Jean-Marc Lemelin
HOMMAGE À CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS
à l’occasion de son centième anniversaire
28 novembre 2008
Département d’Études françaises et hispaniques
Université Memorial
Saint-Jean, Terre-Neuve et Labrador
1.
Claude Lévi-Strauss is well known and recognized for his ethnology of
the Amerindians and for his doctoral thesis of 1949: Les structures élémentaires
de la parenté; this work is based
on the phonology of Roman Jakobson and the prince Troubetzkoï of the
Prague Circle (around 1930), which was influenced by the general and structural
linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, who taught in Geneva before World War
One. It is this same phonology that is used in the analysis of the sonnet « Les
Chats » from Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, published by
Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss in 1962.
2.
One can find the foundations of the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss in Tristes
tropiques, Anthropologie structurale (volumes one and two), Le
totémisme aujourd’hui, and La pensée sauvage. In the latter work,
Lévi-Strauss maintains that “la pensée sauvage” is not “primitive”, unlike the
ideas proposed by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. For Lévi-Strauss, there are unconscious
structures of the mind that are common to every human being, regardless of
space or time and whether they produce binary classifications or not.
3.
For many years, Lévi-Strauss has been interested in mythology, by the
myths that are the object of the four volumes of Mythologiques from 1964
to 1971, where he added a
transformed morphology of
Vladimir Propp to the phonology of the Prague Circle. The semiotics of
A. J. Greimas and the School of Paris was inspired by these ideas of
Lévi-Strauss. For him, “mythemes” are like phonemes and the myth of origin is
the origin of myth.
4.
Lévi-Strauss has always been directly associated with structuralism : he
said one time that he was the only true structuralist with Georges Dumézil or
Émile Benveniste - unlike Michel
Foucault, who said that he was not a structuralist…
There
are so many definitions of structure and structuralism that it is difficult to
put them in the same bag or file:
Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Althusser, Barthes, Lacan. Gilles Deleuze himself, who
is associated with “poststructuralism”, proposed a complex structuralist
definition of the structure in Différence et répétition.
There
is however certainly a link between Lévi-Strauss and the Roland Barthes of Mythologies
and Système de la mode. Barthes
wrote about Le totémisme aujourd’hui and La pensée sauvage in
1962. I have copies here of a letter by Lévi-Strauss to
Barthes in 1970 about S/Z: it is a good example of the way Lévi-Strauss
was thinking at that time.
There
is also a link between Lévi-Strauss and Greimas, as I already mentioned, mainly
regarding the relations between nature and culture with the prohibition of
incest as the rule of the “sociolect” or the “collective universe”. Joseph
Courtés published a book about the semiotics of the Mythologiques in
1973. For Lévi-Strauss, what is collective is cultural and particular and what
is individual is natural and universal; but ultimately, there is no separation or
opposition between nature and culture.
There
is also a link between the symbolism according to Lévi-Straus and the symbolique
according to Jacques Lacan: both are a matter of language, prohibition and
rules. But Lévi-Strauss is not Freudian, despite his respect for Freud – and
for Marx… After the suicide of Lucien Sebag, in analysis with Lacan,
Lévi-Strauss broke his relationship with him in 1965.
5.
One of the problems I have with Lévi-Strauss is his rejection or dismissal of totemism;
he has a very narrow conception of it. He does not accept or understand,
contrary to Sigmund Freud and Émile Durkheim or Alain Testart, that there is a
blood taboo, what a would call the “prohibition of infest”, related to the
complex of castration, the “evil” foundation of the prohibition of incest and
the prohibition of murder, with its perverse effects that continue still:
sexism, chauvinism, racism, anti-Semitism and genocide…
6.
In his Introduction à la pensée de Marcel Mauss and mainly about the Essai
sur le don, Lévi-Strauss cannot see that exchange can take place outside
reciprocity, that is with the gift; for that, I refer to Testart again
and to Alain Caillé, Jacques Godbout and the MAUSS periodical or to Maurice
Godelier and Marcel Hénaff. Lévi-Strauss insists on three types of exchange or
trade: women, goods and words or messages; these can be related to the three
ideological functions of Dumézil (fecundity, sovereignty and war) and to the
three indo-european social classes of Benveniste (farmers, priests and warriors).
7.
To conclude, I would say that, basically, the thinking of Lévi-Strauss is a
paradigmatic one with an insistence on system and synchrony; it is not a
syntagmatic one. For that, see his polemic with Jean-Paul Sartre in Race et
histoire in 1951 and the last chapter of La pensée sauvage entitled
“Histoire et dialectique”.
Claude
Lévi-Strauss has great followers like Françoise Héritier and Philippe Descola;
he has been criticized by Marxists, functionalists and evolutionists; his
immense glory was a screen for other original ethnographers or ethnologists
like Laura and Raoul Makarius or Alain Testart. But let us not forget that he
is one of the greatest French writers of non-fiction of all time, with Michel
de Montaigne, Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jacques Derrida.
JML/novembre
2008
The
100th Birthday of
Claude
Lévi-Strauss
The
Thinker of the Century?
A
Panel discussion with Jean-Marc Lemelin,
James
MacLean, Adrian Tanner
November 28, 3.00 p.m.
SN-4035
Moderated
by Myriam Osorio
Department of French and Spanish Seminar Series