Preamble: what is the

structuralism?
1. Definition
Structuralism will have been one of the major currents of intellectual life in the 20th [Link]
French conjugation has a rather unique tense in the future perfect. If it indicates
usually an event is placed, in the future, before another event also to come,
it can equally denote, separately or together, the nature of a supposition concerning a
made a past or the idea of a retrospective view, in the form of an assessment.
In our case, these two additional connotations apply. We know that structuralism has
counted, but, in light of what seems to remain at the beginning of the 21st century, we are not certain of
and

the importance that she indeed had; but in the same gesture, we will agree to think
Regardless of the question, which is essential, about its real effect on contemporary thought, its
The story is completed, and we are therefore legitimized to draw up the final inventory.
It should still be added that structuralism, because it undeniably left its mark
History may remain, perhaps secretly, at work within us, and even carry unintended consequences.
explicit for the moment. To the point that one could, with Derrida and in the beautiful formula that opens
saGrammatology, saying about structuralism:
For this coming world and for what in it will have shaken the values of sign, of word
and writing, for what leads here our future anterior, there is not yet an epigraph». 1

Things get even more complicated when considering the image that our present has of
structuralism. By a curious paradox, of which we will speak of its fertility, the term evokes everything at the
the conceptual effervescence accompanying May 68 – and in this regard, one sees in him a
movement both political and theoretical – and a particularly abstract form of thought,
but the social impact seems limited, if not null. The word lends itself well to such tension: the -ism the
tilt towards all these movements (Marxism, Maoism, Anarchism, Situationalism,
and many others) that stirred minds in the late 1960s; the term structure emphasizes in
contradicts the exclusively scientific dimension of the operation and implies a certain
austerity bordering on asceticism.
These few preliminary observations justify this work. They also mark, of course,
the difficulty of a satisfactory definition, and its absolute necessity if one wants to be able to situate in
time and space are concepts that structuralism will have been. But it is still necessary
unfortunately insisting: the thing cannot be grasped, as outside of two or three
proper names, most of those we have called structuralists do not want the label, and that
everyone refuses to be reduced to a slogan, to a symbol, to a flag, asserting, with more or
less honesty, having nothing in common with each other. We will thus agree with Deleuze:
"It is better to ask: how do we recognize those we call structuralists? And what is-"
what they themselves recognize? For it is true that one does not recognize people, in a way
visible, only to the invisible and insensible things that they recognize in their own way». 2
 Let's get straight to the point, and to keep it simple, let's say that this movement, whose
the productivity period covers approximately a good twenty years, from the middle
the 50s and that of the 70s is characterized by a thesis and a conviction. The thesis: the
Language is a system whose functioning is based on identifiable and stabilized relations.
among a finite number of basic elements, the set forming a structural order allowing
the articulation, through a play of differences and analogies, between signifiers and signifieds,
acoustic signs and concepts. One conviction: this discovery of linguistics can be
extended to the entirety of cultural products, and even beyond, to the entirety of phenomena
humans. This means that there is structuralism as soon as three conceptual positions exist.
are posed together: language is a system; the whole man functions like a language; in
consequence: the linguistic order constitutive of the paradigm of analysis that must be used, to
the exclusion of all others, by the human sciences.
One can never insist enough on the strength of this assertion and its all-encompassing nature. The
Structuralism is, in the market of ideas, a strong thesis that does not tolerate half-hearted adherence.
even less the criticism, since precisely the movement is only worth it if its claims are
all together assumed.
These three elements, which constitute several identification criteria, allow us
to sketch already the outline of the representatives of structuralism and part of its history. In fact,
It can only begin with the complete elaboration, in the science of language, of understanding.
of language as a system. This comes directly from Ferdinand de Saussure and his
Course in general linguistics, written in 1916, but which only became known and disseminated from
1950s, spurred in particular by linguists Roman Jakobson and Émile Benveniste. We
One can certainly talk about a certain structuralism prior to those years, but not in the strict sense.
what we will retain here. Once this understanding of the language is accepted, it is necessary that a same
functioning to be perceived in other scientific fields, such as that of structures of
kinship, rules of literary composition, or relationships between psychic instances. This
the extension of the linguistic model took place in the 1950s through the work, among others, of
Lévi-Strauss in anthropology, Barthes in literary studies, and Lacan in psychoanalysis, all
having been preceded, in this approach, by the American ethnology of Boas and Radcliffe-Brown.
Finally, structuralism asserts itself as such at the moment when the model becomes a paradigm, and when
the scientific dimension of the explanation used, final theorization and
radicalization that culminates in the 1960s. This last period helps to understand the
continuation of the story: from the moment one of the elements of the triad indicated here begins to bend
on its basis, structuralism is in trouble: questioning the exclusively
systematic and synchronic of language - Chomsky's generative grammar; contestation of
monopoly of linguistics – the critique of logocentrism by Derrida; critique of positivism
naïve of structuralist works – the archaeology and genealogy of Foucault.
The prevalence of linguistics is, as we can see, the determining element. This means that this
discipline is undoubtedly at the source of structuralism, and also, of course, that it exists
a particularly rich structural linguistics. To the point that it is not unreasonable to conceive
structuralism as the system of the sciences of the sign, from the moment when one considers,
like François Wahl in his general preface to the collective What is Structuralism?
that the most diverse anthropological facts can enter there, but only insofar as they
go through the facts of language - that they are caught up in the institution of a system of the type
signifier/signified and lend themselves to the network of a communication – and they receive their from there
structure» .3 Claude Lévi-Strauss, in a text written in 1945, but which is truly read only in
from the moment it was reintroduced, in 1958, in the first volume of Structural Anthropology,
don't say otherwise: there is structuralism - here in the specific case of an anthropology of
family structures - when, once the scientific success of linguistics is noted, we
consider that 'in another order of reality, kinship phenomena are phenomena
of the same type as linguistic phenomena» . 4

This dual position – the success of linguistics as the only reliable human science and
understanding all human facts as analogous to language facts rests on
his tour on a privilege granted to the relationships on objects. Jakobson enjoys quoting the words of
painter Georges Braque: "I do not believe in things, but in the relationships between things"» . On 5

understand well what this means in linguistics: the meaning of a signifier does not depend on the fact
that it would unilaterally represent a signified but based on the relationship it has with the whole
of the system of signifiers. For the human sciences in general, this means that a fact
anyway – a myth or a psychic phenomenon – has no meaning for the researcher except that
if it can identify the differential structure that is established on a broader plan, that we
qualifier according to the authors of the periodic table, of the empire of signs or of symbolic instance.
In a 1967 interview, Michel Foucault, while refuting the assertion of his interlocutor
calling him a priest of structuralism, acknowledges to be at most its altar boy, and gives
immediately a definition of the movement that confirms Jakobson's idea. Structuralism would be
thus "an analysis not so much of things, behaviors and their genesis, but of relationships
that govern a set of elements or a set of behaviors» , on the condition again
6
one
once this set is designed as analogous to the linguistic system, an analogy that grants to
any object has the status of a sign, and therefore allows us to conceive of structural study as
a semiology. Barthes, in 1965, puts it very well and very simply, opposing a form
the dissemination of the word very harmful to its actual capture:
For me, the word structuralism has a much narrower meaning: it designates in my eyes all
systematic research subject to semantic relevance and inspired by the linguistic model» 7

The triad is back in place, in reverse order: the scientific pretension of the system; the
paradigmatic position of semantics; the recognition of an inspiration, linguistics.
This set does not form a school, but it certainly designates an activity, which is defined by a
a body of methods, but above all by a goal: to make man himself explainable by producing
a structural world that copies in a sense the real world, by making it speak. Between the position of a
structure that makes visible what we could not see – the first phase of the activity–, and the
recomposition of a structural order - in the second phase, something new has been established,
and this new one is nothing less than the general intelligible» . 8
Let's clarify. Barthes does not say here that the structuralist invents structures, which would double them.
faithfully the real by making it scientifically understandable. He asserts that the real is structured
like a language, and that the primary activity of the researcher is to uncover this system lying in
the facts, and then to develop it in all its implications. Structuralism is perhaps
essentially an imitation activity» , but in a radically
9
anti-Platonist sense. In
Indeed, while Plato believes that our sensible world imitates an intelligible world that must be
to reach for oneself and what matters only to knowledge, the structuralist considers that there is not
there is a world, the one we have before our eyes, and that intelligibility is not found elsewhere
that in a shift of gaze on this unique reality, allowing us to see the grammar
internal that confers meaning to us. In the words of Derrida:
 If she were to withdraw one day, abandoning her works and her signs on the beaches of our
civilization, the structuralist invasion would become a question for the historian of ideas. Perhaps
even an object. But the historian would be mistaken if he were to stop there: by the very gesture in which he
would consider it as an object, he would forget its meaning, and that it is primarily an adventure of
regarding a conversion in the way of questioning about any object». 10

In the final essay of his Structural Journey, Milner offers a comprehensive analysis of
structuralism that usefully complements the overview we have just sketched very quickly.
lecture, very original, relies more explicitly than Barthes does on the famous allegory
from the cave of the Republic of Plato. The thesis is as follows: whereas Plato imagined a
exit from the cave - place of error and illusion - through the practice of philosophy, the
Structuralism would be defined as the position of a definitive absence of escape. The
men are confined by structures in a world they inhabit as best they can but
that they do not master, neither by the power of thought, nor by an absolute contingency of freedom,
by revolutionary action. Structuralism is a caveman thought: man is a being
structural, the language holds it, enclosed in what will be its grave. We can at most establish
the layout of the place, identify the specific relief of the cave - our world and our life - perceive
the walls. But there are no exits. Structuralism draws no despair from this.
situation. He is even in this a cheerful knowledge.
For to hold that one does not exit the Cave, that in truth there is none outside of it,
men of 1960 do not choose sadness, but joy: the real one, that of knowledge. One must
that knowledge remains possible and that true opinion remains possible, even though one does not exit
not. Or, they are possibles».
11

Let's leave it there for a first approach, sufficient at least to define our object.

2. History
When does structuralism start, and when does it end, if it even has an end? One can immediately...
rule out any fixed and undisputed determination, in that no one can claim to have founded
the movement, and that no text can serve alone as a manifesto or an inaugural act. One
can no longer consider that there would be a generation of structuralist thinkers born in the
the 1930s and necessarily and almost fatally reaching the age of producing in the
sixties. One can even less consider that there would be a 68 Thought, which would organize around
of a critical project with political scope the whole of the structuralists. Here we must stick to our
initial definition, and to some very simple factual elements. For there to be structuralism, there
First, the linguistic revolution undertaken by Saussure must be known by all and accepted.
as a revolution. Several milestones in this adventure: the linguistics of the Copenhagen Circle
who, around Louis Hjelmslev and throughout the 1930s, offers a first structural reading
the major Saussurean distinctions; the work of the Prague Circle, founded in 1926, among others
by Roman Jakobsonnfinally–
12
and here historical contingencies play a predominant role–
the American exile of this same Jakobson, who meets Lévi-Strauss in 1942 at the Free School
from the Higher Studies of New York. It took two great minds to flee Nazism for
that the transfer of a linguistic model to the entire field of human sciences can take place,
here through anthropology. Things are of course a bit more complicated, and
we will not fail to emphasize further the diversity of sources of structuralism, as well as
their meeting not so coincidental in these war years, or immediately after the war.
 The most important texts are therefore naturally those of the linguists named here,
even if their work will not be more widely known, particularly in France, until later, in
the glorious period of the movement: we can thus retain The Language of Hjelmslev , in 13
1963, the
General Linguistics Essays by Jakobson, the same year and of course the Problems of
general linguistics of Benvenisteein 141966 – all these texts grouping works sometimes
largely prior. From the moment the linguistic paradigm spreads in the sciences
In the humanities, structuralism can be found in areas as diverse as the study of systems.
familial (Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1949, that of 15
the novel
1953)the analysis of the unconscious (Lacan, Function and field
16

of speech and language in psychoanalysis, 1953)One 17

can thus consider that structuralism
was formally constituted and identifiable as such in the early 1950s.
The great period of structuralism extends from 1953 to the late 1960s. In addition to the continuation
the most important works of the authors already mentioned 18
s ,and which we will return to
for a long time, we must acknowledge the emergence, this time in philosophy, of methods or
structuralist origin processes. By a curious phenomenon, a movement that from the very beginning has
constituted against philosophy, regarded as a literary digression without scientific rigor, will
to irrigate the hated discipline, not without distortions: structuralism very explicitly inspires
the work of Althusser in his rereading of Marxit19is present, although deeply rethought,
at the Foucault of the History of Madness and of Words and Thingssit20 influences, again under
very diverse forms, the youthful works of Derriofand of Deleuze21
e . 22

Structuralism, in 1968, is the dominant intellectual movement in publishing.

but it is very marginal in teaching. It is therefore quite natural that the vast movement
The social and cultural aspects of May 1968 partly rely on him to claim a transformation in
depth of the structures of the University, in a sort of pragmatic convergence that must not
do not erase the scientific and sometimes terribly abstract character of the writings first
structuralists. A famous anecdote summarizes the debate well. A student had written on a
tableau, at the Sorbonne: "the structures do not go down to the street." Following a conference
from Michel Foucault on the notion of author, Lucien Goldmann, Marxist thinker, takes back to his
counts the quote, to which Lacan, also present that night, responds by saying 'if there is something'
one thing that the events of May demonstrate is precisely the descent into the street of the
structures» 23. What should we conclude from this? Would the theoretical nature of structuralism exclude its
political effect? Or rather, what Lacan seems to rightly say: structures determine
broadly political action, and even more the awareness that we can have from its exercise
even structuralist science. Without dwelling on this widely discussed issuee , 24

Let us first note that the articulation, in our subject, of a practical, ethical, and political dimension,
and a very formalist architecture is precisely one of the defining elements of
structuralism, in the sense that the clarification of the structures organizing, let us remember, the entirety of
human phenomenon is not without consequences on the choice of what can be changed and the implementation
in the very work of social transformation.
A beginning, a triumph, perhaps a political role, then, starting from the very beginning of the 1970s, the
beginning of a decline, which must be attempted to explain. We mentioned earlier that structuralism does not
could no longer hold if one or the other of its three fundamental theses were to weaken. If no one
It does not contest the interest of linguistics; its transformation into a paradigm is increasingly
comprises as a form of dogmatism, even of philosophical totalitarianism. One arrives at
so, for example with Derrida, to highlight the heavily metaphysical character of
structuralist logocentrism; there is a more general contestation of Lacanian dogmatism – the Anti-
Oedipus Deleuzeeor25Lyotard's libidinal economydwe claim 26the importance of
the historicity in the understanding of structures – The Archaeology of Knowledge by Foucaultt [Link], the
The positivist claims of structuralism are regarded with caution. It would be appropriate
to be more attentive to the plurality of regimes of rationalityé28 ,not to give up entirely
the contribution of phenomenology and philosophies of consciousness, to finally integrate the
structuralism as a research tool for a broader work of meaning development.
In other words: against the monopoly of language and the position of a structuralist truth, the
diversity of registers, the variety of interpretations, which is not unrelated to a
underground Nietzscheanism that, around 1970, would come to light and quickly prove to be
incompatible with structuralist monolithisme .Finally, 29
and of course, the first agents of
the end of structuralism are the authors themselves in their commendable effort of revision and
critique of their own approach, particularly in Lacan, whose approach is in this regard
exemplary, in the most neutral sense of the term. Thus, from Seminar XX, he contests the model
linguistics, in favor of a reflection on the failures of language, which will unfold in him.
two directions, that of mathematical writing and that of a theory of the letter. The clarity of its
the proposition will often be altered, even annihilated: but the break with structuralism
orthodoxy is assumed, in favor of what he calls a linguist craft, a sort of duolingual craftsmanship,
opposed to the science of language from its beginningss 30.
One could, if one insists, consider all these attempts as post-structuralist that have not
of meaning that after the structural revolution and can only be understood within the framework of a commitment
partial to his theses. In this regard, the year 1972 is indeed determining, as a turning point.
The three elements of the structuralist triad suffer throughout the 1970s. To such an extent that Lévi-
Strauss, when giving a title to his third collection of articles, chose The Distant Gaze,
instead of the structural anthropology that was supposed to come back to him. He justifies himself by stating,
apparently without regret, that in 1983, the word 'structural' was emptied of its content» . 31

3. Movement
A definition, a story that indeed has a beginning and an end. If we have until now, by
convenience, talking about structuralist movement, we must now question the term, and evaluate the
degree of unity of thought and inspiration that can truly be found among the so-called authors
"structuralists." The problem mainly arises from these same authors: many
consider - without doubt the somewhat easy pose of the solitary spirit - that placing them under the same
to label someone as a certain researcher is an abuse of language; others deny it, sometimes despite
the evidence, their belonging to structuralism; others can indeed be located
At the edge of the current, margin included or not, it depends.
The first element to credit the effective unity of structuralism is factual: it has
something happened around 1960, between authors who together produced an effect of
many, publishing often with the same publishers, sometimes in the same month. They have established more than
less willingly the idea that a new wind was blowing, certainly heralded by the emergence well
anterior to linguistics, psychoanalysis, and ethnology, but which could only
overthrow the old structures of knowledger 32.
Unity of effect does not mean uniqueness of theses. However, one can still affirm that the three
the elements retained above indeed form a corpus, and that the divergences, although sometimes significant,
are interpretations of the relative weight between these three elements, and they disappear if we take
the pain of looking at the works in question from the outside. Foucault, after emphasizing
somewhat heavily that he himself, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, and Althusser have not much
In common, it is admitted that at least negatively, one can indeed identify a shared position:
questioning of the subject, through the revelation, beneath it or within it, of an unconscious organizing its
language, its myths, its cultural productions or its drives. Foucault then adds that there is
structuralism when this unconscious is thought of as a system from which it is possible to extract
logical structuress .This33 position, seemingly very favorable to an almost unity
The philosophical aspect of structuralism is seriously amended by Foucault, in the sense that, by reducing
the movement on the critique of the subject dilutes it in a much broader and older gesture, of which
The roots are to be found in Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and perhaps Heidegger. Even more:
Foucault constantly refuses to be labeled a structuralist, even as he says he situates himself
in the critique of the subject, and he recognizes a form of proximity at least methodological with
some of the more outspoken representatives of the movement. This denial must be viewed with suspicion,
and if we take it into account, it does not impose any censorship on us in the reading of the texts.
It is important in this regard to distinguish different moments in the history of this complicated relationship. If,
Up to the Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault expresses a clear benevolence towards the
structuralism, if it also uses, in a specific context, the notion of structure, its attitude
began to move, in the late 60s, and he tends to multiply signs of annoyance in the face of
his assimilation to a movement whose essential theses he does not believe he shares. The reason for
disagreement revolves around the design of language. Structuralism retains the idea that 'it
speaks "everywhere, and that the structure of language is found, modified, in all structures
social sciences. Structural science is then thought of as a form of interpretation meant to
bring the studied social structure back to its fundamental grammar, what we will properly call
the structure, a rather ambiguous notion, between sensitivity and intelligibility, present in reality but
revealed by the scientist's gaze. For Foucault, reality is not structured like the
language, in an analogical mode, but through discursive formations, which are of language. There is not
So nothing to interpret, but everything to describe, nothing to explain, but everything to untangle. Difference
of accent undoubtedly, as the two orientations share at least their refusals: that of the subject, that of
a naive conception of freedom, one of a meditative vision of philosophy, one of the
primacy of conscience.
In 1966, Foucault admits that Lacan and Lévi-Strauss have also influenced his work.
breaking with the belief in meaning, and establishing, at the heart of reflection, the idea of system,
true object he said, of philosophy, which he defines well as a structure. Structuralism
is the theory of "one", that of "anonymous thought, knowledge without a subject, theory without
identity» ,34like a continuation of the spatial organization of knowledge that prevailed in the age
classic. In this regard, it is not surprising that Foucault massively uses the notion of structure
in The Words and the Things, not in its contemporary sense, but to describe history.
natural of the 17theAnd by a curious effect of mirror, one cannot help but think that Foucault
he retrieves for his argument the definition he gives of structure among classical naturalists:
The structure is this designation of the visible that, by a sort of pre-linguistic detour, allows it
to transcribe into language» . It is also 35
significant that we find in this same
the most beautiful and most laudatory definition of structuralism: "it is the awakened consciousness
and worried about modern knowledge 36
» .
 Perhaps irritated by the amalgams that may imply his supposed adherence to this movement,
Foucault, in a way that is both brutal and sudden, breaks, in 1969, with this initial attitude: "I
I will first confide in you something that seems to be unknown in Paris, which is that I am
post-structuralist. Except in a few pages that I regret, I have never used the word
structure. When I talk about structuralism, I speak of it as an epistemological object that
is contemporary to me» 37.
Extraordinary bad faith, manifest mood, but also a turning point that Archeology of
knowing, in its controversial ending, will confirm, and even consolidate. Foucault would not be
structuralist for two reasons: first, it does not deny the subject in the name of a grand discourse
universal, but he seeks to multiply the centers of subjectivity by defining 'the positions and
the roles that the subject could occupy in the diversity of discourse» and then
38
he does not deny
the history in the name of the permanence of structures, but it tends to modulate, for each object, the
historical temporalization. Archaeology would be a form of multiplied structuralism and
historicized, breaking away from its Lévi-Straussian model. The object of the conflict thus defined, it is appropriate
not to give more importance than they deserve to the numerous irritated remarks of
Foucault, thrown at all those who persist in calling him a structuralist. The essential thing is that the orientation
general archaeology, because it seeks to analyze something like the unconscious of
Knowing is in an obviously related report with works that are explicitly structuralist. And the
Foucault's rather dishonest complaints will not change anything.
The case of Derrida is also significant, but simpler to decide, in the sense that he has not
never said structuralist and especially to attribute the term to him is truly a mistake.
Derrida acknowledges that he feels a common belonging with – the list is important here – Lacan,
Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze and Lyotard, and that it "marks the alliance » with
39
those
the same person he will take on in his texts from the 60s. His reading of the structuralists will be
loving and faithful, while deconstructing the principle of their statements.
The controversy between Derrida and structuralism is not one of outright opposition. For
a reader unfamiliar with the singularities of deconstruction, the difference between what Derrida says
From writing and what Saussure says about language, nothing is obvious. Therefore, one must proceed cautiously.
without denying the influence or the effect that such a powerful and fruitful intellectual current has on
structuralism may have had on the beginnings of deconstruction. Two motives can be identified to justify
Derrida's distancing from structuralism.
The first reason is fundamental and pertains to the concept of structure. In his words: "The
structure, or rather the structurality of the structure, although it has always been at work, has
always found neutralized, reduced: by a gesture that consisted of giving her a center, to the
report to a point of presence, to a fixed origin» 40

Structuralism stops halfway across the stream. A structure, by definition, is a play of

infinite differences, which cannot tolerate the immobility of a center or an organizing power.
Ricoeur says of structuralism that it is a transcendentalism without a transcendental subject. Derrida
shows that in reality, notably through the primacy of the voice, structuralism refuses to allow itself
losing in one's own game, and reinstates the analogy of a subject. Lévi-Strauss is undoubtedly targeted
here, as the pages that Derrida dedicates to the lesson of writing of Tristes tropiques will show.
First parricide.
The deconstruction of structuralism relies on the concept of structure to counter it.
the illusion of full presence, in a way it serves as a hyperbole of structuralism,
as long as he gets rid of his linguisticism, which constitutes the second reason for
the gap. This attitude, which Derrida claims, against appearances at times, to distance himself from, consists of
apply the linguistic paradigm to any conceptual field, or even to any field of analysis.
Linguisticism, due to its systematic and even obsessive nature, is built on a model
of the language stripped of dispossession and the absence brought about by the transition to writing. It
is merely a camouflaged form of phonocentrism, a system of differences that is established by the
rejection of another system of differences, less pure, improper. The attack against Saussure will crack
the language and reveal the contamination of the voice by the graphic phenomenon. Second parricide.
Do the cases of Foucault and Derrida definitively condemn the idea of a list of authors?
Structuralists, labeled as such, undeniably? Let's proceed cautiously and make a distinction.
First, we can consider as first-circle structuralists those who embrace the word and
the thing: Lévi-Strauss s 41,Lacan, Barthes, and Jakobson. In a second circle, we will place the
thinkers who share the essence of the project but reject its possible dogmatism: Foucault and
Althusser in philosophy, Richard, Genette, and Todorov in literary analysis. Finally, in a
third circle, we will position the sometimes very critical friends of structuralism: Derrida, Deleuze and
to a lesser extent Lyotard. Arbitrary classification in part, and obviously debatable,
but allows us to prioritize, in the following pages, our different references, taken according to
the cases in the three circles.
3. The Text
From literature
The structure, the sign, then the Text, especially dedicated to a capital letter as Barthes does,
would have replaced the ancient idols of Conscience, Self, and Author, substituting a
structural dogmatism to a metaphysical dogmatism? We do not think so: on one hand in this
that these concepts, which only make sense in a differential system, excluding any position
central; on the other hand, in that they have no fixed character, and will operate in a very
variable depending on the structural fabric considered.
The concept of Text is simply another way of saying the system of signs, which influences it.
towards a specific interest in the written thing, even if, according to the principles of semiology, nothing
does not prevent extending the method of structural analysis to non-literary objects, such as
Barthes does it in his Mythologies, repeating, regarding our culture, the operation that Lévi-
Strauss had conducted in his Mythologiques.
The text replaces the work, just as the scribe replaces the Author. Barthes multiplies the
approaches: the Text is a methodological field, a movement, a work of production, it is
plural never stops at a signified. It 'reads itself without the inscription of the Father»42 , and prefers the
network to the organism, space to time, the reader to the Author, enjoyment to consumption.
Theoretical reference here: Lacan; literary reference, once again, Mallarmé. Barthes hesitates on it.
sees between an anhistorical position of the Text, as the structure of structures - the field - and its
more directly modern and literary, as if the Text in general were better seen in
the most recent texts – we should of course mention Genet, Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, and before them
Proust. Fertile hesitation: today's literature is the liberation of the signified, making explicit
a text that has always structured the works, which are only the tail of a comet. Barthes
Moreover, apply structural reading to all texts, including those of Racine or Michelet, which
do not embody in any way a literature dedicated to language.
The principles of structural analysis are established from a methodological point of view in
several important texts, including "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" by Barthes,
in 1966, and the same year Structuralism and literary criticism. Barthes proposes here a model
analysis that involves successively extracting from the considered narrative its levels of meaning,
functional units and their specific syntax, each of these elements constituting the mechanisms
from the textual machine where everything works: "a narrative is made up of functions: everything, at
of varying degrees, it means. This is not a question of art, it is a question of structure.» , 43

it has nothing to do with the author's talent, but rather with the logic of the literary object in
general. The actions, the characters, the narration, the storytelling system as a whole, are themselves
also placed in this higher order of the relationship, which produces meaning but also emotion, the
formality of the technique used never erasing sensitivity to the aesthetic effect proper to
text. Genette subscribes to these principles: however, he modifies them towards greater attention to
the contribution of hermeneutics, to that of all these disciplines which require enriching the approach
immanent to the texts, more strictly structuralist, through an understanding of their cultural meaning
and historical. These nuances, certainly important, only come into play after a double allegiance: to
the Savage Mind by Lévi-Strauss, which Genette comments on at the beginning on one hand; to the
linguisticism on the other hand: 'the structural character of language at all levels is quite
universally accepted today for the 'structuralist' approach to expression
literary imposes itself so to speak» . 44

A science of literature is possible, which identifies the empty meaning that underlies, like a
floating significant, the full senses of the worke [Link] can cover all types of narratives, hence the
richness of the readings offered by Barthes, Genette, or in a structuralism more sensitive to
emotions and bodies, by Jean-Pierre Richardit can
46
illuminate a fragment or an entire work,
to become either a hyper-technician or more lyrical depending on the object considered.

Mythologies
Text analysis, on specific cases, extends the domain of linguistics of which
we have indicated above the paradigmatic nature. This broadening allows Barthes to
think about what works in the news story or the Eiffel Tower, and to Lévi-Strauss to consider
the myths, however rarely written, like the variants of an absent Text.
Let's take an example. In the article 'Wine and Milk' from Mythologies, Barthes
47
writes immediately
that wine is a very versatile function, France's originality in this regard being to grant to
this drink has a status that goes beyond its most immediate functionality. Wine and its use
become in France like a syntactic norm: anyone who wishes to deviate from the belief in
Wine will have to explain itself. Wine establishes a collective morality, a setting, and a ceremony, almost.
a reason of state. The analysis is quick, somewhat anecdotal, but its principles are not, and
point by point corresponding to those who organize literary analysis. In both cases, a
a form of textuality is identified, which allows this national singularity of wine to function,
like a Word in a Language.
The work of Lévi-Strauss is of a completely different magnitude, and it cannot be summarized in a few
observations the thousands of pages of Mythological, in which he will verify the hypothesis
structural in the detail of an empirical research on the largest possible number of myths.
More precisely: eight centers, thirteen myths, and a thousand variants, to which one can add
all the myths studied in The Jealous Potter, Story of Lynx, and even in The Way of
Masks.
The fundamental principle of a myth is to think of every problem as analogous to others.
problems arising on other levels. At this first level of myth construction is added the
the structure of the links established between its different versions. The myth thinks the world on the
mode of homology, but above all he thinks of himself, according to a logic that it is possible to
reconstruct well although it remains unaware of all the vectors of the myth. The analysis
structural must then occur at three levels: understanding the first-order code, that of
language, which organizes the narrative of the myth; then grasp the second-order code that structures this narrative
from the point of view of its content and its narration; finally identify the third level, constituted
by "the system of axioms and postulates defining the best possible code, capable of
to give a common meaning to unconscious elaborations» . The anthropologist 48
elaborates
thus the rules of reciprocal translatability of several myths, chosen precisely according to
of their cultural distance.
Structural anthropology aimed to refine this model of a mythic logic, based on the
based on an observation: while anything can happen in a myth, and its content seems completely
Contingent, even fanciful, myths are quite similar from one end of the earth to the other.
The necessary structure of myths is thus constituted by a logic of combination that one
can be said scientifically, by isolating constituent units, called mythèmes.
 The mytheme is a word of words, according to the curious expression used in Anthropology.
structural ofuxit 49has a primary meaning derived from language, but also at the same time
a super-meaning coming from the relational structure where it takes place. The analysis will have to
So certainly understand and recount the story, but above all she will have to reconstruct this logic.
second that forms the syntax of the myth. In all the cultural and temporal variations that a
myth undergoes changes throughout its existence, this syntax will constitute the resistant invariant that will allow
in the sense of the myth of maintaining oneself, despite episodes of confusion and muddlen . 50

4. The space
In all its forms, structuralism functions as a topic, that is to say as a
work of cutting, distinctions, relational analyses, which situates the structural elements
on a plane, and therefore in a space. There is indeed a form of spatial obsession here, which does not have the
explicit status of the concepts that we detailed in the chapter, but which underlies the
the very manner of structuralism.
This trend obviously appears in the lexicon of combination, inventory, of the
mapping, very prominent in Lévi-Strauss and Althusser for example. It is exemplary
developed by Foucault, which appears to be all the more significant as he is the most historian
from the band, and one might think that temporality mattered more to him than spatiality.
The reference to space runs through all of his work and serves as a deterrent to
the regard of the naive belief in the continuity of history or in its regular unfolding;
consistently, Foucault plays space against time, the enunciative level against
the internal organization, the surface against the contentu [Link] archaeology of the field where they are given
discourse and practices do indeed have as their object the history of these and therefore a close link with time
historical; but, in the search for the conditions of enunciation, Foucault clearly rejects
genetic analysis and the determination of sources in favor of a spatialization of history, where
discursive formations are related not to their supposed origin but to others
instances of the same field. The study of conditions, of a transcendent nature, does not imply
not at all to look behind or before the given. Not the history of ideas, but the
topography of the domains.
This sharing between two methods that oppose everything – archaeology and doxology – can, if we
reformulated in terms of established disciplines, to be understood as opposition between geography
and the history. The first corresponds to the description of the archaeological order, to the second that
of chronological successions regardless of the heterogeneity of historical time; to that one
the analysis of 'enunciative periods» , to52 this the study of "these units so confused that they are called
epochs» . As history
53
allows the time of concepts to unfold, archaeology, in
good geography, cuts, articulates, delineates in their specificity areas, certainly located in
the story, but each time they have their own game and rules, given in time throughout
the surface of a determined field. Two ways to apprehend the same historical object.
But the timelines and successions are, in the case of archaeology, freed from any
perspective of progress, they are located in a movement 'which borrows nothing from the purpose of
the knowledge or to the orthogenesis of knowledge54» . The organization of a set of rules, in
the practice of speech» does55
not need to rely on an origin and a horizon: it can be
determined in history as the characteristics of a particular field.
 We see the topological inflection that archaeology imposes on the historical discipline. It is not
neither necessary nor desirable to reconstruct chains of inference, as if
so many different formulations, often opposing rules of use, strategic possibilities
if divergent, could be quietly rewritten into a continuum. Archaeology does not
consider essentially the story "to freeze it» , to pin 56down the limits and boundaries
from a given period, as if it were a matter of surveying a territory. It strives to
to free oneself from these two detrimental models for capturing breaks, which are the linear model
of speech and that of the stream of consciousness.
Structuralism would thus be, even when it engages in history, of geographical inspiration,
as if it granted a principled privilege to synchrony over diachrony. In linguistics
Saussurean, the two dimensions of language study are possible and necessary. The analysis
structural privileges the invariants of the system, and in that the synchrony. But that does not mean
absolutely no disregard for the evolutions or the negation of history, which is true even in
linguistics, as Jakobson emphasizes by challenging the equivalence between static and
synchronous: "A change is therefore, at its beginnings, a synchronous fact and, as long as one
one must avoid oversimplifying, the synchronic analysis must encompass the changes
linguistics» . Althusser
57
positing a succession of structural models in Marx; Foucault
thinking of the episteme as a temporarily stabilized historical structure; Barthes in
marking the novelty of the narrative structure of In Search of Lost Time is not said otherwise
Choose. Without structure, we understand nothing, and even nothing about temporality.
The controversy between Sartre and Lévi-Strauss must be read in this light. While the latter considers
that history only makes sense as a story-pour, as a narrative
58
linked to the structural vision of a
group of individuals, that one presents history as a global dialectical product of a subject-man
of itself; while anthropology is concerned with describing the mental space of an unconscious
savage and, as such universal, existential philosophy gives itself a mystical image of
time, which only works for our own civilization.
Structuralism is a dynamic synchronism. As such, it cannot deny the fact that the
structures work not only in the system of their differentiations, but also in
articulating with events or institutions that are not always of essence
linguistics. Undeniable limit of structuralism, as emphasized by Foucault: the structural space of
Text is not independent of a political history, it therefore has a form of thickness,
of architecture, stratification, which does not lead to renouncing the privilege of the spatial model,
but rather to give them a new dimension. The word archaeology already said it, but we
this idea can also be significantly found among the first circle structuralists, notably in
their interest in geology, or in the geological dimension of their work.
Lévi-Strauss explains in Tristes Tropiques that geology played a major role in
her becoming an anthropologist, due to the sensitivity it implies for a fine understanding of
terrain, which weaves history and geography, the surface and the deepur.59This discipline, like
psychoanalysis and Marxism understood the essential: 'the true reality is never the most
manifest» .60
A more anecdotal reference perhaps, which has the interest of being roughly contemporary with
Sad Tropics, is found in the first Seminar of Lacan: "You cannot imagine, my
poor friends, what you owe to geology. If there were no geology, how would we reach
to think that one might go, at the same level, from a recent layer to a very
previous? It wouldn’t be a bad idea, I mention it in passing, for every analyst to make the purchase of a small
geology book» . 61

Foucault finally uses this idea of geology in a more militant sense: to understand the ground of
our thinking is still the best way to outline paths for thinking differently. Geology
philosopherwhatpmore
62
than really structural, but bearing a possible aim for the
structuralism in its entirety: a science of signs can precede a politics and a
ethics, action being effective only through the clear perception of the general syntax of the world
human.