6.”What we have here are thus two extreme types of proper name between which there are a
whole series of intermediate cases. At one extreme, the name is an identifying mark which, by
the application of a rule, establishes that the individual who is named is a member of a
preordained class (a social group in a system of groups, a status by birth in a system of
statuses) . At the other extreme, the name is a free creation on the part of the individual who
gives the name and expresses a transitory and subjective state of his own by means of the
person he names. But can one be said to be really naming in either case? The choice seems
only to be between identifying someone else by assigning him to a class or, under cover of
giving him a name, identifying oneself through him. One therefore never names: one
classifies someone else if the name is given to him in virtue of his characteristics and one
classifies oneself if, in the belief that one need not follow a rule, one names someone else
‘freely,’ that is, in virtue of characteristics of one’s own. And most commonly one does both at
once” (p. 240) [p. 181]. Cf. also “The Individual as A Species” and “Time Recaptured”
(chapters 7 and 8) : “In every system, therefore, proper names represent the quanta of
signification below which one no longer does anything but point. This brings us to the root of
the parallel mistakes committed by Peirce and by Russell, the former’s in defining proper
names as ‘indices’ and the latter’s in believing that he had discovered the logical model of
proper names in demonstrative pronouns. This amounts in effect to allowing that the act of
naming belongs to a continuum in which there is an imperceptible passage from the act of
signifying to that of pointing. I hope that I have succeeded in showing that this passage is in
fact discontinuous although each culture fixes its thresholds differently. The natural sciences
put theirs on the level of species, varieties or subvarieties as the case may be. So terms of
different degrees of generality will be regarded each time as proper names” (pp. 285–86) [p.
215].
Radicalizing this intention, it should perhaps be asked if it is any longer legitimate to refer to
the pre-nominal “property” of pure “monstration”—pointing at—if pure indication, as the
zero degree of language, as “sensible certitude,” is not a myth always already effaced by the
play of difference. It should perhaps be said of indication “proper” what Lévi-Strauss says of
proper names: “At the lower end there is no external limit to the system either, since it
succeeds in treating the qualitative diversity of natural species as the symbolic material of an
order, and its progress towards the concrete, particular and individual is not even arrested by
the obstacle of personal appellations: even proper names can serve as terms for a
classification” (p. 288) [p. 218] (cf. also p. 242) [pp. 182–831.
7.[Pp. 269–70]. Since we read Rousseau in the transparence of the texts, why not slide under
this scene that other taken out of a Promenade (9) ? In spelling out all its elements one by one
and minutely, I shall be less attentive to the opposition of term to term than to the rigorous
symmetry of such an opposition. Everything happens as if Rousseau had developed the
reassuring positive whose impression Lévi-Strauss gives us in the negative. Here is the scene:
“But, soon weary of emptying my purse to make people crush each other, I left the good
company and went to walk alone in the fair. The variety of the objects there amused me for a
long time. I perceived among others five or six boys from Savoy, around a small girl who had
still on her tray a dozen meagre apples, which she was anxious to get rid of; the Savoyards, on
their side, would have gladly freed her of them; but they had only two or three pence among
them all, and that was not much to make a great breach among the apples. This tray was for
them the garden of the Hesperides; and the young girl was the dragon who guarded it. This
comedy amused me for a long time; I finally created a climax by paying for the apples from
the young girl and distributing them among the small boys. I had then one of the finest
spectacles that can flatter a man’s heart, that of seeing joy united with the innocence of youth,
spreading everywhere about me. For the spectators themselves, in seeing it, partook of it, and
I, who shared at such cheap expense this happiness, had in addition the joy of feeling that it
was my work” (Pléiade, I, pp. 1092–93; [The Reveries of a Solitary, tr. John Gould Fletcher
(New York, 1927), pp. X84–85])
((337))
8.Of that word and that concept which, as I had suggested at the outset, has sense only within
the logocentric closure and the metaphysics of presence. When it does not imply the
possibility of an intuitive or judicative adequation, it nevertheless continues in aletheia to
privilege the instance of a vision filled and satisfied by presence. It is the same reason that
prevents the thought of writing to be simply contained within a science, indeed an
epistemological circle. It can have neither that ambition nor that modesty.
9.A situation difficult to describe in Rousseauist terms, the professed absence of writing
complicating things yet further: The Essay on the Origin of Languages would perhaps give
the name “savagery” to the state of society and writing described by Lévi-Strauss: “These
three ways of writing correspond almost exactly to three different stages according to which
one can consider men gathered into a nation. The depicting of objects is appropriate to a
savage people; signs of words and of propositions, to a barbaric people, and the alphabet to
civilized peoples [peuples policés]” [p. 17].
10. “If the West has produced anthropologists, it is because it was so tormented by remorse”
(“A Little Glass of Rum,” Tristes Tropiques, chap. 38) [(p. 449) [p. 388]].
11.What one may read between the lines of the second Disource: “It is reason that engenders
self-love, and reflection that confirms it: it is reason which turns man back upon himself, and
divides him from everything that disturbs or afflicts him. It is philosophy that isolates him,
and it is through philosophy that he says in secret, at the sight of the misfortunes of others:
‘Perish if you will, I am secure’ “ (p. 6o) [p. 184].
12.[Jean-Jacques Rousseau,] p. 245. Italics author’s.
13.Tristes Tropiques, chap. 18. With respect to Diderot, let us note in passing that the severity
of his judgment on writing and the book does not in any way yield to Rous-seau. The article
“book” [livre] which he wrote for the Encyclopédie is a most violent indictment.
14.Tristes Tropiques, chap. 6. “How I Became an Anthropologist.”
15.In the Geneva lecture [see n. 4] Lévi-Strauss believes he can simply oppose Rous-seau to
the philosophies that take their “point of departure in the cogito” (p. 242).
16.Particularly in the Conversations with Georges Charbonnier which adds nothing to the
theoretical substance of the “Writing Lesson.”