2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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S TRUCTURES (AND SPACES)
tention to the philosophical concept of game (rather, jeu). However, Delruelle does not tar-
get the concept of jeu itself as used by Lévi-Strauss and he deals even less with the formal
constructs of game-theory, besides some passing remarks. Instead, he starts from a very
rough characterization of the concept, and sets forth to defend it against the French critiques
of Lévi-Strauss coming from philosophical quarters (Claude Lefort, Paul Ricoeur, Gilles
Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida). The formal rapprochement between the mathematical con-
cept of game and Lévi-Straussian structures that I will suggest in this chapter and in the
next, however, is far from being uncontroversial. On the contrary, many a commentator ex-
ploit Lévi-Strauss’s lack of precise analysis of the concept of game to claim a very loose
and only “metaphorical” (in an almost derogatory sense) connection between any rigorous
mathematical idea and the basic concepts of structuralism. Any solution to the issue, there-
fore, will have to proceed through a patient work of analysis of the sources. 4
We can start by remarking that Lévi-Strauss seems to add a particular slant to the con-
cept of rule, because whenever he mentions it in a more or less rigorous game-theoretic
context he tends to oppose the rules of the game to the subject that will follow them. For
example, in the same essay from which we quoted above, he notes that game theory would
help make clear that anthropology consists
exclusively of the study of rules and [has] little concern with the nature
of the partners (either individual or groups) whose play is being patterned
after these rules. [...] What is important is to find out when a given a player
can make a choice and when he cannot. (ib.)
In other words, Lévi-Strauss seems to stress the interpretation of a rule as a constraint rad-
4. Edouard Delruelle, Claude Lévi-Strauss et la philosophie (Bruxelles: de Boeck, 1989). For a very general,
and sometimes generic, introduction to Lévi-Strauss’s use of mathematics see the recent article
by Mauro W. Barbosa de Almeida,” Symmetry and Entropy. Mathematical Metaphors in the Work of
Lévi-Strauss,” Current Anthropology, 31, 4 (1990) 367-377 and the trenchant reply by Terence Turner,
“On Structure and Entropy: Theoretical Pastiche and the Contradictions of «Structuralism»,” Current
Anthropology, 31, 5, (1990) 563-568. Turner charges Lévi-Strauss with an incoherent application of
mathematical concepts necessitated by a reductive interpretation of structure that divorces it “from the
individual social and cultural forms that are its putative bearers” (566). He proposes alternative renditions
in “Narrative Structures and Mythopoesis: A critique and reformulation of structuralist approaches
to myth and poetics,” Arethusa, 10 (1977), 103-163, and “Le denicheur d’oiseaux en contexte,”
Anthropologie et Sociétés, 4, (1980), 85-115; the latter essay is a direct critique of Lévi-Strauss’s analysis
of the Bororo myth that opens The Raw and the Cooked.