Introduction à Acta Structuralica : Phenomenology and Structuralism
Résumé
The relationship between phenomenology and structuralism has generally been pictured as one of opposition, even antagonism. To take one example, Michel Foucault wrote in the English preface to The Order of Things: « If there is one approach that I do reject […] it is that (one might call it, broadly speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity – which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness » (Foucault 2002, xv). Perhaps as a result of such positions, structuralists and phenomenologists have tended to ignore their respective concepts and fundamental assumptions. As Sémir Badir writes in these pages, « on the whole, phenomenologists rarely read the works of semioticians or linguists; as to the knowledge that semioticians have of phenomenology, one has to admit that it is often superficial » (Badir, infra).
0Despite this mutual ignorance (which in any case seems to be subsiding, cf. Bordron 2011, Denis 2011), it is possible to construe the opposition between phenomenology and structuralism more positively, in terms of their complementarity, or – in the words of Bernard Waldenfels (2005) – as a fratricide or parricide, that is to say as opposing elements which nonetheless share a common origin and genealogy. It is in this sense, for instance, that Elmar Holenstein has claimed that « phenomenology constitutes the historical and material condition of possibility of structuralism » (Holenstein 1975). This more synthetic line of research pioneered by Holenstein in the 1970s has recently regained its vigour (cf. Stawarska 2015, De Palo 2016, Aurora 2017, Flack 2018) and is the one pursued by the contributions in this issue. Its main premise is that phenomenology and structuralism emerged as pan-European, interdisciplinary traditions which, far from representing conflicting or alternative schools, developed within a wide and complex network of mutual influences at the beginning of the 20th Century.