ABSTRACT
Like Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss focused on la langue rather than on la parole. But Saussure had studied die signs of language both sychronically, that is, in their static interrelations and permutations, and diachronically, that is, as they evolve over time. Lévi-Strauss' Marxism took off from the premise that life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. Since men must live before they can think, their thoughts and beliefs necessarily originate from their economic productions. Lévi-Strauss always looked to Sigmund Freud's sociology and philosophy rather than to his later clinical theory or data. Jacques Lacan, too, stressed social influences and the early Freud who studied hysteria; he focused on Freud's language rather than on symptomatology. By now Lévi-Strauss' original structuralism has been amended almost beyond recognition. Lévi-Strauss himself is particularly dismissive of the "ministructuralists". In the Finale of L'homme nu, he accused them of applying structural techniques without "real" structures.
