2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE ANACLASTIC ILLUSION OF A TRANSCENDENTAL UNITY
tually, to point out how the text contains in itself the possibility of the inversion of the dif-
ferences on which it is based.
This brief excursus into Petitot’s and Derrida’s criticisms and positive programmes in-
dicates the range of issues that are opened up once the fixity of the structure’s center is re-
nounced in favor of a functional interpretation of the center as the pure locus of the
structural organization that is itself subjected to an ever-shifting dynamic process. More-
over, Petitot’s and, even more pointedly, Derrida’s criticism make clear that Structuralism
cannot avoid confronting this issue, lest is remains caught in a ambiguous and contradictory
situation in which it wishes to overcome the traditional philosophical grounding of mean-
ing in an a-historical, essentially “natural” truth that has always found its ultimate ground-
ing in the essential features of “man” while, at the same time, it proclaims to have finally
banished the mythological and self-delusional adoration of man from the realm of human
intellectual endeavors.
This ambiguity in well-caught by Derrida, when he points out that the structural enter-
prise, in the texts of Lévi-Strauss, has in fact two faces which are necessitated by this the-
oretical ambiguity:
Il y a donc deux intérpretations de l’intérpretation, de la structure du signe
et du jeu: l’une cherche à déchiffrer, rêve de déchiffrer une vérité ou une
origine échappant au jeu et à l’ordre du signe, et vit comme un exil la
nécessité de l’intérpretation. L’autre, qui ne’est plus tourné vers l’origine,
affirme le jeu et tente de passer au-delà de l’homme et de l’humanisme, le
nom de l’homme étant le nom de cet être qui, à travers l’histoire de la
métaphysique […] a rêvé la présence pleine, le fondement rassurant,
l’origine et la fine du jeu. 54
It is difficult to deny Derrida’s assessment when Lévi-Strauss affirms explicitly this
duplicity by asserting, for example, that the conflict between philosophy and structuralism
54. Jacques Derrida, La structure, le signe, … 427. Emphasis in the text. Among the nostalgic texts Derrida
is implicitly referring to here, are the well-known pages on the corrupting influence of writing on a
primitive society contained in Une leçon d’écriture, and commented at length by Derrida himself. See
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques…, 288 ff, and Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie…, Engl.
tr. 118 ff.
305