Abstract

The importance of Claude Lévi-Strauss for Jacques Lacan’s structuralist return to Freud has been acknowledged in the literature but only in an abstract way. This essay examines the specific form of the debt, apparent in two talks given by Lacan during a three-year span. An examination of those talks and of Lacan’s relationship to Lévi-Strauss when they were presented leads to the conclusion that Lacan developed his own theory of repetition on the basis of his encounter with Lévi-Strauss’ ideas on myth. The essay draws upon the Claude Lévi-Strauss collection at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where archival documentation points to a link between Lacan’s application of structuralism and Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of myth.

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