Benjamin’s word-centered theory of language was not structuralist avant la lettre.

Evidence

Benjamin was far more interested in words than in sentence structure as the divine text, a fact that makes it hard to call him a “structuralist avant la lettre,” 32 as he has sometimes been labeled. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 788

Categorization

• XREF: The structuralist labeling dispute echoes how later French theory (Derrida, deconstruction) tried to claim Benjamin; worth contrasting his theologically word-centered view with Saussurian structuralism.