It's in the colon, which implies a causation, an explication or something similar. Here it means, CLS is a great figure of French philosophy, therefore a figure of the past.
Perhaps that would be a fair reading in French? In English one can't be so sure of such an interpretation. The sentence would still make sense if its subject were Voltaire rather than Lévi-Strauss. Being a monument to another time is simply one way for someone to be a giant figure in a cultural tradition. (Certainly, it's a clumsy sentence, but there's no indication of poisonous motivation.)
This determination to take offense via idiosyncratic hermeneutics seems so "stereotypical", one almost suspects trolling.
I find it hard to conclusively read the sentence as you do. Yes, there could be snark meant, but I cannot say positively that the author intends one to understand a French tradition of canonized fossils.
