2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE ANACLASTIC ILLUSION OF A TRANSCENDENTAL UNITY
ward an “absolute” truth in the traditional sense and turn toward a truly non-philosophical
reinterpretation of philosophy and epistemology tout court. Jean Petitot seems to opt for the
first alternative, if we are to judge from a recent essay, where he says:
Le “tournant morphologique” su structuralisme opéré par la théorie des
catastrophes ouvre un vaste territoire qui reste encore à explorer
entièrement. Il permet de constituer le structuralisme théorique en «système
physique». […] Loir de devenir obsolète comme le voudrait un certain
irrationalism contemporain, le structuralisme garde présentement toute sa
pertinence et toute sa force. Son programme de recherche est loin d’être
épuisé, bien au contraire, puisqu’à travers la théorie de l’(auto)organisation
et la physique mathématique des phénomènes critiques il est en train
d’établir sa jonction avec le sciences naturelles. 51
The “present-day irrationalist” Jean Petitot alludes to in the text is of course Jacques
Derrida, who instead chooses the second option and decides to challenge the Structuralist
ambition to objectivity. He presents an argument that aims to unveil the illusory character
of an “absolute” structuralist enterprise, e.g. of a structuralism where the center enjoys an
absolute, non-structural status.
I will discuss Derrida’s critique mostly on the basis of his criticism of the notion of text
and its principles of structural organization. It should be emphasized, in order to appreciate
the relevance of Derrida’s effort to our present theme, that the “textual” character of Lévi-
Straussian structures is stressed—and quite naturally so, given the linguistic foundations of
Structuralism—by Lévi-Strauss himself, for example in Finale, where he says: “In other
words, the operations of the senses have, from the start, an intellectual aspect, and the ex-
ternal data belonging to the categories of botany, geology, zoology, etc. [e.g. the non-phe-
nomenal elements that are rearranged and transformed by the mind at work in the mythical
51. Jean Petitot, “Approche morphodynamique de la formule canonique du mythe,” L’Homme, 106-107,
(1988), 46. Petitot reiterated his position in 1993, in occasion of a round table on the “canonical formula
of the myth” organized by Emmanuel Désveaux and Jean Pouillon where he pointed out that “if
the categorization process [that generates the transformations/oppositions, etc.] is implemented as a
neural network, then the generative potentials become truer potentials in the physical sense, i.e. they
become “energy” functions whose minima determine the terms of the categorization.” See Jean Petitot,
“Note complémentaire sur l’approche morphodynamique de la formule canonique du mythe,” L’Homme,
135, july-sept. 1995, 18.
301