Abstract:
This essay attempts to compare and contrast the different conceptions of the human subject in
Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, with specific reference to the notions of art and the act.
For this occasion I will draw on my reading of structuralism, developed elsewhere, as a “logic of the
aesthetic perception of the social.” Structuralism apparently distances itself from the act, but it
presupposes the act as a foundation. Psychoanalysis takes the act as its point of departure and
seeks its art. In each case, the human subject is conceived differently. Nonetheless, the exercise
appended to this essay proposes a space in which these two approaches can perhaps encounter
each other on the common ground of structure.