STRUCTURALISM
83
comes to dominate all discussions of it (as for example it did most
strikingly a year ago at the Johns Hopkins conference), namely the
status of the
subject.
The subject, first of all, is a linguistic category, the "vantage"
(to use an expression due to Benveniste) of verbs in the first person.
As
such it is important only for purposes of clarity in reference: it
avoids confusion between persons. (Strictly speaking the first person
refers to the subject "I"; the other "personal" subject
you
and the
"nonpersonal" subject
he,
however, do not lend themselves as readily
to overinterpretation.) The subject is a vantage-point in nonlinguistic
senses too: I look at the world from a particular point of view, I act
upon it from a particular strategic location. So far there is no difficulty
about the matter. But - whether under the influence of Greek philos–
ophy, or Christianity, or Renaissance humanism - Western man
began to look for a more substantial embodiment of the subject than
that provided by his own contingent and transient body as percipient
and agent, or by his linguistic habits as a mere point of reference.
Just as the assertion that the world is a message now elicits the im–
mediate response "from whom?" so the intelligibility of the world
seems to be addressed to something more basic and more permanent
that the momentary and evanescent subject of particular utterances
or particular actions.
If
God had to be invented to originate and
sustain the world, man had to be invented to perceive and under–
stand it. Men therefore began to ask "What am
n"
in a nonlinguistic
sense, much as they also asked "What is matter?" or "What is
gravity?" They began, in other words, the long and frustrating at–
tempt to get the subject out into the world so that it could be
examined objectively. But this involves a logical mistake and can
easily lead to a p6ychoanalytic disaster.
The psychoanalyst among the structuralists is of course Lacan,
and he has devoted a large part of his work to the problem of sub–
jectivity. Lacan's career began at least as early as Levi-Strauss', and
it is evident from his collected writings
(Ecrits)
1966) that he repre–
sents a genuinely independent source for structuralism. His repu ta–
tion in France rests mainly on his Seminar at the
Ecole Pratique des
Hautes Etudes,
whose members hold him in a regard reminiscent of
that in which Wittgenstein was reputedly held by his students at
Cambridge. Lacan has been in no special hurry to get his ideas
into general circulation, and there is no systematic development to
