repressed. The quest for truth
took the form of examining the unspoken, ferreting around in the hia-
tuses and silences of a society that reveals itself in what it hides. Mad-
ness th us became an ideal object for both historical anthropology and
psychoanalysis.
Nineteen
Marxism in Crisis:
A Thaw or the Deep Freeze Again?
In 1956, a good part of the French intelligentsia underwent sorne dra-
matic changes, which had sorne very real effects for the generation of
a decade later. Structuralism was born as an intellectual phenomenon
that, in a certain sense, took up where Marxism left off. Existentialism
was the expression of postwar optimism, but the new relationship to
history was more disenchanted. In early 1956, at the twentieth con-
gress of the USSR's Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, the new
secretary-general of the Communist Party, acknowledged Stalin's
crimes; the year ended with the crushing of the Hungarian revolution
by Soviet tanks.
The shock waves breached the sacrosanctity of the Soviet model,
which came under criticism by the left. Communist ideology of hope
for the future met historical reality to reveal the horrors of the logic of
torture and totalitarianism. The seismic shock did not penetrate into
the ranks of Billancourt, however, and the French Communist Party
(PCF) remained the most powerful political machine outside of
Moscow. Intellectuals whose work was based on the search for truth
and on the critique of false appearances, however, could no longer un-
questioningly accept that which tiU then had constituted their analytic
framework. A period of mourning for lost hopes extended from 1956
until 1968, and yet the collective sensibility held to certain unshakable
and unchanging ideas. What was it that was so well anchored that po-
litical voluntarism failed to triumph?
Marxism in Crisis Ti')
Postwar Europe was the mst rapid economic
changes since the end of the eighteenth century. "We were consid-
erabiy behind in our perceptions and we could only measure how
important the 'thirty giorious years' had been after they were over be-
cause while the y were unfolding we said that nothing was happen-
ing." 1 Dntil the n, the Russian Revolution had been seen as the con-
tinuation of the French Revolution; 1917 was the realization of the
modern democratic ideal and was therefore an extension of 1789. Not
only 1789, however, but the ideals and values of the Enlightenment
themselves were beginning to be reevaluated in France. And indeed,
many would make Boishevism and its fatal destiny weigh heavily on
those ideals.
Structuralism took root within the context of this cri tic al rereading
of Western democratic values. lndependence, liberty, and responsibility
were no longer the fundamental principles for the French intelligentsia.
"The explanatory substitutes led to the primacy of totalities over that
of subjects."2 A critique of modernity and of the formaI nature of
democracy began to take shape, but it was no longer made in the name
of a waning Marxism, but rather on the basis of Heidegger and Nietz-
sche, or by taking refuge in textual cio sure and internaI architectonics.
This was also a time when French history was taken firmly in
hand, in 1958, by General Charles de Gaulle, who put an end to the
structural instability that afflicted politicallife since the end of World
War II, and surrounded himself for the first time with technocratic
ministers. His choices made it ciear that the cole Normale Suprieure
was no longer the institution al mold for the country's future leaders;
the cole Nationale de l'Administration (ENA) came to play that role;
whereas the cole Normale had up to that point been the institutional
incarnation of the reproduction of the humanities, the technocratic
graduates of the ENA (narques) now replaced the intellectuals. Ulm
reacted. lndeed, it became the epicenter of a structural quake in 1966,
and the voice of the most scientific of discourses, in an attempt to slow
down the process that was relegating it to a secondary role in training
the republic's elite. Since 1958, technical/technocratic thinking had
been well esta blis he d, however. "For me, structuralism was very suc-
cessful because it was the basis of technocratie thinking and gave it a
philosophical, logical daubing, a certain rationality, a kind of vigor.
There was more than a single positive encounter between structural-
ism and these times, there was a marriage of reason."3
I60 Marxism in Crisis
1956: A Time of Ruptures
The priests responsible for the cult questioned the "little father of the
people" and brought the edifice of belief crumbling down. Structural-
ism provided a life raft for many at a time when institutional Marxism
was in its agony: "A kind of ceremonious massacre. . . . This made
possible a clean sweep, a big breath of fresh air, a hygienic act. We
don't always choose the scent of our deodorant or detergent; they
often stink, but they work."4 A period of ruptures began for intellec-
tuaIs who could no longer pretend and who subjected their own
fetishes to attack.
Roger Vailland removed the portrait of Stalin from his office
walls. Claude Roy was forced out of the French Communist Party for
"having joined in the game of reaction by the enemies of the working
class and the people."5 Even Jean-Paul Sartre, who had borne his cross
since the beginning of the fifties as an irreproachable fellow traveler of
the French Communist Party, published an incendiary article about
Hungary in L'Express on November 9, 1956, leading to an irrecon-
cilable divorce between him and the party. The numbers of critical ar-
ticles and remarks were increasing; it was clearly possible to be right
even if it meant being subjected to a continuous flow of insults and
calumny. But this form of intimidation culminated at this point since
many who joined the anticolonial prote st against the war in Aigeria
discovered the shattering proof of the lie of the accusation that they
had joined the other side. In 1956, a good many of the postwar trau-
mas were swept away for many intellectuals in the West, weil before
the cleanup was completed in the East in 1989. The question at the
time was how to go on being a Marxist while keeping a historical
consciousness.
History no longer held out hope of a better future, but was scruti-
nized for the failings that had borne the seeds of barbarism. The rift in
1956 "led us to stop being forced to hope for anything."6 According
to Michel Foucault, the inteilectual should search out the range of pos-
sibilities and impossibilities in a given society rather than be buoyed
up by the continuous flow of history or await the arrivaI of a messiah
incarnated by the party as a guide to earthly salvation. But even before
mapping out a site for research and identity, the party that considered
itself to be the foyer of sociability, an adoptive family, and everything
surrounding it, with its specifie rites and habits, had to be abandoned.
Marxism in Crisis I Gr
Pierre Fougeyrollas quit the French Communist Party in I956. "1
was teaching at the Lyce Montaigne in Bordeaux at the time and was
a member of the federal office of the PCF of the Gironde. 1 quit be-
cause of Hungary. When 1 came to Paris in 1958,1 joined the group
Arguments."? Grard Genette also left the PCF in 1956. "At that
point, 1 began a three-year detoxification with Socialisme ou Barbarie,
where 1 often saw Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Jean-
Franois Lyotard. After having supported Stalin for eight years, 1
needed a centrifugaI force to become a non-Marxist, and Socialisme
ou Barbarie scraped things clean."8 As Olivier Revault d'Allonnes put
it, "We could have created an association of the class of 1956."9 He
had joined the PCF in Lille in 1953, where he found himself in the
company of Michel Foucault when both were protesting the war in
Indochina.
Through his support for Polish October, Jean-Pierre Faye was fas-
cinated to discover the rigor of Lvi-Strauss's program in 1956. He
had gone to an important and solemn UNESCO reception for Polish
representatives in Louis-Liard Hall at the Sorbonne, presided by Fer-
nand Braudel. The meeting ended on a spectacular note, with the ar-
rivaI of Gomulka, the conqueror of the Polish revoIt and an early vic-
tim of the Stalinist purges. At that point, Lvi-Strauss "harangued us
from atop some kind of chair, explaining that structure reigned and
that econometrics, structural linguistics, and anthropology, which
was to become structural a few months later in another book, were
the three sciences that would dominate."lO Jean-Pierre Faye wondered
how mythologies could function in the modern world, especially after
the 1929 crash in the United States, but also after the depression
that had affected Vienna in 1873. Taking a structural path seemed
promising at the time because of the way, according to Lvi-Strauss,
it explained the many, complex correlations between mythology and
an economic situation, and between structure and the fluctuations of
history.
Structura li sm as the Outcome of the Crisis of Marxism
For others, recourse to Lvi-Strauss became the basis of a conversion
to anthropology. This was true for the Communist philosophers
whom we might call the club of four: Alfred Adler, Michel Cartry,
Pierre Clastres, and Lucien Sebag. All four had quit the PCF in 1956,
and had switched from philosophy to anthropology-a choice that
I62 Marxism in Crisis
cannot be dissociated from the changes in the political situation.
"Nineteen fifty-six was a central date for US."11
Alfred Adler described the intellectual development that had led
him from existentialism to structuralism.
12
He had joined the PCF in
1952 at the age of eighteen; his political militancy had led him to
Marxism, but he had remained on the sidelines, and defined himself
as a Communist in the sense of moral commitment rather than as
a Marxist. While studying philosophy and taking courses with Jean
Hyppolite, he discovered Hegel. "Hegelian Marxism gave us intellec-
tuaI substance so long as political choices came first, and it also gave
us a militant content."13 When the events of 1956 unfolded, the PCF
became an object of opprobrium, even if it took two years for the ex-
clusion to fully take shape. "Nineteen fifty-six is the very condition of
the choice of ethnology."14 It was no longer possible to make ethico-
political commitment adequate to Hegelian Marxist speculation, and
Alfred Adler found himself in Claude Lefort's seminar on The Elemen-
tary Structures of Kinship. The discovery of Lvi-Strauss's work was a
source of pleasure for the group of four for it had the merit of signify-
ing a de-ideologization and of espousing an apolitical discourse: "We
discovered Tristes Tropiques. 1 remember that Pierre Clastres was
crazy about Tristes Tropiques, and had read it four or five times."15
This conversion led the group to become interested in everything
having to do with the birth of the structural paradigm. They read all
they could with great enthusiasm, an effective catharsis with respect to
the pasto They threw themselves into structural linguistics and began
attending Jacques Lacan's seminar at Sainte-Anne Hospital in 1958.
Between 1958 and 1963, their appetite for discovery led to a thorough
theoretical introduction to ethnology, in relation to other disciplines,
as well as to a number of trips to do fieldwork. At that point, the
group split in two: Lucien Sebag and Pierre Clastres went to work on
Amerindian cultures while Alfred Adler and Michel Cartry left for
Africa. "They say jokingly that the only place to find true primitives is
in Latin America."16 They aspired to find something more profound
than exoticism; for them, it was a matter of locating societies that had
been sheltered from the unitary map of Hegelian Marxist thinking,
societies that were not classified in Stalinist handbooks.
The spirit of discovery was also spurred by a disappointment in
speculative philosophy and history, whose creative cycle seemed to
have come to an end when Hegelian Marxist theory frayed. Unlike
Marxism in Crisis l 63
rpr,pv,,,c' speculative Lvi-Strauss's work
a veritable intellectual adventure: "In Tristes Tropiques Lvi-Strauss
says that you have to lose a lot of time in order to find the name of a
clan. Reading that, we realized that someone had introduced some-
thing new." 17 Setting off to do fieldwork, and the ensuing shift in
personal and cultural history, were decisive aftereffects of the 1956
quake.
The Thaw
An ideological thaw shattered the vulgate, therefore, as of 1956.
There had been sorne forerunners, of course, particularly among the
members of Socialisme ou Barbarie, founded by Cornelius Castoriadis
and Claude Lefort in 1949, to which a number of intellectuals turned
in 1956. This group developed a radical critique of the left in order to
analyze the Stalinist model of a bureaucratie and totalitarian system.
For Castoriadis and his group, structura li sm was not an alterna-
tive to the vulgate, but a simple adaptation to the mode of domination
of modern capitalism, which, in 1958, reigned. The discourse gave ab-
solute priority to science; "whereas people were more and more op-
pressed in the name of science, they try to persuade them that they are
nothing and that science is everything. "18 They denounced structural-
ism's elimination of living history and the way in which intellectual
thought became infused with technocratie thinking.
ln 1956, a new current was born and it fused around the journal
Arguments. The group argued for a revision of Marxism, a rejection
of the vulgate but also a clarification of the contradictions of modern-
ization. Edgar Morin founded and directed the journal and his board
included Kostas Axelos, Jean Duvignaud, Colette Audry, Franois
Fejta, Dionys Mascolo, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Fougeyrollas. The
review was the very expression of the thaw that, in place of the previ-
ous dogmatism, offered a real questioning and multidimensionality.
"Spring 1956 flowered. Gusts of hope came from Poland, Hungary,
and Czechoslovakia. History hesitated between the ebb and the
flow .... We realized that what we thought was the bedrock of our
doctrine was little more th an an ice floe without any real solidity."19
The review was born of a meeting between Edgar Morin and
Franco Fortini, who was already publishing the review Rugionamenti
in Italy. "During the years immediately prior to this, 1 had been a half-
dead political corpse, 1 was a member of no party, and 1 had been
I64 Marxism in Crisis
happy to me et sorne friends in Italy ... with whom 1 could dia-
10gue."2o This was an open group that was intellectually vital from the
beginning and, unlike any political party organ, it established itself as
a simple laboratory or bulletin for ideas. Arguments measured politi-
cal problems and offered reflections on our technical civilization and
on language in its search for a critical radicality beyond disciplinary
discoveries and party blinders. During its first two years, the review
focused on mourning its break with the French Communist Party, and
then its concerns grew less political, addressing such issues as love, the
universe, language. "During its six years of existence, Arguments en-
joyed that rare, happy union between affect and thinking."21
This search for a new direction ended prematurely in 1962. "With
and without joy and sadness, Arguments was sabotaged by its cap-
tains. "22 This sabotage was due in part to the dispersion of the editor-
ial board: Pierre Fougeyrollas left for Dakar and Jean Duvignaud was
in Tunisia. But, above aIl, one fact became clear, and this was that
times had changed and, at the beginning of the sixties, a new kind of
thinking was taking up where others had left off: structuralism.
"Within the university context, this way of thinking was ta king over,
and it offered a scientific solution to aIl of our problems. So, it was
over. We had once again bec orne deviants, but we were wise enough to
realize it. "23
The Deep Freeze Again?
Edgar Morin saw structuralism's success as one more freeze after the
thaw. Structural epistemology replaced a totalizing Marxism, but it
was equaIly persuaded of its scientificity and adherence to the laws of
classical science. Determinism and objectification excluded the sub-
ject, which was too uncertain, as weIl as history, which was too con-
tingent, to which it preferred a model as rigorous as the natural sci-
ences: structural linguistics. Another form of deep freeze was also
evident, for there was a clear tendency to swap Moscow for Peking,
Hanoi, and Havana. And yet this need to scientize the approach of the
social sciences was easy to understand in terms of the errors accumu-
lated under Stalin, in the same way that there had been a need to hold
on to sorne certitudes. On the one hand, conferring the primary value
on structure made it possible to explain the persistent difference in the
relationship between determinism and freedom, and between the his-
torical task of transformation and the inability to convince people of
Marxism in Crisis r 65
its ta Saussure and the notion an un-
conscious structure us to better understand something that
evolved not as a function of class or of social change, but outside of
conscious will."24 On the other hand, with anthropology, as with
structurallinguistics, other visions of the world and other systems of
representation could be considered: "It became possible for us to
renew the dialectical vision, which we had tended to regard as a form
of getting beyond oppositions, since the notion of multiplying ever
more subtle mediations seemed to us to renew dialectical thinking. "25
Structuralism was the real beneficiary of the crisis in 1956. The
bases of its programs had already been well established by the time it
took root at the beginning of the century. Structuralism made it possi-
ble to confer a certain level of scientificity and operationality in a par-
ticular area of thought by preserving the goal of universality that prior
forms of commitment had held to, without making this one part of the
des ire to transform the world. The enterprise was a limited one: an at-
tempt to better understand the world by integrating alterity and the
unconscious into it.
Twenty
The French School of Economics
Takes a Structural Path
One discipline among the social sciences did not wait for the fifties be-
fore reacting to structuralism: economics. Of course, unlike the other
social sciences, e c o ~ o m i c s did not draw its model from linguistics.
Economists were ahead of others in formalizing their research and
were thus able to serve as examples for other disciplines in search of
scientific rigor. Lvi-Strauss borrowed the idea of a model from eco-
nomics in order to give priority to the scientific aspect of structural
anthropology.
Economics, however, did not play the role of a pilot science dur-
ing the period when structuralism was at its height even if it was at the
time the most advanced discipline in terms of the mathematization re-
quired by most of the social sciences. Exchanges did exist and Lvi-
Strauss's use of theoretical modeling was one such example, but
economics nonetheless remained rather removed from the important
debates being carried on in the sixties about the structuralist para-
digm. This relative marginality resulted from the fact that the mirage
of the period was the extension of the phonological model, but institu-
tional divisions in the social sciences were such that economists found
themselves housed with jurists and both were cut off from literature.
"The rue Saint-Jacques really was a very deep river running between
economists and literary types. By contrast, contacts with historians
were already going on in the Sixth Section of the cole Pratique des
Hautes tudes."l In I958, Fernand Braudel proposed the creation of
I66
French Economies Takes a Structural Patb 167
a for the social sciences broadly conceived; proposaI
was rejected, and the decision to separate letters and the social sci-
ences more narrowly from the law school and the school of economics
created a long-standing gulf. Economies could not be a hub discipline
in the structural paradigm.
And yet, economic science produced highly axiomatic results even
if it did not spend a long time pondering the epistemological condi-
tions of the discipline's creation. Microeconomics in the fifties man-
aged a rather complete axiomatization around the idea of a general
equilibrium, which appeared to be a totally formalized structure. In
economics, there was "a form of structuralism that met the logical
conditions of scientificity, in terms of the criteria of the logical con-
struction of propositions, and that led to results having universal
value."2 The very success of this axiomatization and its practical ap-
plications contributed to the lag time in problematizing the results of
microeconomics, which, for the most part, remained removed from
any critical reflection about its postulates.
The Marriage of State and Structure
Postwar changes in the relationship between the government and the
market in France also pragmatically strengthened the idea of structure
in economics. At a macroeconomic level, much thought was devoted
to the range of possibilities for government intervention. "This was
the golden age of Keynesianism."3 But in the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon
tradition, which is marginalist, and where state intervention must be
limited to the periphery of a general equilibrium that is considered a
given, the situation in France was unusual. After the Second World
War, the government that had emerged from the National Council for
the Resistance attacked macroeconomic models. Long-term plans,
territorial redefinitions, and the nationalization of private enterprise
would profoundly change the mechanisms of the French economy.
Economic structures themselves needed to be rethought in order
to definitively change the overall flows of demand and, therefore, lev-
els of activity. At that point, because the state was ostensibly directing
national reconstruction and economic modernization, it took charge
of the important structural transformations. These imperatives fueled
activities that were propitious for regrouping and made possible the
creation of "a veritable French school of economics."4 This was one
of those rare moments when energies came together, in an are a that
r68 French Economies Takes a Structural Path
more generally favored fragmented research in a number of direc-
tions, in order to examine the unavoidable interconnections between
the period's economic and social problems.
La Revue conomique was one of the major hubs for this reorga-
nization. Directed by Franois Perroux, Jean Weiller, Jean Lhomme,
and the Marchal brothers, the editorial board also included Fernand
Braudel, and thus symbolized the organic links of a dialogue begun
between economists and historians of the Annales. The state created a
series of new administrative structures following the war's end in
order to effectuate the necessary structural reforms and enlighten pub-
lic authorities about the short and middle term. The Institut National
de la Statistique et des tudes conomique (INSEE) was created in
order to generate economic predictions, and then, in 1952, the Trea-
sury created its own programs (Service des tudes conomiques et
Financires [SEEF]), which later became the Direction de la Prvision
et du Plan, with its economic research centers, the CREDOC (Cen-
tre de Recherche en Documentation) and the CEPREMAP (Centre
d'tudes Prospectives d'conomie Mathmatique Appliques la
Planification). The government's use of economic expertise "took two
directions: setting up a national accounting mechanism and creating
macroeconomic planning models."
5
The consequences of this organic alliance between the state and
the theoreticians and practitioners of macroeconomics underscored
the breach with the university of the humanities, and particularly with
literature. Claude Gruson, Pierre Uri, Alfred Sauvy, and Franois Per-
roux created teams that included relatively few university represen-
tatives by contrast with the numbers of civil administrators and engi-
neers coming from the Grandes coles. Prospective models of the
national economy were developed, therefore, at the highest levels of
administrative power in se arch of a certain harmony between the dif-
ferent sectors of the economy and the mechanisms of production.
6
Valorizing the structuralist method was therefore quite effective
among economists, but their outlook was generally foreign to the
viewpoint of literary scholars, and the formalization of their research
removed them further still. And yet, this situation did not prevent the
creation of a number of bridges making dialogue possible between
economists and the rest of the social sciences. Franois Perroux played
a fundamental role in this.
French Economies Takes a Structural Path I69
Where the Paths Converged: Franois Perroux
As of 1955, Franois Perroux was a professor at the Collge de France.
He had created the ISEA (Institut de Science Applique) in 1944 and
his review, Les Cahiers de l'ISEA, was receptive to philosophical-
and, more particularly, epistemological-debates and included articles
by Claude Lvi-Strauss and Gilles Gaston-Granger. Franois Perroux's
influence was twofold. He borrowed the notion of a generalized econ-
orny from Merleau-Ponty but contributed to its dissemination among
economists. He also proposed a concept of structure to those liberals
who deified a perfect market in which prices operated without restric-
tions. "The structure of an economic ensemble is defined by the net-
work of links between simple and complex units and by the series of
proportions between the flow and the stocks of elementary units and
the objectively significant combinations of these units."7
Europeans massively used the structural paradigm in political
economy around the 1930S, in reaction to the 1929 crash. But even
before the idea of structure was generalized in political economy, Henri
Bartoli astutely remarked that "structural sociology and structural
economics were contemporary with the birth of sociology and politi-
cal economy."8 The ide a of structure was born in the seventeenth cen-
tury out of the correlation between the different economic givens seen
as so many elements of an overall coherence guiding economic life.
Auguste Comte had already placed the physiocrats among the ini-
tiators of "social physics." And then Marx sought to distinguish the
laws of capital by invoking such structural notions as modes of pro-
duction, social classes, and the social relationships to production. He
attempted to get beyond a simple description of observable facts in
order to discern "the internai organization of the capitalist mode of
production, in its ideal."9 If Marx used the ide a of structure to orga-
nize a purely conceptual theoretical model, he in no way forgot the
other end of the chain; the model is linked to the economic reality of
the stage of development of the productive forces in a given social sys-
tem. The structure in question after 1945 in the French school of eco-
nomics, on the contrary, relied more on empirical and observable facts
th an on the ory, and more closely resembled the methodology of histo-
rians th an that of anthropologists. This was altogether clear in the
work of Franois Perroux, who defined structure by the proportions
of flow and stocks of basic units, and that of Ren Clmens, who saw
French Economies Takes a Structural Path
structure in the "proportions and value relations between costs, prices,
revenues, and money in a given context." 10
The German Ernst Wagemann had already used the notion of
structure systematically in the thirties. Economists had adopted his
definition, notably in France, beginning in 1936 with the structural
reforms of the Popular Front. In France, structure was considered
"the most permanent."l1 Structure is what resists rapid changes, what
makes for an economic situation and inflects it without identifying
with it. Structure is marked by the slowness of what are generaUy
cyclical economic rhythms set into motion by deep mechanisms.
Franois Perroux adopted this vision of structure as an invariant, or as
a variant with relatively mild fluctuations, and saw structures as
"ensembles of slowly moving quantities, sets of kinds of behavior or
of relatively stable behaviors."12 During a I959 coUoquium led by
Roger Bastide,13 Andr Marchal proposed his own more dynamic
perspective in opposition to Franois Perroux's static notion of struc-
ture. Marchal's approach was based on relativizing those economic
laws that are valid according to the type of structure or between two
structurallimits within an economic system in which a certain multi-
dimensional combination evolves.1
4
Andr Marchal examined how the idea of structure had made
its way back into contemporary economic thinking.1
5
He saw in this
a quest among economists to explain the big historical changes of
twentieth-century capitalism: the transition from a competitive capi-
ta li sm to a monopoly capitalism, the I929 crash, and decolonization.
The conjunction of aU of these changes made it necessary to move
beyond the models that eliminated aU external elements.
Attempting an Economic Anthropology
Andr Nicola's work must be seen within this context of global con-
frontation. He defended his thesis in I9 5 7, although his reflection on
the notion of structure dated back to I948, his last year in high
schoo\.16 He had been very excited by the debate between Tarde and
Durkheim and saw in their work a problem that would remain central
to aU of his later work: the polemic between the importance of behav-
ior (Tarde) and that of structures (Durkheim). Nicola said to himself
then that "both are partly right because society stubbornly remains
composed of agents who, at the same time, seem to be acted upon by
society." 17 In or der to continue thinking, using this contradiction as a
French Economies Takes a Structural Path 171
he was led ta a position that went a strictly economic
viewpoint; when he found Tristes Tropiques in 1955, he was de-
lighted. Not only did he enroll in economics, but in political science as
weil, and at the Sorbonne he took philosophy, sociology, and psychol-
ogy courses with Piaget, Lagache, Merleau-Ponty, and Gurvitch, and
finaIly found himself at the heart of the structural confluence by the
end of the Mties. He was a precocious structural economist, slighdy
atypical by virtue of his receptivity to aIl the social sciences and by his
desire to establish a structural economic anthropology.
Econometries
But there was an intermediary level between concrete reality and
structure, which the economists more than others developed. This was
the level of the model, a necessary mediation that produces the most
developed formalization. It is here that economics, in the process of
becoming econometrics, becomes a completely formalized language.
"Constructing mathematical models became one of the most presti-
gious branches of economic science, to the immense benefit of the dis-
cipline and-why not admit it-to its great mis fortune as weIl."18
The International Society for Econometrics dates from 1930, but
it was only after 1945 that econometric models reaIly developed. Cer-
tain historical events contributed to their development, and the mod-
els were perfected, for example, during the "great aerial bridge over
West Berlin."19 When Stalin blocked aIl but aerial access to and from
Berlin in 1948, an econometric model had to be designed in order to
organize a continuaI routing of airplanes to keep the population in
West Berlin from starving. This kind of operational research signifi-
candy broadened the use of mathematics as applied statistics in eco-
nomic models. Collecting statistical information became much more
sophisticated and was important for the extended application of
eonometric models. Lvi-Strauss was fascinated by this operation al
efficiency and the capacity to take reality into account in a purely for-
mal language. It was at the intermediary level of model making espe-
ciaIly that economists in the fifties participated in the structura li st par-
adigm, more so th an when they invoked a structure's reality, which is
bascially nothing more than a way of accounting for the permanence
of certain situations. Econometrics enables us to discern a certain
number of aporias that become obstacles for the enterprise as it cornes
up against the limits of formalism in the social sciences: "Not only
I72 French Economics Takes a Structural Path
does mathematization push the intellectual undertaking to free itself
of reality and to yield to a sort of deductive euphoria deeply contemp-
tuous of patient, factual observation and any enthusiasm for analysis,
but it also imposes sorne very severe syntactic limits. "20
A number of economists hypostasized their tools when they
adopted an econometric methodology, and sorne even went so far as
to take these instruments for reality itself. Everything that could not
be measured was meaningless. Historicity, which is part of the struc-
tural paradigm, was clearly eliminated since nothing can be foreseen
in this scheme of things once the model perfectly reproduces itself,
except variations in quantity. The same obstacle arises: how to con-
struct an analytical apparatus of simple self-reproduction, a truly self-
regulating machine that considers all human activity to be meaning-
less except for the initial structure, as well as any history of this
action. Gilles Gaston-Granger very quickly recognized the danger of a
formalism that creates such an illusion. It "cornes from the fact that
once the themes have been determined through axiomatic abstraction,
we want to confer an ontological privilege over the operations, which,
paradoxically, gave birth to them. "21
Twenty-one
Get a Load of That Structure!
At the end of the fifties, before structuralism was being spoken of, the
reference to structure was everywhere in the social sciences. At this
point, certain representatives of convergent research interests chose to
evaluate the situation and draw up a balance sheet on the use of the
concept. The evaluation provided the occasion for the first important
multidisciplinary meeting, which gives a good idea of how discipli-
nary boundaries were becoming increasingly porous-a situation that
a good many researchers had already been using to their benefit. Be-
cause man was the common object of a whole series of disciplines, the
conceptual approach that was taking shape, and that was overriding
studies on intentionality or consciousness, suggested that it was possi-
ble to see a common approach take shape that would encompass all
thinking in the social sciences. The air was redolent with the possible
and proximate victory of the ambitious goal of paradigmatic unity.
Two important meetings took place in 1959. In January, Roger
Bastide organized an important colloquium on the idea of structure.
1
Maurice de Gandillac, Lucien Goldmann, and Jean Piaget presided
over a colloquium at Cerisy on the confrontation between genesis and
structure.
2
The reference to structural binarism, which was already
being invoked rather frequently, was becoming the necessary path
for any researcher to take at sites of innovative research such as
the Muse de l'Homme, the Sixth Section of the cole Pratique des
Hautes tudes, and certain courses at the Collge de France. At that
I73
Get a Load That Structure!
point, the search beyond sememes for other emes was
general.
The colloquium organized by Roger Bastide set the scene for a
broad confrontation over the use of the concept of structure in diverse
disciplines. tienne Wolff argued that the notion corresponded to a
biological given: "Living beings inelude a whole hierarchy of struc-
tures."3 He defined several scales of biological structure, of the arrange-
ment of cells in tissues, of tissues in organs, and that of the "ultra-
structures" made visible by the electronic microscope. Although the
level of observation could be defined, the passage from one structure
to another remained mysterious and therefore a matter for theoretical
speculation. mile Benveniste gave a paper on linguistics, ma king
elear that linguistics had played a fundamental role in diffusing the
paradigm, which was no longer even that of structure in the eyes of
this pioneer discipline: structure had become structural, and finally
structuralism. Benveniste recalled the innovators: Saussure, Meillet,
the Prague Cirele, Jakobson, Karcevsky, and Trubetzkoy, who had al-
ready defined phonology in structural terms as early as 1933: "Con-
temporary phonology is characterized above all by its structuralism
and its systematic universalism."4
Lvi-Strauss, for his part, considered that anthropology had
brought about the decisive changes that made possible the discovery
of the structural arrangements at the heart of the social order. He
disputed George-Peter Murdock on the se grounds, and rejected the
possibility of simultaneously studying structure and process, holding
that such an ide a belonged, "at least in anthropology, to a naive phi-
losophy."s Daniel Lagache recalled that structuralism took shape in
psychology in reaction against atomism and around the psychology
of forms, of Gestalt psychology. "It was in this context that structur-
alism became one of the dominant characteristics of contemporary
psychology."
6
Robert Pags, for his part, recalled for the audience how the idea
of structure in social psychology had been polysemic, and how
frequently Jacob-Lvy Moreno had used it in sociometrics. Henri
Lefebvre gave a paper on the use of structure in Marx in which he
made it appear that Marx was the important forerunner of the current
revolution, quoting the preface to his 1859 Contribution to a Critique
of Political Economy (1859). Even Raymond Aron placed himself
within this structural perspective by invoking his desire to see political
Get a Load of That Structure! I75
science rise to a higher level of conceptual abstraction. He regretted
that the structures in question were still too dependent on a concrete
political reality and expressed the wish that "we might discover the
basic functions of every political order at a later stage of abstrac-
tion."7 Other participants demonstrated the fecundity of the struc-
tural approach in their partieular discipline: Pierre Vilar in history,
Lucien Goldmann in the history of ideas, Franois Perroux and Andr
Marchal in economics.
The Consecration of Cerisy: Genetic Structuralism
The second confrontation took place in I959 in Normandy, at the
sixteenth-century chteau cum colloquium center known as Cerisy-Ia-
Salle. The question this time was less one of determining which disci-
pline had gone farthest in its use of the ide a of structure than of com-
paring the ideas of structure and genesis. The colloquium organizers
considered that their work lay in the wake of the structuralist break
but they refused to see the social as statie and sought instead to recon-
cile dynamic potentialities and permanent factors, in other words, to
bring history together with structural coherence. They were the bear-
ers of a genetic structuralism: "Genetic structuralism appeared for the
first time as a fundamental philosophical idea along with Hegel and
Marx."8 Goldmann situated the second stage in the genesis of this
new method in the development of phenomenology and especially of
Gestalt psychology.
Somewhat earlier, Lucien Goldmann had applied genetic struc-
turalism in his remarkable study on the links between Jansenism,
Pascal's Penses, and Racine's theater.
9
He situated the work of these
two writers in relation to the far more vast significant structures of
the different currents of Jansenism and the social antagonisms of the
seventeenth century. Unlike Lvi-Strauss, however, Goldmann no
longer saw the search for structures as incompatible with the search
for genesis, and he thus opened up another direction for structural-
ism's development, one that was more receptive to history. Jean
Piaget, another adherent of genetic structura li sm and one of the collo-
quium organizers, criticized Gestalt for its immobility as much as for
its Lamarckism, wherein structure was completely ignored. He argued
for the inseparability of genesis and structure based on his work in
child psychology: "There are no innate structures; every structure im-
plies a construction."lO
of Thar Structure!
Maurice de Gandillac was the third of the orgamzers.
He voiced sorne criticisrn of Jean-Pierre Vernant's paper on the Hes-
iodic myth of the races. Setting himself squarely in a genetic perspec-
tive, de Gandillac criticized Vernant for giving tao much weight ta the
internaI structure of Hesiod's myth to the detriment of history: "1
wonder if we can go as far as you have in eliminating temporality
from the interpretation of the myth of races."l1 Vernant, who also
sought to reconcile history and structure, answered by arguing that
Hesiod does indeed use temporality, but not our linear and irreversible
temporality.
Structural Anthropology and Its Hegemonie Ambitions
Structure and genesis squared off at Cerisy. The colloquium had the
merit of bringing to light very early on one of the major themes of
the future debates concerning the relationship between history and the
structural paradigm. The debate is fundamental and there are two sets
of issues. The first was the much-disputed place of the discipline of
history and the second the manner in which the West conceived its
relationship to history. In this respect, structuralism posed a double
challenge for historians.
When Lvi-Strauss reprinted a whole series of articles in Struc-
tural Anthropology in 1958, the collection was something of a mani-
festo. His opening article dated from 1949 and defined the ties be-
tween ethnology and history.12 Lvi-Strauss's remarks were in the line
of Franois Simiand's 1903 challenge to Durkheimian sociology; he
observed that history had not renewed itself since, whereas sociology
had metamorphosed itself, particularly through the prodigious prog-
ress that had been made in ethnological research.
The 1929 break with the Annales was forgotten in passing,
doubtless for the sake of the polemic in order to better discredit a dis-
cipline that, in his eyes, was condemned to monographs and ideo-
graphs. Lvi-Strauss dernonstrated that structural anthropology dis-
tinguished itself from evolutionism by breaking with the biological
model and by hypothesizing a radical discontinuity between nature
and culture. Not that he challenged the validity of history; in this re-
spect, he disagreed with the functionalist school, and particularly with
Malinowski, for having too easily sidestepped historical givens in
favor of functions: "For to say that a society functions is a truism; but
to say that everything in a society functions is an absurdity."13 Faced
Ger a Load of That Structure! 177
with the excess of history in the diffusionist method with the
functionalists' negation of history, Lvi-Strauss proposed a third di-
rection for structural anthropology.
He showed that ethnography and history are related by their ob-
ject (alterity in time and space), by their goal (to go from the specifie
to the general), and with respect to their methodological demands (the
critique of sources). They therefore resemble each other, but if they are
to work in concert their distinctions would have to be made in the re-
lationships between ethnology and history, two disciplines with dis-
tinct but complementary perspectives. "History organizes its data in
relation to conscious expressions of social life, while anthropology
proceeds by examining its unconscious foundations." 14 What made
the unconscious accessible to ethnology, as we have seen, was the lin-
guistic model, and especially phonology.
What also became clear through the se distinctions was that only
ethnology claimed a scientific, nomothetic project for itself, defined by
the transition from the specifie to the general, which alone allows the
transition from the conscious to the unconscious. The ethnologist
must therefore appropriate historie al materials in the same way that
he uses ethnographie inquiry, but he alone can claim to have access to
"the complete range of unconscious possibilities. These are not unlim-
ited." 15 The traditional opposition between history and ethnology,
based on the distinction between the type of sources, between the
study of societies without writing systems and those with a written
culture, is of only secondary importance in Lvi-Strauss's view. Rather
than the object of study, it was the orientation of the scientific project
that was fundamental, and we can see how Lvi-Strauss's project chal-
lenged historians, especially since he considered the ethnologist to be
no more than the first step toward a final synthesis that alone cou Id
forge a social or cultural anthropology that aims for a comprehensive
understanding of man from the hominids to the present. Structural
Anthropology coherently grouped together a number of articles deal-
ing with anthropology's place in the social sciences, the relationship
between language and kinship, artistic representations in Asia and
America, magic and religion-in other words, a range of very diverse
objects that seemed to ignite what Lvi-Strauss called a "Copernican
revolution ... which will consist of interpreting society as a whole in
terms of a theory of communication." 16
The structural version of anthroplogy proclaims its hegemonic
I7S Get a Load of That Structure!
intentions in the realm of knowledge about humankind, and Lvi-
Strauss defines it broadly enough to de scribe allievels of social reality:
"But as soon as the various aspects of sociallife-economic, linguis-
tic, etc.-are expressed as relationships, anthropology will become a
general theory of relationships."17 This point of view lets anthropol-
ogy receive its analytic models from mathematics, the formaI language
par excellence. By grouping complete series of variables as a group of
permutations, the structuralist programs aspired to discover the very
law of the group under study. In this analytic structure, the group's
structure is understood through the procedure of repetition, based on
the invariable whose function is to flush out the structure of the myth
from its diverse enunciations. Here aga in, history and ethnology are
opposed in their capacity for modelization. Structural ethnology can
claim a mechanical modeling: "Anthropology uses a 'mechanical'
time, reversible and noncumulative,"18 whereas history must limit
iself to a contingent, noniterable temporality that requires statistics.
The time of history "is statistical." 19
Those societies that Lvi-Strauss calls cold resemble mechanical
machines that infinitely use the energy shaped at the outset-the
clock, for example; hot societies resemble thermodynamic machines,
such as the steam engine, which functions through temperature differ-
entials. They produce more work, but consume more energy by pro-
gressively destroying it. This last society seeks ever wider and more
numerous differentials in order to go forward and renew its sources.
Temporal succession should influence the institutions in cold societies
as little as possible. The most radical and destabilizing challenge Lvi-
Strauss makes to historians is that structural anthropology leans on
what is considered the most modern and the most efficient advances in
the social sciences. Having resolutely situated anthropology on cul-
tural grounds, Lvi-Strauss takes advantage, with respect to histori-
ans, of having a theoretical perspective that should one day make it
possible to decode the inner structures of the brain. There is a kind of
structuralist materialism in him, for, according to his analyses, struc-
ture is occasionally considered to be an analytic grid and, at other
times it springs directly from concrete reality: "Claude Lvi-Strauss is
a materialist. He constantly says as much. "20
Structural anthropology can therefore flourish without bound-
aries, according to Lvi-Strauss; it makes it possible to move beyond
the traditional culture/nature split. Similarly, structural anthropology
Get a Load of That Srructure!
can cast its net more widely ta whole of humankind. The
structuralist manifesta of 1958 doubly challenged history and philos-
ophy in this respect. Philosophy, which reflects in the first place on
how the human mind functions, sees its object of inquiry co-opted by
anthropology, which, in the name of an enterprise that has the advan-
tage of scientificity, claims, at the end of its long road, to reach mental
fortresses and their internai structures. The greatest advance made
possible by Lvi-Strauss in the history of anthropology was "to work,
in the first place, on relationships. This was structuralism's own con-
tribution; it amply demonstrated the tremendous fecundity of this ori-
entation. To work on relationships more than on objects made it pos-
sible to escape typology and typological classification, which had long
been obstacles for anthropology."21
Ontologizing Structure
ln 1959, Claude Roy considered Lvi-Strauss's que st to be a modern
revival of "the old and untiring quest for the Grail of the Argonauts of
the intellect, the alchemists of the mind: seeking the Grand Corre-
spondence, the pursuit of the First Key. "22 Roy saw Lvi-Strauss as the
great lama, the shaman of the twentieth century. There was a certain
bitterness in this backward quest for the philosophers' stone; Lvi-
Strauss had not forgotten the nightmare history had become, and in
his disenchantment he sought to escape the present. Jean Duvignaud
pictured Claude Lvi-Strauss as "the vicar of the tropics,"23 who
adopted in his own name the nostalgic dream of an original purity
among the first men of the Savoyard vicar (Jean-Jacques Rousseau).
Lvi-Strauss answered Duvignaud's 1958 criticism of the struc-
turalist method for which he proposed a pluralist approach to society,
in a letter in which he defended, and even carried further, his point of
view: "1 don't know what human society is. 1 work on certain perma-
nent and univers al modes of human societies, and on certain levels of
analysis that can be isolated."24 Duvignaud raised a criticism dealing
with the problem of the status of freedom and the place of collective
dynamism in the anthropological project. In the same letter, Lvi-
Strauss answered that "the question is not pertinent. The issue of free-
dom has no more meaning at the level of observation at which 1 place
myself than it does for someone who studies man organically."25
For Lvi-Strauss, the issue was definitively removed from struc-
tural anthropology and he took the natural sciences as his epistemo-
I80 Get a Load of That Structure!
logical model. Man, therefore, can only attest to his own impotence,
his inanity before mechanisms that he will eventually render compre-
hensible but over which he has no control. Lvi-Strauss's position re-
sembled the scientist illusion of the positivists, for whom theoretical
physics embodied scientificity.
In a somewhat similar way, by taking phonology as its model,
structural anthropology rejected any form of social substantialism and
causality in favor of a notion of the arbitrary. It aimed more toward
the meanders of neuronal complexity, which seem to hold an ontolog-
ical key, the veritable structure of structures, the final underpinning of
structurality.
Lvi-Strauss's Linguistie Underpinnings:
A Strategie Choice
Georges Mounin used Structural Anthropology to define Lvi-Strauss's
ties with linguistics during the period covered by the articles, which is
to say between 1944 and 1956. He questioned the validity of the lin-
guistic ideas used by Lvi-Strauss and, as a linguist, argued that in this
volume Lvi-Strauss essentially borrowed the ideas of structure and
opposition from phonology, whereas these "are not specifically lin-
guistic. "26 Moreover, Lvi-Strauss rejected functionalism, and this
prohiited him from linking these ideas to that of function, which is
central in phonology. Identifying phonemes with signifying elements
has no linguistic relevance: "The phoneme only helps to construct a
morpheme's signifier; it is not part of the signified. "27 Even if Lvi-
Strauss found many parallels between kinship structures and struc-
tures of language to the point of saying that "treating marriage regula-
tions and kinship systems as a kind of language,"28 he still remained
reticent, as an anthropologist, about any reductionism in the service
of linguistics. In 1945, he counseled against "hurrying to transpose
the linguist's analytic methods, "29 and refrained, in 1956, from want-
ing "to reduce society or culture to language. "30
Georges Mounin presented Lvi-Strauss's relationship to linguis-
tics as confused, clumsy, and full of regrets, albeit supremely clever,
for Lvi-Strauss had no intention of becoming a linguist; he wanted to
use the powerful thrust of linguistic rigor to propel the much broader
project of structural anthropology. In this respect, Fernand Braudel
understood much more clearly the intention, the stakes, and the risks
Get a Load of That Structure! I8I
of Lvi-Strauss's strategy. Braudel was a historia n, and he was careful
to preserve the historian's position at the forefront of the social sci-
ences. At the same time, he was aware that this was a real challenge,
and could threaten the position of the Annales school within the Sixth
Section of the EPHE, over which he had presided since the death in
1956 of Lucien Febvre. He answered Lvi-Strauss in a manifesto-
article that appeared at the end of 1958 in the Annales: "conomies,
socit, civilisations." In it, Braudel argued for the longue dure as the
common language of the social sciences that the historian would fed-
erate.
31
This answer or riposte from the historians significantly turned
historical discourse in the direction of a structuralization.
History Veers toward Structure
Before the structuralist challenge, historians had already shifted their
centers of interest. When Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre created the
review Annales d'histoire conomique et sociale in 1929, they were al-
ready adopting Durkheim's program, and the result was a change of
direction toward a longer dure, toward examining phenomena and
their underlying causes in depth, which had been too easily buried by
the postivist school in favor of a short-winded history narrowly con-
ceived as politico-military.
The fashion for structures emphasized this shift in the historical
discourse away from the tendency to valorize change and toward an
attention to immobile stretches of time. As early as his 1947 thesis,
"The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World at the Time of
Philippe II,''32 Fernand Braudel had altered the historian's vision by
relegating the hero of the period, Philippe II, to a minor role and
by focusing on immobile stretches, on the fixed points of the geo-
historical framework of the Mediterranean world.
In the line of Franois Simiand, and therefore of the Durkheimian
school, Ernest Labrousse's 1949 thesis, "The French Economic Crisis
at the End of the Ancien Rgime,"33 written in the Division of Letters
and Social Sciences, had similarly shifted the historian's vision; he had
resituated the revolutionary crisis of 1789 within a triple temporality
of seasonal variations embedded within cyclical oscillations that were,
in their turn, integrated into movements of longue dure. Labrousse
had thus made it possible to add a structural situationalism to
Franois Simiand's use of economic circumstances: "The historian-
economist was struck with the frequency of repetition. "34 Not that
I82 Get a Load of That Structure!
events were eliminated; but they underwent a procedure of elucida-
tion as an end point that should be explained by statistical curves:
"Our history is at once sociological and traditional. "35 And yet,
Ernest Labrousse reigned over the Sorbonne during the fifties and di-
rected much historical research oriented toward a social and eco-
nomic history attentive to structural phenomena.
It was in this context, with elements drawn from both an eco-
nomic situation and a structure set into a dialectic, that Pierre Vilar
undertook his research on Catalonia. He had been an ENS student in
1925, had published his thesis in 1962,36 and in a Labroussian per-
spective, he directed a seminar at the Sorbonne on the idea of struc-
ture: "The whole problem in history is to combine structure and
circumstances. Therefore, 1 reflected a lot on structures. Claude Lvi-
Strauss interested me when he showed that he was observing things
that were structurally logical. "37 If the historian borrowed a logical and
abstract dimension from anthropology, he nonetheless kept to a con-
crete and observable content, and within his field favored phenomena
of crises like abcesses of fixation, or like so many poles around which
structural givens crystallized, as if these poles dynamized them. The
research was rigorous and relied heavily on strong statistical infor-
mation and had a comprehensive ambition: its name was Ernest
Labrousse in the fifties. "We were aIl anxious to ask him for the sis
subjects-Maurice Agulhon, Alain Besanon, Franois Dreyfus, Pierre
Deyon, Jean Jacquart, Annie Kriegel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,
Claude Mesliand, Jacques Ozouf, Andr Tudesq ... ," Michelle Per-
rot recounts.
38
For Perrot, Labrousse incarnated modernity, and she
visited him in the spring of 1949 in order to propose a subject dealing
with feminism-a subject that made her master smile. He suggested
instead that she work on the workers' movement during the first half
of the nineteenth century.
For Michelle Perrot, Ernest Labrousse incarnated a concern for
rigor, a concern to reach beyond the altogether too familiar impres-
sionism of the discipline of history: "Labrousse wanted to rediscover
causality and laws; this was in keeping with both Marxists and posi-
tivists. "39 Given this outlook, Labroussian historians were very recep-
tive to the structuralist phenomenon and to the anthropological chal-
lenge of the end of the fifties. They were on familiar ground when they
read Lvi-Strauss, and in a similar quest for invariants, even if their ob-
ject was different by nature: "There is a phrase in Claude Lvi-Strauss
Get Load of That Structure! 83
that l m my 'Workers on Strike, France (1 ' at
the beginning of section entitled 'Structures,' and that amounts tu
saying that when there are laws somewhere, they must be everywhere,
a fundamental remark for the social sciences. "40
Historical Anthropology: Jean-Pierre Vernant
The structura li st undertaking broadened after Jean-Pierre Vernant's
lecture at Cerisy in 1959. Vernant had passed the agrgation in phi-
losophy in 1937 and came, in fact, rather late to Greece, in 1948, but
he did not leave his field of study to become a Hellenist. He had been a
disciple of Louis Gernet and y gnace Meyerson and recognized the
triad of mile Benveniste, Georges Dumzil, and Claude Lvi-Strauss
as his other masters. His research was psychohistorical; he was inter-
ested by mental forms, which he called "the interior man," and inves-
tigated the nature of work, technical thought, the perception of the
categories of time and space in the imagination, and the imagery of
ancient and classical Greece. "Man is made of the symbolic. Sociallife
only functions through symbolic systems, and in this respect 1 am pro-
foundly structuralist. "41
Following the publication of Structural Anthropology, Jean-Pierre
Vernant therefore gave a paper at Cerisy on structure in the Hesiodic
myth of the races, and his article was published shordy thereafter.
42
Vernant's article had an explicidy structural thrust, which was doubly
enriched through discussions with Georges Dumzil about trifunc-
tionality and by the revolution that Lvi-Strauss had realized in his
study of Amerindian myths.
Vernant sought to apply his analytic grid ta Greek myths and in
so doing effected a major methodological shift that created possibili-
ties for an entire productive school that took shape around him, estab-
lishing a historical anthropology of ancient Greece. In making the
work he was analyzing comprehensible, he did not proceed like classi-
cal Hellenists, who sought to date the traditions they found in their
work, but focused instead on explaining the fundamental articulations
and the code underpinning the myth in question. The myth of the
races opens Hesiod's Works and Days; it proposes a theogony that
recounts how the archaic order of Greece can be explained by the suc-
cessive batdes between generations of divinities, until Zeus took com-
mand and established an immutable order. Hesiod's tale therefore ap-
r84 Ger Load of That Structure!
pears chronological, following the succession races of gold, of
silver, of bronze, of iron, and finally of heroes.
Jean-Pierre Vernant reduced and displaced the myth. In the first
place, he held that the !ive ages correspond in fact to a functional tri-
partition "whose dominance over lndo-European religious thought
has been demonstrated by Georges Dumzil. "43 Hesiod, therefore,
framed his thinking in a tripartite structure when he reinterpreted the
myth of the races. But, above ail, Vernant took up binarism, Lvi-
Strauss's oppositional framework, in order to show that time does not
unfold chronologically in the Hesiodic vision of the races, but accord-
ing to "a system of antinomies. "44 A binary structure opposing dik
(justice) and hubris (exaggeration) is repeated during each age. Hes-
iod's tale, in this framework, has a didactic mission with respect to his
brother, the cultivator Perses, to whom he speaks in order to preach
the value of work as destiny and respect for dik-a lesson that ap-
plies to ail social categories in Greek society.
Vernant's demonstration depended on reorganizing mythic mater-
ial in order to bring out the major principles at work in Hesiod's
mythic discourse: "The dik/hubris opposition is put to a melody,
in music, through a Dumezilian functional tripartite organization."45
For Jean-Pierre Vernant, Hesiod's founding myth was a plea for jus-
tice, made necessary because it took place during a period of transi-
tion during which the Greeks were in se arch of what is just and what
is not just, and at a time when the old forms of dik no longer held.
Vernant did not propose a purely formalist or antichronological
approach, therefore, because he referred the myth to a concrete
geopolitical situation in which it is like "the presage of a universe in
which the law of the polis, the political nomos, will be the fundamen-
tal element. "46 He therefore successfully combined an analysis of a
mythic discourse with a sociohistorical context, giving it the value of a
symptom, thereby reconciling history (genesis) and structure. Vernant
later again emphasized the trifunctionality of the tale's internai struc-
ture, however, as a result of criticism he received:
1 would no longer say trifunctionality because if it functions for the
first two ages (gold and silver), which do indeed represent sover-
eignty and the bronze race and the race of heroes and war, it is not
the same for the iron race, which is more complex than the third
function of production. This was the time of Hesiod and it was
therefore not topica1.
47
Ger a Load of That Structure! IB5
Vernant was therefore obliged to reintroduce historicity into his
analysis by considering the fifth age in the chronological succession of
the four others. He admits to having go ne too far in structuralizing the
historical vision, but his rereading nonetheless made it possible to
dialectize the dik/hubris, justice/exaggeration dichotomy, which 1S
essential for analyzing categories of thought in ancient Greece.
Lvi-Strauss's Consecration
A chapter came to a close on January 5, 1960, on the occasion of
Lvi-Strauss's inaugurallesson at the Collge de France: the heroic age
of structura li sm was over, while broad vistas of the paradigm's intel-
lectual triumph stretched ahead. The entrance of the man who at the
time embodied the rigor of structuralism's scientific program symbol-
ized its success; this was official recognition of the rich effervescence
that was under way, a decisive consecration at the dawn of the sixties.
This venerable institution was also undergoing a minor internaI
revolution by creating, for the first time, a chair for social anthropol-
ogy. It is true that Marcel Mauss had taught at the Collge, but he
taught anthropology from a chair in sociology.
In his inaugural lesson, Lvi-Strauss defined his project in line
with Ferdinand de Saussure's discussion of semiology. This social an-
thropology took as its true object the very broad spectrum of the life
of signs at the he art of society. He clearly expressed his debt to struc-
tural linguistics, mobilized as the hard scientific underpinning of his
own anthropological project. He also expressed the global nature of
his program by carefully avoiding becoming disconnected from the
social realm and reality for the sake of the symbolic nature of his ob-
ject: "Social anthropology ... does not separate material culture from
spiritual culture."48 Moreover, he considered that the neuronal uni-
verse would offer the key to understanding the true sources of the
symbolic universe: "The emergence of culture will remain a mystery
so long as we are unable to understand, at the biological level, the
brain's modifications of structure and function. "49
Beyond this scientific thrust, Lvi-Strauss's lesson was also part of
a particular moment in French historical conscience, or of "Western
bad conscience. In a breathtaking way, Claude Lvi-Strauss orches-
trated this grand theme of third-world sentimentalism and the struc-
turalist sails were filled with third-world winds."so Pierre Nora's eval-
uation was confirmed at the end of Lvi-Strauss's inaugurallesson, for
I86 Get a Load of
he in this
the adar of sulfur:
Structure!
confined his were like
You will allow me, therefore, dear colleagues, after having rendered
homage to the masters of social anthropology at the beginning of my
lesson, to reserve my final remarks for the savages whose obscure
tenacity provides us with the means of assigning their real dimen-
sions to human acts: men and women who, even as l speak, thou-
sands of kilometers from here, in sorne savanna eroded by brush
fires or in a rain-drenched forest, return to their camp to share a
meager pitance, and together evoke their godS.
51
Lvi-Strauss ended this very beautiful reminder of his field experience
with the wish to remain within the Collge de France as both a stu-
dent and a witness to these Indians of the tropics condemned to ex-
tinction by our civilization, the last of the Mohicans.
If the Collge de France represented the ultimate consecration for
Lvi-Strauss, it was also a trompe l'oeil; the real research teams were
at the university and the Collge alone did not resolve the problem of
isolation or the possibility of creating a discipleship. This was not
Lvi-Strauss's fate, however, for he immediately created a laboratory
for social anthropology, which depended on the CNRS, the Collge de
France, and the EPHE and which meant that he was immediately sur-
rounded by researchers able to benefit from the prestige of the Col-
lge. He was well aware that in order to realize such an ambitious
project he needed solid institutional bases.
This was the context in which, in 1961, Lvi-Strauss created a
new review, L'Homme, so that there would be a French counterpart
to Man in England and the American Anthropologist in the United
States. By his choice of codirectors for this professional anthropologi-
cal publication, Lvi-Strauss clearly laid out his ambitions for a scien-
tific structural anthropology, as well as his program. Two other pro-
fessors from the Collge de France joined him on the editorial board:
mile Benveniste represented structural linguistics as the very model
of scientificity on which Lvi-Strauss determinedly based his work,
and Pierre Gourou, a tropical geographer, clearly represented the old
vitality of the French school of geography in the Vidalian tradition.
Lvi-Strauss made another attempt at the takeover the Durkheimians
had tried at the beginning of the century of a school of geography long
on the wane because it had joined forces with the Annales historians.
Lvi-Strauss quickly enlarged his team, which he thought was a bit
Get a Load of That Structure! I87
too much of a "Collge de France dub," and asked Andr Leroi-
Gourhan, Georges-Henri Rivire, and Andr-Georges Haudricourt to
join. The absences were significant, for there were no historians, de-
spite the fact that their work had drawn much doser to the anthropo-
logical program since the creation of the Annales. Lvi-Strauss's an-
swer reflected the institutional stakes dividing the two disciplines: "In
1960, history and ethnology, which had come so much doser together,
were, dare 1 say, rivaIs for the public's attention."52
The same year, Lvi-Strauss's interviews with Georges Charbon-
nier gave an ide a of the ambitions of his program and of the metamor-
phosis that he hoped for in the social sciences in general, which should
draw their inspiration from the natural sciences, going so far as to
identify with them: "We might say that ethnology is a natural science
or that it aspires to shape itself based on the example of the natural
sciences." 53
Crossing the Rubicon to join the natural sciences supposed a rela-
tionship with progress, history, and man that sought to reduce them in
order to give precedence to a quasi-mechanical model; this in the
framework of a cooling down of temporality and of a significance that
escaped the individual and established itself on the basis of a logical
time, without his knowledge. The structuralist challenge to the social
sciences did not lack for grandeur. Throughout the fifties it had dearly
demonstrated its fertility by embracing different figures of alterity. On
the strength of its promises, this program was soon to flourish, during
the sixties.
Part II
The Sixties:
I963-I966, La Belle poque
Twenty-two
Contesting the Sorbonne: The Quarrel
of the Ancients and the Moderns
On the threshold of the sixties, the aged and venerable Sorbonne con-
tinued to reign undisputed over the country of the mind. Indeed, it
engaged only with great difficulty in any discussion of its orientation.
The Sorbonne oversaw the heritage of a literary method whose con-
cern for historical and philological exactitude had made it appear rig-
orous and modern in the nineteenth century. But university erudition,
strengthened by an already ancient break, turned a deaf ear to the
epistemological challenge that had begun to raise its voice in the
fifties. Faced with triumphant positivism and the atomization of its
method, the structura li st thrust took on the guise of veritable anti-
mandarin trench warfare whose primary weapon was the construc-
tion of more modern and holistic scientific models.
This combat reached its climax in May 1968, when the old edifice
collapsed. The weight of the Sorbonne had relegated those who con-
tested it to a position of margina lit y, forcing them to seek out support
and new disciplinary alliances, to define an ambitious program and
the broadest possible readership/electorate in order to surround,
deflect, and eject the mandarins in place. Institutionally, therefore,
"structural linguistics embodied the contestation of modernity with
respect to the dominant model."l For those invested with the role of
preserving the dominant model, the role of reflection on language was
entirely secondary, not to say elementary, insofar as it had been lim-
ited to language acquisition in the early classes of primary school.
Contesting the Sorbonne
Since mastery was complete, the crown-
ing study of literature was removed from studying its mechanisms.
The study of literature, indeed, was limited ta purely aesthetic consid-
erations removed from linguistics, which could, however, be part of
the pro gram of studying foreign languages. Linguistics was simply a
technical tool, dismissed with a certain condescension from the noble
literary environment of creative genius. "In the tradition al curriculum
of literary studies, the study of language was dependent on and infe-
ri or to work on the literary text."2
Andr Martinet Returns
The only real, noteworthy exception in the aged institution was Andr
Martinet's course in general linguistics. He had come back from the
United States in 1955 and was internationally known. His notoriety,
however, made little impression in the traditional humanities, where
he was suspect and barely tolerated by those who initially confined
him ta a small enclave where, they believed, he would be forgotten.
He was finally given a course ta teach at the old Linguistics Institute,
but in a small classroom that could hold only about thirty students.
The room quickly overflowed with students and Andr Martinet im-
mediately found himself directing about thirty theses of Africanists
who were 100 king for a way ta describe their languages. Since walls
cannot be moved, university authorities had to find a bigger classroom
for Martinet, who every year required more chairs for students who
poured into his courses. In 1958, he was given Guizot lecture hall
but it was only adequate for two years. In 1960, he held class in the
Descartes lecture hall, which could hold up to four hundred students.
"In 1967, the Descartes amphitheater was too small and they gave me
Richelieu which, if you include the annexes, can ho Id up to six hun-
dred people."3 His trajectory within the Sorbonne clearly reflected the
growing enchantment with linguistics in the sixties.
Richelieu consecrated Martinet. Despite his complaints about the
inhuman amount of work, his course had become requisite for anyone
wanting to become a modern semiologist, especially because, in addi-
tion to his universally recognized pedagogical talent, he was an excep-
tion in France. An entire student public could arm itself in his courses
for the antimandarin criticism that was to grow throughout the six-
ties. "We were young, we were against those who were old, and it
happened that the avant-garde movement of the time was structural-
Contesting the Sorbonne l 93
ism SO, let's bec orne structuralists."4 For the young generation, struc-
turalism played a role of stripping things clean and became a provi-
sional morality much in the manner of Descartes.
In a context of contestation against the powers that be, the at-
tacks were once again directed against any form of vague psycholo-
gism among the specialists of traditional history, "the veritable pox of
the French university and not only among literature people, but also
among philosophers."5
A Lonely Innovator: Jean-Claude Chevalier
Jean-Claude Chevalier, a young teaching assistant in French grammar,
defended his thesis, "The Idea of Complement among Grammarians,"
in 1968.6 The preface carefully presented the term "epistemology" in
quotes as if he were handling an explosive element in his milieu. He
used the central ide a of the period, rupture, and recalls the euphoria of
contestation as something like a "hygienic pleasure."7 But theoreti-
cally, he was looking for a conceptual break, a way of moving things
forward in a new direction. This conception of a future rupture led to
valorizing breaks in the pasto Chevalier therefore saw a certain discon-
tinuity in 1750 among grammarians, who until then had only used the
term "origin," and henceforth would use the ide a of complement.
"Things shifted from a morphological system to a semantic system of
syntax, implying a considerable change. "8
Jean-Claude Chevalier did not, however, think of himself as an
innovator at the time. He was just doing the work of an honest histor-
ical grammarian and he was quite unaware of the fact that Louis
Althusser and Michel Foucault were engaged in similar work. Even at
that point, however, Julia Kristeva remarked in Critique that Jean-
Claude Chevalier's work was an essential element in shaping the rup-
ture that was winning over all the avant-garde intellectuals.
Todorov Encounters the Void
With the exception of Martinet's enclave, which was limited to teach-
ing how language functioned, nothing was going on at the Sorbonne
in literature using the new methods of structurallinguistics. When the
young Bulgarian Tzvetan Todorov arrived in Paris in the spring of
1963, he was utterly discomfited by the resistance he encountered.
Todorov had come from the University of Sofia after finishing his
university studies, and he was looking for an institutional setting in
I94 Contesting the Sorbonne
which to develop research on what he was already calling the theory
of literature. For him this meant thinking about literature without
drawing on external elements, be they sociological or psychological,
but he might as weIl have been looking for a needle in a haystack.
Bearing a letter of recommendation from the de an of letters in Sofia
and confident of getting a positive response, he contacted the director
of the Sorbonne to learn about the possibilities there. "He looked at
me as if 1 came from another planet and explained to me, quite coldly,
that there was no literary theory going on in his university, nor were
there any plans for it in the future."9 Rather confused, Todorov
thought at the time that there had been sorne misunderstanding and
he asked if there might be a program in stylistics, but the de an wanted
him to specify in which language. This conversation between deaf
men continued and Todorov began to feel increasingly uncomfort-
able because "1 couldn't say to him, French stylistics, since 1 was stut-
tering in an entirely doubtful French. He would have told me to go
and study French first."l0 Of course it was a question of general sty-
listics and the Sorbonne director reiterated that this field of study did
not exist.
It was only thanks to completely fortuitous circumstances that
Todorov finally managed to find a place in Paris, where what was to
be called poetics constituted a field of study. Having established rather
pleasant contact with the director of the Sorbonne library (thanks to
her father, who was a librarian in Sofia), Todorov began to take heart
by plunging into the holdings of the library. The librarian informed
him that her nephew's work might help introduce him to the ale a tory
paths of Parisian modernity. So Todorov went to meet the nephew,
Franois Jodelet, who was a teaching assistant in psychology at the
Sorbonne. Jodelet took him to meet another assistant at the Sorbonne
who was working in literature and whose name was Grard Genette.
"So 1 met Genette. He immediately understood what 1 was looking for
and told me about someone who was working on this sort of thing:
Roland Barthes. He told me that 1 had to take Barthes's seminar."ll
Literary Dissatisfaction
If you studied English at the Sorbonne, you stood a chance of coming
into contact with structuralism. Marina Yaguello came to the Institut
d'Anglais in I963 in this way, at the same time that Antoine Culioli,
who had been an assistant in Nancy until then, was appointed. Culi-
Contesting the Sorbonne I95
oli's work on Old English and on yowei variation made it not
only to take a synchronie approach, but an approach that was also
"completely structuralist insofar as when each vowel moves, the whole
system moves with it."12
Linguistic training was not aimed at the majority of French litera-
ture students at the Sorbonne. Franoise Gadet was enrolled in litera-
ture but deeply dissatisfied by the teaching, and had gone to one of An-
toine Culioli's classes ta take notes for a friend who was absent. The
course was a revelation for her. "1 said to myself, there things are really
rigorous and demanding." 13 Gadet therefore chose to do a linguistics
certificate at the Licence level and found herself with Martinet. She
switched from literature to structurallinguistics because structuralism
meant choosing rigor. "When you experienced the atmosphere in the
Sorbonne in the sixties, you understood that there was nowhere else to
go. When you understand just how much of a graveyard it was, you
understand why structuralism was so a ppealing. "14
Professors of literature at the time included, among others, Grard
Castex, Jacques Deloffre, Marie-Jeanne Durry who was a poet and
Apollinaire specialist, and Charles Ddyan, an Armenian prince who
taught comparative literature. They were all conscientious professors
but they emptied their lecture halls after a single class. "1 saw it with
my own eyes in Ddyan's class. Fifty people had been at the first class
and three were at the second," recalls Philippe Hamon who, like so
many in his generation, chose linguistics in the mid-sixties. "It was the
first time that a science called human could attain such a degree of
rigor; the discourse was clear, it could be demonstrated, repeated, and
reproduced."15 lisabeth Roudinesco began studying literature at the
Sorbonne in 1964, and quickly felt the same dissatisfaction. She had
to face the fact rather quickly that her interests were in no way sus-
tained by the classes she took: "When you studied literature, the line
of demarcation was: have you read the latest Barthes? There were two
camps. Besides, what they taught us was idiotic."16 In literature at the
Sorbonne, therefore, there was a very marked split between two lan-
guages and two types of interest. The widening rift between the teach-
ers and their students provoked a considerable degree of frustration
but also created a buildup of tension that would later explode. Litera-
ture students were not alone in their frustration, however, for philoso-
phy students were equally dissatisfied. As Franois Ewald described
things, "The Sorbonne was a complete void,"17 and he was dissatis-
I96 Contesting the Sorbonne
fied with Raymond Aron's haughty, sardonic sideward glance at Jean-
Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason.
This feeling of cosmic void was so palpable that Franois Ewald
and his friend Franois George conceived of a project-which never
bore fruit--of starting a review along the lines of Les Cahiers pour
l'analyse, and which would be entided Les Cahiers pour l'poch.
They wanted to express the feeling of the end of history, of a world on
the wane, which completely corresponded to the new structuralist
sensibility. Ewald had quickly encountered this sensibility through the
people he knew at Ulm from Les Cahiers pour l'analyse. At the Sor-
bonne, he took a course with one of the members of that group,
Jacques-Alain Miller, as well as Lacan's seminar. "This makes me a
child of structuralism. 1 was raised on Bachelard, Canguilhem, and
French epistemology."18
This deep sense of expectation was answered by the dynamism in
the social sciences and their veritable explosion in the sixties. But
should we see in the attraction of literature students, historians, and
philosophers to structuralism an expression of the growing pains of
sciences worried about institutionalization and seeking to drape them-
selves in greater rigor? "1 would sooner speak about the senility of the
social sciences because 1 don't see how they would be considered inau-
gural," answers Roger-Pol Droit, who saw in the structuralist ambi-
tion the high point of Durkheimianism in sociology and anthropology
and would take a quarter century to discover an instrument of objecti-
fication, provided by the linguistics of the thirties. "It's more a ques-
tion of a belated history in which the social sciences probably discov-
ered something like the expression of their modernity."19 Of course
this desire for renovation can be considered in relation to an older
Durkheimian exigency, but insofar as this tradition had only been
half-successful, its program, renewed by linguistics, was the banner of
modernization at a Sorbonne that remained largely indifferent to
change.
The Foyers of Modernity
The sixties offered a particularly effervescent spectacle in the strategy
of circumventing the principal academic institution. Innovation hailed
from the periphery: it reached Paris via the provinces, or took root in
marginal enclaves of the capital: "This university is incapable of doing
anything new. "20 The philosopher Cournot had already observed dur-
Contesting the Sorbonne 197
the that the French university, until the Re-
naissance, almost provoked the reform that would culminate in the
development of universities in northern Europe. But since then, when-
ever the habitus of Homo academicus needed a slight push, a new in-
stitution had to be created: the Collge de France, the ENS, the EPHE,
and the CNRS. The events of the sixties therefore bore this legacy,
which required a revolution to reform a system. Even at the very pin-
nacle of the paradigm, the celebra tory concert of publishing houses,
reviews, and the press should not make us forget that the tradition al
institution kept its grip on legitimacy. "Structuralism never reigned; it
would be incorrect to say that it di d, and especially in literature. "21
Institutional frameworks did eventually provide the context for
much research that was breaking with the past and making it possible
for a great deal of work to be accomplished on many fronts with a
common, new orientation. Textual structurality was shifting the se arch
for textual genesis more and more radically, function was replacing
the notion of oeuvre; literary analysis came to adopt the Russian for-
malists' notion of immanence. A common program allowed for very
different kinds of research, which depended on the linguistic model to
unseat the preeminent creative subject, considered fundamental until
that point. The structural totality of the text was becoming most im-
portant, but a text whose internaI ratio na lit y necessarily escaped au-
thorial grasp because its enunciation escaped authorial knowledge. In
the na me of logic or aesthetics, criticism tended to bec orne confused
with an essentially descriptive thrust; different levels of resemblance
or opposition were brought into relationship, or criticism was specifi-
cally linguistic. The decade that began in I960 was therefore a partic-
ularly intense period for the linguistic model, which was principally
structuralist, and its methodological effort.
22
Strasbourg was one of the high spots of this structuralist renewal
and Georges Straka, professor of philology, was its central figure.
Straka was a friend of Greimas and he published semiotic articles in
Les Travaux de linguistique et littrature,23 a review created in I963
with an initial print run of one thousand issues distributed by Klinck-
sieck. He organized colloquiums, brought French and foreign linguists
together at Strasbourg, and made their work known thanks to Klinck-
sieck's support, as well as through the influence of the University of
Strasbourg, which had already seen the great historiographical revolu-
tion of the Annales in I929.
I98 Contesting the Sorbonne
The university at Besanon was the other site of innovation and
convergence, but its vitality was completely contingent; the youngest
recruits were forced to take up their walking stick and begin their ca-
reers in excentric universities, and Besanon was a particularly distant
and enclosed location. Young researchers such as Bernard Qumada,
Georges Mator, Henri Mitterand, and Louis Hay who were con-
demned to work together found themselves there. Interdisciplinarity
was deliberate and bridges were built between professors in the de-
partments of letters and sciences in order to apply laboratory methods
to the social sciences. "An interdisciplinary dialogue went on every-
where, in the train, at restaurants. Henri Mitterand, who was always
practical-minded, said that if Les Cahiers du rapide 59 were ever pub-
lished, they would be far superior to most of the institutionalized jour-
naIs. "24 There was a real hunger for learning and for belonging to
modernity at Besanon, something that characterizes a young and en-
thusiastic generation. "We were interested in aU the new things that
came our way. "25 The works of Barthes, Greimas, and Lvi-Strauss
were aU very enthusiastically received during this period of high intel-
lectual tension. Alongside the Germanist Louis Hay, there was young
Henri Mitterand, a grammarian and philologist who remembers the
publication of Jean Dubois's the sis, "Political and Social Vocabulary
in France between I849 and I872,"26 as a fundamental event. Dubois
incited an entire generation to look for paraUels between discursive
structures beyond the structures of class and vocabulary. The dy-
namism at Besanon made it possible to reach beyond the university
enclave; before becoming a place to which everyone swarmed, Be-
sanon was a place where a whole inteUectual community, including
Parisians and foreigners, could meet and thereby minimize the geo-
graphical distance between people like Jean-Claude Chevalier in Lille,
Jean Dubois in Rouen and then Paris, and Greimas in Poitiers.
There were, of course, significant nuances in the work being
undertaken. Barthes was the big reference point of the period, and
he was more interested in how codes worked in a text than was
Greimas, who wanted to find the system behind the text that com-
manded the working of the human mind. But, beyond these differ-
ences, there was "this setting into place of the critic as an explorer of
immanence,"27 a notion developed by Knud Togeby, a professor in
Copenhagen who was a disciple of Louis Hjelmslev. Togeby had pub-
lished Immanent Structures of the French Language
28
in I965, and
Contesting the Sorbonne 199
term became the cry of an entire young g e n e r a ~
tion of new critics.
Clearly, the east of France was in its heyday and the winds blew
with sorne strength. As of 1960, Nancy also became a dynamic r e ~
search center when Bernard Pottier created a Society for Automatic
Translation, which attracted linguists and scientists to a colloquium
on the topic as early as 1961. This branch of linguistic analysis would
convert professional scientists to linguistics. In the early sixties, Mau-
rice Gross, an engineer at the State Arms Laboratory who was as-
signed to the Center for Calculus, remarked: "1 didn't have the
vague st idea about what a linguist was. 1 didn't even know that such a
thing existed."29 Automatic translation made it possible for Maurice
Gross to become a linguist and to leave for Harvard in October 1961
where he met Noam Chomsky. The period was also propitious for re-
se arch teams and for a certain reorganization of research that could
only be carried on at the periphery of the great institutions but that
compensated for the absence of modernization at the Sorbonne.
The French Communist Party still wielded sorne political influ-
ence at the beginning of the sixties, and many intellectuals were active
in its ranks or were satisfied with their roles as fellow travelers. How-
ever, one important Communist linguist named Marcel Cohen was
responsible for a Marxist research group that included a good number
of the structurallinguists. The group met regularly at the homes of its
different members, including Jean Dubois, Antoine Culioli, Henri Mit-
terand, and Andr-Georges Haudricourt, among others. Quite quickly,
however, political changes as much as Marcel Cohen's concept of lin-
guistic work, which was considered too restrictive, created a diaspora
among the old Marxist research group: "Cohen's idea of Marxism
was sociological and Durkheimian .... Marcel Cohen always thought
ill of the Americans."30 According to Andr-Georges Haudricout, who
recognized the importance of this group at the time, Cohen's sectari-
anism had a significant impact on the group's cohesion: "Poor Cohen
was very totalitarian: for him, there was the party and the others."31
The group turned its curiosity to the Russian formalists of the twen-
ties and toward Soviet linguistics-Vinogradov-with the ide a of con-
structing a sociology of language that would not encompass the struc-
turalist ambitions. Whence its rather swift disappearance, despite its
major role as a place for fruitful encounters.
200 Contesting the Sorbonne
Growing Effervescence
The excite ment that was ta king ho Id in a number of areas was a
veritable explosion of curiosity, which could not express itself in the
official Socit de Linguistique de Paris (SLP). In 1960 the Socit
d'tudes de la Langue Franaise (SELF) was created in Paris by three
auditors of Robert-Lon Wagner's course: Jean-Claude Chevalier,
Jean Dubois, and Henri Mitterand. Robert-Lon Wagner, a professor
at Hautes tudes, was decisive for diffusing structural linguistics in
France. He was a medievalist who had been trained as a philologist
and was the first to introduce Benveniste, Jakobson, and Hjelmslev in
his seminars. "He played a seminal role."32
The SELF was born of necessity and in reaction to a sarcastic re-
mark made by Michael Riffaterre, a professor at Columbia University
who was quite disappointed by Jean-Claude Chevalier's personal li-
brary. Chevalier decided therefore to have a small group of friends
pool their discoveries. Every month it met to hear presentations by
semanticians like Greimas, lexicologists like Guilbert or Dubois, syn-
tacticians like Chevalier, or stylisticians like Meschonnic. Articles ap-
peared shortly thereafter. This "public welfare committee among the
lost"33 would quickly grow. Its disappearance in 1968 was due not to
failure but, on the contrary, because its catalytic role had succeeded,
given the importance of the movement that was under way.
Other groups came together in the sixties, among them Enseigne-
ment pour la Recherche en Anthropologie Sociale (EPRAS) at Hautes
tudes, where, in 1966, Greimas created a two- or three-year pro gram
of experimental teaching at the master's level with the help of Oswald
Ducrot and Christian Metz, and the Association Internationale de
Linguistique Applique (AlLA), created in 1964, where seminar par-
ticipants numbered as many as two hundred. "The seminar in Nancy
in 1967 brought crowds of researchers. Practically the entire future
team at Vincennes was there."34
The Sixth Section at the EPHE was another breeding ground
for renewal, especially with Roland Barthes's seminar, which in 1964
addressed the question of cuisine. Barthes had been named directeur
d'tudes
35
in 1962 for a research project titled "Sociology and Semiol-
ogy of Signs and Symbols." Beyond the particularly active work in
literature, Lvi-Strauss's work also spurred much new research.
Published in 1958, Structural Anthropology had a triple effect on
Contesting the Sorbonne 20I
the literary world in ferment:
36
the fecundity of the phonological
mode! in one of the disciplines of the humanities, the anachronic read-
ing of the Oedipus myth, and the myth's transformational formula.
Two years later, Lvi-Strauss directly addressed a literary work with a
polemical article titled "Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk-
tale," which had many repercussions.37 And in 1962, his fa mous col-
laborative study with Roman Jakobson on Baudelaire's "Les Chats"
was published, demonstrating that the sonnet is entirely determined
by phonetic choices.
38
These incursions into literary territory revealed
the ability of the method to contend with a vast area, in the name of a
general semiology. These were so many confirmations of the scien-
tificity and promises of their program for those working in literature
and newly converted to linguistics.
In 1962, Jean Rousset's Form and Signification, subtitled Essays in
Literary Structures,39 also lent support to the immanence of literary
analysis. In keeping with Paul Valry's thinking and writing, which
became the major literary reference for the new aesthetics, Rousset
adopted the ide a that form is rich in ideas. "It is the structure of the
work that is inventive. "40 Rousset avoided any subjective judgment of a
work in order to better concentrate on discerning its formaI structures,
borrowing not from linguistics but from the renewed literary criticism
and reflection on rhetoric of Lo Spitzer and Gatan Picon; his work
would be important in the program of literary structuralism. He took
one of the important ideas of the literary structura li sm of the sixties
from Lo Spitzer's German stylistics, which was to consider an isolated
work as a complete and self-sufficient organism whose inner coherence
can be studied: "Madame Bovary is an independent organism, an ab-
solute, a whole that can be understood and elucidated by itself. "41
Jean Rousset broke with the kind of criticism that went beyond
the work and dissolved the work in its context and genesis to the ex-
tent that everything except the work itself was present. This restora-
tion of the literality of the work would be firmly invoked against the
representatives of traditionalliterary history. The weapons of this new
criticism were initially found in Jungian psychoanalysis, archetypes,
and authorial imagination, taking inspiration largely from Gaston
Bache!ard's intuition, and later from Jean-Pierre Richard's thematic
criticism and Georges Poulet's systematized reflection on temporality.
Later, this new criticism looked to linguistics for the weapons that
would enable it to adopt a rigorous scientific program.
Twenty-three
1964: The Semiological Adventure
Makes a Breakthrough
The year 1964 marked the end of the Sorbonne's undivided reign. Pe-
ripheral and marginal activity won its first important victory thanks
to the spectacular rise in the numbers of students enrolled in letters
and the social sciences in the mid-sixties-an effect of the baby boom.
Nanterre was created in 1964, and this new campus gave a good
number of the renovators the chance to hold a university job near
Paris. Bernard Pottier and Jean Dubois, both linguists, made their way
into the institutional ranks this way. This was the beginning of a shift
that gained numbers and speed and drew peripheral institutes like the
EPHE toward departments of letters. Whereas Strasbourg and Be-
sanon had already clearly understood what was taking place, things
in Paris took on an entirely different cast, of course. General linguis-
tics was simultaneously starting to have an institutional existence in-
dependent of language departments and traditional philology, and
consequently attracted a considerably broader audience than the nar-
row scope of specialists. Linguistics seemed at that point to be the
common denominator for anyone involved with language.
Jean Dubois played a major role in this, particularly since he was
an editor at Larousse, a tenured professor in a Parisian university, and
a member of the selection board at the CNRS, a post that put him into
frequent contact with Louis Guilbert, Robert-Lon Wagner, Aigirdas
Julien Greimas, Bernard Qumada, and so on. In addition, he directed
research projects, selected members of Nanterre's linguistics depart-
202
ment, and was on the tenure-granting board for a whole generation of
French linguists. He was also a close friend of Roland Barthes, who
had known his brother Claude Dubois when they were both at the
sanatorium. Although their background and political leanings were
not always consonant-Bernard Pottier was conservative and worked
in Spanish while Dubois was a member of the French Communist
Party and his field was French linguistics-the overriding feeling was
one of belonging to a community of structural linguists. "One day,
Pottier came to find us, saying, come help, Martinet is in trouble at the
Sorbonne, and Dubois and 1 left to save him." 1
Jean Dubois was responsible for a number of dynamic research
groups, which counted among their members linguists like Claudine
Normand, Jean-Baptiste Marcellesir, and Denise Maldidier; he was
even able to attract specialists from other disciplines to linguistics. He
recruited Joseph Sumpf, for example, as an assistant in the Iinguistics
department at Nanterre in 1967 to do sociolinguistics. Sumpf had
been working at the CNRS since 1963 in educational sociology, and
at the Centre d'tudes Sociologiques, where Liliane Isambert was his
direct or. He was aiso in Pierre Naville's seminar, where the question of
the necessity of formalization for reaching the notion of structure was
being discussed. There were anthropologists as well in this same semi-
nar, including Claude Meillassoux and Colette Piot. "Naville's ideas
about formalization came from Saussure and Piaget, but 1 couldn't say
that it was his major concern."2
Joseph Sumpf worked on the function of the philosophy class in
the French school system. His research Ied him to create a corpus of
interviews and papers from classes, and he went to see Jean Dubois
with this material to work out a method of analysis. "Jean Dubois in-
troduced me to linguistics and to Harris, and this was the basis on
which he recruited me to Nanterre."3 Structuralism thus became a
particular approach to analyzing a mass of documents comprised of
signs or traces; it offered a tool for discerning their internaI coherence.
Lecturing before a group of Tunisians in 1965, Michel Foucault
described this process as "deixology," the analysis of a document's in-
ternaI constraints: "It is a question of finding what system determines
the document as a document."4 When considered an essentiallevel of
hum an practices, deixology established "the methodological impor-
tance, the epistemological importance, and the philosophical impor-
tance of structuraIism."
5
One of the characteristics of the structuralist
revolution was to redefine the traditional split between a work
that has been critically classified and consecrated and the remains of
the fact of writing. Rather than splitting these two aspects of writing,
all writing traces were considered in a relationship that established the
literary work as a complete document. Desacralized, it became noth-
ing other th an language, a simple writing effect upon which another
act of writing is superposed. This discursive economy modified the
contours of disciplinary boundaries, which are in fact effaced to bring
a fundamentally linguistic analysis to the fore. Literary analysis be-
came important in its synchrony, true to the Saussurean bases of lin-
guistic analysis, but to the detriment of a temporal approach. No
longer perceived as an expression of its time but as a fragment of
space in the internaI logic of its own mode of operation, the literary
work was approached in terms of contiguous, syntagmatic, and para-
digmatic relationships. External or contextual causes, indeed causa lit y
itself, fall to the wayside before questions of the simple communi-
cation of a range of different codes organized around a given number
of poles.
Communications 4: A Semiological Manifesto
In 1964, an issue of Communications was published that presented the
structural linguistic model in literature as the program of the future.
Issue 4 of Communications was a veritable semiological manifesto. In
it, Tzvetan Todorov wrote his first article in French: "La description
de la signification en littrature." In it he defined a stratigraphy of
analytic levels and differentiated between phonematic distribution,
where content has no impact, and a grammatical level, which he de-
fined as the form of the content who se substance is a matter of sem an-
tics and which plays a decisive role for meaning in literature. Todorov
suggested taking a radically formalist approach, and although he ac-
knowledged that literature bears traces of other signifying systems
deriving from social or nationallife, "the study of these systems obvi-
ously remains outside literary analysis strictly speaking."6
In the same issue, Claude Brmond examined the possibilities and
limits of formaI analysis using Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the
Folktale. He argued for an autonomous semiology to replace tradi-
tional content analysis. Propp had transcribed approximately a hun-
dred Russian folktales according to a li st of thirty-one functions that
made it possible to give an exhaustive account of the actions in the en-
tire corpus folktales examined. Brmond argued a method of
formai analysis that would be a descriptive tool, in contrast to the
concerns of traditionalliterary historians: "In their obsession with re-
solving questions of genetic ascendency, they forget that Darwin was
only possible after Linn."7
Propp's method was particularly suggestive for Brmond, who
was interested in understanding the conditions un der which it be-
comes possible to make generalizations, or rules. However, Brmond
adopted sorne of Lvi-Strauss's criticisms of 1962 and rejected Propp's
teleological hypotheses, which certainly aUowed him to create a more
perfect model, but the cost was high since he could not include aU of
the material of folktales. Reducing themes to their invariant function
necessarily limited his choices. Brmond preferred to differentiate the
levels of analysis in order to adopt a methodical approach to narra-
tion: on the one hand, the classificatory work, that of the comparative
study of different forms of narrativity, and, on the other hand, estab-
lishing a relationship not between forms but between "the narrative
stratum of a message and the other strata of meaning."8
Roland Barthes's "Les lments de smiologie" came out in this
same issue of Communications. This article translated a seminar he
had given in the Sixth Section of the EPHE and was directed toward
a wider audience of researchers. But it became a manifesto for the
new science. The theoretical presentation was also a framework for
Barthes's research since he was in the process of writing The Fashion
System.
9
Barthes was enjoying a veritable "methodological eupho-
ria"10 at the time and even abandoned his own writing in or der to
undertake research with scientific aspirations. Caught between his
writer's sensibilities and his aspirations as a semiologist, Barthes sup-
pressed the writer in himself more strenuously than at any other time.
"There are two phases in Roland Barthes. In the first, he believed in
the necessity and possibility of establishing a science of man. In the
same way that the natural sciences were forged in the nineteenth cen-
tury, couldn't the twentieth century be the century of the sciences of
man ?"ll
In its article form, what later became Elements of Semiology gave
a didactic presentation of Saussure's and Hjelmslev's teachings with
an eye toward constructing this new semiologie al science. Barthes used
Saussure's oppositions between language/speech, signifier/signifie d,
and syntagm/system, and remained strictly orthodox in his structural-
206 I964: The Semiological Breakthrough
ism in this regard. He described three distinct levels of structure (lan-
guage in Saussure's sense), norm (language as material form), and use
(language as a group of habits of a given society). It was thanks to
Hjelmslev that the idea of language, based on this trilogy, could be radi-
cally formalized and replace Saussure's language/speech dichotomy
with structure/use.
Of the linguistic revolution, Barthes retained the general concern
for constructing a new science, and reversed Saussure's vision of semi-
ology as the future of linguistics. He saw the semiological program as
a subset of linguistics
12
and called for all the research being done
across disciplines to clearly bear witness to the capacity of linguistics.
Semiology, the science of the future, appeared as the science par excel-
lence of society in that it signifies: "The sociological implications of
the language/speech concept are clear."13
However, Barthes did not see the first positive signs of the cre-
ation of semiology in sociology. While other disciplines were giving
clear signs of their interest, sociology remained recalcitrant toward
the notion of immanence. Barthes saw these signs in the history
practiced by the Annales under Fernand Braudel, who distinguished
between event/structure; in the anthropology of Lvi-Strauss, who
adopted the Saussurean postulate of the unconscious nature of lan-
guage; in the psychoanalysis of Lacan, "for whom desire itself is ar-
ticulated as a system of signification." 14 For Barthes, sociology defined
itself as a socio-Iogic in which meaning is the product of the process
that brings signifier together with signified whether it be in a Saus-
surean or a Hjelmslevian perspective.
Four disciplines played important roles in this semiology of the
future: "Today, economy, linguistics, ethnology, and history form a
quadrivium of pilot sciences."15 Semiology was to delineate its own
boundaries and limits and would be organized around the principle
of pertinence, which meant the field of signification of the objects
analyzed in themselves based on a situation of immanence. The cor-
pus would have to be homogeneous, therefore, and would, by defini-
tion, reject all other systems, whether psychological, sociological, or
whatever. This science would be ahistorical: "The corpus should
eliminate diachronie elements as much as possible; it should coincide
with a state of the system, a slice of history."16 And the instrument
used in this search for meaning was to be found primarily in conno-
tative linguistics, which adopted the Hjelmslevian opposition between
Jean-Paul S'Htre (photo }{of',cr-Vlollcr,
copyright Lipniuki,Violit'ti
Ccriw(,olloqulllll1, '055: "\Vhatls
phil'hoplw)" !rom Ictr to righrl J(ostas
AXl'I"c" i\Llrtin Heidegger, J\1rs, Heidegger
lcopnighr Archives de Pontigny-Cerisy)
Cerisy Colloquium, l '! Sh: "Thcory of History," From ldr to rigbt: Unknowll, Raymond Aron,
R, P. D:ll1ieiou, CLllldc km-Claude Michaud (':Op\'flght ArchiH's cLe Pontigny-Cerisy)
Roman Jakobson (photo Editions de ",lillllit)
Claude lvi-Strauss, 1963 (photo Magnum,
copyright Henri Cutier-Bresson)
Louis Hjelmslev (photo f:ditions de Minuit)
Georges Curvitch (photo Presses Universi-
taires de France)
Andr \ iartinet, ] 957 (photo Presses Uni-
ITrsiuircs de France)
Jean Piaget (copyright press and information service oi the University of Gcncva)
Jean Duvignaud (copyright Univers al Photo) Algirdas Julien Greimas (photo ditions du
Seuil)
Paul Ricoeur, 1961 (copyright Univers al Photo)
Michel Serres (photo ditions de Minuit) Pierre Bourdieu (photo ditions de Minuit)
Louis Althusser (photo D.R.)
The office of Tel Quel. From left to right: Jean-Loup Dabadie, Jean-Edern Hallier, Jean-Ren
Huguenin, Renaud Matignon, Jacques Coudol, Jean Thibaudeau, Philippe Sollers (photo
ditions du Seuil)
Jacques Lacan (photo ditions du Seuil) Edgar Morin (photo ditions du Seuil)
Roland Barthes (photo Magnum, copyright
Henri Cartier-Bresson)
Michel Foucault, 1963 (photo ditions Gal-
limard, copyright Andr Bonin)
Pierre Nora (photo ditions Gallimard,
copyright Jacques Robert)
Georges Balandier (photo Presses Universi-
taires de France)
Georges Dumzil (photo ditions Galli-
mard, copyright Jacques Sassier)
Cerisy Colloquium, I964: "Man and the Devi\." Maurice de Gandillac, Catherine Backs-
Clment (copyright Archives de Pontigny-Cerisy)
27
denotationlconnotation, and which Barthes had used ln
"My th Today."
In order to better consolidate this ambitious project of construct-
ing a semiological program, Barthes assembled the major part of the
articles he had written as chronicler between 1953 and 1963 in Criti-
cal Essays. The collection can be read as a semiology in gestation, ar-
ticulated by trial and error, a form of scientific bricolage that focused
more intensely th an ever before on the problem of the sign, influenced
by Jakobson's binary thinking and Trubetzkoy's analyses in terms of
differential positions. "Barthes's internaI revolution became apparent
at that point, between 1962 and 1963."17
Barthes Defines Structuralist Activity
Barthes defined his structuralism in this collection of articles as some-
thing that could not be limited to a school because this supposed a
nonexistent community of research and solidarity among authors.
How, then, could one define structuralism? "Structuralism is essen-
tially an activity .... The goal of all structuralist activity ... is to re-
constitute an object in such a way as to reveal the rules by which the
object functions. The structure is therefore, in fact, a simulacrum of
the object."18 There was thus a common goal of this activity, bringing
together the diversity of disciplines engaged in the search for struc-
tural man, beyond the singularity of each researcher. Structural man
was a producer of meaning, and the method used would essentially
address the act of producing meaning more th an the content of mean-
ing. Structuralism was "an activity of imitation,"19 a mime sis based
on an analogy not of substance but of function. Barthes invoked a
number of precursors, including Claude Lvi-Strauss, Nicolai Trubet-
zkoy, Georges Dumzil, Vladimir Propp, Gilles Gaston-Granger, Jean-
Claude Gardin, and Jean-Pierre Richard. In addition, it was now pos-
sible to move beyond the distinction between artistic and literary
work and scientific work. In this respect, Barthes placed this activity
that uses linguistics to construct a science of structure on the same
level as the one that created Butor's writing, Boulez's music, or Mon-
drian's painting; all belong to the same simulacrum of the object that
semiology examines.
Barthes's approach was very Saussurean. Structura li sm was not a
simple reproduction of the world per se, but generated new categories
that are irreducible to either reality or rationality. Structuralist activity
208 1964: The Semiological Breakthrough
referred to function, to an examination of the conditions of thought,
of that which makes meaning possible, and not its specifie content.
And in its effort to uproot natural and immutable meaning from its
ideological base, the structuralist program embodied a radical critique
of the dominant ideology, which presented itself as something natural
and immutable.
A semiologist was charged not with deciphering sorne underlying
meaning already present in a work, but with accounting for the con-
straints imposed on its sense-making operations and the conditions of
its validity. Deconstructing ideology and established meaning by at-
tacking their monolithic status in order to pluralize them were so
many forms of a radical historicism that is systematized in Michel
Foucault's work, together with an ahistoricism characteristic of the
synchronie position. Structuralism was much more than a school, in
Barthes's view; it marked a true shift in the evolution of conscious-
ness. "Structuralism can be historically defined as the passage from a
symbolic consciousness to a paradigmatic consciousness,"20 which
becomes apparent in a comparative approach, not on the basis of
meanings defined by their substance, but on the basis of their forms.
For Barthes, phonology was the science par excellence of this para-
digmatic consciousness, the model of models. "It is [phonology]
that, throughout Claude Lvi-Strauss's work, defines the structuralist
threshold. "21
A Critical Vocation
This change in the sixties cannot be reduced simply to a shift among
the disciplines in the social sciences; it was also the expression of a pe-
riod during which the intellectual, that is to say, the writer, could no
longer argue from a critical perspective or revoit in the same way as
during the immediate postwar period. The issue was no longer to sub-
vert the entire social order. Henceforth, revoIt "is really the whole, the
stuff of all our truths, 1 mean what we might calI Western civiliza-
tion."22 Barthes's critique, like that of all the structuralists, worked on
destabilizing dominant Western values, on making a radical critique
of petit-bourgeois ideology, of opinion, and of the doxa. This para-
digmatic consciousness or consciousness of paradox, which tried to
shake the doxa, had to evaluate and dismantle from within logics and
models, modes of being, and modes of appearance of ideological con-
structions. Its object was the superego of dominant rationality and its
I964: The Semiological 209
connotations, which required a thorough understanding of how lan-
guage functions.
The angle of attack seemed more effective than simply rejecting
past values in the na me of avant-garde literary princip les destined to
be very quickly assimilated into the system in place: "Any avant-garde
is quite easily and quite quickly co-opted. Particularly in literature. "23
The consumer society that spread du ring the fifties had such a capac-
ity for rotating goods that it embraced cultural goods as weIl; never
was the move from an avant-garde-that is to say a radical break-to
a commercial object so swift. Assimilation provided the mechanism of
seH-regulation in this culture and "the windows at Herms and the
Galeries Lafayette are surreaI."24
It became increasingly difficult, and virtuaIly illusory, to escape
the web of the technical society and the culture of mass consumption
in order to express a cry, a revolt, or a refusaI. Doubtless this was one
of the reasons that semiology, as a discourse with scientific and critical
aspirations, became something of a refuge, and which, for want of
being a Rimbaud, a Bataille, or an Artaud, made it possible to disman-
de the mechanism of domination from an irrecuperable position of
extraterritoriality in the name of scientific positivity. Subverting lan-
guage necessarily meant using language itseH and constituted the first
step in breaking down the barriers between literary genres: the novel,
poetry, criticism. AlI these forms of expression are textual and there-
fore from the same analytic grid of paradigmatic consciousness: "1 be-
lieve that now we are beginning a revoIt that is more profound th an
prior revolts because, perhaps for the first time, this one affects the
very instrument of revolt, which is language. "25 ln this sense Barthes
saw himself as participating in the writer's enterprise with other
means. The obvious tension in him between the writer and the semi-
ologist never completely killed his literary aspirations, even when he
examined such diverse objects as cuisine or fashion and its language,
the technical language of linguistics. In 1964, his program elicited
ever-growing enthusiasm. Semiology appeared to be the modern means
of literary creation in the second haH of the twentieth century.
Twenty-four
The Golden Age of FormaI Thinking
Closest to the hard sciences and to mathematical language, semiotic
structuralism was the most formalized branch of structuralism. It was
also the most ambitious. As Aigirdas Julien Greimas, the program's
first promoter, understood it, semiotic structuralism was not just a
simple offshoot of linguistics, but sought to encompass aU of the sci-
ences of man. "From the beginning, 1 have always intended that semi-
otics go beyond linguistics, which is only one part of it."l Greimas
remained faithful to Saussure's vision in this, believing that he could
unify anthropology, semantics, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism
under a single banner.
For those linguists who gave courses at the Institut Poincar at the
Facult des Sciences de Paris, proximity to mathematicians and logi-
cians was institutional. Antoine Culioli gave a seminar on formaI lin-
guistics beginning in I963. Greimas taught there, as did Bernard Pot-
tier, Jean Dubois, and Maurice Gross. Greimas's seminar focused on
semantics, which until then had been considered to be extraneous to
traditionallinguistics.
This was where, little by little Nicolas Ruwet, Oswald Ducrot, Mar-
cel Cohen, and then Tzvetan Todorov came together. There was also
an important person named Lucien Sebag, who died, unfortunately,
during the summer when we had thought of giving a seminar to-
gether. We wanted to establish a link between anthropology, seman-
tics, and psychoanalysis. Sebag committed suicide and 1 have never
forgiven Lacan for that.
2
2IO
The Golden Age of Formai Thinking 2IT
Greimas's Structural Semantics came out in 1966, the year of
the structuralist hits. It grew out of the seminar that he had given at
the Institut Poincar from 1963 to I964 and emphasized a general
semiotics embracing aH signifying systems. This finally resulted in a
certain receptivity of linguistic research to quite different fields. The
futile dialogue in which the two masters of French linguistics, Greimas
and Martinet, were engaged quite clearly indicated their differences.
"1 get lost when 1 read Greimas. Semiology likewise goes in all direc-
tions at once."3 Martinet wanted to limit himself to describing how
language functions and he set clear boundaries on linguistic research.
Greimas responded: "Martinet is a big peasant who knows his own
field well. When someone wanted to study music or painting, 1 sent
them to Martinet, who told them, 'Study phonetics and come back in
a year.' A fairly unappetizing prospect!"4
The Roland Barthes of Elements of Semiology very clearly
adopted Greimas's view of general semiotics, even if he was institu-
tionally ahead of his Alexandrian master in the Sixth Section of the
EPHE, ta which he had Greimas elected in I965, with Lvi-Strauss's
help. Once Greimas became a directeur d'tudes and after Smantique
structurale came out, semiotics began to gain institution al support in
France, thanks once again to Lvi-Strauss, whose work sketching out
the structura li st program was more advanced and who was also al-
ready better ensconced, with contacts in high places.
ln 1966, a research group took shape around Greimas as the
semio-linguistic section of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology of
the EPHE and Collge de France, which is to say, around Lvi-Strauss
and his team of anthropologists. Oswald Ducrot, Grard Genette,
Tzvetan Todorov, Julia Kristeva, Christian Metz, Jean-Claude Co-
quet, Yves Gentilhomme were all involved.
s
ln addition to research,
there was sorne very high-powered semiotic teaching, based on gen-
erallinguistics, mathematics, logic, grammar, and semantics.
Structural Semantics: Greimasism
Structural semantics "was always the poor cousin of linguistics,"6 if
we look at how many hurdles it had to overcome before its specifie
object and methods were established, and the fact that it only came on
the scene at the end of the nineteenth century. To overcome these
handicaps, Greimas anchored semantics on the most rock-solid for-
maI grounds possible, which were those of logic and mathematics,
2 l 2 The Golden Age of FormaI Thinking
"which linguistics cannot ignore."7 He adopted the model of Saus-
sure's most formalist heir, Hjelmslev; "Claude Lvi-Strauss said that
before he began writing, he always read three pages of Marx's Eigh-
teenth Brumaire. 1 used to read a few pages by Hjelmslev."8
Greimas adopted the mathematical notion of discontinuity, and
contrasted two different analytic levels: the object of the study, lan-
guage, and the linguistic instruments that constitute a metalinguistics.
From a Hjelmslevian point of view, everything takes place in two
metalanguages: the one descriptive, with meanings formulated in lan-
guage, and the other methodical. This approach implied two new
instruments or denominations with respect to Saussure's definitions.
Greimas differentiated signifying phemes from the semes of the sig-
nified, considering them to belong to different levels. He also re-
examined the signifier/signified unit split into two heterogeneous lev-
els. "Once the communication has occurred, the junction between
signified and signifier is destined to be dissolved if the analysis of one
or the other levels of language is to proceed even a little bit."9 The
seme becomes the minimal distinctive unit making the construction of
lexemes, paralexemes, syntagms, or other elements possible.
Another concept that Greimas borrowed from logic, isotopia, re-
veals how entire texts belong to homogeneous semantic levels that can
be interpreted as structural realities that become visible in language.
"These techniques are comparable, for the social sciences, to algebraic
formulation in the natural sciences."10 This model seemed to offer the
possibility of allowing the social sciences to acquire the same degree of
scientificity as the hard sciences. But this meant that structural seman-
tics needed to dissociate itself from any humanist perspective and
replace intuition with verification. A speaker's intentionality fell by
the wayside, dissolved within a subjectless hierarchy of contextual
interwea vings.
The other implication of structural semantics, which had already
been apparent in Saussure but which Greimas made quite clear, was
its nonhistoricism. Structural semantics sought to extract an atempo-
raI and organizational structural reality from the real, whatever the
contextual framework or signified content might be: "We can reason-
ably suppose that the achronic organization of contents that we en-
counter in areas quite unrelated to each other should have a general
scope. Because this model is uninterested in contents ... we must con-
sider it to be metalinguistic."l1 Greimas hopedto move beyond the
The Golden Age of Forma! 2
contingency the events in human in order ta write a struc-
tural history purged of aU traces of empiricism. During the structural-
ist phase, his was the most scientistic semiotic project for it went fur-
the st in its desire for scientificity made manifest by the onmipresent
mathematical terminology-"procedural algorithm," "rules for estab-
lishing equivalences," "conversion rules"-and its function was to be
a model of rigor.
We find this logical and scientific approach in Lvi-Strauss and in
Lacan, whose two projects most closely approximated scientific struc-
turalism. The recurrent structuralist notion of rupture lay at the heart
of semiotics since it established the division between two structures
belonging to two different realities, but "how can we go from an im-
manent theory of language to an immanent the ory of meaning in gen-
eral? How, in other words, can we infer the binarism of meaning from
the binarism of signs?"12
Claude Brmond proposed an answer to these fundamental ques-
tions,!3 He differentiated between two stages of analysis in Greimas's
reading of Propp: the first was inductive based on the model of Mor-
phology of the Folktale: "Greimas considered the sequence of func-
tions outlined by Propp in order to discern-and his idea has sorne
merit -a better-structured system of basic oppositions." 14 Greimas
contributed a certain number of useful tools, by distinguishing, for
example, between the actors and actants among Propp's characters on
the basis of their operationallevel. This let him build a mythical ac-
tantial model with six terms, which was more effective than Propp's
seven characters.
But Greimas did not stop there. He quickly went on to a second
stage of deductive abstraction where he argued for the a priori exis-
tence of a transcendent princip le that would make it possible to go
step by step from this principle to its concrete, textual manifestations.
There were two basic ideas here: the semiotic square, which was
Greimas's basic unit of meaning, and the ide a of a semiotic generation
of meaningful objects. Brmond saw the square as "completely ster-
ile," more a "mystical ide a th an a transcendent principle,"15 and
nothing justified its extrapolation from Propp's model, which would
be the model of models for any text in general, but especially for every
possible written and unwritten text. "Ultimately, this simple postulate
is like the head of a pin on which the diversity of the entire uni verse is
made to rest. "16
2 r 4 The Golden Age of Forma!
The semiotic square, a the Aristotelian square of op-
posites and oppositions, became an explanatory matrix for an inde fi-
ni te number of narrative structures. "This is the most flagrant case of
an irrefutable theory, as Popper explains it."17 The semiotic square
usually imposed an initial structure on a narrative, whether filmic or
textual, letting it land on its feet since anything could be put in the
four corners of the square without any verification whatsoever. "The
use of the semiotic square has always shocked me a bit. 1 think it is
justified at the end of an analysis, but surely not at the beginning."18
With the semiotic square, the empirical world and the referent could
be kept at bay so that the kernel of intelligibility, the principal and
invisible key of aH signified reality, could be discerned. Meaning was
therefore directly derived from a structure that was immanent to it.
Paradoxically, the semiotic program that united Propp, Lvi-
Strauss's analysis of myths, and Hjelmslev's Prolegomenas, and that
presented itself as the most comprehensive semiotic program, disap-
pointed its promises. Greimasism quickly seemed to bec orne hermeti-
cally locked in an increasingly confidential abstraction. The orthodox
believers rapidly dwindled in number as Greimas's theories mobilized
the most sophisticated, meticulously logical strategy that produced very
disappointing and often tautological conclusions. "1 remember that,
as part of the jury, 1 presented the summary of a very thick thesis by a
very weIl known student of Greimas, on marriage. The conclusion
was that marri age is a binary structure. This is true, in a certain way,
but is this a conclusion that requires a thousand pages of analysis?"19
If Greimasism did not have a particularly brilliant destiny, Greimas
himself remained one of the major sources of hope for the structuralist
enthusiasts of the sixties. For Jean-Claude Coquet, who had met
Greimas at the University of Poitiers where they taught together dur-
ing his last year there, "Smantique structurale was an absolutely bril-
liant book, full of ideas, one of the major works of the period. "20
When Greimas left Poitiers, he also left a student who was work-
ing on a diplme d'tudes suprieures ta Jean-Claude Coquet. Franois
Rastier was very close ta Greimas, who considered him ta be his spiri-
tual son. "Rastier informed me about structural semantics. That was
how 1 came ta know Greimas and 1 was fascinated by his intellectuai
dexterity and the force of his convictions."21 The kind of linguistics
most often practiced at the time eliminated the subject and history.
Given this, Greimas seemed ta be the ma st radical, and therefore the
The Golden Age of Formai Thinking 2 Il
most his success sidelined mile Benveniste's approach
to structural linguistics. Hjelmslev's mode!, which Greimas adopted,
was in fact based on the production of a text baptized "normalized,"
or "objectivized." In order to arrive at this pure, scientific object,
Greimas eliminated aIl dialogic signs or forms referring to a subject
(first and second person pronouns, for example), which meant that he
was left with third person canonical enunciations. And for the sake of
a uniform present, he also normalized texts by e!iminating all refer-
ence to time. The criterion for dissociating anteriority and posteriority
became the vague reference to a distant past: "Whence Greimas's in-
terest in folktales and mythic narratives, which were easier to work
on. "22 But there was a steep price for the quadruple negation of the
first pers on pronoun, of the subject, of intersubjective dialogue, and of
the here and now with respect to space and time, and Greimas's the-
ory rather quickly ran onto the shoals of an impoverished narrative
reality, in favor of an ontologized structure.
Would semiotics be able to create such a unifying pro gram for the
social sciences? Its scientific imperialism was certain but its cohabita-
tion with structural anthropology in a single institutionallaboratory
was short-lived.
Barthes the Semiotician
Greimas had a disciple between 1960 and 1964 who already enjoyed
significant notoriety: Roland Barthes. This was the period when
Barthes repressed his vocatiolll as a writer and used Greimas's theory
in order to better approximate a rigorous and scientific discourse. But
Barthes was an essentially intuitive thinker, and he needed to rational-
ize his feelings; Greimas was the person who seemed to go farthest in
this direction. "You can't understand anything about Barthes if you
don't understand that even when his thinking appears most abstract,
he is really just covering up his affective choices. "23 Saussure's binary
mode! fit Barthes like a glove since he thought in dichotomies, and al-
ways set a valorized term against a devalorized term: the good and the
bad; someone who is attractive and someone who is not; the crivain
and the crivant; taste and distaste, and so on. But if Barthes would
later give free rein to his feelings, they remained underground in the
early sixties when he was articulating the principles of a semiologie al
pro gram that were consonant with Greimas's theses.
We can also understand Barthes's phase of theorizing and sei en-
ZI6 The Golden Age of Formai Thinking
tism in terms of a desire for university respectability. Even if he suc-
ceeded quite quickly and brilliantly, he never joined the ranks with the
traditional diplomas. His quest for recognition generated a veritable
work ethic in him, and behind the dilettante that the specialists saw
was a deeply ascetic man devoted to work. "He was basically the op-
posite of a bohemian and led a typically petit-bourgeois life; he had an
absolute need not to be upset by unexpected events. "24 At the begin-
ning of the sixties, then, Barthes worked on the topie he would have
wanted to have worked on as a thse d'tat had he continued his uni-
versity work: fashion. He had tried to find a thesis director and, ac-
companied by Greimas, visited Andr Martinet: "1 almost directed
The Fashion System as a thesis. 1 gave him my O.K., aIl the while say-
ing that this was not linguistics. "25 Given Martinet's relatively un-
enthusiastic response, Barthes went to see Lvi-Strauss to ask him to
direct his thesis. Greimas again went with him, and waited like an
anxious father in a nearby bistro to hear how things had gone.
"Barthes came out after half an hour saying that Lvi-Strauss had re-
fused. "26 Their disagreement had to do with the limited breadth of the
project since, for Lvi-Strauss, Barthes's work only dealt with a writ-
ten system of style and not with a general system. Barthes, on the
other hand, believed that nothing significant existed beyond the realm
of the written. Barthes's hopes of university recognition were dashed,
but in 1967, Seuil published the book, the labor of six years from
1957 to 1963. Because it was like a thesis for him, even if it did not
have that tag, this book was partieularI, meaningful for Barthes. His
spiritual father confided that "we looked at his book together three
times and reworked it each time. "27
So this was both theoretically and affectively the expression of a
significant period in his relationship with Greimas. The Fashion Sys-
tem bears the marks of this relationship and appeared from the outset
as a methodical work set on examining spoken-rather than worn-
clothes, which was the basis for the divergence with Lvi-Strauss.
Barthes essentially worked on the style system as a metalanguage, in
Hjelmslevian terms. The transition from real to written clothing, by
way of the clothing-image, was made with the use of shifters, an idea
Barthes took from Jakobson. Shifters "are used to transpose one
structure into another, to go from one code to another code, if you
will."28 But Barthes used the idea in a very partieular way since he was
not referring to a specific message. He also designated three shifters
The Golden Age of Formai Thinking 2I 7
for moving from one code ta another: the principal shifter was the
"sewing pattern," the second the "sewing program," and the third is
the one that "makes it possible to go from the iconic structure to the
spoken structure, from a representation of a piece of clothing to its
description. "29
Formalist assumptions of normalizing the functional uses of lan-
guage led Barthes to give priority to the written piece of clothing be-
cause it was the only one that could give rise to an immanent study
free of any practical function: "For these reasons, 1 have decided to
examine the verbal structure here. "30 He defined his objects, consist-
ing of newspapers from 1958 to 1959, and exhaustively sifted through
Elle and Le Jardin des modes. A strictly orthodox Saussurean, Barthes
reproduced the language/speech duo by opposing the clothing-image,
located on the speech si de and therefore inappropriate for scientific
consideration, and the clothing-text, which is on the language side
and therefore an object eligible for scientific inquiry.
Barthes anchored his analysis in the opposition developed by
Hjelmslev: "The problem raised by the coincidence of two semantic
systems in a single enunciation was dealt with primarily by Hjelm-
slev."31 He adopted the separation between the expressive level (E)
and the level of contents (C), brought together by the relation (R); this
gives ri se to a multilevel analysis of denotation and connotation, of
the language-object and of the metalanguage. Fashion was thus caught
up in a process of formalization and therefore of desubstantification,
giving Barthes access to the essence of fashion, which appears as a sys-
tem of signifiers, a classificatory activity cut off from the signified.
"Fashion therefore immediately proceeds to a sort of sacralization of
the sign: the signified is separated from its signifier." 32 F ashion func-
tioned on the basis of a double postula te. Because it was, on the one
hand, a naturalist system, it could be interpreted as a logical system.
The popular press practiced a naturalized fashion with an infinite
number of fragmented references to a dream world and its utilization,
whereas a more "distinguished" press practiced fashion in apurer
manner, freed from all ideological underpinnings. At the end of his
long study, Barthes made it manifestly clear that the full signified rep-
resented the signifier of alienation, and he thereby drew sociological
conclusions without falling prey to sociological reductionism. The
fashion system translated a semiology characterized by its elaboration
2 r 8 The Golden Age of Formai Thinking
of a taxonomy. The novelty, however, was that this taxonomy was
made in order ta dissolve the subject in language.
Jean-Franois Revel took the work ironically, and used a syllo-
gism to illustrate its thesis: a rat nibbles the cheese but the rat is a syl-
lable and therefore the syllable nibbles the cheese. "A structuralist rat,
nothing impossible about that, of course. But if the rat writes, can he
still eat chee se ? It is up to the sociologists to tell us." 33 However, the
book was weIl received in general. Raymond Bellour interviewed
Barthes in Les Lettres franaises,34 and Julia Kristeva saw the book as
a step toward demystifying the science of the sign: "Barthes's work
subverts the main current of modern science: thinking the sign. "35
Kristeva applauded Barthes for his radical interrogation of all
metaphysics of depths, and for separating signifier and signified in
favor of the relationship between signifiers, which was in fact part of
Lacan's reading of Saussure when he invoked the signifying chain.
Thanks to The Fashion System, an entire generation could imagine
that it was possible to undertake similar investigations in other par-
ticularly vast fields. If Barthes was able to isolate the vestemes in
written/described fashion, why not flush out the gustemes and other
distinctive units at allieveis of social practice?
In 1967, the response to Barthes's work was spectacular and a
veritable collective fervor took hold of his semiological program. But
Barthes soon distanced himself from his own pronouncements and
ambitions and, leaving Greimas to occupy center semiotic stage, re-
turned to his vocation as a writer, which for him was the goal of a
structuralism that would have been meaningless had it not subverted
scientific language from within. "Structuralism's logical continuation
can only be to rejoin literature not as an object of analysis, but as an
activity of writing .... It is therefore up to the structuralist to trans-
form himself into a writer."36 The need to write as the result of
Barthes's methodological exigency in 1967 presupposed another re-
naissance, which came to be the very principle of his writing: the plea-
sure principle.
In an interview with Georges Charbonnier in 1967, Barthes an-
swered a question about the book of the year. Would it be a mathe-
matical work, given that the public relished formaI thinking to the
point that the social sciences would quickly consume themselves?
"The final phase is that they question their own language and become,
in their turn, writing." 37 Although Barthes did not renounce this liber-
1
The Golden Age of Formal Thinking 2I9
ating aspect of generalized formalization-the triumphant relegation
of aH referents to the dustbin of insignificance, the intersection of
work and fate in a Mallarman Hne between writing and formaliza-
tion-he nonetheless admitted that "literary writing maintains a sort
of referential illusion that makes it delicious." 38 By his taste for writ-
ing as a figure of the other's desire, an erotics of language based not on
reality but on the illusion of the referent, we see that Barthes's writing
in I967 was already setting the stage for a radical change that would
become apparent in the Barthes of post-May I968.
An Ideology of Rigor
Hjelmslev inspired the semiotic program in France, but other influ-
ences were also at play during the golden age of formaI thinking.
There was, for example, a spectacularly successful mathematical epis-
temology in France, known for the mathematician Bourbaki. Bour-
baki's mathematical structure, however, appeared as an antididactic
form occulting the origin in the historical and empirical sense of math-
ematical knowledge. "The logic of its presentation and the context of
the justification are far more important than the context in which the
disco very was made or in which the investigation took place. The
entire empirical and tentative aspect of mathematics is systematically
eliminated in favor of a purely formalist presentation. "39 This new ap-
proach even gave rise to an important teaching reform at the begin-
ning of the sixties, called new math; but it was a dis aster and even its
author repudiated it.
The Bourbaki ideology certainly contributed toward a structural-
ist mentality and activity, which Pierre Raymond called an ideology of
rigor. Bourbakism made it clear that the splendors of the mathemati-
cal edifice were such that even those who might be able to appreciate
them were held at arm's length: "Where the links, the concatenation,
the imbedding of propositions are given as a sort of subjectless, objec-
tive necessity whose internaI weaving is to be analyzed without under-
standing the properly historical process of mathematical discovery. "40
The French found this model particularly fascinating, showing how
much Louis Hjelmslev, the major linguistic inspiration for the semiotic
school in Paris, valorized mathematics as a science. Semiotics was
therefore complicitous with Bourbakism in its search for the codes
and messages exchanged around points of emission, and in its concern
to constantly extend the formalization of communication phenomena.
220 The Golden Age of Formai Thinking
The other model in this are a from which structuralism drew its
concepts and methods was cybernetics. Cybernetics became increas-
ingly productive in the era of mass communication and cast an aura
around the structuralist program. Cybernetics offered a potential
bridge between math and the social sciences, and provided a frame-
work for sorne especially wide-ranging investigations. It was a true
interdisciplinary crossroad that addressed notions from algebra, logic,
and information theory and game theory.
A certain osmosis existed, therefore, between a desire for formal-
ization that found the very expression of a split from the referent in
mathematical language, and formalist research in the visual arts,
music, literature, and architecture, coming from the East. "It was a
period when Lacan and Chomsky sold as well as the popular mystery
stories written by San Antonio. 1 remember that 1 was living in
Puteaux and 1 would go buy my books at the drugstore on the Neuilly
bridge. That's where 1 bought Desanti's Mathematical Idealities
41
and
Lacan's crits. "42
These formaI models proposed that all boundaries between mathe-
matical, logical formalization and the social sciences be effaced. Jean
Piaget offered a particularly good example of a will to place psychol-
ogy in a continuum using mathematics. With this end in mind, Piaget
established a circular diagram of scientific knowledge that ended with
a single and interdependent idea of the different sciences. Such a circle
made it possible to link mathematics, physics, biology, and psychol-
ogy.43 The semioticians were utterly fascinated by logical formaliza-
tion, which they adapted to language. The temptation to borrow in
this way was strengthened because computer programs were address-
ing problems having to do with language, and logicians had the ad-
vantage of having come up with almost perfect formalizations in their
thinking about linguistic operations. "The temptation was therefore
quite strong to try to adapt these logical formalizations to language,
but 1 think that it was a sort of capitulation. "44
Although he never denied that formalization and model making
were necessary, Oswald Ducrot held that a properly linguistic concep-
tualization should be the starting point, but that it should not, for
example, be limited to differentiating true from false. If there is a ten-
dency in language to construct true propositions and to link them
through the reasoning process, other dimensions of language must
also be taken into account and that logicians tend to ignore. "A re-
The Golden .Age of Formai 222
that Antoine about this a big influence on me.
One day, he said, 'truth-I don't know what that iS."'45
Lacan: A Bend in the Road toward Logic
In 1965, logic took up where the Saussurean linguistic modelleft off
via another discipline, psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan's text, "La sci-
ence et la vrit" showed how much the cole Normale Suprieure
and Jacques-Alain Miller had determined the direction in which
things would go. Beginning with Gottlob Frege, Miller wanted to un-
coyer the concept of structural causality that Althusser emphasized in
his reading of Marx, as a basis for applying Lacan's notion of suture.
Frege, in his Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), had established mod-
ern symbolic logic by criticizing the empirical method. Symbolic lan-
guage should be dissociated from aH reference to any conscious sub-
iect. "Logic is that which is conceived or constructed outside any
intuition; logic is that which is general to the point of belonging to
every language such that no language could be conceived without
it. "46 We can easily understand Lacan's interest in the work of a logi-
cian who excluded the psychological subiect, even if Frege, who initi-
ated a philosophy of language, was more appreciated by the Anglo-
Saxons th an by the French.
According to lisabeth Roudinesco, when Jacques-Alain Miller
articulated Frege's concept of the zero and that of its successors with
Lacan's theory of the signifier, he recast Lacanian thinking. The conse-
quences were political and theoretical: "Theoretically, Lacanian think-
ing becomes the model par excellence of the capacity of Freudian
thinking to elude the ide aIs of psychology. Politically speaking, this re-
casting makes it possible to designate adversaries who are considered
to be deviants with respect to a doctrine that represents scientific nor-
malization in its aH-powerful singularity. "47 After having used the rise
of the social sciences to decenter the subiect with Saussurean linguis-
tics, Lacan radicalized his reading of Freud even further in order to
avoid becoming the agent of constructing the social sciences, with the
attendant risk of reestablishing a humanism of an unalienated subiect.
In Kurt G6del's logic, a theorem of incompleteness makes it possi-
ble to perceive the idea of truth as eluding complete formalization.
"He infers that the experience of the Cartesian doubt marks the sub-
iect with a split between knowledge and truth."48 This turning point
heralded the transition from a me-theme to a matheme, and is at the
222 The Golden Age of FormaI Thinking
origin of many topological manipulations. For some, this formaliza-
tion had less to do with clinical psychoanalysis than with its transmis-
sion, and was more a didactic concern for rigor and method: "It is
clear that Lacan does not use these objects as mathematical objects.
They have a purely metaphorical status. "49 For others, the topological
turning point was much more important because it made it possible
for Lacan to better grasp the structure of the subject: "For him, the
subject's structure is topological; he said so." 50
This structure, which had for centuries been represented as com-
plete by the figure of the sphere, in fact better approximates the aspher-
ical and incompleteness. This view of the subject gave rise to the mul-
tiple topological manipulations designed to turn the sphere around in
order to finally reach the subject's true structure as fundamentally
split within the topology of knots.
Notwithstanding their differences, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Aigirdas
Julien Greimas, and Jacques Lacan were the most scientific of the
structuralists in the mid-sixties, the most radically turned toward the
search for a deep, occult structure, whether the metaphor be Lvi-
Strauss's enceintes mentales as the structure of structures, Greimas's
semiotic square, or the aspherical structure of Lacan's subject. These
were the three crowning points of formaI thinking, aIl part of the same
adventure seeking to establish the social sciences on the same footing
as the natural sciences within the city of science.
Twenty-five
Great Confrontations
Barthes/Picard
A Homeric combat that best reveals the issues of the period was
waged between Roland Barthes and Raymond Picard. This was an im-
portant joust, with the new criticism contesting the old Sorbonne. The
pivotaI figure was that classic of classics, Racine, who had become an
object of contention and scandaI.
Would the venerable Sorbonne aUow itself to be dispossessed of
its patrimony in that realm of predilection known as tragedy by those
very individuals who could not distinguish between journalistic scrib-
bling and national literary treasures? Surely such provocation could
not go ignored for francit was outraged. The confrontation occurred
in the mid-sixties between two protagonists with different institu-
tional ties and statures. Raymond Picard belonged to the venerable
Sorbonne and Roland Barthes raised his voice from a modern but
marginal institution. The stage was set and aU the elements assembled
for the duel, which was cast like sorne great Racinian tragedy of the
twentieth century. The important combat deepened the differences be-
tween the two camps. Literary history was no longer the same after
this, caught in the vise of two languages, each a stranger to the other.
The French Book Club published Roland Barthes's Racinian Man
in 1960 and an article on Racine came out in the Annales that sum-
mer.! Three years later, Seuil published both pieces as On Racine, to-
gether with a third piece on the same topic, and it was only then that
223
224 Great Confrontations
they received public acclaim. The Sorbonne could accept the fact that
the new criticism addressed the new novel, but that it sought to appro-
priate the representative of classicism and of tradition in order to ex-
periment with the incendiary effects of its analytic grid, its mixture of
linguistic methods, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, bordered on
scandaI. "If you want to do literary history, you cannot touch the indi-
vi dual Racine."2
That Barthes published his article in the Annales already gave a
clear idea of how he aligned himself in his approach to literary history,
appealing to Lucien Febvre against the tenets of literary positivism.
He adopted Febvre's combat against historicizing history, against the
domination of events, in order to de fend the necessary dissociation be-
tween the history of the literary function and the history of writers of
literature. To do so, Barthes raised the same problems that Febvre had
sketched out when he expressed the desire to study a writer's context,
his ties with his public and, more generally, the elements of a collective
mentalit, what Febvre called the mental equipment of a period. "In
other words, literary history is only possible if it is sociological, and if
it is interested in activities and institutions, and not in individuals."3
Barthes adopted the Annales ide a about an active criticism that
does more than assemble and collect documents and archives, asking
questions and subjecting the material to new hypotheses. Just as his-
tory, for Febvre, was a history problem, Barthes held that a literary
critic had to be paradoxical and raise contemporary questions when
addressing any literary work, thereby participating in its undefined
impact. Barthes read Racine analytically and structurally, therefore,
and no longer saw the author as a cult figure, but rather as a field of
investigation for validating new methods.
The structure of Racinian man was Barthes's object and it was re-
vealed through Barthes's careful and attentive dialectic of space, and
particularly through a logic of places. The interior spaces of the bed-
room, that mythic retreat separated from the antechamber-the scenic
site of communication-by a tragic object (the door), the object of
transgression, were contrasted with the exterior spaces of death, flight,
and events. "In short, in Racinian topography, everything converges
on the tragic site, but everything gets mired in it."4
Based on this topo-Iogic, tragic unity took shape not so much in
the individual singularity of Racine's characters as in the function
defining the hero as enclosed. "He who cannot go out without dying:
Great Confrontations 225
his limits are his privilege, his captivity is his distinction. "5 This func-
tional, binary opposition separating interior and exterior also made it
possible to distinguish between Eros and the Eros event. Eros was a
peaceful and sororal love rooted in childhood, whereas the Eros event
was sudden, expressing itself violently and without warning, pro duc-
ing ravishing effects that provoke a tragic alienation, which, accord-
ing to Barthes, was Racine's true subject. "Racinian disorder is essen-
tially a sign, which is to say, a signal and a communication."6
A whole dialectic of the logic of places unfolded in this mythic
combat of shadows and light in terms of contiguity and hierarchy. The
Racinian hero was driven by the need to prove his ability to make a
break; his heroism depended on his capacity to do so. His own infi-
delity created the hero who, like a creature of God, appeared locked in
an inexpiable batde between the Father and his son. Barthes quite con-
vincingly demonstrated that Racine substituted the word for praxis,
for the offstage event; verbal communication became the source of dis-
organization, the very site on which the tragedy unfolded and con-
sumed itself. "The fundamental reality of the tragedy is therefore this
word-action. Its function is clear: to mediate the Power Relationship. "7
Barthes used Jakobson's binarism as much as Freudian categories,
together with a structural synchronic approach, and the Sorbonne's
most erudite Racine scholar had a particularly violent reaction to all
of this. Raymond Picard, author of The Career of Jean Racine, editor
of the Pliade's publication of the complete works of Racine, and
great Racine specialist, published his answer in 1965 in the evocatively
entided work, New Criticism or New Imposture? Picard focused espe-
cially on Barthes's excessive use of psychoanalytic decoding for under-
standing Racine's theater and quickly lowered a chaste veil over the
heroes whose secret and frustrated sexual passions had been revealed:
"We must reread Racine in order to recall that his characters are, after
all, quite different from those of D. H. Lawrence .... Barthes has
decided to discover an unbridled sexuality."
8
Picard sliced through
Barthes's systematization, denounced his avowed inability to speak
the Truth about Racine, and therefore refused him the right to say
anything whatsoever about an author about whom he had no exper-
tise. For Picard, Barthes was "the instrument of a criticism that oper-
ates by instinct,"9 that uses a pseudoscientific jargon to make inept
and absurd assertions in the name of biological, psychoanalytic, and
philosophical knowledge. Picard denounced the tendency toward gen-
226 Great Confrontations
eralization, toward taking a single, concrete example for a category of
universals in a critical game that confuses everything. For Picard, the
mixture of impressionism and dogmatism set to a modernist rhythm
of indetermination "makes it possible to say absolutely any stupid
thing."lO
Picard was not personally attacked by Barthes's study, but he
counterattacked nonetheless, as self-appointed spokesman for the Sor-
bonne. The institution was irritated by this structuralist agitation and
wanted to see Barthes, who had become an idol, pilloried before being
rejected. The violence of the polemic against him rather surprised
Barthes: "1 was not expecting such an attack from Picard. 1 never at-
tacked university criticism, 1 simply set it apart, named it."l1 For
Barthes, the assault was provoked by the issue of university exams in
literature. New criticism was dangerous because it questioned the ab-
solute, intangible nature of the criteria used to establish a comfortable
canon of knowledge, which was so certain of its values and methods.
He saw the attack against his book as a defense of verifiable knowl-
edge measured in terms of eternal truths.
A whole generation of structuralists sided with Barthes, of course,
and wholeheartedly embraced his cause against the aged Sorbonne.
On the human level, we were always on Barthes's side. Today, 1
would not say that Picard was entirely wrong intellectually, but he
was entirely wrong when it came ta his aggressivity. Barthes and
Greimas were not agrgs and they could not enter the university.
Barthes's thesis had been refused. As for the linguists, they had no
career options and many of them suffered because of that. They
were the victims of a veritable interdiction. French scholars of the
time were mostly conservative politically, and governed by univer-
sity scruples.
12
Picard's answer showed just how hermetic academic discourse was,
and it once again demonstrated its stubborn hermeticism in the face of
new issues and questions.
Aesthetics professor Olivier Revault d'Allonnes kept score, and in
the spirit of reconciliation, told himself that aH the polemicists were
right. He did not want to choose between Lucien Goldmann's socio-
logical perspective, Charles Mauron's psychoanalytic viewpoint, Ray-
mond Picard's biographical approach, and Roland Barthes's struc-
turalist outlook. "They are aH right. AH of that exists in Phdre and
perhaps that is what makes it a great work. To recaH Adorno's
Great Confrontations 227
metaphor, great work can layering. "13 At the time, as Louis-
Jean Calvet pointed out, Picard was well received by the media.
Jacqueline Piatier wholeheartedly supported him in Le Monde and
referred ta "Roland Barthes's surprising interpretations of Racine's
tragedies."14 Le Journal de Genve relished Picard's counterattack:
"Roland Barthes KO'd in one hundred and fifty pages."15 Barthes suf-
fered from these attacks at the time because he could not bear the
polemic. He confided to his friend Philippe Rebeyrol: "You know,
what 1 write is playful, and if 1 am attacked, there's nothing at all
left."16 But the polemical debate, which Picard turned into a public
event, boomeranged against the old Sorbonne.
Soon, an enthusiastic generation of students would have the op-
portunity to contest academic wisdom. Barthes answered Picard in his
Criticism and Truth, published in 1966, at the height of the structural-
ist paradigm. The book was clamorously heralded by the press, and
bore the question "Should Barthes Be Burned?" on the promotional
band encircling the coyer. The drama was therefore carried to an ex-
treme, and Barthes once again played the role of the virtuous innocent
risking being burned at the stake. It was an opportunity to fire up an
entire intellectual community around the ambitious program pro-
posed in The Elements of Semiology, which thus reached a vast pub-
lic. This time, Barthes answered without spa ring the polemical tone.
He denounced the fact that within "the literary state, criticism
needs to be as restrained as the police."17 Barthes saw Picdrd's criti-
cism as an expression of the most traditionalliterary history, clinging
to a vague notion of "verisimilar criticism," which stands on its own,
and thus has no need ta be supported by evidence. This notion in-
cluded references to a critic's objectivity, to his taste, and to the clarity
of his argument. Barthes characterized this type of literary history as
the old criticism: "These rules are not of our time: the last two come
from the classical age, the first from the era of positivism. "18 He also
attacked the postulate according ta which the literary critic should
limit himself to the literary level. Here, Barthes forayed beyond imma-
nentist proclamations in order ta defend content and the external ele-
ments that shed sorne light on the general economy of the literary text
and required sorne knowledge of history, psychoanalysis, and anthro-
pology. Unlike the positivist method, Barthes defined the critical act as
an act of writing in the full sense of the work, a work on language.
And in sa doing, by bringing the writer and critic together, he weak-
228 Great Confrontations
ened the boundaries, limits, and prohibitions that differentiated writ-
ing genres.
Barthes took a double line of defense against Picard. He invoked
the rights of the critic as writer and bearer of meaning, a veritable crea-
tor by virtue of his own active reading; this critidwriter represented a
more scientific discourse that no longer considered writing as deco-
rum, but as a source of truth. The structuralist current supported his
argument, with references to Lacan, Jakobson, and Lvi-Strauss. In-
fluenced by the work of deconstruction in the social sciences, he pro-
posed and made himself the spokesman for a "science of literature,"
as opposed to a traditional literary history.1
9
A science of the condi-
tions of the content rather than of the content itself, which is to say, of
its forms. Not surprisingly, Barthes took linguistics as the model for
his science: "Its model, obviously, will be linguistics. "20 The author is
displaced by the language, which has become the true subject, making
the search for a hidden sense and ultimate meaning vain because it
assumes an idea of the subject that is, in fact, an absence. "Literature
never bespeaks anything other than the subject's absence. "21
In proclaiming the birth of a new historical era based on the unity
and truth of writing, Barthes spoke for the ambitions of an entire gen-
eration that saw in the explosion of the critical discourse of the social
sciences a mode of writing that, properly speaking, rejoined literary
creation. He shook up a university discourse that preferred to turn a
deaf ear to an increasingly insistent voice. Even after 1966, the distant
echoes of these batdes and gambols reverberated, and Ren Pommier's
violent remarks clearly revealed the breach that Barthes had success-
fully made into academic knowledge-a true robin announcing the
spring of 1968.22
Lvi-Strauss/Gurvitch
The other notable confrontation of the sixties pitted Lvi-Strauss
against a whole area of sociology that was reluctant to be cast in the
structural mold, even if it was familiar with the notion of structure.
This sociology was gready influenced by the highly colorful personal-
ity of Georges Gurvitch. It was another front in the battles of the mo-
ment and was essential for Lvi-Strauss, who absolutely needed to
persuade sociologists to join him if he hoped to bring aIl the sciences
of man together around an anthropology that had become structural.
The polemic between Gurvitch and Lvi-Strauss was, therefore, quite
Great Confrontations 229
lively because the theoretical and institutional stakes were important;
not surprisingly, it crystallized around the notion of structure.
Gurvitch had laid out his idea of social structure in 1955, and de-
fined it much as Murdock had done, as a phenomenon designating the
idea of coherence among social institutions.
23
As a phenomenon, the
idea of structure can be compared with or contrasted to other terms.
For Gurvitch, social classes had to be distinguished in their structure
as well as in their organization, and these social structures became the
objects of an ongoing process of destructuring and restructuring.
When they are involved in a process, they are also part of a dialectic.
For Gurvitch, the social encompassed and extended beyond structure,
and was irreducible to it: "It is incomparably richer than [its struc-
ture], and its fullness implies the unexpected even more."24 Gurvitch
criticized structuralism at once for its reductionism and impoverish-
ment of reality and as something static that crushed society's imma-
nent movement beneath its weight.
Lvi-Strauss's retort was particularly stinging. "By what authority
does M. Gurvitch appoint himself as our mentor? And what, in fact,
does he know about concrete societies? As a pure theoretician,
Gurvitch is interested only in the theoretical aspect of our work. "25
Which should take precedence, the singularity of an event or the per-
manence of structure? This debate had recurred in sociology ever
since Durkheim and Tarde, and was once again evoked at the heart of
the confrontation between Lvi-Strauss and Gurvitch. An article by
Gilles Gaston-Granger that was widely cited in the sixties paid consid-
erable attention to it.
26
Gilles Gaston-Granger, an epistemologist, defined the alternative
apparently opposing a perceptual comprehension of the world and an
intellectual conception of the scientific approach, and in this regard he
contrasted Gurvitch with Lvi-Strauss. "For Gurvitch, a structure is,
in a certain way, a being, where for Lvi-Strauss, it is only a model. "27
Gurvitch refused both mathematical tools and formalization and con-
sidered structure to be a phenomenon, whereas for Lvi-Strauss it was
a question of a learning tool. Gaston-Granger considered Gurvitch to
be an Aristotelian, whereas Lvi-Strauss represented "the party of a
mathematics of man."28 Gaston-Granger did, of course, point out the
danger of reifying a learning tool and transforming it into the object
of knowledge in the social sciences, but the risk was to be taken de-
spite the potential danger: "The risk must be run. "29 Gaston-Granger
230 Great Confrontations
opted for structuralism even if he maintained a critical distance
and criticized Lvi-Strauss for having gone from analytical models to
universalizing diagrams, and running the risk of reintroducing a cer-
tain ontologization into the instruments of conceptualization.
Thirty years have passed since he published his article and Gaston-
Granger is freer now th an he was at the time because he did not want
to ruffle Gurvitch's sensibilities. Today, he considers that Gurvitch was
"infinitely sm aIl next to Lvi-Strauss, and the bearer of a scholastic
void."30 As for Lvi-Strauss, Gaston-Granger had only warned him
against the danger of considering structures to be more real than real-
ity, much like Plato; he nonetheless hoped that a great sociology or
structural anthropology would be created and discover the key to a
scientific understanding of social man. Today, Gaston-Granger is less
optimistic about the results of Lvi-Strauss's program: "1 think that
Lvi-Strauss's work did not yield what 1 had hoped it would."31
Gaston-Granger is severe and he does not fully admit how impor-
tant Gurvitch was for a whole generation of sociologists and anthro-
pologists. Of course, Gurvitch was something of a megalomaniac,
whose rather natural vanity made him consider only his own work as
worth taking seriously. Roger Establet, who became his assistant,
was in fact supposed to have worked on that project: "1 was supposed
to give courses on his work."32 His dogmatism was weIl known.
"When he said that there were fourteen levels of structural depth, he
did not me an thirteen or fifteen and he recalled with no little irony a
Durkheim who had only found three." 33 But the hidden side of these
dogmatic assertions reveals a touching individual, bludgeoned by
history and driven by a consuming passion. Gurvitch lived on the
rue Vaneau in the apartment where Marx had lived when he was in
France; he was an exile in Paris and bought nothing except books,
hoping one day to return to the Soviet Union. The conditions he stipu-
lated for his return in his ongoing negotiations with Soviet authorities
made him particularly sympathetic. He wanted to be able to speak in
Russian to workers as they left the factories, and to be able to work
in Russian archives in order to write a history of the Russian Revolu-
tion in the place where he had been a commissar of the people. He
was, therefore, a sociologist forever cut off from the field in which
he would have liked to work. Finally granted permission in 1964 (he
had given up on the idea of addressing workers in Russian, on the ad-
vice of his wife), Gurvitch died before being able to realize his dream.
Great Confrontations 23I
During this entire period, Gurvitch was the rather charismatic
leader of a network that was more or less reticent about the structural-
ist vogue. The coterie included sociologists like Jean Duvignaud and
Pierre Ansart, philosophers like Lucien Goldmann and Henri Lefebvre,
and anthropologists like Georges Balandier. Most did not want to con-
front Lvi-Strauss head-on. The choice was rather between two em-
blematic figures of sociology: Raymond Aron and Georges Gurvitch.
And yet, even in Gurvitch's group, the influence of structuralism
spurred research and determined sorne methodological choices.
Lucien Goldmann, of course, was receptive to a structuralism that
he qualified as genetic and receptive to history. But structuralism's
influence was also palpable among sociologists such as Pierre Ansart
even if Gurvitch was directing his thesis. "1 have a very clear memory
of the first day 1 heard structuralism discussed. It was a course that
Georges Davy had given after having been at Lvi-Strauss's thesis de-
fense. He gave an absolutely fascinating discussion on The Elemen-
tary Structures of Kinship, which he presented as a unique intellectual
possibility."34 And yet, Pierre Ansart, who had to do a complementary
thesis on the birth of anarchism-which, moreover, he defended in
1969, after Gurvitch's death-freely elected a structuralist problem-
atic. Influenced by Lucien Goldmann, he tried to construct a presenta-
tion of the structuration of a thought process about anarchism in its
relationships with economic structures, practices, and contemporary
worldviews. "For those of us seeking our way, structuralism seemed
to offer something extraordinarily productive for our work." 35
Structuralism did have a real influence on this group of left-wing
sociologists, but it was the object of heated debate because of its
demonstration of the dehumanizing process of our technical civiliza-
tion. During a colloquium at Royaumont in 1960, the debate was
quite lively; a consensus on criticism led by Gurvitch against struc-
turalism brought together in a united front Jeannine Verds-Leroux,
Sonya Dayan, Pividal, Tristani, and Claude Lefort. Jean Duvignaud,
who was close to Gurvitch, examined the correlation between struc-
turalism and the place from which it emanated: "Many people were
dragged into this conflict because there was something more than what
met the eye. The question was whether or not a society could trans-
form itself from within."36 For Duvignaud, the famous epistemological
break, which legitimated ideological structuralism so that it could
either become official university doctrine or that of the intelligentsia,
232 Great Confrontations
reproduced the hiatus between the dominant laws of the technostruc-
ture and those of an eventual global change. "1 will therefore say that
Lvi-Strauss's thinking has become true, even obvious, since, after hav-
ing taken a detour via the natives, it once again found the very struc-
tures of the second industrial age."37 Jean Duvignaud suggested the
idea that Lvi-Strauss ignored history less because he observed the
prevalence of relationships of reproduction, of a cooling of temporal-
ity among tropical cultures he called cold, than because of an intuition
about the changes under way in the postindustrial civilization at a time
when communication was carrying the day over change.
A Book Event: The Savage Mind
Another great intellectual duel pitted two sacred monsters of the
French intelligentsia against one another: Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude
Lvi-Strauss. Lvi-Strauss had been attentive when Sartre's Critique
of Dialectical Reason was published but had not objected at the time
to Sartrean philosophy, not because he had abandoned philosophy,
despite his remarks to the contrary, but because he was preparing a
severe and highly polemical response on his own anthropological turf.
Lvi-Strauss's answer was the final chapter of The Savage Mind, enti-
tled "History and Dialectic," which became the masterwork in the
history of anthropology. The Savage Mind came out in 1962, as did
Totemism Today. Lvi-Strauss not only reacted to Sartre's theses, but
he continued to explain how the savage mind operated. He added
grist to the demonstration begun in "Race and History," by concen-
trating this time on a demonstration of the universality of mental
mechanisms beyond differences of content. In this respect, there was
an important shift from Lucien Lvy-Bruhl's theses contrasting the
prelogical mentality of primitive societies, characterized by the prin-
ciple of participation, with the logical mentality of civilizations, gov-
erned by a principle of contradiction.
Contrary to anthropological tradition, Lvi-Strauss asserted: "The
savage mind is logical, in the same sense and the same fashion as
ours."38 Long presented as the primitive expression of emotions, the
savage mind, here, was perceived in terms of the dimensions of the syn-
thetic and analytic goals it assigns itself. The savage mind proceeds just
like the Western mind through the paths of understanding, and uses a
complete system of extremely varied distinctions and oppositions.
There are, however, two distinct but unhierarchized kinds of
Great Confrontations 233
minds, distinguishable two strategie levels. The savage mind,
on a perceptuallogic and expressing itself in signs rather than in con-
cepts, i5 a closed and finite system, governed by a given number of
laws. Lvi-Strauss, to be sure, opposed this closed and circular system
to open scientific thinking with its different relationship to nature.
The savage mind belongs to a kind of thinking that binds words and
things together in a relationship of redundancy. It understands the
concrete world and is neither spontaneous nor confused, as was long
believed. Its terrain of predilection comprised the daily activities in
primitive societies, including hunting, gathering, fishing, and so on.
"The richness of abstract words is not a monopoly of civilized lan-
guages."39 Lvi-Strauss described the confusion of ethnographers
when faced with the wealth of knowledge of Indian tribes and their
capacity to distinguish, identify, and represent the animal and vege-
table worlds in which they lived. The Hopi Indians had distinguished
three hundred and fifty kinds of plants and the Navajo Indians more
than five hundred. This kind of concrete mind made its classifications
in a meticulously careful way so that this knowledge, organized in a
complete system of prescriptions and prohibitions, could be useful for
everyday life.
ln Totemism Today, published the same year, Lvi-Strauss illus-
trated the central thesis of The Savage Mind. He showed that until
then anthropologists had encountered an apparent aporia because they
limited their observations about totemism to similarities between the
animal or vegetable world and the human world, whereas the value of
totemic classification lay in the structural homology it established be-
tween a natural and a social series. "The totemic illusion begins, first
of aU, by distorting the semantic field governing the same type of phe-
nomena."40 Totemism integrates binary oppositions and its function is
to transform whatever might appear to create an obstacle to integra-
tion into something positive. Natural species are not selected because
they are good to eat but because they are good to think about.
41
An
osmosis exists between method and reality, a homology between
human thinking and its object. Ethnographie research therefore be-
cornes logical construction and can reach the level of anthropology-
in other words, the se arch for the fundamental laws of the human
mind.
Lvi-Strauss diverged here from Malinowski's functionalist inter-
pretation, which only examined the naturalist, utilitarian, and affec-
234 Great Confrontations
tive dimensions when explaining that the deep interest that primitive
societies showed for the animal and vegetable worlds cornes from
their primary preoccupation with food. Lvi-Strauss argued that the
explanation lay at a deeper level than a simple identity mechanism,
namely, the intersection of nature and culture: "Totemism postulates a
logical equivalence between a society of natural species and a world of
social groups. "42 Structuralism always flourishes, therefore, at the
crossroads of nature and culture, upon which its project is built.
The Savage Mind was an immediate and spectacular success and
helped to make the structuralist program better known beyond an-
thropological circles. It was so successful, in fact, that a journalist
from France-Soir warned those of her readers who might be tempted
to buy the book not to be misled by the reproduction on the cover of
the Viola tric%r, called "wild pansy" (pense sauvage). The lovely
bouquet of flowers adorning bookstore windows might make poten-
tial readers think that the book was about botany, whereas, the jour-
nalist warned, this was really a very difficult essay. More seriously,
Claude Roy considered Lvi-Strauss's book to be as important as
Freud's Psychopath%gy of Everyday Life: "Freud brilliantly demon-
strated that our madness obeys a logic that escapes the conscious
mind. Claude Lvi-Strauss proposes a profound and new demonstra-
tion that shows that the apparent chaos of primitive myths and rituals
in fact obeys an order and principles that until now have remained
invisible. "43
In a long article in Critique, Edmond Ortigues began by drawing
an analogy between the methods of Paul Valry and Lvi-Strauss.
Both the poet and the ethnologist shared the same formaI concern: "A
like-minded family of minds: the same reticence with respect to his-
tory, both equally insistent about defending the sensitivity of the intel-
lect against the intelligence of the emotions."44 In his column in Le
Monde, Jean Lacroix hailed this strictly scientific work but was some-
what skeptical of what he called "the most rigorously atheist philoso-
phy of our time."45 For him, this philosophy occasionally resembled a
vulgar materialism that sees a reflection of the mind's liberty even in
mathematical expression, that is, cellular activity in the cerebral cor-
tex, which obeys its own laws. Le Monde gave the event considerable
coverage; in addition to Jean Lacroix's article in November 1962,
there was Yves Florenne's article of May 1962 and an interview with
Lvi-Strauss on July 14 of the same year. Claude Mauriac reviewed
Great Confrontations 235
the book in Le Figaro, and Robert Kanters enthusiastically reviewed it
in Le Figaro littraire, commenting judiciously that "the sciences of
man today are the sources of the art of tomorrow. "46
The structura li st community voiced its approval through Barthes's
very favorable review of Lvi-Strauss's two 1962 works. Barthes ap-
plauded the substitution of a sociology of signs for a sociology of sym-
bols, as well as the introduction of a socio-Iogic that was in keeping
with the comprehensive semiological enterprise. Lvi-Strauss's merit
was to have extended the field of human freedom to a realm that had
escaped it thus far: "Claude Lvi-Strauss invites us to consider a soci-
ology of that which is specifically human. It acknowledges that hu-
mans have the unlimited power to make things signify. "47
Lvi -Stra uss/Sartre
The Savage Mind was one of those rare moments when a book seemed
to be a real irreversible event thanks to its capacity to transform our
vision of the world and of others. Lvi-Strauss decided to publish his
deferred attack on Sartre in this centerpiece of the structuralist pro-
gram, a veritable riposte to Critique of Dialectical Reason that was
particularly polemical. Sartre's charisma was targeted, along with the
status of philosophy as the crown discipline, as well as the privileged
position of the philosophy of history, and of historicism, eliminated
from the structural perspective. History is nothing more than a narra-
tive, condemned to ideography. Lvi-Strauss attacked Sartre's eleva-
tion of it as unifying and totalizing: "In Sartre's system, history plays
exactly the part of a myth. "48 Experience, events, historical material
all belong to myth and Lvi-Strauss could not understand why phi-
losophers, and Sartre first among them, insisted on granting history so
much importance. He viewed their fascination as something resem-
bling the effort to restore a collective temporal continuity, in contra st
to the ethnologist's method, which unfolds in spatial discontinuity.
For Lvi-Strauss, historical content was wholly illusive and mythi-
cal; since a historian chooses a given region or epoch, he can only con-
struct local histories, without ever managing to achieve any sort of
meaningful comprehensive history: "A truly total history would can-
cel itself out-its product would be naught. "49 Thus, no historical to-
tality existed, but only a multiplicity of histories untied to a central
subject, to man. History can only be partial or incomplete, and there-
fore remain partial, in the sense of being "biased."50 This was a for-
236 Great Confrontations
mal diatribe against philosophy of history: its "alleged historical
conti nuit y is secured only by dint of fraudulent outlines."51 History
would only be the last refuge of a transcendental humanism and Lvi-
Strauss invited historians to rid themselves of their vision of man as
central, and even to give up history. "As we say of certain careers, his-
tory may lead to anything, provided you get out of it."52
Instead of history identified with huma nit y, Lvi-Strauss proposed
the timelessness of the savage mind, which grasps the world in a
renewed synchronic totality. Sartre did not directly respond to this
attack, but Pierre Verstraeten analyzed Lvi-Strauss's work in Les
Temps modernes in an article entitled "Claude Lvi-Strauss or the
temptation of nothingness." Verstraeten argued that "Lvi-Strauss
willingly mixes up the realms of semiology and semantics (or linguis-
tics) by systematicaUy applying the princip les of semantics to aU of
semiology."53 Lvi-Strauss proved the power of the dialectic nega-
tively, by discerning how inane historical temporality was for him.
Verstraeten therefore criticized Lvi-Strauss by taking his own idea of
the imagination just as Lvi-Strauss had dubbed Sartrean philosophy
as mythic. In 1962, this underlying battle between the two giants of
the period led to Lvi-Strauss's triumph: the structural program took
precedence over Sartre as the incarnation of historicism.
Ricoeur /Lvi -Stra uss
The Savage Mind also stirred another important debate during
the same period in the review Esprit. The editorial board immediately
felt concerned and chaUenged by Lvi-Strauss's work and as represen-
tatives of a philosophy of the subject. Esprit's director, Jean-Marie
Domenach had created a philosophical group to study Lvi-Strauss's
work over a period of months, in order to publish a special issue on
him. There were articles by Jean Cuisenier, Nicolas Ruwet, and oth-
ers, that put The Savage Mind into perspective, and the issue ended
with a debate between Lvi-Strauss and the team that had worked on
his work. Certain of Lvi-Strauss's remarks were edited out of the
transcribed debate, such as this one: "My own formula is that of
Royer-CoUard: the brain secretes thought the way the liver secretes
bile."54 And Lvi-Strauss refused a second round of interviews or de-
bate, which many foreign reviews repeatedly requested. Nonetheless,
Jean-Marie Domenach was particularly grateful to Lvi-Strauss for
having participated in this contradictory confrontation: "1 appreciate
Great Confrontations 237
his participation in this debate because 1 greatly admire his inteUectual
ability." 55
Paul Ricoeur's article "Hermeneutics and Structuralism" clearly
sketched out the two divergent positions. Ricoeur did not reject the
scientificity of structuralism's work on the codes operating in lan-
guages and myths, but he did contest what he saw as a transgression
of limits in the unjustified shift to generalization and systematization.
For Ricoeur, the two levels needed to be clearly differentiated. The
first was based on linguistic laws and formed an unconscious, non-
reflective stratum, a categorical imperative that did not necessarily
require reference to a conscious subject. Binary oppositions in phonol-
ogy illustrated this level, as did elementary kinship structures-about
which, moreover, Ricoeur acknowledged the validity of Lvi-Strauss's
analyses: "The structuralist enterprise seems perfectly legitimate to me
and removed from any criticism so long as it remains conscious of the
conditions of its validity and therefore of its limits." 56
With The Savage Mind, Lvi-Strauss generalized his enterprise,
which worked as well in the tropics as it did in more temperate climes
and resembled logical thinking. Yet Ricoeur contrasted totemic think-
ing to biblical thinking, which reversed the relationship between di-
achrony and synchrony. He did not suggest that subjective meaning
should replace the objectivity of formalized meaning, but rather some-
thing he called the object of the hermeneutic: "Which is to say the di-
mensions of meaning that are opened by each of these successive re-
turns; the question that is raised becomes the following: do aU of these
cultures equally offer as much to reconsider, repeat, and rethink?"57
Ricoeur characterized the transition from structural science to struc-
turalist philosophy as "Kantianism without a transcendental subject,
indeed, an absolute formalism."58 His hermeneutic took this stage
of formaI deciphering into account at the same time as it set a goal
of making understanding the other coincide with self-understanding
through the mediation of the interpretation of meaning, by a mind
that ceaselessly thinks and rethinks itself.
Lvi-Strauss repeated and accepted the "Kantianism without a
transcendental subject" in his reply to Ricoeur, but although he ac-
cepted the terms, he rejected the question of the meaning of meaning:
"We cannot at the same time try to understand things from without
and from within."59 For Lvi-Strauss, the scientific phase of his work
238 Great Confrontations
was the requisite taxonomy of societies, which meant that he could
only go forward in those areas that had been sufficiently prepared.
The era of great debates had begun, and with it the question of disci-
plinary boundaries was raised. Caught up in the game of disciplinary
confrontations, many would go from one to another and accumulate
analytical tools and areas of competence; interdisciplinarity was on its
way to becoming the new religion. In order to be a good structuralist,
one had to be a linguist, an anthropologist, and have a bit of psycho-
analysis and Marxism. The period was rich and intense; men and con-
cepts became mobile, irrespective of boundaries and indifferent to
customs agents. These were the forerunners of a structuralism that
was more ideological than scientific; this malleability made it possible
to acquire powerful positions and shake up the old Sorbonne. Indeed,
Michel Foucault's election in November I969 to the Collge de France,
and Paul Ricoeur's defeat, can be seen as part of structuralism's pro-
pulsive force.
As the numbers of encounters and debates increased, different dis-
ciplines were forced to redefine their positions. Andr Green did just
that for psychoanalysis when he called its practices into question on
the basis of the then current opposition between history and struc-
ture.
60
Back to back, he dismissed Sartre, who denied a theoretical
basis to psychoanalysis, and Lvi-Strauss, whose panlogical position
led him to limit his considerations about man to his physical-chemical
structure. A defender of the work of Freud, Andr Green demon-
strated that history and structure could not be dissociated in psycho-
analytic practice: "History is inconceivable outside of repetition,
which itself refers to structure; structure, insofar as man is concerned,
is not conceivable outside of man's relationship with his genitors, who
constitute the symbolic and introduce a temporal-atemporal relation-
ship that implies the historical dimension."61 ln this symphony of dis-
cord and friction, which produced anathemas and exclusive models,
Andr Green's position of a well-tempered structuralism seemed like
that of the sage who settles matters at a time of extreme positions
when it was a question of pushing things to an extreme.
Twenty-six
Signifying Chains
The Schisrn
Between the schism in 1953 and his excommunication in 1963, Jacques
Lacan consolidated his positions by anchoring them firmly in the flour-
ishing structuralist paradigm. Indeed, this grounding became necessary
while negotiations to affiliate the Socit Franaise de Psychanalyse
(SFP), which was finally created in 1953, with the International
Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) foundered. It quickly became clear
that the sine qua non of this affiliation would be the abandonment of
Lacanian practice, and the pure and simple exclusion of Lacan himself,
who had become the main obstacle to a general reconciliation.
Banished, Lacan gathered the faithful around and created the
cole Franaise de Psychanalyse in 1964, while another part of the
SFP, led by Jean Laplanche, affiliated itself with the IPA in 1963 and
became the Association Psychanalytique de France. What was true for
Trotskyists was also true for psychoanalysts: the schisms and dissolu-
tions became the yeast for the Lacanian movement. The secession of
those who had been members of the SFP for ten years, in addition to
being the result of the sought-after benediction of the IPA, followed a
certain number of disagreements.
On the one hand, the practice of short sessions created great con-
cern for the numbers of patients filling the waiting rooms. On the
other han d, mixing individu al or so-called didactic analyses with
teaching also raised a certain worry about the risks of mixing the gen-
239
240 Chaim
res. "But above Lacan's unwillingness to give up anything
ta do with his practices suddenly revealed their importance .... Sa,
what in our (or my) nave eyes had appeared to be secondary was in
fact the main issue."l A good many of Lacan's disciples would there-
fore go their way within other organizations.
Risk of isolation and marginalization became Lacan's major con-
cern. Anyone who was not with him was considered to be necessarily
against him. But Lacan needed to rise above things in order to give his
charisma free rein. Exiled and banned, definitively excluded from his
temple, Lecan identified himself quite simply with Spinoza, who had
fallen victim to the same excommunication, in two stages: the Kherem
of July 27, I656, was the principal excommunication, followed by the
Chammata, which forever excluded him from the Jewish community
of Amsterdam.
2
ln order to hone the image of the martyr, Lacan left
his teaching position at Sainte-Anne Hospital.
Lacan was alone at that point, without his refuge of Colombey-
les-Deux-glises, but the author of the Rome Report returned as a
hero and announced a new undertaking: on June 2I, I964, he estab-
lished the cole Franaise de Psychanalyse: "1 establish, as alone as 1
have always been in my relationship to the psychoanalytic cause, the
cole Franaise de Psychanalyse." He obtained the protection of Fer-
nand Braudel and Louis Althusser and created an outpost at the Sixth
Section of the EPHE at the ENS. This institutionallink allowed him to
broaden his public considerably and, thanks to the philosophers, he
found himself in an important strategic position on the intellectual
playing field. Eminently aware of the absolute necessity of developing
his public, he bowed to Franois Wahl's insistent request to publish
the bulk of his writings, something he had always refused to do. Seuil
began publishing in I966.
Given Lacan's theoretical politics, he needed to find sorne sup-
port. Having failed with Paul Ricoeur,3 he invited Lvi-Strauss to the
opening lecture of his seminar in Dussane Hall at the ENS. Lvi-
Strauss agreed to come despite very serious reservations about Lacan's
style. Lacan therefore managed to transform his failure with regard to
the IPA and the weakening of his movement in the wake of the split
into a moment of glory symbolized by his teaching at the ENS. For
five years, anyone who was anyone among with-it Parisian intellectu-
aIs rushed to see and hear the man who became the shaman of mod-
ern times. "Rejected by the international psychoanalytic movement,
Signifying Chaim 24I
Lacan's work came to have a central place in the French adventure of
structuralism. "4
The Signifier
The trace of structuralism in Lacan's theory of the unconscious is par-
ticularly noticeable in the role of the signifier. We have already seen
that he adopted 5aussure's notion of the sign in the fifties and modi-
fied the respective places of the signified and the signifier in order to
valorize the latter. In his seminar on Psychoses (1955-56), Lacan
made it clear that the signified was not free from the signifier but slid
beneath it until it reached a point at which the patient's meaning be-
came more clear, which he called a point de capiton; this is "what
makes the signifier stop the otherwise indefinite slippage of significa-
tion."S There is therefore no similarity between 5aussure's and Lacan's
signifier, even if the 5aussurean signifier "is not only the homonym but
also the eponym of the Lacanian signifier. "6 Once it had bec orne inde-
pendent from the idea of the signifie d, the notion of the signifier took
on even greater importance for Lacan at the beginning of the sixties,
when the signified represented the subject for another signifier. "It was
on December 6, 1961, exactly, during the seminar on Identification,
that Lacan defined the signifier for the first time, by distinguishing it
then and from then on quite clearly from the sign. "7 It was not until
1964 and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis that the
signifier really came to occupy the place of the subject for another sig-
nifier that it kept from then on.
The signifier, the n, occupied the place and site of the subject,
who se existence is given as the absent cause for its effects, that is, the
signifying chain by which it makes itself intelligible. The subject is not
reduced to nothing, but rather ta the status of nonbeing; it is the non-
signifying foundation of the significance of signifiers, in other words
their very condition of existence. It is the analyst's job to restore the
internaI logic of this signifying chain, for no one of the discrete ele-
ments can in and of itself represent meaning. A subject for another sig-
nifier, the signifier only fulfills its function by constantly being effaced
in order to let another signifier take its place. Lacan represented this
chain by making 5 bec orne 52, which represents the signifying chain,
and 51 the additional signifer that pushes it forward. The subject,
however, is nowhere, or in the place of the signifier that it supplants,
given that that place is to be nowhere. Transcribed as a slashed $, out
242 Signifying Chains
of step with itself, the subject is forever split; it occupies the fourth
term of the signifier's structure and is just as eccentric with respect to
what is said. This object is represented as the objet petit a [object little
0] (for other).8
Lacan's profound interest in the signifier is thus key and took off
in the sixties as a fundamental stake in the structuralist vogue. The
context revealed what Jean-David Nasio called the "umbilical" mean-
ing of an idea, or the conditions under which an idea is born and
evolves.
9
An entire dialectic developed on the basis of this signifying
structure, according to a double logic of places and forces, and estab-
lished the primacy of the signifier over the signified. The world be-
came little more than a fantasy in which things are subordinate to
words. Even if Lacan's definition of the signifying chain freely inter-
preted Saussure's ideas, it was nonetheless part of a more general
structuralist conception that atomized the realms of discourse and in-
stituted the order of things on the basis of the order of words. Only
the signifier of lack holds the world together, the Thing that Lacan
took from Heidegger in order to designate the quadripartite earth,
sky, humans, and gods. "Thinging is the nearing of the world,"lO but
just as it did in Heidegger, the Thing "bears this fourfoldnesss because
it is essentially constituted by a void."ll The thread of the world was
thus based on a centrallack, which was the condition of its unity.
Objet petit a
One of the principal terms of Lacan's signifying structure is the objet
petit a. Serge Leclaire considered this to be a major scientific discov-
ery: "An invention worthy of the Nobel Prize, a veritable inven-
tion."12 The innovation came in two steps. Lacan first referred to
the "little other" as a mediating element between the barred subject
and the Other, situated in an imaginary function. In the second stage,
the little other became the objet petit a, as an object of lack, a
metonymic object of desire, a simple signifier of desire cut off from its
reference to a desiring subject and from any symbolic reference to an
unconscious signifer. Lacan no longer attached the objet petit a to the
imaginary, but to the Real as he understood the term, which does not
mean reality but that which resists signification. "The Real is what is
impossible. "
For Lacan, this partial objet petit a was extremely important. He
placed it at the level of the function of refuse and gave new meaning to
Chains 243
the separation of the fetus, forever separated from the placenta,
which is tossed into the trash bin. The libido is thus designated as a
multiple chain of desires, trying in vain to substitute themselves for
the initial separation. The objet petit a is put "in the place of the
refuse of the signifying operation." 13 It has a relationship with all
parts of the body that can be linked to the function of refuse, transi-
tion, or separation. Objet petit a as an object of desire ever reborn and
always lacking became increasingly central to Lacan's thinking and
came to incarnate the very object of psychoanalysis: "The object of
psychoanalysis ... is nothing other than what 1 have already set forth
in the function that the objet petit a plays in it." 14 It is the object of the
drive that makes the law of desire, as well as the phantasmatic object,
function. "The objet petit a is the negative of the body." 15 Whatever
its place in Lacan's framework, the objet petit a cannot be addressed
as an isolated object, for it only exists through its articulation with the
symbolic and the imaginary by way of the Real. Castration, however,
determined the mode of this articulation and made it possible for de-
sire to become manifest: "Castration is the law that organizes human
desire like a partial truth,"16 ma king it possible to enter into the order
of the Law, linked to the Name of the Father, in other words to a fig-
ure that can be dissociated between that of the real father and the
symbolic father.
ln this respect, Lacan reversed Freud's vision of the Law as a pro-
hibition: the Law was positive, the law of desire. In the early sixties,
when he taught principally through lectures, Lacan favored writing,
as did Jacques Derrida later, and identified the signifier with the letter
(The Pur/oined Letter), completely in tune with Saussure. "The Thing
becomes word, says Lacan, in the sense of motus: it is both speech and
silence, which takes your breath away and overwhelms speech."1? ln
analytic practice, the objet petit a has become a fundamental to01 for
certain analysts. "The objet petit a is useful. Analysts even say that,
depending on the object, this or that drive can be deduced. It makes it
possible to get des ire going once again and to avoid despair."18
Lacan said of this objet petit a that it had to become the corner-
stone of psychoanalysis rather the corner stone of rejection. Even if he
established the rules of a science while remaining fundamentally pes-
simistic about it, the object on which his science was based was syn-
onymous with an unrecoverable loss; the objet petit a set the signify-
ing chain going. So Lacan laid out the rules for investigating the
244 Signifying Chains
signifying chain but held out no illusions about the analyst's ability to
find what had been forever lost. An analysis is not just a positivist ef-
fort of memory; in place of the lost object there is an entire "construc-
tion made of signifiers, but what organizes them? The object as if it
were 10st."19 For Serge Leclaire, the partial object is the necessary
counterweight, by virtue of what it evokes as impermanent in order to
escape the pure Signifier, to a Symbolic purged of its Imaginary dimen-
sion. This was one of Lacan's fundamentallessons and had the virtue
of preventing any dogmatic closed-mindedness. "AlI the analysts who
have really contributed something interesting have spoken about ob-
jects. Whether it be Freud, of course, or Melanie Klein, Winnicott, or
Lacan."20
Lacan broached the question of meaning through the idea of sig-
nifying sequences. Interpretation always cornes after the fact and is
deferred with respect to what has been said. This temporal difference
makes recourse to the objet petit a necessary as a substitute for de-
taching meaning in the relationship between the signifier and signified.
We might even wonder if Derrida did not simply borrow this objet
petit a for his notion of diffrance, so central to his work on decon-
struction. For Lacan, the objet petit a became something like the
means of recuperating the eliminated of the signified in the signifying
chain. "It is the loss of this objet petit a as an object that provokes de-
sire and as an object of desire per se that both makes the subject speak
and is that about which he will speak, while always eluding him. "21
The analyst is therefore glad to be able to keep his patient's attention
riveted to these objets petit a.
Yet even those analysts who were quite deeply affected by Lacan's
teaching do not attribute the same importance to this objet petit a. "1
don't do anything at aH with the objet petit a. "22 Andr Green is
clearly the most critical on this essential issue. In 1966, he published
an article in Les Cahiers pour l'analyse on the objet petit a in which he
clarified Lacan's perspective on it as well as that of Jacques-Alain
Miller on the relationship between (a) and the suture, based on Frege.
This was the period when Green, while still a member of the Socit
Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) and of the IPA, was fascinated by
Lacan's work: "The love 1 felt for Lacan lasted seven years. "23 Andr
Green is the current director of the SPP and has therefore had an en-
tirely fascinating and receptive career, given how deeply he was af-
fected by Lacan's teaching, even though he maintained his theoretical
''''''lifvinp- Chains 245
and distance. His position changed and he became in-
creasingly critical of Lacanian positions for theoretical reasons. "As
time went on, 1 was less and less in agreement with him, but he
fected me quite profoundly."24
Green began going to Lacan's seminar in 1961 and was at the
same time interested in Winnicott, whom he had discovered at the Ed-
inburgh conference in July of that year. Although he was conceptually
interested in the objet petit a at the time, today he is quite critical
about this aspect of Lacan's thinking: "1 don't think that psycho-
analytic theory can be satisfied with a the ory about partial objects. By
eliminating the so-called total object, the Other capital 0 is once
again necessary and this Other is nothing other than God."25 Green
was interested in Lacan's Augustinian sources and particularly in Saint
Augustine as read by Pascal in his Writings on Grace, doubly infused
with religion and mathematical formalism.
26
He also saw this double
polarization in Lacan, who gave his spiritual forebears, and not the
church, which he criticized, a chance to renew themselves. "The struc-
tural approach (the question of the Filioque) should come first and it
alone makes it possible to have an exact idea of the function of im-
ages. Here De Trinitate is just like a theoretical work which we can
take as a model. "27 Lacan's rereading of Freud referred to a pure Sig-
nifier that can be read through the lens of religion. In the place of
Freud's castration anxiety, Lacan gave castration an ontological status
derived from the Name of the Father, together with the trinitary order
of the Subject-Real/SymboliclImaginary-giving a Christian cast to
his reading. Indeed, Lacan was quite familiar with the Bible and, inso-
far as the Great Other is concerne d, its position with respect to the
drive chain remains undetermined, a pure extraterritorial Signifier, the
veritable equivalent of the soul: "Lacan reverses Freud's appreciation
of Goethe in Totem and Taboo: 'In the beginning was the action.' He
admitted that he preferred a formula taken from Saint John: 'In the
beginning was the language.' "28
Other readings are possible. Alain Juranville, for example, also
recognized the figure of God in the pure Signifier, not a religious God
but the God of absolute reason. However, the Thing's location outside
the world as an incarnated Signifer refers back to fullness as God's
jouissance, beyond the world's closure in Saint Augustine. Lacan's po-
sition of radical if dialectical idealism was confirmed when he posited
the world as fantasy or when he referred to its unity as an initiallack
246 Signifying Chains
or to a causal chasm. The Signifier-master was everywhere and no-
where; it escaped the worldly world and at the same time could be
located within it. Like God, it was only a Name, albeit an essential
Name because it was the condition of being in this world insofar as
castration, as a symbolic operation, must be endured. AlI of Lacan's
efforts to decontextualize and to eliminate the organic dimension of
Freudian theory and to take refuge in linguistics, and then in topology,
as so many intellectual and formalizable means of approaching the
question, can therefore be seen as so many secular efforts to achieve a
rule, a Law made by a regular member of the clergy who had attained
salvation after having blocked ail the other roads that did not lead to
the Big Other.
Reading Lacan this way could explain why so many Jesuits, and
not the least among them Michel de Certeau or Franois Roustang, as
weil as Catholics like Franoise Dolto, joined in the Lacanian adven-
ture. "1 see in Lacan a new encounter with that whole Catholic, post-
Tridentine, theological intelligence, in the sense of an awakening re-
garding the question of the Trinity,"29 remarked Jean-Marie Benoist, a
philosopher who shared this feeling with Philippe Sollers. Both con-
sidered that Lacan had made a post-Tridentine opening possible, that
of baroque thinking. Many Christians thus followed Lacan, "believ-
ing that they were working for God, until the moment they realized
that Lacan was only working for himself."3o
This religious dimension was carefully occulted during the struc-
turalist period when the issues were science, theory, and formaliza-
tion. And yet, specialists of the history of religion attended the semi-
nars. Bernard Sichre, for example, did not believe that Lacan was
trying to give a Catholic reading of Freud, but that he was, in fact, the
only one to believe that, at the risk of going mad or suffering the re-
turn of the repressed in its most fanatical and frightening forms, the
religious question was unavoidable. And this at a time when the major
concern was to wring the neck of Western metaphysics. "This is not to
say that psychoanalysis should be religious. But to ask why one of the
la st important works of Freud was, precisely, Moses and Monothe-
ism. "31 On this point, both Freud and Lacan attributed to religion a
centuries-old function of effectively mediating between forbidden sex-
ual reality, and they wondered whether this discourse had the same
place in contemporary society. Yet, Lacan confronted a total symbolic
where nothing had replaced the mediating role of religion. Neither a
SHY,o,tVlnU Chains 247
political nor a scientific discourse cau replace the dominant
fictions that organize social and Lacan therefore assigned this role
ta psychoanalysis, this lucid placeholder, "ideally, because psycho-
analysis cannot be a religion." 32
Affect
The signifying chain effectively eliminated the insignificant dimension
of affect. This was another of the points on which Andr Green criti-
cized Lacan. In I960, at Bonneval, he heard Jean Laplanche and Serge
Leclaire on the unconscious and he shared Laplanche's reservations
about the linguistic conception of the unconscious. At the same time,
and with respect to affect, Lacan announced at Royaumont that "in
the Freudian field, in spite of the words themselves, consciousness is a
feature as Inadequate to ground the unconscious in its negation (that
unconscious dates from Saint Thomas) as the affect is unsuited to play
the role of the protopathic subject, since it is a service that has no
holder."33 So Jean-Bernard Pontalis asked Andr Green to write on af-
fect for Les Temps modernes; his article was published in I961. Green
took up the question more broadly in a work published in I970:34
"For me, Lacan gives an anti-Freudian version of the unconscious."35
For Andr Green, the richness of Freudian the ory was based on
the heterogeneity of the signifier. Freud did not consider the signifier
ta be an array of internally homogeneous, interchangeable terms such
as one finds in language, but a series of levels of different materials.
Green insisted on distinguishing, as Freud did, between the mate rial of
the psychic representations of drives (endosomatic stimulation) and
the preconscious (the representation of things with the representation
of words that corresponds to them). The clearly distinct levels may
not always translate from one to the other. "The proof is that there
are psychosomatic problems that do not have representations."36 And
yet, according to Green, with Lacan we return to a Platonic concep-
tion linking things to a linguistic essence. Where Freud saw hetero-
geneity, Lacan saw homogeneity and went so far as to introduce intel-
lectuals to a clean unconscious. However, according to Green, the
analyst's work is to account for complexity. Eliminating affect in favor
of a purified Signifier explains why Saussure was considered to be the
dawn of modern consciousness on this point. In order to establish
the scientificity of linguistics, Saussure was also obliged to eliminate
the referent, speech, the individual, and the diachrony. There was a
248 Signifying Chains
price to be paid for the birth of modern linguistics; ma king the mean-
ing of language less vital was the parallel to be drawn with Lacanian
psychoanalysis. Lacan used the Saussure an rift to negate affect and to
leave on the sidelines other possible linguistic sources that took affect
more into account: Saussure's disciple Charles Bally, for example.37
In structural linguistics as in Lacanian psychoanalysis, affect was
forced to the sidelines by an ever-increasing formalism. A sense of
mastery could be maintained as long as the field was limited and
homogeneous. And yet, "affect is something over which we really
have no control; it is evanescent, diffuse, slippery, full of disorder and
noise. That is why it seems fundamental to me."38 In his Studies on
Hysteria, Freud emphasized the need to get to the affective origin of
trauma tic memories. Serge Viderman used the metaphor of the crystal
ball so dear to the structuralists and considered psychoanalysis to be
doser to the smoke than to the crystal ball. Negating affect, the barred
objet petit a could simply be the result of an essential aspect of analy-
sis that Lacan needed to use but that he also wanted to guard against,
even going so far as to repress it: transference.
Lacan was so concerned with formalizing and purifying the ana-
lytic situation that he reduced transference as much as he could, for it
created the most aberrant sentiments, and difficult to rationalize. He
banished the term "countertransference" by placing it in the category
of the analyst's desire. "He refused to let us talk about or use the
term." 39 Freud's relative laconism on the subject became a pretext that
made it easier for Lacan to purge the term. Was it also in order to guard
against his personal tendencies toward an overflowing affectivity,
working out his theoretical justification after the fact in order to con-
tain his own affective drives? But although transference was to be con-
tained in an analysis, Lacan recommended it in the teaching of psycho-
analysis. The first yearbook of the cole Freudienne made it quite dear
that teaching psychoanalysis succeeded only when transference oper-
ated. But it changed at this point to become a vector of knowledge free
of all sentiments, referring back to "the subject who is supposed to
know." The Lacanian subject was disincarnated, and the familiar struc-
turalist theme of the negated individual once again made its presence
felt. "The Lacanian operation is double, which is to say perfectiy con-
tradictory. On the one hand, it has to maintain subjectivity, ... and on
the other, to empty this subjectivity of all incarnation, humanization,
affectivity, and so on, in order to turn it into a mathematical object. "40
Signifying Chains 249
Jean Clavreul believed Andr Green's criticism of affect to be un-
founded. Of course, Lacan always refused to take any pleasure in the
delights of intersubjectivity where one hates or loves oneself, but this
did not mean that he was indifferent to affect, since he never stopped
speaking about love, hate, and love-ha te, and he even devoted an en-
tire seminar to anxiety. "But what Lacan showed us was this kind of
dependency of affect with respect to the game of signifiers. "41
Serge Leclaire also remained unconvinced by Andr Green's cri-
tique of Lacan for eliminating affect, which he found too imprecise
and to which he preferred the ide a of economy or of drive-inspired
movement: "1 remember a debate with Green in which 1 had proposed
sorne other formulations, saying that one is affected to a job or re-
ceives ones affectation, but to make it a corner stone, no. "42
And yet, Lacan used affect in the transference that he promoted
among his disciples. He did not hesitate to mix genres in this context,
for whatever he learned through a personal analysis was immediately
reinjected into the organizational circuit of power and knowledge in
the name of the imperative of didactic transmission. Reacting against
this tendency, "the French Psychoanalytic Association is the only asso-
ciation in the world in which there are no didacts, in which analysis is
considered a personal issue. "43
The key institutions Lacan created were interesting for the way
they lent dynamism to analytic know-how, rather than letting it slug-
gishly coagulate into a dogma. Analytic work became a source of re-
newal and debate. The conventions of transmission, supervision, and
multiplication of cartels were so many tools and points of observa-
tion. "1 have said of la passe [transmission] that it was a site for ob-
serving the transferential situation. "44 There were two types of cartels:
work groups with at least three and no more than five people, with ei-
ther an additional person (the "extra one") or the "plus one," so that
each of the individuals in turn became the "plus one" onto which the
transference was made without the presence of any additional person.
Above aH, this made it possible to pursue unfinished analytic work
and to sweep away illusions, but the unconscious returned in another
swing of the pendulum. For Claude Dumzil, Lacan pointed out a dif-
ficult path, the only possible one, which required that the toys used
along the way be destroyed; but this was the only way to keep the pos-
sibilities of analytic research open.
Twenty-seven
Mythology's Earth Is Round
Lacan placed the signifying chain at the level of the unconscious; Lvi-
Strauss situated it in the constant reutilization of myths. This recycling
made it possible to understand the meaning of mythology thraugh the
matrix whose transformations resemble the unconscious operations of
condensation and displacement. Lvi-Strauss saw mythic structure as
the product of a veritable syntax of transformations. In the tetralogy
he devoted to myths, Mythologiques, he pursued his argument, which
diverges from the dominant symbolist theory of the early twentieth
century, symbolist theory, which viewed the mythic story as an object
eut off from its environment and which tried to raot out the occult
meaning of each term of the mythic tale. Lvi-Strauss also tried to get
beyond functionalism, and particularly Malinowski, who tried to take
account of the social function of myths in their specifie context. In-
stead, he integrated the study of myths into a symbolic system, but
emphasized the ide a of system, structure, and construction by cutting
the myth into minimal units, which he called mythemes, and which he
arranged into paradigms. He essentially attempted to decode mythic
discourse internally and, unlike the functionalists, he studied each
myth independently of the conditions of its communication and func-
tion. By studying the full range of myths, he hoped to find their com-
mon structure.
Myths must be understood by juxtaposing their differences and
variations, an approach that would be consonant with Vladimir
25
Earth Is Round 25 l
ProPP's 1928 suggestions. Comparing mythic analysis to Penelope's
tabors, Lvi-Strauss intimated that the work of decoding was infinite,
whereas the conclusions to be drawn were relative: "As happens in the
case of the optical microscope which cannot reveal the ultimate struc-
ture of matter to the observer, we can only choose between various de-
grees of enlargement. "1
The My th as a Mode of Derealization
Lvi-Strauss did not believe that myths were the best material for
working out a comparison between infrastructure and the uncon-
scious psyche, but that they could provide a key to the constants of the
human mind since they, more than any other object, escaped external
determinism and social constraints. Seen this way, myths, even more
than kinship structures, provided a propitious terrain for study and
were a better means of reaching the structures of the human mind:
"They make it possible to discover certain operational modes of the
human mind which have remained so constant over the centuries and
are so widespread over immense geographical distances, that we can
assume them to be fundamental."2 Their meaning would be the prod-
uct of a signifying chain, and, in the manner of Lacan's concept of the
unconscious, the signified, while not exclu de d, slips beneath this chain.
The environment was not really negated in this signifying system, but
could play a local role in the communication of the mythological mes-
sage, and which operated internally in its resistance to reality: "The
syntax of mythology is absolutely free within the confines of its own
rules. Ir is inevitably affected by the geographical and technological
substructure."3 Beyond the diversity of the societies that spawned
them, myths could be taken as a group, a mode of derealization, an
uninterrupted flow of representations to be examined in their internaI
variations, "in the author's fascination with myths which, in the last
resort, all say the same thing."4 They referred to a double unit y: unit y
of the system in which they were integrated and unit y of the message
to which they referred, expressed by the relationship of the message to
itself and to another message, thereby doubling the emphasis.
Myth's Signifying Chain
Lvi-Strauss started working on Amerindian mythologies relatively
early on. In 19 SI, he began teaching in the Fifth Section, where the
theme was religious sciences, at the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes
252 Mythology's Earth Is Round
(EPHE) and his first seminar was entitled the Visit of Souls. "My ideas
on mythology took shape at the cole [Pratique] des Hautes tudes."5
In his I955 article "The structural study of myths,"6 he laid out the
methodological principles according to which the constituent units of
myth are not isolated relations but bundles of relations whose combi-
nation produces meaning: "We have reorganized our myth according
to a time referent of a new nature ... a two-dimensional time referent
whieh is simultaneously diachronic and synchronic."7
Anthropology was no longer to seek an ultimate meaning or the
essence of myth in an invariant, but should defiue each myth by the
accumulation of its versions as constituent parts of the signifying
chain that alone is capable of substituting a beginning of interpreta-
tive order to initial chaos. Repetition revealed the myth's structure
and was a function of one or many codes disclosing the mythic sub-
stance of the message.
The Savage Mind, published in I962, was a prelude or general in-
troduction to the later tetralogy. In this early work, Lvi-Strauss pre-
sented the mythie mind as being as structured as the scientific mind
and every bit as able to think in terms of analogies and generaliza-
tions. He attacked Jung's theory of archetypes and the notion of the
collective unconscious, and laid out his own ambition of sketching the
construction of a "theory of superstructures,"8 based on juxtaposing
many explanatory systems and on reintroducing the individual myth,
as a single element in a process of general transformation, into the sig-
nifying chain of other myths. One element was therefore substituted
for another in the signifying mythological chain and internaI shifts
within the mythic system became necessary. In this way, he adopted
the binary oppositions between marked or unmarked terms, a notion
borrowed from phonology, and above aIl the notion that meaning re-
sults from position, so many analytic tools borrowed from linguistics
and applied to myth. More than ever, linguistics became the heuristic
mode!.
The anthropologist's work, therefore, must consist in "organizing
aIl the known variants of a myth into a set."9 Repetition acquired a
special status since it was essential for revealing the very structure of
the myth in its synchronic and diachronie dimension. "Mythieal
thought is therefore a kind of intellectual bricolage,"lO continually re-
cuperating the de bris of events. Lvi-Strauss attacked the quest for ul-
timate origins because he considered the object of the analysis to be to
define each individual by the ensemble its versions. He
fore opened up a limitless and indefinite quest for the primitive mind,
who se lively imagination organized material in new ways, inverting or
substituting ideas integrated into increasingly complex combinations.
Social reality, however, dropped out of the anthropologist's pur-
view in this game of slipping beneath the signifying chain in which dis-
tinctive oppositions take their place within the structure and establish
the structura lit y of the signifying chain. References to the ecosystem
or to social organization only made sense once they were integrated
into the signifying chain, which, by definition, was constructed at a re-
move from referential reality, which is always held at sorne distance.
Saussure had excluded the subject, similarly eliminated from this
scientific perspective. "The subject is an epistemological obstacle"l1
for Lvi-Strauss. There was no place for a "cogito"-"Myths are
anonymous"12-and Lvi-Strauss pursued his enterprise of decenter-
ing a subject dominated by the mythological universe that speaks in
him but unbeknownst to him. Man is only a pertinent level of analysis
insofar as he reveals the organic constraints inherent in his mode of
thought: "The problem therefore is to define and categorize these
enceintes mentales."13 Although he addressed other objects of study,
Lvi-Strauss had in fact pursued the same goals since his work on kin-
ship. His oeuvre was coherent, straddling the borderline between na-
ture and culture and bent on establishing the natural bases of culture
(and making it possible to transform anthropology into a science of
nature freed from the reins of a philosophy that, at each step along the
way, was being repudiated and treated as an object of derision and of
repeated polemics).
The My th of Reference
Having established the bases of his method, Lvi-Strauss really began
his study of the vast field of Amerindian myths in 1964, with The Raw
and the Cooked. He opened with the Bird-nester's aria, a myth of the
Bororo of central Brazil, which became his myth of reference and the
basis for the study of 187 myths belonging to about twenty tribes,
which together constituted a series that answered the question of the
origin of cooked food, of cuisine.
A son, guilty of incest with his mother, is sent by his father to con-
front the souls of the dead. The son accomplishes his task with the
help of a good grandmother and various animais. Furious that his
254
Earth 1s Round
plans had been foiled, the father invites son ta come with him to
capture the macaws that nest on the face of a cliff. The two men arrive
at the foot of the rock; the father erects a long pole and orders his son
ta climb it. When the son had barely reached the place where the nests
were perche d, the father knocked the pole down, leaving his son to the
vultures. The birds devour the son's buttocks, after which they save
him. Once back in the village, the son takes revenge by transforming
himself into a stag and rushing at the father so furiously that he im-
pales him on his antlers. He then gallops toward a lake and drops his
victim into it; all that remains of the grues orne feast are the bare bones
at the bottom of the lake and the lungs, which float to the surface in
the form of aquatic plants. The son also takes revenge on his father's
wives, including his own mother.
Decoding: Culinary Mediation
Lvi-Strauss's method resembled Freud's interpretation of dreams, iso-
lating each sequence of the myth and comparing it to other sequences
in other myths. And yet, an anthropologist's questions differ funda-
mentally from those of an analyst: the interpretation focused less on
the son's incest than on the oppositions between sensorial qualities,
based on their binary organization. The Bororo were apparently not
interested in guilty incest in this myth or in the veritable guilty party
or the perpetrator of the incest, who appears as the hero of the myth;
the y were interested in the father who wanted to take revenge on his
son and who was mortally punished. The object of the myth, accord-
ing to Lvi-Strauss, lay not in what it recounted explicitly but in the
explanation of the origin of cooked food-even though this theme
was apparently missing-because cooking is the mediating operation
par excellence between heaven and earth and between nature and cul-
ture. Myths about the origins of fire bespeak a double binary opposi-
tion between the raw and the cooked and between the pristine and the
corrupted. The link between raw and cooked has to do with culture,
whereas the link between the raw and the rotten has to do with na-
ture. Fire is an essential mediator for the beginning of cooking and
works in two ways. It unites sun and earth and saves man from what
is rotten, but it also eliminates the risks of a situation that would lead
to a burned world. The basic rule of Lvi-Straussian interpretation
was to focus on the myth's internaI organization and to arrive at para-
digmatic sets based on different mythemes. In order to reveal the
Earth 15 Round 25S
meaning this a deeper rationality had to be
brought to bear, drawn from the se arch for permuting sets, articula-
tions of sign systems manifested in a long mythic series; whence the
long comparative quest to establish a meaningful series.
Taking as starting points observable, empirical categories such as
the cooked, the raw, the humid, the rotten, and the burned, Lvi-
Strauss restored conceptual tools and abstract ideas, behind his ethno-
graphie observations, which elucidated the way primitive societies
think. Although he took ethnographie observation quite seriously,
Lvi-Strauss nonetheless considered theory to be most important.
Discernible qualities of mythic discourse have a logical existence that
reiterates the five senses in five fundamental codes. The mythic mind
was structured like a language in a way that recalled Lacan's defini-
tion of the unconscious: "By ta king its raw material from nature,
mythic thought proceeds in the same way as language which chooses
phonemes from among the natural sounds."14
The Infra- and the Supraculinary
ln From Honey to Ashes, the second volume of his Mythologiques,
Lvi-Strauss moved from the oppositions between material qualities
to oppositions between full and empty, container and contained, inter-
naI and external. The analysis became more complex as the less obvi-
ous myths were discussed, for while they said the same thing, they me-
andered and took more detours on their way to saying it. These myths
reflected a new dimension of a culture's transition to society: from the
paleolithic economy to a neolithic economy, from the hunter-gatherer
society to an agrarian society. Lvi-Strauss explored the same realm of
cooking with honey and tobacco, but in a roundabout way, for they
appear, "each in their different ways, culinary paradoxes."15 The Indi-
ans considered honey to be a ready-made food, a given of nature,
ma king it a natural infraculinary object. The symbol of a descent to-
ward nature, honey could be good but it could also be poisonous.
Ambiguous, therefore, it engendered risks illustrated by the "girl who
was crazy about honey" myth with its reference to the seduction of
the natural order over human culture and the danger of its dissolution
in the natural order. Unlike honey, tobacco is a supraculinary product,
whose function is to restore the relationship between the natural and
cultural orders that honey can undo. As the smoke rises sinuously,
tobacco restores what honey undid by rising toward culture. Lvi-
2)6 Earth 15 Round
Strauss made a second shift in his distinction between a
of immediately obvious images and a new category of the imagination
that came iuto play and required an image that symbolism did not
offer: "We see aH the important mythic scenes backwards, a little as if
we had ta decipher the subject of a tapestry from the interwoven
threads which we see on the back."16
Human life had ta find its precarious balance somewhere between
the two perils of a natureless culture and a cultureless nature, each of
which posed the threat of famine. Setting the nature/culture relation-
ship, initially considered as a fact and then as the arder of things in
The Elementary Structures of Kinship, into a dialectical relationship
was here perceived as a myth culture needed in order ta create itself
with and against nature. "1 have changed rather a lot since then
through the influence of the progress made in animal psychology and
the tendency ta make ideas of a cultural nature intervene in the sci-
ences of nature."17 The nature/culture opposition shifted; from an im-
manent property of reality, it became an antinomy belonging to the
human mind. "Opposition is not objective; it is men who need to for-
mulate it. "18 The ethnographic context was no more than a frame, the
beginning of a reflection that had to free itself from the popular cus-
toms, beliefs, and rituals whence myth arises, in order to reach a
higher level of abstraction so that "the context of each myth consists
more and more of other myths. "19 Honey and tobacco, unlike the sta-
tic ideas of the raw and the cooked, represent dynamic imbalances:
they are temporal rather than spatial oppositions.
The Culinary Moral
With his third volume, The Origin of Table Manners, Lvi-Strauss
cast his net more widely than the geographical zone that until then
had been limited ta South America; he now included North American
1ndians in an even more complex comparative study of myths that
studied the opposition between the different ways according to which
the terms were used, whether together or separately. Culinary media-
tion continued to be the general focus, but in this volume morality
made its appearance as a new and central object. After the material
and formallevels, this was the third level involved in describing what
was now a logic of propositions.
The ordered world is also a threatened world; it suffices to dis-
place the boundaries or transgress the safe distances. Every infraction
Mythology's Earth Is Round 257
can crea te disturbances in any universe, be it natural or cultural; ap-
propriate customs therefore play a regulatory role. Lvi-Strauss con-
trasted the ethics of the West, where individuals respect hygiene in
or der to protect themselves, and the et hic of societies called primitive,
where hygiene is respected so that others are not victims of one's own
impurity. The "savage," unlike the "civilized man," shows a greater
humility toward the order of the world. After the origins of cooking
and its derivations, therefore, Lvi-Strauss addressed the different
ways of preparing and eating dishes. Each stage along the way iIlus-
trates the fact that "culture is not defined as a realm but as an opera-
tion, one that makes of Nature a veritable universe .... This operation
is a mediation that is both separated and united."20 Nature was
therefore constantly acculturated and culture, conversely, naturalized;
mythic thinking operated in both directions in this instance.
The Tetralogy
The Naked Man came out in 1971, the fourth and last volume of the
remarkable tetralogy and the end of a seven-year-Iong effort. The
press applauded the event. Le Monde published a complete dossier in-
cluding an interview with Lvi-Strauss by Raymond Bellour, articles
by Hlne Cixous ("Le regard d'un crivain"), by historians Marcel
Dtienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant ("Eurydice, la femme-abeille"), and
by the linguist-musicologist Nicolas Ruwet ("Qui a hrit?"), as weIl
as an article by Catherine Backs-Clment.
Even television viewers could watch what Le Figaro called a "seri-
ous Sunday": Lvi-Strauss was the gue st speaker. He decided to show
off the Laboratory of Social Anthropology he had created, showing
viewers bits of the fieldwork of Franois Zonabend, Pierre Clastres,
Maurice Godelier, and Franoise Izard. The Naked Man as weIl as
the entire Mythologiques were unanimously hailed, and Lvi-Strauss
thus joined Wagner in the register of the social sciences.
The fourth volume at first seemed out of joint with the first three,
for it was no longer a question of cooking or of culinary metaphors.
But in fact the four volumes were linked by a profound unit y, and it
was clear for Lvi-Strauss from the outset that if the first term of the
Mythologiques was raw, the la st would be nude, for at the end of this
mythological journey, he found the equivalent of the Boraro myth of
reference. Moreover, "if the transition from nature to culture, for the
Indians of tropical America, is symbolized by the transition from the
raw to the cooked, for the Indians of North America, this transition is
symbolized by the invention of clothing, ornaments, costumes, and,
beyond aH this, by the invention of commercial exchanges. "21 The
South American hero reduced to the state of nature-or to the state of
rawness-had his parallel in the North American hero reduced to the
state of nudity.
The Naked Man revisited the determinisms of the economic infra-
structure and the tetralogy reached its apex: "This rounds off my
analyses of a vast system, the invariant elements of which can consis-
tently be represented in the form of a conflict between the earth and
the sky for the possession of fire. "22 The decisive and founding ele-
ment was therefore a mortal hero's capture of fire from the heavens,
willingly or not. The earth oven appears as effectuating the double
conquest of fire and of earth by the culinary art of cooking. A verita-
ble pivot of these mythic tales, the earth oven plays the role of a for-
maI pattern. "Consequently, at this stage, the image of the earth oven
as a supreme manifestation of culinary art ... marks the transition
from the state of nature to the constitution of society. "23
In the finale of The Naked Man, which was like a contrapuntal re-
sponse to the overture of the first volume, Lvi-Strauss reminded the
reader of the methodological necessity of effacing the subject in order
to reach mythic structure. And, by attacking the subject, he once again
took up the polemic he had never really ceased waging against the pre-
tensions of philosophie discourse. Lvi-Strauss answered those critics
who accused him of dessicating and impoverishing the human uni-
verse with his formaI reductions of messages shaped by the societies
he studied:
However, for too long now philosophy has succeeded in locking the
social sciences inside a closed circle by not allowing them to envisage
any other object of study for the consciousness than consciousness
itself. . . . what structura li sm tries to accomplish in the wake of
Rousseau, Marx, Durkheim, Saussure and Freud, is to reveal to con-
sciousness an abject ather than itself; and therefore, to put it in the
same position with regard to human phenomena as that of the nat-
ural and physical sciences, and which, as they have demonstrated,
alone allows knowledge to develop.24
This criticism also sought to achieve the status of a natural science
able to discern the conditions governing the operations of the human
mind through anthropology, among other things. The internaI tension
Earth 15 Round 259
between nature and culture was reiterated in Lv-Strauss's own
course, between his own ambition to read the intangible laws of the
neuronal nature of the human brain and his undying desire to be a
creator who had chosen the social sciences as a realm of study in
which to create something artistic.
This tension is palpable in the very composition of Mythologiques,
conceived on the basis of Wagner's tetralogy.25 The Raw and the
Cooked dealt with the origins of cooking and once again repeated the
theme of the genesis of the world, of the Law, and of Das Rheingold.
The Origin of Table Manners corresponded to Die Walkre in its
treatment of kinship and of incest and how to avoid it. From Honey
to Ashes corresponded to Siegfried as an acculturation of savagery.
The Naked Man, of course, corresponded to Die Gotterdammerung,
a return to origins after the disappearance of the system constructed
to reach the finale. The musical analogy is present from the definition
of the project to study myths in "La structure des mythes," where
Lvi-Strauss compared the mythological object to a musical score that
should be read vertically and horizontally. The Raw and the Cooked
was dedicated to music and took the figure of a fugue. The musical
reference was even more explicit in The Naked Man: "1 have tried to
construct with meanings a composition comparable to those that
music crea tes with sounds. "26
Music and mythology in Lvi-Strauss mirrored one other, from
the invention of the fugue whose composition was reflected in the
myth. "With the death of myth, music becomes mythical in the same
way as works of art."27 And yet, the scientific if not scientistic per-
spective of the program of structural anthropology was constantly
repeated with greater optimism about its powers of analysis: "struc-
turalism offers the social sciences an epistemological mode! incompa-
rably more powerful than those they previously had at their dis-
posaI. "28 Philosophy was the obvious target for it had always given
priority to the subject, "that unbearably spoilt child who has occupied
the philosophical scene for too long now."29
Naturalist Structuralism
If Lvi-Strauss rediscovered man, it was as human nature. In The
Naked Man, he used his research on vision and on the cerebral cortex,
which demonstrated that the data of perception are repeated as binary
oppositions. Binarism, therefore, became not simply an externallogi-
260 M",'h"il",,,,,'o Earth Is Round
cal apparatus slapped on reality, but a reproduction of corporal oper-
ations, "and if it constitutes an immediate property of our nervous
and cerebral organization, we should not be surprised that it also sup-
plies the best common denominator for making human experiences
coincide that might seem superficiaIly ta be utterly different."30
Lvi-Strauss hoped to awaken on Judgment Day to find himself
among the natural sciences. But the price for such an accession would
be the elimination of aIl narrative content from the signifying chain of
myths and, like phonemes, the reduction of mythemes to oppositional
values. Scientific conque st would then be based on compatability or
incompatability but it led Lvi-Strauss to a "logical formalism"31 that
contributed to setting mythemes into relationship with each other
within a myth. Formalism established the syntagmatic link and the su-
perposition of mythemes taken from different myths, which constitute
paradigmatic groups. The mind reiterated nature because it was na-
ture; their complete isomorphism blurred the tradition al lines of de-
marcation between these two orders of reality. In this respect, we can
talk about Lvi-Strauss's radical materialism. Indeed, he remarked
that if he were asked about the signifier to which the signifying chains
ultimately lead, "the only reply to emerge from this study is that
myths signify the mind that evolves them by making use of the world
of which it is itself a part. "32
Causality was clearly at work in these mythological links, but it
was neuronal and implied, by definition, that the semantic content of
mythological propositions be kept at a complete distance from their
social referent. Not that this referent was absent from Mythologiques,
of course, because these volumes include aIl the available ethno-
graphic information that Lvi-Strauss had, but it was only as per-
tinent as a simple decor, the basic material that was used without
determining the mode of thinking. Because the logical constraints
governing mythic utterance could only be seized at the grammatical
level, this was the only pertinent level for mythic necessity, and the
only possible means of reaching the enceintes mentales. Through the
symptom that it represented, grammar revealed that which it avoided
saying. A myth's truth consists "in logical relations which are devoid
of content or, more precisely, whose invariant properties exhaust
their operative value."33 Lvi-Strauss could thus avoid the specular
relationship between social reality and myths. He escaped-and he
was right to do so-the mechanisms of reflective thought; but he re-
Mythology's Earth Is Round 26I
placed them with an internaI mythological logic obeying only neu-
ronal constraints.
The necessary autonomy of culture from society was pushed to
the limits of its logic, until it became entirely independent. The phono-
logical model became the theoretical basis for extracting social con-
tent, for favoring the code over the message. "The proposition accord-
ing to which the elements that form the myth lack independent
meaning follows from the application of phonological methods to
myths. In fact, the absence of meaning is a characteristic of pho-
nemes."34 His analogy between mythology and music lent support to
Lvi-Strauss's ambition to have a theory that is constructed, detached
from an object. The result was a fascinating monument-Lvi-
Strauss's work itself-but its cost was the loss or abandonment of the
principles of any hermeneutic perspective. Logical reductionism re-
quired eliminating affect from the signifying chain, just as it had for
Lacan. Thus, the sexuality of Amerindian societies was put to every-
thing except sensual ends. It answered a "dialectic of opening and
shutting,"35 and therefore opened onto a desexualized world where
sexuality was everywhere. The parallels between Lvi-Strauss's and
Lacan's structural procedures were once again clear, and made patent
by Lacan's similar affirmation that "sexual relationships do not
exist." The subject was negated, an insubstantial site, delivered up to
the anonymous thinking unfolding within it. This mind could be bet-
ter understood so long as the subject "dissolve, like a spider, in the
threads of its structural web."36
A Machine That Abolishes Time
History is the other important omission in the Mythologiques. Lvi-
Strauss saw a particular relationship between myths and temporality.
Mythology and music, "indeed, are instruments for the obliteration of
time."37 The object Lvi-Strauss chose to use in his polemical demon-
stration with philosophers was designed to unseat the priority, which
he considered exorbitant, that they gave to historicity. And yet history
was not absent much and we have already seen that Lvi-Strauss criti-
cized functionalism for ignoring it, but it belonged to the realm of
contingency.
History's place was "the place that rightfully belongs to that irre-
ducible contingency .... To be valid, any investigation which is en-
tirely aimed at elucidating structures must begin by submitting to the
262 Mythology's Earth Is Round
powerful inanity of events."38 Clio was repressed, the first step in a
scientific procedure; the dichotomies Lvi-Strauss established between
necessity and contingency, nature and culture, form and content, all
align structure and science, the event and contingency. Relegating his-
toricity in this way did not belong to cold societies alone: Lvi-Strauss
saw the "Greek miracle" (the transition from mythic to philosophical
thinking) as a simple historical occurrence that meant nothing more
than that it happened there and could just as weU have taken place
elsewhere since no necessity made it inevitable. At the end of his
mythological adventure, Lvi-Strauss radicalized his position. The
temporal order that myths reveal was not only time rediscovered, like
sorne Proustian experience, it was "abolished."39 "If taken to its logi-
cal conclusion, the analysis of myths reaches a point where history
cancels itself out."40
We once again find that importance ascribed to presence that so
characterized the structural paradigm, but this is a present that
stretches out and dissolving past and future in a temporality nailed to
the ground, static, a mind that refutes historical teleology as much as
the ide a of fleeing time in a reconciled present. Lvi-Strauss borrowed
this ide a of "man liberated from the temporal order" from Marcel
Proust.
41
Both this liberation and refutation of history led him to the
point of "reinstalling a philosophy of presence."42 This presence was
nothing other than the presence of nature that had forced out history,
presence of the mind and of the universal genotypes that functioned
like a binary machine; aU of this a reinstatement in the living and pres-
ent material of the human mind.
The Dusk of Men
The end of history sounds a crepuscular note in the finale of The
Naked Man. At the culmination of this great work elucidating the
mythological universe, the reader perceives the historical pessimism
that, from the beginning of the undertaking, has inhabited Lvi-
Strauss. Everything that had been so inteUigently studied becomes
nothing more than the ephemeral flowering of a world fated to meet
its end, its ineluctable death. Mythologiques ends with the dusk of
men, and echoes Wagner. These myths let the complex edifice appear
as it "slowly expands to its full extent, then crumbles and fades away
in the distance, as if it had never existed. "43
Time unfolds in the very logic of its disappearance, inscribing its
Earth 1s Round 263
own abolition in a dusky Lvi-Strauss his initial con-
ception of an anthropology as entropy: "The lyrism of death is the
most beautiful, but also the most fearsome. "44 Having been revealed
to itself at the price of a very complex conceptual unfolding, structure
has no message to communicate to us other than that we must die:
"This gigantic effort has therefore met its vain limits: it opens on
NOTHING, which is the last ward, and not accidentally so, of this
sumptuous 'finale.' "45 The polemic with philosophers, and with Sartre
in particular, and the teasing and distant tone Lvi-Strauss sounded
with respect to philosophy in general, should not, however, lead us to
imagine that philosophy was absent in him.
Lvi-Strauss never stopped thinking of structuralism not only as a
scientific method or a new sensibility that occasionally finds echoes in
literary, pictarial, and musical creation, but also as a philosophy of
the end of history, henceforth foreclosed. According to Jean-Marie
Domenach, Lvi-Strauss "contributes to the destruction by killing,
with his knowledge, this cultural vivacity, life, and vigor. The murder-
ous side of this philosophy is atrocious .... Rather than finishing with
hope or a renaissance, he ends by what 1 had called a requiem or a de
profundis. The only thing that remains is to let writing sink into
entropy. "46
A sign of the degradation of the ideologies that inspired it, struc-
turalism was the oudine of a totalizing ideology in the making, an ex-
pression of synthetic thinking as well as its destruction in a vertiginous
and deathly spiral.
Twenty-eight
Africa: The Continental Divide
of Structuralism
Lvi-Strauss, and numerous anthropologists after him, traveled all
over the American continent using the structural grid in or der to bet-
ter grasp the unconscious dimension of the social practices of native
populations. Those who turned their sights toward Africa held the
structural paradigm at a greater distance because it did not adequately
describe societies that had been colonized. Not only did researchers
need to work on populations larger th an those small Indian communi-
ties that had escaped genocide, but the interweaving of beliefs and
local cu st oms together with colonial institutions also led to phenom-
ena of acculturation that made it rather difficult to reduce African so-
cial organization to binary oppositions; geographically, the area to
which the structural paradigm could be applied was therefore rather
limited. But there were structuralist Africanist anthropologists, and at
the risk of being quite reductive, we might imagine a binary opposi-
tion between Lvi-Straussian Americanists and Africanist disciples of
Georges Balandier.
Georges Balandier: Africanism
Georges Balandier trained a whole generation of ethnologists as
Africanists. He had been trained in ethnology by Michel Leiris, who
became his model, and belonged to the small circle of sociologists in-
cluding Jean Duvignaud and Roger Bastide who met on the rue
Vaneau at Georges Gurvitch's place. Balandier's conception of doing
Africa: The Continental Divide of Structuralism 265
sociology in was informed by his militant anticolonialism
and his work quite naturally addressed the political dimension of life.
A victim of structuralism, Balandier paid quite dearly for his criricism
of the dominant paradigm of the sixties. "1 paid for it at the Collge
de France. Claude Lvi-Strauss did aIl he could to find candidates who
were the equivalent of what 1 could propose."1
And yet, Balandier and Lvi-Strauss had been close friends for six
or seven years, until Lvi-Strauss was elected to the Collge de France.
Despite their different methodologies and fields, they had had com-
mon activities. Both were involved, for ex ample, in the International
Council for Social Sciences, affiliated with UNESCO after 1954, and
of which Lvi-Strauss was secretary-general and Georges Balandier
the head of a research office. Their falling out was apparently due to a
bad pun that reached Lvi-Strauss and for which he was unforgiving.
"Everything degenerated because of a trivial incident, a sort of gossipy
story."2 What should not have been an definitive rupture took on the
tone of a polemic as early as 1962 with a vigorous critique of Georges
Balandier's inconsistency in the organization of his propositions.
3
The
rift was never repaired; beyond the peripeteias and the ruffling of sen-
sibilities, it symbolized two divergent points of view.
Georges Balandier was, in fact, deeply marked by postwar existen-
tialism. A member of the Resistance during the Second World War, he
had been associated with Michel Leiris and the Muse de l'Homme,
and Leiris had introduced him to Sartre's entourage at Les Temps
modernes. Balandier was not involved, however, in the great postwar
debates because he left to do anthropology in black Africa in 1946. In
Dakar, he became the editor in chief of Prsence africaine and actively
participated in decolonialization in Africa, during which he became
"an active agent close to certain African leaders."4
What struck Balandier first when he went to Africa was poverty.
He quickly looked to politics as a means of emancipation and came to
believe that politics took precedence; he diverged from the structural-
ists. Balandier participated in history in the making and saw Lopold
Sdar Senghor, Skou Tour, Houphout-Boigny, and Nkrumah prac-
tically on a daily basis. He discovered the figure of the other, of alter-
ity, and of negritude as a culture that was different and was to be rec-
ognized as such, but at the same time, he immediately felt that he was
participating in a moment in history that was coming to a boil not
only because of growing hostility to the colonial framework and the
266 Africa: The Continental Divide of Structuralism
desire for political emancipation, but also because of the historical de-
mand of these peoples aspiring to reestablish links with their own pre-
colonial history.
Africa was changing profoundly. Since the Bandung Conference
on Asian and African nonaUiance, the continent was rising up and the
confrontations were increasing even as populations were growing
poorer and shantytowns were spreading. Parties and unions were
emerging in a world that until then had been organized by clans. The
society Georges Balandier was discovering was therefore the very op-
posite of a society frozen in time: "1 can in no way accept the ide a that
in these societies myth shapes everything and history is absent, in the
name of a notion in which everything is a system of relations and
codes, with a logic of possible permutations that enables the society to
maintain an equilibrium."5 To the contrary, Balandier discovered the
movement and productivity of chaos, the indissociability of synchrony
and diachrony. "1 am learning that societies are not produced, they
produce themselves; none escapes history even if history is made dif-
ferently and even if there are multiple histories."6
Once he was back in France, Balandier joined the Sixth Section of
the EPHE, where, in 1954, he set up a program on sociological studies
in black Africa. He also became a member of the cabinet of the secre-
tary of state, Henri Longchambon, in Mends-France's government,
where he was responsible for the social sciences. In 1961, Jean Hyp-
polite asked him to teach a seminar at the cole Normale Suprieure
at the rue d'Ulm, which he did until 1966. "Everything was bathing in
structuralism, which had borne many things along with it in its
course."7 It was in this sanctuary of triumphant structuralism during
the sixties that Balandier successfully attracted sorne geographers,
historians, philosophers, and students of literature to anthropology,
among them Jean-Nol Jeanneney, Rgis Debray, Emmanuel Terray,
and Marc Aug.
A whole generation that had protested against the Aigerian war
was drawn to Georges Balandier, whose charisma was linked to his
ability to fit his theoretical practice and the disturbances of history
and to avoid the ivory tower isolation of a scientific laboratory. He
gave his first class at the Sorbonne in the faU of 1962. "The African-
ism about which 1 lectured didn't concede anything to the structuralist
mode."8 ln 1967, he published Political Anthropology9 and his analy-
sis looked beyond the classical vision of power as the simple manage-
Africa: The Continental Divide of Structuralism 267
ment of repressive to include the imaginary and the symbolic.
In this respect, his work in Africa was consonant with Marc Bloch's
The Thaumaturge Kings, where the analysis focused on the trans-
formed body of the king incarnating political power. Balandier em-
phasized politics and history, which structura li sm had largely ignored.
Indeed, having taken shape at a remove from things political, French
structural anthropology had a particular blind spot for politics. Ba-
landier therefore read the work of Anglo-Saxon Africanists starting
in 1945: Meyer Fortes, John Middleton, Siegfried-Frederick Nadel,
Michael-Garfield Smith, David Apter, J. Beattie.
He adopted Edmund Leach's criticisms of applying the structuralist
approach to the study of political systems. In his work on the political
organization of the Kachin, Edmund Leach had noticed an oscillation
between the aristocratic and democratic poles that required constant
variation and fine-tuning of the sociopolitical structure. "The rigorous-
ness of many structuralist analyses is superficial and deceptive,"lO be-
cause they are based on unreal situations of equilibrium. Although Ba-
landier's thinking diverged from Lvi-Strauss's, he nonetheless agreed
with Lvi-Strauss's criticism of Western ethnocentrism and its tendency
to define politics in such a limited way that it was reduced to little more
than an apparatus of the state. As early as 1940, Meyer Fortes and Ed-
ward Evans-Pritchard had established a dichotomy between stateless
segmentary systems and state systems, the former among the Nuer of
the Sudan, and the latter among the Tallensi of Ghana.
Il
But Balandier went even further in attacking a typology based
solely on the princip le of coercion. Instead, he proposed a synthetic
approach to politics that included social stratification and kinship
laws. He rejected the structuralist postulate of isolating variables in
order to study their inner logic, preferring a total approach mixing the
real, the imaginary, and the symbolic in a dynamic equilibrium that
was, by definition, unstable. This perspective accorded a place and an
importance to such notions as open strategies, thereby giving its au-
thors some latitude in their choices; it could include the relationship
between kinship and power through the interplay of marriage al-
liances conceived of as so many pieces of the political network.
Balandier took issue with anthropology's assertion that politics
began where kinship ended. Such an approach let historical problema-
tizing into the picture: "Anthropology, political sociology, and history
have been led to coalesce their efforts."12 It became possible to dia-
268 Africa: The Continental Divide of Structuralism
logue with historians. This dialogue occurred in 1968, when a
sion show called the Lundis de l'histoire presented Balandier's work
and Balandier, along with Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Vidal-Naquet.
Balandier's synthetic and diachronie approach in fact resembled the
work of both of these medievalists, in which certain sources, like the
epics, de scribe wars among pretenders to the crown as so many politi-
cal issues. Balandier's definition of politics was therefore quite broad.
"Politics as a means of ensuring the government of men must be dis-
tinguished from politics as a strategie me ans that men use. We too
often tend to mix up these two levels."13
The Heirs of Balandier and Lvi-Strauss
It would be pointless to try to compare the respective impact and in-
fluence of Lvi-Strauss and Balandier. Clearly, the structuralist vogue
carried Lvi-Strauss to his glory and left Balandier in the shadows,
relatively speaking. And yet, historie al injustice has to be rectified, for
Balandier's influence was as important as it was on occasion mis-
understood. Balandier launched quite a number of studies and careers
and if Lvi-Strauss had his progeny, many of Balandier's, and particu-
larly the Africanists among them, consider themselves to have a dou-
ble paternity.
Marc Aug, the current president of the EHESS, was one such ex-
ample. In 1960, while preparing his agrgation in literature at the
cole Normale Suprieure and unsure about the direction to take
since he was attracted equally to philosophy and literature, he was
going to both Lvi-Strauss's and Balandier's classes. He thought that
ethnology might offer a middle road that could reconcile his taste for
writing and his desire for a more speculative form of thinking. The op-
portunity presented itself, thanks to Balandier, to enter the ORSTOM,
and in 1965 Aug left for the Ivory Coast. "It was my friend Pierre
Bonnaf who suggested that 1 go and see Balandier, who was very
attentive, and seductive because of his unusual background. "14 Aug
received his training as an Africanist in Balandier's seminar but he did
not sense a significant opposition between Balandier's perspective and
Lvi-Straussian structuralism. "It's true that in those years, a critique
of Lvi-Strauss was taking shape in Balandier's seminars, but 1 was
too much of a novice to attach any fundamental importance to it."15
ln the Ivory Coast, Marc Aug's sensibilities to colonialism and
neocolonialism, which had profoundly affected the lagoon popula-
Africa: The Continental Divide of Structuralism 269
tians of the Alladian, were sharpened. In this respect, was doser ta
Balandier in cansidering history had a certain place in equa-
tion, but his first object of study placed him more in Lvi-Strauss's
camp since he was working on a monograph trying to recover the
logic of kinship ties among the Alladian. His first concern, upon arriv-
ing in Africa, was to look for kinship rules. This
would have reminded even the most myopie that transformation sys-
tems do indeed exist .... There are many variants, but they are ail
based on the common models of reference for occupying space, in
the modes of residing in that space, and in the way power is trans-
mitted. The West has the most purely lineal societies without any
central authority, and, at the other end of the spectrum, a sovereign
ruled at the head of an autonomous political power; ail the inter-
mediary systems can be found between the rwO.
16
But his thinking quickly evolved and he worked increasingly on power
and on the ties between politics and religion, themes that were doser
to Balandier's work, although he never questioned the contribution of
structuralism.
Dan Sperber, similarly, was trained by both Balandier and Lvi-
Strauss and went from Balandier to Lvi-Strauss. A third-world mili-
tant who translated one of the earliest of Nelson Mandela's texts in
1963, Sperber turned to anthropology as a complementary science
that would help him better understand the cultural dimension of polit-
ical problems in the third world. "1 was therefore first at Balandier's
seminars at a time when the structuralists, or Lvi-Strauss, were no
longer part of my thinking." 17 He finished his Licence in 1962, and
then signed up with Balandier to do his troisime cycle. 18
Dan Sperber left for England in 1963 to work with Rodney Need-
ham, who initiated him, in fact, to structuralism. "Needham, on the
one hand, and the empirical atmosphere in England, on the other, gen-
erated a very lively interest in structuralism." 19 Dan Sperber gave
many presentations in Britain in which he defended and explained
structura li sm.
l remember a talk l gave in a college at Oxford in which l defended
the structuralism of the moment when General de Gaulle had re-
fused to let the English into the Common Market. One of the profes-
sors said then, "Sperber does intellectually what de Gaulle did to us
politically." At the time, l seemed to be defending something rather
exotic and not altogether trusrworthy.20
270 Africa: The Continental Divide of Structuralism
It was only upon his return to France in 1965 that Dan Sperber,
who had joined the CNRS, started going to Lvi-Strauss's seminars on
a regular basis. Today, he says that anthropology interested him at the
time because of Lvi-Strauss, "not in the sense of simply being in
agreement with him or sharing his convictions, but because thanks to
him it was possible to raise general questions in a scientific way. "21
Africanism Resists Structuralism
But many Africanists remained skeptical about structuralism. Claude
Meillassoux, for example, had a very particular background that sug-
gested once again how much the choice to be a professional anthro-
pologist resulted from chance and opportunity more than any clear-
eut university trajectory. Meillassoux was an untraditional Africanist
whose training and activities were quite eccentric with respect to the
profession of ethnology. After studying law and political science, he
left for the University of Michigan's School of Business in 1948. Upon
his return, he ran his family's textile business in Roubaix, in the north
of France, but he found administration unsatisfying and left again for
the United States, recruited by the commissariat la productivit.
Back in France once again, he became the intermediary between
American experts and French businesses. In the early fifties, Meillas-
soux became a militant in the new, independent left and joined the
CAGI (Centre d'Action de la Gauche Indpendante [Center for action
by the independent left]), along with Claude Bourdet, Pierre Naville,
and Daniel Gurin. He was looking for a job and Balandier needed
someone to inventory the works by British functionalists on black
Africa. "That was how 1 did my ethnology classes. 1 had an office on
the Avenue Ina. 1 wrote my index cards and had endless discussions
with Georges Balandier. "22 Having been trained, after having taken
Balandier's courses, Meillassoux joined a research project in the Ivory
Coast in 1956 where he was to be responsible for the economic aspect
of things.
ln the sixties, after a seminar on trade and markets in West Africa
organized by the Institutional African Institute (lAI), Meillassoux
organized an international colloquium to which he invited, among
others, Emmanuel Terray, Michel Izard, and Marc Piot. The collo-
quium was supposed to take place in the Ivory Coast but Terray was
persona non grata there and Meillassoux, who did not want to give in
to the government's orders, held it in Sierra Leone. After this, Michel
Africa: The Continental Divide of Structuralism 27 l
Izard suggested that Meillassoux give an unofficial seminar on Africa
that would be called the Meillassoux seminar. By its very existence, it
demonstrated that even theoretical splits could take second stage to
more empirical considerations about ethnographic material collected
through fieldwork. However, in keeping with Balandier's perspective,
Meillassoux always remained very critical of structuralism as it tri-
umphed in anthropology: "Primitive 60cieties were used for all pur-
poses and structuralism used them as material to push its ideas on the
way the mind structures the rest, whereas this is, in a word, the way
computers think. Binary thinking is bureaucratic thinking. "23
ln Meillassoux's view, Lvi-Straussian structuralism worked by
analogy. For want of being able to construct its own problematic,
Lvi-Strauss used different sciences, one after the other, to support his
theses, and his disciples were always tripping over these trying to keep
up with their master's frenetic movement, which was always one step
ahead of them. "1 went to Lvi-Strauss's courses at the Collge de
France. He was a king who opened a door; the moment it seemed that
the philosophers' stone had been found, he shut the do or again and
took up another subject in the next seminar. Still, it was fascinating
because he came up with intellectually stimulating comparisons and
combinations. "24
Jean Duvignaud was also disappointed by the structuralist model
in North Africa because it did not account for the complexity and
changes in the kinship systems there: "My work in Chebika, in Tunisia,
led me to take my distance from structuralism. "25 His work of four
years was published in 1968.26 Bertucelli used it as the basis for a
very beautiful film called Ramparts of ClayP Lvi-Strauss's review
L'Homme criticized Duvignaud for having abandoned kinship struc-
tures, but it was not for not having tried to apply the analytic categories
that Lvi-Strauss had developed. Duvignaud had not been able to apply
them successfuUy. Close to the group of Gurvitchian sociologists and to
Balandier, he was also very critical of the ambitions of the structuralist
paradigm, which he considered to be a renewal of the Comtian posi-
tivist legacy, which culminated "in a sort of ontology of the visible."28
The structuralist a priori met functionalism in its presupposition of a
positivity of social coherence and through its holistic view of the social
realm: "It is not at aU clear that contestations, deviations, forms of sub-
version, revoIt, eccentricities, atypicality, and figures of anomie can be
integrated into the whole and are in the service of the whole. "29
272 Africa: The Continental Divide of Structuralism
ln the center of Chebika, Jean Duvignaud discovered a place that
corresponded to no logic or rule, an empty zone where people wan-
dered and waited; it challenged aIl reductionism and stymied the self-
enclosed structural grid. The phenomenological perspective remained
valid, according to Duvignaud, in its desire to define consciousness as
the consciousness of something, recalling the hidden dimension of life
behind formaI logic. Without refuting the validity of sorne points of
the structuralist method, Duvignaud suggested that this epistemology
should include that part of collective experience that resists any par-
ticular determinism.
Structura li sm Regains Africa
There was, therefore, an implicit spatial division of labor. When
Michel Izard joined the CNRS and the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie
Sociale
30
in 1963, he was more of an exception as an Africanist.
Africanism was represented by Balandier on the one hand, and on the
other by the sector of studies of systems of thought in black Africa
established in the wake of Marcel Griaule by Germaine Dieterlin and
taken up again by Michel Cartry. But structuralism's success was such
that in 1968 the situation changed and Africanism managed to pene-
trate Lvi-Strauss's Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, "which must
be tied to the entrance of Tarditz, who was probably the first Africanist
close to Lvi-Strauss."31 Including Africanists in the laboratory meant
that Africa and structuralism were not incompatible, as a certain
geopolitics of research might have suggested. The fact that today an
Africanist, Franoise Hritier-Aug, heads the laboratory is quite sig-
nificant in this respect. There are many homes in the African house,
and for Jean Pouillon, who was also an Mricanist in the lineage of
Lvi-Strauss, "Balandier's Africa is not at aIl the one 1 know."32 More-
over, the fact that many Marxist Africanist anthropologists, among
them Emmanuel Terray and Maurice Godelier, were interested in struc-
turalism would increase this current's influence throughout the sixties.
It is not at aIl clear that Africa defined the limits of structuralism,
but it certainly suggested an analysis that was more attuned to politi-
cal phenomena and to acknowledging social dynamics and history,
perspectives that remained marginal if not repressed, in the structural-
ist current.
Twenty-nine
Reviews
One measure of the exceptional intellectual activity of the period was
the vitality, number, and influence of the new reviews, which provided
both a place for a special sociability and the perfect framework
for valorizing the strength of the structuralist paradigm. These inter-
disciplinary reviews could circumvent traditional institutions, and
provide a forum for exchange from which concentric circles of influ-
ence spread outward.
A review's inherent structural flexibility, its capacity to respond
quickly to the most recent theoretical debates and battles, as well as to
reflect the conceptual progress in thinking about these problems, en-
abled the various reviews to augment the structuralist successes well be-
fore these made the daily or weekly press. Those that were to transform
readers in the social sciences into crowds of enthusiastic structuralists
addressed a public of disciplinary specialists, or touted themselves as
the embodiment of interdisciplinarity, or finally, were linked with a par-
ticular political ideology, which felt troubled by the structuralist phe-
nomenon and invited a debate with its representatives. We have already
mentioned the mst issue of Lacan's review, La Psychanalyse, which
came out in 1956 and carried the famous Rome Report, a text by
Heidegger, and an important article by mile Benveniste on the func-
tion of language in Freud's understanding of the unconscious.
The publication of philosophical and linguistic theses in a psycho-
analytic review clearly indicated the intentions of the Socit Franaise
273
274 Reviews
de Psychanalyse: "If dwells in language, it must be
receptive ta dialogue. Psychoanalytic receptivity to the human
sciences is a gesture that puts an end ta psychoanalysis's long-held
position of extraterritoriality. "1 La Psychanalyse therefore had no in-
tention of strictly limiting itself either to a well-established Freudian-
ism or ta the internaI debates of the analytic corporation, but rather
planned to present itself as an organ of structural modernity able to
renovate Freudian thinking based on a dialogue with the other social
sciences. We have also mentioned Lvi-Strauss's creation of L'Homme
in 1961. Although L'Homme presented itself as a French anthropology
journal, it sought a broader public than that of the professional milieu;
its editorial board included Pierre Gourou, a geographer, and mile
Benveniste, the most popular and respected linguist of the period.
Langages
Linguistics was the pilot science for the structuralist renewal of the
sixties. Although only one review-Le Franais moderne-was founded
between 1928 and 1958, during the decade from 1959 to 1969, no
fewer than seven new linguistics reviews were created. They repre-
sented the culmination of the energetic work and thinking in linguis-
tics going on in a number of areas in the discipline.
In 1966, the year of the structura li st consecration, Andr Mar-
tinet created La Linguistique
2
and Larousse began its own linguistics
review, Langages.3 The editorial board of Langages included sorne of
the most illustrious names in modern linguistics and the team that
worked on the review was drawn primarily from the meetings, semi-
nars, and colloquiums in Besanon. Aigirdas Julien Greimas, a veri-
table flag-bearer of structural thinking, conceived the project and
proposed a thematic formula for the review whereby one or two spe-
cialists in the are a being addressed would guest-edit each issue. Work
sessions took place at his home and the project bore fruit thanks to
Jean Dubois at Larousse.
Martinet's review was aimed at professional linguists, but Lan-
gages had other ambitions. From the outset, the structuralist method
was supposed to reach the vast field of the social sciences, bring into
contact, contrast, and unify the networks of research in the various
disciplines. The first issue announced the very princip les of linguistics
as a pilot science. "The study of language is fundamental for the hu-
manities, for philosophers, psychoanalysts, and people in literature,
Reviews 275
and this exigency calls for broad information-this study
encompasses all signifying systems. "4 This very broad notion of an en-
compassing semiological project indu ding linguistics as a subconti-
nent corresponded exacdy to the program defined by Roland Barthes
in 1964. Barthes was, in fact, the anonymous author of this opening
of the first issue of the review. "It was really a very new type of 'lin-
guistic' review .... It set linguistics in the broad cultural arena, an idea
that had taken hold of Paris in 1966."
5
The project was ambitious and
sound, it relied on groups that had been working for a number of
years in this direction, and it was receptive to different areas of think-
ing in their relationship with language-Nicolas Ruwet was working
on music and language, Oswald Ducrot on logic, Henry Hcaen on
medicine, Roland Barthes on literature, and Maurice Gross on artifi-
cial intelligence.
The mood was euphoric during the planning stages but the first
issue led to a serious conflict because several schools were already dis-
puting the paternity of modern thinking about language. Todorov was
in charge of this inaugural issue bearing on "research in semantics,"
which gave considerable importance to Chomsky's theses. Greimas
was so angered ("He [Todorov] produced an American issue")6 that
he resigned from the editorial board. The rupture would not be over-
come. Jean Dubois and Nicolas Ruwet would adopt increasingly
Chomskyan positions; with Greimas gone, Barthes wanted to avoid
getting involved in the dispute and, "as a result, sought one thing and
one thing only, to escape."7 In the grips of a veritable implosion, the
editorial board of Langages stopped meeting and it fell to Jean
Dubois, who had sorne editorial power at Larousse, to continue. This
episode notwithstanding, Dubois was able to begin a collection called
"Langages at Larousse." At the high point of the structuralist vogue,
it sold as many as five thousand copies, a sign of success that was aIl
the more remarkable given the technical nature of linguistic discourse.
Communications
Communications was a major instrument for disseminating struc-
turalist ideas. Born in 1961 at the Centre d'tudes et de Communica-
tion de Masse (CECMAS) in the Sixth Section of the EPHE, which
had been created in January 1960 at Georges Friedmann's initiative,
Communications was a veritable symbiosis between sociology and
semiology. The tide expressed the major concern of the moment: de ci-
276 Reviews
phering the meaning of messages transmitted by the technology of in-
formation dissemination: press, radio, television, advertising, aIl the
media, whose importance was growing considerably at the time. It
was thus a matter of investigating modernity in which "technical civi-
lization and mass culture are organically linked .... The contents, the
substance pass, but the form, the being, and consequently, the mean-
ing of the thing remains."8
Georges Friedmann edited the review and the members of his edi-
torial board had diverse relationships with structuralism.
9
Communi-
cations published two programmatic issues-number 4 in I964 and
number 8 in I966-prepared by a group around Roland Barthes.
These were real syntheses of structuralist ambitions: number 4 in-
cluded Barthes's "Les lments de smiologie," and number 8, in par-
ticular, was devoted to the structural analysis of a rcit that came to be
seen as a manifesto of the French structuralist school.lO
Tel Quel
Tel Quel was founded in I960, at Seuil, and quickly became the ex-
pression of structuralism's syncretic ambition.
ll
It did not emanate
from any particular discipline among the humanities and as such
reflected the profound concern for synthesis during this period.
Launched by writers and targeting an avant-garde intellectuai audi-
ence, Tel Quel had been in the offing since I958. "Franois Wahl had
said that it would be the Parnassus of Napolon III, this new
Napolon III embodied by General de Gaulle inI958."12
On the cover of the first issue, Tel Quel took up a phrase by Nietz-
sche: "1 want the world and 1 want it as it is [tel quel], and 1 still want
it and want it forever."13 This liminary declaration denoted an essen-
tially literary intention, placing poetry "at the mind's acme."14 The
whole group had an essentially literary goal, but the word "science"
set off the quote on the cover because the project sought to appropri-
ate aIl avant-garde and modernist forms in the social sciences in order
to advance a new kind of writing. During the sixties, structuralism
embodied scientific modernity, whence a very encompassing subtitle:
" Literature/Philosophy/Science/Politics. " But the goal remained liter-
ary: "This periodic and contemporary political activity was always
carried out in the name of literary creation, by writers."15 The objec-
tive, therefore, was to influence literary creation and change the mode
of writing by using the contributions of structuralism to support the
Reviews 277
new Tel was interdisciplinary from the start,
a place where discussion and exchange were given priority, where the
only princip le was to reflect the avant-garde. The cornerstone of the
project was rhetoric, a particular realm of knowledge made popular
by structuralism.
Tel Quel took as its adversary classicalliterary history of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries: "To set ourselves apart from the reign-
ing idea of literature in France in the postwar period, which was a lit-
erature of psychologie al restoration." 16 In this sense, the inteIlectual
communion was unambiguous between the structuralist paradigm,
which attacked the notions of the conscious mind, the subject, a mas-
tery of history, and Tel Quel, which had recourse to the social sciences
in or der to destroy the idea of a harmonious and positivist literary his-
tory. The review was a crossroads and at the same time a surprising
and curious mix of Lacan-Althusser-Barthesianism, so much so that
it was often considered to be the organ of an imaginary structuralist
international; in the sixties, Marcelin Pleynet, as the review's director,
was invited to write an article on structuralism by a medical journal.
The privileged position enjoyed by the unconscious and by formaI
structures was a time bomb that would eventuaIly explode psycholo-
gism: "The best way to say that psychologism in literature was fin-
ished was to be interested in psychoanalysis."17
The strength of Tel Quel was to remain inde pendent of aIl parties
and institutions and to be without any particular disciplinary loyalty.
The logic of the editorial board was to stay in the avant-garde, but in-
sofar as the avant-garde always runs the risk of being recuperated, in-
geste d, and digested by the system-"Run, comrade, the old world is
behind you" -what resulted was a conception that was most often
terrorist and that amounted to flattening the adversary (in general, the
one that was closest at hand), and imagining that there was always a
conspiracy brewing. Tel Quel gave free rein to a veritable terrorized
terrorism, which Marcelin Pleynet summed up by saying, "It was al-
ways a matter of avoiding being surrounded."18 And, curiously enough,
even though it was born in 1960, Tel Quel had nothing to say about
Aigeria until it became the hard core of one of the most pro-Chinese
positions in France.
The review's history is punctuated by extremely brutal ruptures,
each of which resulted in the expulsion of valuable members of the
editorial board. "In truth, the history of Tel Quel is not a history of
278 Reviews
exclusions of the exclusion of individuals, which made it possible
ta include much broader fields of investigation. "19 Sollers was respon-
sible for the first overtures, thanks to his position in support of the
New Novel, which led to Thibaudeau and Ricardou joining the
board. The second overture was to include poetics, with the intro-
duction of Denis Roche and Marcelin Pleynet, who became secretary
in 1962, replacing Jean-Edern Hallier, whose break would come in
1971, at a time when Maoism was triumphant, as "the failure of an
attempt from the right to take over the review. "20
During the period from 1962 to 1967, baptized a posteriori as
the review's "formalist era," Tel Quel was strongly influenced by the
rising wave of structuralism.
21
Barthes, who had formed a strong
friendship with Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva, became closer to
the editorial board and to the review, "which provoked a break be-
tween people like Genette, Todorov, and me, on the one hand, and Tel
Quel, on the other."22 For Barthes, the Tel Quel group was seductive;
it incarnated modernity, and his friendship with Sollers and Kristeva
was reinforced by their common publisher, Seuil, which published
both Barthes and the review. It was under the "Tel Quel" imprint that
Barthes's Critique et vrit came out in 1966, and at that point,
Barthes remarked that "the review Tel Quel is a critical enterprise for
me."23 Jacques Derrida was also close to the review, which he sup-
ported and which published his texts. Lacanian discourse was very
much in evidence in articles by Sollers and Kristeva, who were faithful
auditors of Lacan's seminars.
Althusser's influence was palpable in Tel Quel's rereading of Marx,
particularly in the dialogue it undertook with the French Communist
Party as of 1967, with La Nouvelle Critique. 50 were the pro-Chinese,
pro-Cultural Revolution positions the review took, which hailed from
an orthodox Althusserian perspective. Jean-Pierre Faye, who had
joined the editorial board in 1963, left when its members became
Maoists, and his departure was a crisis punctuated with insults. If the
important breaks in the history of Tel Quel took place because of
arguments about particular political positions, these remained sec-
ondary ta a fundamentally literary goal.
The Communist Thaw
For the French Communist Party press, on the other hand, literature
came after the application of the official party line. Not that this pre-
Reviews 279
cluded the article by someone from the outside in order ta
broaden the party's audience by attracting an intellectual readership.
During these years of peaceful coexistence and of the beginning of de-
Stalinization, Les Lettres franaises, the PCF literary weekly run by
Louis Aragon and Pierre Daix, began to print articles of the avant-
garde and of formalist thinking in order to break out of the socialist
realist mold. "tes Lettres franaises and a certain avant-garde of the
PCF were the tir st to make it possible for the literary avant-garde, the
university, and structuralism to meet prior to 1968."24
Jean-Pierre Faye, for example, was a member of the Tel Quel
group who regularly contributed to Les Lettres franaises, and he so
successfully convinced the journal's board to take an interest in for-
malism that he was asked to publish an interview with Roman Jakob-
son. "1 became quite close friends with Jakobson. As soon as he came
to Paris, he got in touch with me."25
La Nouvelle Critique was the second PCF review that was open to
debate. Created in December 1948 as an organ for theoretical struggle
to be waged after the creation of the Cominform, this weekly publica-
tion for PCF intellectuals was the tool for a veritable normalization in
the hands of its editorial director, Jean Kanapa. This was the Stalinist
period, the period of the two sciences (bourgeois and proletarian), of
Zhdanovism and of Lysenkoism. This kind of review would have ig-
nored the structuralist challenge had it not been for the meeting in
March 1966 of the central committee of Argenteuil, and then of the
Eighteenth Congress of Levallois in January 1967. The result was a new
position with respect to intellectuals. A "logic of receptivity replaced a
politics of the besieged fortress."26 Thanks to the new formula of 1967,
La Nouvelle Critique therefore enjoyed relative autonomy with respect
to the PCF leadership, and it acted as a headhunter in the social sci-
ences. This quest for new alliances especially led the PCF intellectuals to
valorize a history informed by the social sciences, and, as a result, An-
toine Casanova organized a collective discussion in the review. He pub-
li shed a number of articles on this theme that were reprinted in a 1974
anthology entitled Aujourd'hui l'histoire. Here, alongside articles by
Communist historians, were others by Andr Leroi-Gourhan, Jacques
Le Goff, Jacques Bergue, Georges Duby, and Pierre Francastel.
As of 1967, La Nouvelle Critique thus became a place of debate,
receptivity to modernity, and therefore to an encounter with struc-
turalism. Of course, this PCF review never adopted structuralist
280 Reviews
theses, but it did discuss and comment on them. Even before the
turning point, La Nouvelle Critique had opened its pages ta certain
positions and fundamental debates. It was there that Althusser pub-
lished his famous 1964 article "Freud et Lacan," in which he had
opened Marxist thinking to psychoanalysis and to Lacanian think-
ing.27 These pages had also held debates on the relationship between
humanism and Marxism in 1965-66. After Maspero' publication of
Althusser's new reading of Marx, the debates in La Nouvelle Critique
corresponded to the need to "decide, first of aIl, on whether to assimi-
late Marxism to a philosophical humanism, as Garaudy and Schaff
asserted, or to assert its antihumanist and theoretical aspect, as Al-
thusser maintained."28
In 1967, the new La Nouvelle Critique was invited by Tel Quel to
join an enterprise of intellectuai modernization. The PCF review en-
thusiastically accepted the offer, considering that its work was "of a
high literary and scientific level," so much so that the Communists
claimed that they were ready to learn from the Tel Quel writers, whose
"work greatly merits our sympathy and can teach us quite a bit."29
This was a time of dialogue, but the PCF did not adopt aIl of the
structura li st theses. In 1967, La Nouvelle Critique published four arti-
cles attacking structuralism, without directly attacking Althusser, who
was a member of the party.3
0
Pierre Vilar and Jeannette Colombel criti-
cized Michel Foucault's The Order of Things for ignoring history;
Georges Mounin criticized the broad and flabby dissemination of the
linguistic model, and Lucien Sve argued for a scientific humanism
against the Althusserian theoretical antihumanism.
31
La Nouvelle Cri-
tique did not adopt the paradigm, but it it did help to disseminate and
discuss it, and this strategy attracted a certain number of intellectuais
such as Catherine Backs-Clment, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, and
lisabeth Roudinesco to the PCF, which they perceived as a place
where debate was possible. This turn in the relationship between the
PCF and intellectuais was the result of a certain international thaw,
but, as the party leadership saw it, it was also necessary because of the
competition from the political and cultural activity of students, who
would later reject it and establish their own theoretical development.
The Maoist Pole
The cole Normale Suprieure on the rue d'Ulm in Paris was a sanc-
tuary of protest, and Louis Althusser was its figurehead. Sorne disci-
Reviews 28I
pIes of the caman of the philosophy agrgation began the
marxistes-lninistes in late I965. Distributed by the Union of Com-
muni st Students, the CML bore this remark by Lenin in an epigraph:
"Marx's the ory is all-powerful because it is true." They were success-
fuI: the first printing of a thousand copies immediately sold out.
However issue 8 created a serious crisis. Robert Linhart, a hard-line
Maoist, an Althusserian, and a philosopher who specialized in econ-
orny, blocked it because he no longer recognized the review's mission
of placing political struggle at the fore front when the issue was com-
pletely devoted to the power of literature and included articles by
Aragon, Jorge Luis Borges, and Witold Gombrowicz. Linhart accused
Jacques-Alain Miller of "only looking for an academic career, a bour-
geois position of authority. "32 The year 1966 at Ulm saw a double
break: Jacques-Alain Miller and his group established an epistemologi-
cal circle that would publish Les Cahiers pour l'analyse, and a second
break would affect the Union of Communist Students in November
1966, when its "pro-Chinese" wing was dissolved and had to form its
own organization, the Union of Young Marxist-Leninist Communists
(UJCML). With issue 9-10 of the Cahiers marxistes-lninistes, Do-
minique Lecourt became editor in chief, and references to Althusser
became increasingly obvious. Issue II was entirely devoted to his
work with, in particular, the publication of excerpts from Matria-
lisme historique et matrialisme dialectique.
As of issue I4, which was devoted to the Chine se Great Proletar-
ian Cultural Revolution, the Cahiers marxistes-lninistes became the
theoretical and political organ of the Young Communists Marxist-
Leninist. The break with the PCF was consummated; the party was
considered revisionist, according to the Chine se line. And yet Al-
thusser, who remained a member of the PCF, nonetheless gave his
blessing to his students by publishing an article in this issue on the
Cultural Revolution, but without signing his name. Paradoxical as it
might appear, given the distance between the respective positions of
the exaltation of Maoist China on the one hand, and structuralism on
the other, an entire generation of students was politically and theoreti-
caUy fascinated by this symbiosis.
The editor in chief of the Cahiers marxistes-lninistes, Dominique
Lecourt, embodied this double commitment. He had been accepted at
the ENS in 1965 as a HeUenist but had converted to philosophy. A
militant against the war in Aigeria at the beginning of the sixties,
282 Reviews
within the UNEF (National Union of French Students) Lecourt was
seduced by Althusser's positions. In 1966, along with four others, he
founded the UJCML. "There was something in the themes of the Cul-
tural Revolution that echoed a certain number of Althusser's posi-
tions." 33 Theoretical concerns were an essential vector of Dominique
Lecourt's political combat; as early as 1967, he regularly went to
Georges Canguilhem's seminar. Canguilhem "played an absolutely
decisive role in my thinking."34 Lacan was at Ulm, and Lecourt did
not miss the show even if the Maoist militants were "rather over-
whelmed by the relatively irreconcilable atmosphere of our proletar-
ian ideals." 35
These young ENS students wanted to find the same scientific rigor
in their interpretation of Marx as Lvi-Strauss had found in the savage
mind. But theoretical combat, like political combat, had to be on-
going, and this was what a certain number of Althusserians, including
Dominique Lecourt and Robert Linhart, found unacceptable in issue 8
of the Cahiers marxistes-lninistes. Jacques-Alain Miller, Franois
Rgnault, and Jean-Claude Milner, who were in charge of the issue,
appeared to be totally esoteric, and there was a split after awful ses-
sions that probably lasted until three in the morning. We talked
about the epistemological split and the Signifier. 1 remember espe-
cially one big meeting where Robert Linhart was talking with Jean-
Claude Milner about the Signifier and unsignified of the Signifier for
hours in order to know how it was materialistic. These discussions
had a certain appeal.3
6
Out of this break finally came the review by the young generation
of Althusserians, Les Cahiers pour r analyse, which we might consider
to be an Althussero-Lacanian review. It took a position of a combative
structuralism as a totalizing philosophy, and its sources included Al-
thusser, Lacan, Foucault, and Lvi-Strauss. The offspring of Althusser
and Lacan were here. The editorial board included Alain Grosrichard,
Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, and Franois Rgnault, all
of whom were members of Lacan's psychoanalytic association, the
cole Freudienne de Paris.
From 1966 to 1969, Les Cahiers pour l'analyse was engaged in an
epistemological investigation into the scientificity of psychoanalysis,
linguistics, and logic in order to construct the science, conceived as a
theory of discourse or philosophy of the concept. Georges Canguil-
hem's remark opened the collective reflection on one of the issues:
Reviews 283
To work on a concept is to vary the ways in which can be ex-
tended, to understand and generalize it by incorporating certain
exception al traits, to export it beyond its original context, to take it
as a model or, converse!y, to seek a mode! for it-in short, to pro-
gressive!y confer transformations upon it that are regulated by the
function of a formY
Les Cahiers pour l'analyse in the sacred ENS on the rue d'Ulm
was the most symptomatic emanation of the structuralist fervor of
the sixties, in its unbounded, ambitions in its most radical scientistic
experiments, in its most elitist appearance as an avant-garde/popular
dialectic that claimed to speak in the na me of the world proletariat,
and which it used to legitimate the most terrorist and terrifying of the-
oretical practices.
Was it a caricature, a Ubuesque parody, or was this a serious en-
ter prise that took the baton from the first structuralist period? Doubt-
less both, and it was this unharmonious mixture that inspired an en-
tire generation of philosophers.
Thirty
Ulm or Saint-Cloud:
Althusser or Touki?
In the sixties, the challenge of the social sciences was taken up by
philosophers, who would reappropriate the structuralist program and
thereby maintain their domination of the intellectual field, avoiding
the marginalization experienced by the classical humanities. The cole
Normale Suprieure was a sanctuary of intellectuallegitimacy and an
essential institution, for through it and its goal of transmission, struc-
turalism could circumvent and disdain the traditional universities
(even if the ENS was in the process of losing its unique stature as the
institution responsible for shaping future leaders of the nation to the
cole Nationale d'Administration [ENA]).
ENS students were part of a double structure, depending on
whether they were at the rue d'Ulm or at the school in the suburb
of Saint-Cloud. At Saint-Cloud they could take courses with Jean-
Toussaint Desanti, who encouraged his students to convert to the new
disciplines, counseling them to be trained in one of the social sciences
even if it might mean eventually giving up philosophy. Conversely,
Louis Althusser constructed a theory in which philosophy. played a
central role, and he incited his students to test the validity of the dif-
ferent social sciences on the basis of a philosophy of the concept. Al-
thusser, like Desanti, included the structuralist paradigm in his strat-
egy, but this meant speaking in the name of philosophy, whereas for
Desanti it meant more of a reconversion.
Ulm or Saint-Cloud: Althusser or Touki? 285
Saint-Cloud
Jean-Toussaint Desanti has a place in the phenomenologicalline. An
heir to Merleau-Ponty, who had him read Husserl as early as 1938,
Desanti joined the PCF after the war. "It was the experience of politi-
cal struggle that led me toward Marx and his successors."l He had en-
tered the ENS on the rue d'Ulm in 1935, where he met Jean Cavaills,
an important meeting for Desanti, who elected mathematics as a privi-
leged philosophical object, and engaged essentially in work on episte-
mology. He concluded that philosophy was not an autonomous and
founding discourse, but a second discourse. "In order to do philoso-
phy seriously, we have to get to the heart of positivities-these are
Desanti's words."2
The confliet in the sixties between these two philosophers was
latent. Althusser was increasingly committed to Marxism-Leninism,
while Desanti was disengaging himself, having broken with the PCF in
1958. Nonetheless, Desanti had helped the agrgation students at
Ulm, including Althusser, to take the examination, and had even had
Althusser get his PCF card after he had passed it: "1 was the one who
had him join the Party ... alas!"3 Desanti regretted having led Al-
thusser into what he considered, as early as the end of the fifties, to be
a dead end. He considered Althusser's work to be a true philosophical
undertaking of complexifying Marxism, but that only had the effect
of "slowing things down because this very elaborate enterprise of
maintaining Marxism-Leninism is not at all adapted to the problems
of our period. Who, aside from the Albanians, is a Leninist today?"4
Desanti combined structuralism and phenomenology in his search
for mathematical idealities. He was not, however, trying to escape
either the world or experience: "They are the form of an exigency
that makes it possible for us to understand the productivity of this
sort of object, ideal objects."
5
They are rooted in an are a that is sym-
bolizable from the outset and belong neither to the intelligible nor
to the material world, but lie somewhere between the two. In his re-
search on mathematical objects, Desanti used the contribution made,
since the mid-nineteenth century, by the baring of structures and,
since the beginning of the twentieth century, the contributions of the
Bourbaki group, which had made it possible to construct symboli-
cally defined problematic objects. "It is a poor structure from which
extremely powerful theorems can be obtained that enables us to mas-
286 Ulm or Saint-Cloud: Althusser or Touki?
ter chains of properties among fields of objects that are differentiated
from the outset."6
In this respect, Desanti was driven by a desire to lay bare the
structure, form, and unity. His theoretical project of establishing sig-
nificant connections using the principles of closure and the rules of
transition is related to the structuralist project. However, he did not
give up on meaning-giving acts or on his eidetic quest for an area
where meaning is preconstituted and therefore to be reactivated. He
basically remained a phenomenologist.
The necessity of having to link conducts to the determination of a
underlying structure once again poses the question of the subject.
The subject is not abolished because if it signifies nothing, there is no
structure. Where experience is missing, there is no structure. Struc-
ture is that which shapes itself, is made and one wants to make, and
this relationship must be understood. That is the problem we are
facing today.?
Sylvain Auroux, an epistemologist in linguistics and a disciple of
Desanti, chose a path reflecting the relationship of his teacher's work
to philosophy and science. In 1967, he was accepted into khgne, and
took courses with Desanti, who initiated him into structuralism.
"Structuralism was the anticulture and we bathed in it."8 He entered
the ENS in Saint-Cloud, passed the agrgation, did his doctorate in
philosophy, taught high school for a while, and then entered the
CNRS in the sciences of language. In so doing, he fulfilled the advice
that Desanti had given him to get involved in a specifie discipline, lin-
guistics, and to become a research director at the CNRS and work
with other linguists. "People like me always saw Althusser as an ideol-
ogy maker .... He had managed this feat of giving a Platonic version
of Marxism."9
Rather than constructing an epistemology outside of and critical
of science, Desanti therefore encouraged epistemological work on
sciences from within, which is what Sylvain Auroux later accom-
plished. "As Desanti said at the time, to be a philosopher of mathe-
maties is to place one self within mathematics. "10 Sylvain Auroux's
conversion to linguistics did not indicate, however, that students at
Saint-Cloud should abandon philosophy, particularly since Martial
Guroult was giving a very strict history of philosophical texts there at
the same time.
Ulm or Saint-Cloud: Althusser or Touki? 287
Ulm
At Ulm, Louis Althusser was the tutelary figure for the new genera-
tion. He became an agrg in philosophy in 1948, was the philosophy
caman responsible for preparing ENS students specifically for the
agrgation examinations. Althusser, more th an Desanti, considered
that philosophy had a role to play vis--vis the modern social sciences,
as a the ory of theoretical practices able to evaluate the scientific val id-
ity of different disciplines in order to test the truth. Philosophy, for Al-
thusser, should main tain its traditional role as the que en of disciplines,
even if its discourse should change and address new problems. During
the sixties, Althusser and his disciples played a central role in dissemi-
nating structuralism because they could me et the challenge of the so-
cial sciences, which prided themselves on their rigor and as the bearers
of a certain modernity, by shepherding them into the traditional mold
of a totalizing philosophical discourse as the bearer of truth.
Ulm therefore became the epicenter of a structuralist ideology, a
very French symptom of the importance of the humanities in the uni-
versity program. From this point of view, it was the ideal place for
launching a counteroffensive against the aged Sorbonne. The very ex-
pression of excellence, the ENS incarnated the double advantage of
traditional scholarly legitimacy and the most advanced modernism. "1
remember quite clearly that university philosophy inspired tremen-
dous weariness; it was a mixture of humanism and spiritualism," re-
calls Jacques Bouveresse, who had been a student at Ulm.
11
The ap-
pearance of what was called, at the time, the "good" social sciences
came as a breath of fresh air, a real intellectualliberation. The remedy
was not, however, to appropriate all the social sciences: there were the
good ones (psychoanalysis, anthropology, and linguistics, the trio
comprising the structuralist paradigm) and the bad ones (the tradi-
tional social sciences of psychology and sociology, the empirical sci-
ences of basic classification), which were looked down upon with the
greatest disdain.
The philosophers tried a takeover in the se three innovative sci-
ences. "The scientists who were involved accepted this, as is often the
case, because philosophy, even if it is disdained, has the advantage of
being able to conquer a broader public than the one scientists can ever
hope to reach." 12 By renewing its problematic, philosophy could thus
socialize the social sciences, which had the advantage of using a read-
288 Ulm or Saint-Cloud: Althusser or Touki?
able, rigorous, and formalizable discourse. The operation was so suc-
cessful that philosophers refrained from carrying it out in the name of
philosophy, which many at the time considered dead; instead, they
substituted the word theory, as, for example, in the imprint by that
name inaugurated at Maspero, and whose director was none other
than Louis Althusser.
It was not a matter of becoming an anthropologist, a linguist, or a
psychoanalyst, however, but of using the rigor of these disciplines to
demonstrate their scientism in the name of a theory that was superior
to these specific theoretical practices. This was an effort at internaI sub-
version as much as of appropriation undertaken in favor of philoso-
phers. Such an operation required a certain stealth, and that, according
to Jacques Bouveresse, imposed a heavy price: "It was a time when one
had the impression that agame was being played without any rules.
You could say anything, without any rule for argumentation once a
certain number of dogmatic presuppositions were accepted."13
MarxatUlm
The first innovation made by the caman at Ulm was to enshrine Marx
among the holy of holies by including his works in the ENS, the insti-
tutional bastion for training the nation's prestigious elite. In I960,
Althusser published Feuerbach's Philosophical Manifestos,14 and in
I96I he began giving his seminar on the "young Marx," in response
to student demand. "The book on Montesquieu came out in I959,
and his first texts on overdetermination and on the young Marx came
out in I960. We asked him to give a seminar on the young Marx at
the ENS."15
Students at Althusser's seminar included Pierre Macherey, Roger
Establet, Michel Pcheux, Franois Rgnault, tienne Balibar, Christ-
ian Baudelot, Rgis Debray, Yves Duroux, and Jacques Rancire. For
them, reading Marx like Aristotle or Plato was completely surprising
at the time, even if the literaI method of textual explanation continued
to use well-known canons. If Althusser's disciplines expressed their
enthusiasm about this "overwhelming originality,"16 they also had po-
litical reasons to fight Garaudy since they had broken with the PCF
leadership. This political dimension was fundamental for a generation
that protested against the war in Aigeria, and their feeling of commu-
nion was cemented by the intense sociability that prevailed among the
boarders at the ENS. "It was a militant community. When Althusser
Ulm or Saint-Cloud: Althusser or Touki? 289
published his 6rst articles on the young Marx, we said to ourselves,
"Here is a rigorous Marxist we can respect. "17 Again emphasizing the
intensity of the social life within the school, a common theoretical
undertaking began to take shape while preparing the agrgation ex-
amination. This was how "we decided that we would help one an-
other for the agrgation." 18
Althusser spent 1962-63 lecturing on the origins of structuralist
thinking: Lvi-Strauss, Montesquieu, and Foucault. Jacques-Alain
Miller talked about the archaeology of knowledge in Descartes; Pierre
Macherey addressed the origins of language. Jacques Rancire, tienne
Balibar, Jean-Claude Milner, and Michel Tort also participated in this
seminar.
19
ln 1964, Althusser changed his orientation and the seminar under-
took a collective reading of Capital. "AlI that happened without
ever giving a thought to the possibility of a publication. It was a free
and disinterested activity. "20 And yet, this work, which was supposed
to have been limited to a strictly confidential circle, was published
by Maspero as Reading Capital and had remarkable repercussions. In
19
6
5,
we were in an unbelievable situation; we had become famous
overnight without having tried. . . . It was a time when the exam
readers for the agrgation found our names quoted in the students'
exam papers as if we were important contemporary philosophers.
We were immediately famous, and remained so through 1968, and 1
can assure you that we paid for it dearly.21
This work and its publication quite obviously had major political
implications beyond the university, particularly in the confrontations
occurring inside the PCF where, since 1963, Althusserian positions
had come un der sharp criticism from Garaudy. Ulm thus became a
double instrument contesting the traditional university structure and
the PCF leadership. Just as the linguists who were confronted with
classical literary history had used structuralism, so here too it was
used to prote st the leading authorities, whose imprecision was de-
nounced in the name of scientific rigor. A symbiosis took hold of the
different disciplines at Ulm, the temple of structuralist ideas. Michel
Pcheux had acquired a solid linguistic background and many took
Georges Canguilhem's courses and were therefore involved with epis-
temology. Everyone was familiar with Lvi-Strauss's work. "1 had
290 Ulm or Saint-Cloud: Althusser or Touki?
been interested in Lvi-Strauss somewhat in reaction to the norm im-
posed by the Certificat de morale et sociologie. There was a counter-
culture side to it."22 Althusser added a revisited Marx to this struc-
turalist paradigm, and a return to Marx joined the ranks of the
"returns to" Saussure and Freud. He had the excited feeling of finally
being able to achieve a philosophical synthesis that could account for
the different forms of contemporary rationality, beyond the social
SCIences.
In a confused way, Althusser was adopting the structuralist orien-
tation while maintaining a critical distance in the name of Marxism.
An internaI tension existed from the outset in the concepts that were
advanced, making it possible to understand why Althusser later spoke
about a "flirtation" with structuralism that had gone too far. At the
time, it was a question of using the momentum, the propulsion, the
scientistic side of a rather optimistic linguistic positivism that thought
it could interpret aIl reaches of knowledge with a total semiology,
starting from a simple phonological model. But Althusser and the AI-
thusserians, in line with Nietzsche via Canguilhem, were at the same
time critical of those who believed themselves able to create such a
metalanguage. This ambivalent captation made it possible to coast
along on the crest of a structuralist wave, using those themes that
brought disciplines and viewpoints together, while at the same time
deconstructing them from within. "The somewhat enormous opposi-
tions like subjectlstructure or the notion of a subjectless trial took on
such importance because they served to mask the conceptual ambigu-
ity within which we were operating. "23
During these first years of working out their theory, the Althusser-
ians leaned, however, toward scientism. The changes in political ori-
entation that they hoped to see on the part of the PCF leadership were
to be guided by science: "Science had to be placed in the driver's seat,
as was said at the time."24 The ambient climate of scientism empha-
sized further the enthusiasm of a whole generation that believed it
was possible to synthesize modern rationality and philosophical prob-
lematization, and that lived it as an emancipation. Jacques Rancire
was a student at the ENS in 1960, and he was immediately seduced by
"the intellectual dynamism that was generated around Althusser,"25
whereas until then, philosophy had been limited to Husserl and Hei-
degger. When he got to the ENS, "the generation that was taking the
agrgation were aH old-guard Heideggerians. "26 This was the last year
Ulm or Saint-Cloud: Althusser or Touki? 291
during which Jean Beaufret, a disciple of Heidegger, was giving his
course. The Althusserian new guard was receptive to new fields of
knowledge, ta broadening philosophical culture sa that it took new
objects into consideration, and to bringing about a radical break with
everything that was based in any way on dassical psychology. "For
my generation, this corresponded to a kind of liberation from univer-
sity culture. "27
If structural linguists attacked literary history limited to the au-
thor and the work, and anthropologists and psychoanalysts circum-
vented models of consciousness, Althusserian philosophers also sought
to joyfully bury humanism like the pitiful remnants of a bygone era of
triumphant bourgeois thinking. Man was the object of a dismissal; he
should surrender his arms and soul and submit ta the various logics
that condition him and of which he is only a miserable speck. By
virtue of its challenge of the validity and the very existence of the sub-
ject, the Althusserian enterprise was utterly harmonious with the en-
tire structura li st movement.
Lacan Shores Up the Breach
A powerful ally in this effort against huma ni sm and psychologism
penetrated the sanctuary on the rue d'Ulm in 1963, at the invitation of
Althusser: Jacques Lacan. Lacan too was at war, but his war was
being waged within a different institution-psychoanalysis. Banned
from the institution, he was also exduded from the psychoanalytic ap-
paratus (the International Psychoanalytic Association). Lacan and Al-
thusser were to become a team that was as curious as it was fascinat-
ing for a generation that would become, in part, Althussero-Lacanian.
Jacques-Alain Miller, the former director of the cole de la Cause
Freudienne, daims to have read Lacan at Althusser's urging,28 when
he was giving his seminar on the foundations of psychoanalysis in
1963-64, but which was essentially focused on Lacan. As we have
seen, many Althusserians were to go from Marx to Freud and from
Althusser to Lacan; Les Cahiers pour l'analyse was essentially the ex-
pression of this Ulmian Lacanianism, which evolved from Althusseri-
anism. The Althusserians were split among themselves; there were
those who remained strictly loyal to their master and who would re-
main in philosophy, such as tienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, and
Jacques Rancire, and there were those who converted to psycho-
analysis, choosing to exercise a particular discipline in a practical way.
292 Ulm or Saint-Cloud: Althusser or Touki?
Philosophy had once again lost a good part of its forces to a new,
conquering social science. A whole Althussero-Lacanian current iden-
tified with a position known as antirevisionist: at one and the same
time opposed to the Soviet and PCF revis ion of Marx and to the revi-
sion of Freud by the official heirs of the IPA. The symbiosis between
these two currents was at once theoretical and strategie and led to a
reliance on solid dogma and sacred texts. In the mid-sixties, the crowds
of Chinese waving the little red book on Tiananmen Square would
represent for them the hope for an end to the old world. Their leader
Mao Tse-tung quickly became the harbinger of a new China, saluting
the birth of a new world.
Mao Tse-tung thought, Lacan thought, Althusser thought-all
united aga in st ego thought. But by the end of the sixties, the Molotov
cocktail was poised to welcome the radicalization of young French
students.
Thirty-one
The Althusserian Explosion
Neither God, nor Caesar, nor the tribune-yet Louis Althusser seemed
to many to be the supreme savior of Marxism. His was a difficult
undertaking, a veritable wager that amounted to setting Marxism at
the center of contemporary rationality but disengaging it from praxis
and from the Hegelian dialectic so as to get beyond the current Stalin-
ist vulgate based on mechanistic economism. To carry out this shift,
Althusser used structura li sm; he presented Marxism as the only form
of thinking that could manage a global synthe sis of knowledge and set
itself at the center of the structural paradigm. The price therefore im-
plied getting on the structuralist bandwagon by setting aside experi-
ence, its psychological dimension, models of consciousness, and the
dialectic of alienation. Setting the referent on the sidelines took the
form of an "epistemological break," resembling Bachelard's models of
rupture. It differentiated the ideological on the one hand, from a sci-
ence incarnated by historical materialism on the other. AlI the sciences
were thus to be questioned on the basis of the foundations of scientific
rationality and the philosophy of dialectical materialism in order to
free them from their ideological setting. Based on the model of the ar-
bitrariness of the sign with respect to the referent, science was to "sat-
isfy purely internaI exigencies," 1 and the cri te ri on of truth was there-
fore not to dep11d on a possible falsifiability of propositions.
Untethering Marxism from its own historical destiny in the early
sixties provided a means of saving it from rapid decomposition by
293
294 The Althusserian tX1JlOS:lOn
placing it at center of science. It was one response ta need ta
abandon an official, dogma-bound, post-Stalinist Marxism with an
onerous past. Althusser made it possible to camplexify Marxism, to
cross its adventure with that of social sciences that were in full swing,
and to up the ante by presenting the theory of theoretical practices as
the discourse of discourses. Louis Althusser offered the exciting chal-
lenge to a militant generation that had cut its teeth in anticolonial
combats of resuscitating a scientific Marxism freed of the scoria of the
regimes that had ruled in the na me of Marxism.
From Jesus to Marx
Louis Althusser was born on October I6, I9I8, in Birmandreis, AIge-
ria. In I939 he entered the ENS, and from I940 to I945 he was a pris-
oner of war in Stalag XA in Schleswig-Holstein, where he corresponded
with Ren Michaud, who initiated him into Marxism. He continued
his preparation for the agrgation. after the Liberation; he was twenty-
seven. Agrg in I948, he joined the French Communist Party at the
same time, and decided to stay at the ENS on the rue d'Ulm, where he
became the caman, the person responsible for helping to prepare stu-
dents for the agrgation. At the same time, he began working on a
thse d'tat with Jean Hippolyte and Vladimir Janklvitch, "The Poli-
tics and Philosophy of Eighteenth-Century France."
And yet, at the beginning, Althusser was a practicing Catholic, a
member of Action Catholique, and confirmed in his religious convic-
tions by his khgne teacher in Lyons from I937 to I939, Jean Guit-
ton. According to Guitton, although Althusser had returned from the
war transformed, he nonetheless remained fundamentally true to his
des ire for a religious absolute, which he in fact displaced onto Marx-
ism. The friendship between the two never waned, des pite the distance
between their respective positions and Jean Guitton's experiences of
contestation at the Sorbonne, where he held a chair in the history of
philosophy: "You taught me to enter a relationship with an idea, with
two, to combine them, oppose the m, unite them, dissociate them, to
flip them like flapjacks, and to serve them up in an edible dish."2 From
I945 to I948, Althusser had been attracted both to the PCF and to a
small group of Catholics from Lyons founded by Maurice Montuclard
and headquartered in Paris.
Althusser's fascination with religion and mystical purity lasted
until the drama of I980 when he asked his friend John Guitton to in-
The Althusserian Explosion 295
tervene in his ta me et Jean-Paul II. Althusser \Vas granted a
meeting with Cardinal Garrone, and Guitton, who had met the Holy
Pather, was given ta understand that his request \Vas granted. How-
ever, Althusser murdered his wife Hlne shortly thereafter and the
project was aborted. A great reader of Pascal, Althusser was fiHed
with the disquiet of a tragic mysticism and the unsolvable character of
contradiction. Having abandoned Christianity, however, he displaced
his que st for an absolute onto a purified Marxism, a crystaHine phi-
losophy that could counterbalance religious faith and get beyond
metaphysics by substituting a total, exclusive, and rigorous science for
it. "In his bedroom, 1 saw the works of Lenin next ta those of Teresa
of Avila. Regarding Althusser, 1 wondered about a problem that had
always haunted me-the problem of change. Had Althusser changed
in the secret and profound recesses of his being?"3
It was fashionable ta ontologize structure during the sixties, and it
enabled Althusser ta shift the system of causality in use in the Marxist
vulgate. Until then, explanations had been limited ta a simple mono-
causal notion of reflection. Everything had ta derive from economics,
and superstructures were therefore considered ta be simple transla-
tions of the infrastructure. Breaking with this purely mechanical view
offered the double advantage of complexifying the system by sub-
stituting a structural causality for a simple relationship of cause and
effect in which the structure determines what dominates. However, as
Vincent Descombes explains, Althusser's analytic model also made it
possible ta save the Soviet economic model, still considered consonant
with the socialist model and dissociated from any objectionable and
autonomous political and ideological reality. Althusser could there-
fore make an even further-reaching critique of Stalinism than that of
the official critique of the personality cult, but at a lesser cast because
it saved the socialist base of the system in the name of the relative
autonomy of the forces of production. Althusser quickly grasped the
utility of structuralism for a Marxism in need of renewal and contin-
ued ta regard the Soviet Union as a socialist country. "The structural-
ist doctrine was almost worked out at the ENS under Althusser,"4 and
it was represented by his disciples in Les Cahiers pour l'analyse.
Until then, structura li sm had advanced within specific disciplines:
anthropology for Lvi-Strauss, psychoanalysis for Lacan, linguistics
for Greimas. With Althusser, it became possible ta broaden horizons
ta include a structuralist philosophy that presented itself as such, and
296 The Althusserian Explosion
as the expression of the end of philosophy, the possibility of reaching
beyond philosophy in the name of theory. Moreover, Althusser's con-
ception of a separation between science and ideology coincided with
and quickened the rapidly genei"alizing division between the techno-
structure and the workers. The Althusserians "gave significant com-
fort to the split between the learned elite and the ordinary mortals,
which, they implemented in their reviews and in their Maoist move-
ment, which were hierarchized into groups with their relays and their
grassroots committees: an organization that reflected that of French
administration."5 The project therefore took its place as part of the
project of unifying the thinking that was going on about the social
sciences, under the vigilant supervision of the philosophers. "There
really was ah attempt to construct a single problematic of the social
sciences. "6
Strategie Planning
There was also another-political-Iogic guiding Althusser's interven-
tion in challenging the validity of the official PCF positions. As we
have seen, between March I96S and February I966, La Nouvelle Cri-
tique became the locus of an important debate between Communist
intellectuals about the relationship between Marxism and humanism.
An important confrontation took place between Roger a
partisan of a Marxist humanism, and Althusser, who argued for a the-
oretical antihumanism. "This controversy ... appeared to us very
concretely to raise the essential question of the theoretical status of
historical materialism."7 Jorge Semprun opened the argumenfagainst
the Althusserian position by separating Marxist thinking, which is
dialectical, from Althusserian thinking, which operates in terms of
breaks. Using Marx's I843 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, he
showed that even the young Marx had never had an abstract notion
of man, and that on the contrary, even as early as I843, he defined
man as an entirely social being. Michel Simon insisted on the disso-
ciability of Marxism and humanism, even if he agreed with the AI-
thusserian criticism of the use of the notion of alienation outside of
the vague realm of ideology. He was careful to distinguish clearly
between the abstract and universalizing humanism of the rising
bourgeoisie and Marxist positions, but "humanism designates some-
thing that, in its deepest recesses, is essential for Marxism."8 Pierre
Macherey defended the hard line of Althusser's positions and pro-
The Althusserian Explosion 297
posed a position of rupture in place the discourse of
that was being outlined by certain party ideologues: "There is a break
between the approaches of Semprun and Althusser."9 He rejected any
possible dialogue between two discourses that did not grant equal im-
portance to the concepts being used. Using the same terminology was
misleading because it addressed opposing ideas. The same was true
for the term "praxis," which for Semprun referred to a real object,
whereas for Althusser it referred to a theoretical object. Michel Verret
also enthusiastically embraced Althusser's position: "Althusser em-
phasizes in a remarkable way that this huma ni sm can only follow the
theoretical destiny of alienation. "10
Roger Garaudy had been warning against Althusser's sabotage of
the young Marx since 1963, but his arguments were strongly contested
by many party intellectuals. But the philosophers' meeting that took
place in January 1966 at Choisy, without Althusser, made it possible
to consolidate the team of ideologues who were part of the leadership
around Garaudy: Lucien Sve, Guy Besse, Gilbert Mury, Pierre Boc-
cara, Jean Texier. Each, at different levels, expressed disagreement
with Althusser's positions. On this occasion, Garaudy strenuously at-
tacked Althusser's notion of science, which he characterized as "out-
dated," "naive, scholastic, and mystical," as well as his "bloodless
doctrinariness. "11
A Marxist heretic in the eyes of the Communist Party apparatus,
Althusser was isolated, and his isolation makes it easier to understand
his strategie interest in suturing his positions to those of the structural-
ist wave, which had the enthusiastic support of intellectuals during the
mid-sixties. Althusser offered the advantage of defending a "Cartesian
Marxism made up of dear and distinct ideas,"12 which made intellec-
tuaIs proud to be Communists. A return to Marx and to his funda-
mental texts made possible by a purely theoretical and exegetical ap-
proach helped to attenuate the guilt feelings of being a Communist
after the incontrovertible evidence of Stalin's crimes. "Althusser's
work really represented a breath of fresh air."13 The context was fa-
vorable for Althusser's theses because the PCF had been trying to es-
tablish a new relationship with intellectuals since the end of the fifties
in order to abandon Stalinism bit by bit. Receptive to new forms of
artistic expression and to the different avant-gardes, the party was
breaking with socialist realism; in its openness to new theoretical exi-
genes, it was casting off the Lysenkoist delirium of the pasto As earIy
298 The Althusserian LAl"V'lVU
as I959, Maurice Thorez announced the creation of a Center for
Marxist Research and Study (CERM), which Roger Garaudy was to
head up. The PCF was looking for a way to compensate for the losses
it suffered from the trauma of I956, by resuming the interrupted dia-
logue with intellectuals. Althusser arrived at a propitious moment, the
culmination of a process that had begun with the decade and that gave
intellectuals a special place in defining the new post-Stalinist line. But
his theses went unadopted by the PCF central committee that met in
March I966 and that concluded, in fact, that "Marxism is the human-
ism of our time."14
Once the Garaudy line had triumphed, Althusser's work was care-
fully filtered by the party leadership and his texts disappeared from
the shelves of the cole Centrale des Cadres. This defeat was largely
offset, however, by the tremendous dissemination of his work from
the very place where Althusser would once aga in resume his theoreti-
cal efforts: the ENS on the rue d'Ulm. From Ulm, he could oppose the
party leadership with a Marxist discourse fertilized by structuralism
and worthy of the ranks of modern rationality.
Michel Pcheux had been a disciple of Althusser in I965-66,
and the philosophy professor of Roger-Pol Droit, who, along with
Guy Lardreau, Christian Jambet, and many others, was stimulated by
Althussero-Lacanism, which seemed to incarnate the philosophy of
the concept. Today, Roger-Pol Droit looks back on his training and his
early philosophical years as
a period defined by grids: grids in the sense of a conceptual frame-
work of elucidation. We had the feeling that if we could just find the
right overlay we would see what was invisible without the grid. The
structure depended on this: it belonged to what was apparent in
what we did not see, in the rainbow diversity of reality. And at the
same time, theses are grids in the cellular sense of the word.
15
The Althusserians had succeeded in ma king epistemology fash-
ionable. It was a time when the epistemology of everything was being
undertaken, such that one could say that it was no longer philosophy
that was being done, but science. The situation was aIl the more para-
doxical in that epistemology, by its hermetic discourse and the degree
of expertise required in different fields, was generally limited to small
circles: "1 even saw Derrida once answer a question put to him about
whether what he was doing was science say no, it was not, but that it
The Althusserian Explosion 299
could become that." 16 This was the scientistic context of Althusser's
project, which also responded to the desires of a new generation that
did not want to bear the burden of Stalinist crimes and hungered for
an absolute. A11 of this made possible a paradoxical bringing together
of an often mad political voluntarism-a desperate activism-and the
notion of a subjectless process that resembled a mystical commitment:
Just as for ail religious persons, the subject tears itself from itself in
arder to become the agent of a process. l was raised by the Jesuits. It
was clear that we were ripping ourselves from ourselves, and were
no longer subjects before the great Subject that was the Process; this
is how we saved our souls. It was completely feasible to reconcile
these thingsY
Althusser became a rallying point for an entire generation. For those
who wanted to leave academicisms behind, he was a standard-bearer,
an anchor: "1 was a student from I95 5 to I960 and Althusser brought
us a kind of illumination. It was extraordinarily stimulating."18
The Return ta Marx
Maspero published two books in I965 that were immediately and
spectacularly successful and became the major references of the pe-
riod: For Marx, a collection of articles by Althusser published in
the "Thorie" collection, which sold thirty-two thousand copies; and
Reading Capital, a collective work including, in addition to Al-
thusser's pieces, contributions by Jacques Rancire, Pierre Macherey,
tienne Balibar, and Roger Establet. Maspero had been created in
I9 59, and we might wonder if Louis Althusser deliberately chose this
house or if he came to it after having been rejected by the ditions So-
ciales. According to Guy Besse, on the one han d, Althusser did not
want to commit the whole of the party to his positions, which would
have been the case had his book come out at the ditions Sociales,
and, on the other hand, his concern for efficiency would have led him
to choose Maspero because its distribution network enabled him to
reach a much broader public than simply that of the PCE But it would
seem that behind Althusser's attitude, which was at once daring and
fearful, lay the party leadership's major roadblocks. "In I979, Al-
. thusser told me that he had only published at Maspero after having
been turned down elsewhere." 19
50 the Althusserians had achieved a "return to" Marx himself, a
300 The Althusserian Explosion
Marx extracted from the commenta ries and from the exegeses that
had been made of his work up to then and that had blocked any direct
knowledge of his positions. The act of reading Marx was the first of
the shifts the Althusserians accomplished, and in so doing they fully
participated in the structural paradigm by favoring the discursive
realm and the internaI logic of a self-enclosed system. Of course, AI-
thusser's perspective was not linguistic, but he was part of this auton-
omization of the discursive sphere that must be approached on the
basis of a new theory of Reading, inaugurated by Marx himself, ig-
nored by the vulgate, and reactivated by Althusser.
This new practice of reading was baptized "symptomatic read-
ing," using an adjective directly borrowed from psychoanalysis and
from Lacan in particular, and which bespoke the more essential
character of that which is invisible and refers to a lack or an absence.
Althusser distinguished between two different modes in Marx's read-
ing of classical political economists. First, he read the discours es of
Ricardo, Smith, and so on, within his own categories of thinking in
order to understand their lacunae and to establish their differences,
thereby demonstrating what his predecessors had missed. This first
reading allowed for "an inventory of possible agreements and differ-
ences."20 But behind this was a more essential reading, beyond the ob-
served inadequacies, lacunae, and silences. This second reading let
Marx see where classical political economy had been blind even with
its eyes open. He made patently clear those assertions his predecessors
had left unproblematized and unquestioned. Marx thus made answers
appear where questions had not even been asked, in a purely intra-
textual play. "The not-seeing is then included within the seeing; it is a
form of seeing, therefore, in a necessary relationship with seeing. "21
Just as an individual neurosis can be expressed by a certain number of
symptoms without any obvious or direct correspondence to their
cause, so too political economy could see or take into consideration
what it does.
There were two advantages to this kind of reading. On the one
hand, it demonstrated a certain sensitivity to the need for linguistic
rigor by seeking the key to the problem within the text itself, by prob-
lematizing the text and its internallogic; and, on the other hand, it of-
fered a method that, similar to Freudian analysis, considered that the
most essential reality is the least obvious. Althusser's reading was situ-
ated neither in the absence of the discourse nor in what it makes ex-
The Althusserian Explosion 301
but in that gray area the latent manifest
discourses, which anly a particular kind of Iistening or reading can
bring ta light. If the error concerns seeing, sight depends on structural
conditions, the conditions of discourse, the range of possibilities of
what is said and what is unsaid. This shift borrowed as much from
Michel Foucault as from Lacan: "Althusser did nothing more th an
reemphasize the ideas of Foucault,and Lacan again."22 The model of
making a dialectic of visible and invisible space carne from Foucault's
Madness and Civilization, which Althusser invoked at the beginning
of Reading Capital, not only with regard to the relationship of the
interiority of shadows, darkness, and light, but also with respect to
the attention paid to those apparently heterogeneous conditions that
organize branches of knowledge into disciplinary units: "Terms that
recall sorne very remarkable passages of Michel Foucault's preface to
his Madness and Civilization. "23
The Epistemological Break
Althusser also borrowed Bachelard's idea of an epistemological rup-
ture, but he made it more radical by adopting the term "break" in
order to emphasize its trenchant quality. He took his analytical model
for reading Marx from scientific epistemology. Bachelard applied this
notion notably to physics, and more precisely to quantum mechanics,
to express the distance separating scientific knowledge and perceptual
understanding.
Althusser extended the idea, broadening it into a general concept
that applied to the history of any of the sciences, making it clear that
the discontinuities on which any particular scientific edifice was built
needed to be discerned. In his concern to present Marx as the bearer
of a new science, Althusser saw a radical split between a young Marx
still mired in Hegelian idealism, and a mature, scientific Marx. Yet,
"Bachelard never would have spoken about a split between a science
and a prior philosophical construction."24 According to Althusser,
Marx reached a scientific level at the point when he managed to rid
himself of the ideological and philosophicallegacy with which he was
imbued. Althusser even laid out the phases of the process and very
precisely designated l 84 5 as the moment of the caesura that permitted
Marx to bec orne scientific. Everything before l 84 5 is the work of the
young Marx, a Marx before he was Marx.
The young Marx is therefore marked by the Feuerbachian theses
302 The Althusserian Explosion
of alienation, of generic man. This was the period of a rationalist, lib-
eral, humanist Marx doser to Kant and to Fichte than to Hegel. "The
first works suppose a Kantian-Fichtean kind of problematic,:'25 fr.
tered around the figure of a man destined to his freedom and who
must restore his lost essence in the thread of a history that alienates
him. He must resolve the contradiction of his alienated rationality, in-
carnated by astate that remains deaf to the demands of freedom. De-
spite himself, this man realizes his essence through the alienated prod-
ucts of his labor and he must complete this realization by once again
taking possession of this alienated essence in order to become trans-
parent to himself, a total man finally realized at the end of History.
This reversaI came directiy out of Feuerbach: "The fundamentals of
the philosophical problematic are Feuerbachian."26
According to Althusser, Marx rejected the notion of founding
history and politics on an essence of man in I845, when he adopted
a scientific theory of history based on entirely new explanatory con-
cepts such as social formation, the forces of relation-
ship,s onf4lIoduction, and so on. At that point, he elimlnated the
philosophical categories of the subject, essence, and alienation and
made a radical critique of humanism, which was considered to be
part of the mystifying ideology of the ruling class. This was the ma-
ture Marx of the period between I845 and I857, and his evolution
made the great scientific work of his matur years possible, for Capi-
tal is a veritable science of the modes of production, and therefore of
human history.
This fundamental break in Marx's work was perceptible thanks
to the shift from praxis to epistemology. Thanks to Capital, Marx
broke definitively with ideology and his work thus cam to make a sci-
entific contribution the equal of Newton's Principia. "We know that a
pure science exists only if it is ceaselessly refined .... This purification
and this liberation are acquired only at the cost of a constant struggle
against ideology itself. "27 Whereas until then Marx's work had been
considered to be a return to the Hegelian dialectic from a materialist
perspective, Althusser made a term-by-term comparison of Hegel's
and Marx's dialectics; Marx did not simply stand Hegelian idealism
back on its feet, he constructed a theory whose structure was in aH
ways different, even if the terminology of the negation and the identity
of opposites, and of getting beyond contradiction, suggested certain
similarities in procedure. "It is absolutely impossible to maintain the
The Alrhusserian Explosion 303
fiction of the reversaI, even in its apparent rigor. Because, in truth,
even as Marx reversed them, he did not maintain the terms of the
Hegelian model of society. "28
This discontinuity between Hegel and Marx let Althusser break
with the Stalinist ecbnomist vulgate, which was satisfied with substitut-
ing the economic sphere as an essence for Hegel's political-ideological
essence. But this criticism of the mechanisms of Marxist thought was
made in the name of the construction of a pure and decontextualized
theory, which, as such, made it possible to achieve the status of a sci-
ence. Dialectical materialism, for Althusser, was the theory that estab-
lished the scientificity of historical materialism, and it had to be pre-
served from the ideological contamination that constantly threatened
it. "We see that it can no longer finally be a matter of reversaI. Because
we do not get a science when we overthrow an ideology."29
Historical materialism was therefore the science of the scientificity
of sciences. And a historian can only find perplexing this obvious sci-
entism that runs through Althusser, even when he is, like Pierre Vilar,
deeply committed to the construction of a Marxist history. "There is a
progression in Marx's thinking that absolutely do es not occur around
a break. 1 completely disagree with such an idea, which in fact belongs
to Foucault's work. "30
Althusser certainly wanted to escape the Stalinist vulgate, which
had a tendency to see everything as a reflection of economic relation-
ships, by making a purified scientific field autonomous. In this regard,
he produced a veritable renewal of Marxist thought. But by offering a
system that was closed in on itself, Althusser precipitated the crisis.
This sounded the death knell for a certain Marxism because, after
coming full circle, things went around in circles. If Marxism is alive,
it is not because it is satisfied with exhuming scientific concepts. This
dimension contributed to a certain decline of Marxism, which, para-
doxically, it had wanted to save. How can you construct a Marxism
that is fundamentally a reflection on history with a profoundly ahis-
torical method.
31
If Althusser finally sawed off the branch he was sitting on, he did
nonetheless inspire a momentary second wind in Marxist thinking
and comforted a whole current of modernist intellectuals in se arch of
a radical break that was as much theoretical and institutional as it was
poiiticai.
34 The Althusserian Explosion
A Structured Totality
Rather than the mechanistic vulgate of the theory of reflection, Al-
thusser proposed a structured totality in which meaning was a function
of the position of each of the e l e m e n T S ~ of the mode of production. He
could therefore acknowledge the specifie efficacy of the superstructure,
which was dominant in certain cases, and in aIl cases in a relationship
of relative autonomy with respect to the infrastructure. By unhooking
the superstructure from the ideological-political sphere, Althusser
could save the socialist base of the Soviet Union because its relative
autonomy "could explain quite simply, in the ory, that the socialist
infrastructure could, for the most part, evolve without being harmed
during this period of errors affecting the superstructure."32 As they
said at the time, you don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, and
although one could legitimately speak about Stalinist crimes and of a
savage repression against the masses by those in power, it was not yet
possible to talk about exploitation and the failure of a system that
remained fundamentaIly and miraculously preserved at the level of its
infrastructure, safe in the face of a bureaucratie degeneration affect-
ing only the highest reaches of Soviet society. To Hegel's ideological-
political totality, Althusser opposed the complex, structured totality
of Marxism, which, depending on the historie al moment, was hier-
archized differently in terms of the respective places of ideology and
politics, for example, in the mode of production, even if economics
was always determinant in the final analysis.
With Althusser, structure became plural, transforming a single
temporality into multiple temporalities. "There is no general history,
but only specifie structures of historicity." 33 Thus there were unly dif-
ferential temporalities, with each one autonomous in its relationship
to the whole: "The specificity of each of these times and of each of
these histories-in other words, their relative autonomy and indepen-
dence-is based on a certain type of articulation within the whole."34
Althusser participated in the deconstruction of history, and in so
doing he was part of the structural paradigm, not by denying historic-
ity but by breaking it into heterogeneous units. To his way of think-
ing, the structured whole was dehistoricized anq decontextualized in
the same way that, in order to achieve the status of a science, that
which is ideological had to be detached. Knowledge (Generality III) is
only possible through the mediation of a body of concepts (Generali-
The Althusserian Explosion 305
ties II) that work on an empirical prime matter 1). Snch an
approach assimilated the object of analysis of Marxism ta the abjects
of the physical and chemical sciences and implied a total decentering
of the subject. "This meant mixing up experimental sciences with
what are caUed the social sciences." 35
Structural Causality
ln general, structuralism tried to avoid simple causal systems, and in
this respect Althusser's work was consonant with structuralism. Leav-
ing the the ory of reflection behind, he proposed to combine what was
internaI to the structure of the mode of production. And yet he did not
abandon the search for a causal system, which was indispensable for
establishing the scientific character of his theory, but defined a new de-
termination, which he caUed structural causality or metonymic causal-
ity: "1 believe that when it is understood as the concept of the efficacy
of an absent cause, this concept is admirably weU suited for designat-
ing the absence as structure in the effects under consideration."36
This concept of the efficacy of an absence, a structure defined as
the absent cause of its effects, reaching beyond each of its elements in
the same way that the signifier goes beyond the signified, belonged
ta the aspherical structure that defined the Subject for Lacan, con-
structed on the basis of a lack, of the loss of the first Signifier. This
dialectic around a void is found in Lacan and in Althusser, and the
princip le of explanation, which is of course unfalsifiable, can accom-
modate any kind of situation like an open sesame. Here, the purifica-
tion of Marxism reached the highest degree of a metaphysics that
"also makes sacrifices to a hidden God in the name of the struggle
against theology."37 This structuralist philosophy, which endows itself
with aU the appeal of scientificity in order to renew Marxism or
Freudian thinking, also ontologized structure with idea of structural
causality. It becomes a fact that "structures are deep causes and the
observable phenomena of simple surface effects; ... these structures
therefore have an ambiguous status."38 They are, in fact, occult enti-
ties insufficiently substantial to act since, as structures, they are only
pure relations; but, moreover, they are too solid to be structures in
Lvi-Strauss's sense of the term, and thus make it possible to account
for observable phenomena in terms of causalities.
L ~ c a n is everywhere in Althusser's work and the strong current of
Althussero-Lacanianism at the rue d'Ulm was based on a theoretical
306 The Althusserian
matrix that made a symbiosis of the two possible: from the sympto-
matic reading via the structural causality, which is absent from its ef-
fects, to overdetermination, another fundamental conceptual tool that
Althusser imported from psychoanalysis. "1 did not forge this con-
cept. As 1 have indicated, 1 borrowed it from two existing disciplines:
linguistics and psychoanalysis. "39
This notion was central, pro vi ding the Marxist contradiction with
its specificity and making it possible to account for the structural total-
ity, the transition from structure to another in a concrete social
formation. Along with overdetermination, Althusser borrowed other
Freudian concepts as weIl, such as condensation and transference,
which make their way into Marxism. This intrusion let Althusser mul-
tiply the contradiction, if not to dissolve it. It "corroded ... the com-
fortable arrangements of the logos of contradiction. "40
Theoretical Antihumanism and Antihistoricism
The appetite for Althusser's theses also corresponded to a moment in
which the conception of the Subject was taking off from the theoreti-
cal horizon. The structuralist program had already managed to re-
duce, dethrone, and split the Subject, and generally make it insignifi-
cant; with Althusser, Marx took his place alongside those who, on the
basis of the social sciences, were carrying out and developing this de-
centering of man in every way. "In a strict relationship ta theory, we
can and should speak openly of Marx's theoretical antihumanism."41
The notion of man loses aIl meaning as it is reduced to little more than
a philosophical myth, a contemporary ideological category of the ri se
of the bourgeoisie. Reading Capital in a theoretical antihumanist per-
spective would set in place essentially structural categories; these were
Lacanian in Althusser and Lvi-Straussian for tienne Balibar. "In
Reading Capital, 1 had somewhat imitated a certain number of models
for constructing concepts that, although they wete not ta ken from
Lvi-Strauss, made it possible to discover, surprisingly, a comparative
method in Marx's texts. There are aspects of Marx that are structural-
ist before structuralism. "42
Balibar in fact made an essential contribution in the collective an-
thology Reading Capital, in which he studied the fundamental con-
cepts of historical materialism. He elucidated Marx's theses on the
basis of a theoretical apparatus in which the methodological presup-
positions of Lvi-Straussian structuralism became readily apparent.
The Althusserian L,X1JiU"UH
37
l'vlarxist notions were reconstructed from purely formaI determina-
tions, as they are in the phonological model, and evolved according to
a system of purely spatial pertinent differences that exduded material
nature, the concrete substance of the objects in question. Just as for
kinship structures, empirical descriptions of observable reality counted
less th an defining the mode of production as "the differential determi-
nation of forms, and defining a 'mode' as a system of forms that repre-
sents a state of variation. "43 Setting the referent aside therefore lent an
essentially formaI aspect to the approach, making it possible to daim
a greater latitude for applying it to aIl possible cases. "This combina-
tion-practically mathematical- ... will incite us to speak about a
perfectly unexpected structuralism here. "44 In a pure interp!ay com-
bining forms and pertinent differences, tienne Balibar did, never-
theless, agree that economics played the fundamental role, that of
determining the relationship of relationships, that of the structural
causality.
This theoretical elaboration made a science of the modes of
production possible because it could achieve a high degree of abstrac-
tion and generalization and at the same time make use of a system
of pertinent causality. In such a science, the Subject shone by its im-
pertinence; indeed, it is sim ply impossible to find, an exquisite corpse
cast out with the ideological bathwater: "Men only appear in the the-
ory as supports for the relationships implied in the structure, and the
forms of their individuality only appear as the determined effects of
the structure. "45 The structural paradigm lends sorne support to this
decentering, which also daims a philosophical heritage in Spinoza and
his definition of attributes, which function like pertinent characteris-
tics within the mode of production in Marx. A subjectless process,
therefore, according to the Althusserians, shapes the course of history.
Not only the Subject, but aIl historicist notions of history went
unrecognized for their potential perversion of the sought-after theo-
retical scientificity: "The fall of science in history here is only the indi-
cation of a theoretical faIl."46 Althusserian antihistoricism evolved
over a number of stages, induding the de composition of temporalities
and the construction of a totality articulated around pertinent rela-
tionships within a general theory. But this totality in fact became im-
mobilized without recognizing structure in the same way that Lvi-
Strauss's cold societies were immobilized, without recognizing what
was going on in their internaI contradictions or in the potential for
308 The Althusserian Explosion
getting beyond them. By metonymy, the state of t r u ~ t u r e was substi-
tuted for the cadaver of the subject, which had disappeared along with
its historicity. Since this atrophied and frozen structure had to be at-
tached to something, Althusser anchored it with the status he gave the
notion of ideology, which served as a pivot much as the symbolic did
for Lacan or Lvi-Strauss. Althusser used it as an invariant, atemporal
category, like the Freudian unconscious, and therefore had free rein to
complexify the kind of purely instrumental relationship used in the
Marxist vulgate's view of the dominant ideology as a simple instru-
ment of the ruling class.
A Subject of Substitution: Ideology
Althusser elevated ideology to the level of a relatively autonomous
veritable function making it mechanically irreducible to what und er- _
lay it. But setting ideology at a distance also meant its hypertrophy as
a transhistoric structure invoked in order to construct theory. By in-
duction, then, the efflcacy of the ideologicalled to the creation of sub-
jects absolutely subjected to the place to which they were assigned,
like so many mystified objects of occult forces represented by a new
subject of history: ideology.
This was the period when everything was ideology: feelings, be-
havior ... Nothing escaped the critique of ideology, which became a
totalizing category within which an impotent individual operated. The
only escape from what could have been a vicious circle in a closed sys-
tem, the only way of getting out of this labyrinth, was, for Althusser,
through the epistemological break, the sole thread that made the ad-
vent of science possible.
Marxism, as a theory of theoretical practices and as the ideologi-
cal detergent in the name of science, allowed for an entire generation
to reconcile its political commitment with a truly scientific exigency
that, in its purity, resembled a metaphysical desire for an absolute. We
can readily understand how such a thinking machin could attract
those avidly in se arch of critical arms.
Thirty-two
Marxism's Second Wind
This new Althusserian reading represented a youthful cure for Marx-
ism and rid it of its tragic cast. Everyone used the mature Marx to
turn him into the harbinger of the scientificity of his discipline, as the
remarkable sales of the very theoretical For Marx attested. Moreover,
the totalizing conception of Althusserian thought gave each discipline
the feeling that it was an active participant in a common adventure.
Marx became the intersection of aIl research, a veritable common de-
nominator in the social sciences.
In philosophy, Althusser received the exemplary and completely
unexpected support of Alain Badiou, a brilliant philosopher who was
close to Sartre, who thus once more lost one of his disciples, carried
away by the structural wave. Badiou published an enthusiastic article
on the (new) beginning of dialectical materialism in Critique.
1
"This
article was very favorable and everyone was quite surprised by such a
reversal."2 Alain Badiou was pleased with the harmony generated by
the new Althusserian theses and by the political context. He discerned
three types of Marxism: a fundamental Marxism based exclusively on
the young Marx of the Manuscripts of I844, a totalitarian Marxism
based on dialecticallaws, and, ta king Althusserian thinking as its real-
ization, an analogical Marxism for which Capital is a privileged ob-
ject and that "uses Marxist ideas in such a way as to undo their orga-
nization. He in fact considered the relationship between the base and
the superstructure ... as pure isomorphs."3 After the publication of
39
3IO Marxism's Second Wind
his article, Badiou was invited by Althusser's work group to partici-
pate in a philosophy course for scientists that was to be held at the
ENS during the academic year 1967-68. Lecturing to an enormous
crowd, Badiou presented his ideas of the mode!.
This symbiotic synergy between political commitment, epistemo-
logical reflection, and a new approach to Marxism carried beyond the
Latin Quarter to most French university campuses. In Aix-en-Provence,
Jolle Proust, who was about twerity at the time and working in epis-
temology with Gilles Gaston-Granger, discovered For Marx with a
passion and discussed its new theses in her work group. "We were
completely convinced. We felt that we were discovering the theoretical
possibilities linked to political positions and inseparable from struc- \
turalism that seemed to offer the key for interpreting a range of differ-
ent fields. What was fascinating was that it worked in linguistics, so
we aIl did sorne linguistics."4
Such a return to Marx's work and to the internaI construction of
his texts cannot but recall the principles of Martial Guroult's method.
For a whole generation of philosophers, this kind of reading meant
the possibility of breaking with a form of teaching that tended to water
down the specificity of philosophical problematization itself and to
analyse purely doxographic influences. Althusserian structural Marx-
ism laid the foundations for a new era in philosophy, but aIl the fields
of knowledge experienced a serious jolt in 1965. Althusser's model,
which made use of the structuralist vogue, became in its turn, the
launching pad for other efforts to transform the human sciences.
Althusserism in Linguistics
Michel Pcheux, a friend and disciple of Althusser, thought that the
best way to do philosophy in the sixties was to do it in the social sci-
ences. In this regard, he was somewhat of an exception among the
ENS disciplines. Appointed to a CNRS social psychology laboratory
at the Sorbonne, under Pags, he belonged to a discipline that, at
the time, had the reputation of being the worst of horrors in the eyes
of Althusserians. As a student of Althusser and Canguilhem, he was
something like the Trojan horse of psychologism. In 1966, Pcheux
met Michel Simon and Paul Henry, two researchers from another
social science laboratory in the Sixth Section of the EPHE, under the
direction of Serge Moscovici. The three of'them together worked on a
critique from within of the classical forms of the social sciences. "We
Marxism's Second Wind 1 l
had become sort an informaI te am and we worked together practi-
cally aIl week long. "
5
Michel Simon had been a technician in the laboratory and later
became a researcher, while Paul Henry, who had been trained as a
,
mathematician, was interested in ethnology. He had gone to see Lvi-
Strauss in 1962, just after having fini shed his Licence in mathematics,
to discuss his interest in taking up ethnology. Henry had found Lvi-
Strauss appealing because of his use of mathematical models and his
will to construct an encompassing communication theory. Lvi-
Strauss advised Henry to do linguistics and to get a certificate in eth-
nology. When Henry entered the social psychology laboratory, he, like
Pcheux, had a critical perspective. He was surprised by the use of
mathematics and the proliferation of equations without any concep-
tuaI constructions, and his research projects were increasingly ori-
ented toward linguistics, toward the structures of language and the
notions of what is implicit or presupposed. These placed him at the
heart of the structura li st problem. "We were interested in structural-
ism because it was a way of critiquing social psychology, and particu-
lady by the notion of the subject."6
Led by Pcheux, this little work group tried to apply Althusser's
theses to linguistics. Many others worked on this as weIl, particulady
at Nanterre: Rgine Robin, Denise Maldidier, Franoise Gadet, Clau-
dine Normand. Michel Pcheux initially pub li shed two articles in Les
Cahiers pour l'analyse under the pseudonym of Thomas Herbert, first
in 1966 and aga in in 1968.7 This theoretical work was part of the dou-
ble return to Marx that Althusser had undertaken and the return to
Freud carried out by Lacan, and was to be used as a framework for
the publication of a book that became a methodological manifesto.
Pcheux's Automatic Discourse Analysis, published in 1969,8 served as
a bridge to Althusser's thinking, making it accessible to linguists.
Pcheux also argued for the notion of a break in the process of estab-
lishing a science, and he took the example of technical practices that
only later became scientific practices, such as stills or scales. Scales were
long used for commercial transactions before Galileo used them as an
object for the theory of physics. "This process is exactly what Pcheux
called the 'methodical reproduction' of the object of a science."9
For Pcheux, this second stage was the true realization of science;
he was convinced that the human sciences were merely ideologies and
that philosophically based criticisms of them were useless. He hoped
3 I2 Marxism's Second Wind
to transform them from within by providing truly scientific instru-
ments adapted to their specifie field. However, the proximity between
this ideology belonging to the social sciences and political practice in
its ability to reproduce social relationships made it necessary to give
priority to discourse, the specifie instrument of political power. This
hidden tie between political practice and the social sciences needed to
be examined. "Pcheux totally rejected any idea of a language reduced
to an instrument for communicating meanings that exist or could be
defined independently of it. "10 The orientation that Pcheux gave dis-
course analysis took its place within the Althusserian notion of ideol-
ogy, transformed into a veritable subject of discourse, a universal ele-
ment of historical existence. His goal was to make the link between
language and ideology explicit. He "placed himself between what we
might call the subject of language and the subject of ideology,"l1 at -
the core of the problem of a structuralized Marxism.
Althusserian Thinking in Anthropology
Alain Badiou's conversion to Althusserianism brought with it another.
The anthropologist Emmanuel Terray had also been rather a Sartrean
early on and a great admirer of Critique of Dialectic Reason. Later,
Terray would transform anthropology from a Marxist-structuralist
perspective. He had taken courses with Althusser at the ENS but had
left Ulm in I96I, just before Althusser began teaching Marx. When
Althusser's theses were published, Terray was in the Ivory Coast doing
fieldwork, and it was his friend, Alain Badiou, who kept him current.
"1 read For Marx and Reading Capital then with great interest and
excitement."12 Althusser's article "Contradiction and Overdetermina-
tion" in For Marx seemed the most fundamental to him because it
made it possible to tear Marxism away from questions of origins and
metaphysics in order to make it an instrument of scientific analysis.
But what would influence Terray's anthropological perspective more
than anything was tienne Balibar's article "The Fundamental Con-
cepts of Historical Materialism," in Reading Capital.
Terray later tested the validity of the concepts of mode of produc-
tion, relation of production, forces of production, and their articula-
tions while doing his fieldwork. "Reading this text, 1 wrote the second
part of my book, Marxism and Prirrtitive Societies.
13
This was a
rereading of Claude Meillassoux's work using the conceptual grid that
tienne Balibar had proposed."14 Before pub1ishing his book, Terray
Marxism's Second Wind 3 I3
sent the manuscript to Althusser, who not only considered it ta be per-
- tinent but immediately understood how much it would affect the
work being done in anthropology. From then on, Terray was included
in the circle of Althusserians.
An ethnologist and friend of Terray, Marc_Aug, was also work-
ing in the Ivory Coast at the time, and he also joined the Althusserian
vogue. "Althusser was enormously influential because he appeared to
be a liberator, a model of nuance with respect to the Marxist vul-
gate."15 ln his monograph on the Alladians, Aug had also tested the
pertinence of the Althusserian model, but only in notes,16 although
today he recognizes his discomfort in this exercise of ma king a theo-
retical projection of a reality ill adapted to his reading grid at the
time: "It did not correspond to what 1 was looking at empirically,
which is to say, people who wondered about death, illness, and the
beyond. "17 This manner of questioning was therefore quite eccentric
with regard ta the instruments being used in Althusser's form of struc-
tural Marxism, even if there was a real change in anthropological re-
ceptivity ta an entirely new manner of thinking about social and eco-
nomic fields.
Althusserianism in Economics
Althusserian thinking also made inroads in economics. Under AI-
thusser's direct influence, Suzanne de Brunoff published Money in
Marx,18 a book that was contemporaneous with Reading Capital. But
it was especially Charles Bettelheim's work that was spectacularly
influential at the tme. Bettelheim took Althusserian categories of
contradiction between the relations and forces of production in order
to demonstrate-and in this he distinguished his work from that of
Althusser-the reestablishment of the capitalist mode of production in
the Soviet Union. Using the invariant of the separation between pro-
ducers and owners of the means of production-the basis of business
organization in the Soviet economy-he deduced the domination of
capitalism in social organization. Taking a structural Marxist perspec-
tive, meaning became positional, defined by the polarity between the
proletarian and the bureaucrat, who, like the capitalist, finds himself
on the other side of the structure. Bettelheim's work was also interest-
ing because it reduced the dominance the Marxist vulgate attributed
to the forces of production and underscored, tu the contrary, the prin-
cipal role played by social relationships in the very organization of
3I4 Marxism's Second Wind
production.
19
Bettelheim and Balibar agreed on this point to consider
the level of the productive forces also as a relation of production. Bet-
telheim questioned the neutrality of the productive forces, a thesis that
Robert Linhart later took up in his study on the inherent contractions
in the development of Soviet socialism in Lenin, Peasants, and Taylor.
20
Linhart demonstrated the opposition between the construction of
a socialist reality and the application that Lenin, as early as 1918,
wanted to make of Taylor's model, which involved a clear division be-
tween a technocratie leadership and the workers. This application of
Taylorism overwhelmed the technical division of work at the same
time as it tore the workers' own knowledge out of their hands in order
to transfer it to a bureaucratized management.
And yet, because the Althusserian theses were so intensely theo- .
retical, it was impossible for them to make a decisive and immediate
incursion into economic territory, although economists would be
deeply jolted by Althusser's ideas after the shock wave of the May
1968 movement.
Althusser Introduces Lacan
It is also to Althusser's credit that psychoanalysis came to the fore of
French intellectuallife, thanks to his 1964 article "Freud and Lacan,"
which came out at the same time that Lacan relocated his seminar to
the ENS on the rue d'Ulm.
21
Althusser's position made it possible to
open Marxism up to Freudian thinking and to put an end to the sepa-
ration imposed by the Stalinist rejection of psychoanalysis. With Al-
thusser, the return to Freud took the form of a recourse to Lacan, for
both were engaged in a similar enterprise of epistemological elucida-
tion and ideological critique and both were waging a war against hu-
manism and psychologism in the name of science. This similarity was
also apparent in their renewal of a particular kind of reading of the
basic works of Marx and Freud.
"The return to Freud was not a return ta the birth of Freud but to
the mature Freud. "22 What Althusser appreciated in the Lacanian ap-
proach was that Lacan saw a break in Freud's work that resembled
the one he perceived in Marx's work: "Lacan's first words are to say
that by virtue of his principles, Freud founded a science."23 But a sci-
ence needs it own object; it cannot be constructed as a simple art of
accommodating leftovers. After Freud's discoverr of this specifie ob-
ject, the unconscious, Lacan, according to Althusser, taok a step for-
Marxism's Second Wind I5
ward in constituting psychoanalysis as a science by considering that
the transition from a biological to a social existence was to be in-
scribed in the register of the Law of Order, which is to say, language.
According to Althusser, Lacan's contribution lay in the priority he ac-
corded the symbolic over the imaginary: "Lacan made clear this cru-
cial point: the se two moments are governed, domina te d, and marked
bya single Law, that of the symbolic. "24
Shifting the ego out of the center and subordinating it to an order
eluding consciousness recalls Althusser's reading of Marx wherein
history is a subjectless process. In this way, an Althussero-Lacanism
could explode and make Marx and Freud the great thinking machine
of the sixties. A renewed Marxism received its second wind, fanned
even further by the aftermath of May 1968.
Thirty-three
I9
66
Annum mira bile (1): A Watershed
Year for Structuralism
Everything started falling apart as of 1966. A friend had talked to
me about The Order of Things and 1 made the mistake of opening
it .... 1 dropped Stendhal, Mandelstam, and Rimbaud, the way one
fine day you stop smoking Gitanes, in order to read the authors that
Foucault was discussing-Freud, Saussure, and Ricardo. 1 was in-
fected. The fever did not stop and 1 loved this infection. 1 did not
want to get better. 1 was proud of my knowledge, like a louse on the
pope's head. 1 was talking about philosophy. 1 called myself a struc-
turalist, but 1 was not going around shouting my head off since 1 was
still uncertain; the slightest jolt would have shaken me. 1 spent my
nights teaching myself the principles of linguistics and 1 was quite
happy .... 1 was gorging myself on syntagms and morphemes .... If
1 happened to have any discussions with a humanist, 1 wiped him out
with an epistemic blow. . . . 1 spoke the names Derrida or Propp in
an emotional and almost ttembling voice, preferably during autumn
evenings, like an old soldier caressing the flags he has wrested from
his enemy .... Jakobson was my tropics and my equator, mile Ben-
veniste my Guadeloupe, and the proairetic code my Club Med. 1
thought of Hjelmslev like a steppe .... It seems to me that 1 was not
the only one to have gotten lost in these detours.!
Twenty years later, Gilles Lapouge describes the real Saturday
night fever of the sixties for a structuralism that had reached its
zenith. AlI the energy of the social sciences converged at that point to
irradiate the perspective of research and publication around the struc-
turalist paradigm. The year 1966 was the "central reference point ....
At least in Paris, we could say it was that year when lots of things got
p6
A Watershed Year for Structuralism JI7
mixed together, and it was probably a decisive year for the most spe-
cialized research areas."2 The year I966 can be consecrated as the
structuralist year; if we can talk about the descendants of I848 or of
I968, we have to include those descendants of I966, who were just as
turbulent. "1 am a child of I966."3
Publishing in the Kingdom of Structure
The activity in publishing houses in I966 gave a clear idea of the veri-
table structuralist explosion going on everywhere that year and it,
appeared to be a real seismic jolt. The number of major works was
impressive: Roland Barthes published Critique et vrit at Seuil, his fa-
mous reaction to Picard's attack, and about which Renaud Matignon
wrote in L'Express: "This is the Dreyfus Affair of the world of letters.
It too had a Picard, whose name was even written the same way, and
his 'J'accuse' has just been published."4 For Matignon, Barthes's work
holds a place in the history of critical thought equal to the one ac-
corded the Declaration of the Rights of Man in social history. There
was no real French civil war to decide whether Barthes or Picard was
right, but the .intellectual world found itself very much divided that
year along those lines.
Greimas published his Structural Semantics at Larousse that year.
"Thanks to D ~ b o i s , my semantics has become structural in big red let-
ters. He told me, 'You will sell a thousand more copies if you add the
word structuraL'"
5
Adding the adjective "structuralist" was a good
sales pitch in the mid-sixties. Everyone was affecte d, including the
"trainer of the French soccer team, who declared that he was going to
reorganize the team according to structuralist principles."6
Franois Wahl, Roland Barthes's close friend and editor at Seuil,
managed to persuade Lacan to publish his writings in an anthology:
"The crits were published because of me, to tell you the truth. 1
found myself de facto in a central role, speaking purely in a topo-
graphical sense."7 This enormous nine hundred-page volume, written
in a baroque and hermetic style, consecrated Lacan as the "French
Freud" in I966. When the reviews starting coming out, 5,000 copies
had already been sold and Seuil quickly had to reprint the crits. They
continue to sell well: 36,000 volumes had been sold by I984. In I970
the two-volume paperback was published and it broke all records for
this kind of book, selling 94,000 copies of the fust volume and 65,000
copies of the second volume.
3I8 A Watershed Year for Structuralism
Still at Seuil, in the Tel Quel collection, Tzvetan Todorov made
the work of the Russian formalists known to a French public with his
Theory of Literature, with a preface by Roman Jakobson. Grard
Genette published Figures in the same collection.
The real event of the year, however, was Michel Foucault's The
arder of Things. Its success was unprecedented: the book was out of
print within days. "Foucault is selling like hotcakes: 800 copies of The
arder of Things in five days, during the last week of July (9,000
copies in all)."8 Published in April of 1966, The arder of Things sold
20,000 copies during that year al one; in 1987, it sold 103,000 copies.
9
Given the difficulty of the work, this was entirely exceptional.
Thanks ta Foucault's work, Pierre Nora, who had just joined Gal-
limard, began the Library of the Human Sciences collection in 1965:
1 was profoundly convinced that there was a movement taking place
in what we called the sciences of man. Different disciplines were be-
ginning to converge around a common set of problems based on the
fact that when men speak they say things they are not necessarily re-
sponsible for, and end up doing things they did not necessarily want
to do, that forces they are not conscious of course through them and
dominate them. . . . Moreover, a second movement was going
through the research being done: this was a sociopolitical content,
which gave this knowledge a potentially subversive value.1
At the same time and in the same collection, along with Michel Fou-
cault Pierre Nora brought out lias Canetti's Mass and Power,11 and
Genevive Calame-Griaule's Ethnology and Language.
12
mile Ben-
veniste's General Linguistics also became the great reference work of
the moment and brought its author out of his isolation at the Collge
de France.
Pierre Nora did not, however, want to limit himself ta being a
simple spokesman for structuralism. He was taking Raymond Aron's
seminar at the time and asked Aron ta prepare a book that would
come out in 1967, The Stages of Sociological Thinking.
13
And yet, the
fact that he was director of Gallimard's social sciences publications in
1966 made him, despite himself, structuralism's standard-bearer. He
tried, unsuccessfully, ta draw Lvi-Strauss into his circle: "When 1 got
ta Gallimard, 1 went ta see him ta try and bring him along. For rea-
sons that are not important here, he did not want to come to Galli-
mard."14 ln 1966, Payot decided to publish Georges Dumzil's An-
cient Roman Religion,15 which was originally ta have come out at a
A Watershed Year for Structuralism I9
German publishing house. Pierre Nora immediately understood how
important it was to publish a work by Dumzil in the structuralist
fever of the time and went to see him. "Pierre Nora intervened. He
made me. 1 am a creation of Gallimard." 16
Even if certain houses, such as Seuil or Gallimard, appeared to be
the spearheads of the structuralist publishing enterprise, others also
participated in the explosion of 1966. ditions de Minuit published
Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel's Love of ArtY ditions Franois
Maspero, which had stunned everyone in 1965 with Reading Capital
and For Marx, published For a Theory of Literary Production
18
by Pierre Machery, an Althusserian. Presses Universitaires de France
reprinted Georges Canguilhem's thesis, Normal and Pathological,19
which had initially come out in 1943. Nor were historians silent
in this rising tide of structure. The Annales school also published a
certain number of major works during this same year of 1996, includ-
ing Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's The Peasants of Languedoc,20 pub-
lished at the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes (SEVPEN), and Pierre
Goubert's Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen,21 published by
Fayard. The master of the Annales school, Fernand Braudel, took ad-
vantage of this infatuation with the long haul and structures to have
Armand Colin republish his The Mediterranean and the Mediter-
ranean World at the Time of Philip II.22
The year 1966 was one during which the apprentice structuralist
reader had to read constantly. Every day brought another work to the
harvest; a number of reprints came out that were also considered ab-
solutely indispensable reading for a good structuralist. Gilles Gaston-
Granger's FormaI Thinking and the Human Sciences
23
(Aubier, 1960)
was an example. "When 1 got to the Sorbonne in 1965-66, 1 asked
people two or three years older what 1 should read. Everyone told me
that 1 had to read that book, which was being quoted everywhere."24
The same was true for Jean Rousset's Form and Meaning
25
(Corti,
1962), which was essential for an entire generation, and in which the
author proposed to analyze the production of meaning within texts
based on their internaI formaI structure.
Reviews in the Kingdom of Structure
The year 1966 was also one of intense structuralist activity in reviews.
Hundreds were created. The first issue of Langages came out in
March 1966 and presented the scientific study of language as an es-
)20 A Watershed Year for Structuraism
sential dimension of culture. This project focused on the interfacing of
various disciplines interested in problems of language. Similarly, Les
Cahiers pour l'analyse was published by the Cercle d'pistemologie
de l'cole Normale Suprieure in early 1966, and the Note to the
Reader, signed by Jacques-Alain Miller for the editorial board, clearly
expressed its ambition to construct a theory of discourse for aIl the
sciences of analysis: logic, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. The first
issue focused on truth and included Lacan's famous text "La science et
la vrit," which was reprinted in the crits published by SeuiL Issue 3
of Les Cahiers pour l'analyse came out in 1966, and in it Lacan
clearly placed himself within the structuralist movement, in an answer
he gave to philosophy students: "Psychoanalysis as a science will be
structuralist to the point of acknowledging a rejection of the subject in
science. "26 Analytic discourse should therefore be used to construct a
the ory of science.
Communications 8: An Ambitious Pro gram
But the major review-event was issue 8 of Communications, devoted
to the structural analysis of the rcit, which included articles by the
semiology luminaries of the day: Roland Barthes, Aigirdas Julien
Greimas, Claude Brmond, Umberto Eco, Jules Gritti, Violette Morin,
Christian Metz, Tzvetan Todorov, and Grard Genette. Communica-
tions 8 was not just a simple issue, it was a pro gram. Barthes wrote
an introduction to the structural analysis of the rcit and designated
linguistics as the founding model for "dechronologizing" and "relogi-
fying" narrative within a structural .logic. Greimas located the struc-
turalist enterprise at the intersection between semantics and a Lvi-
Straussian analysis of myth. His contribution, written as an homage
to Lvi-Strauss, was supposed to complement to the anthropologists
work in its constitution of elements for a the ory of interpretation for
mythic narrative: "The recent progress in mythological research,
thanks especially to the work of Claude Lvi-Strauss, includes a con-
siderable number of materials and elements of reflection that belong
to semantic theory. "27 Greimas put himself on Lvi-Strauss's turf and
addressed the Bororo myth of reference, which had been the basis for
the first volume of Mythologiques, The Raw and the Cooked. But he
shifted the perspective, and, rather than arguing that narrative was the
unit y of the mythological universe, he considered that universe from
A Watershed Year for Structuralism 32I
the angle of narrative unit y in order to explain the descriptive proc-
esses at work in it.
This Hjelmslevian approach to the material that Lvi-Strauss had
studied in order to understand immanent structures did not sit particu-
lady well with Lvi-Strauss, who did not feel he needed a lesson in
rigor, even when it was given by a semantician like Greimas. Shortly
thereafter, Lvi-Strauss dismissed the team of semioticians headed by
Greimas, which he was housing in his social anthropology laboratory
at the Collge de France. He could not continue to keep a team under
his roof that thought it did things better than he did by creating a syn-
thesis between his own paradigmatic approach and Propp's syntag-
matie analysis. "Greimas did not understand that the two things were
completely different. "28 He paid a heavy price for his lack of under-
standing. Lvi-Strauss's structures were not, in fact, narrative struc-
tures. He did not study the linear, syntagmatie links of a myth whose
constitutive elements of a -paradigmatic structure were picked here
and there: "Mythic structure is something completely external to nar-
rative form and is altogether of capital importance. "29
Vladimir Prpp's work on folktales provided the other important
model of narrative analysis. Morphology of the Folktale appeared in
Russian in I928 and became the great inspiration for the structuralist
method, especially after it came out in France in I965 at Seuil. It was
translated into English in I958 and had attracted Lvi-Strauss's atten-
tion as eady as I960.30 Lvi-Strauss explained Propp's method in his
article and was enthusiastic about what he called its prophetic quality,
but critical of the distinction Propp drew between folktales and myth.
For Lvi-Strauss, the folktale was the degraded, weakened version of
the first myth, and the fact that it lent itself to the most diverse permu-
tations made it less appropriate than the myth for structuralist analy-
sis. But Lvi-Strauss especially criticized Propp's formalist vigor, and
contrasted it with the structuralist method: "Formalism destroys the
object. Propp ends up discovering that there is, in fact, only one folk-
tale."31 Lvi-Strauss took issue with formalism because it ignored the
complementarity between signifier and signified that Saussure had
pointed out, and he essentially criticized Propp for his method, al-
though he did acknowledge and emphasize the importance of Propp's
work, which became one of the matrices of thinking in the context of
literary semiology.
Propp responded in the Preface to the Italian edition of his book,
322 A Watershed Year for Structuralism
which came out in 1966. "Morphology of the Folktale and Theory
and History of Folklore were two parts or two terms of an important
work."32 In fact, Lvi-Strauss did not consider that the morphology of
the folktale was presented as the prelude to a historical study that is
its inevitable complement. This second work, published in the Soviet
Union in 1946, was carefully ignored in France,33 Gallimard pub-
lished it only in 1983, a clear sign of how, in the sixties, a historical
approach was carefully overlooked.
Claude Brmond had already based his study on the narrative
message using Propp's method in issue 4 of Communications in 1964,
and in 1966 he again used Propp's work to define the logic of possible
narratives.
1 fust had Madame Jakobson's translation of Vladimir Propp and
indeed found that it was very interesting insofar as it implied a shift
in the mechanics of narrative and of characters toward functions. 50
1 began to think about this approach without ever considering that
what 1 was doing fit into the structuralist project. There are narrative
structures, of course, but they do not represent more than simple
logical constraints or ways of creating the drama of the story. For
me, you do not need to look for anything more.3
4
In his 1966 text, Claude Brmond sketched out a typology of elemen-
tary narrative forms that corresponded to universal categories of
human behavior, and from this he constructed a possible classification
of narrative types around a basic referential structure that then under-
goes a process whereby it is made more complicated or adapted to this
or that spatial or temporal situation.
Umberto Eco's piece clearly revealed one of the ambitions of
structuralism to decipher everything rather than limiting the corpus of
the great literary works to the usual canons. Eco chose Ian Fleming's
popular 007 James Bond series. Casino Royale, the first volume in the
series, which came out in 1953, served as the unvarying matrix for aIl
the later books. Eco was interested in James Bond's sustained popular-
ity, and instead of giving the general analysis and valorizing its ideo-
logical aspects, he demonstrated that the series was, above aIl, rhetori-
cal. Fleming's world is Manichaean because of its convenience in the
art of persuading the reader. "Fleming is not reactionary because he
uses a Russian or a Jew as a bad guy; he is reactionary because he uses
formulas."35 Eco shifted the reactionary label generally attached to
A Watershcd Year for Structuralism 323
Fleming in arder ta describe the fable, a genre in which inherent dog-
matism leads to inevitably reactionary forms of formulaic thinking.
For his part, Todorov used the work of the Russian formalists to
create categories of literary narration within the framework of some-
thing that was no longer a literary study, but a study of literariness,
not a direct reading of works but of the possibilities of the literary dis-
course that made the works possible. "This is how literary studies can
become a science of literature."36
Grard Genette investigated the boundaries of narrative using
Aristotelian and Platonic definitions of how these boundaries operate
in the work of such contemporary writers as Philippe Sollers or Jean
Thibaudeau who experimented with and proclaimed the end of repre-
sentation, and announced perhaps the definitive end of the age of rep-
resentation. Taken together, these contributions provided an immense
scaffolding for literary research, which would be used to contextualize
the dominant discourse of classicalliterary history with a vengeance,
fueled by the apparent collectivity of the project and its promise of
constructing a truly new science.
Les Temps modernes
When Sartre's Les Temps mOdernes devoted a special issue to struc-
turalism, its sweeping success was consolidatedY Jean Pouillon wrote
the Introduction, beginning with the incontrovertible fact that struc-
turalism was in vogue: "Fashion is exasperating in that by criticizing
one is also yielding to it."38 For Pouillon, the phenomenon expressed
two important ideas: totality and interdependence, or the search for
relations between different terms, not in spite of, but in light of, their
differences. Structuralism was therefore a matter of "looking for the
relations that give a positional value to the terms that they bring to-
gether in an organized set."39 Marc Barbut wrote about the meaning
of the term "structure" in mathematics, and recalled Lvi-Strauss's use
of the analogy of a system of four classes in his analysis of the Kariera
kinship system.
Greimas contributedan analysis of the relationship between
"structure and history" in order to emphasize that the Saussurean di-
chotomy between diachrony and synchrony lacked pertinence, and he
contrasted Hjelmslev's notion of structure as an achronic mechanism.
He also responded to the criticism of structuralism's ahistoricism and
recalled Fernand Braudel's three temporalities of structure, moment,
324 A Watershed Year for Structuralism
and event to salute-without in any way agreeing with the use to
which it was put-the beginning of a reflection on the problem as weil
as historians' effort to integrate structure. "Such a view, unfortu-
nately, does not stand up to dose examination .... First of all, we do
not see how to sustain the argument according to which that which
lasts longer is more essential than that which does not la st long. "40
According to Greimas, everything, for a structuralist, is located at the
level of a metalinguistic model, and in this context, the historical di-
mension is relegated to the role of "background."41
Maurice Godelier reiterated the pertinence of the link between
Marx and structuralism. Marx "presages the modern structuralist
current,"42 and he is therefore understood, thanks to Lvi-Strauss's
work, as the true precursor of the structuralist paradigm because he
made it possible to dissociate visible social relationships from their
underlying logic. Not only did he prefer structural analysis to histori-
cism, but he finally furthered the contradiction by locating it in "two
structures that were irreducible to one another: the forces of produc-
tion and relation of production. "43 Pierre Bourdieu laid out the bases
of a sociology of intellectual thought and of artistic creation that, he
argued, should encompass more than the traditional opposition be-
tween internaI and external aesthetics by using a rigorous structural
method: "The intellectual realm enjoys a relative autonomy, which
justifies the methodological independence of the structural method
when it considers this realm to be a system ordered by its own
laws."44
Althia
Althia published its special issue on structuralism in February 1966.
It included an article by Maurice Godelier on contradiction, and an
article by Lvi-Strauss on scientific criteria in the social sciences and
the humanities. Kostas Axelos contributed an article on Lucien
Sebag's attempt to reconcile Marxism and structuralism, and Georges
Lapssade wrote a piece on Hegel. Roland Barthes presented struc-
turalism as the possibility of "defetishizing the old-or concurrent-
knowledge. "45
Esprit
Esprit had devoted an issue in 1963 to Lvi-Strauss's thesis and in De-
cember 1966, the review organized a conference whose proceedings
A Watershed Year for Structuralism 325
were published in in a speciai issue on structuralism.
46
Esprit invited its readers ta ponder this rather complete panorama.
Jean-Marie Domenach viewed the structura li st phenomenon as an en-
terprise that destabilized the terms by which philosophy had operated
until then, particularly in its view of consciousness. He raised the
question of how the challenge of those on the left to the foundations
of the established system can be reconciled with their political stuggle,
for if men are moved by a system that cons trains them and cannot
assure sorne autonomous consciousness, in the name of what can
they continue to protest? The complexities and contradictions of
the structuralist phenomenon explained its attraction. "Structuralism
has two faces: one expresses the epistemological sufficiency of our
period and the other expresses the anxiety of an absence, the tides of
darkness. "47
But Esprit remained reticent and cri tic al of the notion of the death
of man and his dissolution in the structures surrounding him. On the
one hand, Mikel Dufrenne placed the neopositivism in vogue in a
France that was belatedly dise ove ring Anglo-Saxon logical positivism,
and interpreting it in its ciwn way, on the same plane as antihuman-
ism. "Contemporary philosophy cries: hands off of man!"48 On the
other hand, Paul Ricoeur recogaized that the structural triumph was
costly; scientificity was accompanied by two major exclusions: the
act of speaking-Saussure's elimination of speech in his study of lan-
guage-and history. And without repeating the wanderings of either
mentalism or psychologism, he suggested moving beyond this ampu-
tation; thus, "reflecting on language would me an considering the
unity of that which Saussure untethered, the unit y of language and of
speech."49
Sartre Breaks His Silence
Jean-Paul Sartre was mute in the face of this unbridled passion
for structura lis m, alone in his silence as each successful publication
weakened the bases of his existentialist philosophy a bit more. In
1966, Foucault, at the height of his glory, shelved Sartre along with
nineteenth-century philosophers. This was too much for Sartre, who
decided to break his silence and wage war, on the occasion of a special
issue of L'Arc that was devoted to him.
50
Bernard Pingaud wrote the
Introduction, in which he reviewed the radical changes that had taken
place over the previous fifteen years, during which time philosophy
326 A Watershed Year for Structuralism
had been supplanted by the social sciences: "We no longer speak
about consciousness or the subject, but rather about rules, codes, and
systems. We no longer say that man makes sense, but that meaning
cornes to man. We are no longer existentialists, but structuralists." 51
Sartre responded to Pingaud's questions, and the polemical tone of his
remarks reflected his anger as well as the difficulty of his position. On
the great success of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, Sartre re-
marked that "the success of his book proves that people were expect-
ing it. However, truly original thinking is never expected. Foucault
brought what people needed: an eclectic synthesis in which Robbe-
Grillet, structuralism, linguistics, Lacan, and Tel Quel are each used in
turn to demonstrate the impossibility of historical thinking. But what
was being targeted behind the attack on history, of course, was Marx-
ism. The issue was the creation of a new ideology, the la st barrier that
the bourgeoisie can still erect against Marx." 52
Following this somewhat reductionist assault, Sartre pondered his
remarks, and clarified: he did not totally reject the structuralist
method, so long as it remained mindful of its limits. If, for Sartre, the
mind could not be reduced to language, it remained a fundamental
part of his philosophy and corresponded to a constitutive part of the
practico-inert. Even if Lvi-Strauss's work found grace in Sartre's eyes,
he still answered the polemic against him that Lvi-Strauss opened in
The Savage Mind, by considering that "structuralism as Lvi-Strauss
conceives and practices it has significantly contributed to history's cur-
rent fall from grace."53 For Sartre, Lacan fully belongs to structural-
ism insofar as his decentering of the subject is linked to the same dis-
crediting of history: "If there is no longer any praxis, there cannot be
any subject. What do Lacan and the psychoanalysts who come after
him tell us? That man does not think, he is thought, just as for certain
linguists he is spoken."54 He nonetheless recognized Lacan's debt to
Freud, for the status accorded the subject in Freud was already am-
biguous, and the psychoanalytic cure in principle presupposed that
patients let themselves be acted upon by abandoning themselves to
free association. Althusser also came under attack for his ahistoricism
because he privileged the concept of atemporality at the cost of his-
toricity, without fully understanding "the permanent contradiction
between the structure of the practico-inert and man, who turns out to
be conditioned by it." 55
Finally, Sartre attributed this tremendous development and energy
A Watershed Year for Structuralism 3
of social sciences ara und the structura li st paradigm ta an Ameri-
ean import, an ideologieal adaptation of a technocratie civilization in
which philosophy has no place: "You see what is happening in the
United States: philosophy has been replaced by the social sciences."56
During the same year that President Johnson sent B-S2s to bomb
North Vietnam on a daily basis, we can ap)feciate the extent to which
Sartre's evaluation could be insulting to the structura li st musketeers.
In fact, this affair created a scandaI because Sartre's viewpoint on
the successive attacks on his philosophy since the early sixties was
ardently solicited. Le Figaro littraire dramatized the gravit y of the
situation, brandishing on its coyer: "Lacan Judges Sartre." Lacan an-
swered ironically in an interview, and relativized Sartre's position: "1
don't consider myself at aIl with respect to him." 57 Lacan simply re-
fused to credit any notion of a homogeneous structuralist group:
"Who is going to believe that we are working together?"58 It was not
an issue of plotting, of course, but of an intellectual debate, and Jean-
Franois Revel, who had virulently criticized structuralist theses in his
articles in L'Express, titled his report on the dossier on Sartre in L'Arc:
"Sartre on the Ballot." He recalled "King Lear, repudiated and de-
spoiled by his daughters,"59 and to the Sartrean analogy of the corre-
spondence between the ri se of a technostructure and the success of an
antihistorical and negative doctrine of the subject, he added the politi-
cal parallel between a Gaullism in which the French citizen is spoken
when his role is limited to listening to General de Gaulle incarnate the
voice of France during his famous press conferences.
Structuralism Crosses the Atlantic
The year 1966 also saw a number of important colloquiums and sym-
posia. The chteau at Cerisy remained a sanctuary for intellectual ac-
tivity; in 1966 it was the site of a colloquium on the topic "Current
Paths of Criticism." Plon published the proceedings two years later.
6o
In September 1966, on the shores of Lake Leman in Geneva, a
francophone philosophy congress was organized on language, and the
discussions focused on presentations by mile Benveniste and Mirca
Eliade. Others, beyond the confines of Europe, were also beginning to
be touched by the fever of French structuralism. In October 1966,
un der the auspices of the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity, an important structuralist ceremony unfolded. This was the
first structuralist crossing of the Atlantic to reach the New World.
328 A Watershed Year for Structuralism
Americans, having quite correctly perceived the multidisciplinarity of
the phenomenon of critical thinking in France, invited the representa-
tives of the different sciences of man:
61
Lucien Goldmann and Georges
Poulet in sociological literary criticism, Roland Barthes, Tzvetan
Todorov, and Nicolas Ruwet in literary semiology, Jacques Derrida in
philosophy for his work on Saussure and Lvi-Strauss, published in
Critique at the end of 1965,62 Jean-Pierre Vernant for his historical
anthropology of ancient Greece, and Jacques Lacan for his structural-
ist rereading of Freud. The symposium was published several years
later in the United States.
63
Roland Barthes was quite clearly singled out as one of the stars of
the effervescence in French intellectuallife. He spoke about the repres-
sion of rhetoric in the nineteenth century and how its replacement by
positivism had long separated the paths of literary theory and the
theory of language. Within this framework, he outlined the historical
roots of the rise of interest in a reflection upon language and the new
interfacing between literature and linguistics, which he called semio-
critical, based on writing as a system of signs in a relationship of ob-
jectivation. He recalled the new frontiers to be conquered in the ex-
ploration of language using the modern symbiosis that structuralism
had achieved between linguistics, psychoanalysis, and literature.
Jean-Pierre Vernant addressed Greek tragedy by demonstrating
that tragedy cannot be interpreted unless its context is understood,
but not in the classical sense of the term: "What 1 calI context is not
something that is outside the text, but that underlies the text. As we
read and decipher the text itseH, we realize that its semantic fields
force us to consider elements that are outside the tragedy and that give
meaning to it."64 Vernant insisted on the necessity of starting with the
internaI, hermetic structure of the text, but also on the need to bring
to light aIl the verbal, semantic, and ideological play that makes the
specifie effects of tragic discourse possible.
Vernant met Lacan for the first time in Baltimore. It was a meeting
that was not to be repeated, even if shortly thereafter, while Vernant
was vacationing on Belle-Ile, he was surprised to see three Lacanian
messengers arrive and explain that he absolutely had to attend the
master's seminar. "They were explaining to me that 1 was doing the
same thing as Lacan was doing without knowing it-which proved
that 1 needed a good psychoanalysis. 1 told them that it was a little
late, but they insisted that Lacan was very interested in my work and
A Watershed Year for Structuralism ]2.9
that he it qui te attentively."65 who se discourse was
ready difficult to understand in his native tongue, insisted on speaking
English in Baltimore, despite the fact he did not speak it fluently, mak-
ing his talk even more hermetic. Still, he appeared as the great guru of
structuralism.
Thirty-four
19
66
Annum mirabile (II): Foucault
Sells like Hotcakes
The publishing event of the year and the summer blockbuster was,
without any doubt, Michel Foucault's The Order of Things. Sartre
had said that the book was predictable, but neither Foucault nor
Pierre Nora, his editor, had foreseen anything like what happened.
The first printing of 3,500 copies, which had come out in April,
quickly sold out, and 5,000 copies were reprinted in June, 3,000 in
July, and 3,500 in September. Michel Foucault was borne along by the
structuralist tide and his work came to embody the philos op hic al syn-
thesis of the new thinking that had been developing for fifteen years. If
the author later put sorne distance between himself and the structural-
ist tag, which he considered insulting, in 1966 he considered himself
to be at the heart of the phenomenon: "Structuralism is not a new
method; it is the awakened and troubled consciousness of modern
thought."l
Pierre Dumayet invited Foucault to appear on an important tele-
vision literary show of the period, Books for Everyone, where he spoke
in the name of the founders of a collective rupture in which he, to-
gether with Lvi-Strauss and Dumzil, considered that Sartre "still be-
longed to the nineteenth century because his entire enterprise tries to
make man adequate to his own meaning."2 Foucault's remarks em-
phasized his consonance with the new ambitions of structura li sm. He
claimed that philosophy had been dissipated in other activities of the
mind: "We are coming to an age that is perhaps one of pure thinking,
33
Foucault Sells like Hotcakes 33 T
of thinking in deed, and disciplines as abstract and general as linguis-
tics or as fundamental as logic, or even more, literature since Joyce,
are activities of the mind. They do not replace philosophy, but are the
very unfolding of what philosophy was in the past."3
Foucault defined his archaeology of the social sciences (the book
was originally to be subtitled An Archaeology of Structuralism) as
the expression of the will to make our culture appear in a position of
strangeness similar to the way we perceive the Nambikwara de-
scribed by Lvi-Strauss. It was not at all a question of tracing the con-
tinuous and logical lines along which thinking had unfolded, but
rather of discerning the discontinuities that made our own cultural
past appear as fundamentally other and foreign to us, thanks to this
restored perspective. "This is the ethnological situation that 1 wanted
ta reconstitute."4 Moreover, Foucault attacked any effort to identify
with the purely ephemeral figure of man, a figure at once recent and
destined to quickly disappear. God was dead, and man was destined
to follow him, nudged along by the very sciences whose legitimacy is
based on his existence: "Paradoxically, the development of the social
sciences invites us to witness the disappearance of man rather than
his apotheosis." 5
The epoch was clearly fascinated by the death of man, and many
were ready to join the funeral procession. The successive negations of
the subject in Saussurean linguistics in structural anthropology and
Lacanian psychoanalysis found in Foucault someone who could re-
install the figure at the very core of Western cultural history, but as an
absence, a lack around which the epistemes unfold.
The Foucault Effect
Foucault's reception was a flamboyant event. Jean Lacroix saluted
his work as "one of the most important of our time,"6 and Robert
Kanters dubbed it "an impressive work" in Le Figaro'? Franois
Chatelet, in La Quinzaine littraire, considered the book to be a
philosophical event that revolutionized thinking. Reading Foucault's
work would lead to the birth of "a radically new perception of the
past of Western culture and a more lucid notion of the confusion of its
present."8 In L'Express, Madeleine Chapsal evocatively entided her
three-page article "The Greatest Revolution since Existentialism,"9
and Gilles Deleuze wrote a three-page review in Le Nouvel Observa-
teur: "Foucault's idea: the sciences of man were not created when man
332 Foucault Sells like Hotcakes
took himself as an object of representation, nor even when he discov-
ered his own history-to the contrary, they were created when he de-
historicized himself. "10
Foucault was of course very much in demand to explain this
death of man that the press quite generously attributed to him alone.
In answer to a question about when he stopped believing in meaning,
asked during an interview given by La Quinzaine littraire, Foucault
answered: "The breaking point came on the day when Lvi-Strauss
for societies and Lacan for the unconscious showed us that meaning
was probably only one sort of surface effect, a shimmering, a froth,
and that what profoundly coursed through us, what existed before us,
what maintained us in time and space, was the system."ll Raymond
Bellour strongly supported Foucault's theses, whereas his party, the
PCF, was clearly less enthusiastic. But Bellour enjoyed a certain auton-
orny in Les Lettres franaises, where he interviewed Foucault. Bellour
considered Foucault to be the initiator of a true revolution in the his-
tory of ideas when he restored the logical totality of the ideas of a pe-
riod and when he relegated to the dustbin of history what had been
considered until then to be the bible in this field, the famous "Hazard"
and his Crisis of European Consciousness.
12
Bellour quite lucidly dis-
cerned the writer beneath the philosopher, and appreciated the daz-
zling style: "This era will have seen the birth of a new kind of writer,
under the guise of the decipherers of meaning."13
In aIl of his numerous interviews and lectures during I966, Fou-
cault continued to shelve Sartre alongside nineteenth-century philoso-
phers and to firmly place himself alongside Lvi-Strauss, Dumzil,
Lacan, and Althusser-the writers and researchers who embodied the
modernity of the twentieth century. Which fully justified Didier ri-
bon's remark: "It seems clear that Foucault considers himself to be a
full member of the structuralist galaxy,"14 even if it was a very special
structuralism based not on the existence of structures, but a "struc-
turalism without structures,"15 leading Franois Ewald to say that
Foucault was never a structuralist and that his project was to combat
the idea of structure and therefore of structuralism. For Ewald, Fou-
cault's whole enterprise was to make politics possible, whence his hos-
tility to the very ide a of structure: "Structure is one of the forms of the
important historical subject, of the grand identity running through
history, whereas Foucault quite clearly explained that that is what he
wanted to destroy."16 This internaI tension, as yet unfelt by Foucault
Foucault Sells like Hotcakes 333
in I966, arose his ambiguous position as a philosopher who
placed himself at the center of the social sciences in order to subvert
them from within. But, far from challenging the structuralist phenom-
enon, his position was reinforced by structuralism, even if Foucault
disagreed with the scientism that the others in the movement sought
to legitimate their discipline.
Transitory and Ephemeral Man
Above aU, The Order of Things was an heir to Georges Canguilhem's
work. Foucault also argued that scientific history should be based on
discontinuities and on the Nietzschean deconstruction of established
disciplines. His radical rejection of humanism bespoke the Nietz-
sc he an base. Man, as an active, conscious subject of his history, dis-
appeared. His recent return and discovery presaged his proximate
end. His centra lit y in Western thinking was merely an illusion, dis si-
pated by studying the many different kinds of conditioning that he un-
derwent through history. Decentered, man becomes relegated to the
periphery of things, un der the influence of many forces, such that he
disappears in the froth of time: "Man is probably no more th an a kind
of rift in the order of things .... It is comforting, however, and a
source of profound relief, to think that man is only a recent invention,
a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge." 17
Foucault undertook to historicize the manner in which the illusion
known as man took shape, born only in the nineteenth century. For
the Greeks, what existed were the gods, nature, and the cosmos; there
was no room for a conception of a responsible subject. For Plato, the
fault could be attributable to an error in judgment or to ignorance
rather than to individual responsibility.
Similarly, there was no room for man in the classical episteme.
Neither Renaissance huma ni sm nor the rationalism of the classics
could conceive of him-there had to be a rift in the configuration of
knowledge for man to corne to have a central place there. Western cul-
ture conferred a central role on man, who appears as the king of crea-
tion, the absolute referent of aU things. This fetishization is particu-
larly clear in philosophy, where the Cartesian ego introduced the
subject as substance, the container of truths, reversing the ancient and
medieval scholastic problematic of error and guilt. "Subordination is
reversed, and it is error that becomes relative to fault: to make an
error ... is to openly assert, by means of the free and infinite will, the
334 Foucault Sells like Hotcakes
meaningful contents of understanding that remain confused."18 And
yet, as Foucault, following Freud, commented, this man has experi-
enced many serious narcissistic wounds in the history of Western
thought. Copernicus, discovering that the earth was not at the center
of the universe, revolutionized thinking and set back the primitive
sovereignty of man. Later, Darwin, discovering the proximity between
man and simian, reduced man to the phase of an episode in a biologi-
cal time that he does not comprehend and that leaves him behind.
Finally, Freud discovered that man cannot know himself alone, that he
is not fully conscious, and that his behavior is determined by an un-
conscious to which he has no access, yet which makes his words and
actions comprehensible.
Man therefore found himself progressively dispossessed of his at-
tributes, but he reappropriated these breaks in the realm of knowledge
in order to forge so many instruments with which to reassert his dom-
ination. In the nineteenth century, he appeared as a starkly palpable,
perceptible object, at the confluence of three forms of knowledge:
Propp's philological apparatus, Smith and Ricardo's political econ-
orny, and Lamarck and Cuvier's biology. The singular figure of a liv-
ing, speaking, and laboring subject appeared at that point, the prod-
uct of this triple knowledge and the holder of a central place among
these new sciences, their necessary figure and common signifier. He
could then be restored to his sovereignty over nature. Astronomy
made physics possible, biology made medicine possible, the uncon-
scious made psychoanalysis possible. But, for Foucault, this recent
sovereignty was necessarily illusory and short-lived. On the heels of
Freud, who had discovered the unconscious dimension of individual
behavlor, and of Lvi-Strauss, who sought to explore the unconscious
of collective social practices, Foucault set off in se arch of the uncon-
scious of the sciences where we believe our conscious minds dwell.
Such was the Copernican revolution he wanted to realize in order
to demystify humanism, which for him was the important perversion
of contemporary times: "Humanism is the Middle Ages of the modern
era."19 Foucault saw the philosopher's main role as removing the epis-
temological obstacle of the privilege granted to the cogito, or to the
subject as consciousness and substance. He fully theorized the consti-
tution of a true philosophical base bringing together the different
semiotics oriented around the text and subjecting man to a network
dissolving him despite himself: "Let us be done with this old phi-
Foucault Sells like Hotcakes 33
losopheme of human nature, this abstract man."20 This was Fou-
cault's perspective, and it corresponded with Lvi-Strauss's evocation
of the fleeting figure of man: "The world began without man and it
will end without him."21 Moreover, Foucault paid homage to Lvi-
Strauss when, through ethnology, he made it possible to dilute man
by successively undoing all his efforts at positivity. Ethnology and
psychoanalysis ho Id privileged positions in our modern knowledge,
Foucault remarked. "One may say of both of them what Lvi-Strauss
said about ethnology: that they dissolve man."22
This obituary might appear paradoxical at a time when the social
sciences were exploding, but Foucault conceived psychoanalysis and
ethnology to be "countersciences,"23 and their valorization was con-
sistent with the structuralist paradigm, which portrayed them as the
main keys to modern understanding. In this respect, the structural
revolution was "the guardian of man's absence. "24
Multiple and Discontinuous Temporalities
Decentering or dissolving man created another temporal and historical
relationship in which time became plural and immobile. External con-
ditions that determine human practices were also observed differently.
Will the history of man ever be more than a sort of modulation com-
mon to changes in the of life (climate, soil fertility, meth-
ods of agriculture, exploitation of wealth), to transformations in the
economy (and, consequently, of -society and institutions) and ta the
succession of forms and usages of language? But in that case, man is
not himself historie al: since time cornes ta him from somewhere
other than himself.
25
Man thus endures multiple temporalities that escape him, and in
which he can be no more than a mere object of these pure external
events. Consciousness became the dead horizon of the mind. The un-
thought was not to be sought in the depths of the human mind; it was
the Other for man, within him and outside of him, next to him, irre-
ducible to him, fleeing "in an unavoidable duality."26 Man was articu-
lated on the already-begun of life, of work, and of language, and thus
he found to be closed the paths leading to what would be his origins
and his beginning.
Modernity, for Foucault, lay in this recognition of the impotent
and inherently illusory theology of the man of the Cartesian cogito.
Having removed the hero and cultural fetish from the pedestal upon
336 Foucault Sells like Hotcakes
which our culture had placed him, Foucault took on historicism. Fou-
cauldian history is no longer a description of evolution, a notion bor-
rowed from biology, nor a tracing of progress, a moral-ethical notion,
but rather an analysis of the many transformations at work, a tracing
of discontinuities, like so many instant snapshots. This deconstruction
resembled a Cubist enterprise, exploding history into a dehumanized
constellation. Temporal unit y became little more than a fiction obey-
ing no necessity. Indeed, reversing historical continuity was the neces-
sary corollary to the decentered subject. "The human being no longer
has any history: or rather, since he speaks, works, and lives, he finds
himself interwoven in his own being with histories that are neither
subordinate to him nor homogeneous with him .... the man who ap-
pears at the beginning of the nineteenth century is 'dehistoricized."'27
Self-consciousness dissolved in the discourse-object and in the multi-
pli city of different histories.
Foucault proceeded to deconstruct history in the manner of Cu-
bism, breaking it up into a dehumanized constellation. Temporal
unit y was now nothing more than a fiction; it obeyed no necessity.
History belonged to the sole register of the aleatory, to contingency, as
it did for Lvi-Strauss, both unavoidable and meaningless. And yet,
unlike Lvi-Straussian structuralism, Foucault did not elude historic-
ity. He even considered it to be a privileged zone for analysis, the per-
fect site for his archaeological investigation, but in order to point out
the discontinuities vexing it, beginning with the important fractures
juxtaposing coherent synchronie slices.
Epistemes
Foucault located two important discontinuities in the episteme of
Western culture: that of the classical period in the mid-seventeenth
century, and that of the nineteenth century, which inaugurated the
modern era. Areas as diverse as language, political economy, and biol-
ogy gave indices that, if correctly read, revealed these alterations in
the order of knowledge. At every stage, Foucault separated what be-
longed to the realm of the conceivable from what did not. "The his-
tory of knowledge can be written only on the basis of what was con-
temporaneous with it."28 The discontinuities that Foucault indicated,
insofar as any form of evolutionism was eliminated, became so many
enigmatic figures. These were true rents in the fabric, and it was
enough to localize them and discern their modalities without asking
Foucault Sells Iike Hotcakes 337
how they emerged. lndeed, how events came to occur remained fun-
damentaHy enigmatic in Foucault's work. "Such a task implies the
calling into question of everything that pertains ta time, everything
that has formed within it, everything that resides within its mobile ele-
ment, in such a way as to make visible that rent, devoid of chronology
and history, from which time issued. "29 Discontinuity appeared in its
specificity, irreducible to a system of causality because it was eut off
from its roots, an ethereal figure that emerged from the morning fog
of the creation of the world.
Foucault's approach radically broke with any se arch for origins or
for any system of causality. He substituted a polymorphism that made
it impossible to restore a historie al dialectic. The Order of Things, his
archaeology of the social sciences, sought to explain how this new
configuration of knowledge emerged, based on a method that was the
most structuralist form that Foucault's thinking took and that led
from one episteme to another, from one discursive tissue to another in
an unfolding in which words led to other words. The synchronie di-
mension of this eminently structuralist approach of valorizing the au-
tonomous discursive realm over the referent made it possible to locate
the significant coherence between discourses that do not immediately
appear to share anything except simultaneity. "He showed me the a u ~
dacity of the inteBectual comparison between biology, astronomy, and
physics .... Contemporary sociology today does not have this expan-
sive power." 30
Foucault's episteme, however, raised the most questions. Not only
the unresolved question of understanding how to proceed from one
episteme to another, but also the question put to Foucault himself: on
the basis of which episteme does he speak? This idea, omnipresent in
I966 in The Order of Things, was so contested that it disappeared
from Foucault's later work. His archaeology sought the fault lines, the
significant ruptures in the continental plates of knowledge: "What 1
am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the epis-
teme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from aB criteria having ref-
erence to its rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its posi-
tivity and therefore manifests a history." 31
The Representation of the Represented
The first configuration of knowledge that Foucault addressed was the
episteme of the Renaissance until the sixteenth century. Knowledge at
338 Foucault Sells like Hotcakes
the time was based on the same, on repetition, on the representation
of what is represented. The basis of knowledge in Western culture was
similitude. The relationship of the idea to its object was doubled:
"The universe was folded in on itself."32 Many procedures of simili-
tude existed in this episteme: the proximity of site, simple reflection,
analogy, and the interplay of sympathies-aH could assimilate very
diverse things to a fundamental identity. The sixteenth century super-
imposed semiology and hermeneutics in a form of knowledge that
was complete, with unlimited similitude or reference to resemblance,
but at the same time reduced because it was constructed as a simple
addition: "Sixteenth-century knowledge condemned itself to never
knowing anything but the same thing."33 Nature was merely a figure
reflecting the cosmos; erudition and divination belonged to the same
hermeneutc.
This episteme would shift in the sixteenth century because of a
rent affecting the old kinship between words and things, the site
from whch man could be born to himself and become a particular
object of knowledge. The change was figured by Don Quixote's
que st, his attempt to read the world in order to demonstrate the
truth of books. He pitted himself against the nonconcordance be-
tween signs and reality, against the perfect discord that brought his
utopia up short. Nonetheless, this tilter against windmills stubbornly
persisted in his desire to decode the world through its dated grid, and
his adventure became doubly significant as it unveiled the birth of a
new configuration of knowledge and the historicity of language. Don
Quixote's experience of words and things and the inadequacy of his
form of knowledge could lead to madness in its indifference to dif-
ferences: "Words wander off on their own, without content, without
resemblance to fiH their emptiness; they are no longer the marks of
things."34
With the new episteme of the classical seventeenth century and
Cartesian rationalism, the analogical hierarchy gave way to critical
analysis. Resemblances became comparative. "Western reason is en-
tering the age of judgement."35 A general science, a theory of signs,
became possible in the classical episteme by using a mathesis for sim-
ple structures for which algebra was the universal method, and a sys-
tem of classification for complex natures. A general grammar was
born with this critical order: "The basic task of classical discourse is
to give names to things, and with this name, to name their being."36 A
Foucault Sells like Hotcakes 339
science of language arose out of this new distance between words and
things. Similarly, natural history, inseparable from language, was
barn. Divided into three classes-mineraI, vegetable, and animal-
natural history did not yet cleave the living from the nonliving. The
classical episteme was also characterized by the birth of the analysis of
wealth, which resembled the analysis of natural history and general
grammar. Whereas ec-onomic conceptions of the Renaissance made
monetary signs correspond in quantity and weight of the metal elected
as the standard of exchange, things changed during the seventeenth
century. Exchange became the basis for the birth of mercantilism.
Gold became precious because it was a form of money, and not the re-
verse, as had been believed in the sixteenth century. Money took its
value from its pure sign function.
The Episteme of Modernity
At the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nine-
teenth, this episteme was once again shattered. Our modern episteme
was born of the same disjunction that forced aH of Western thinking
to shift. The new sciences that appeared in the nineteenth century con-
structed their objects in a realm removed from observation. Life,
work, and language became so many "transcendents." The analysis of
wealth was supplanted by political economy. Adam Smith embodied
the first important shift: what circula tes as things could be referred to
work. "From Smith onward, the time of economics is no longer to be
cyclical time of alternating impoverishment and wealth ... but the
time of capital and production."37 Ricardo completed this advent of
political economy by ensuring that, at the heart of economic thinking,
work determined value, not as a sign but as a product.
A similar revolution took place in natural history and made the
birth of biology possible. Jussieu and Lamarck no longer defined char-
acteristics on the basis of the observable but on an internai princip le
of organization that determines function; this implied a transversal
cut within the organism' to see the vital organs below the superficial
organs. Biology became possible, and Cuvier used the discovery to as-
sert the primacy of function over organ.
In the realm of language, an epistemological revolution took
place with the appearance of philology. No longer limited to its rep-
resentational function, the word now belonged to a decisive gram-
matical whole. "The language is then defined by the number of its
340 Foucault Sells like Hotcakes
units and by aH the possible combinations can be established
tween them in discourse; so that it is a question of an agglomeration
of atoms." 38
The Era of Relativism
The succession of epistemes up to our own era, this historicization of
knowledge and of man-a figure that only became possible in the la st
epistemological configuration-Ied to a historie al relativism for Fou-
cault, similar to that of Lvi-Strauss. Just as there is no inferiority or
anteriority between primitive and modern societies, there is no truth
to be sought in the different stages that constitute knowlege. There are
only historically distinguishable discourses: "Since the human being
has become historical through and through, none of the contents ana-
lyzed by the human sciences can remain stable in itself or escape the
movement of History."39 The foundations of contemporary knowl-
edge, represented by disciplines that are themselves structures used in
verifiable scientific practices, are only temporary, transitory configura-
tions. Paradoxically, this absolute relativism that completely histori-
cizes knowledge is turned against the historical approach in favor of a
fundamentally spatial conception, a purely synchronic epistemologi-
cal space that must separate inside from out, but that turns its back on
duration, and therefore on history.
Foucault invited us to turn an eye on temporality that was as cold
as the one the ethnologist turns on primitive societies. The misunder-
standing with historians arose from the fact that Foucault took no re-
ality or historical referent into consideration, but only considered the
internaI modulations of the discursive realm. The level of discourse
was the only one he saw in this nominalist approach, which cons id-
ered the word to be something practically physical, like a thing, and
replaced the thing. Discourse and documents were no longer to be
considered documents, but monuments: "The text is a historical ob-
ject like the trunk of a tree. "40 His approach led him to valorize the
internaI coherence of successive epistemes and to ignore the processes
of transformation and mediation. Diachrony and discontinuities re-
mained, therefore, fundamentially enigmatic.
The Order of Things was written during Foucault's most struc-
turalist phase. This was the period when the sciences of sign systems
tlourished and during which, behind the description of the succession
of different epistemes since the classical period, he discerned the re-
Foucault Sells like Hotcakes 34I
pressed each these stages of Western culture, modes or
order, their historical a prioris and hierarchies. Just as Lvi-Strauss
perceived the unconscious of social practices in primitive societies,
Foucault deciphered the unconscious foundations constituting West-
ern knowledge, thereby prolonging the Kantian effort to "shake us
out of our anthropological slumber. "41
In order to escape from this anthropological space and from fi-
nite analysis at the empirical transcendentallevel, Foucault conferred
a special status on three different disciplines at the end of his book.
Psychoanalysis reconsidered and corrected by Lacan, ethnology, re-
vised by Lvi-Strauss, and history, reconsidered and deconstructed
by Nietzsche. The Order of Things closed, therefore, on the episteme
of structuralism, which offered itself as the realization of modern
consciousness.
One noteworthy absence in this pro gram was entirely consonant
with the structura li st moment: Marx was relegated to the episteme of
the nineteenth century.
At the deepest level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no
real discontinuity; it found its place without difficulty, as a full, quite
comfortable and, goodness knows, satisfying form for a time (its
own), within an epistemological arrangement that welcomed it gladly
(since it was this arrangement that was in fact making room for
it) .... Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in
water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else.
42
There was an important break between the position of Foucault, who
tried to diverge from the Marxist model as much as from the phenom-
enological model, and that of the Althusserians, who were trying to
give Marx a second wind. They wer clearly divided and their diver-
gence was such that they provoked a major rupture in the history of
science. Foucault had to justify his position because the Althusserian
group of the ENS epistemological circle considered it a provocation.
Later, he rectified things with The Archae%gy of Know/edge. "When
he wrote The Order of Things, he was unaware of Althusser's reading
of Marx, whereas in The Archae%gy of Know/edge he speaks of a
Marx revisited by Althusser."43 Foucault's position in 1966 was
wholly in line with the ambient structuralist theorizing. By speaking
of the primacy of pure reason and of the representation of the struc-
tures of experience articulated on the constitution of epistemological
objects, he gave it a philosophical answer.
342 Foucault Sells like Hotcakes
Thanks ta this, Foucault appeared as the potential spearhead
aH the structuralists united in their battle aga in st the philosophy of
meaning, against huma ni sm and phenomenology, by raising again the
question of the relevance of philosophy, as Kant had done, and con-
sidering it in its critical and demystifying capacity.
Thirty-five
19
66
Annum mira bile (III): Julia
Cornes to Paris
When the twenty-four-year-old Julia Kristeva arrived in Paris in a
snowstorm just before Christmas 1965 with only five dollars in her
pocket, this young Bulgarian woman never imagined that she would
bec orne the Egeria of structuralism. Indeed, the structuralist period
was, along with everything else, an encounter between a daring cul-
tural adventure and a talented woman. It was a propitious moment.
Kristeva's arrivaI in France near the beginning of 1966 plunged her
into a veritable cultural whirlpool that would rivet her with the pas-
sion of a foreigner eut off from her native Bulgaria. Circumstances
would lead her into the eye of the cyclone. The French were inter-
ested in and responsive to the Russian formalist texts that Todorov
was publishing, and in the political and literary events unfolding in
Eastern Europe at a time when East-West relations were thawing.
This was the context in which Kristeva was awarded a French gov-
ernment scholarship by General de Gaulle and began to work on
what seemed to be the very expression of modernity in France at the
time: the New Novel. She began writing her thesis with Lucien Gold-
mann, but very quickly direct contact with semiological thinking,
then in full flower, led her to deconstruct her subject of study in order
to work on narrative and on the constitution of the novel as a genre.
From that point on, she was a full-fledged participant in the intellec-
tuaI fervor of the day.
343
344 Julia Cornes ta Paris
A Taste for Formalism
Krsteva attended Barthes's seminar at the Hautes tudes and also
went to Lvi-Strauss's Laboratory for Social Anthropology, which
housed a section on semio-linguistics. She met Philippe Sollers there.
"1 will always see her as she appeared to me then, very charming.
There was something quite striking about her, her grace, her sensu al-
ity, this union between grace and physical beauty and her capacity for
reflection. From this point of view, she is unique in history."l
Their union sealed Kristeva's intellectual place within Tel Quel,
the most active and provocative group in 1966, which placed her at
the center of the who's who of Parisian intellectuals. She met her com-
patriot Todorov, became friends with Benveniste, discovered Lacan,
thanks to Sollers, and went to his seminar. Sympathetic to the PCF or
at least to its intellectual fringe (La Nouvelle Critique, Les Lettres
franaises), she argued for Marxist positions and, after sorne months,
became the spokesperson for structuralism's pretentions to generaliza-
tion, a surprising mixture of semio-Marxo-Freudian thinking that
embodied the intellectual avant-garde's desire to revolutionize the
world ... through writing. Ir was a foreigner who was to best express
this ambition, the most Parisian foreigner in the capital. Philippe
Sollers, whom Kristeva would marry in 1967, was interested in liter-
ary semiology at the time. In 1966 he wrote up a presentation that he
had given on Mallarm on November 25, 1965, in Barthes's seminar
in which he proclaimed Mallarm to be the great initiator of the cur-
rent rapprochement between literature and literary theory: "For Mal-
larm, literature and science are henceforth in close communication. "2
Tel Quel's entire project was part of the Mallarman legacy: an
experimentation with literature beyond genres and limits, literature as
the expression of self-consciousness in death, a veritable suicide after
which language claims its rights and reaches beyond the limits of the
subjectivity of the author's consciousness. Mallarm was attuned to
rhetoric and to philosophy, and invited semiological reflection ail the
more so since Le Livre crire sets the impossible as its horizon. Only
scintillating fragments remain, glittering in a foreclosed future that,
according to Mallarm, "is never more than the flash of that which
should have happened before or near the beginning."3 Mallarm
opened a vast program of formai thinking, that of a literai revolution,
of a return to rhetoric, of a return of the East, of the "return to," and
Julia Cornes to Paris 345
the arrivai from the East of a certain Julia Kristeva. According ta
Jean Dubois, "this taste for formalism is the expression of a profound
tendency that pre dates even structuralism. As a young agrg, 1 was
interested in formaI structures, and if 1 was a good Greek and Latin
grammarian, it was because the se are formaI structures."4
A Toast to Literature
The excitement of I966 quickly affected Julia Kristeva, but her status
of foreigner gave her a certain lucidity that enabled her rather quickly
ta point out the two important aporias of the structuralist paradigm:
history and the subject. Mikhail Bakhtin's work was particularly use-
fuI for her in this. The year I966 was indeed a special one for literary
thinking. Althusserian thinking had even appropriated literature,
which Pierre Macherey considered as an abject of production in For a
Theory of Literary Production.5 Macherey examined the new figure of
the literary cri tic, who, during the structuralist era, had stopped being
a second skin and had become practically a writer: "The critic is an
analyst."6 The critic's task comprises the deciphering and reconstruc-
tion of meaning; it is no longer restricted to the role of simply restor-
ing the meaning that had been deposited in a literary work. Although
Macherey did not adhere to the principles of the general formalism of
the period, and even saw "a Platonic reminiscence"7 in them that led
to derealizing things, he was in favor of reading literature as Althusser
and his group read Marx. It was not a matter of looking for the
philosophers' stone hidden behind the text, but of saying what the
text says without saying it: "A true analysis ... should encounter
something that is never said, an initial unsaid."8
Literature, decidedly, was in its heyday, the center of a major
theoretical wager during the year of Barthes's response to Picard in
Critique et vrit. Grard Genette, however, argued for a more subtle
position, apparently preferring a peaceful coexistence based on a com-
plementary division of labor between hermeneutics on the one hand,
and structuralism on the other. There would thus be a division of the
literary field between a literature capable of being experienced by
the critical consciousness of hermeneutics, and another distant and
rather indecipherable literature that became the privileged object of
structural analysis: "The relationship that brought together struc-
turalism and hermeneutics could be one of complementarity rather
than a mechanical separation or exclusion."9 Genette clearly defined
346 Julia Cornes to Paris
the reversaI taking place at the time by identifying the shift from a
temporal to a spatial determinism. The new structural sensibility was
essentially characterized by its rejection of historicity and its with-
drawal into a slack present whose shape needed only to be outlined:
"Each unit is defined in terms of relationship and no longer in terms
of filiation." 10 Like Pierre Macherey, Grard Genette was particularly
critical of the way the psychologism that held sway in classicalliterary
history took an individualist approach, paying exclusive attention to
works and authors at the expense of the networks of literary produc-
tion and those of reading. "The conditions of its communication are
produced at the same time as the book ... ; what makes the book also
makes its readers."ll
When crits came out that year, it provoked many conversions to
a Lacanized Freudian thinking. Gennie Lemoine, one of the members
of the Esprit team who had been with the review since 1946, left it to
join Lacan's school in 1966. Antoinette Fouques was writing her the-
sis with Barthes on the avant-garde at the time and she converted to
psychoanalysis as soon as she read the crits. "1 could almost say that
1 knew Lacan before Freud. "12 At the end of the crits, Lacan repub-
lished an essential article that had already come out in January 1966
in the first issue of Les Cahiers pour l'analyse, "Science Truth." ln it he
rejected the fashionable notion of "human sciences" because it recalled
for him the state of servitude that Georges Canguilhem had already
pointed out with respect to psychology.
But the repugnance with which the "human sciences" inspired
Lacan evaporated once they became invested and metamorphosed by
structuralism to imply a new notion of the subject. "The subject is, shall
we say, internally excluded from its object."13 During this structural
year, and despite a move toward logic that had begun in 1964, Lacan
still leaned heavily on Lvi-Strauss: "The loyalty that Claude Lvi-
Strauss's work displays with regard to this structuralism will only be
considered in our thesis to limit us for the moment to its periphery."14
Shortly after, Lacan evoked the "Lvi-Straussian graph" to explode the
subject. Descartes's famous ego would have had no other existence than
one of denotation. According to lisabeth Roudinesco, in 1966 Lacan
was still suffering from insufficient recognition, which would explain
his search for support, whether from Lvi-Strauss or from Foucault,
whose Birth of the Clinic he mentioned in the crits,15 without falling
into what he would later qualify as the "structuralist banquet."
Julia Cornes to Paris 347
Julia Kristeva therefore traversed a Paris jolted structuralism,
the sanctuary of exchanges among those who enthusiastically shared
the impression of belonging to a new world of the concept, beyond the
notion of substance and disciplinary deep-rootedness, in the sole
abyssal vertigo of the infinite game of relationships and their com-
binations, shaking boundaries and settling in as close as possible to
the limits, on the threshold of the ever-receding and ev er-inaccessible
realm of the possible.
The Solitary Path of Maurice Godelier
Freud and Marx were the two important tutelary figures in question.
Lacan's reading and his return to Freud became absolutely fundamen-
tal for the indispensable renovation of Freud's work, in the same way
that Althusser's reading of Marx was a return and a revision of the
master. But there were also sorne hybrid cases, and Maurice Godelier
was one of these. Godelier sought a way to reconcile two approaches
that might seem antagonistic at the outset, for he tried to create a syn-
thesis between Lvi-Strauss and Marx in order to return to Marx. And
his effort was every bit as much a renewal and just as structural as the
efforts of Lacan and Althusser.
ln 1966, Maspero published Godelier's Rationality and Irra-
tionality in Economy,16 but the second part of his work was a group
of articles that had appeared between 1960 and 1965 in La Pense
and conomie et politique, which is to say prior ta Althusser's reread-
ing of Marx. Godelier distinguished between Marx's hypothetic-
deductive and dialectical methods. He had not awaited Althusser's re-
turn to Marx; his solitary undertaking was part of an oeuvre that
displays a certain solidarity with Lvi-Strauss's structural anthropol-
ogy. "1 reread Capital alone at a time when no one was interested in
rereading it."1? Having come from an agrgation in philosophy, Gode-
lier had studied economics for three years and tried to create an eco-
nomic anthropology that would make it possible to undertake a com-
parative theoretical study of different economic systems over time and
in space, based on a widely accepted definition of political economy
that would include aIl dimensions of social life. "There is no eco-
nomic rationality in itself nor any definitive form or mode! of economic
rationality."18
Of course, in the context of the sixties, it was surprising that no
common activities were ever undertaken by Althusserians and Gode-
348 Julia Cornes to Paris
lier, given the great proximity in their points of view. Godelier, how-
ever, did go ta the rue d'Ulm one Sunday morning to the initial meet-
ing of an important collective research program led by Althusser. "A
monstrous operation unfolded there before our very eyes. There was
Althusser, the sacred interpreter of the sacred work, assigning tasks to
everyone. Badiou was supposed to take care of the Marxist theory of
mathematics, Macherey was to take care of the Marxist theory of
literature ... "19 According to Emmanuel Terray, Godelier had an un-
favorable reaction to the group because he was suspected of seeking
an impossible compromise between Marx and Lvi-Strauss.
If ideas circulated quickly in I966, and if aU roads led to struc-
turalism, it was not easy ta discern who held center stage, a poten-
tiaUy hegemonic position in this cultural cauldron. The positions were
dear and the risk of faUing into the pot relatively high. The game had
to be subtle. No, clearly, a structuralist Paris was an impossible wager.
Part III
A Hexagonal Pever
Thirty-six
The Postmodern Hour Sounds
Imperceptibly, over the course of the twentieth century in the West, a
new relationship with temporality was ta king hold. At the same time,
European domination and its role as a model for the rest of huma nit y
were on the wane. At the beginning of the century in Vienna, at the
heart of the old, decadent Hapsburg empire, a new ahistorical culture
was bursting forth.
1
The First World War had decisively redrawn the old economic
maps in favor of the non-European powers. Europe underwent a crisis
of consciousness as it realized that the uninterrupted linear evolution-
ism of its own historicity had been broken when it had been obliged to
pass the baton of modernity to the young American power. In 1920,
Spengler's Decline of the West relegated Europe to its proper provin-
cial place, a Europe that was beginning to experience the unstable
foundations of nineteenth-century evolutionism.
Heirs to the Lumires and the Aufklarung, the social sciences
were enjoying their belle epoque, progressing toward the age of per-
fection and of reason triumphant. The tenants of immobilism or of
change had all concurred on a general shape of the future of progress,
whether Saint-Simon, Spencer, Comte, or Marx. August Comte saw
outlined against the horizon of humanity a theological state, suc-
ceeded by a metaphysical state, and finally a positive state. For Karl
Marx, the transition from slavery to serfdom to capitalism culminated
with socialism. These certainties about constructing the future in a
3F
352 The Postmodern Hour Sounds
progressive perspective would founder in the face of the tragic reality
of a twentieth century that, in 1920, had not yet run out of surprises
for Eurocentrism.
The Second World War and the Holocaust further traumatized a
West that had scarcely dressed its wounds when it saw its leading po-
sition in the world challenged by whole continents shaking off the
colonial yoke. A denuded Europe problematized its dramatic past
against a background of increasingly radical pessimism. And at each
new jolt, Europe mourned the very idea of a future of rupture.
A Futureless Present
A dilated present made the pa st present. A new kind of relationship to
historicity developed; the present was no longer the anticipation of the
future but the arena for a possible recycling of the pasto "When the
difference of the future is no longer to be sought in the present, we
suddenly discover it coming from behind, backwards."2 Only when
the question was no longer the search for something in the past that
made another construction of the future possible could the relation-
ship between past and present be relaxed, when the future was
screwed shut, weighed down in a present equilibrium condemned to
infinitely repeat itself. The taste for novelty, the publicity picture of
our daily life, made it possible to further dilute every possible future
alterity.3 Having rejected all historical teleology and all meaning given
to the history of humanity, the distant enticements of the "world that
we have lost," of the Middle Ages magnified as the site of alterity
linked to the search for the roots of identity, could be rediscovered.
A new, ethnological consciousness was needed to replace histori-
cal consciousness as this decentering of European culture and meta-
physical deconstruction unfolded. The West was beginning to exam-
ine its nether side, the ways in which the unconscious made itself
palpably present by its very absence. Freud had discovered the laws of
the unconscious underlying our society and Durkheim had deciphered
the unconscious of our collective practices. Postmodernity therefore
was built around this quest for underlying mechanisms and targeted
the deconstruction of the humanism that Michel Foucault had charac-
terized as medieval, using this triumphant epistemological revolution
of the sixties in order to glorify it: "Structuralism is not a new
method, it is the awakened and troubled consciousness of modern
thought."4
The Postmodern Hour Sounds 353
Reason Loses Its Charm
A fundamental pessimism, a sort of negative theology, was nourished
by the provincialization of Western reason and realization of the irre-
ducible logic of resistance of other logics, and of cultural plurality.
"Those who were disappointed by Western reason"5 countered the
optimistic belief in rationality by falling into a sort of nihilism or
reflection on limits made at the intersection between sense and non-
sense. It was a complex situation confusing personal idiosyncrasies
born of disillusionment and rejection but still bearing the marks of
its contesta tory beginnings. Theorizing man's incapacity to master
his collective or personal history, underscoring his incompleteness, the
defunct pavane of Western reason also heralded a more rigorous ef-
fort whose lucidity was greater than that of Western reason itself. This
is what was clearly at work in Lvi-$trauss's exhuming of primitive
societies, what gave Lacan a capacity to care for his patients, what
allowed Foucault to work on prisoners, the forgotten, and the re-
pressed. The ruse of reason worked at its own decentering.
The relationships between the structuralist paradigm and the dis-
illusionment of the period are therefore complicated, not a mirror re-
flection of each other, but rather the scientific mind developed au-
tonomously with regard to the context. To argue for their equality
would be "like saying that Einstein's relativity is a disillusionment
based on the idea that everything is relative."6 And yet another piece
must be added to this context of ambient disenchantment preceding
the explosion of structuralism, which is the exhaustion of the evolu-
tionist, phenomenological, functionalist paradigms and the se arch for
an epistemological renewal. The law of evolution itself was seen to be
comprised of successive ruptures and models and programs surpassed,
conveying a veritable histary of theoretical failures. In the same way
that the West was discovering a nonlinear history, the social sciences
were no longer thinking of themselves as successive accumulations of
layers of sedimentation.
The Ideology of Suspicion
The twentieth century is the century of ruptures, breaks, and radical
shifts. It has led to a fundamental pessimism with respect to history
and ta the onset of the postmodern era. We would agree with Jean-
Franois Lyotard, who dates the rupture of Western evolutionism in
354 The Postmodern Hour Sounds
1943/ the year of the final solution, a radical plunge into horror. No
one could henceforth ignore Dachau and Auschwitz, said Adorno.
Technological modernity became a steamroller, a planetary death ma-
chine enmeshed in an ideology of suspicion. In addition to which, the
reality of the totalitarian system behind the Iron Curtain was laid bare
as the underside of the ostensible model. Beyond reason, implacable
ruses muzzled the hopes of creating a better world and this obser-
vation of a necessary discontinuity: "We must start from the begin-
ning."8 It was no longer possible to naively exalt the continuous
progress of freedom and human lucidity, nor to sustain the humanist
vision according to which man is the perfectible master of his destiny,
marching directly toward perfection. In place of that rosy future stood
the approach of partial changes whose limits and possibilities needed
definition.
From Budapest to Alexandria by way of Aigiers, 1956 witnessed a
procession of disillusionments. In France, songs of Liberation were
silenced and a certain collective hope dimmed. Only the voice of the
master who ended aIl hope sounded and resounded as he awaited the
moment in 1958 when he could calI for a new national leader, this
general who presented himself as the incarnation of the "incarna-
tion." The fifties were to deal a new hand to French intellectuals.
"After 1956 ... we were no longer obliged to hope for anything."9
Not that the decade was more propitious for bringing forth posi-
tive changes. If, during the space of a springtime in 1968, the inter-
national movement had infected French society, the year ended with
the Soviet boot crushing another spring, the Prague Spring. A new
wave of intellectuals was to fully feel the brunt of this new jolt. "1 was
in New Guinea in 1968, and 1 cried when 1 heard that the Russians
had invaded Czechoslovakia .... We saw how legitimacy was estab-
lished with tanks rather than with democracy; it was all over." 10 Revo-
lutionary hopes, exposed to the forces of oppression, took on a
mythological cast for an entire generation, reduced to a fantasy and
repressed like a nineteenth-century myth. These important experi-
ences of limits invoked by the intellectuals were irreversibly eroded in
Western society, which no longer thought of itself as belonging to
what Lvi-Strauss called a warm history, but rather seemed to borrow
from primitive societies, in order to favor a cold relationship to an im-
paled and immobile temporality ..
The Postmodern Hour Sounds .3 5 5
The Death of Evolutionism
Revolutionary eschatology dissolved with the resistances, blockages,
and inertia of our society. In the same way that political will and com-
mitment were discredited, a similar theoretical discredit tainted aIl
things historical. The structuralist paradigm would be constructed
and flourish from this negation of historicity and quest for origins,
from the genesis of the reflection on temporal rhythms. It would freeze
movement, cool off history, and anthropologize it when "the natives
become the indigents." Il
Western fascination with the unchanging lifestyle of the Nambik-
wara that Lvi-Strauss had resurrected in a certain way, a West break-
ing with its historicity, revealed the beginning of the postmodern pe-
riod. The very ide a of progress as a unifying phenomenon underwent
a form of disinfection. Pluralized, progress was no longer perceived as
the driving force of social evolution. And without refuting certain ad-
vances, these were no longer part of a total problematization of soci-
ety. This deconstruction lay behind a true intellectuai revolution inau-
gurated by structuralism, particularly through anthropology and the
idea of the equivalence of the human species. This was a fundamental
shift from Lvy-Bruhl to Lvi-Strauss. It demonstrated that, beyond
the tropics with their plurality of lifestyles and thinking, aIl human
societies were the complete and hierarchy-free expression of human-
ity. This aspect of the structura li st revolution remains, ane! it gave a
new perception of the world in which aIl forms of social organization
were considered equal, abolishing distinctions between inferior and
superior or befores and afters. Thanks to structuralism, the idea of
progress lost significant luster. "In order for there to be a notion of
progress, there had to be primates at the beginning .... This was
acquired thanks to structuralism, something we no longer realize be-
cause we do not see the transition clearly. It is a given; it has become
something obvious."12 Granted, it was easy to go from re!ativity to
re!ativism, but whatever the position, perceiving the Other as a partial
manifestation of the human Univers al meant abandoning the histori-
cal vision of nineteenth-century evolutionism. The human sciences re-
placed the consciousness of a mode! Europe poised at the vanguard of
human progress with a critical consciousness that dethroned the Sub-
ject and History, and that turned consciousness upon itself, or rather,
upon its nether side, its repressed. This egalitarian notion burst forth
356 The Postmodern Hour Sounds
during postwar period, and with decolonization it was here to
stay. Ir was a completely new idea that recleflned the geopolitical
points of the globe. The perception of humanity became eccentric as a
result for the Western inteIlectual; no longer read from within, iden-
tity was projected into an external space. This inflection of perspective
required a dialectical relationship between spaces, and that the an-
thropologist's glasses be trained on the universe of the Other.
Temporality Slides into Spatiality
There had clearly been a radical break with the Enlightenment and the
belief in continuous progress as Condorcet had imagined it.1
3
Western
man had been at the center of the conception of knowledge and judg-
ment before his anthropocentric viewpoint was decentered. The seeds
of this revolution had been planted at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury by new structures of scientiflc thought, pictorial perspective, and
writing, aIl of which favored discontinuity and deconstruction. From
the arbitrariness of the Saussurean sign to the new mathematical and
physical models to quantum the ory to the Impressionists' dislocation
of classical perspective, foIlowed by that of the Cubists, a new vision
of the world imposed discontinuity: the referent was held at bay.
Western reason was being gnawed at from within and tending
toward plurality as of the late nineteenth century, no longer con-
ceived of as a reflection, but rather as a discontinuous succession of
different structures. Psychoanalysis emphasized this phenomenon by
demonstrating the discontinuity between the unconscious and the
conscious requiring the presence of a third element in the analytic
context. An inflnite unfolding of epistemes replaced the unitary view
of evolutionism.
The shifting ideas between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
further accentuated these changes. Nineteenth-century European his-
toricism had seen human history as a liberation from the laws of na-
ture, whereas the twentieth century once again took its distance from
history in order to retether itself to nature, perceived as "a regulatory
ideal in the para dise to be rediscovered."14 The batdes waged by man
in the name of the noble values of freedom and equality were thus
considered doubtful, incomplete, and most often destined to failure.
Historical consciousness was repressed by a planetary, topo-
graphical consciousness. Temporality shifted into spatiality. Being re-
moved from the natural order gave way to a se arch for unvarying
The Postmodern Hour Sounds 357
logics born of the nature/culture joining. The prospect of a foreclosed
future generated a quest for an immutable human nature with evident
constants-Lv-Strauss's enceintes mentales, ecosystems, the longue
dure, structures, the extension of the notion of geographicity-and
the natural paradigm took its revenge. "Today we see how the de-
sacralization of history leads to a resacralization of nature by com-
municating vases." 15
The ruptures were tragic and provoked a need for and a return to
cultural, ethnie, and natural constants for protection. This approach
sought even more to protect against history, to be free by clinging to
an identity that anchors rather than constructs history from a signify-
ing diachronie logic. Those uncertain moments of history, the cult of
the past, the restorations occulting superficial ruptures transformed
man as the subject of his history into an object of history that he could
not understand. The relationship between men, as a result, is "sub-
jected to a zoological status." 16
Western society underwent a number of changes during the inter-
war years that further upset the relationship between past, present,
and future. The future was reduced by computerized programming to
little more than a projected reproduction of the present, but it was im-
possible to think a different future. The end of terri tories and the be-
ginning of a society beyond national soil contributed to the state of
temporal weightiness, a cooled relationship to temporality. "What we
called the acceleration of history fifty years ago . . . has become the
crushing of history."17 Similarly, this atemporal relationship became
fragmented into myriad uncorrelated objects, a segmentation of par-
tial and disarticulated knowledge, a disaggregation of the general field
of understanding, and the gutting of any real contents. This socio-
economic mulch would particularly nurture a structurallogic, symp-
tomatic reading, logicism or formalism that would find its coherence
elsewhere than in the world of flat realia.
Sorne, like Henri Lefebvre, saw a direct link between structural-
ism's success and the implantation of a technocratie society. In his view,
structuralism played the role of an ideology legitimating a social caste,
the technostructure of the new indus trial state, the justification of its
location at the highest levels of authority, and the theorization of the
elimination of history. Structuralism would thus be the harbinger of
the end of history for a middle class that had managed to reach a posi-
tion of domination. An ideology of constraint and of the weight of the
358 The Postmodern Hour Sounds
structural on human liberty reduced to common property, it reflected
the consumerism in which the citizen would cede his or her place to the
consumer. The social universe and the representation of the world that
it engendered were thus magnificently connected with the mortification
of the European left, which, in the sixties, averted its gaze from history
and from notions of progress. Structuralism therefore answered a so-
cial need; it crystallized a particular historical situation in which shift-
ing attention toward the figure of the "savage" no longer responded to
a need for exoticism but to the desperate search for the truth of hu-
manity in a universe where the future seemed to be foreclosed.
As early as 1967, Franois Furet had seen that the intellectual mi-
lieu of the Marxist left was the most receptive to the structuralist
vogue.t
8
According to Furet, this milieu had an inverted relationship
whereby it could express nostalgia for a Marxism that was being
abandoned little by little to the rhythm of revelations about the gulag,
and, thanks to structuralism, find sorne compensation for the same
determinist ambition to universalize and totalize, but without the bur-
den of history. According to this hypothesis, structuralism would ex-
press a very specific historical moment, an intersection characterized
by political immobility and the consolidation of systems.
The death knell had sounded for progress; the structuralist fervor
led to a calling into question of dialectical thought. Philosophers con-
tributed new readings that were to cast doubts on the Hegelian foun-
dations of their analyses. In their place, a symptomatic reading made
it possible to perceive an epistemological break between the "young
Marx," who is still Hegelian, and the "mature Marx," scientifically
mature, a structuralist before his time. "A nondialectical culture is in
the process of taking shape."19 At the same time, Franois Chtelet
w;as reducing the dialectic to rhetoric and Gilles Deleuze was an-
nouncing "an ebb of dialectical thinking in favor of structuralism."20
Today we customarily say that the ebb of ideologies has made it possi-
ble for a hundred structuralist flowers to bloom. In the same way that
the limits of praxis resulted in man's decentering, an immantentist
reading of the social sciences saw the sources of scientific rigor in the
decentering of human practices.
Repetition Compulsion
Posthistory brought a new relationship with a dilated present that ap-
pears as ahistorical, an eternal recycling of different configurations of
The Postmodern Hour Sounds 359
the pasto This present offered a hermetic horizon, for it could only re-
pro duce itself in the dominant presentism. The fashion for commemo-
ration clearly illustrated this new re1ationship with historicity. Mem-
ory repressed history, which was no longer the search for origins in
or der to generate future possibilities, but the simple reminder of the
universe of signs of the past living in an immutable present. Signs that
referred to each other and whose only referents were those sites of
memory, so many traces left in the space of a past, perceived some-
where over the horizon of an impassable split. We experience "the end
of what we were as an affirmation: the adequation of history and
memory."21 These sites of memory kept their symbolic value and in-
vited an archivistic relationship to the pasto They were not revisited so
as to be reconstructed, but were simply considered as the remains of a
repressed past that had disappeared.
A radical discontinuity separated the memory of an ever-indefinable
past, invisible as reality except for its multiple material signs, from a
slack present that recycles, commemorates, and remembers. The rela-
tionship to temporality was thus split and memory became memories,
fractured for want of a breakwater constituting a full, collective mem-
ory. History flowed back into the moment, thanks to the unification of
lifestyles and mentalits when there were no longer any true events,
but only a profusion of "news." The present plunged its roots into the
past through a purely museographical relationship, without concern-
ing itself with the oudines of a definition of the future. It thus destabi-
lized the very function of historical discourse as the connection be-
tween past and present.
Postmodernism established a re1ationship to history resembling
that of a senile individual who can do little more than collect souve-
nirs, remaining forever cut off from all possibility of a future project.
Structuralism's success therefore corresponded to a general phenome-
non of civilization and should be ascribed as much to the establishment
of a technocratic society and to the birth of Herbert Marcuse's one-
dimensional man as to the reification of man reduced to his con-
sumerism. In this respect, and without being reducible to that, humanity
was the ideology of nonideologies, the end of revolutionary ideologies,
of colonial ideologies, and of Christian ideologies. But in the sixties this
aspect was the unsaid, the unconscious of profound changes that only
bec orne evident in the eighties. This process of pacification, this end of
meaningful breaks, closed the present in on itself; what came to domi-
360 The Postmodern Hour Sounds
nate was the feeling of satisfaction, of marking time, of a society where
"the new is greeted like the oId, where innovation has become banal. "22
Discourses of Legitimation in Cri sis
Both a fundamental pessimism critical of the illusions of reason and a
des ire to deconstruct everything that presented itself as total coher-
ence, categorical imperative, and natural order subjected to the de-
compostion of a radical critique, spurred the retreat of history and the
crisis of discourses of legitimation that characterize postmodernity.
The very notion of reality was caIled into question. Since everything
that touched these categories elicited only disillusionment, reality was
repressed into meaninglessness. Structuralism was, in this respect, one
stage in the process of deconstruction, by its faculty of derealization.
Public space was imperceptibly transformed into a space of advertise-
ment in the era of the simulacrum, at the same time as aIl the poles of
reference were vanishing, so many spatiotemporal frameworks for the
values we had believed to be eternal and univers al.
Paul Virilio saw in philosophy's search for the hidden face an echo
of an aesthetic of disappearance in which the reality effect supplants
reality. Every metanarrative is in crisis in the postindustrial or post-
modern society because of a generalized skepticism. According to
Jean-Franois Lyotard, this transition to a new economy of discourse
occurred at the end of the fifties in Europe when "reconstruction" was
coming to an end.
23
With modern technologies of communication and the informatiza-
tion of society, knowledge shifted and became the inseparable face of
the power of the deciders, the programmers, who little by little rele-
gated the old traditional political class to a lesser role. In this context,
the question of legitimation deviated and provoked a crisis of the major
narratives. "The 'crisis' of scientific knowledge ... represents, rather,
an internaI erosion of the legitimacy principle of knowledge."24 De-
constructing the One, the metadiscourses, yielded to a proliferation of
multiple discourses unassigned to any single subject, simple language
games, a seamless fabric. The humanist perspective dissolved and was
replaced by a performative stake, a "legitimation by the fact."25
A Crepuscular Vision
Structuralism responded to this crisis of legitimation discours es by re-
ducing human ambitions to something of only provincial proportions,
The Postmodern Hour Sounds 36I
simple participants without any particular privileges, living beings on
the planet, subjected to a history that no longer belongs ta them, at
the geologicallevel. Lvi-Strauss was the most eminent representative
of this fundamental pessimism, of this retreat of man. One of the most
critical observers of the evolution of Western modernity, he contrasted
it with a profound skepticism and pessimism that placed him in the
long line of conservative thinkers stretching from Edmund Burke to
Philippe Aris. "1 would gladly accept the reproach of pessimism, on
the condition that the adjective 'serene' is added. "26
This jaded view was further underscored by Lvi-Strauss's own
position as an anthropologist who watched his field disappear be-
neath his very feet with the staggering blows of an often forced ac-
culturation. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were
two hundred and fifty thousand natives in Australia, but in the mid-
twentieth century there were only fort y thousand survivors of hunger
and illness. Between 1900 and 1950, ninety tribes disappeared in
Brazil. These disappearances from the specific ethnological field
forced the ethnologist to consider his own society, to which he could
certainly apply his methods of analysis, but based on the uniformity of
modernity that imposed its laws. Lvi-Strauss therefore observed an
atmosphere of something that was ebbing. After the dusk of the gods,
it was the turn for humans: "The day is coming when the last of the
cultures we call primitive will have disappeared from the face of
the earth."27 At the end of his four volumes on myths, a disabused
Lvi-Strauss concluded with an involution of the resources of the
universe/nature/home combination, which ended "before collapsing
in upon themselves and vanishing, through the self-evidence of their
own decay. "28
As early as 1955, Lvi-Strauss had warned the West of the disas-
ters, of the underside of its euphoria in the thirty glorious years. With
Tristes Tropiques, he was offering to make primitive societies live
aga in, to remove them from the mire beneath "our garbage" flung in
the face of humanity, the concrete that takes root everywhere like dan-
delions, the pauperization of the sIums, deforestation. This is a sad
score ca rd of a conquering, lesson-giving civilization, a civilization of
death behind the hypocrite face of adventure and of encounter with
the Other. Lvi-Strauss's structural anthropology attacked the Lu-
mires and their pretension to a univers al message.
In a similar fashion, and on a speculative rather than an ethno-
362 The Postmodern Hour Sounds
graphie level, Foucault expressed this same desire to shake up universal-
ism. "1 dream of the intellectual who destroys facts and universals. "29
The Richness of a Clos ure
Whether defined by Lvi-Strauss or by Foucault or by aIl of new struc-
turalist thinking, and despite its tremendous diversity, this new prob-
lematization took root in this retreat of history characteristic of post-
modernity, in this pessimism that was not only serene but productive.
For want of a historical perspective, once having destabilized the sta-
tus of man and taken its distance from the reality of the real, struc-
turalism preferred closed systems in which methods with a scientific
vocation sought refuge, an inaccessible place, repressed and removed
from consciousness. An increasingly complex social reality and an in-
ability to identify any unifying logic favored this withdrawal into the
search for a unit y in the hidden face of reality. Revealed meaning fell
into insignificance. It was no longer part of the closed field of this uni-
verse of signs that, removed from the referent, referred back and forth
among themselves in the absence of any material causality. The truth
of the closed system could no longer be sought by sorne hermeneutic
whose starting point was revealed meaning, but it was to be under-
stood in the relationships and interrelationships between signs within
their specifie and limited structure, and the interplay that it defined be-
tween the signs.
This web of relationships excluded historical contingency just as it
excluded the free play of initiative. If structurallinguistics provided the
preferred model of approach, there was nonetheless sorne resemblance
between the cybernetic approach, which decenters the finalist and an-
thropocentric perspective in order to give precedence to the processes
of self-regulation, a combination of a physics of relationships, the
games and replays of the same and the other, decentered humanity that
only held an illusory place. "We must break this network of appear-
ances that we caU man with aIl our might. "30 At the moment when the
social sciences seemed fascinated by the cybernetlc model, the human
variable in its psychological and historical components lacked consis-
tency and was replaced by a rigorous method that sought to reach a
level of efficacy equal to that being practiced in the hard sciences. The
closed system that became necessary would paya heavy price for set-
ting the real world at a distance. And yet, it would be remarkably ef-
fective in the receptivity it would inaugurate in the field of knowledge.
The Postmodern Hour Sounds 363
In its quest for the unconscious dimension of social practices,
structuralism would open the universe of signs of the symbolic, of col-
lective representations, and of customs and rituals in their internal
logic, and from the nonexplicit strata find the traces of human activity.
Acceding to the se new objects and pluralizing them would help shat-
ter systems of causality: "The structural method has made it possible
to triumph over causalisms or simplistic determinisms."31 The unify-
ing coherence of social history faded as weil, sinking into the quick-
sands of the unifying and plural structural combinatory, a dialectical
game of the same and of the other inaugurating the new era of a
posthistory.
Thirty-seven
Nietzschean -Heideggerian Roots
One philosopher was intensely aware of the impasses of history at the
heart of a nineteenth century in which Western history reigned tri-
umphant, and that was Nietzsche. He clearly understood that the
thinking of the moment was preparing the advent of the despotic
state. German unit y was realized, but at the price of a militarized and
aggressive Prussia. Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations (1873-74) ad-
dressed the dangers of history, by which he meant two different defini-
tions of the term: historicity (Geschichte), and the understanding of
historical change. Nietzsche theorized the suicide of Western history
and the death of Homo historicus. Instead of the theodicy leading to
the creation of the col de st "of cold monsters," the state, he put forth
an argument in favor of multiple, local, and present values, a return to
sources in a Europe bastardized by successive racial mixtures and
whose universalizing message had been deformed by the radical exit
from historicity. During the same period, Darwin was demonstrating
the simian origins of the human species. Anthropocentric perspective
and metaphysical thinking were thus both being rut to the test by sci-
entific discoveries.
Nietzsche's nihilistic discourse could flower and challenge the out-
look of the triumphant Lumires like a narcissistic wound following
on the heels of the Copernican-Galilean revelation that the earth was
not at the center of the universe, and rock Western metaphysics. The
evolution of reason would thuslead to its other side, to a realization
Nietzschean-Heideggerian Roots 365
of the non-sense, the even the relativization of the figure
of man. Nietzsche dispatched history as well as the dialectic of reason.
Later, Heidegger renewed the Nietzschean legacy in his radical
critique of modernity. His thinking was rooted in Oswald Spengler's
Decline of the West, a depiction that Heidegger, aHected by the
trauma of the First World War and the ensuing debade in the Weimar
Republic of the twenties, pushed to its paroxysm. He plotted the tra-
jectory of the Forgetting of Being, of a constant repression underlying
the prevalence of being. Man no longer had access to the revelation of
truth insofar as each manifestation of truth "is at the same time in it-
self a dissimulation."l ln this view of things, history was nothing more
than the sad unfolding of reason, mystified since the original crack.
The theme of the eternal return found its echo in the Heideggerian no-
tion of a perennis philosophy, a veritable remake of the same based on
the question of why there is Being rather than nothing. The answer
was that there was no answer. As a philosophy of impotence, this phi-
losophy signaled our incapacity to answer without reappropriating
the "Scriptures and the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church, which
does not, however, me an that Heidegger was a believer."2
Both of these philosophies, moved by a profound pessimism,
sought to establish the end of philosophy. "It looks as though every-
thing is becoming chaotic, the old becoming lost to us, the new prov-
ing useless and growing ever feebler."3 For Nietzsche, the faculty of
reason that made it possible to decenter man still nourished his illu-
sion of omnipotence, salving the wounds it inflicted each time a bit
more. Similarly, the Forgetting of Being was further accentuated by
the development of modernity and the generalization of technicity.
The Anti-Lumires
These two thinkers presented themselves as anti-Lumires. Nietzsche
denounced the brutal violence of the Lumires philosophy that culmi-
nated in the French Revolution. In his eyes, any brutal change or revo-
lutionary break could only elicit a vision of barbarism: "It is not
Voltaire's moderate nature ... but Rousseau's passionate follies and
half-lies that called for the optimistic spirit of the Revolution against
which 1 cry: 'crasez l'infme.'''4 Here Nietzsche defended the moder-
ate and progressive philosophers against those radical philosophers
who worked toward the fulfillment of the Revolution. But Nietzsche's
work, like that of Heidegger, was essentially a radical critique of the
366 Nietzchean-Heideggerian Roots
Lumires. Both attacked a certain notion of historicity as a bearer of
progress, for if history has any meaning at aU, it is that we are inex-
orably moving toward a decline. The conscious mind is encumbered
by history and must free itself in order to judge the present. "He sends
the dialectic of reason packing."5 Underlying the Lumires' claims of
universality, Nietzsche saw the immanent and hidden roots of the wiU
to power. Becoming was meaningless, or rather an apprenticeship in
the tragedy of the world, which is its very essence. "History resides in
us like camouflaged theology."6 Meaninglessness clearly led man to
impotence, to a nihilism assumed by an aristocratic and powerful elite
making any illusion of human action moot. The human spirit of ratio-
nalization was perceived as continuous with religious spirit; substitut-
ing reason for God would have been equaUy illusory. The effort at
human mastery was therefore absurdo
For Nietzsche, humanity began its decline with the beginning of
Greek thought, and Socrates, who appeared in Ecce Homo, was the
very symptom of decadence. Instincts and Dionysian hubris are con-
trasted to Socrates' ethic, which would later be embodied by religious
morality in order to repress and suffocate vital drives. The entire his-
tory of civilization therefore unfolds according to an internallogic of
castrating reason and a mystifying morality. Philosophy must discover
the creative drive shrouded beneath the mask of civilization. Nietz-
sche favored forgetting in order to be rid of the illusory and mystifica-
tion: "Thus it is possible to live almost without memory, and to live
happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates, but it is altogether im-
possible to live at aU without forgetting."7 Filled with a fundamental
pessimism and hostility to historicity, Nietzsche also nourished a vis-
ceral hatred of the masses and of revolution.
Nietzsche described his thoughts in his correspondence with a
German officer during the I870 siege of Paris. He considered war to
be a useful test of virility, but the awful spectacle of the Paris Com-
mune, the "slaves'" revoIt, and their breaking of rules frightened
him. General insurrections lead straight to "barbarism" he wrote in
I87I-73 in his preparatory notes for an essay on the future of teach-
ing establishments. Those dispensers of earthly happiness, the social-
ists of the late nineteenth century, could only perfect the metaphysical
cast of mind at work in aU of Western history and therefore make it
veer toward decadence and catastrophe. But laying bare the illusions
of the metaphysical era also revealed an unprepared and weak indi-
Nietzschean-Heideggerian Roots 367
vidual in the grips of the ephemeral, a striking contra st to the false
happiness of the metaphysical ages. Whence the temptation to be
borne toward the construction of a better future, a future that is al-
ways part of a comforting illusion: "That better future which one
wishes for mankind must necessarily be in sorne respects a worse fu-
ture for it is folly to believe that a new higher stage of mankind will
write in itself aIl the excellences of earlier stages."
8
Socialism was Nietzsche's true enemy: "Socialism is the fanciful
younger brother of the almost expired despotism who se heir it wants
to be."9 "The poison of this disease which is presently contaminating
the masses with increasing speed as a socialist scabies of the heart."lO
Since history at the close of the nineteenth century seemed to guaran-
tee the irresistible success of the socialist movement, history needed to
be eliminated in order to better destroy the dangers threatening the
West and was thus assimilated at once to a mystification, to deca-
dence, to a smell of rot, and to a paralyzing straitjacket. In the middle
of a historicist century, Nietzsche was a radical partisan of the dissolu-
tion of the category of the new, the thinker of the end of history.
Nietzsche was therefore a precursor of the triumphant post-
modernity of the mid-twentieth century. He was already sketching out
the deconstruction of the unified, total framework of historical move-
ment, which yielded to the immobility of a slack present in which
histories undergo a process of atomization and multiplication when
they are only constructed on an individual basis: "Nietzsche and
Heidegger . . . laid the necessary foundations for constructing an
image of existence in response to the new conditions of nonhistoricity
or, better yet, of posthistoricity." 11
The Forgetting of Being
In the I930S, Heidegger took up Nietzsche's critique of modernity in
his lectures. Heidegger, like Nietzsche, saw history as little more than
the unfolding of a slow decline whose roots harken back to the Greeks
in the constant Forgetting of Being. In his 1957 The Princip le of
Reason, Heidegger critiqued two forms of historical thinking. He
qualified the first as the metaphysics of history, which imagines that
freedom operates in historical evolution, metaphysical insofar as it
presupposes man at the center of the historical process-a belief that
Heidegger clearly considered to be an illusion, a metaphysics of sub-
jectivity. In the second place, he attacked Hegelianism as a teleology in
368 Nietzchean-Heideggerian Roots
which reason slowly revealed itself to itself through history, as simply
another form of metaphysics that subjects history to the principle of
reason, a variation that also reintroduced the Subject into a central
position-not because this subject mastered a process that more often
than not victimized him by its ruses, but because he could come to
understand its significance. However, man modeled meaning on the
structure of his own human reason rather than that of Being, which
remained confined within Forgetting.
In place of these approaches, which Heidegger characterized as
metaphysical, he proposed the history of Being, a history without a
history, the simple unfolding of that which is presented through its
successive images, meaningless, without either filiation or periodiza-
tion. To conceive of history, he used the metaphor of a trunkless, root-
less rose bush flowering in the springtime. A profusion of buds de-
scribed shattered history, with neither a subject to infuse the historical
unfolding with meaning nor an underlying, occult subject whose
traces would have to be sought.
In Being and Time (I927), the temporality of Being was placed
alongside that of a progressive decline leading to an apocalpyse, in
which, as we know, Heidegger participated. Degradation is structural
in human history: "Belonging to the very being of Dasein, degrada-
tion is an existential."12 From his rectorate speech to his interview in
Der Speigel, Heidegger never stopped reiterating his Cassandra-like
warning against the decline (Verfall) in which the West was inexorably
becoming mired: "The spiritual force of the West eludes us and its edi-
fice trembles, the dead appearance of culture crumbles."13 To this in-
volution, Heidegger contrasted the strength of rootedness, tradition,
and country; they must be so many breakwaters of resistance against
the technicity of the modern world that carries away the totality of
being with which the being-there of Being is dissolved. If the history of
Western civilization is the history of a progressive forgetting of Being,
the twentieth century is the culmination of this amnesia.
For Jrgen Habermas, Heidegger's critique of modernity, technic-
ity, and mass civilization was unoriginal because it simply appropri-
ated the repertory of received ideas of the genration's conservative
mandarins. Habermas situated the drift leading Heideggerian theory
to embrace National Socialism in what was, in I933, a new invest-
ment in the categories of fundamental ontology. Until that point, Da-
sein had designated the being toward death in its singularity, whereas
Nietzschean-Heideggerian Roots 369
after 1933 it took on a collective sense the reunited population.
Heidegger also diverged from the path of triumphant reason and
chose the sinuous path of an obscure world that "willlead nowhere."
A conception of wandering ta come nearer the paths leading to the
realm of origins and of logos. This theme of wandering found no
earthly culmination; these pilgrimages of the hum an "shepherd of
Being" could only evoke a complete theological variation. "This ex-
plained how theologians were the first to adopt Being and Time."14
Heidegger radically detached Being from empirical reality in the same
way that he realized the end of history.
Antihumanism
If structuralism was fortified by this antihistoricism, Nietzsche and
Heidegger radically critiqued humanism, in which the figure of man
disappeared like so many grains of sand beneath the waves. At the
beginning, there was the fracture Nietzsche created with the death
of God, which destabilized the notion of an identifiable, definable
human mastery and subject of history. He denounced the deification
of man that replaced religion at the time of the Lumires and that con-
tinued throughout the nineteenth century.
If God was dead, no immutable human nature could exist as an
aeterna veritas or measure of all things, and this relativism led Nietz-
sche to a radical nihilism. Moral judgment became impossible; on
what basis could a norm be constructed? "When virtue has slept, she
will get up more refreshed. "15 Ethical judgment supposed a freedom
of action and a level of responsibility that man does not possess.
Under such circumstances, individual judgment in any given situation
became the sole criterion for action, the rest little more than the basis
for subjugating the subject. "The complete unaccountability of man
for his actions and his nature is the bitterest draught the man of
knowledge has to swallow if he has been accustomed to seeing in ac-
ceptability and dut y the patent of his humanity."16 Nietzsche attacked
humanism as a doctrine that assigned man the central role of subject
as a full being, as the seat of the proof of self-consciousness. Here,
Nietzsche translated the impossibility of relying on any transcendental
foundation whatsoever, given the death of God.
Heidegger took Nietzsche's critique of huma ni sm further. Man
was fundamentally dispossessed of any mastery since his reality could
only forever appear to him as something veiled. "The question: who is
370 Nietzchean-Heideggerian Roots
man? can only be raised in the questioning of Being." 17 This question-
ing led to indetermination and inaccessibility, except that here, man is
the trace, the communion, the witness. The effectiveness of Heideg-
ger's critique lay in emphasizing the fact that man's definition in no
way gave him the capacity to free himseH from the codes enclosing
him in contingent definitions and in particular determinations. Ek-
sistence preceded being and determined man's initial nothingness, and
his vocation of universality.
Heidegger represented a major break from the vision of man as
mas ter and owner of nature. Later, Sartre would say, "If man, such as
existentialism conceives him, is undefinable, it is because he is, first,
nothing."18 From this point on, the problem was posed and would
give rise to two different interpretations of whether existentialism
could be a humanism, as Sartre claimed, or if, as Heidegger believed,
it leads to an antihumanism.
ln 1946, Heidegger sent his Letter on Humanism to Jean Beaufret
in which he clarified his the sis by cleaving the humanist interpretation
of his thinking. Ek-sistence was not given to man like the Cartesian
cogito, which is only a rationalist hyperbole to be reversed by the for-
mula "1 am, therefore 1 think." Man was in an inextricable alienation:
"Man, exiled from the truth of Being, goes in circles around himseH
like a rational animal. "19
Rather than assuming its position as the shepherd of Being, being
in the world has been lost in being. In the twentieth century, this is
translated by a universal technologization and generalization of mod-
ernity, the Ge-Stell, the setting into place of technology. As Heidegger
saw it, man's fate was independent of himseH; he was not autonomous
in his subjective faculties and could only be attentive to the voice of
Being. In this regard, the philosopher and the poet were presented as
those who succeeded in being most proximate to this being-there of
Being, most often presented as an abyss.
Being points to the human condition as being-toward-death, the
first root from which the world of the mind arose. It thus displaced the
point of view of the Cartesian cogito or of psychologism. No longer
there where consciousness masters itseH, Being was to be found in
the cogito's conditions of existence. Whence Heidegger's criticism of
Sartre's effort to determine the conditions of the cogito. This archaeol-
ogy revealed man to be inexorably decentered and subjected to a his-
tory of which he is no longer the subject, but rather its object or its toy.
Nietzschean-Heideggerian Roots 37 l
The Primacy of Language
In this que st for the beginnings of the thinkable, Nietzsche and Hei-
degger both thought that language and its laws played a particularly
important role. Language had lost its original purety because it had
been diverted by the functionality of being. The philosophical or po-
etic que st sought to complement this lack in or der to rediscover the
meaning of the lost logos. Because being masked the conditions of its
reality, Heidegger favored using linguistic interpretation as the privi-
leged medium of the history of Being. "Heidegger gives the phenome-
nological method the sense of an ontological hermeneutic."20
Language th us became the important object of study in a Heideg-
gerian perspective. This clearly showed the fundamental roots of
structuralism's generalization of the linguistic model to the entire
range of the social sciences. Heidegger's influence was fruitful, but it
was constructed at a distance from anything having to do with being.
Moreover, his influence went unfelt for Charles Sanders Peirce's prag-
matics as well as for the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
or of John L. Austin.
For Heidegger, who was unfamiliar with the work being done in
pragmatics, man did not speak, language spoke, while man was spo-
ken. Consequently, his approach was nominalist and fetishized the
discursive since language differentiated hum ans from the vegetable
and animal realms, a distinction and a burden. Similarly, Nietzsche's
critique of metaphysics also decentered the cogito from language pre-
sented in its "natural" rhetoric. Metaphoric and metonymic processes
found a critique of unattainable truth, in place of which they offered
the infinite interpretative labyrinth who se only value lay in the relativ-
ity of their site of enunciation. "Rather has the world become 'infinite'
for us aIl over aga in, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that
it may include infinite interpretations. "21 This new area of interpreta-
tion had to avoid metaphysics, which was little more than an exagger-
ated que st for a genesis and origins in order to establish a conti nuit y
and causality around the unity of the subject. Nietzsche favored a de-
constructive genealogy of the subject so as to decipher the conditions
of belief systems based on what they occult or repress. This decon-
struction aimed at unearthing the originary inscription of a primitive
truth, which preceded its formulation; it sought every absolute that
was supposed to bear the human being.
372 Nietzchean-Heideggerian Roots
The Genealogical Program
Nietzsche, like Heidegger, privileged language as disenfranchised from
aIl subjection to the imperative of truth. "With his aphorisms, Nietz-
sche establishes the return in force of censored and repressed e1e-
ments, and puts them in perspective."22 This Nietzschean genealogy
had to take another approach to temporality and to the re1ationship
to truth. Presented as the point-by-point antithesis of the Platonic ap-
proach, Nietzsche argued for the destructive use of reality rather than
reminiscence/recognition, for the derealizing and dissociative use of
identities against tradition, and for the destruction of truth in place of
history-knowledge. "Genealogy is history as a concerted carnival."23
Access to truths thus became doubly inaccessible. On the one han d,
truths were no more than c10uds of metaphors, metonymies, and an-
thropomorphisms that we believe to be stable, simple exchange values
whose use value has been forgotten. On the other hand, the fiction of
the cogito became the targeted site of the illusion: "There is no one
who is innocent enough to still raise the question of the subject 'l'as
Descartes did, as the condition of 'think."'24 For Nietzsche, the cogito
was the mode1 of metaphysical pronouncements and the hypostasis of
the fictive subject whose polysemism he analyzed.
The genealogy valorized the territory of the sign, which was to be
retraced as an unveiling of a unitary, metaphysical discourse. The
meaning was unsheathed behind the ever-denied textual opacity. Hav-
ing deconstructed the carnival masks, it was necessary to reconstruct
the unbroken signifying chains of successive interpretations; these
chains are no longer proposed as continuo us, but on the contrary per-
ceived as discontinuity, as symptoms, or as lacks. The genealogical ap-
proach favored the underbelly of what is spoken, the hidden face of
the signifieds. It defined a game of dis placement in order to disinvest
and de-implicate the metaphysical content of the stratified layers of
the signs. The genealogy sought to restore the conditions of discourse
more than its contents. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger made this shift
toward the discursive.
The Nietzsche-Heidegger Program Once Again
Heidegger's quest for logos and Nietzsche's genealogy converge here,
and both nourished structuralist thinking. The critique of ethnocen-
trism and of Eurocentrism intensified during the fifties and sixties with
1"< Roots 373
the structuralist vogue, which adopred Nietzschean-Heideggerian
critical paradigm on its own; but behind the continuaI unfolding of
triumphant reason lurked the image of the madman, of the savage,
and of the child as so many repressed figures allowing reason to reign.
Lvi-Strauss rehabilitated the savage mind; Jean Piaget looked at
childhood no longer as the negative of adulthood, but understood as a
specifie age; Foucault rediscovered the long drift of madness before its
internment; as for Lacan, he truly pulverized the Subject, demonstrat-
ing, contrary to the Cartesian cogito, that "1 think there where 1 am
not, therefore 1 am there where 1 do.not think."
In Thinking 68, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut systematized the in-
te11ectual structure of the sixties, even if they were mistaken in cor-
relating May I968 and this inte11ectual cast of mind.
25
The major
thrusts of Nietzschean-Heideggerian thinking are here: the theme of
the end of philosophy, which Derrida developed in order to free think-
ing from its captivity. He favored the writing of a pure trace, a mind
"that does not mean anything," pure meaning freed from the signi-
fied. Also present are the paradigm of the genealogy, or the problema-
tization, of the external conditions of production of discourse, rather
than the examination of their contents. And there is the idea of truth
as the sole means of verifying the adequation between a discourse and
its content, an idea that, along with the referent, which is radically
cast to the sidelines, loses any foundation. Fina11y, we witness the his-
toricization of categories and the end of any reference to a universal.
To this systematization, elucidated by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut,
must be added the disappearance of the name of the author and the
meaning of his existence. The author is erased behind the laws of lan-
guage, of which he is nothing more than one pole performing a com-
position that does not belong to him. We once again find an attack on
the subject and on the enunciation of discourse, and it led to a new de-
finition of the literary text and of the work of the cri tic, who must
shift his gaze from the author to the text as a closed system.
Certainly, these shifts are atwork between Nietzschean-Heideggerian
thinking and structuralism. Thus, Heidegger's antihumanism and that
of structuralism, even if one may be heir to the other, are not rea11y
of the same nature. The structuralist point of view refers huma ni sm to
an episteme of the past and therefore finds a compe11ing epistemologi-
cal justification, whereas Heideggerian antihumanism remains meta-
physical in nature. "He hypostasizes Being to a11 dimensions of his-
374 Nietzchean-Heideggerian Roots
tory."26 He produced a philosophy that, more than a conception of the
end of history, was a conception of metahistory whose core was Being,
a perspective that was not at aU shared by structuralism in its diverse
manifestations.
Foucault: "1 Am Simply Nietzschean"
Foucault's ties to Nietzsche are obvious and overt: "1 am simply Nietz-
schean."27 Foucault wrote within a Nietzschean scope and even used
the same metaphor of an erased figure of man at the end of The Order
of Things; he deconstructed the subject in the same way as Nietzsche
had and substituted the project of a genealogy: "Everything is already
interpretation. "28 Like Nietzsche, Foucault scoured the lower depths
and exhumed what history had forgotten, deciphering the advance of
a disciplinary society lying behind the progress of the Lumires, oc-
culted by the predominance of a liberating legal-political discourse.
Madness was repressed in this way by the very development of Reason,
of a Western culture that was vacillating in the mid-twentieth century.
Foucault was a brilliant student of Nietzschean thinking, and adopted
the dissolution of the figure of man, perceived as a simple fleeting pas-
sage between two modes of being of language: "More than the death
of God, ... what Nietzsche's thinking presages is the end of his mur-
derer, the explosion of the face of man. "29 And from this death of
men, he also concluded the primacy of philology and of an examina-
tion of discourse, already heralded by Nietzsche and readdressed by
Mallarm.
Hermeneutics became semiology when it infinitely interpreted in-
terpretation, the sign having broken its moorings with the original sig-
nified. Humanism had been erected on false foundations of lack and
inexistence and was a form of consolation; the principal issue then be-
came knowing why and under what conditions man conceives some-
thing that will forever be situated outside of him.
For Foucault, Nietzsche represented the first uprooting of anthro-
pology, whose collapse indicated "the imminent death of man."30 Nietz-
sche's genealogy also inspired work rooted in the historical present
rather than in an impossible search for origins, so Foucault did not try
to understand the continuities that proclaim by bespeaking our world,
but rather pointed out the discontinuities, the shifting of the epistemes.
Historical knowledge had to its credit the fact that it problematized,
that it broke the constants and the consolatory game of recognition.
NlItzs,ch,;an-!it;ldt;gg,en,m Roots 375"
During the course of archaeology, Foucault was to pay
particular attention to archives, to the document understood as a
monument that let him retrace the fault Hnes and point out the singu-
larity of events freed from any teleological finality. The fact that Fou-
cault carried on a dialogue with historians, more often than not shot
through with mutual incomprehension, and even went so far as to
work with historians such as Michelle Perrot and Arlette Farge, that
he was, during the last months of his life counseled by Paul Veyne, is
not at aIl fortuitous but corresponded to Foucault's genealogical ap-
proach. "The genealogist needs history in order to conjure away the
chimera of the origin."31 Highlighting heterogeneity, deconstructing
history, and working toward giving the myriad of lost events a sense
by making them once again into events-such are the orientations of a
Foucault who transported Nietzscheism onto historical terrain.
To a lesser degree, we can also perceive Nietzsche's influence on
Lvi-Strauss's work. Jean Duvignaud sees this particularly in Tristes
Tropiques and in the "finale" of The Naked Man, where Lvi-Strauss's
general vision bathes in a profound aestheticism that harks back to
Nietzsche: "Aesthetics always emerges as soon as history is elimi-
nated."32 Thus, structuralism's circula rit y in Lvi-Strauss, based on
which myths refer to each other in a magnificent construction of logic,
would refer to Nietzsche's eternal return.
Citing Reason
Heidegger's influence is even more obvious and widespread for the
various components of structuralism. Foucault declared that "Heideg-
ger was always the essential philosopher for me."33 Unlike Nietzsche,
who was a constant reference, Heidegger's influence on Foucault was
implicit, although Foucault quickly became familiar with the work of
the German philosopher. Foucault's friend Maurice Pinguet de scribes
his first encounter at Ulm with the young Michel Foucault, whom he
heard intelligently holding forth in his metallic voice with sorne im-
passioned friends about notions of Dasein and being-for-death.
34
Nothing more ordinary for a young ENS student in 1950, when Hei-
deggerianism was the koine of every philosopher. But Heidegger is
present in the work itself of Michel Foucault.
In speaking of Kant in The Order of Things, Foucault employed
the typically Heideggerian expression of the "analytics of finitude,"
according to which man discovers that he is "always already" in the
N!etzcI1CaJt1-Hleldeggen21l1 Roots
work and that it is therefore vain to look for "Removed fmm
aH origins, he s already there."35 We also find Heidegger in Madness
and Civilization, where "the entire theme of reason that only bec ornes
reason by exclusion is typically Heideggerian." 36 The Archae%gy of
Knowledge is an implicit debate with Heidegger's Letter on Human-
ism. Similarly, the way of seeing a disciplinary society unfold behind
the society of the Lumires in Discipline and Punish corresponds to
Heidegger's inspection of reason and points to a fundamentally pes-
simistic vision of the fate of Western society. Of course, the lessons
to be drawn from this diagnosis went unassimilated; very few simi-
larities exist in terms of praxis between commitment in the sense of
the resistance to power as Foucault understood it and Heidegger's
"commitment" !
ln Lvi-Strauss's case, Heidegger's influence was neither direct nor
acknowledged, as it was for Foucault. And yet it is no less diffuse and
present in Lvi-Strauss's profound skepticism with regard to moder-
nit y, in his critique of global technologization, and in his denunciation
of its destructive-and potentially genocidal-character. Questioning
planetary homogenization and the suppression of differences is also
part of the same sensibility.
Lacan and Heidegger
Heidegger's influence on Lacan was also quite clear. As lisabeth
Roudinesco has pointed out, Lacan was fascinated by Heidegger's
style, as indeed was the entire French postwar intelligentsia. The first
meeting between the two took place in 1950, but it was above aIl
thanks to Heidegger's French disciple, Jean Beaufret, who began an
analysis with Lacan in 1946, that Lacan came to know Heidegger
via the patient on his couch who became the very source of the diffu-
sion of Heidegger in France. Indeed, Lacan and Jean Beaufret struck
up a friendship, which made it easier for Heidegger's language to
take mot.
Lacan's first reference to Heidegger dates precisely from this pe-
riod. In September 1946, at the Bonneval colloquium, Lacan gave his
presentation "Regarding Psychic Causality." The allusion made it clear
that Lacan had read Plato and the Doctrine of Truth, which Heideg-
ger had pub li shed in 1941-42.37 Later, Lacan visited Heidegger in
Freiburg.
38
Shortly thereafter, he translated the article entitled "Logos,"
submitted it to Heidegger, and then published it in the first issue of his
Nietzschean-Heideggerian Raots 377
review La Psychanalyse in 1953. Lacan paid a resonant hornage to
Heidegger on this occasion: "With respect to the presence here of
Monsieur Heidegger, for aU those who know where the highest rnedi-
tation in the world takes place, this presence alone guarantees that
there is, at the very least, a manner of reading Freud that does not
bear witness to a mind as cheap as one patent loyalist to phenomenol-
ogy claims it to be."39
Despite his enthusiasm, Lacan did not translate more than four-
fifths of the text, and he amputated the end in which Heidegger saw
poetic writing as a means of escaping the drama of hum an existence.
For Lacan, neither escape nor saivation were possible; he perceived
no glimmering of Being. lisabeth Roudinesco tells of Heidegger's
first trip to France, which, in that August of 1955, looked quite pic-
turesque. He came to participate in the interviews at Cerisy-la-Salle
organized by Jean Beaufret and Kostas Axelos. Lacan organized a
small meeting at Guitrancourt in honor of the illustrious guest.
Heidegger stayed at the Prvt, then visited the cathedral at
Chartres. Lacan drove as fast as he ran his sessions. Sitting in the
front seat, Heidegger did not budge or show any signs of nervous-
ness, but his wife kept asking Lacan to drive more slowly. Sylvia ex-
plained her worries to Lacan, but to no avail: the master drove faster
and faster. On the way back, Heidegger remained silent and his
wife's protests got louder, while Lacan kept his foot down on the
accelerator. The trip came to an end and everyone went home.
40
Their relationship could have been warmer, obviously, but what
counted was the conceptual borrowing beyond any direct communi-
cation, which was made difficult by the fact that Heidegger considered
that there was only one true language-German-which Lacan was
able to translate but could not speak.
Lacan took up Heidegger's notion of ek-sistence, the ide a that
man is separated from any form of essence, and took inspiration from
the distancing of Being with respect to being. Each time Lacan quoted
Heidegger, it was to use the notion of ek-sistence as weIl as being-for-
death. The Lacanian idea that a reallife is not a real life but a sym-
bolic life "is an idea that is everywhere in Heidegger. It is even essen-
tial to his philosophy. "41
Heidegger's influence on Lacan's paradigms is easily deciphered.
Not only does one find there the fundamental pessirnism of Heidegger,
man's decentering, the deconstruction of the subject that is split and
letzchean-I-ielaeg;gerlan Roots
forever inaccessible ta the long path of 1055, of the Forgetting of
Being starting with the structuring experience of the Mirror Stage, but
one can aiso find borrowings from Heidegger's vocabulary. Every-
thing having ta do with the relationship to Truth, to authenticity, to
full and empty speech stems from a Heideggerian approach trans-
posed onto psychoanalytic terrain. AlI the commentary on Greek
philosophy, on althia, is common to both. In Lacan's "Seminar on
the Purloined Letter," the letter's circula rit y recalls the structuralist
model and is, at the same time, supported by a whole Heideggerian
concern for a site in which truth is unveiled, which is the very site of
the letter, a site where it is not in its place. Thus Lacan, in the early
fifties, was truly fascinated with Heidegger, a fascination that went
unreciprocated, for Heidegger was always indifferent to Lacan's work.
It is therefore impossible to agree that "Lacan was never a Heidegger-
ian, "42 and to reduce what he borrowed to a simple matter of vocabu-
lary, even if it is true that with respect to the problem of science, their
positions were opposed. For what is most essential-that is, Heideg-
ger's proposaI of a philosophy as a common language for aIl the
social sciences-there is a legacy that goes much further than Lacan
and Lacanian thought.
Jacques Derrida and Heidegger
Heidegger's influence was dearer on Jacques Derrida, despite what he
has said since the "Farfas affair."43 Derrida considered the epithet
"Heideggerian," to be dumsy and he rejected it. At the same time,
he daimed that Lvi-Strauss, Althusser, and Foucault were never in-
fluenced by Heidegger!44 And to support his thesis about the total
absence of Heideggerian influence in France, Derrida recounted an
anecdote going back to I967-68. Driving with Foucault one day, he
asked why he never spoke about Heidegger. Foucault answered that it
was both too important and too difficult, that Heidegger was beyond
his grasp.
But if we limit ourselves to Derrida's texts, Heidegger's omnipres-
ence is not only obvious but explicit: "Nothing that 1 have tried to do
would have been possible without the opening of Heideggerian ques-
tions, ... without the attention to what Heidegger calls the difference
between Being and being, the ontic-ontological difference such as it
remains unthought in a certain fashion by philosophy."45 Of course
Derrida did not servilely adopt or daim Heidegger's thinking as his
Nietzschean-Heideggerian Roots 379
own, for his deconstruction also attacked the very knots of this think-
ing and, as with Lacan, sought to radicalize its theses.
For Derrida, the Ereignis, man as shepherd of Being, were vestiges
in Heidegger of the debris of a humanism to be deconstructed. Der-
rida's starting point, however, still remained the privilege Heidegger
granted language as the medium of Being, and the transition from a
philosophy of consciousness to one of language. Commentary held
a similar fascination for Derrida. While participating in the general
orientation of structuralism, he distinguished himself by criticizing
in turn Claude Lvi-Strauss in On Grammatology, Michel Foucault
in Writing and Differance, and Jacques Lacan in The Truth Factor.
46
We will return to his criticisms, which introduce us to the main echos
of French Nietzschean-Heideggerianism, which adopted structuralism
as its emblem in order to deploy the particularly diverse research po-
tentialities in the entire field of knowledge of the social sciences.
Thirty-eight
Growing Pains
To understand structuralism's success, we must do more than broadly
paint its historical context and identify the philosophical positions to
which the movement was heir. We must also describe the state and
shape of the social sciences themselves during the period. For, con-
trary to what much reductive thinking might imply, the history of each
discipline was generally independent of the others and to the history
leading to its creation. As Gilles Gaston-Granger put it, the life of con-
cepts at this level is autonomous. We can shed sorne light on the social
conditions surrounding the appearance and transformation of a com-
mon theory like structuralism if we consider the interdisciplinary rub-
bing of shoulders among researchers and teachers, and more generally
in the intellectual world.
The Intense Socialization of the Social Sciences
This period of flourishing structuralist activity was also one during
which the social sciences, and particularly those fighting for their
place in the sun, were exp an ding in a spectacular way. These new so-
cial sciences were in search of their legitimacy, but they also needed to
win over a growing intellectual audience of the fifties and sixties.
Their identity was forged around a rupture so that they could circum-
vent established, traditional positions. The structuralist break pre-
sented itself as a scientific revolution drawing numerous disciplines
under its banner, and this intense socialization helped win the day.
3
80
Growing Pains 38 l
The profoundly scientific and ideological aspects of the movement
during this period cannot therefore be ignored, nor can the ideological
aspects of its history, for this much-sought socialization led to an
ideologization of structuralism's scientific discourse. The structural
method does not sum up the history of structuralism. Indeed, we
might even raise the question of whether "scientific revolutions are
not, in fact, this intense socialization." 1
ln this respect, no science is protected against ideologization or
socialization. As we know, physical observation implied purely ideo-
logical issues during the time of Copernicus and Galileo; the transition
from a geocentric vision of the universe to a heliocentric one gener-
ated theological conflicts. Paul Rivet understood the necessity of so-
cialization for the institutional success of French ethnology in its early
years. Born during a period when colonial thinking had left its mark
on this science, ethnology was steeped in ideology. Rivet saw that he
could use the situation and reverse it to radically change the percep-
tion of cultural and social alterity, and he deliberately used ethnology
as an ideological weapon and a major element in the intellectual de-
bates of the thirties, thereby facilitating its institutionalization. Eth-
nology underwent a certain metamorphosis. From a conditioned disci-
pline, it became a conditioning discipline, bearing with it an ethics and
a policy of antiracism.
Intense socialization and ideologization therefore corresponded to
a mode of being in these newly armed sciences. Conceptually forceful,
however, they were nonetheless disarmed on the level of institutional
legitimacy. What was true for ethnology during the thirties was even
more dramatically so for the sciences of the sign during the fifties and
sixties, for they could profit from the support of the media, which was
playing an increasing role in the intellectual field.
The media were in fact taking over the debates of the sixties and
placing the issues in the public arena. One could even hear the famous
PicardJBarthes duel described as a new Dreyfus Affair. Sorne cons id-
ered that the only tangible reality of structuralism was in fact this
media hype and that once the media noise was eliminated, "struc-
turalism no longer exists."2 ln the same way that the divergences and
contradictions counted more among Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal, or
Hobbes, the similarities among the structuralists stemmed from their
contemporaneity, but their differences were more pertinent. Behind
the facade of homogeneity, the conflicts and polemics that exercised
382 Growing Pains
aIl the researchers were particularly lively. But media amplification
was sought out of a concern for making the phenomenon better
known, for recognition, and in a quest for intellectuallegitimacy.
Maurice Godelier embodied another attempt at dissociating a
form of thinking opposing science and ideology,3 by virtue of his radi-
cal distip.ction between the structural method, based on pertinent, rig-
orous, scientific analyses of kinship ties and mythic structures, for ex-
ample, and structuralism, which belonged more to the realm of the
ideological, to general speculative declarations about humanity, soci-
ety, and the progress of thought. These were completely different for
Godelier, even if researchers combined method and an ideological
dimension. "My argument is that the structural analysis of myths,
Claude Lvi-Strauss's method, does not at aIl imply his structuralism;
he is the one who defined his method, not because his method is lim-
ited but because he wanted to define it for other reasons."4 Science,
ideology, socialization, mediatization-structuralism was aIl of these
at once, like an entangled skein of yarn whose untangling depends on
contextualizing certain moments, currents, issues, and their stakes.
Philosophers Respond to the Challenge of the
Social Sciences
The taste for structuralism therefore corresponded to an intense so-
cialization of the social sciences and to an explosion such that these
became part of a veritable policy of development from the fifties
onward. In 1958, for example, a new sociology Licence was created
thanks to Raymond Aron's influence: sociology had made consider-
able progress in establishing itself institutionally. More generally,
those actors in the social sciences in full swing "did not look to
philosophers' recognition; on the contrary, they sought to differentiate
themselves ostentatiously."s We can appreciate structuralism's success
in this respect as a response from philosophers to the challenge raised
by the social sciences, which for the most part had come from the
same philosophical house. Philosophers were shaken up by the com-
petition from disciplines with more scientific and pragmatic ambitions
and that were able to articulate concepts and fieldwork. They reacted
by appropriating the program in order to consolidate and strengthen
their position on the intellectual playing field.
Philosophy witnessed the waning of two programs. Sartrean
Growing Pains 383
existentialism, articulated around notion a tran-
scendental, omnipotent, and completely abstract subject from which
everything and aH meaning proceeded, was in complete disarray in the
sixties and ran up on the shoals of history against which it had
foundered: "One of the last models of the idealism of the French uni-
versity."6 Structuralism, by virtue of the immobility of structures and
the decentering, if not the extinction, of the subject, offered the means
for reacting radically to those philosophers who wanted to mark their
distance from this idealism. Sartre had inaugurated a new style of phi-
losophy as a stake in a public debate, and this strongly contributed to
his popularity during the postwar years and during the decade of the
fifties. But he was the first victim of this new mode of relationship
with a public that would elude him and be drawn to the structuralists,
who turned against him the same weapons he had used to win pre-
eminence for his philosophy. The economic situation, the end of the
war in Aigeria, the dis engagement from political commitment, and a
general disillusionment all contributed to the creation of a new style
of intellectual. Sartre no longer incarnated this intellectual and he be-
came the expia tory victim of the dtente.
The second pro gram on the wane was phenomenology, from
which the structuralists also dissociated themselves. Of course struc-
turalism did adopt sorne phenomenologie al approaches-for exam-
pIe, the priority of structures and of the search for meaning-so much
so in fact that Jean Viet, the author of the first thesis on structuralism,
saw phenomenology as a specifie tendency of structuralism.7 And yet,
phenomenology remained a philosophy of consciousness and basically
sought to describe phenomena. For Jacques Derrida, phenomenology
remained enclosed in the "closure of representation," by maintaining
the princip le of the subject: "Deconstructions replaced descriptions."8
The notion of deconstruction, which would orient aU of structuralist
thinking, was first introduced by Derrida when he translated Heideg-
ger's Destruktion, a term with neither negative nor positive connota-
tions. "Deconstruction seeks to propose a theory of philosophical dis-
course. Such a pro gram is manifestly critical."9
Born of the prote st against phenomenology, philosophical struc-
turalism carried the critical paradigm to its zenith. It used phenome-
nology as a way of opening up or rai ding the legacy of the field of in-
vestigation of the social sciences. Most structuralists were trained
384 Growing Pains
philosophers: Claude Lvi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Lacan,
Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Vernant. And yet, in
search of something else, they had aIl broken with the traditional phi-
losophy taught at the university. This was a philosophical generation
intensely aware of the challenges of the social sciences and it broke
with traditional university rhetoric. But in order to do so, it had to
circumvent the traditional, legitimized institutional structures and di-
rectly address the intelligentsia. This meant choosing new philosophi-
cal objects with a specifically relevant and contemporary orientation,
by articulating thinking with the social realm and institutions and ac-
quiring a praxeological value.
Moreover, for these philosophers, structuralism helped renew a
discourse that had become more scientific and that offered them a de-
fense against the social sciences. Pierre Bourdieu baptized this the
"logy-effect,"lO when he observed the success of archaeology, gram-
matology, and semiology. "Logy" evoked the scientific aspirations of
speculative structuralism, which borrowed as much from mathemati-
callogic as it did from linguistics in order to establish itself as a schol-
arly pole in the history of science. Foucault described this fauIt line,
which he emphasized and which transcended aIl other forms of opposi-
tion: "This is what separates a philosophy of experience, meaning, and
the subject from a philosophy of knowledge, rationality, and the con-
cept. On the one hand, there is the line of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty,
and on the other, of Cavaills, Bachelard, Koyr, and Canguilhem."l1
The social sciences appropriated a whole series of questions, and
even the privilege of reflection of a philosophical nature. The philo-
sophical avant-garde thus spearheaded a successful counteroffensive
under the structuralist banner. Philosophy-open, renewed, carried
along by its growing public-would emerge revitalized by the contest
and markedly stronger by its growing batallion of teachers: the num-
ber of high-school philosophy jobs rose from 905 in I960 to I,3 II in
I965 and I,673 in I970.12 The number of postsecondary teaching
jobs rose from I24 in I963 to 267 in I967.
The gurus of structuralism wanted to assimilate the social sci-
ences. They nonetheless criticized their model of positivity and
crossed swords with them. Structuralist philosophers increased their
virulent attacks on the scientistic pretensions of the social sciences:
Lacan against psychology, Althusser against history, and Foucault
against the methods of classification in the social sciences. A veritable
Growing Pains 385
barrage flre was opened up against the ostensible imposture of the
social sciences and their scientiflc certitudes. The structuralists un-
leashed an epistemological critique against them, fueled by the work
of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem.
tienne Balibar described this successful turn quite well. The so-
cial sciences, purifled by the structuralist critique, sought their positiv-
ity in the models and concepts that philosophers had developed.
"Thus the text 1 contributed to Reading Capital (1965) seduced an-
thropologists and a few historians because 1 was constructing a con-
cept of the mode of production and they found it operational." 13
Structuralism could maintain the primacy of this renovated philoso-
phy-based on a "formula of compromise"14 between a redeflnition
that added a dimension of dynamism, which was critical of humanism
and led to radical rupture, and the preservation of the elevated status
of the philosophical discipline, despite the frequent reference to the
end of philosophy that seemed to mask the phenomenon-by privileg-
ing an essentially conceptual and theoretical disco ur se and by casting
the borders and divisions among the rising social sciences into sorne
degree of uncertainty and confusion. As Louis Pinto pointed out, this
was the concern that made Foucault's use of the term "archaeology"
able to satisfy the double requirement of proposing a historical dis-
course about the social sciences, but that would make it possible to
consider them philosophically, which is to say, differendy and better
than they could conceive themselves on their own.
15
ln this respect, the philosophical avant-garde fully responded to
the challenge of the social sciences and even favored their expansion
during the sixties. At the same time, it preserved philosophy's presti-
gious place as the "crowning discipline" among the disciplines. Phi-
losophy remained at the zenith of the high-school curriculum, and
particularly in the institutions where the national elite was shaped:
khgne and the coles Normales Suprieures. Philosophy withstood
the offensive rather well. Witness the assurance with that Louis Al-
thusser rejected the "so-called social sciences" as an anathema that
"cannot be explained without referring to their weakened institu-
tional (and often intellectual) state in the flfties." 16 The batde of the
humanities with respect to the social sciences at this level reiterated
the joust between the ENS and the ENA in shaping the national elite,
between a classical elite and the new, technocratic elite.
386 Growing Pains
Emancipation from History
Structuralism did not limit itself to attacking academic philosophy. It
also attacked history, that other ancient and well-ensconced canonical
discipline certai.n of its positions and methods. This destablization not
only of the university discipline but of historicity in general was another
characteristic trait of structuralism. War was declared against histori-
cism, the historical context, the search for origins, diachrony, teleology
and the argument made in favor of permanent invariables, synchrony,
and the hermetic text. The Annales school took up the challenge. In
1958, Fernand Braudel favored the longue dure and temporal triparti-
tion as the common language of aIl the social sciences under history's
baton. At the end of the sixties, the third generation of the Annales de-
constructed a fractured and anthropologized history,17 Structuralist lit-
erary criticism or semiology began to define itself by repudiating his-
tory. Of course it had to cut itself off from traditional, academic literary
history of the man and the work, but in its concern for formalization,
semiology went quite far in negating any historical elucidation, and
thus cut itself off from any psychological or historical referent.
Historians, including those who were most open to dialogue with
the other social sciences, could not help but feel challenged by struc-
turalism. They reacted by attending to the study of socioeconomic
structures, cycles, and repeated phenomena, which had already been
part of their own program. But they could not calI themselves struc-
turalists for the antinomy would have been too marked. There was
therefore a profound desire for emancipation with respect to history,
pushed to the absurd negation of any historical foundation. Michelle
Perrot, a professor at Paris VII who was at the very summit of mod-
ernism in history, gave a seminar at the time with colleagues in litera-
ture who turned the seminar into a dead end. Perrot thought that she
was taking a step toward interdisciplinary progress, but the attacks
against aIl reference to any kind of historical context whatsoever gave
her "the feeling of being completely out of date." Indeed, for those
partisans of new literary criticism, "the very word 'context' made
them jump-it was spurned. We had to stay with the closed text,
which made conversation very difficult. "18
Antiacademicism
This determination to have it out with the canonized disciplines-
traditional philosophy, history, psychology-was part of a larger con-
Growing Pains 387
text of antiacademic revoit. This was the means for the philo-
sophical avant-garde or for the young sciences of the sign to make a
place for themselves within the institution. For most of the adherents
of structuralism, their status was in fact precarious.
Innovation came essentially from those institutions considered
marginal at the time, such as the Sixth Section of the EPHE, or even
the Collge de France. While considered the high point of intellectual
legitimation, these institutions were nonetheless at the margins of the
university, the principal teaching and research structure.
The paths of the structuralists were, in this respect, significant be-
cause they essentially took place outside the university. This was true
for Lvi-Strauss among others, as he freely admitted: "It was therefore
an active university career whose most striking characteristic is doubt-
less that it always took place outside the university per se."19 The
same was true for Barthes, Greimas, Althusser, Dumzil, Todorov, and
Lacan. Considering the courses given at the Sorbonne in 1967, one
notices with no small surprise that the linguistics courses were given
by linguistics professors who, with the exception of Andr Martinet,
were entirely different from those who are well known today. "In
1967, there was not even any linguistics department at the Sorbonne,
but only a simple Institut de Linguistique .... When 1 was a high-
school teacher doing my thesis in linguistics, 1 was planning to be un-
employed since what 1 was doing was absolutely useless. "20
The weight of tradition and the recalcitrant conservatism of the
venerable Sorbonne kept the French university system closed to new
influences. Its immobility in turn helped to fan the revolt and the
necessary rupture. In order to make a place for themselves, the sci-
ences of the sign had to get beyond the institution and find massive
and effective support. Structuralism made it possible to federate the
avant-gardes of different disciplines and to transform the revolt into
a revolution.
This was the context in which references to Nietzsche, Marx, and
Saussure became operational as true arms of an antiacademic critique
of those partisans of a university and mandarin orthodoxy. The struc-
turalists in fact adopted an older program in order to make it relevant
and current. They were determined to bring areas that obeyed specifie
rationalities into the realm of the sciences of man, an idea that went
back to Auguste Comte.
Structuralism's other main paradigm held that the objective rela-
388 Growing Pains
tionships between isolated elements are important rather than any
particular elements without the interference of consciousness, the idea
of a lag between behavior and consciousness; this view of things had
already been clearly proclaimed by Durkheimians and Hegelians.
What was new.was that a program rather than its contents became a
reality, as well as the speed with which this program was applied and
produced tangible scientific results.
Linguistics: A Common Program
Structurallinguistics provided a method and a common language for
bringing about a scientific renewal of the social sciences. Linguistics
appeared as the model for a whole series of sciences lacking in formal-
ism, and it penetrated ever more deeply into anthropology, literary
criticism, and psychoanalysis and profoundly changed the mode of
philosophical questioning. And yet, a certain number of social sci-
ences remained essentially removed from this dramatic change, or
were simply only marginally affected by the debate; it did not shake
their fundamental positivism. Psychology at this point was developing
systems of modeling and scientific structures free of metaphysical
problems, and the situation in economics was essentially the same.
Linguistic contagion had affected disciplines in precarious institu-
tional positions or those in search of an identity because of the inter-
naI contradictions between pretensions to scientific positivity and a
link with the political arena, as was the case with sociology. Finally,
there were those disciplines, like literary studies or philosophy, that
were fully caught up in a quarrel between the ancients and the mod-
ems. These circumstances contributed to the weakening of discipli-
nary boundaries and structuralism appeared as the unifying project:
"At the end of the sixties, it appeared necessary to unify the diverse at-
tempts at renewing the human sciences into a single current or even
into a single discipline that was more general than linguistics. "21
Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco expressed the temptation even more
clearly by agreeing to propose a general semiology that could confed-
erate the human sciences around the study of the sign.
Modemization was therefore joined with interdisciplinarity. It was
necessary to violate the sacrosanct boundaries so that the linguistic
model could penetrate the entire field of the social sciences. From the
moment when everything has to do with language and we are aH made
of language in a world that is language, "everything becomes inter-
Growing Pains 89
convertible, everything.
This interdisciplinarity, which put the brakes on Humboldt's mode! of
a university in which each discipline had its place within strict limits,
created a veritable taste for aU the variants of formalism, for knowl-
edge that was immanent to itself. The password of the period was
communication. Beyond the review of the same name, the term con-
veyed this multidisciplinary euphoria.
A Unitary Science
Just after the war, Lvi-Strauss was the first to formulate this unifying
program in the social sciences. Of course his constellation gravitated
around social anthropology, which he represented, the sole discipline
deemed capable of carrying out this totalizing undertaking. For Lvi-
Strauss, anthropology's particular vocation came from its ability to
position itself at the crossroads between the natural sciences and the
social sciences. Consequently, anthropology "does not abandon the
hope of one day awakening among the natural sciences, at the hour of
the Last Judgment."23
To construct his anthropology, Lvi-Strauss drew inspiration and
a certain number of logical-mathematical models or operational tech-
niques from the natural and exact sciences. He aspired to erase the
frontier between the natural sciences and the social sciences thanks
to scientific rigor. Encouraged by his fruitful meeting during the war
in the United States with Jakobson, Lvi-Strauss gave the linguistic
model a certain pride of place in his anthropological approach. In his
search for invariants, in his paradigmatic and syntagmatic deconstruc-
tions, he adopted the lessons of Jakobson's phonology: binary opposi-
tions, differential divergence, and so on. Linguistics, thanks to Jakob-
son, further enriched a particularly rich area of knowledge. If, thanks
to the priority given to language and to deciphering signs, Lvi-Strauss
oriented anthropology toward culture, the aspiration of unity was by
no means left along the wayside. His quest for enceintes mentales also
implied biology, a discipline that was absolutely fundamental in struc-
tural anthropology even if it was not truly exploited. Structural analy-
sis found that "its model is already present in the body, 1 have already
mentioned . . . the exhaustive research that has been done on the
mechanism of visu al perception in various animais. "24 "Instead of
opposing ide al and real, abstract and concrete, 'emic' and 'etic,' one
will recognize that the immediate data of perception cannot be re-
390 Growing Pains
duced to any of these terms but lies betwixt and between: that is,
already encoded by the sense organs as weIl as by the brain, in the
manner of a text."25
In aspiring to a totality, Lvi-Strauss was adopting Marcel
Mauss's goal o ~ constructing a "total social fact." He therefore sought
to embrace the full scientific arena and finally to make structural an-
thropology the science of man, a discipline federating those sciences
on the basis of logico-mathematical models, strengthened by the con-
tribution of phonology and by a boundless realm of investigation that
took in, in a single glance and over the face of the planet, societies
without history or writing.
The anthropologist could therefore reach the unconscious dimen-
sion of social practices and could restore the complex combinations of
rules operating in aIl human societies. We can understand how such
aspirations could vex aIl those sciences that take man as their primary
object, and how it provoked a number of reactions from other disci-
plines--competition from sorne and support to the dynamic conqueror
from others, in order to win sorne degree of legitimacy for themselves.
Defined this way, the goal was equivalent to the difficulty anthropol-
ogy had encountered early on in positioning itself institutionally:
Newly established sciences find difficulty in inserting themselves into
traditional structures. It can never be sufficiently emphasized that an-
thropology is by far the youngest of these young sciences (the social
sciences) and that the general solutions appropriate to its eiders have
what is, for it, an already traditional aspect. It has, as it were, its feet
planted on the natural sciences, its back resting against the humanis-
tic sciences and its eyes directed toward the social sciences.
26
If anthropology did not manage to dig out the human sciences entirely
on its own, structuralism took up the relay. It was in fact the common
paradigm, for want of being a common school, for a whole series of
disciplines aIl working toward the same end of establishing a total
unified science.
A French Phenomenon
The structuralist blaze was essentially a French phenomenon that
radiated outward from France. The Anglo-Saxon world grouped the
many works that made the structuralist moment famous under the
general category of French Criticism. Why, more than elsewhere, was
France a better soil in which structuralism could take root and flour-
Growing Pains 39I
We can suggest a few answers. First of aH, the weight the hu-
manities in France blocked the social sciences within the French uni-
versity, contrary to the situation in American universities, where they
were triumphing. The philosophical avant-garde in France reacted to
the growth of the social sciences by appropriating the structuralist
pro gram, making it possible for the renovated humanities to triumph
in the quarrel between tradition and modernity. What's more, the
joust between the partisans of tradition and those of modernism was
also a typically French phenomenon, which merely replayed the de-
bates of the early century between the "new" and the "ancient" Sor-
bonne. The weight of the humanities also enabled the French intel-
lectual to speak in the name of humanity and to be engaged as a
spokesperson in a context that did not call on a specific expertise.
Another tradition existed that went back largely to the eighteenth
century, but that was expanded during the nineteenth century with the
Dreyfus Affair, and incarnated during the twentieth century by Jean-
Paul Sartre. Even if structura li sm took its distance from Sartre and the
figure of the committed intellectual, it would amply use the practice of
circumventing structures in or der to directly address and persuade the
readers and the public of its theses and short-circuit its peers. Con-
versely, in the United States, the university professor is evaluated in
dollars and "has no particular right to speak in the na me of human-
ity. "27 Similiarly in Germany, few university professors were involved
in a media network where it was possible to make a breakthrough, as
was the case in Canada for Marshall McLuhan, although the univer-
sity made him pay for it dearly.
In France, the university grip on its own autonomy was weaken-
ing because there were other possibilities of institutional consecration.
Underlying the theoretical debates were issues of power represented
by the new ambitions of the young social sciences facing the mo-
nopoly of the traditional humanities. We once aga in find the specifi-
cally French situation of a highly centralized and routinized university,
an old Napoleonic legacy, unchanged during the fifties and sixties.
The weight of the humanities is also revealed by the central position
of an institution like the cole Normale Suprieure on the rue d'Ulm
in elaborating the structural paradigm; where the major reviews of
the period-Les Cahiers pour l'analyse and the Cahiers marxistes-
lninistes-were created and produced there. And Althusser, Derrida,
and Lacan were at Ulm.
392 Growing Pains
Another given of the that went beyond the university was
the relationship between French intellectuals and the history of their
own country. Suddenly they became aware, in a decolonized and paci-
fied France, that they no longer lived in the country that had presented
itself as the gui9ing light of huma nit y since 1789- France was no
longer a great power but sim ply a mode st part of a plural Europe. As
Franois Furet saw so clearly, the French intellectual, "despite the
Gaullist rhetoric, no longer has the feeling of making human history.
That France, the one that is expelled from history, accepts all the more
easily the expulsion of history."28 Jean Duvignaud confirmed this. He
saw the French specificity of the success of structuralism as "a flight
from history. "29 Coming together in France and speaking among
themselves gave intellectuals the need to fortify an ideology able to
create a reassuring cohesion and new aspirations. "There we have the
search for an order, practically in the chivalrous, initiative meaning of
the word." 30
This would contribute to the radical destabilization of history and
thus to the success of structuralism on French soil. In addition, and
conversely, there was an element that pointed to the preeminence of
the antimodern spiritualist tradition among French intellectuals, a tra-
dition strengthened by the dominance of philosophy constructed, if
not against science, then at least removed from it and subordinating it,
"which amounts to this incredible thing where we see Althusser giving
lessons in scientificity to scientists. "31 Marcel Gauchet found in the in-
tellectual community's expression of antimodernism the old opposi-
tion between the spirit and industry, between art and the horrors of a
civilization of the masses, an old, recurrent theme of French intellec-
tuaI history.
Thomas Pavel offered other views on why France was the favored
land for structuralism. He explained the phenomenon through the in-
ternaI logic of the development of epistemology in France. The taste
for structuralism, he claimed, resulted from France's considerable tar-
diness with respect to its European neighbors. France remained so re-
moved from the debates on language of the early twentieth century
and unaware of the Vienna school (Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath,
Herbert Feigl, Karl Popper) in the thirties that at the moment when
this school went into exile because of the rise of Nazism, the diaspora
found refuge in the Anglo-Saxon countries, essentially the United
States. France's epistemological removal was clear and even further
Growing Pains 393
underscored by the tact that it was ignored as a possible place
refuge. "The work of Claude Lvi-Strauss, of the early Barthes, and of
Lacan in part represented a deferred-and aH the more visible-
explosion in France of the hidden debate on language and the episte-
mology of knowledge. "32 After Lvi-Strauss, who had assimilated
linguistics as a model for building structural anthropology, the avant-
garde philosophers, eut off from the analytic current, also hurried
to adopt the linguistic model, but without any epistemological pre-
caution, by appropriating a Saussurean linguistics that was already
outmoded by the advances of analytical philosophy.
The intensity of Parisian life that made it possible to short-circuit
the tradition al university and institution al networks also assured a
swift diffusion of the structuralist paradigm on the French cultural
market. Its adherents were transformed into media stars, the new
gurus of a public that had broadened thanks to the spectacular rise in
the number of students in letters and social sciences during the sixties.
It was thus beneath the tricolor flag of France, and of France alone,
that structuralism would flourish and fascinate other countries. But it
was always a specifically French product that we indulged in because
of our need for exoticism.
Appendix: List of Interviewees
(Parisian universities are listed as Paris 1 through Paris X.)
Marc Abls, anthropologist, researcher at the Laboratoire d'Anthro-
pologie Sociale, EHESS.
Alfred Adler, anthropologist, researcher at the Laboratoire d'Anthro-
pologie Sociale, EHESS.
Michel Aglietta, economist, professor of economy at Paris X.
Jean Allouch, psychoanalyst, director of the journal Littoral.
Pierre Ansart, sociology professor at Paris VIL
Michel Arriv, linguistics professor at Paris X.
Marc Aug, anthropologist, director of studies at the EHESS, presi-
dent of the EHESS.
Sylvain Auroux, philosopher and linguist, director of research at the
CNRS.
Kostas Axelos, philosopher, former editor in chief of the journal Argu-
ments, teaches at the Sorbonne.
Georges Balandier, anthropologist, professor at the Sorbonne, director
of studies at the EHESS.
tienne Balibar, philosopher, lecturer at Paris 1.
Henri Bartoli, economist, professor at Paris 1.
Michel Beaud, economist, professor at Paris VIII.
Daniel Becquemont, anthropologist and professor of English at the
Universit de Lille.
395
396 Appendix: List ofInterviewees
Jean-Marie Benoist, philosopher, assistant director to the History of
Modern Civilization chair at the Collge de France, deceased in
I990.
Alain Boissinot, literature professor, teaches advanced classes at Louis-
le-Grand High School.
Raymond Boudon, sociologist, professor at Paris IV, director of
the Groupe d'tudes des Mthodes de l'Analyse Sociologique
(GEMAS).
Jacques Bouveresse, philosopher, professor at Paris 1.
Claude Brmond, linguist, director of studies at the EHESS.
Hubert Brochier, economist, professor at Paris 1.
Louis-Jean Calvet, linguist, professor at the Sorbonne.
Jean-Claude Chevalier, linguist, professor at Paris VII, general director
of the journal Langue franaise.
Jean Clavreul, psychoanalyst.
Claude Cont, psychoanalyst, former head of the clinic at the Paris
Medical School.
Jean-Claude Coquet, linguist, professor at Paris VIII.
Maria Daraki, historian, professor at Paris VIII.
Jean-Toussaint Desanti, philosopher, taught at Paris 1 and at the cole
Normale Suprieure in Saint-Cloud.
Philippe Descola, anthropologist, associate director of the Laboratoire
d'Anthropologie Sociale.
Vincent Descombes, philosopher, professor atJohns Hopkins University.
Jean-Marie Domenach, philosopher, former director of the journal Es-
prit, founder of the CREA.
Jol Dor, psychoanalyst, director of the journal Esquisses psychanaly-
tiques, professor at Paris VII.
Daniel Dory, geographer, researcher at the CNRS and at Paris 1.
Roger-Pol Droit, philosopher, editorialist at Le Monde.
Jean Dubois, linguist, professor at Paris X, on the editorial board of
the journal Langages.
Georges Duby, historian, professor at the Collge de France.
Oswald Ducrot, linguist, director of studies at the EHESS.
Claude Dumzil, psychoanalyst.
Jean Duvignaud, sociologist, professor at Paris VII.
Roger Establet, sociologist, member of the CERCOM (EHESS).
Franois Ewald, philosopher, president of the Association for the
Michel Foucault Center.
' f ' f " ~ U U ' A . List of Interviewees 3 9
Arlette Farge, director of research at the EHESS.
Jean-Pierre philosopher, linguist, professor at the Universit Phi-
losophique Europenne.
Pierre Fougeyrollas, sociology professor at Paris VII.
Franoise Gadet, linguistics professor at Paris X.
Gilles Gaston-Granger, philosopher, professor at the Collge de France.
Marcel Gauchet, historian, editor in chief of the journal Le Dbat.
Grard Genette, linguist, semiologist, director of studies at the EHESS.
Jean-Christophe Goddard, philosopher, professor for Hautes tudes
Commerciales prepara tory courses.
Maurice Godelier, anthropologist, scientific director at the CNRS, di-
rector of studies at the EHESS.
Wladimir Granoff, psychoanalyst, head physician at the medical-
psychology center in Nanterre.
Andr Green, psychoanalyst, former head of the Institut de Psych-
analyse in Paris.
Aigirdas Julien Greimas, linguist, honorary director of studies at the
EHESS.
Marc Guillaume, economist, professor at the Universit Paris-Dauphine,
lecturer at the cole Polytechnique, director of the journal IRIS.
Claude Hagge, linguist, professor at the Collge de France.
Philippe Hamon, linguist, professor at Paris III.
Andr-Georges Haudricourt, anthropologist and linguist.
Louis Hay, literature professor, researcher at the CNRS.
Paul Henry, linguist, researcher at the CNRS.
Franoise Hritier-Aug, anthropologist, professor at the Collge de
France, head of the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale.
Jacques Hoarau, philosopher, professor at the Centre de Formation
des Professeurs in Molignon.
Michel Izard, anthropologist, director of research at the CNRS, co-
direct or of the journal Gradhiva.
Jean-Luc Jamard, anthropologist, researcher at the CNRS.
Jean Jamin, anthropologist, researcher at the ethnology laboratory of
the Muse de l'Homme, codirector of the journal Gradhiva.
Julia Kristeva, linguist, professor at Paris VII.
Bernard Laks, linguist, researcher at the CNRS.
Jrme Lallement, economist, lecturer at Paris 1.
Jean Laplanche, psychoanalyst, professor at Paris VII, director of the
journal Psychanalyse l'Universit.
398 Appendix: List of Interviewees
Francine Le Bret, philosopher, professor at Jacques Prvert High School
in Boulougne-Billancourt.
Serge Leclaire, psychoanalyst.
Dominique Lecourt, philosophy professor at Paris VII.
Henri Lefebvre, philosopher, former professor in the Universities of
Strasbourg, Nanterre, and Paris VIII.
Pierre Legendre, philosopher, professor at Paris 1.
Gennie Lemoine, psychoanalyst.
Claude Lvi-Strauss, anthropologist, professor at the Collge de France.
Jacques Lvy, geographer, researcher at the CNRS, codirector of the
journal Espaces-Temps.
Alain Lipietz, economist, associate researcher at the CNRS and at the
CEPREMAP.
Ren Lourau, sociology professor at Paris VIII.
Pierre Macherey, philosopher, lecturer at Paris 1.
Ren Major, psychoanalyst, teaches at the Collge International de
Philosophie, director of Cahiers Confrontations.
Serge Martin, philosopher, professor at Pontoise High School.
Andr Martinet, linguist, emeritus professor at the Universit Ren
Descartes, and in the Fourth Section of the EPHE.
Claude Meillassoux, anthropologist, director of research at the CNRS.
Charles Melman, psychoanalyst, director of the journal Discours
psychanalytique.
Grard Mendel, psychoanalyst, former intern at the Hpital Psychia-
trique de la Seine.
Henri Mitterand, linguist, professor at the new Sorbonne.
Juan-David Nasio, psychoanalyst, leads the Sminaire de Psychanalyse
de Paris.
Andr Nicola, economist, professor at Paris X.
Pierre Nora, historian, director of studies at the EHESS, director of
the journal Le Dbat, editor at Gallimard.
Claudine Normand, linguist, professor at Paris X.
Bertrand Ogilvie, philosopher, professor at the cole Normale at
Cergy-Pontoise (as of I992, cole Normale schools, which are
teacher-training institutions, have become the Institut Universi-
taire de la Formation des Matres).
Michelle Perrot, historian, professor at Paris VII.
Marcelin Pleynet, writer, former secretary of the journal Tel Quel.
Appendix: List of Interviewees 399
Jean Pouillon, philosopher and anthropologist, researcher at the Lab-
oratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, EHESS.
Jolle Proust, philosopher, research group on cognition, CNRS.
Jacques Rancire, philosopher, teacher at Paris VIII.
Alain Renaut, philosopher, professor at the Universit de Caen, founder
of the Collge de Philosophie.
Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, philosopher, professor at Paris 1.
lisabeth Roudinesco, writer and psychoanalyst.
Nicolas Ruwet, linguist, professor at Paris VIII.
Moustafa Safouan, psychoanalyst.
Georges-Elia Sarfati, linguist, teacher at Paris III.
Bernard Sichre, philosopher, professor at the Universit de Caen, for-
mer member of the team of Tel Quel.
Dan Sperber, anthropologist, researcher at the CNRS.
Joseph Sumpf, sociologist and linguist, professor at Paris VIII.
Emmanuel Terray, anthropologist, director of studies at the EHESS.
Tzvetan Todorov, linguist, semiologist, researcher at the CNRS.
Alain Touraine, sociologist, director of research at the EHESS.
Paul Valadier, philosopher, former editor in chief of the journal tudes,
professor at the Centre Svres in Paris.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, classicist, honorary professor at the Collge de
France.
Marc Vernet, semiologist of cinema, professor at Paris III.
Serge Viderman, psychoanalyst, medical doctor.
Pierre Vilar, historian, honorary professor at the Sorbonne.
Franois Wahl, philosopher, editor at Seuil.
Marina Yaguello, linguistics professor at Paris VII.
Notes
One. The Eclipse of a Star: Jean-Paul Sartre
1. Khgne, preceded by hypokhgne (from the Latin for lazy), are the two arduous
years of prepara tory courses following but taking place in a high schoo\. These are pri-
marily humanities courses designed for selected students hoping to pass the entrance
exams to the cole Normale Suprieure (ENS).-Trans.
2. Pascal Ory and Jean-Franois Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels en France, de l'affaire
Dreyfus nos jours, p. 166.
3. Billancourt is a southwestern, largely working-class Parisian suburb where the
Renault factories were located. For Sartre, it was important that the working class not
imagine that it was being forgotten or ignored.-Trans.
4. Les Temps modernes, no. 89 (April 1953), "Le marxisme de Sartre," by Claude
Lefort; "Rponse Claude Lefort," by Jean-Paul Sartre.
5. Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre, p. 447.
6. Rgis Debray, Le Nouvel Observateur, April 21, 1980.
7. Normal Schools were established by the Third Republic to train teachers for the
newly instituted secular schools. Normal Superior was reserved for the elite students, se-
lected, as they are today, by arduous competitive examination. Students are admitted for
four years of subsidized training, in exchange for which they are assigned to teach in
French high schools. The ENS on the rue d'Ulm, located in the Parisian Latin Quarter, was
reserved for men (the women's branch is located in Saint-Cloud, a southwestern suburb of
Paris) and renowned for the intellectual quality of its teachers and students.-Trans.
8. The tide of agrg was created in 1808 when the imperial university was orga-
nized. At the time, it designated an associate high-school professor. An examination, ag-
gregating several parts, was established in 1821 and was designed to recruit professors
for high schools. It was only in 1883 that women were admitted to the agrgation
exam. There are currendy twelve subject matters in which one can be agrg.-Trans.
9. Jean Pouillon, interview with the author.
10. Les Temps modernes, no. 126 (July 1956); reprinted in Jean Pouillon, Ftiches
sans ftichisme, 1975.
11. Pouillon, Ftiches sans ftichisme, p. 301.
4
0r
402 Notes ta Chapter Twa
12. Ibid., p. }07.
13. Ibid., p. 312.
14. The cole Pratique des Hautes tudes was created Victor Duruy during the
Second Empire, as a rather experimental research institution that was not a diploma-
granting institution. A number of sections were created according to themes. The Fifth
Section was that of Religious Sciences and was created by Lvi-Strauss. The section that
is most important for the history of structura li sm was the Sixth Section with its theme
of the social or human sciences. The first section president was the representative of the
Annales, Lucien Febvre. The Sixth Section of the cole Pratique became the cole des
Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESSJ in I977, at a time during which this institu-
tion, which was marginal until that point, was allowed to grant recognized diplomas.
At this point, the margins converged toward the center, the Sorbonne.-Trans.
15. Jean Pouillon, Sminaire de Michel Izard, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale,
November 24, I988.
16. Jean Pouillon, interview with the author.
17. Pouillon, quoted by Cohen-Solal, Sartre, p. 502.
18. Pouillon, Sminaire de Michel Izard, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, Feb-
ruary 9, I989
19. Ibid.
20. Georges Balandier, interview with the author.
21. Georges Dumzil, Entretiens avec Didier ribon, p. 204.
22. Ibid., p. 208.
23. Claude Lvi-Strauss, De prs et de loin, p. 2I9.
Two. The Birth of a Hero: Claude Lvi-Strauss
1. Claude Lvi-Strauss, De prs et de loin, p. l 5.
2. Ibid., p. I9.
3. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Le Monde, interview with Jean-Marie Benoist, January 2I,
I979
4. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p. I8.
S. Lvi-Strauss, De prs et de loin, p. 47.
6. Ibid., p. 64.
7. Ibid., p. 8I.
8. Francine Le Bret, interview with the author.
9. Raymond Boudon, interview with the author.
10. Ibid.
11. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Le Regard loign; translated as The View from Afar, p. I03.
12. mile Durkheim, "La prohibition de l'inceste," L'Anne sociologique, vol. I, I848.
13. Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p. 57.
14. Ibid.
15. Claude Lvi-Strauss, La Pense sauvage, p. I55; translated as The Savage Mind.
16. The forerunner of the French Socialist Party.
17. Philippe Descola, interview with the author.
18. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. I4.
19. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, "The Study of Kinship Systems," Journal of the Royal
Anthropology Institute (I94IJ: p. I7.
20. Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p. 59.
21. Robert H. Lowie, "Exogamy and the Classificatory Systems of Relationship,"
American Anthropologist, vol. I7 (April-June I9 I 5 J.
22. Lvi-Strauss, De prs et de loin, p. 58.
23. Jean Jamin, interview with the author.
Notes ta Chapter Four 403
24. Claude Lvi-Strauss, structurale en et en anthropologie,"
Ward, vol. l, no. 2 (1945): pp. 1-21; reprinted as "Linguistique et anthropologie,"
Supplement ta the International Journal of American Linguistics, vol. I9, no. 2 (April
I953); reprinted as "Linguistics and Anthropology" in Structural Anthropology.
Three. Where Nature and Culture Meet: Incest
1. Claude Lvi-Strauss, La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara (Paris:
Socit des Amricanistes, I948); The Elementary Structures of Kinship, preface ta the
first edition, p. xxiii.
2. Marc Aug, interview with the author.
3. Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, interview with the author.
4. Emmanuel Terray, interview with the author.
5. Lvi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, preface ta the first edi-
tion, p. ix.
6. Dan Sperber, Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? Le structuralisme en anthropolo-
gie, p. 26.
7. Lvi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, p. 30.
8. Ibid., p. I4.
9. Jean-Marie Benoist, La Rvolution structurale, p. II2.
10. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, pp. 3I-32.
11. Claude Lvi-Strauss, De prs et de loin, p. 63.
12. Lvi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 32.
13. Roman Jakobson, Six leons sur le son et le sens (Paris: Minuit, I976), preface
by Claude Lvi-Strauss; reprinted in Le Regard loign, "Les leons de la linguistique"
(Paris: Plon, I983).
14. Nicolai Trubetzkoy, "La phonologie actuelle," Psychologie du langage (Paris:
I933), p. 243; quoted by Lvi-Strauss in Structural Anthropology, p. 3I n. 8.
15. Yvan Simonis, Lvi-Strauss ou la passion de l'inceste, p. I9.
16. Lvi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 68.
17. Ibid., p. 82.
18. Ibid., p. 46.
19. Ibid., p. 62.
20. Jean Pouillon, interview with the author.
21. Raymond Boudon, interview with the author.
22. Jean Pouillon, interview with the author.
23. Simone de Beauvoir, Les Temps modernes (November I949): p. 943.
24. Ibid., p. 949.
25. Claude Lefort, 'Tchange et la lutte des hommes," Les Temps modernes (Febru-
ary I951).
26. Jean Pouillon, "l}uvre de Claude Lvi-Strauss," Les Temps modernes, no. I26
(July I9 56); reprinted in Jean Pouillon, Ftiches sans ftichisme, p. 310.
Four. Ask for the Program: The Mauss
1. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "Introduction l'uvre de Marcel Mauss," in Marcel
Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, I968 (I950); translated as Introduction to the
Work of Marcel Mauss.
2. Claude Lvi-Strauss, De prs et de loin, p. I03.
3. Aigirdas Julien Greimas, interview with the author.
4. Jean Jamin, interview with the author.
404 Notes to Chapter Six
5. Ibid.
6. Robert Hertz, Mlanges de sociologie religieuse et folklore, I928.
7. Jean Jamin, interview with the author. [The Collge de Sociologie was founded
around 1933 by Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois to train sociologists. The major in-
fluences in the school's orientation included surrealists, Hegelianism through Kojve's
work, Freud, and work being done in anthropology.-Trans.)
8. Lvi-Strauss, "Introduction l'uvre de Marcel Mauss"; Introduction to the
Work of Marcel Mauss, p. 3.
9. Ibid., p. 10.
10. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "Le sorcier et sa magie," Les Temps modernes, no. 41
(March 1949).
11. Marcel Mauss, "Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'change dans les socits
archaques," in Anne sociologique, 1921; translated as The Gift.
12. Lvi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, p. 26.
13. Ibid., p. 8.
14. Ibid., p. 34.
15. Ibid., pp. 35-36.
16. Ibid., p. 37.
17. Vincent Descombes, Le Mme et l'autre, p. 121.
18. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, p. 51.
19. Ibid., p. 485.
20. Ibid., p. 481.
21. Vincent Descombes, interview with the author.
22. Lvi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, p. 53.
23. Claude Lefort, "L'change et la lutte des hommes," Les Temps modernes (Febru-
ary 1951); reprinted in Claude Lefort, Les Formes de l'histoire, p. 17.
24. Lvi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, p. 35.
Pive. Georges Dumzil: An Independent
1. The Acadmie Franaise was founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu under
Louis XIII to bring together the wise men of the country. Forty members, known as
"immortals," were and continue to be e1ected by their peers to continue the work of
writing and revising a dictionary of the French language.-Trans.
2. Georges Dumzil, Mythe et pope, Introduction.
3. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "Dumzil et les sciences humaines," France-Culture, Octo-
ber 2, 1978.
4. Georges Dumzil, Entretiens avec Didier ribon, p. 64.
5. Franz Bopp, Systme de conjugaison de la langue sanscrite, compar celui des
langues grecque, latine, persane et germanique (1816); translated as Analytical Com-
parison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic Languages Showing the Original
Identity of Their Grammatical Structure (1974).
6. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "Rponse Dumzil reu l'Acadmie Franaise," Le
Monde, July 15, 1979.
7. Dumzil, Entretiens avec Didier ribon, p. 174.
8. Claude Hagge, Le Monde, October 14, 1986.
Six. The Phenomenological Bridge
1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Structure du comportement; Phnomnologie de la
perception.
Notes to Chapter Seven 45
2. Vincent Descombes, interview with the author.
3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Sur la phnomnologie du langage," lecture delivered
to the Fifst International Phenomenology Colloquium in Brussels, 195I; reprinted in
Signs.
4. Ibid., p. 49.
5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 10, pp. 55-69;
reprinted in Signs, p. 98.
6. Claude Lvi-Strauss, De prs et de loin, p. 88.
7. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, pp. u6, u8.
8. Vincent Descombes, interview with the author.
9. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, p. I22.
10. Vincent Descombes, interview with the author.
11. George W Stocking, Histoires de l'anthropologie: XVI' -XIX
e
sicles, pp. 421-3 I.
12. Langues Orientales trains students in Eastern (Arabic) and Oriental (Asian) lan-
guages.-Trans.
13. Established by royal decree on February 22,1821, the cole des Chartes trained
specialists in reading medieval documents (chartes). The school depends on the Min-
istry of National Education, and prepares paleographic archivists during the three years
and nine months of studies.-Trans.
14. Jean Jamin, Les Enjeux philosophiques des annes cinquante, p. 103.
15. Alfred Adler, Sminaire de Michel Izard, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale,
November 17, 1988.
16. Michel Arriv, interview with the author.
17. Algirdas Julien Greimas, interview with the author.
18. Jean-Marie Benoist, interview with the author.
19. Michel Foucault, "Structuralism and Post-Structuralism," Telos, vol. 16 (1983):
pp. 195-21 1; interview with Georges Raulet.
20. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses; translated as The Order of Things: An
Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
21. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 248.
Seven. The Saussure an Break
1. Vincent Descombes, Le Mme et l'autre, p. 100.
2. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale.
3. Franoise Gadet, "Le signe et le sens," DRLAV, Revue de linguistique, no. 40
(1989).
4. Ibid., p. 4.
5. Algirdas Julien Greimas, interview with the author.
6. Gadet, "Le signe et le sens," p. 18.
7. Roland Barthes, "Saussure, le signe, la dmocratie," Le Discours social, nos. 3-4
(April 1973); reprinted in Roland Barthes, L'Aventure smiologique, p. 22I.
8. See Tzvetan Todorov, Thories du symbole.
9. Claudine Normand, interview with the author.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Jean-Claude Coquet, interview with the author.
13. Sylvain Auroux, interview with the author.
14. Andr Martinet, interview with the author.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
406 Notes to Chapter Nine
17. Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale, p. u6.
18. Ibid.
19. Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclopdique du langage,
p. I33
20. Louis-Jean Calvet, Pour et contre Saussure, pp. 82-83.
21. Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale, p. 33.
22. Sylvain Auroux, interview with the author.
23. Louis-Jean Calvet, interview with the author.
24. Calvet, Pour et contre Saussure.
25. Jean Starobinski, Mercure de France, February I964; then Les Mots sous les
mots, I97I.
26. Saussure, COUIflS de linguistique gnrale, p. 30.
27. Claude Hagge, I.:homme de parole, p. 35.
28. Oswald Ducrot, interview with the author.
Eight. Roman Jakobson: The Man Who Could Do Everything
1. Roman Jakobson, final text of the Conference of Anthropologists and Linguists,
held at Indiana University in I952, Essais de linguistique gnrale.
2. Ibid., p. 42.
3. Ibid. (1:957), p. 72.
4. Ibid. (I957), p. 74.
5. Roman Jakobson, interview with Tzvetan Todorov, Potique, no. 57 (February
I984): p. 4
6. Ibid., p. u.
7. Roman Jakobson, interviewed by Jean-Jos Marchand on the television program
Archives du XX
e
sicle (February IO, I972;January 2, I973; September I4, I974), and
rebroadcast on Channel 7 in October I990.
8. Potique, no. 57 (February I984): p. I6.
9. Roman Jakobson, preface to Tzvetan Todorov, Thorie de la littrature, p. 9.
10. Marina Yaguello, interview with the author.
Il. Jean-Pierre Faye, interview with the author.
12. Ibid.
13. J. Makarovsky, reprinted in Change, no. 3 (I97I).
14. "I929 Theses," published by Change (I969): p. 3I.
15. Jakobson, in Archives du XX" sicle.
16. Editorial, Ward, no. I (I945).
17. Franoise Gadet, DRLAV, Revue de linguistique, no. 40 (I989): p. 8.
18. Jakobson, Essais de linguistique gnrale, pp. 35-36.
19. Roman Jakobson, "Les douze traits de sonorit," in "Phonologie et phontique"
(I9 56), in Essais de linguistique gnrale, pp. U8-29.
20. Roman Jakobson, "Deux aspects du langage et deux types d'aphasie," in Essais
de linguistique gnrale, pp. 5D-P.
21. Jean-Claude Chevalier, interview with the author.
Nine. A Pilot Science without a Plane: Linguistics
1. Andr Martinet, in "La cration de revues dans les annes soixante," interview
with Jean-Claude Chevalier and Pierre Encrev, Langue franaise, no. 63 (September
I984): p. 6I.
Notes ta Chapter Eleven 407
2. Robert-Lon Wagner, foreword to his Introduction to French Linguistics (1947);
quoted by Chevalier and Encrev in ibid.
3. Bernard Qumada, in "La cration de revues dans les annes soixante," inter-
view with Chevalier and Encrev.
4. Michel Arriv, interview with the author.
5. Bernard Pottier, in "La cration de revues dans les annes soixante," interview
with Chevalier and Encrev.
6. Chevalier and Encrev, Langue franaise, no. 63 (September 1984).
7. Bernard Qumada, interview with Chevalier and Encrev.
8. Jean-Claude Chevalier, interview with the author.
9. Philippe Hamon, "Littrature," in Les Sciences du langage en France au XX
e
sicle, p. 285.
10. Ibid., p. 284.
11. Grard Genette, interview with the author.
12. Jean-Claude Chevalier, interview with the author.
13. Andr Martinet, interview with the author.
14. Andr-Georges Haudricout, interview with the author.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
Ten. At Alexandria's Gates
1. Algirdas Julien Greimas, interview with the author.
2. Ibid.
3. Roland Barthes, Michelet par lui-mme.
4. Algirdas Julien Greimas and Roland Barthes, quoted by Louis-Jean Calvet,
Roland Barthes, p. 124.
5. Charles Singevin, quoted in ibid.
6. Algirdas Julien Greimas, preface ta Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory
of Language.
7. Louis Hjelmslev, Language: An Introduction, p. 96.
8. Thomas Pavel, Le Mirage linguistique, p. 92.
9. Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, p. 23.
10. Jean-Claude Coquet, interview with the author.
11. Ibid.
12. Andr Martinet, interview with the author.
13. Ibid.
14. Andr Martinet, review of Hjelmslev's Prolegomena to a Theory of Language in
the Bulletin de la socit de linguistique, vol. 42 (1946): pp. 17-42.
15. Serge Martin, interview with the author.
16. Serge Martin, Langage musical, smiotique des systmes.
Eleven. The Mother Figure of Structuralism: Roland Barthes
1. Le Degr zro de l'criture.
2. Ibid., p. 10.
3. Maurice Nadeau, Les Lettres nouvelles (July 1953): p. 599.
4. Jean-Bertrand Ponta lis, Les Temps modernes (November 1953): pp. 934-38.
408 Notes to Chapter Twelve
5. Barthes, Le Degr zro de l'criture, p. 24.
6. Ibid., p. 45.
7. Ibid., p. 55.
8. Ibid., p. 65.
9. Roland Barthes, interviews with Jean-Marie Benoist and Bernard-Henri Lvy,
France-Culture, February I977, rerun December I, I988.
10. Roland Barthes, Ocaniques, FR3, November I97o-May I97I, rerun on Janu-
ary 27, I988.
11. The Licence is a university degree awarded after the third year of study, before a
master's or a doctorate. With it one can teach in high schools but not in the university
or any advanced school.-Trans.
12. The Collge de France is a teaching institution established in Paris in IBO by
Franois 1 as the Collge du Roi, through the initiative of Guillaume Bud, a classical
scholar and humanist. The Collge elects its peers based on publications. A university
diploma is not a prerequisite for election, which allowed "marginais" like Barthes to be
recognized. For Barthes, the recognition by peers of his work legitimated him and
salved the wound of having received no advanced university degree, which would have
allowed him to teach as a regular faculty member.-Trans.
13. Louis-Jean Calvet, interview with the author.
14. Barthes, Ocaniques, FR3.
15. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, p. I09.
16. Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes, p. 67.
17. Ibid.
18. Barthes, Mythologies, p. 229.
19. Ibid., p. 25I.
20. Barthes could teach, therefore, without a university degree, having been recog-
nized for the work he had published, even if he was not sanctioned by the official
diploma-dispensing university.-Trans.
21. Andr Green, interview with the author.
22. Roland Barthes, "Mre courage aveugle," in Essais critiques, pp. 49-50.
23. Georges-Elia Sarfati, interview with the author.
24. Georges Mounin, Introduction la smiologie, p. I93.
Twelve. An Epistemic Exigency
1. Alexandre Koyr, De la mystique la science; cours, confrences et documents
(I922-62), p. I29
2. Jean-Louis Fabiani, Les Enjeux philosophiques des annes cinquante, p. I2 5.
3. Martial Guroult, Leon inaugurale au Collge de France (December 4, I95I),
pp. I6-I 7
4. Ibid., p. 43.
5. Gilles Gaston-Granger, interview with the author.
6. Marc Abls, interview with the author.
7. Ibid.
8. Jean-Christophe Goddard, interview with the author.
9. Guroult, Leon inaugurale au Collge de France, p. I8.
10. Jolle Proust, Bulletin de la socit franaise de philosophie (July-September
I988): p. 8I.
11. Martial Guroult, Descartes selon l'ordre des raisons.
12. Ibid., p. IO.
13. Jean-Christophe Goddard, interview with the author.
Notes to Chapter Thirteen 409
14. Martial Guroult, Philosophie de l'histoire de la rmuo:mt'In,?, p. 243.
15. Jean Piaget, Psychologie et pistmologie, p. 10.
16. Jean Piaget, lments d'pistmologie gntique.
17. Vincent Descombes, interview with the author.
18. Jean Cavaills, Sur la logique et la thorie des sciences.
19. Pierre Fougeyrollas, interview with the author.
20. Ibid.
21. Georges Canguilhem, interview with Jean-Franois Sirinelli, Gnration intel-
lectuelle, p. 597.
22. Ibid., p. 598.
23. Bertrand Saint-Sernin, Revue de mtaphysique et de morale (January 1985): p. 86.
24. "Essai sur quelques problmes concernant le normal et le pathologique."
25. Georges Canguilhem, Le Normal et le pathologique, p. 8.
26. Pierre Fougeyrollas, interview with the author.
27. Georges Canguilhem, "La dcadence de l'ide de progrs," Revue de mta-
physique et de morale, no. 4 (I987): p. 450.
28. Michel Foucault, Revue de mtaphysique et de morale (January I985): p. 3.
29. Ibid., p. I4.
30. Pierre Macherey, "La philosophie de la science de Canguilhem," La Pense, no.
II3 (January I964)
31. Ibid., p. 74.
32. Georges Canguilhem, "Qu'est-ce que la psychologie?" Lecture given Decem-
ber I8, I956, at Jean Wahl's Collge Philosophique and reprinted in Revue de mta-
physique et de morale (I958): pp. I2-25, in Les Cahiers pour l'analyse, no. 2 (March
I966), and in Georges Canguilhem, tudes d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences.
33. Vincent Descombes, Les Enjeux philosophiques des annes cinquante, p. I59.
34. Michel Serres, La Traduction, p. 259.
35. Michel Serres, "Structure et importation: des mathmatiques aux mythes" (No-
vember I96I); reprinted in Herms, vol. I, "La Communication" (Paris: Minuit, I968).
36. Ibid., p. 26.
37. Ibid., p. 32.
38. Serres, "Structure et importation," p. 34.
Thirteen. A Rebel Named Jacques Lacan
1. lisabeth Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, p. I 5 5.
2. Ibid., p. I54.
3. Ibid., p. I24.
4. Ibid., p. I29.
5. "De la psychose paranoaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalit."
6. See Boris Souvarine et "La Critique sociale," ed. Anne Roche.
7. Bertrand Ogilvie, Lacan, le sujet, pp. 20-2I.
8. Jean Allouch, interview with the author.
9. This I936 version was later revised and delivered at the sixteenth International
Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zurich in I949 and published in the Revue franaise de
psychanalyse, no. 4 (October-December I949). This final version was translated as The
Mirror Stage: Theory of a Structuring and Genetic Moment of the Constitution of Real-
ity, Conceived in Relationship with the Experience of Psychoanalytic Doctrine, and in
crits: A Selection, as "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the l as Re-
vealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," pp. I-7.
10. Jol Dor, Introduction la lecture de Lacan, p. 100.
4IO Notes to Chapter Fourteen
11. Ibid., p. lOI.
12. "Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je" ("The Mirror Stage
as Formative of the Function of the 1 as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience").
13. Ogilvie, Lacan, le sujet, p. 107.
14. Anika Lemaire, Lacan, p. 27.
15. Ibid., p. 277.
16. Moustafa Safouan, interview with the author.
17. Jean Hyppolite, La Psychanlayse, vol. 1, pp. 29-39, with Lacan's response,
reprinted in Jacques Lacan, crits, pp. 879-87.
18. Vincent Descombes, Les Enjeux philosophiques des annes cinquante, p. 155.
19. Like the poetic notion of scansion, the Lacanian use of the term involves punc-
tuation, but in this case the punctuation, and end, of a therapeutic session. Lacan, and
others, ended a session on a word uttered by the patient in a way that left its greater sig-
nificance muted. Ending the session on the term drew attention to it and shifted the
weight of its meaning.-Trans.
20. Wladimir Granoff, interview with the author.
21. Gennie Lemoine, interview with the author.
22. Jean Laplanche, interview with the author.
23. Jol Dor, interview with the author.
24. Wladimir Granoff, interview with the author.
25. Ibid.
26. Jean Clavreul, interview with the author.
27. Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse in France, p. 294.
28. Jean Clavreul, interview with the author.
Fourteen. Rome CaUs (1953): The Return ta Freud
1. Andr Green, interview with the author.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Structure du comportement.
3. Andr Green, interview with the author.
4. Claude Dumzil, interview with the author.
5. Ibid.
6. The French pun cornes from the auraI homology between le nom du pre, le non
du pre, and le non dupe erre.-Trans.
7. Claude Demzil, interview with the author.
8. Ibid.
9. lisabeth Roudinesco, interview with the author.
10. Wladimir Granoff, interview with the author.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Grard Mendel, Enqute par un psychanalyste sur lui-mme, p. 165.
14. lisabeth Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2, p. 272.
15. Jacques Lacan, "Rapport de Rome," in crits, vol. 1 (1953) ("Report to the
Rome Congress held at the Istituto di Psicologia della Universit di Roma, 26 and 27
September, 1953," trans. Alan Sheridan, in crits: A Selection, p. 57).
16. Ibid., p. 40.
17. Ibid., p. 65.
18. Ibid., p. 66.
19. Ibid., p. 73.
20. Ibid., P.76.
21. Ren Major, interview with the author.
Notes to Chapter Fiireen 4II
22. Lacan, "Report to the Rome Congress," p. 86.
23. Bernard Sichre, Le Moment lacanien, p. 59.
24. Charles Melman, interview with the author.
25. Psychiatry in France, as in America, is a medical field of specialization and there-
fore practiced by medical doctors. Psychoanalysis can also be pracriced by doctors, but
it is not a medical field. There is no single, formally recognized psychoanalytic training
institute in France, but rather a proliferation of institutes and groups, which may or
may not offer training programs. The situation appears chaotic and even dangerous in
American eyes, particularly since a psychoanalyst can authorize himself or herself to
practice, according to the Lacanian dictum. In terms of pathways to analysis, many
practicing analysts are trained in philosophy, have themselves been in analysis, and are
therefore close to the central, linguistic problematic around which French psychoanaly-
sis has been focused, particularly since Lacan.-Trans.
26. Jacques Lacan, "Vinstance de la lettre dans l'inconscient," in crits, vol. l, p. 251;
"The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud," trans. Alan
Sheridan, in crits: A Selection, p. 147.
27. Ibid., p. 149.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., p. 154.
30. Ibid., pp. 165-66.
31. Michel Arriv, interview with the author.
32. Jol Dor, Introduction la lecture de Lacan, pp. 55-56.
33. Jacques Lacan, "Sminaire sur la lettre vole," in crits, vol. l, pp. 35,4.
34. Dor, Introduction la lecture de Lacan, pp. 59-60.
35. Ibid., p. 63.
36. Jacques Lacan, "La chose freudienne" (1956), in crits, vol. l, p. 144; "The
Freudian Thing," trans. Alan Sheridan, in crits: A Selection, p. 125.
37. Anika Lemaire, Lacan, p. 340.
38. Ibid., p. 347.
39. Georges Mounin, Introduction la smiologie, pp. 184-85,
40. Ibid., p. 188.
41. Lemaire, Lacan, p. 30.
Fifteen. The Unconscious: A Symbolic Uni verse
1. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity
Baker, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. xx.
2. Jacques Lacan, "Remarques sur le rapport de Daniel Lagache" (1958), in crits,
p.648.
3. Claude Lvi-Strauss, De prs et de loin, p. 107.
4. Janson High School in Paris is weil known as being one of the best high schools.
Located in the rich west side of Paris, it is the high school for many French writers and
intellectuals.-Trans.
5. Claude Lvi-Strauss, interview with the author.
6. Ibid.
7. Le Totmisme aujourd'hui.
8. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "Le sorcier et sa magie," Les Temps modernes, no. 41
(March 1949): pp. 3-24; 'TEfficace Symbolique," Revue d'histoire des religions, no. 1
(1949): pp. 5-27; reprinted in Anthropologie Structurale. See "The Sorcerer and His
Magic" and "The Effectiveness of Symbols," in Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire
412 Notes to Chapter Sixteen
Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), pp. 161-80
and 181-201, respectively.
9. Lvi-Strauss, "Le sorcier et sa magie," p. 201; "The Sorcerer and His Magic,"
PI77
10. Lvi-Strauss, "L'Efficace symbolique," p. 224.
ll.Ibid.
12. R. Georgin, De Lvi-Strauss Lacan, p. 125.
13. Lvi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, p. 56.
14. E. R. de Ipola, "Le Structuralisme ou l'histoire en exil," p. 122.
15. Ibid., p. 126.
16. Claude Lvi-Strauss, La Pense sauvage, p. 174; translated as The Savage Mind.
17. De Ipola, "Le Structuralisme ou l'histoire en exil," p. 244.
18. Claude Lvi-Strauss, interview with Raymond Bellour (1972), Paris: Ides-
Gallimard, 1979), p. 205.
19. Lvi-Strauss, De prs et de loin, p. 150.
20. Claude Lvi-Strauss, La Potire jalouse, p. 243; translated as The Jealous Potter,
P
18
5
21. Ibid., p. 193.
22. Andr Green, Sminaire de Michel Izard, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale,
December 8, 1988.
23. Grard Mendel, La Chasse structurale, p. 262.
24. Grard Mendel, interview with the author.
25. Franois Roustang, Lacan; see also Vincent Descombes, "L'quivoque du sym-
bolique," Confrontations, no. 3 (1980): pp. 77-95.
26. Jacques Lacan, "Situation de la psychanalyse en 1956," in crits, vol. 2, p. 19.
27. Ibid.
28. Roustang, Lacan, pp. 36-37.
29. Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire III: Les Psychoses, p. 208.
30. Jol Dor, interview with the author.
31. Claude Cont, interview with the author.
32. Jacques Lacan, Sminaire XX, Encore (1973-1974), p. 45.
33. Charles Melman, interview with the author.
Sixteen. ReallSymboliclImaginary (RSI): The Heresy
1. Jean Allouch, interview with the author.
2. Ibid.
3. Moustafa Safouan, interview with the author.
4. The French original reads: "Tu t'y es mis un peu tard," and the acronym is
"T.t.y.e.m.u.p.t. "-Trans.
5. Jacques-Alain Miller, Ornicar, no. 24 (1981).
6. Ibid.
7. Claude Cont, interview with the author.
8. Pierre Fougeyrollas, Contre Claude Lvi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser (Paris:
Lavelli, 1976), p. 99.
9. Franois George, I.:Effet yau de pole (Paris: Hachette, 1979), p. 65. [The pun in
French is on perversion, which becomes pre-version.-Trans.]
10. Jacques Lacan, "Rapport de Rome," in crits, vol. 1 (1953), p. 168.
11. Information taken from lisabeth Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en
France, vol. 2, p. 318.
Notes to Chapter Seventeen 4I3
12. Maurice Colloque de Bonneval, L'Inconscient
Descle de Brouwer, 1966).
13. Serge Leclaire, "L'inconscient, une tude psychanalytique," in L'Inconscient, pp.
95-130,170-77; reprinted in Psychanalyser, pp. 99 and II6.
14. Serge Leclaire, interview with the author.
15. Jean Laplanche, interview with the author.
16. Jean Laplanche, 6' Colloque de Bonneval, in L'Inconscient, p. II 5.
17. Ibid., p. 121.
18. Jean Laplanche, interview with the author.
19. Jean Laplanche, Psychanalyse l'Universit, voL 4, no. 15 (June 1979): pp.
523-28.
20. Ibid., p. 527.
21. Ibid.
22. Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, voL 2, p. 323.
23. Anika Lemaire, Lacan.
24. Jacques Lacan, "Position de l'inconscient," in crits, vol. 2, p. 196.
25. Ibid., p. 211. [The pun in French is between homme and hommelette.-Trans.]
26. Jacques Lacan, interview, Belgian Radio Television, December 14, 1966.
27. Lettre and l'tre ("Letter" and "Being") are homonyms punning on lettre (letter,
language) and l'tre (being}.-Trans.
Seventeen. The Cali of the Tropics
1. Serge Martin, interview with the author.
2. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "Race et histoire" (1952); reprinted in Anthropologie
structurale, vol. 2, p. 399; translated as "Race and History."
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 415.
5. Bertrand Ogilvie, interview with the author.
6. Roger Caillois, "Illusions rebours," Nouvelle Revue franaise (December l,
1954): pp. 1010-21; (January l, 1955): pp. 58-70.
7. Roger Caillois, "La rponse de R. Caillois," Le Monde, June 28,1974.
8. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "Diogne couch," Les Temps modernes, no. 195 (1955):
pp. Il87-122I.
9. Caillois, "Illusions rebours," p. 1021.
la. Ibid., p. 1024.
11. Lvi-Strauss, "Diogne couch," p. Il87.
12. Ibid., p. 1202.
13. Ibid., p. 1214.
14. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman
(New York: Atheneum, 1974).
15. Claude Lvi-Strauss, interview with Jean-Jos Marchand, Arts (December 25,
1955)
16. Claude Lvi-Strauss, De prs et de loin, p. 76.
17. Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p. 408.
18. Ibid., p. 393.
19. Ibid., p. 413.
20. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "Le droit au voyage," L'Express (September 21, 1956).
21. Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p. 386.
22. Ibid., p. 411.
23. Ibid., p. 390.
414 Notes ta Chapter Eighteen
24. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Antht"Oonlrlf'le structurale, vol. 2, p. 5 L
25. Ibid., pp. 46-47.
26. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "Des Indiens et leur ethnographe," excerpts from "Tristes
Tropiques Saon ta Be Published," Les Temps modernes, no. TI6 (August 1955)'
27. Raymond Aron, Le Figaro, December 24, 1955.
28. Franois-Rgis Bastide, Demain, January 29, 1956.
29. Madeleine Chapsal, L'Express, February 24, 1956.
30. Jean Lacroix, Le Monde, October 13-14, 1957.
31. P. A. Renaud, France-Observateur, December 29,1955.
32. J. Meyriat, Revue franaise de science politique, vol. 6, no. 2.
33. Claude Roy, Libration, November 16, 1955.
34. Georges Bataille, "Un livre humain, un grand livre," Critique, no. II5 (February
1956).
35. Alfred Mtraux, L'Ile de Pques (1956).
36. Bataille, "Un livre humain, un grand livre," p. 101.
37. Ren Etiemble, Evidences (April 1956): p. 32.
38. Ibid., p. 36.
39. Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p. 38.
40. Le Figaro, December l, 1956.
41. Maxime Rodinson, "Racisme et civilisation," Nouvelle Critique, no. 66 (1955);
no. 69 (November 1955); La Pense (May-June 1957).
42. Rodinson, "Racisme et civilisation," p. 130.
43. Etiemble, vidences, pp. 33-34.
44. Lvi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, vol. 2, p. 331-32.
45. Michel Izard, interview with the author.
46. Michel Izard, Sminaire, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, June l, 1989.
47. Michel Izard, interview with the author.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Izard, Sminaire.
51. Franoise Hritier-Aug, interview with the author.
52. Ibid.
53. Olivier Herrenschmidt, Sminaire de Michel Izard, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie
Sociale, January 19, 1989.
54. Louis Dumont, quoted by Herrenschmidt in ibid.
55. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Leroi-Gourhan ou les voies de l'homme, pp. 205-6.
56. Hlne Balfet, Sminaire de Michel Izard, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale,
1989.
Eighteen. Reason Raves: Michel Foucault's Work
1. Pierre Nora, Les Franais d'Algrie.
2. Jacques Rancire, interview with the author.
3. Edgar Morin, L'Esprit du temps, p. 149.
4. Didier ribon, Michel Foucault, p. 21.
5. Bernard Sichre, interview with the author.
6. Daniel Defert, France-Culture, July 7,1988.
7. Ibid.
8. Libration pol!, June 3,1984.
9. Michel Foucault, Ethos (fal! 1983): p. 5.
10. Histoire de la sexualit.
Notes to Chapter Eighteen 4IJ
11. Michel Foucault, interview with Audr Berten, Catholic University of Louvain,
1981; shawn on FR3, January 13, 1988.
12. Michel Foucault, "Jean Hyppolite, 1907-1968," Revue de et de
morale, vol. 14, no. 2 (April-June 1969): p. 13 1.
13. "Gense et structure de la phnomnologie de l'esprit."
14. Surveiller et punir.
15. Michel Foucault, quoted by ribon, Michel Foucault, p. 35.
16. "Nietzsche, la gnalogie, l'histoire."
17. Michel Foucault, Hommage Hyppolite.
18. Jacques Proust, Libration poli, June 30, I984.
19. Maladie mentale et personnalit.
20. ribon, Michel Foucault, p. 49.
2l. From the word for alligator, caman designates the ENS professor assigned par-
ticularly to training students for the agrgation examination.-Trans.
22. Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, interview with the author.
23. Maurice Pinguet, Le Dbat, no. 4I (September-November 1986): pp. I25-26.
24. Ibid., pp. I29-30.
25. Quoted by ribon, Michel Foucault, p. I79.
26. Michel Foucault, quoted by Pinguet in Le Dbat, p. I26.
27. Quoted by ribon, Michel Foucault, p. 96.
28. Georges Dumzil, Entretiens avec Didier ribon, p. 2I5.
29. Michel Foucault, Folie et draison (Paris: Plon, I96I), Preface, p. x.
30. Michel Foucault, Le Monde, July 22,1961.
3l. Pierre Macherey, interview with the author.
32. Ibid.
33. Quoted by ribon, Michel Foucault, p. 133.
34. Michel Foucault, "Vrit et pouvoir," interview with M. Fontana, L'Arc, no. 70,
p. I6.
35. Michel Foucault, Politique-Hebdo, interview, March 4, I976.
36. Ibid.
37. Foucault, Folie et draison, pp. i-v.
38. Ibid.
39. Vincent Descombes, Le Mme et l'autre, p. 138.
40. Pascal, Penses, ditions Brunschwicg, no. 4I4, quoted by Michel Foucault, His-
toire de la folie, p. 47 (Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard, Preface, p. ix).
41. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 59.
42. Histoire de la folie, p. I47.
43. Ibid., p. 4I5.
44. Ibid., p. 523.
45. ribon, Michel Foucault, p. 131.
46. L'Enfant et la famille sous l'Ancien Rgime.
47. Philippe Aris, Un historien du dimanche, p. I45.
48. Roland Barthes, "De part et d'autre," Critique, no. 17 (I96I): pp. 915-22; re-
printed in Essais critiques, p. I7L
49. Ibid., p. 168.
50. Maurice Blanchot, "L'oubli, la draison," Nouvelle Revue franaise (October
I96I): pp. 676-86; reprinted in L'Entretien infini, p. 292.
51. Robert Mandrou, "Trois cls pour comprendre l'histoire de la folie l'poque
classique," Annales, no. 4 (July-August I962): pp. 76I-7L
52. Michel Serres, "Gomtrie de la folie," Mercure de France, no. II88 (August
4I6 Notes to Chapter Twenty
1962): pp. 683-96, and no. II89 (September 1962): pp. 63-81; reprinted in Herms ou
la communication.
53. Les Mots et les choses.
54. ribon, Michel Foucault, p. I47.
55. Robert Castel, "Les aventures de la pratique," Le Dbat, no. 41 (September-
November, 1986): p. 43.
56. Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain, La Pratique de l'esprit humain: I.:institution
asilaire et la rvolution dmocratique.
57. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La Pense 68, p. 131.
58. Ibid., p. 132.
Nineteen. Marxism in Crisis: A Thaw or the Deep Freeze Again?
1. Marcel Gauchet, interview with the author.
2. Alain Renaut, interview with the author.
3. Georges Balandier, interview with the author.
4. Ren Lourau, interview with the author.
5. Quoted by Pascal Ory and Jean-Franois Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels en France, de
l'affaire Dreyfus nos jours, p. 188.
6. Michel Foucault, Ocaniques, FR3, January 13, I988 (1977, at Vzelay, home
of Maurice Clavel).
7. Pierre Fougeyrollas, interview with the author.
8. Grard Genette, interview with the author.
9. Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, interview with the author.
10. Jean-Pierre Faye, interview with the author.
Il. Alfred Adler, interview with the author.
12. Alfred Adler, Sminaire de Michel Izard, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale,
November 17, 1988.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Cornelius Castoriadis, "Les divertisseurs," Le Nouvel Observateur,June 20, 1977;
reprinted in La Socit franaise (Paris: Io1I8, 1979), p. 226.
19. Edgar Morin, Le Vif du sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1969).
20. Edgar Morin, "Arguments, trente ans aprs," interviews, La Revue des revues,
no. 4 (fall 1987): p. 12.
21. Kostas Axelos, in ibid., p. 18.
22. Kostas Axelos, "Le jeu de l'autocritique," Arguments, nos. 27-28 (1962).
23. Morin, "Arguments, trente ans aprs," p. 19.
24. Daniel Becquemont, interview with the author.
25. Ibid.
Twenty. The French School of Economics Takes a Structural Path
1. Andr Nieola, interview with the author.
2. Michel Aglietta, interview with the author.
3. Ibid.
4. Andr Nicola, interview with the author.
Notes to Chapter Twenty-one 4 Il
5. Mario Dehove, L'Etat des sciences sociales en France, p. 252..
6. Robert Boyer, "La croissance franaise de l'aprs-guerre et les modles macro-
conomiques," La Revue conomique, vol. 27, no. 5 (1976).
7. Franois Perrroux, in Sens et usages du terme de structure, ed. Roger Bastide
(Paris: Mouton, 1972 [1962]), p. 6r.
8. Henri Bartoli, Economie et cration collective, p. 315,
9. Karl Marx, Le Capital, book 2, voL 3, p. 208.
10. Ren Clmens, "Prolgomnes d'une thorie de la structure," Revue d'conomie
politique, no. 6 (195 2): p. 997.
11. Ernest Wagemann, Introduction la thorie du mouvement des affaires, pp.
372-73; and La Stratgie conomique, pp. 69-70.
12. Franois Perroux, Comptes de la nation, p. I26.
13. Andr Marchal, in Bastide, ed., Sens et usages du terme de structure.
14. Andr Marchal, Mthode scientifique et science conomique.
15. Andr Marchal, Systmes et structures.
16. Andr Nicola, Comportement conomique et structures sociales.
17. Andr Nicola, interview with the author.
18. Bartoli, conomie et cration collective, p. 344.
19. Henri Bartoli, interview with the author.
20. Bartoli, conomie et cration collective, p. 345.
21. Gilles Gaston-Granger, Pense formelle et science de l'homme, p. 53.
Twenty-one. Get a Load of That Structure!
1. Roger Bastide, ed., Sens et usages du terme de structure.
2. Entretiens sur les notions de gense et de structure, colloquium at Cerisy,
July-August 1959 (Paris: Mouton, 1965). There was also a colloquium in 1957, orga-
nized by the Centre International de Synthse: Notion de structure et structure de la
connaissance (Paris: Albin Michel, 1957).
3. tienne Wolff, in Bastide, ed., Sens et usages du terme de structure, p. 23.
4. Nicolai Trubetzkoy, "La phonologie actuelle," in Psychologie du langage (Paris,
1933), p. 245
5. Claude Lvi-Strauss, in Bastide, ed., Sens et usages du terme de structure, p. 44.
6. Daniel Lagache, in ibid., p. 81.
7. Raymond Aron, in ibid., p. II3.
8. Lucien Goldmann, in Entretiens sur les notions de gense et de structure, p. 10.
9. Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu cach.
10. Jean Piaget, in Entretiens sur les notions de gense et de structure, p. 42.
11. Maurice de Gandillac, in ibid., p. 120.
12. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, reprinted in Histoire et ethnolo-
gie, Revue de mtaphysique et de morale, nos. 3-4 (1949): pp. 363-91 (Structural An-
thropology, "History and Anthropology," pp. 1-28.)
13. Ibid., p. 13.
14. Ibid., p. 19.
15. Ibid., pp 23-24.
16. Ibid., p. 82.
17. Ibid., p. 95.
18. Ibid., p. 278.
19. Ibid.
20. Maurice Godelier, interview with the author.
21. Philippe Descola, interview with the author.
4 18 Notes to Twenty-two
Claude Roy, "Claude Lvi-Strauss ou l'homme en question, La Nef; no. 28
(I959): p. 70.
23. Jean Duvignaud, Les Lettres nouvelles, no. 62 (I9 58).
24. Letter from Claude Lvi-Strauss, quoted by Jean Duvignaud in Le Langage
perdu, p. 234.
25. Ibid., p. 251.
26. Georges Mounin, Introduction la smiologie, p. 202.
27. Ibid., p. 204.
28. Lvi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 60.
29. Ibid., p. 41.
30. Ibid., p. 90.
31. Franois Dosse, L'Histoire en miettes.
32. "La Mditerrane et le monde mditerranen l'poque de Philippe IL"
33. "La Crise de l'conomie franaise la fin de l'Ancien Rgime."
34. Ernest Labrousse, "La Crise de l'conomie franaise la fin de l'Ancien Rgime
et au dbut de la crise rvolutionnaire," p. 170.
35. Ernest Labrousse, Actes du congrs historique du centenaire de la rvolution de
r848, p. 20.
36. Pierre Vilar, La Catalogne dans l'Espagne moderne. Recherches sur les fonde-
ments conomiques des structures nationales.
37. Pierre Vilar, interview with the author.
38. Michelle Perrot, Essais d'ego-histoire, p. 277.
39. Michelle Perrot, interview with the author.
40. Ibid. [The French tide of Perrot's thesis is "Les Ouvriers en grve, France
(1871-1890)." - Trans.]
41. Jean-Pierre Vernant, interview with the author.
42. Jean-Pierre Vernant, "Le mythe hsiodique des races: Essai d'analyse structurale,"
Revue de l'histoire des religions (1960): pp. 21-54.
43. Jean-Pierre Vernant, in Entretiens sur les notions de gense et de structure.
44. Jean-Pierre Vernant, "Le mythe hsiodique des races" (1960), in Mythe et pen-
se chez les Grecs, p. 21.
45. Jean-Pierre Vernant, interview with the author.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "Leon inaugurale au Collge de France," January 5, 1960;
reprinted in Anthropologie structurale, vol. 2, p. 20.
49. Ibid., p. 24.
50. Pierre Nora, interview with the author.
51. Lvi-Strauss, "Leon inaugurale au Collge de France."
52. Claude Lvi-Strauss, De prs et de loin, p. 96.
53. Claude Lvi-Strauss, in Georges Charbonnier, Entretiens avec Claude Lvi-
Strauss, p. 181.
Twenty-two. Contesting the Sorbonne: The Quarrel of the Ancients
and the Modems
1. Alain Boissinot, interview with the author.
2. Ibid.
3. Andr Martinet, interview with the author.
4. Jean-Claude Chevalier, interview with the author.
5. Ibid.
Notes to Chapter 1\venty-three 4I9
6. Jean-Claude Chevalier, "La Notion de chez les grammairiens."
Jean-Claude Chevalier, interview with the author.
8. Ibid.
9. Tzvetan Todorov, interview with the author.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Marina Yaguello, interview with the author.
13. Franoise Gadet, interview with the author.
14. Ibid.
15. Philippe Hamon, interview with the author.
16. lisabeth Roudinesco, interview with the author.
17. Franois Ewald, interview with the author.
18. Ibid.
19. Roger-Pol Droit, interview with the author.
20. Sylvain Auroux, interview with the author.
21. Grard Genette, interview with the author.
22. Philippe Hamon, "Littrature," in Les Sciences du langage in France au XX
e
sicle, p. 289.
23. Work in Linguistics and Literature.
24. Louis Hay, interview with the author.
25. Ibid.
26. "Le Vocabulaire politique et social en France de I849 I872."
27. Henri Mitterand, interview with the author.
28. Knud Togeby, Les Structures immanentes de la langue franaise.
29. Maurice Gross, in "La cration de revues dans les annes soixante," interview
with Jean-Claude Chevalier and Pierre Encrev, Langue franaise, no. 63 (September
I984): p. 91.
30. Jean Dubois, in ibid.
31. Andr-Georges Haudricourt, interview with the author.
32. Henri Mitterand, interview with the author.
33. Ibid.
34. Jean-Claude Chevalier and Pierre Encrev, "La cration de revues dans les an-
nes soixante," p. 97.
35. A directeur d'tudes can lecture without necessarily having an advanced univer-
sity degree. Barthes's published work had justified his election at the EPHE.-Trans.
36. Hamon, "Littrature," p. 289.
37. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "La structure et la forme," Cahiers de l'ISEA, no. 99
(March I960), series M; no. 7; reprinted in Anthropologie structurale, vol. 2.
38. Claude Lvi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson, L'Homme, II, no. l (January-April,
I962).
39. Jean Rousset, Forme et signification: Essais sur les structures littraires de
Corneille Claudel.
40. Ibid., p. vii.
41. Ibid., p. xx.
Twenty-three. 1964: The Semiologie al Adventure
Makes a Breakthrough
1. Joseph Sumpf, interview with the author.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
420 Notes to Chapter Twenty-four
4. Michel Foucault, "Le structuralisme et l'analyse littraire," in Mission culturelle
franaise Information, French embassy in Tunisia, April Io-May 10, 1987 (1965);
unedited tapes of two lectures by Michel Foucault at the Club Tahar Haddad, p. II
(Centre Michel-Foucault, Bibliothque du Saluchoir).
5. Ibid.
6. Tzvetan Todorov, "La description de la signification en littrature," Communi-
cations, no. 4 (1964): p. 36.
7. Claude Brmond, "Le message narratif," p. 4.
8. Ibid., p. 31.
9. Le Systme de la mode.
10. Roland Barthes, Ocaniques, FR3, January 27,1988 (interview, 1970).
Il. Algirdas Julien Greimas, interview with the author.
12. Roland Barthes, Le Systme de la mode, p. 9.
13. Barthes, "Les lments de smiologie," Communications, no. 4 (1964); re-
printed in I.:Aventure smiologique, p. 28.
14. Ibid., p. 29.
15. Ibid., p. 51.
16. Ibid., p. 82.
17. Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes, p. 83.
18. Roland Barthes, "L'activit structuraliste," Les Lettres nouvelles (1963); re-
printed in Essais critiques, p. 214.
19. Ibid., p. 215.
20. Roland Barthes, "L'imagination du signe," Arguments (1962); reprinted In
Essais critiques, p. 27.
21. Ibid., p. 209.
22. Roland Barthes, interview with Georges Charbonnier, France-Culture, Decem-
ber 1967; rebroadcast November 21 and 22, 1988.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
Twenty-four. The Golden Age of FormaI Thinking
1. Algirdas Julien Greimas, interview with the author.
2. Ibid.
3. Andr Martinet, interview with the author.
4. Algirdas Julien Greimas, interview with the author.
5. Jean-Claude Coquet, "La smiotique," in Les Sciences du langage en France au
XX' sicle, p. 175.
6. Algirdas Julien, Greimas, Smantique structurale, p. 6.
7. Ibid., p. 8.
8. Algirdas Julien Greimas, interview with the author.
9. Greimas, Smantique structurale, p. 31.
10. Ibid., p. 60.
11. Ibid., p. 223.
12. Thomas Pavel, Le Mirage linguistique, p. 151.
13. Claude Brmond, Logique du rcit.
14. Claude Brmond, interview with the author.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Jacques Hoarau, interview with the author.
Notes to Chapter Twenty-five 42I
18. Marc Vernet, interview with the author.
19. Louis Hay, interview with the author.
20. Jean-Claude Coquet, interview with the author.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Claude Brmond, interview with the author.
24. Ibid.
25. Andr Martinet, interview with the author.
26. Algirdas Julien Greimas, interview with the author.
27. Ibid.
28. Roland Barthes, Le Systme de la mode, p. 16.
29. Ibid., p. 17.
30. Ibid., p. 18.
31. Ibid., p. 38.
32. Ibid., p. 282.
33. Jean-Franois Revel, "Le rat et la mode," L'Express, May 22, 1967.
34. Raymond Bellour, "Entretien avec R. Barthes," Les Lettres franaises, no. II72
(March 2, 1967).
35. Julia Kristeva, "Le sens et la mode," Critique, no. 247 (December 1967): p. 1008.
36. Roland Barthes, "De la science la littrature," Times Literary Supplement
(1967); reprinted in Le Bruissement de la langue, p. 17.
37. Roland Barthes, interviews with Georges Charbonnier, France-Culture, Decem-
ber 1967.
38. Ibid.
39. Jacques Hoarau, interview with the author.
40. Ibid.
41. Les Idalits mathmatiques.
42. Sylvain Auroux, interview with the author.
43. Jean Piaget, Psychologie et pistmologie, p. 145.
44. Oswald Ducrot, interview with the author.
45. Ibid.
46. Gottlob Frege, Les Fondements de l'arithmtique, p. 12.
47. lisabeth Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2, p. 410.
48. Ibid., p. 413.
49. Jol Dor, interview with the author.
50. Gennie Lemoine, interview with the author.
Twenty-five. Great Confrontations
1. Roland Barthes, "Histoire et littrature: propos de Racine," Annales (May-June
1960): pp. 52 4-37.
2. Ibid., in Sur Racine, p. 157.
3. Ibid., p. 146.
4. Ibid., p. 13.
5. Ibid., p. 14.
6. Ibid., p. 21.
7. Ibid., p. 60.
8. Raymond Picard, Nouvelle Critique ou nouvelle imposture (Paris: J.-J. Pauvert,
1965), pp. 30-34.
9. Ibid., p. 52.
10. Ibid., p. 66.
422 Notes to Chapter Twenty-five
11. Roland Barthes, Ocaniques, FR3, February 8, 1988 (November 1970-May
1971).
12. Jean Dubois, interview with the author.
13. Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, interview with the author.
14. Jacqueline Piatier, Le Monde, October 23, 1965; quoted by Louis-Jean Calvet,
Roland Barthes, p. l87.
15. Ibid., p. l88.
16. Ibid.
17. Roland Barthes, Critique et vrit (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. l3.
18. Ibid., p. 35.
19. Ibid., p. 56.
20. Ibid., p. 57.
21. Ibid., p. 7I.
22. Ren Pommier, Assez dcod (Paris: ditions Roblot, 1978), and R. Barthes, Ras
le bol! (Paris: ditions Roblot, 1987), in which he attacks Barthes and the "jobarthi-
ans." He writes, among other things: "The idiocies of a R. Barthes are, for me, an insult
to human intelligence" (p. 40); "When I read him, I never say to myself that R. Barthes
is too intelligent; I constantly say to myself, with an ever-present surprise: how can you
be such an ass?" (p. 27). The tone is noteworthy.
23. Georges Gurvitch, "Le concept de structure sociale," Cahiers internationaux de
sociologie, no. 19 (l955).
24. Ibid., p. 3 I.
25. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 322.
26. Gilles Gaston-Granger, "vnement et structure dans les sciences de l'homme,"
Cahiers de l'ISEA (December 1959).
27. Ibid., p. l68.
28. Ibid., p. l74.
29. Ibid., p. l75.
30. Gilles Gaston-Granger, interview with the author.
31. Ibid.
32. Roger Establet, interview with the author.
33. Ibid.
34. Pierre Ansart, interview with the author.
35. Ibid.
36. Jean Duvignaud, interview with the author.
37. Jean Duvignaud; Le Langage perdu, p. 2l5.
38. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. 268.
39. Ibid., p. I.
40. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Le Totmisme aujourd'hui, p. 25.
41. Ibid., p. I28.
42. Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. l04.
43. Claude Roy, "Un grand livre civilis: La Pense sauvage," Libration, June 19,
1962.
44. Edmond Ortigues, Critique, no. l89 (February 1963): p. l43.
45. Jean Lacroix, Le Monde, November 27, I962.
46. Robert Kanters, Le Figaro littraire, June 3-23, I962.
47. Roland Barthes, "Sociologie et socio-Iogique," Informations sur les sciences
sociales, no. 4 (December 1962): p. 242.
48. Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. 254.
49. Ibid., p. 257.
50. Ibid., p. 258.
Notes to Chapter Twenty-six 423
51. Ibid., p. 261.
52. Ibid., p. 262.
53. Pierre Verstraeten, "Claude Lvi-Strauss ou la tentation du nant," Les Temps
modernes, no. 206 (July 1963): p. 83.
54. Claude Lvi-Strauss, remarks quoted by Jean-Marie Domenach, interview with
the author.
55. Jean-Marie Domenach, interview with the author.
56. Paul Ricoeur, Esprit (November 1963): p. 605.
57. Ibid., p. 644.
58. Ibid., p. 618.
59. Claude Lvi-Strauss, in ibid., p. 637.
60. Andr Green, "La psychanalyse devant l'opposition de l'histoire et de la struc-
ture," Critique, no. 194 (July 1963).
61. Ibid., p. 661.
Twenty-six. Signifying Chains
1. Jean Laplanche, "Une rvolution sans cesse occulte," Communication aux
journes scientifiques de l'Association Internationale d'Histoire de la Psychanalyse,
April 23-24, 1988.
2. Jacques Lacan, "L'excommunication," Ornicar? (1977).
3. See lisabeth Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2, pp.
399-43
4. Ibid., p. 383.
5. Jacques Lacan, crits, p. 805.
6. Marcel Arriv, Linguistique et psychanalyse, p. 12.
7. Jean Allouch, Littoral, nos. 23-24 (Oetober 1987): P.S.
8. "Objet petit a": "The 'a' in questions stands for 'autre' (other), the concept hav-
ing been developed out of the Freudian 'object' and Lacan's own exploitation of 'other-
ness.' The 'petit a' (small 'a') differentiates the object from (while relating it toi the
'Autre' or 'grand Autre' (the capitalized 'Other'). However, Lacan refuses to comment
on either term here, leaving the reader to develop an appreciation of the concepts in the
course of their use. Furthermore, Lacan insists that 'objet petit a' should remain un-
translated, thus acquiring, as it were, the status of an algebraic sign" (crits: A Selec-
tion, p. xi).-Trans.
9. Jean-David Nasio, Les Sept Concepts cruciaux de la psychanalyse.
10. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York:
Harper and Row, 1971 (1975)).
Il. Alain Juranville, Lacan et la philosophie, p. 167.
12. Serge Leclaire, interview with the author.
13. Jacques-Alain Miller, Ornicar? no. 24 (1981): p. 43.
14. Lacan, crits, p. 863.
15. Juranville, Lacan et la philosophie, p. 175.
16. Ibid., p. 195.
17. Ibid., p. 286.
18. Gennie Lemoine, interview with the author.
19. Serge Leclaire, "L'objet a dans la cure," Rompre les charmes, p. 174.
20. Jean Clavreul, interview with the author.
21. Jol Dor, interview with the author.
22. Jean Laplanche, interview with the author.
23. Andr Green, "Le bon plaisir," France-Culture, February 25, 1989.
424 Notes ta Chapter
24. Ibid.
25. Andr Green, interview with the author.
26. Andr Green, "Le langage dans la psychanalyse," in Langages, Les Rencontres
psychanalytiques d'Aix en Provence.
27. Lacan, crits, p. 873.
28. Andr Green, "Le langage dans la psychanalyse," p. 23 I.
29. Jean-Marie Benoist, interview with the author.
30. Grard Mendel, interview with the author.
31. Bernard Sichre, interview with the author.
32. Ibid.
33. Jacques Lacan, "Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire," in crits: A
Selection, p. 297.
34. Andr Green, I:Affect.
35. Andr Green, interview with the author.
36. Ibid.
37. Charles BaUy, Le Langage et la vie.
38. Serge Viderman, interview with the author.
39. Wladimir Granoff, interview with the author.
40. Franois Roustang, Lacan, p. 58.
41. Jean Clavreul, interview with the author.
42. Serge Leclaire, interview with the author.
43. Jean Laplanche, interview with the author.
44. Claude Dumzil, interview with the author.
Twenty-seven. Mythology's Earth Is Round
1. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of
Mythology, vol. I, p. 3.
2. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Naked Man: Introduction to a Science of Mythology,
vol. 4, p. 639
3. Lvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 245.
4. Claude Lvi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes: Introduction to a Science of My thol-
ogy, vol. 2, p. 472.
5. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Paroles donnes, p. I4.
6. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myths" (I9 5 5); reprinted in Struc-
turai Anthropology, pp. 202-28.
7. Ibid., pp. 207-8.
8. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. I30.
9. Lvi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 220.
10. Lvi Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. I7.
11. Jean-Marie Benoist, La Rvolution structurale, p. 32.
12. Lvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. I8.
13. Lvi-Strauss, "L'avenir de ethnologie, I959-I960," in Paroles donnes, p. 34.
14. Lvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 341.
15. Lvi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes, p. 303.
16. Ibid., p. 256.
17. Claude Lvi-Strauss, interview with Raymond BeUour, Les Lettres franaises,
no. II65 (January I2, I967); reprinted in Le Livre des autres, p. 38.
18. Ibid., p. 38.
19. Lvi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes, p. 356.
20. Jean Pouillon, La Quinzaine littraire, August I-3I, I968, p. 21.
Notes to Chapter Twenty-eight 425
21. Claude Lvi-Strauss, interview with Raymond Bellour, Le Monde, November 5,
197I.
22. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Naked Man, p. 598.
23. Ibid., pp. 621-22.
24. Ibid., p. 629.
25. Catherine Backs-Clment, in Le Magazine littraire (November 1971), points
out that this analogy works with a single exception.
26. Lvi-Strauss, The Naked Man, p. 649.
27. Ibid., p. 653.
28. Ibid., p. 687.
29. Ibid.
30. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Le Magazine littraire (November 1971).
31. Jean Duvignaud, Le Langage perdu, p. 243.
32. Lvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 341.
33. Ibid., p. 240.
34. Thomas Pavel, Le Mirage linguistique, p. 48.
35. Lvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 135.
36. Manfred Frank, Qu'est-ce que le no-structuralisme? p. 56.
37. Lvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 16.
38. Lvi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes, p. 475.
39. Lvi-Strauss, The Naked Man, p. 322.
40. Ibid., p. 607.
41. Ibid.; quote taken from Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouv, vol. 2 (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1954), p. 15,
42. Benoist, La Rvolution structurale, p. 275.
43. Lvi-Strauss, The Naked Man, p. 694.
44. Jean-Marie Domenach, "Le requiem structuraliste," in Le Sauvage et l'ordina-
teur, p. 81.
45. Ibid., p. 85.
46. Jean-Marie Domenach, interview with the author.
,
Twenty-eight. Africa: The Continental Divide of Structuralism
1. Georges Balandier, interview with the author.
2. Ibid.
3. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, pp. 234-35 n.
4. Georges Balandier, interview with the author.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Georges Balandier, Histoire d'autres, p. 187.
8. Ibid., p. 183.
9. Georges Balandier, Anthropologie politique.
10. Ibid., p. 22.
11. Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, eds., African Political Systems, 1940.
12. Balandier, Anthropologie politique, p. 27.
13. Lundis de l'histoire, France-Culture, March II, 1968.
14. Marc Aug, interview with the author.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Dan Sperber, interview with the author.
18. In the French university system, the first two years of training, the first cycle, cul-
426 Notes to Twenty-nine
minate in a DEUG (Diplme d'tudes universitaires the third year is the sec-
ond cycle and leads to a Licence, and, during the third cycle, one prepares a matrise,
after which a doctoral thesis. The first part of this cycle is the DEA or Diplme d'tndes
approfondies, which is crowned, in its turn, by a doctoral thesis.-Trans.
19. Dan Sperber, interview with the author.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Claude Meillassoux, interview with the author.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Jean Duvignaud, interview with the author.
26. Jean Duvignaud, Chebika (1991).
27. Remparts d'argile.
28. Jean Duvignaud, "Aprs le fonctionalisme et le structuralisme, quoi?" in Une
anthropologie des turbulences. Hommage G. Balandier, p. 151.
29. Ibid., p. 152.
30. A research group created by Lvi-Strauss within the institutional framework of
the Collge de France. Izard therefore belonged to two different research institutions,
the one at the Collge and the other at the EHESS.
31. Michel Izard, interview with the author.
32. Jean Pouillon, interview with the author.
Twenty-nine. Reviews
1. La Psychanalyse, no. l (1956): p. iv.
2. La Linguistique, no. l (1966); director: Andr Martinet; general secretary,
Georges Mounin.
3. Langages, no. l (March 1966), Larousse; editorial board: Roland Barthes, Jean
Dubois, Aigirdas Julien Greimas, Bernard Pottier, Bernard Qumada, Nicolas Ruwet.
4. Ibid., Introduction.
5. Jean-Claude Chevalier, Pierre Encrev, Langue franaise, no. 63 (September
1984): p. 95
6. Algirdas Julien Greimas, Langages, no. l (March 1966): p. 96.
7. Jean Dubois, interview with the author.
8. Communications, no. l (Paris: Seuil, 1961), Introduction: pp. 1-2.
9. Communications, editorial board: Roland Barthes, Claude Brmond, Georges
Friedmann, Edgar Morin, Violette Morin.
10. Contributors to Communications, no. 8, were Roland Barthes, Algirdas Julien
Greimas, Claude Brmond, Umberto Eco, Jules Gritti, Violette Morin, Christian Metz,
Tzvetan Todorov, and Grard Genette.
11. Tel Quel, secretary-general and director: Jean-Edern Hallier, editorial board:
Boisrouvray, Jacques Coudol, Jean-Edern Hallier, Jean-Ren Huguenin, Renaud Matig-
non, Philippe Sollers.
12. Jean-Pierre Faye, interview with the author.
13. Tel Quel, no. l (1960, Seuil), quote of Nietzsche.
14. Ibid., p. 3.
15. Marcelin Pleynet, interview with the author.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
Notes to Chapter Thirty 427
19. Ibid.
20. Tel Quel, no. 47 (fall I971): p. 142.
21. Ibid.
22. Claude Brmond, interview with the author.
23. Roland Barthes, Ocaniques, FR3 (I970-71),]anuary 27, 1988.
24. Julia Kristeva, "Le bon plaisir," France-Culture, December 10, 1988.
25. Jean-Pierre Faye, interview with the author.
26. Frdrique Matonti, "Entre Argenteuil et les barricades: La Nouvelle Critique et
les sciences sociales," Cahiers de l'Institut d'histoire du temps prsent, no. II (April
1989): p. 102.
27. Louis Althusser, "Freud et Lacan," La Nouvelle Critique, nos. 161-62 (1964).
28. Jacques Milhau, "Les dbats philosophiques des annes soixante," La Nouvelle
Critique, no. 130 (1980): pp. 50-51.
29. "Tel Quel rpond; prsentation," La Nouvelle Critique (November-December
1967): p. 5
30. Matonit, "Entre Argenteuil et les barricades," p. 18.
31. Pierre Vilar, "Les mots et les choses dans la pense conomique," La Nouvelle
Critique, no. 5 (1967); Jeannette Colombel, "Les mots de Foucault et les choses," La
Nouvelle Critique, no. 5 (1967); Georges Mounin, "Linguistique, structuralisme et
marxisme," La Nouvelle Critique, no. 7 (1967); Lucien Sve, "Marxisme et sciences de
l'homme," La Nouvelle Critique, no. 2 (1967).
32. Robert Linhart, quoted by Herv Hamon and Philippe Rotman, Gnration,
vol. l,p. 313.
33. Dominique Lecourt, interview with the author.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Les Cahiers pour l'analyse, reprinted in Socit du Graphe, nos. 1-2 (Paris:
Seuil,1969).
Thirty. Ulm or Saint-Cloud: Althusser or Touki?
1. Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Un destin philosophique, p. 129.
2. Sylvain Auroux, interview with the author.
3. Jean-Toussaint Desanti, interview with the author.
4. Ibid.
5. Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Autrement, no. 102 (November 1988): p. II6.
6. Jean-Toussaint Desanti, interview with the author.
7. Ibid.
8. Sylvain Auroux, interview with the author.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Jacques Bouveresse, interview with the author.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Louis Althusser, Manifestes philosophiques de Feuerbach.
15. Pierre Macherey, interview with the author.
16. Ibid.
17. Roger Establet, interview with the author.
18. Ibid.
428 Notes to Chapter Thirty-one
19. lisabeth Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2, p. 386.
20. Pierre Macherey, interview with the author.
21. Ibid.
22. Jacques Rancire, interview with the author.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2, p. 387.
Thirty-one. The Althusserian Explosion
1. Vincent Descombes, Le Mme et l'autre, p. 147.
2. Letter from Althusser to Jean Guitton, July 1972, in Lire, no. 148 (January
1988): p. 85
3. Jean Guitton, in ibid., p. 89.
4. Vincent Descombes, interview with the author.
5. Ibid.
6. tienne Balibar, interview with the author.
7. "Ouverture d'un dbat: marxisme et humanisme," La Nouvelle Critique, no.
164 (March 1965): p.!.
8. Michel Simon, La Nouvelle Critique, no. 165 (April 1965): p. 127.
9. Pierre Macherey, "Marxisme et humanisme," La Nouvelle Critique, no. 166
(May 1965): p. 132.
10. Michel Verret, La Nouvelle Critique, no. 168 (July-August 1965): p. 96.
11. Roger Garaudy, quoted by Jeannine Verds-Leroux in Le Rveil des somnam-
bules, p. 296; full text of the meeting of philosophers at Choisy in January 1966, pp.
125-48.
12. Daniel Lindenberg, Le Marxisme introuvable, p. 38.
13. Interview 64, in Verds-Leroux, Le Rveil des somnambules, p. 197.
14. Central committee of the PCF, March II-13, 1966, Cahiers du communisme
(May-June 1966), quoted in ibid., pp. II9-20.
15. Roger-Pol Droit, interview with the author.
16. Jacques Bouveresse, interview with the author.
17. Dominique Lecourt, interview with the author.
18. Pierre Macherey, interview with the author.
19. J. Verds-Leroux, Le Rveil des somnambules, p. 295.
20. Louis Althusser, Lire Le Capital, vol. l, p. 16.
21. Ibid., p. 20.
22. Daniel Becquemont, interview with the author.
23. Althusser, Lire Le Capital, vol. l, p. 26.
24. Dominique Lecourt, interview with the author.
25. Louis Althusser, Pour Marx, p. 27.
26. Ibid., p. 39.
27. Ibid., p. 171.
28. Ibid., p. 108.
29. Ibid., p. 196.
30. Pierre Vilar, interview with the author.
31. Paul Valadier, interview with the author.
32. Althusser, Pour Marx, p. 248.
Notes to Chapter
33. Althusser, Lire Le voL 2, p. 59.
34. Ibid., p. 47.
35. K. Naf, "Marxisme ou structuralisme?" in Contre Althusser (Paris: roll8,
1974), p. 192.
36. Althusser, Lire Le Capital, voL 2, p. I7I.
37. Jean-Marie Vincent, "Le thoricisme et sa rectification," in Contre Althusser,
p.226.
38. Vincent Descombes, interview with the author.
39. Althusser, Pour Marx, p. 212 n. 48.
40. Jean-Marie Benoist, La Rvolution structurale, p. 85.
41. Althusser, Pour Marx, p. 236.
42. tienne Balibar, interview with the author.
43. tienne Balibar, Lire Le Capital, vol. 2, p. 204.
44. Ibid., p. 205.
45. Ibid., p. 249.
46. Althusser, Lire Le Capital, vol. l, p. 170.
Thirty-two. Marxism's Second Wind
1. Alain Badiou, "Le (re)commencement du matrialisme dialectique," Critique
(May 1967).
2. Pierre Macherey, interview with the author.
3. Badiou, "Le (re)commencement du matrialisme dialectique," p. 441.
4. Jolle Proust, interview with the author.
5. Paul Henry, interview with the author.
6. Ibid.
7. Thomas Herbert, "Rflexions sur la situation thorique des sciences sociales,
spcialement de la psychologie sociale," Les Cahiers pour l'analyse, no. 2 (March-April
1966); Thomas Herbert, "Remarques pour une thorie gnrale des idologies," Les
Cahiers pour l'analyse, no. 9 (summer 1968): pp. 74-92.
8. Michel Pcheux, L'Analyse automatique du discours.
9. Paul Henry, "pistmologie de L'Analyse automatique du discours de Michel
Pcheux," in Introduction to the Translation of M. Pcheux's Analyse automatique du
discours (text given by Paul Henry).
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Emmanuel Terray, interview with the author.
13. Emmanuel Terray, Le Marxisme devant les socits primitives.
14. Emmanuel Terray, interview with the author.
15. Marc Aug, interview with the author.
16. Marc Aug, J,.,e Rivage Alladian.
17. Marc Aug, interview with the author.
18. La Monnaie chez Marx.
19. Charles Bettelheim, Calcul conomique et formes de proprit.
20. Robert Linhart, Lnine, les paysans, Taylor.
21. Louis Althusser, "Freud et Lacan," La Nouvelle Critique, nos. 161-62 (December
1964-January 1965).
22. Ibid.; reprinted in Positions (Paris: ditions sociales, 1976), p. 16.
23. Ibid., p. 15.
24. Ibid., p. 26.
430 Notes ta Chapter Thirty-three
Thirty-three. I966: Annum mirabile
for Structuralism
A Watershed Year
1. Gilles Lapauge, "Encore un effort et j'aurai pous mon temps," La Quinzaine
littraire, no. 459 (March 16-30,1986): p. 30.
2. Roland Barthes, Essais critiques (Paris: Points-Seuil, I98I), "Avant-Propos:
1971," p. 7
3. Philippe Hamon, interview with the author.
4. Renaud Matignon, L'Express, May 2, 1966.
5. Algirdas Julien Greimas, quoted by Jean-Claude Chevalier and Pierre Encrev,
Langue franaise, p. 97.
6. Jean Pouillon, interview with the author.
7. Franois Wahl, interview with the author.
8. Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 91 (August 10, 1966); quoted by Anne-Sophie
Perriaux, "Le structuralisme en France," DEA thesis directed by Jacques Julliard,
September 1987, p. 34.
9. Information provided by Pierre Nora.
10. Pierre Nora, interview with the author.
Il. Masse et puissance.
12. Ethnologie et langage.
13. Les tapes de la pense sociologique.
14. Pierre Nora, interview with the author.
15. La Religion romaine archaque.
16. Georges Dumzil, interview with Jean-Pierre Salgas, La Quinzaine littraire,
no. 459 (March 16, 1986).
17. L'Amour de l'art.
18. Pour une thorie de la production littraire.
19. Le Normal et le pathologique.
20. Les Paysans de Languedoc.
21. Louis XIV et vingt millions de Franais.
22. La Mditerrane et le monde mtiterranen l'poque de Philippe II.
23. Pense formelle et science de l'homme.
24. Philippe Hamon, interview with the author.
25. Forme et signification.
26. Jacques Lacan, Les Cahiers pour l'analyse, no. 3 (May 1966): pp. 5-13.
27. Algirdas Julien Greimas, "L'analyse structurale du rcit," Communications,
no. 8 (1966); reprinted by Points-Seuil (1981), p. 34.
28. Claude Brmond, interview with the author.
29. Ibid.
30. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "La structure et la forme," Cahiers de l'Institut de science
conomique applique, no. 9 (March 1960), M series, no. 7: pp. 3-36.
31. Lvi-Strauss, in ibid.; reprinted in Anthropologie structurale, vol. 2, p. 159.
32. Vladimir Propp, in the Appendix to Morphologia della fiaba.
33. Vladimir Propp, Les Racines historiques du conte (Theory and History of
Folklore).
34. Claude Brmond, interview with the author.
35. Umberto Eco, Communications, no. 8 (1966); reprinted by Points-Seuil, 1981,
P9
8
.
36. Tzvetan Todorov, in ibid., p. IF.
37. "Problmes du structuralisme," Les Temps modernes, no. 246 (November 1966);
Notes to Chapter Thirty-four 431
contributors: Jean Pouillon, Marc Barbut, Greimas, Maurice Godelier,
Pierre Bourdieu, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Ehrmann.
38. Jean Pouillon, in ibid., p. 769.
39. Ibid., p. 772.
40. Algirdas Julien Greimas, in ibid.; reprinted in Du sens, p. 106.
41. Ibid., p. 107.
42. Maurice Godelier, "Systme, structure et contradiction dans Le Capital," Les
Temps modernes, no. 246 (November 1966): p. 832.
43. Ibid., p. 829.
44. Pierre Bourdieu, "Champ intellectuel et projet crateur," in ibid., p. 866.
45. Roland Barthes, interview in Althia (February 1966): p. 218.
46. "Structuralismes, idologies et mthodes," Esprit, no. 360 (May 1967); articles
by Jean-Marie Domenach, Mikel Dufrenne, Paul Ricoeur, Jean Ladrire, Jean Cuisenier,
Pierre Burge!in, Yves Bertherat, and Jean Cornilh.
47. Jean-Marie Domenach, "Le systme et la personne," Esprit, no. 360 (May
1967): pp. 771- 80.
48. Mike! Dufrenne, "La philosophie du no-positivisme," in ibid., pp. 781-800.
49. Paul Ricoeur, "La structure, le mot, l'vnement," in ibid., pp. 801-21.
50. L'Arc, no. 30 (fourth quarter 1966).
51. Bernard Pingaud, in ibid., p. 1.
52. Jean-Paul Sartre, in ibid., pp. 87-88.
53. Ibid., p. 89.
54. Ibid., pp. 91-92.
55. Ibid., p. 93.
56. Ibid., p. 94.
57. Jacques Lacan, Le Figaro littraire, December 29,1966, p. 4.
58. Ibid.
59. Jean-Franois Revel, "Sartre en ballottage," I:Express, no. 802 (November 7-13,
1966).
60. Les Chemins actuels de la critique, Cerisy proceedings.
61. See lisabeth Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2, p. 414.
62. Jacques Derrida, "De la grammatologie," Critique, no. 223-24 (December 1965).
63. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of
Man, ed. Richard Marksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore and London: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1970 and 1972).
64. Jean-Pierre Vernant, interview with the author.
65. Ibid.
Thirty-four. 1966: Annum mirabile (II): Foucault Sells like Hotcakes
1. Miche! Foucault, The arder of Things, p. 208.
2. Michel Foucault, Lectures pour tous (1966), INA document, shown on Oca-
niques, FR3, January 13, 1988.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Jean Lacroix, "La fin de l'humanisme," Le Monde, June 9, 1966.
7. Robert Kanters, "Tu causes, tu causes, c'est tout ce que tu sais faire," Le Figaro,
June 23, 1966.
8. Franois Chatelet, "L'homme, ce Narcisse incertain," La Quinzaine littraire,
April 1, 1966.
432 Notes to Chapter Thirty-five
9. Madeleine Chapsal, I.:Express, no. 779 (May 23-29, I966): pp. II9-2I.
10. Gilles Deleuze, "L'homme, une existence douteuse," Le Nouvel Observateur,
June I, I966.
11. Michel Foucault, interview, La Quinzaine littraire, no. 5 (May I5, I966).
12. Crise de la conscience europenne.
13. Raymond Bellour, Les Lettres franaises, no. II25 (March 3I, I966); reprinted
in Le Livre des autres, p. I4.
14. Didier ribon, Michel Foucault, p. I89.
15. Jean Piaget, Le Structuralisme, p. I08.
16. Franois Ewald, interview with the author.
17. Foucault, The arder of Things, p. xxiii.
18. Jean-Marie Benoist, La Rvolution structurale, p. 202.
19. Michel Foucault, France-Culture, rebroadcast, June I984.
20. Benoist, La Rvolution structurale, p. 27.
21. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p. 4I3.
22. Michel Foucault, The arder of Things, p. 379.
23. Ibid.
24. Benoist, La Rvolution structurale, p. 38.
25. Foucault, The arder of Things, p. 369.
26. Ibid., p. 32.7.
27. Ibid., pp. 368-69.
28. Ibid., p. 208.
29. Ibid., p. 332.
30. Pierre Ansart, interview with the author.
31. Foucault, The arder of Things, p. xxii.
32. Ibid., p. I7.
33. Ibid., p. 30.
34. Ibid., p. 47-48.
35. Ibid., p. 6I.
36. Ibid., p. I36.
37. Ibid., p. 226.
38. Ibid., p. 284.
39. Ibid., p. 370.
40. Michel Foucault, France-Culture, July IO, I969.
41. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinov, Foucault, un parcours philosophique, p. 7I.
42. Foucault, The arder of Things, pp. 26I-62.
43. tienne Balibar, interview with the author.
Thirty-five. I966: Annum mirabile (III): Julia Cornes to Paris
1. Philippe Sollers, "Le bon plaisir de J. Kristeva," France-Culture, December IO,
I988.
2. Philippe Sollers, "Littrature et totalit" (I966), in L'criture et l'exprience des
limites, p. 73.
3. Stphane Mallarm, quoted by Sollers, in ibid., p. 87.
4. Jean Dubois, interview with the author.
5. Pour une thorie de la production littraire.
6. Ibid., p. I65.
7. Ibid., p. I67.
8. Ibid., p. I74.
Notes ta Chapter Thirty-six 433
9. Grard Genette, "Structuralisme et critique littraire, " L'Arc, no. 26; renrmted
in Figures, vol. l, p. 16r.
10. Ibid., p. 156.
11. Macherey, Pour une thorie de la production littraire, p. 88.
12. Antoinette Fouque, "Le bon plaisir," France-Culture, June 1989.
13. Jacques Lacan, "La science et la vrit," Les Cahiers pour l'analyse, no. 1
(1966); reprinted in crits, vol. 2, p. 226.
14. Ibid.
15. Lacan, crits, vol. 1, p. 80.
16. Rationalit et irrationalit en conomie.
17. Maurice Godelier, interview with the author.
18. Godelier, Rationalit et irrationalit en conomie, p. 95.
19. Maurice Godelier, interview with the author.
Thirty-six. The Postmodern Hour Sounds
1. Carl Schorske, Fin de sicle Vienna.
2. Flix Torrs, Dj vu, p. 142.
3. See Jean-Luc Marion, "Une modernit sans avenir," Le Dbat, no. 4 (September
1980): pp. 54-60.
4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 208.
5. Paul Valadier, interview with the author.
6. Jean Jamin, interview with the author.
7. Jean-Franois Lyotard, Le Magazine littraire, no. 225 (December 1985): p. 43.
8. Michel Foucault, interview with K. Boesers, "Die Folter, das ist die Vernunft,"
Literaturmagazin, no. 8 (Reibek: Rowohlt, 1977).
9. Michel Foucault, remarks made at Maurice Clavel's in Vzelay in 1977,
Ocaniques, January 13, 1988.
10. Maurice Godelier, interview with the author.
11. Daniel Dory, interview with the author.
12. Marcel Gauchet, interview with the author.
13. Jean Antoine de Condorcet, Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrs de
l'esprit humain (1793)'
14. Rgis Debray, Critique de la raison politique, p. 290.
15. Ibid., p. 299.
16. Ibid., p. 52.
17. Jean Chesneaux, De la modernit, p. 50.
18. Franois Furet, "Les intellectuels franais et le structuralisme," Preuves, no. 92
(February 1967); reprinted in l}Atelier de l'histoire.
19. Michel Foucault, Arts, June 15, 1966.
20. Gilles Deleuze, Le Nouvel Observateur, April 5, 1967; reprinted in Lucien Sve,
Structuralisme et dialectique.
21. Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mmoire, La Rpublique, p. xviii.
22. Gilles Lipovetsky, L're du vide: Essais sur l'individualisme contemporain, p. IL
23. Jean-Franois Lyotard, La Condition post-moderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979), p. II
(The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, p. 3).
24. Ibid., p. 39.
25. Ibid., p. 41.
26. Claude Lvi-Strauss, interview with Jean-Marie Benoist, Le Monde, January 21,
1979
27. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, vol. 2, p. 65.
434 Notes ta Chapter Thirty-seven
28. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Naked Man, p. 694.
29. Michel Foucault, interview with Bernard-Henri Lvy, Le Nouvel Observateur,
March 12, 1977; republished on June 29, 1984.
30. Pierre Daix, Structuralisme et rvolution culturelle, p. 29.
31. Paul Valadier, interview with the author.
Thirty-seven. Nietzschean-Heideggerian Roots
1. Martin Heidegger, Questions, vol. l, p. 188.
2. Pierre Fougeyrollas, interview with the author.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, ail too human, vol. l, paragraph 248, pp. 117-18.
4. Ibid., vol. 2, paragraph 463, p. 169.
5. Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: I2 Lectures.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Considrations inactuelles, vol. 2, p. 327.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 62.
8. Nietzsche, Human, ail too human, vol. 2, paragraph 239, p. 114.
9. Ibid., paragraph 473, p. 173.
10. Ibid.
11. Gianni Vattimo, La Fin de la modernit, p. II.
12. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Heidegger et les modernes, p. 82.
13. Martin Heidegger, "Le discours du rectorat" (May 27, 1933), Le Dbat, no. 27
(November 1983): p. 97.
14. Georges Steiner, Martin Heidegger, p. 87.
15. Nietzsche, Human, ail too human, vol. l, p. 52.
16. Ibid., vol. l, paragraph 107, p. 57 (Hollingdale).
17. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics.
18. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism.
19. Martin Heidegger, Lettre sur l'humanisme, p. 107.
20. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 336.
22. Rey, "La philosophie du monde scientifique et industriel," in Histoire de la
philosophie, pp. 151-87.
23. Michel Foucault, Hommage Hyppolite, p. 168.
24. Friedrich Nietzsche, La Volont de puissance, vol. l, pp. 79 and 141.
25. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La Pense 68, pp. 28-36.
26. Georges-Elia Sarfati, interview with the author.
27. Michel Foucault, Les Nouvelles littraires, June 28, 1984.
28. Michel Foucault, Actes du Colloque de Royaumont: Nietzsche, Freud, Marx
(Paris: Minuit, 1967 [1964]), p. 189.
29. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 384-85.
30. Ibid., p. 353.
31. Foucault, Hommage Hyppolite, p. 150.
32. Jean Duvignaud, Le Langage perdu, p. 22 5.
33. Foucault, Les Nouvelles littraires, June 28, 1984.
34. Maurice Pinguet, Le Dbat, no. 41 (September-November 1986).
35. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 343.
36. Marcel Gauchet, interview with the author.
37. lisabeth Roudinesco, Les Enjeux philosophiques des annes cinquante, p. 93.
38. lisabeth Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2, p. 309.
39. Jacques Lacan, La Psychanalyse, vol. 1, p. 6.
40. Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, vol. 2, pp. 309-10.
Notes to Chapter Thirty-eight 435
41. Bertrand interview with the author.
42. lisabeth Roudinesco, interview with the author.
43. Victor Fadas, Heidegger and Nazism, ed. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). Born in Chile, Fadas teaches in Berlin
and was a student of Heidegger. ln his book, he argued that Heidegger had been a vol-
untary Nazi, his position based on lifelong convictions. This thesis created a contro-
versy in France over the relationship between philosophy and politics.-Trans.
44. Jacques Derrida, France-Culture, March 21, 1988.
45. Jacques Derrida, Positions, p. 18.
46. Le Facteur de la vrit.
Thirty-eight. Growing Pains
1. Jean Jamin, interview with the author.
2. Bernard Ogilvie, interview with the author.
3. Maurice Godelier, interview with the author.
4. Ibid.
5. Jean-Louis Fabiani, Les Enjeux philosophiques des annes cinquante, p. 125.
6. Paul Valadier, interview with the author.
7. Jean Viet, Les Mthodes structuralistes, p. II.
8. Vincent Descombes, Le Mme et l'autre, p. 96.
9. Ibid., p. 98.
10. Pierre Bourdieu, Choses dites, p. 16.
11. Michel Foucault (1977), Revue de mtaphysique et de morale, no. l (January-
March 1985): p. 4.
12. Louis Pinto, Les Philosophes entre le lyce et l'avant-garde, p. 68.
13. tienne Balibar, interview with the author.
14. Pinto, Les Philosophes entre le lyce et l'avant-garde, p. 78.
15. Ibid., p. 96.
16. Fabiani, Les Enjeux philosophiques des annes cinquante, p. Il6.
17. Franois Dosse, L'Histoire en miettes.
18. Michelle Perrot, interview with the author.
19. Claude Lvi-Strauss, interview, Libration, June 2, 1983.
20. Louis-Jean Calvet, interview with the author.
21. Thomas Pavel, Le Mirage linguistique, p. 61.
22. Georges Balandier, interview with the author.
23. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "Leon inaugurale au Collge de France," January 5, 1960,
in Anthropologie structurale vol. 2, p. 27.
24. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Naked Man, p. 692.
25. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The View from Afar, p. Il8.
26. Claude Lvi-Strauss, "The Place of Anthropology in the Social Sciences," in
Structural Anthropology, p. 359.
27. Maurice Godelier, interview with the author.
28. Franois Furet, "Les intellectuels franais et le structuralisme," Preuves, no. 92
(February 1967): p. 6; reprinted in L'Atelier de l'histoire, p. 42.
29. Jean Duvignaud, interview with the author.
30. Ibid.
31. Marcel Gauchet, interview with the author.
32. Pavel, Le Mirage linguistique, p. 188.
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Index
Compiled by Hassan Melehy
Abls, Marc, 79-80
Acadmie Franaise, the, 32, 33, 128
Adler, Alfred, 40-41,161,162
Adorno, Theodor, 226-27, 354
Aeschylus, 74
Aglietta, Michel, 416 ch. 20 nn. 2, 3
Agulhon, Maurice, 147, 182
Alain, 85
Alembett, Jean d', 88
Allouch, Jean, 409 n. 8,412 nn. 1,2; 423
n. 7
Alqui, Ferdinand, 123
Althusser, Helen, xxi, 295
Althusser, Louis, xiv, xxi, xxiv, 4,85,
147-49,193,221,240,280-82,
284-92,293-308,309-15,326,332,
341,345,347-48,378,384,385,
387,391
Annales, the, xxiv, 35-36, 65, 78, 134,
168,176,181186-87,197,206,223,
224,319,386
Ansart, Pierre, 231, 432 n. 30
Anzieu, Didier, 120
Apter, David, 267
Aragon, Louis, 281
Aris, Philippe, 154,361
Aristotle, 288
Aron, Jean-Paul, 144
Aron, Raymond, xxii, 133, 174-75, 196,
231,318,382
Arriv, Michel, 60-61, 411 n. 31
Artaud, Antonin, 209
Aubry, Pierre, 120
Audry, Colette, 163
Aug, Marc, 266, 268-69, 312, 403 ch. 3
n.2
Augustine, Saint, 245
Auroux, Sylvain, 286, 405 ch. 7 n. 13,
406 n. 22, 419 n. 20, 421 n. 42, 427
n.2
Austin, John L., 371
Axelos, Kostas, 163,324,377,416 nn.
21,22
Bachelard, Gaston, 84-85, 89, 137, 196,
201,293,301,384,385
Backs-Clment, Catherine, 257
Badiou, Alain, 19, 309-10, 312, 348
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 345
Balandier, Georges, 231, 264-68, 270,
402 n. 20, 416 ch. 19 n. 3, 435 n. 22
Balfet, Hlne, 140,414 n. 56
Balibar, tienne, 288, 289, 291, 299,
306-7,312,314,428 n. 6,432 n. 43
Bally, Charles, 44
Barbut, Marc, 323
Barthes, Roland, xiv, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, 5,
45-46,62,63,68-69,71-77,91,
154-55,163,194,195,198,200,
203,205-9,211,215-19,223-28,
449
450 Index
235,275,276,278,317,320,324,
328,344,345,346,381,387,388,
393,430 n. 2
Bartoli, Henri, 169,417 ch. 20 nn. 19,20
Bastide, Franois-Rgis, 133, 140
Bastide, Jacques, 138
Bastide, Roger, 170, 173, 174,264
Bataille, Georges, 27, 40, 92, 134, 145,
149,209
Baudelaire, Charles, 201
Baudelot, Christian, 288
Bayet, Albert, 18
Beattie, ]., 267
Beaufret, Jean, 147,291,370,376
Beauvoir, Simone de, 24-25
Beckett, Samuel, 149
Becquemont, Daniel, 416 nn. 24, 25; 428
ch. 31 n. 22
Bdarida, Franois, 146
Bellour, Raymond, 218, 257, 332
Benoist, Jean-Marie, 41, 246, 403 n. 9, 424
n. 11,429 n. 40, 432 nn. 18,20,24
Benveniste, mile, 18, 34, 70, 174, 183,
186,200,215,273,274,316,318,
327,344
Berger, Gaston, 61-62
Berques, Jacques, xxi
Berryer, Jean-Claude, 135
Bertucelli, Andr, 271
Besanon, Alain, 182
Besse, Guy, 297, 299
Bettelheim, Charles, 313-14
Biardeau, Madeleine, 139
Blanchot, Maurice, 145, 148-49, 155
Bloch, Jules, 34
Bloch, Marc, Il,65,181,267
Boas, Franz, 15, 16, 53
Boccara, Pierre, 297
Boissinot, Alain, 418 nn. 1,2
Bonaparte, Marie, 112
Bonnaf, Lucien, 102
Bonnaf, Marc-Franois, 102
Bonnaf, Pierre, 268
Boole, George, 122
Bopp, Franz, 33,47,334
Borges, Jorge Luis, 281
Boudon, Raymond, 13,403 n. 21
Bougl, Clestin, Il
Boulez, Pierre, 207
Bourbaki, Charles, 219
Bourdet, Claude, 270
Bourdieu, Pierre, xxiv, 87, 319, 324, 384
Bouveresse, Jacques, 287, 428 n. 16
Bouvet, Maurice, 101
Boyer, Robert, 417 ch. 20 n. 6
Braudel, Fernand, 139,161,166-67,168,
180-81,206,240,319,323-24,386
Brecht, Bertolt, 77
Brhier, Louis, Il
Brmond, Claude, 204-5, 213, 320, 322,
421 n. 23, 427 n. 22, 430 n. 28
Breton, Andr, 4, 12, 92
Brondal, Viggo, 56, 70, 72
Bruneau, Charles, 67
Brunoff, Suzanne de, 313
Brunschvicg, Lon, 11, 83
Burke, Edmund, 361
Butor, Michel, 207
Caillois, Roger, 27, 128-30
Calame-Griaule, Genevive, 318
Calvet, Louis-Jean, 50, 74, 75, 227, 406
ch. 7 n. 20, 420 ch. 23 n. 17,435 n. 20
Camus, Albert, 4, 71
Canetti, Elias, 318
Canguilhem, Georges, 4,85-88,137,143,
147,150,153,196,282-83,289,
290,310,319,333,346,384,385
Carnap, Rudolf, 69, 83, 392
Carnot, Nicolas, 86
Carpentier, Alejo, 137
Cartry, Michel, 137, 161, 162,272
Castel, Robert, 87, 156
Castex, Grard, 195
Castoriadis, Cornelius, 123, 161, 163
Cavaills, Jean, 83-84, 87, 88,285,384
Cazeneuve, Jean, 134
Centre National de la Recherche Scien-
tifique, the (CNRS), 12,61, 65, 186,
197,202,203,270,272,286,310
Certeau, Michel de, 246
Chapsal, Madeleine, 133, 331
Char, Ren, 149
Charbonnier, Georges, 187,218
Chtelet, Franois, 331, 358
Chesneaux, Jean, 433 ch. 36 n. 17
Chevalier, Jean-Claude, 60-61, 62, 193,
198,200,406 ch. 8 n. 21, 407 ch. 9
nn. 8, 12; 418 nn. 4, 5; 419 n. 34, 426
n.5
Victor, 54
Chomsky, Noam, 199,220,275
Cixous, Hlne, 257
Clastres, Pierre, 161, 162,257
Clavreul, Jean, 97, 249, 423 n. 20
Clemens, Ren, 169-70
CNRS. See Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique, the
Cohen, Marcel, 60, 65,199,210
Collge de France, the, 33, 34, 38,41,
61,74,78,130,146,169,173,
185-87,197,211,265,271,318,
321,387
Comte, Auguste, 13, 14, 128, 169,351,
387
Condorcet, Marquis de, 88, 128, 356
Cont, Claude, 97,412 n. 31, 412 n. 7
Cooper, David, 156
Copernicus, Nicholas, 334, 381
Coquet, Jean-Claude, 46, 211, 214, 407
ch. 10 nn. 10, 11
Cournot, Antoine, 196-97
Crevel, Ren, 92
Cuisenier, Jean, 236
Culioli, Antoine, 61, 62, 194-95, 199,
210,221
Curien, Raoul, 149
Cuvier, Georges, 334, 339
Daix, Pierre, 434 ch. 36 n. 30
Dali, Salvador, 92
Darbel, Alain, 319
Darwin, Charles, 205, 334, 364
Davy, Georges, 18
Dayan, Sonya, 231
Debray, Rgis, 4, 266, 288, 433 ch. 36
nn. 14, 15, 16
Ddyan, Charles, 195
Defert, Daniel, 414 nn. 6, 7
de Gaulle, Charles, 99, 158,269,276,
327,343
Dehove, Mario, 417 ch. 20 n. 5
de Ipola, E. R., 412 nn. 14, 16, 17
Delay, Jean, 154
Deleuze, Gilles, 331-32, 358
Deloffre, Jacques, 195
Deltheil, Robert, 85
Derrida, Jacques, xxiv, 243, 244, 278,
298-99,316,328,373,378-79,383,
384,391
Index 45I
Desanti, Jean-Toussaint, 147,284-86,
287,220
Descartes, Ren, 79, 80, 81, 125, 152,
193,289,346,372,381
Descola, Philippe, 402 ch. 2 n. 17,417
ch. 21 n. 21
Descombes, Vincent, 40, 43, 295, 404 nn.
17,21; 405 ch. 6 nn. 2, 8; 409 nn. 17,
33; 410 ch. 13 n. 18,415 n. 39,428
n. 1,429 n. 38,435 nn. 8, 9
Destutt de Tracy, Antoine, 26
Dtienne, Marcel, 36, 257
Deyon, Pierre, 182
Diatkine, Ren, 122
Diderot, Denis, 88
Dieterlin, Germaine, 272
Diogenes, 129
Dolto, Franoise, 97, 246
Domenach, Jean-Marie, 236-37, 263,
325
Dor, Jol, 97, 107, 108, 118,409 n. 10,
410 ch. 13 n. 11,421 n. 49, 423 n. 21
Dort, Bernard, 77
Dreyfus, Franois, 182
Droit, Roger-Pol, 196,298-99
Dubois, Jean, 60-61, 62, 63,198, 199,
200,202-3,210,274,275,317,345,
422 n. 12
Duby, Georges, 36
Ducrot, Oswald, 50, 200, 210, 211, 275,
406 ch. 7 n. 19
Dufrenne, Mikel, 137, 325
Dumayet, Pierre, 330
Dumzil, Claude, 100,249
Dumzil, Georges, 9, 12, 32-36, 87, 100,
149-50,154,183,184,207,318-19,
330,332,387
Dumont, Louis, 139
Dumur, Guy, 76
Durkheim, mile, xxii, 6, 13-14, 170,
181,229,230,258,351
Duroux, Yves, 288
Durry, Marie-Jeanne, 195
Duvignaud, Jean, 76, 163, 164, 179,
231-32,264,271-72,375,392,425
n.31
Eco, Umberto, 320, 322-23, 388
cole Nationale de l'Administration, the
(ENA), 159, 284, 385
452 Index
cole Normale Suprieure, the (ENS), 4,
5,11,85,146,147-49,159,182,
196,197,221,240,266,268,
280-83,284-92,294,295,298,
305-6,310,312,314,320,341,375,
385,391
cole Pratique des Hautes tudes, the
(EPHE), 6, 12,33,60,61,64,76,92,
138,139,166,173,181,186,197,
200,202,205,211,240,251-52,
265,310,319,344,387
cole Psychanalytique Freudienne, the,
122
Eikhenbaum, Boris, 54
Eliade, Mircea, 327
ENA. See cole Nationale de l'Adminis-
tration, the
Engels, Friedrich, 13
ENS. See cole Normale Suprieure, the
EPHE. See cole Pratique des Hautes
tudes, the
Erasmus, Desiderius,151
Eribon, Didier, 14,432 n. 14
Ernout, Alfred, 34
Escarra, Jean, 18
Espinas, Alfred, 39
Establet, Roger, 230, 288, 299
Etiemble, Ren, 4, 134, 135
Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 267
Ewald, Franois, 195-96, 332
Ey, Henri, 99-100,122
Fabiani, Jean-Louis, 408 n. 2,435 nn. 5,
16
Faral, Edmond, 34
Farge, Arlette, 375
Faye, Jean-Pierre, 161,278,406 n. 10,
416 n. 10,426 n. 12
Febvre, Lucien, 34, 78, 134, 181,224
Feigl, Herbert, 392
Fejt, Franois, 163
Ferry, Luc, 373,416 nn. 57, 58; 434 n. 12
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 302
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 79, 81, 302
Flaubert, Gustave, 8, 75, 201
Fleming, Ian, 322-23
Florenne, Yves, 234
Focillon, Henri, 69
Fontenelle, Bernard de, xxii
Fortes, Meyer, 267
Fortini, Franco, 163-64
Foucault, Michel, xiv, xv, xxi, xxii, xxiv,
28,41-42,47,48,80,82,85,86-87,
88,142-57,160,193,203,208,238,
282,289,301,303,316-17,325-26,
330-42,346,351,353,361-62,373,
374-76,378,379, 384, 385,433 ch.
36 n. 19
Fougeyrollas, Pierre, 121-22, 161, 163,
164,409 nn. 19,20,26; 434 n. 2
Fouques, Antoine, 346
Fourni, Georges, 74
Frank, Manfred, 425 n. 36
Frege, Gottlob, 221, 244
French Communist Party, the (PCF), 3,
62, 102, 147-48, 158, 160-62, 164,
199,203,278-80,285,288,290,
292,294,296-98,332,344
Freud, Sigmund, 8,13, 19,39,43,58,91,
92-93,96,97-98,99-110,111,
112-13,114-18,119,121,147,148,
149,221,238,242,244,245,
246-47,248,254,258,273,290,
291-92,311,314-15,316,326,328,
334, 346, 347,351, 377, 404 ch. 4
n. 7
Freyre, Gilberto, 134
Friedmann, Georges, 275-76
Fromm, Erich, 103
Furet, Franois, 146, 358, 392
Gadet, Franoise, 44, 45,195,311,406
ch.8n.17
Galileo, 311, 381
Gandillac, Maurice de, 137, 150, 173,
176
Garaudy, Roger, 288, 289, 296, 297, 298
Gardin, Jean-Claude, 207
Gaston-Granger, Gilles, 79,169,172,
207,229-30,310,319,380
Gauchet, Marcel, 156-57,392,416 ch.
19 n. 1, 433 ch. 36 n. 12, 434 n. 36
Genette, Grard, xxiii, 148, 161, 194,
211,278,318,320,323,345-46,407
ch. 9 n. 11,419 n. 21
Gentilhomme, Yves, 211
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, tienne, 46
George, Franois, 122, 196
Gernet, Louis, 183
Gilson, tienne, 78
Goddard, 408 ch. 12
nn. 8, 13
Gode!, Kurt, 221
Godelier, Maurice, 257, 272, 324,
347-48,382,417 ch. 21 n. 20, 433
ch. 36 n. 10,435 n. 27
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 46, 245
Goldmann, Lucien, 7, 173, 175,226,
231,328,343
Goldmann, Pierre, xx-xxi
Goldschmidt, Victor, 79
Goldstein, Kurt, 99
Gombrowicz, Witold, 281
Gorky, Maxime, 55
Goubert, Pierre, 319
Gougenheim, Georges, 60, 62
Gouhier, Henri, 150
Gourou, Pierre, 186, 274
Grammont, Maurice, 59
Granai, Georges, 135
Granet, Marcel, 33
Granoff, Wladimir, 96, 97,101,424 n. 39
Green, Andr, 76, 116, 122,238,244,
245,247,249,410 nn. 1,3
Greimas, Algirdas Julien, xxiii, 26, 41, 45,
62,63,67-70,71,72,74,197,198,
200,202,210-16,218,222,226,274,
275,295,317,320-21,323-24,387
Griaule, Marcel, 18,40,136,140,272
Gritti, Jules, 320
Grosrichard, Alain, 282
Gross, Maurice, 199,210,275
Gruson, Claude, 168
Guattari, Flix, 137
Gurin, Daniel, 270
Guroult, Martial, 78-84, 147,286,310
Guilbert, Louis, 62, 200, 202
Guillaume, Gustave, 60
Guiraud, Pierre, 63
Guitton, Jean, xxi, 294-95
Gurvitch, Georges, 26, 30-31, 171,
228-32,264
Habermas, Jrgen, 368, 434 nn. 5,20
Hagge, Claude, 36, 406 n. 27
Hallier, Jean-Edern, 278
Hamon, Philippe, 63, 195,430 nn. 3,24
Harris, Zellig, 203
Haudricourt, Andr-Georges, 65-66,
135, 199
Index 453
Hay, Louis, 198,421 fi. 19
Hcaen, Henry, 275
Hegel, G. W. E, xxii, 86, 88, 92, 93,
94-95,103,125,128,129,137,146,
162,175,302-3,324
Heidegger, Martin, 93, 103, 104, 109,
147,148,158,242,273,290,291,
365,367-74,375-79,383
Helier, Clemens, 139
Henry, Paul, 310, 311
Hritier-Aug, Franoise, 138-39,272
Herrenschmidt, Olivier, 137, 139
Hertz, Robert, 27
Hesiod, 176, 183-84
Heusch, Luc de, 136
Hitler, Adolf, 85
Hjelmslev, Louis, xxii, 56, 62, 63, 68-70,
75,81,198,200,205-7,212,214,
215,217,219,316,323
Hoarau, Jacques, 420 ch. 24 n. 17,421
nn.39,40
Hobbes, Thomas, 381
Houphout-Boigny, Flix, 265
Hugo, Victor, 9
Husserl, Edmund, 37, 54, 56, 84, 88,
285,290
Huston, John, 8
Hyppolite, Jean, 4, 95,122,137,146-47,
148,150,162,266,294
Imbs, Paul, 62
Institut National de la Statistique et des
tudes conomiques, the (INSEE),
168
International Psychiatric Association, the
(IPA), 122,239,244,291
Isambert, Liliane, 203
Izard, Michel, 136-39,257,270-71,272
Jacquart, Jean, 182
Jakobson, Roman, xxii, 12, 16, 21-24,
30,44,45,52-58,64,66,72,105,
107,110,121,165,174,200,201,
207,216,225,228,316,318,389
Jambet, Christian, 298
Jamin, Jean, 27, 402 ch. 2 n. 23,403 ch. 4
n. 4, 404 ch. 4 n. 7,433 n. 6, 435 n. 1
Janklevitch, Vladimir, 137,294
Jaulin, Robert, 6-7
Jeanneney, Jean-Nol, 266
454 Index
Jespersen, Otto, 63
Jodelet, Franois, 194
John Paul II, Pope, 295
Johnson, Lyndon, 327
Joyce, James, 331
Jung, Carl, 252
Juranville, Alain, 245, 423 nn. 11, 15, 16,
17
Jussieu, Antoine de, 339
Kant, Immanuel, 30-31, 41,81,85,89,
302,342,375
Kanters, Robert, 235, 331
Karcevsky, Serge, 44, 55,174
Khlebnikov, Vladimir, 53
Klein, Melanie, 244
Klossowski, Pierre, 145
Kojve, Alexandre, 92, 146, 404 ch. 4 n. 7
Koyr, Alexandre, 78, 384
Kriegel, Annie, 182
Kristeva, Julia, 50, 193,211,218,278,
343-47
Kroeber, Alfred, 15
Krushchev, Nikita, 158
Labiche, Eugne, 116
Labrousse, Ernest, 181-82
Lacan, Jacques, xiv, xv, xxi, xxii, xxiii,
xxiv, 28-29, 41, 42, 45, 48-49, 58,
72,76,83,91-98,99-110,111-18,
119-25,144,148,149,155,162,
196,206,210,213,218,220,
221-22,228,239-49,250,255,261,
273,278,282,291-92,295,300,
301,305-6,308,311,314-15,317,
326-27,328-29,332,341,344,346,
347,353,373,376-78,379,384,
387,391,393
Lacroix, Jean, 133,234, 331
Lagache, Daniel, 100, 102, 147, 149,
150,171,174
Laing, Ronald, 156
Lalande, Andr, xxii
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de, 334, 339
Laplanche, Jean, 122, 123-25, 147,239,
247,410 n. 22, 423 n. 22, 424 n. 43
Laporte, Jean, 11
Lapouge, Gilles, 316-17
Lapssade, Georges, 324
Lardreau, Guy, 298
Leach, Edmund, 267
Lebesque,Morvan,77
Lebovici, Serge, 122
Le Bret, Francine, 402 n. 8
Leclaire, Serge, 97, 120, 122, 123,242,
243,247,249
Lecourt, Dominique, 281-82, 428 ch. 31
nn.17,24
Lefebvre, Henri, 122, 174,231,357
Lefort, Claude, 4, 25, 30-31, 123, 137,
161,162,163,231
Lefranc, Georges, 11
Le Goff, Jacques, 36, 268
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 88-89
Leiris, Michel, 25, 27, 39, 40, 41, 264,
265
Lejeune, Michel, 61
Lemaire, Anika, 125,410 ch. 13 nn. 14,
15; 411 nn. 37, 38, 41
Lemoine, Gennie, 346, 410 ch. 13 n. 21,
421 n. 50,423 n. 18
Lenin, Nicolai, 295, 314
Leroi-Gourhan, Andr, 140-41, 187
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 182,319
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, xiv, xv, xix, xxi,
xxii, xxiii, 5-8, 9,10-17,18-25,
26-31,32,33,34,35,38-41,45,
52-53,72,82,83,87,91,94,103-4,
105,110,111-18,121,123,126-41,
143,154,155,161,162-63,166,
169,171,174,175,176-81,182-83,
184,185-87,198,200-201,205,
206,207,208,211,213,214,216,
222,228-38,240,250-63,264,265,
267,268,269,271,282,289-90,
295,306,307-8,311,318,320-21,
323,324-25,326,328,330,331,
332,334,335,336,340,341,344,
346,347,348,353,354,355,361,
362,373,375,376,378,379,382,
384,387,389,390,393
Lvi-Strauss, Monique, 118
Lvy-Bruhl, Lucien, 40, 232, 355, 357
Lhomme, Jean, 168
Lingat, Robert, 139
Linhart, Robert, 281, 282, 314
Linn, Carl von, 205
Lipovetsky, Gilles, 433 n. 22
Loewenstein, Rudolph, 123
Longchambon, Henri, 266
Lourau, Ren, 416 ch. 19 n. 4
Lowie, Robert, 12, 15
Luther, Martin, 78
Lyotard, Jean-Franois, 161, 343-54,
360
Macherey, Pierre, 88, 150,288,289,291,
296-97,299,319,345,346,348,428
n. 18,429 n. 2
Major, Ren, 410 ch. 14 n. 21
Maldidier, Denise, 203, 311
Malevich, Cazimir, 53
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 15, 176,233-34,
250
Mallarm, Stphane, 53, 344-45, 374
Mannoni, Octave, 120
Mao Tse-tung, 292
Marcellesir, Jean-Baptiste, 203
Marchal, Andr, 168, 170, 175
Marcuse, Herbert, 359
Martin, Serge, 70, 413 n. 1
Martinet, Andr, 47, 60, 61, 62, 63-65,
70,139,192-93,195,203,211,216,
274,387,406 ch. 9 n. 1
Marx, Karl, xxii, 11, 13-14, 18, 19,41,
43,85,128,140,147,148,169,174,
175,212,221,230,258,278,280,
282,285,288-92,296-97,299-303,
306-7,309-15,324,326,341,345,
347,348,351,358,387
Mascolo, Dionys, 163
Massignon, Louis, 34
Mathesius, Wilm, 55
Matignon, Renaud, 317
Mator, Georges, 67, 198
Mauriac, Claude, 234-35
Mauron, Charles, 226
Mausi, Robert, 146
Mauss, Marcel, 13, 26-31, 33, 34, 39,
40,65,114,185,390
Mayakovski, Vladimir, 53, 55
Mazan, Andr, 34
McLuhan, Marshall, 391
Mead, Margaret, 29-30
Meillassoux, Claude, 203, 270-71, 312
Meillet, Antoine, 34, 54, 59-60, 65, 66,
174
Melman, Charles, 411 n. 24, 412 n. 33
Mendel, Grard, 116,424 n. 30
Mends-France, Pierre, 266
Index 455
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4, 37-42, 45,
90,99,122,147,169,171,285,384
Meschonnic, Henri, 62, 200
Mesliand, Claude, 182
Mtreaux, Alfred, 12, 40, 134
Metz, Christian, 200, 211, 320
Meyerson, Ygnace, 183
Meyriat, J., 414 n. 32
Michaud,Ren, 294
Middleton, John, 267
Milhau, Jacques, 427 n. 28
Miller, Jacques-Alain, 76, 121, 196,221,
244,281,282,289,291,320,423
n.13
Milner, Jean-Claude, 47, 76, 282, 289
Mitterand, Henri, 62, 198, 199,200
Mitterrand, Franois, xxi
Molire, 43
Molino, Jean, 148
Mondrian, Piet, 207
Monnet, Georges, Il
Montaigne, Michel de, 128
Montesquieu, Baron de, 288, 289
Montherlant, Henri de, 128
Montuclard, Maurice, 294
Moreno, Jacob-Lvy, 174
Morgan, Lewis Henry, xxii, 19
Morin, Edgar, 163, 164,414 n. 3
Morin, Violette, 320
Moscovici, Serge, 310, 311
Mounin, Georges, 77, 109-10, 180
Murdock, George Peter, 174,229
Mury, Gilbert, 297
Muse de l'Homme, the, 12, 16, 135,
140,173,265
102
Maurice, 73, 74
Siegfried-Frederick, 267
K., 429 n. 35
Jean-David, 242
Pierre, 203, 270
Rodney, 27, 269
Otto, 392
School for Social Research, the, 12,
56
Sir Isaac, 50, 302
Andr, 170-71,416 ch. 20
nn.l,4
Friedrich, xv, 144, 148, 149,
456 Index
158,276,290,333,341,364-67,
369,371-72,374-75,387
Nkrumah, Kwame, 265
Nora, Pierre, 142-43, 185-86, 318-19,
330,433 n. 21
Normand, Claudine, 46, 203, 311
Ogilvie, Bertrand, 409 n. 7,410 ch. 13
n. 13,413 n. 5, 435 nn. 41, 2
Ortigues, Edmond, 234
Ozouf, Jacques, 182
Pags, Robert, 174,310
Parain, Brice, 154
Pariente, Jean-Claude, 147
Pascal, Blaise, 151-52, 175, 245, 295, 381
Passeron,Jean-Claude, 87, 148
Pavel, Thomas, 392, 407 ch. 10 n. 8,420
ch. 24 n. 12,425 n. 34,435 n. 21
PCF. See French Cornrnunist Party, the
Pcheux, Michel, 288, 289-90, 298,310,
311-12
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 52, 371
Perrier, Franois, 122
Perrot, Jean, 61
Perrot, Michel, 182, 375, 386
Perroux, Franois, 168, 169-70, 175
Ptain, Philippe, 85
Piaget, Jean, 82, 171, 173, 175,203,220,
373,432 n. 15
Piatier,Jacqueline,227
Picard, Raymond, 223-28, 345, 381
Pichon, douard, 60, 109
Picon, Gatan, 201
Piganiol, Andr, 34
Pingaud, Bernard, 325-26
Pinguet, Maurice, 148, 375
Pinto, Louis, 385
Piot, Colette, 203
Piot, Marc, 270
Pius xn, Pope, 102
Pividal, Rafael, 231
Plato, 43, 230, 288, 333
Pleynet, Marcelin, 277, 278
Poe, Edgar Allan, 107-8
Poincar, Henri, 83
Polivanov, E., 54-55
Pommier, Jean, 34
Pommier, Ren, 228
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 73, 122,247
Popper, Karl, 214, 392
Pottier, Bernard, 61, 199,202,203,210
Pouillon, Jean, 5-8, 24, 25, 272, 323,
424 n. 20, 430 n. 6
Poulantzas, Nicos, xx-xxi
Poulet, Georges, 328
Propp, Vladimir, 69, 201, 204-5, 207,
213,214,250-51,316,321-22
Proust, Jacques, 147
Proust, Jolle, 310
Proust, Marcel, 73,262
Pushkin, Aleksandr, 53
Qumada, Bernard, 62-63, 67, 198, 202,
407 ch. 9 n. 3
Rabelais, Franois, 78
Racine, Jean, 175,223,224-25
Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 15
Rancire, Jacques, 288, 289, 290-91,
299,414n.2
Rastier, Franois, 214
Raymond, Pierre, 219
Rebeyrol, Philippe, 227
Rgnault, Franois, 282, 288
Renaud, P. A., 414 n. 31
Renaut, Alain, 373,416 nn. 57, 58; 416
ch. 19 n. 2, 434 n. 12
Revault d'Allonnes, Olivier, 18, 148, 161,
226
Revel, Jean-Franois, 218,327
Rey, Jean-Michel, 434 n. 22
Ribaud, Albert, Il
Ricardo, David, 300, 316, 334, 339
Ricardou,Jean,278
Richard, Jean-Pierre, 201, 207
Ricoeur, Paul, 122, 236-38, 240, 325
Riffaterre, Michael, 200
Rimbaud, Arthur, 209
Rivet, Paul, 16,40,126,381
Rivire, Georges-Henri, 187
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 326
Robin, Rgine, 311
Roche, Denis, 278
Rodinson, Maxime, 135
Rossi, Tino, 67
Roudinesco, lisabeth, 195,221,346,
376,377,409 nn. 1,2,3,4,410 n. 9,
412 ch. 16 n. 11,423 nn. 3,4; 428 ch.
30 nn. 19,28; 435 n. 42
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 131, 132-33,
179,258,365
Roussel, Raymond, 149
Rousset, David, 4
Rousset, Jean, 201, 319
Roustang, Franois, 117,246,424 n. 40
Roy, Claude, 133-34, 160, 179,234
Royer-CoUard, Pierre, 236
Russell, Bertrand, 83
Ruwet, Nicolas, 210, 236, 257, 275, 328
Safouan, Moustafa, 120,410 ch. 13 n. 16
Saint-Simon, Claude de, 351
Sapir, Edward, 53
Sarfati, Georges-Elia, 408 n. 23, 434 n. 26
Sartre, Jean-Paul, xv, xxi, 3-9, 38, 129,
133,160,196,232,235-36,238,
263,265,309,323-24,325-27,330,
332,370,382-83,384,391
Saussure, Ferdinand de, xiv, xxii, 20,
22-23,33,34,38,39,41,43-51,52,
54,56,57,59,61,63,64,65,67,
68-69,75-76,77,79,80,81,91,94,
103,104-7,109,121-22,124,140,
165,174,185,203,205-6,210,212,
215,218,240,242,243,247-48,253,
258,290,316,321,323,325,328,387
Sauvy, Alfred, 168
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 33, 46
Schlegel, Friedrich, 33, 46
Schleicher, August, 33
Schlick, Moritz, 83
Sebag, Lucien, 161, 162,210,324
Schehaye, Albert, 44
Seghers, Anna, 12
Semprun, Jorge, 296, 297
Senghor, Lopold Sdar, 130, 265
Serge, Victor, 12
Serres, Michel, xxiii, 88-90, 147
Sve, Lucien, 297
Sichre, Bernard, 246, 411 n. 23, 414 n. 5
Simiand, Franois, 13, 176, 181
Simon, Michel, 296, 310
Simonis, Yvan, 403 n. 15
Singevin, Charles, 68
Smith, Adam, 300, 334, 339
Smith, Michael Garfield, 267
Socialisme ou Barbarie, 123, 161, 163
Socit Psychanalytique de Paris, the
(SPP),95-96, 102, 103, 122, 124,244
Index 4.57
Socrates, 366
Sollers, Philippe, 246, 278, 323, 344
Sophodes, 116
Sorbonne, the, xiii, 59-66, 67, 70, 74, 85,
139,140,145,147,150,161,171,
182,191-201,202,203,223-28,
266,287,294,310,319,387,391
Soustelle, Jacques, 12,40,138
Souvarine, Boris, 92
Spencer, Herbert, xxii, 351
Spengler, Oswald, 351, 365
Sperber, Dan, 269-70, 403 n. 6
Spinoza, Baruch, 79, 81, 84, 240, 307, 381
Spitzer, Leo, 63, 201
SPP. See Socit Psychanalytique de Paris,
the
Stalin, Joseph, 148, 149, 158, 160, 164,
171
Starobinski, Jean, 50
Stein, Conrad, 122, 123
Steiner, George, 434 n. 14
Straka, Georges, 62, 197
Sumpf, Joseph, 203
Swain, Gladys, 156
Tarde, Gabriel, 170,229
Taylor, Frederick, 314
Terray, Emmanuel, 19,266,270,272,
312-13,348
Texier, Jean, 297
Thibaudeau, Jean, 278, 323
Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 247
Thorez, Maurice, 298
Thomer, Daniel, 139
Todorov, Tzvetan, xxiii, 193-94,204,
210,211,275,278,318,320,323,
328,343,344,387,405 ch. 7 n. 8,
406 ch. 7 n. 19
Togeby, Knud, 62, 198-99
Torrs, Flix, 433 n. 2
Tort, Michel, 289
Tour, Skou, 265
Trotsky, Leon, 55
Trubetzkoy, Nicolai, xxii, 22, 30, 44, 54,
55,57,64,67,70,174,207
Tudesq, Andr, 182
UNESCO, 161
University of Paris VIII-Vincennes, 149,
200
458 Index
University of Paris X-Nanterre, 202-203,
311
Uri, Pierre, 168
Vachek, J. 55
Vailland, Roger, 160
Valadier, Paul, 428 n. 31,434 ch. 36 n.
31,435 n. 6
Valry, Paul, 201, 234
Vattimo, Gianni, 434 n. Il
Vaugelas, Claude de, xxii
Veille, Jacques, 74
Vendrys, 59, 63
Verds-Leroux, Jeannine, 231, 428 ch. 31
n. 19
Verlaine, Paul, 53
Vernant, Jean-Pierre, xxiv, 36, 176,
183-85,257,328-29,384
Vernet, Marc, 421 n. 18
Verret, Michel, 297
Verstraeten, Pierre, 236
Veyne, Paul, 148, 149,375
Vico, Giambattista, 128
Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 36, 268
Viderman, Serge, 248
Viet, Jean, 383
Vilar, Jean, 77
Vilar, Pierre, 175, 182, 303
Vincent, Jean-Marie, 429 n. 37
Vinogradov, Ivan, 199
Virilio, Paul, 360
Voltaire, 365
Wagemann, Ernst, 170
Wagner, Richard, 257, 259, 262
Wagner, Robert-Lon, 60, 62, 200,
202
Wahl, Franois, 240, 276, 317
Wahl, Jean, 137, 146, 147
Wallon, Henri, 93
Wanters, Arthur, Il
Weil, Andr, 24, 83
Weil, Simone, 24
Weiller, Jean, 168
Westermarck, Edward, 19
Winnicott, D. W., 244, 245
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 69, 83, 371
Wolff, tienne, 174
Wormser, Andr, 146
Yaguello, Marina, 194-95,406 n. 10
Zola, mile, 89
Zonabend, Franois, 257
Franois Dosse received his degree in history from the University of
Paris-Vincennes in 1972, and passed the prestigious agregation exam
the following year. In 1974, he began teaching at Pontoise High School,
and five years later began working on his doctorate, under Jean Ches-
neaux, on the Annales School and the media since 1968, which be-
came the basis for his first best-selling book, L'histoire en miettes: Des
"Annales" la "nouvelle histoire" (1987) (published in translation as
New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales [1994]). Today,
Dosse te aches at the University of Paris-Nanterre and at the Political
Science Institution in Paris, and is a guest lecturer at the University of
Lausanne, where he lectures on historiography, methodology, histori-
cal epistemology, and the relationship between history and the social
sciences. He is the author of a rapidly growing list of publications, the
most recent of which is L'Empire du Sens, l'humanisation des sciences
humaines (forthcoming in translation from the University of Min-
nesota Press). He is also on the editorial board of EspaceTemps, and is
currently working on an intellectual biography of Paul Ricoeur.
Deborah Glassman received a Ph.D. in French from Yale University in
1982. She is the author of Marguerite Duras: Fascinating Vision and
Narrative Cure (1990), among other shorter works, and directed the
Paris Center for Critical Studies from 1988 to 1992. She is working
on a guide to ethnie eating in Paris, where she has lived and worked
since 1988.