Sandford, Stella (2024) Wild thought : Lévi-Strauss, Freud and Metzger. In: Osborne, Peter, (ed.) Futurethoughts : critical histories of philosophy. Kingston upon Thames, U.K. : CRMEP. pp. 75-95. (CRMEP Books, (6)) ISBN 9781739145187

Abstract

This chapter addresses a central ambiguity in Lévi-Strauss’s 1962 book Wild Thought (La pensée sauvage). On the one hand, and although it is contrasted with Western scientific thought, ‘wild thought’ (or ‘thought in the wild state’) is not ‘the thought of a primitive or archaic [non-Western] humanity’ but is a universal form of thought ‘always present and alive among us’. On the other hand, however, Lévi-Strauss does seem to identify wild thought with the ‘science of the concrete’, also called the ‘logic of sensation’ – another ‘distinct mode of scientific thought’ – that he finds exemplified in the symbolic systems of what he sometimes calls the ‘indigenous thought’ of various peoples. Is ‘wild thought’ the universal substratum of all thought? Or is it manifested in a ‘logic of sensation’ that stands as a critical rejoinder to the presumed universality of the restricted logic of Western scientific thought? This lecture will address this ambiguity via a critical comparison of Lévi-Strauss and Freud, specifically Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. It will argue that both Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology and Freud’s method of dream analysis can be interpreted as exposing the logical operations of diverse symbolic systems of differences that nevertheless share certain universal features, leading to a complicated, multi-layered view of the unconscious transcendental conditions of thought – a view that acknowledges the contingency and specificity of Western cultural forms. But is this wild thought? Or do we need something like Hélène Metzger’s conception of ‘spontaneous thought’ to understand how, or even that, these systems are animated and potentially transformed by what might have a better claim to the title of ‘wild thought’ than anything in either Lévi-Strauss’s or Freud’s ultimately structural analyses?

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