A Way of Comparing Levi-Strauss and Lacan

Authors

  • Yvan Simonis Université de Laval, Emeritus, Anthropology, and psychoanalyst, GIFRIC

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.3.1.1406

Abstract

This essay attempts to compare and contrast the different conceptions of the human subject in Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, with specific reference to the notions of art and the act. For this occasion I will draw on my reading of structuralism, developed elsewhere, as a “logic of the aesthetic perception of the social.” Structuralism apparently distances itself from the act, but it presupposes the act as a foundation. Psychoanalysis takes the act as its point of departure and seeks its art. In each case, the human subject is conceived differently. Nonetheless, the exercise appended to this essay proposes a space in which these two approaches can perhaps encounter each other on the common ground of structure.

Author Biography

Yvan Simonis, Université de Laval, Emeritus, Anthropology, and psychoanalyst, GIFRIC

Yvan Simonis received his PhD in Paris in 1967, and is currently a teaching analyst of GIFRIC and an analyst of Freudian School of Québec (EFQ). He is an anthropologist and has been chairman of the Laval University’s Department of Anthropology (1976-1979), and in 1977 he founded the journal Anthropologie et Sociétés, acting as editor-in-chief from 1977 to 1988. He became a member of GIFRIC in 1995 and retired in 1999.

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Published

2010-12-28

How to Cite

Simonis, Y. (2010). A Way of Comparing Levi-Strauss and Lacan. Konturen, 3(1), 149–161. https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.3.1.1406