14 - Morphology and structural aesthetics: from Goethe to Lévi-Strauss

Summary

In a 1999 article written as a tribute to Claude Lévi-Strauss for a special issue of the French journal Critique, I surveyed Lévi-Strauss's references to Goethe, and this led me to refine the thesis that - as I had already argued in the mid-seventies with regard to René Thom's morphodynamic structuralism - there exists an authentic morphological genealogy of structuralism in the history of ideas.

This is the thesis that I will develop in the present essay, taking as an example a pictorial analysis from Lévi-Strauss's Look, Listen, Read (1997). This will enable me to revisit the teachings of a thinker who has left an indelible mark on my intellectual life.

The morphological genealogy of structuralism in Claude Lévi-Strauss

In his presentation of the aims of this Cambridge Companion, Boris Wiseman recalls Claude Lévi-Strauss's assertion that there were only three structuralists in France: Dumézil, Benvéniste and himself (by the way, for Roman Jakobson there were only five structuralists in the world: Saussure, Prince Troubetskoi, Lévi-Strauss, Thom and himself), and he interprets this as a warning against the temptation to dissolve Lévi-Strauss's thinking in the homogeneous cloud 'structuralism'.

Boris Wiseman's remark is well founded. Lévi-Strauss often quite rightly set himself apart from the school of thought which Parisian intellectuals called 'structuralism' before they moved on to 'post-structuralism'. For instance, in his conversation with Didier Eribon (1991b), he drily criticises the 'ridiculous' excesses of the structuralist 'vogue' among the intelligentsia, upbraiding several of his colleagues.