Lacan and Levi-Strauss are often mentioned together in reviews of French structuralist thought, but what really links their distinct projects? In this important study, the author shows how Lacan's ...famous 'return to Freud' was only made possible through Lacan's reading of Levi-Strauss. Via a careful and illuminating comparison of the work of the psychoanalyst and that of the anthropologist, Zafiropoulos shows how Lacan's theories of the symbolic function, of the power of language, of the role of the father and even of the unconscious itself owe a major debt to Levi-Strauss. Lacan and Levi-Strauss is much more than an academic study of the relations between these two thinkers: it is also a superb introduction to the work of Lacan, setting out with detail and lucidity the major concepts of his work in the 1950s.
Postlude Zafiropoulos, Markos; Holland, John
Lacan and Levi-Strauss or the Return to Freud (1951-1957),
2010
Book Chapter
As soon as show how the Name-of-the-Father helps stabilize subjective identity through the fruitfulness of the unary trait-for example, in the experience of the mirror-can say that the subject is a ...function of the Other of the unary trait; or, in other words, the son of the dead father. The critical rereading of Lévi-Strauss' texts can begin. A new period opens up in the less complete universe that contains the Lacan will even go to the point of criticizing a naïve materialism that makes Lévi-Strauss see a "doublet" between the structures of thought, the brain, and even of the world. The staging of the world is carried out under the primacy of the laws of the signifier, which, as have seen, impose their system on the imaginary register of specular identification. This investment of the specular image is a fundamental stage of the imaginary relation, fundamental in that it has a limit.
PDF