STRUCTURALISM
91
to be done. Here again there is an illuminating parallel with existenti–
alism, and one that I think throws a good deal of light on the dif–
ference in habits of thought between French intellectuals and Anglo–
American ones (especially philosophers). Once one
sees
that the
conscious subject is isolated and alone, or that the variety of human
activity is to be accounted for by an inveterate urge to build intel–
ligible structures, everything appears in a new light, nothing is ever
the same again - but for the most part the old problems remain
problematic, at any rate from the analytic point of view. The fact that
existentialism and structuralism do not lend themselves to theoretical
elaboration may account for their unpopularity with Anglo-American
thinkers whose tastes run to the technical and the abstract.
The French, on the other hand, never seem to tire of elaboration
in the direction of the discursive and the concrete: literary philosophy
permits the repetition of the same truth in a variety of ways, philoso–
phicalliterature and
belles lettres
permit its demonstration in a variety
of contexts. The best Structuralist writers have developed these forms to
a point of great finesse. Jacques Derrida, the most recent star of the
movement, exemplifies the philosophical mode brilliantly in his col–
lection
D ecriture et la difference,
published in Paris last summer;
Barthes remains the master of the literary mode, and his lecture on
"La Mythologie de la Tour Eiffel," given during his stay in the
U.S. this winter, was a perfect example of it. In the vein of his
earlier
Mythologies,
it showed that while structuralism may leave
unchanged the structure of the world at large, it
structures
for us the
various parts of the world with which we come in contact - a process,
in Barthes' own words, of "conquest by the intelligible." Its great
contribution has been to provide a strategy for this conquest, to claim
once again for intellect a territory we had all but abandoned to the
absurd.
