Concept and Form, Volumes 1 and 2 by Peter Hallward

Author:Peter Hallward [Hallward, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-84467-932-4
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-01-28T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ONE

François Regnault

Structure and Subject1

We were structuralists, we believed in science, we were not humanists.

Was it possible to reconcile these three positions? This is what I will undertake to analyze.

It seems to me that this was possible thanks to a new theory of the subject. This is what I will undertake to demonstrate.

I STRUCTURE

Structuralism, in the form that it took in the late 1950s, and in the form that young students of literature and philosophy could encounter it, without asking themselves where exactly it came from, was slowly to render phenomenology, the dominant philosophy of the day, empty and obsolete. Phenomenology retained consciousness as its main category. It was all about consciousness in those days, about lived experience, about intention, about perception.

And then suddenly the unconscious and structure crept in, ‘on tip toes’ (à pas de colombe, as Nietzsche would say). Logic, which had survived in the guise of formal logic as a scholastic remnant, now regained its immemorial rights, augmented by, that is to say re-founded by, the great mathematicians and logicians of the twentieth century: Russell, Frege, Gödel. Mathematics could claim to be of interest to philosophers once more, if only as a means of formalization – a formalization of arithmetic, of geometry, as well as of syntax and language: Hilbert, Peano, Carnap. The sciences themselves, which had been considered as a general category in the lifeless form of ‘scientific method’, with Claude Bernard as their guardian angel, now powerfully reasserted themselves at the centre of philosophical concerns, reinforced by the gravity of epistemological problems, or the guarantee of the History of the sciences. There was Gaston Bachelard, on the one hand, whose concepts were easy to grasp for non-specialist philosophers (though he himself knew his science perfectly well). On the other hand there was Alexandre Koyré, whose history of the sciences returned us to Galileo and Newton, and to mathematical physics. Georges Canguilhem, meanwhile, who had always applied himself with rigour to the domain of natural history, biology and medicine, introduced us to the formation and history of scientific concepts, such as, for instance, the concept of the reflex.2

I remember that at the time the very notion of structure – which was starting to receive enough attention to warrant becoming the object of a class at the École Normale Supérieure in 1960–61 given by the eminent specialist of Logic, Jules Vuillemin (who later became a Professor at the Collège de France) – had seemed somewhat opaque to me, especially since Vuillemin insisted that it made hardly any sense outside the domain of algebra. But we soon discovered that Claude Lévi-Strauss had established its credibility in 1949, in his book on the kinship relations of societies that were then still called primitive;3 that psychoanalysis, as taken up by Dr. Jacques Lacan, contained structural considerations, if only in Freud’s two topographies; and that Marxism, finally, soon to be renewed by Louis Althusser, was putting structure in a commanding place at the centre of the field that Marx had himself inaugurated as the critique of political economy.

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