Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (42 page)
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Authors: Patrick Wilcken
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BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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The ease with which continental scholars moved between art and science was also alien to the more compartmentalized Anglo-American approaches. In the year that
La Pensée sauvage
was published, for instance, Lévi-Strauss joined forces with Roman Jakobson in a structural analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s short poem “Les Chats.” After much correspondence on the subject, the two men sat down together in Lévi-Strauss’s study and coauthored an essay deconstructing the poem. A playful exercise, perhaps, but one which ended up being published in
L’Homme
, the house journal of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie, launched by Lévi-Strauss, Émile Benveniste and Pierre Gourou in 1961 as a French equivalent to
Man
in Britain and
American Anthropologist
in the United States.
32
La Pensée sauvage
was published, for instance, Lévi-Strauss joined forces with Roman Jakobson in a structural analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s short poem “Les Chats.” After much correspondence on the subject, the two men sat down together in Lévi-Strauss’s study and coauthored an essay deconstructing the poem. A playful exercise, perhaps, but one which ended up being published in
L’Homme
, the house journal of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie, launched by Lévi-Strauss, Émile Benveniste and Pierre Gourou in 1961 as a French equivalent to
Man
in Britain and
American Anthropologist
in the United States.
32
While British and American critics often seized on errors of scholarship and interpretation of sources, in France Lévi-Strauss was both attacked and lauded on strictly philosophical grounds. Some of the responses were as dense and theoretical as Lévi-Strauss’s original work. In a debate between Lévi-Strauss and Paul Ricoeur, at that time one of France’s leading philosophers, published in the 1963
Esprit
devoted to a critical reading of
La Pensée sauvage
, Ricoeur told Lévi-Strauss:
Esprit
devoted to a critical reading of
La Pensée sauvage
, Ricoeur told Lévi-Strauss:
You salvage the meaning, but it is the meaning of non-meaning [
le sens de non-sens
], the admirable syntactical arrangement of a discourse that says nothing. I see you at that conjunction between agnosticism and a hyper-intelligence of syntax. This is what makes you at once fascinating and disturbing.
33
Ricoeur described Lévi-Straussian structuralism as sometimes a “Kantianism without the transcendental subject”—that is to say, a disembodied version of the mental constraints that Kant argued gave shape to our perception of reality—at other times an “absolute formalism.”
34
Lévi-Strauss had long fought against the tag “formalism,” which he felt misinterpreted his position. As to “Kantianism without the transcendental subject,” he liked the label, even adopting it in the first book of the
Mythologiques
quartet,
Le Cru et le cuit
, where he also cited approvingly another Ricoeur description of structuralism. Adrift from “the thinking subject,” Lévi-Strauss’s “categorising system” was “homologous with nature”—“It may perhaps be nature,” Ricoeur concluded with an air of mysticism.
35
34
Lévi-Strauss had long fought against the tag “formalism,” which he felt misinterpreted his position. As to “Kantianism without the transcendental subject,” he liked the label, even adopting it in the first book of the
Mythologiques
quartet,
Le Cru et le cuit
, where he also cited approvingly another Ricoeur description of structuralism. Adrift from “the thinking subject,” Lévi-Strauss’s “categorising system” was “homologous with nature”—“It may perhaps be nature,” Ricoeur concluded with an air of mysticism.
35
By the end of the
Esprit
encounter, Ricoeur was fascinated by structuralism, but ultimately disillusioned:
Esprit
encounter, Ricoeur was fascinated by structuralism, but ultimately disillusioned:
I see an extreme form of modern agnosticism. As far as you are concerned there is no “message” . . . you despair of meaning, but you console yourself with the thought that, if men have nothing to say, at least they say it so well that their discourse is amenable to structuralism.
36
The vacuum of meaning, the absence of will, the erasure of the “subject”—at that time the focal point of philosophical thinking—these were aspects of structuralism that unsettled some.
37
But others, especially a new generation of thinkers who were at the beginning of their intellectual careers, were intrigued. Not only was Lévi-Strauss challenging the assumptions that had underpinned French thought for a generation, but he was proposing their radical opposites. Against the humanist orthodoxy, he was creating an intellectual space where people, himself included, were merely vessels for ideas, transition points of culture. These ideas had been aired to a mixed response through the 1950s. The time was now ripe for an assault on the philosophy of France’s most famous thinker: Jean-Paul Sartre.
37
But others, especially a new generation of thinkers who were at the beginning of their intellectual careers, were intrigued. Not only was Lévi-Strauss challenging the assumptions that had underpinned French thought for a generation, but he was proposing their radical opposites. Against the humanist orthodoxy, he was creating an intellectual space where people, himself included, were merely vessels for ideas, transition points of culture. These ideas had been aired to a mixed response through the 1950s. The time was now ripe for an assault on the philosophy of France’s most famous thinker: Jean-Paul Sartre.
A philosopher who wrote of the nausea of being, the struggle for authenticity and personal freedom in a godless world; a very public intellectual whose private life became the stuff of legend; a onetime communist activist who ended up a Maoist sympathizer—it is hard to think of someone more at odds with Lévi-Strauss’s ideas and persona. In public Lévi-Strauss praised Sartre as a great thinker who had “a prodigious capacity to express himself in the most diverse genres: theater, newspapers, philosophy, the novel.”
38
Privately, Lévi-Strauss was scandalized by Sartre’s outré lifestyle. While Lévi-Strauss was in America, Sartre’s New York lover Dolorès Vanetti asked him if he liked Sartre. “How do you think I could like him after reading
She Came to Stay
?” he replied, referring to Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel,
L’Invitée
, a fictionalized account of her ménage à trois with Sartre and her student Olga Kosakiewicz. “It’s Sartre portrayed in his entirety and he comes over as a vile bastard.” Dolorès duly passed on one of Lévi-Strauss’s rare indiscretions to Sartre himself, who mentioned it in a letter to de Beauvoir. “Thanks a lot, my fine friend, for the portrait,” Sartre added drily.
39
38
Privately, Lévi-Strauss was scandalized by Sartre’s outré lifestyle. While Lévi-Strauss was in America, Sartre’s New York lover Dolorès Vanetti asked him if he liked Sartre. “How do you think I could like him after reading
She Came to Stay
?” he replied, referring to Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel,
L’Invitée
, a fictionalized account of her ménage à trois with Sartre and her student Olga Kosakiewicz. “It’s Sartre portrayed in his entirety and he comes over as a vile bastard.” Dolorès duly passed on one of Lévi-Strauss’s rare indiscretions to Sartre himself, who mentioned it in a letter to de Beauvoir. “Thanks a lot, my fine friend, for the portrait,” Sartre added drily.
39
In 1960, Sartre published the second of his great philosophical tracts,
Critique de la raison dialectique
(
Critique of Dialectical Reason
), sections of which had already appeared
Les Temps modernes
. Written in part as a response to Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of his work, it attempted the daunting task of marrying existentialism and Marxism into a coherent whole. On its publication, he sent a copy to Lévi-Strauss with the dedication “To Claude Lévi-Strauss. In testimony of a faithful friendship.” He added that the book’s “main questions were inspired by those which occupied you, and especially by the way you posed them.”
40
Sartre had cited Lévi-Strauss approvingly several times during the course of
Critique de la raison dialectique
, including a chapter entitled “Structures—The Work of Lévi-Strauss,” with examples drawn from
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
. There were even hints of structuralism’s influence on Sartre, as he edged toward a more restricted, system-dominated view of freedom.
Critique de la raison dialectique
(
Critique of Dialectical Reason
), sections of which had already appeared
Les Temps modernes
. Written in part as a response to Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of his work, it attempted the daunting task of marrying existentialism and Marxism into a coherent whole. On its publication, he sent a copy to Lévi-Strauss with the dedication “To Claude Lévi-Strauss. In testimony of a faithful friendship.” He added that the book’s “main questions were inspired by those which occupied you, and especially by the way you posed them.”
40
Sartre had cited Lévi-Strauss approvingly several times during the course of
Critique de la raison dialectique
, including a chapter entitled “Structures—The Work of Lévi-Strauss,” with examples drawn from
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
. There were even hints of structuralism’s influence on Sartre, as he edged toward a more restricted, system-dominated view of freedom.
Assisted by Lucien Sebag and Jean Pouillon, Lévi-Strauss devoted his seminar at the École pratique des hautes études to an analysis of
Critique de la raison dialectique
over the winter of 1960-61, reading and rereading Sartre at the same time as he was writing
Le Totémisme aujourd’hui
and
La Pensée sauvage
. To the latter he ended up adding a final, relatively free-floating chapter—“History and Dialectic”—dealing specifically with Sartre’s book. In the preface he described his critique “as a homage of admiration and respect.”
41
But far from returning Sartre’s compliment, Lévi-Strauss’s assessment was brutal.
Critique de la raison dialectique
over the winter of 1960-61, reading and rereading Sartre at the same time as he was writing
Le Totémisme aujourd’hui
and
La Pensée sauvage
. To the latter he ended up adding a final, relatively free-floating chapter—“History and Dialectic”—dealing specifically with Sartre’s book. In the preface he described his critique “as a homage of admiration and respect.”
41
But far from returning Sartre’s compliment, Lévi-Strauss’s assessment was brutal.
Densely woven with the jargon of another intellectual age, making some passages virtually incomprehensible to the modern-day nonspecialist reader, Lévi-Strauss attempted to bulldoze Sartre’s entire project in the space of two dozen pages. His lines of attack were diverse: a defense of “analogical” primitive thought styles against Western dialectical reason; an attack on the solipsistic focus on the subject; more assaults on the primacy of history and Sartre’s fundamentally ethnocentric outlook. At base many of the arguments were retreads of points he had already made in
Race et histoire
and
Tristes Tropiques
, but by now he had both refined and amplified his attack. His most cutting remarks were couched in anthropological Victoriana: Sartre’s privileging of Western history over that of the Papuans was akin to “a sort of intellectual cannibalism much more revolting to the anthropologist than real cannibalism.” His attempt to oppose the primitive and the civilized was an opposition that “would have been formulated by a Melanesian savage.”
42
Lévi-Strauss felt he was now working on a far broader canvas than the Marxist/existentialist discourse of historical forces and the possibilities of personal emancipation. For Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, along with much of the Parisian intellectual elite, was engaged in a parochial debate about a few hundred years of Western mores and history. Bus stop queues, strikes, boxing matches—the examples from which Sartre built his “philosophical anthropology”—seemed provincial in comparison to structuralism’s global reach.
Race et histoire
and
Tristes Tropiques
, but by now he had both refined and amplified his attack. His most cutting remarks were couched in anthropological Victoriana: Sartre’s privileging of Western history over that of the Papuans was akin to “a sort of intellectual cannibalism much more revolting to the anthropologist than real cannibalism.” His attempt to oppose the primitive and the civilized was an opposition that “would have been formulated by a Melanesian savage.”
42
Lévi-Strauss felt he was now working on a far broader canvas than the Marxist/existentialist discourse of historical forces and the possibilities of personal emancipation. For Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, along with much of the Parisian intellectual elite, was engaged in a parochial debate about a few hundred years of Western mores and history. Bus stop queues, strikes, boxing matches—the examples from which Sartre built his “philosophical anthropology”—seemed provincial in comparison to structuralism’s global reach.
Sartre, one of the era’s most combative intellectuals who had often engaged his opponents in very public debate, gave no immediate response. He referred to the piece only several years later, after the structuralist boat had already sailed, lamenting that Lévi-Strauss had misunderstood his ideas and unfairly discredited historical research. Much later Lévi-Strauss would play down the controversy. “It was never much of a feud . . . ,” he told a reporter at the
Washington Post
. “The Sartre disciples said that nothing can be known without history; I had to dissent. But it is not that I don’t believe in history, I just feel there is no privilege for it.”
43
Washington Post
. “The Sartre disciples said that nothing can be known without history; I had to dissent. But it is not that I don’t believe in history, I just feel there is no privilege for it.”
43
At the time, though, the significance of “History and Dialectic” was immense. There was a palpable sigh of relief in intellectual circles. Finally someone had dared to openly attack the man who had dominated French intellectual life for a quarter of a century. Sartre’s rallying call for authenticity, commitment, acts of pure will in a time of gathering political disillusionment had begun to grate. With one sweeping gesture, Lévi-Strauss’s challenge had broken the spell. To Sartre’s “Hell is other people,” Lévi-Strauss would retort, “Hell is ourselves.” “Man is condemned to be free,” wrote Sartre, but for Lévi-Strauss the whole idea of freedom was illusory.
Although Lévi-Strauss was only three years younger than Sartre, there was a sense that a generational shift was under way, a rupture of both style and substance. Power was passing from a chain-smoking, pill-popping haunter of Left Bank café society to a sixteenth-arrondissement aesthete. Pitted against the image of the grandstanding intellectual was the sober technician, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu recalled in an interview in the 1980s:
It is true that philosophers like Sartre are still admirable and perhaps also important: the person who speaks when no one knows what to say—in times of crisis, etc.—but at the same time we were a bit tired of that kind of discourse, as prophets can also speak in the void, at the wrong time. So someone [that is, Lévi-Strauss] telling us, “See, we can understand, we can analyze, there are conceptual tools to understand things that seemed incomprehensible, unjustifiable, absurd”—I think that that was a very important thing.
44
The promise of scientifically based humanities over philosophical rhetoric—though in reality Lévi-Strauss mixed both with abandon—was potent for young thinkers searching for a foothold in what had become a highly politicized activity. Technical terminology of “signs,” “signifiers” and “oppositions,” which had been road tested in linguistics, a discipline with true scientific pretensions, seemed more concrete than the interpretive terms from German philosophy like “ontotheology,” “Dasein” and “noema” that they replaced. Like logical positivism after the First World War, structuralism offered to clean up philosophy, rid it of its vagueness and solipsistic reflections; but unlike logical positivism, it was built not on empiricism, but on high rationalism.
In his “ethnography” of French academic life,
Homo Academicus
, Bourdieu places Lévi-Strauss’s attack on Sartre at the center of seismic changes in the intellectual ecology of the times. It signaled the rise of the social sciences, the ascendance of
anthropologie
(as opposed to the narrower, more specialized
ethnologie
) as a grand synthesizing discipline. Together with linguistics and history, anthropology was supplanting philosophy’s unquestioned superiority. The journal
L’Homme
, along with the already well-established history periodical
Les Annales
, had begun overtaking
Les Temps modernes
, which was “relegated to the status of purveyor of partisan, Parisian literary essays.”
45
Seen in this light, Lévi-Strauss’s continuing assault on the importance of history was a battle fought within a battle, a tussle for leadership within the newly emergent elite of the humanities.
Homo Academicus
, Bourdieu places Lévi-Strauss’s attack on Sartre at the center of seismic changes in the intellectual ecology of the times. It signaled the rise of the social sciences, the ascendance of
anthropologie
(as opposed to the narrower, more specialized
ethnologie
) as a grand synthesizing discipline. Together with linguistics and history, anthropology was supplanting philosophy’s unquestioned superiority. The journal
L’Homme
, along with the already well-established history periodical
Les Annales
, had begun overtaking
Les Temps modernes
, which was “relegated to the status of purveyor of partisan, Parisian literary essays.”
45
Seen in this light, Lévi-Strauss’s continuing assault on the importance of history was a battle fought within a battle, a tussle for leadership within the newly emergent elite of the humanities.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL TIDE was turning. Once more, a clear choice was opening up between what writer and philosopher Alain Badiou defined as the two branches of twentieth-century French thought: the Bergsonian philosophy of “vital interiority, a thesis on the identity of being and becoming,” and the Brunschvicgian philosophy of “the mathematically based concept”—or theories which took subjective experience as their point of departure as opposed to theories which looked at relationships between objects and concepts in the world. One sought meaning; the other, form. Lévi-Straussian structuralism, unambiguously pitched at the formal end of the spectrum, represented a radical break from the post- World War II orthodoxy.
46
46
Ironically, given the severe, antihumanist tone of all his work, Lévi-Strauss’s philosophical reflections threw up the image of a persona. He had set about delineating a style of thinking, but he ended up with a figure—not so much a noble savage as an indigenous bon vivant. A connoisseur and sensualist with a taste for avant-garde cut-up techniques, Lévi-Strauss’s savage had an intuitive grasp of what Western thinkers had toiled for centuries to articulate. A logician of nature, he perceived “as through a glass darkly” (
comme à travers un nuage
) principles of interpretation that were only then becoming evident through the high tech of the times—simple computers and low-powered electron microscopes. A
bricoleur
, he recalled the ingenuity of the French artisan—a dying breed in an era of rapid, standardized industrialization.
47
comme à travers un nuage
) principles of interpretation that were only then becoming evident through the high tech of the times—simple computers and low-powered electron microscopes. A
bricoleur
, he recalled the ingenuity of the French artisan—a dying breed in an era of rapid, standardized industrialization.
47
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