theoretical falling off; one would have to account for its necessity and its positive effects. A
text always has several epochs and reading must resign itself to that fact. And this
genealogical self-representation is itself already the representation of a self-representation;
what, for example, “the French eighteenth century,” if such a thing existed, already
constructed as its own source and its own presence.
Is the play of these appurtenances, so manifest in texts of anthropology and the “sciences of
man,” produced totally within a “history of meta-physics?” Does it somewhere force the
closure? Such is perhaps the widest horizon of the questions which will be supported by a few
examples here. To which proper names may be assigned: the sustainers of the discourse,
Condillac, Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss; or common names: concepts of analysis, of genesis, of
origin, of nature, of culture, of sign, of speech, of writing, etc.; in short, the common name of
the proper name.
In linguistics as well as in metaphysics, phonologism is undoubtedly the exclusion or
abasement of writing. But it is also the granting of authority to a science which is held to be
the model for all the so-called sciences of man. In both these senses Lévi-Strauss’s
structuralism is a phonologism. As for the “models” of linguistics and phonology, what I have
already brought up will not let me skirt around a structural anthropology upon which
phonological science exercises so declared a fascination, as for in-stance in “Language and
Kinship”; 1 it must be questioned line by line.
The advent of structural linguistics [phonologie] completely changed this situation. Not only
did it renew linguistic perspectives; a transformation of this
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magnitude is not limited to a single discipline. Structural linguistics will certainly play the
same renovating role with respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has
played for the physical sciences [l’ensemble des sciences exactes] (p. 39) [p. 31].
If we wished to elaborate the question of the model, we would have to examine all the “as”-s
and “likewise”-s that punctuate the argument, order-ing and authorizing the analogy between
phonology and sociology, between phonemes and the terms of kinship. “A striking analogy,”
we are told, but the functioning of its “as” shows us quickly enough that this is a very in-
fallible but very impoverished generality of structural laws, no doubt governing the systems
considered, but also dominating many other systems without privilege; a phonology
exemplary as the example in a series and not as the regulative model. But on this terrain
questions have been asked, objections articulated; and as the epistemological phonologism
establishing a science as a master-model presupposes a linguistic and metaphysical
phonologism that raises speech above writing, it is this last that I shall first try to identify.
For Lévi-Strauss has written of writing. Only a few pages, to be sure 2 but in many respects
remarkable; very fine pages, calculated to amaze, enunciating in the form of paradox and
modernity the anathema that the Western world has obstinately mulled over, the exclusion by
which it has constituted and recognized itself, from the Phaedrus to the Course in General
Linguistics.
Another reason for rereading Lévi-Strauss: if, as I have shown, writing cannot be felt without
an unquestioning faith in the entire system of differences between physis and its other (the
series of its “others:” art, technology, law, institution, society, immotivation, arbitrariness,
etc.), and in all the conceptuality disposed within it, then one should follow with the closest
attention the troubled path of a thinker who sometimes, at a certain stage in his reflections,
bases himself on this difference, and sometimes leads us to its point of effacement: “The
opposition between nature and culture to which I attached much importance at one time .. .
now seems to be of primarily methodological importance.” 3 Undoubtedly Lévi-Strauss has
only traveled from one point of effacement to another. Les structures élémentaires de la
parenté (1949),* dominated by the prob-lem of the prohibition of incest, already credited
difference only around a suture. As a result both the one and the other became all the more
enigmatic. And it would be risky to decide if the seam—the prohibition of incest—is a strange
exception that one happened to encounter within the
xxx fotnote start xxx
•
Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, 2d edition (Paris, 1967); translated as The
Elementary Structures of Kinship, Rodney Needham et al. (Boston, 1969).
xxx fotnote slutt xxx
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transparent system of difference, a “fact,” as Lévi-Strauss says, with which “we are then
confronted” (p. 9) [p. 8]; or is rather the origin of the difference between nature and culture,
the condition—outside of the system —of the system of difference. The condition would be a
“scandal” only if one wished to comprehend it within the system whose condition it precisely
is.
Let us suppose then that everything universal in man relates to the natural order, and is
characterized by spontaneity, and that everything subject to a norm is cultural and is both
relative and particular. We are then confronted with a fact, or rather, a group of facts, which,
in the light of previous definitions, are not far removed from a scandal: . . . [for] the
prohibition of incest . . . presents, without the slightest ambiguity, and inseparably combines,
the two characteristics in which we recognize the conflicting features of two mutually
exclusive orders. It constitutes a rule, but a rule which, alone among all the social rules,
possesses at the same time a universal character (p. 9) [pp. 8-9].
But the “scandal” appeared only at a certain moment of the analysis; the moment when,
giving up a “real analysis” which will never reveal any difference between nature and culture,
one passed to an “ideal analysis” permitting the definition of “the double criterion of norm
and universality.” It is thus from the confidence placed in the difference between the two
analyses that the scandal took its scandalous meaning. What did this confidence signify? It
appeared to itself as the scholar’s right to employ “methodological tools” whose “logical
value” is anticipated, and in a state of precipitation, with regard to the “object,” to “truth,”
etc., with regard, in other words, to what science works toward. These are the first words—or
nearly so—of Structures:
It is beginning to emerge that this distinction between the state of nature and the state of
society (today I would rather say state of nature and state of culture) while of no acceptable