Morphologie, transformation et traductibilité Le concept de mise en série chez Cassirer, Wind et Lévi-Strauss

National audienceThe confrontation of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of the symbolic forms and Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology makes necessary to clear their definitions of morphology transformation traductibility. We will expose the morphological field where Cassirer’s aesthetics grows by placing him in relation with Goethe, who represents as for Lévi-Strauss himself an important source. Defining the concept of transformation supposes to follow how he modifies the key ideas of the German poet and biologist, by taking account of the new point of view provided by the theory of groups of transformation which the mathematician Felix Klein developed into the “circle of Erlangen”. Then we will give an idea of the manner by which Edgar Wind, a brilliant student of Cassirer, invents a morphological aesthetics to provide art history with a methodology, and we will give some examples of the application of the concept of building series of pictures into the field of art history. We will interrogate the global functioning of the tables of Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, Erwin Panofsky’s well-known iconological interpretation of the Melencolia I of Dürer and then, by contrast, the creation of a virtual and “then” real series of masks through a ruled imaginative variation, which Lévi-Strauss creates to give sense to a particular Amerindian mask which he finds during his investigations. To conclude, we will interrogate the problems appearing by the definition of transformation as traductibility in both Cassirers’ and Lévi-Strauss’ semiologies. We will ask for the use both make of the model of translation in linguistics so as to compare different forms of structural homologies