Provisional Conclusions

What do these orientations mean? Where are they leading? Seen from a certain distance, it seems to me that what is happening is a reaction to the disillusionments produced by certain earlier ideological choices. The justification of ‘scientificity', which is concerned with the search for ‘objective' meaning, was intended to be a response to the limits reached by existential phenomenology which took over from the philosophies of consciousness. However, without realizing it, these were shaken by the discovery of the unconscious. With hindsight, it might be asked whether these phenomenologies were not suffering from the illusions of consciousness. There was a willingness to recognize the unconscious, but on the condition that it paid a price. The price Freud proposed was unacceptable, so one had to choose instead its Saussurean, or even biological version. The Saussurean unconscious came after the studies of the Vienna circle (Troubetzkoy), which saw salvation only in formalism. Wittgenstein, for his part, lent his support to the critique of the unconscious with his theory of logical positivism. One could not ‘explain' what language referred to; one could only say what things looked like through its bewitching effects.

Another major disappointment was Marxist thought and the terrible revelation concerning the blindness of the intellectuals who had adhered to it. Their involvement meant that they had blotted out, more or less deliberately, the crimes of those who were supposed to have drawn inspiration from this system of thought in order to justify their actions (F. Furet1). The liberation from Marxist thought and its illusions based on the so-called scientific character of historical materialism led to a denunciation of history and its teleological versions. Once history had been relegated to the wings of the intellectual scene, structure occupied the terrain left vacant. Who does not recall the controversies of the time? Lévi-Strauss took Sartre to task, finding an al