ABSTRACT
Of all the various forms of structuralism that he has inspired, Lévi-Strauss feels closest to that of Jean-Pierre Vernant and his colleagues at the Gernet Center. 1 However, the word “structuralism” brings with it a Weltanschauung—an “ideology” as the Indo-European mythologist Georges Dumezil would call it—that Vernant does not accept. The “ideology” entails linguistic theories derived from Ferdinand de Saussure and applied to a “structuralist” agenda principally by Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, the philosopher and historian of ideas Michel Foucault (1926–1984), the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), and the Marxian philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–1990). 2
