Sean Homer, Critical Thinkers: Jacques Lacan, New York: Routledge, 2004.
Lévi-Strauss argued that what was significant in this process was not so much the exchange of real people – of actual women – but the way in which women were transformed into signs and operated within a system of symbolic exchange. The exchange of women operated like a language – a formal system with its own rules and regulations which could not be infringed but at the same time remained unconscious to the individual system users. In other words, there is an unconscious structure that determines people’s social position and regulates their relationships without their being aware of it. Lacan drew two important lessons from Lévi Strauss:
1. That there is an elementary structure – a single ‘unconscious’ structure – which can be seen to underlie all other kinship and social relations.
2. That what takes place within kinship systems is not the giving and taking of real persons in marriage but a process of symbolic exchange.
From the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, therefore, Lacan derives the idea that what characterises the human world is the symbolic function – a function that intervenes in all aspects of our lives.