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late 1920s . Why did it take so long, indeed, twenty years, maybe
more than that, for this to break out? Levi-Strauss had already
begun his work before the war as well.
JK:
Because of political reasons : you had the war. At that moment
there was a sociological way of thinking, more rooted in the every–
day and looking for immediate and simple causalities, that pre–
vailed . Existentialism lasted after the war, for historical reasons
and because of economic difficulties.
PM:
So that a movement that claimed to interpret history was itself
part of the determination.
JK:
Precisely.
It
couldn't distance itself.
PM:
It
has been said that Sartre was unable to think the uncon–
scious.
JK:
Absolutely. I think that Sartrean thought has no means to deal
with the unconscious and, similarly, with everything which is ma–
terial and formal, in other words, with the whole problem of the
modern arts, of poetry, of plastic art. The unconscious as a logic,
as a language, which is the essence of the Freudian discovery, is
entirely foreign to Sartrean thought.
PM:
And yet in Marxism, even in orthodox Marxism, there is, im–
plicitly at any rate, even before Lacan tells us so, a notion of the
unconscIous .
JK:
It's not the same unconscious . I think that what seduced us in
Marxism was rather a materialist way of reading Hegel and a
concept of negativity.
It
was and still is a matter of finding the
agent, the agent of process, the agent of history, the agent of the
unconscIOus.
So, to summarize, there were some lacunae that had been
pointed out in each - Marxism, structuralism, Freudianism - and
at the same time, some positive elements which had been brought
in by the others. For example , Marxism had undergone a grafting
of the theory of structuralism, but structuralism had undergone a
grafting of the theory of subjectivity. In structuralism the subject
was missing, so the subject was brought in in the form of different
technical considerations: in linguistics, for example, the subject of
enunciation, the speaking subject in literary texts, etc , There was
a sort of exchange that enriched the three disciplines.
PM:
In a sense, then, structuralism provided the link between
Marxism and Freudianism that had never been accomplished
before.
