Claude Lévi-Strauss

French anthropologist (1908–2009), founder of structural anthropology, and Merleau-Ponty's friend and colleague at the Collège de France. In *Signs*' "From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss" (1959), MP reads Lévi-Strauss as the successor to Marcel Mauss and as the philosopher who has most clearly seen that structure is neither an abstract idea nor a brute fact but a "concrete, incarnate system" — "not Platonic," not a "fixed archetype," but a form that organizes a society from within.

Key Points

  • Structure, not archetype: Lévi-Strauss's "structure" is distinguished from Platonic archetypes. "To imagine imperishable archetypes which dominate the life of all possible societies would be to make the mistake the old linguistics made when it supposed that there was a natural affinity for a given meaning in certain sonorous material" (Signs, p. 117). Structures are concrete systems of equivalence, not abstract forms.
  • Saussurean model: Structure is modeled on Saussure's diacritical sign. "When Saussure used to say that linguistic signs are diacritical — that they function only through their differences, through a certain spread between themselves and other signs and not, to begin with, by evoking a positive signification — he was making us see the unity which lies beneath a language's explicit signification, a systematization which is achieved in a language before its conceptual principle is known" (Signs, p. 117).
  • The subject does not possess the structure; the structure possesses the subject: "The subjects living in a society do not necessarily know about the principle of exchange which governs them, any more than the speaking subject needs to go through a linguistic analysis of his language in order to speak. They ordinarily make use of the structure as a matter of course. Rather than their having got it, it has, if we may put it this way, 'got them'" (Signs, p. 117).
  • Lived + objective: Lévi-Strauss's method requires "joining objective analysis to lived experience" (Signs, p. 119). The anthropologist must be in the field, because the structure is visible only when the observer's own categories are put at risk. This is the source of MP's concept of the lateral universal.
  • Structure as philosophy: "For the philosopher, the presence of structure outside us in natural and social systems and within us as symbolic function points to a way beyond the subject-object correlation which has dominated philosophy from Descartes to Hegel" (Signs, p. 123). MP takes Lévi-Strauss's anthropology as a philosophical event in its own right.

Details

From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss

MP's essay traces the development from Marcel Mauss's insight (that the social is "symbolic" and can be read as "an efficacious system of symbols") to Lévi-Strauss's systematization. Mauss had the right intuition but "looked for the principle of exchange in mana" — an emotive concept that reproduced the society's own theory rather than analyzing its structure. Lévi-Strauss, drawing on Saussure, gives Mauss's intuition the structural form it needed.

MP's enthusiasm is philosophical, not merely anthropological. Structuralism is, for MP, a way of thinking that overcomes the Cartesian subject-object correlation — the same problem that phenomenology has been trying to overcome. "By showing us that man is eccentric to himself and that the social finds its center only in man, structure particularly enables us to understand how we are in a sort of circuit with the socio-historical world" (Signs, p. 123).

The Lateral Universal

From the Lévi-Strauss essay MP derives the concept of the lateral universal: cross-cultural understanding proceeds by the anthropologist's self-transformation, not by the subsumption of the other under prior categories. "It is a question of constructing a general system of reference in which the point of view of the native, the point of view of the civilized man, and the mistaken views each has of the other can all find a place" (p. 120).

Lévi-Strauss himself may not have put it in these phenomenological terms, but MP argues (via the unthought-of reading principle) that structuralist anthropology implies this philosophical consequence. "This is too much philosophizing, whose weight anthropology does not have to bear. What interests the philosopher in anthropology is just that it takes man as he is, in his actual situation of life and understanding" (Signs, p. 123).

The 1954–55 Critique: Relativism as Self-Refutation

The 1959 "From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss" treatment is MP's most sympathetic reading. But the critical framework that underlies it is worked out five years earlier in the 1954–55 Institution course (merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity), where Lévi-Strauss's "Race and History" (1952) is treated much more critically. Key target: Lévi-Strauss's claim that cultural events are essentially probabilistic and that one culture's "cumulativity" versus another's "staticness" is a matter of reference frame, not substance. MP reads this as a covert reintroduction of the Cosmotheoros position that relativism was supposed to refuse.

The decisive formulation is at [74 verso]: "The absolute opacity of history, like its absolute light, is still philosophy conceived as closed knowledge. The one who observes the opacity sets himself up outside of history, becomes a universal spectator." Lévi-Strauss's relativism is diagnosed as structurally identical to Hegel's absolute knowledge — both posit a subject outside history who can survey the whole.

MP's sharper formulation, from an Institution course endnote: "relativism, insofar as professed, denies itself, because, by doing justice to other cultures, it attests the universality of the culture that does justice to the others." The relativist cannot avoid the contradiction of claiming a universal knowledge of cultural particularity.

MP also criticizes Lévi-Strauss's treatment of kinship as probabilistic structure: "Lévi-Strauss's thesis: no difference between the events. The series of events are probabilities and chance" (10). Against this, MP argues that kinship — and culture generally — is instituted, not merely probable. "Institution in the strong sense is this symbolic matrix that results in the openness of a field, of a future according to certain dimensions" (10).

The result: by 1959 (in Signs), MP has found a more conciliatory formulation of the critique — one that credits Lévi-Strauss's structural concept while still working around his epistemological framing. But the underlying disagreement is already in place in 1954–55, before MP and Lévi-Strauss became Collège de France colleagues in 1959. The Signs essay is a diplomatic refinement of the earlier critique, not a change of position.

The Open Question of the 1960s

Signs' engagement with Lévi-Strauss is MP's most sympathetic reading of structuralism. Had MP lived, the structuralist turn of the 1960s (Foucault, Althusser, Lacan, Barthes) would almost certainly have required MP to re-address the relation of phenomenology to structuralism. MP's 1959 reading establishes that on the terms MP valued — structure as carnal, pre-reflective, lived-and-objective at once — structuralism is an ally of phenomenology. The later structuralism's turn against phenomenology (especially Foucault's 1966 The Order of Things) would have found MP a difficult but not impossible interlocutor.

Connections

  • develops Saussure's diacritical principle as anthropological method
  • is read by MP as the model for lateral-universal
  • is the paradigmatic case of MP's claim that "every science secretes an ontology" (Signs, p. 99)
  • shares with MP a rejection of the subject-object correlation
  • colleague of MP at the Collège de France
  • successor to Marcel Mauss in MP's reading of the history of French anthropology

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1964-signs — "From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss" (pp. 114–125), especially pp. 117–123 (structure, Saussurean model, lived/objective method, philosophical consequence); "The Philosopher and Sociology" (pp. 98–113) as the methodological background.