Structuralism

For roughly two decades — from the 1950s to the early 1970s — a single idea reorganized the French human sciences and, by extension, much of Western thought: the idea that the most varied human phenomena (language, kinship, myth, fashion, the unconscious, ideology) must be understood as systems of relations — as structures — and not as collections of isolated things, nor as products of an individual consciousness. This was structuralism: less a unified doctrine than a method and an intellectual climate, exported from linguistics to anthropology, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. This article follows that path, from Saussure to his heirs, up to the post-structuralist turn that pushed it to its limit. ...

Claude Lévi-Strauss French anthropologist and philosopher; founder of structuralism in the human sciences. He applied Saussure’s model of linguistics to anthropology, transforming the study of myths, kinship, and “primitive” cultures. Born in Brussels in 1908 and died in Paris in 2009, Lévi-Strauss studied philosophy and law before becoming a professor in Brazil — he taught at the University of São Paulo from 1935 to 1939, during which time he conducted fieldwork among indigenous peoples of Mato Grosso and the Amazon. That direct encounter with Amerindian societies proved decisive: rather than confirming the dominant evolutionist framework, it led him to question radically the hierarchy between “primitive” and “scientific” thought. After returning to Europe and spending the years of the Second World War in exile in New York, he came into close contact with the linguist Roman Jakobson, whose phonological formalism gave Lévi-Strauss the central methodological instrument: the analysis of binary oppositions as the key to deciphering cultural systems. ...

Ferdinand de Saussure Ferdinand de Saussure (26 November 1857, Geneva — 22 February 1913, Vufflens-le-Château) was a Swiss linguist, regarded as the father of modern linguistics and the theoretical wellspring of twentieth-century structuralism. Trained in the comparative tradition of Leipzig among the Neogrammarians, at the age of 21 he published the Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1878), in which he postulated, on grounds of pure systemic coherence, “sonant coefficients” whose reality would be confirmed only decades later with the decipherment of Hittite (the laryngeals). He taught in Paris and, from 1891, in Geneva, where he delivered a course in general linguistics three times (1907; 1908–09; 1910–11). He published little in his lifetime; his decisive work is posthumous. ...

Jacques Lacan Jacques Lacan (13 April 1901, Paris — 9 September 1981, Paris) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, the most influential figure in psychoanalysis after Freud and a decisive link between psychoanalysis and structuralism. Under the banner of the “return to Freud,” he proposed rereading the Freudian discovery in light of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropology of Lévi Strauss, purging it of the biologism and ego-psychology he saw as betrayals. His Seminar, held from 1953, and his Écrits (1966) became an inescapable — and notoriously difficult — reference. After breaking with the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1963, he founded the École freudienne de Paris the following year, only to dissolve it himself in 1980. ...

Louis Althusser Louis Althusser (16 October 1918, Birmendreïs, French Algeria — 22 October 1990, La Verrière) was a French Marxist philosopher, the leading name of structural Marxism. A professor at the École Normale Supérieure on rue d’Ulm for decades, he trained and influenced an entire generation (Foucault, Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, Alain Badiou). A member of the French Communist Party from 1948, he devoted himself to a rigorous, “scientific” rereading of Marx against the humanist and historicist readings then dominant. His life was marked by severe mental illness: in 1980, during a psychotic episode, he killed his wife, Hélène Rytmann, and was declared unfit to stand trial. ...

Roland Barthes Roland Barthes (12 November 1915, Cherbourg — 26 March 1980, Paris) was a French literary critic, semiologist, and essayist, one of the central figures of structuralism and of the post-structuralist turn. Marked in youth by tuberculosis, which kept him from a regular academic career, he built an unclassifiable body of work poised between criticism, philosophy, and literature. In 1977 he was elected to a chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France. He died in 1980, weeks after being struck by a van in Paris. ...