2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE CHALLENGE OF CLOSURE
on any concrete substratum and cannot be filled by any content. Which is precisely why
Ricoeur’s coined his famous definition: because he wanted to stress that the formal grid is
senseless—and not just meaningless, but deprived of any philosophical sense, motivation,
and justification—unless it is supplemented by an analysis of the subject that uses it. In
Ricoeur’s perspective, moreover, this subject cannot be the a-historical transcendental sub-
ject bequeathed by Kant, but must be conceived as a historically situated being which op-
erates within a horizon of meaningfulness continuously renewed by the interplay between
the individual hermeneutic efforts and the set of discourses and symbols handed down by
tradition.
Ricoeur’s definition, in other words, summarizes in a single phrase the theoretical di-
lemma of structuralism: either it is a formalism that cannot be used to explain how a human
being operates in the world unless it is supplemented by a (possibly hermeneutic) under-
standing of the subject,or it converts into an empty idealism of forms that will not explain
anything because it will be always cut off from a reality that it cannot possibly account for
having excluded it from the analysis in the first place.
We may tempted to leave aside any Kantian connotation, Lévi-Strauss’s approval not-
withstanding, and remark that Ricoeur seems to have forgotten that structuralism differen-
tiates itself from formalism precisely because while form is defined in opposition to
content, “structure has no distinct content; it is the content itself apprehended in a logical
organization conceived as a property of the real.” 32 There is no need, therefore, to postulate
the existence of a separate investigation that would deal with the content, since structural-
ism itself is such an investigation. These remarks seem to push structuralism’s conception
of structure towards the other axis of the philosophical opposition presented by Ricoeur,
namely toward the Hegelian system. This thesis has been proposed, in the context of the
same debate, by Kostas Axelos, who suggested that Hegel is the father of Structuralism in-
sofar as he is the author of “a speculative genealogy, a phenomenology of spirit, this gene-
32. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie Structurale deux, …139; Engl. tr. 115. Emphasis added. The passage
quoted concludes the first programmatic paragraph of the essay (originally published in 1960)
quoted at length above where Lévi-Strauss develops his distinction between formalism and structuralism.
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