2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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tute an ultimate sense, nor can it propose a [privileged] level of reference that would con-
stitute a level of truth.” On the contrary, the only kind of “interpretation” that a mythologist
can provide is to evidentiate the pertinent traits within a group of myths, their transforma-
tions, etc., and “thereby to understand how a group of myths constitutes the representation
of given world and strives to provide answers to some questions, not as statements, but in
the very play of those representations.” 41 The “privileged level” sought by the philosopher
survives, we might add, but it is not is not a level at all, and certainly not a level of reference
to be found outside the structure: rather it is the play itself of the elements within the struc-
ture. The “truth,” if there is any room left for this term, is the truth of the structure as seen
from the inside, in the rearrangements of the various places that the terms can occupy.
Therefore, two strictly related questions are left unanswered, at this stage of the anal-
ysis, by Lévi-Strauss: (a) what is the reality of the structure whose play commands a group
of (transformations of) myths and (b) what is the status of the truth about that very structure
that is being discovered, about its play, when it is discovered by the anthropologist who is
necessarily positioned outside it?
However, the existence of these problems, and even their formulation in rather classi-
cal terms we have just given, does not entail that the solution to the problem must be found
within the confines of philosophy strictu sensu. The philosophical solutions we have
sketched above with reference to Kant and Hegel, and most especially the use of the con-
cepts of subject and object, might not be adequate for Lévi-Strauss’s structural analysis. In-
deed, we should rather expect the opposite to be true, if the structuralist project is to be
consistent with its professed goal of bringing philosophy to an end. In other words, it might
be the case that the effort to unfold the implication of the structural method, still to a large
extent absent in the work of the early 1960s (e.g. before Le cru et le cuit) will bring about
a rethinking, a non-philosophical rethinking of those capital philosophical categories as
subject and object. At any rate, the questions raised by the philosophers, and the impossi-
bility to fit Lévi-Strauss’ model within either a Kantian or Hegelian model, brings up a
problem whose solution is crucial to Structuralism, a problem that may be summed up in a
41. Marcel Hénaff, Claude Lévi-Strauss…, 197.My emphasis.