2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE ANACLASTIC ILLUSION OF A TRANSCENDENTAL UNITY
of survival: the concept of meaning as generated by a “closed field of signs” goes directly
against philosophy’s whole conceptualization of the subject by shifting the responsibility
for a philosophical answer outside of philosophy itself. If successful, Structuralism would
really constitute the endpoint of a trajectory philosophy undertook very long ago. Ricoeur
contends that the challenge is doomed to fail because the “postulate” of the closure of the
semantic field will never be able to account for the content that language, when seen as a
mediator, allows to convey, nor for the practices that recover that content in the historically
mediated linguistic exchange. We do not know, yet, whether Structuralism can answer raise
up to this challenge. What we do know, however, are the its precise terms: the relationship
between closure and content is the crucial issue at stake, and the “termination” of philoso-
phy or the “termination” of Structuralism is the prize to be awarded.
7. The anaclastic illusion of a
transcendental unity
This discussion of the rather difficult relationships between Lévi-Strauss’s project and
the philosophical paradigms provided by Hegel and Kant makes clear that if the reduction
of meaning to meaningless elements vindicated by the structural analysis avoid the formal-
ist pitfalls it does, on the other hand, open up a whole new series of problems. Moreover,
these problems do not consist in idle speculations on the possible philosophical implica-
tions of the analysis of myths, but rather impinge on the very conditions of possibility of
structural analysis and, by consequence, on the scientific status of its findings. No self-
standing structural analysis of myths is possible unless the ontological status of the struc-
ture that the analysis retrieves is specified and the epistemological relationship that enables
the anthropologist to discover it is fully clarified. It is certainly true, as Hénaff, for example,
has remarked, that what the philosophers refuse to acknowledge is that there is “no refusal
of an interpretation of contents in the structuralist approach, but rather an impossibility of
carrying it out because structuralism cannot propose an interpretation which would consti-
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