historical significance, does contain a logic, fully justify-ing its use by modern sociology as a
methodological tool (p. i) [p. 3].
This is clear: in regard to the “chiefly methodological value” of the concepts of nature and
culture, there is no evolution and even less retraction from Structures to The Savage Mind.
Nor is there either evolution or re-traction with regard to this concept of methodogical tool;
Structures announces most precisely what, more than a decade later, will be said of
“bricolage,” of tools such as “means” “collected or retained on the principle that ‘they may
always come in handy.’ “ “Like ‘bricolage’ on the technical plane, mythical reflection can
reach brilliant unforeseen results on the intellectual plane. Conversely, attention has often
been drawn to the mytho-poetical nature of ‘bricolage’ “ (pp. 26 f.) [pp. 17-18]. To be sure, it
would still remain to be asked if the anthropologist considers himself
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“engineer” or
“bricoleur.” Le cru et le cuit [Paris, 1964] is presented as “the myth of
mythology” (“Preface,” p. 2o). *
Nevertheless, the effacement of the frontier between nature and culture is not produced by the
same gesture from Structures to The Savage Mind. In the first case, it is rather a question of
respecting the originality of a scandalous suture. In the second case, of a reduction, however
careful it might be not to “dissolve” the specificity of what it analyzes:
... it would not be enough to reabsorb particular humanities into a general one. This first
enterprise opens the way for others which Rousseau [whose “usual acumen” Lévi-Strauss has
just praised] would not have been so ready to accept and which are incumbent on the exact
natural sciences: the reintegration of culture in nature and finally of life within the whole of
its physiochemical conditions (p. 327) [p. 247].
At once conserving and annulling inherited conceptual oppositions, this thought, like
Saussure’s, stands on a borderline: sometimes within an un-criticized conceptuality,
sometimes putting a strain on the boundaries, and working toward deconstruction.
Finally, why Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau? The quotation above necessarily leads us to this
question. This conjunction must be justified gradually and intrinsically. But it is already
known that Lévi-Strauss not only feels him-self to be in agreement with Jean-Jacques, to be
his heir at heart and in what might be called theoretical affect. He also often presents himself
as Rousseau’s modern disciple; he reads Rousseau as the founder, not only the prophet, of
modern anthropology. A hundred texts glorifying Rousseau may be cited. Nevertheless, let us
recall, at the end of Totémisme aujourd’hui, ** the chapter on “Totemism from Within:” “a . .
.. militant fervor for ethnography,” the “astonishing insight” of Rousseau who, “more prudent
. . . than Bergson” and “before even the ‘discovery’ of totemism “penetrate[d]” (p. 147) that
which opens the possibility of totemism in general, namely:
1.Pity, that fundamental affection, as primitive as the love of self, which unites us to others
naturally: to other human beings, certainly, but also to all living beings.
2.The originarily metaphoric—because it belongs to the passions, says Rousseau—essence of
our language. What authorizes Lévi-Strauss’s interpretation is the Essay on the Origin of
Languages, which we shall try to read closely later: “As man’s first
motives for speaking were
of the passions
xxx fotnote start xxx
•
Tr. John and Doreen Weightman, The Raw and the Cooked, (Harper Torchbooks
edition New York,
1970), p. 12.
** Totémisme aujourd’hui, 2d edition (Paris, 1965); translated as
Totemism, Rodney Needham
(Boston, 1963) .
xxx fotnote slutt xxx
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[and not of needs], his first expressions were tropes. Figurative ‘ language was the first to be
bom” [p. 12]. It is again in “Totemism from Within” that the second Discourse is defined as
“the first treatise of general anthropology in French literature. In almost modem terms,
Rousseau poses the central problem of anthropology, viz., the passage from nature to culture”
(p. 142) [p. 99]. And here is the most systematic homage: “Rousseau did not merely foresee
anthropology; he founded it. First in a practical way, in writing that Discours sur l’origine et
les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes which poses the problem of the relationships
between nature and culture, and which is the first treatise of general anthropology; and later
on the theoretical plane, by distinguishing, with admirable clarity and concision, the proper
object of the anthropologist from that of the moralist and the historian: ‘When one wants to
study men, one must con-sider those around one. But to study man, one must extend the range
of one’s vision. One must first observe the differences in order to discover the properties’
(Essay on the Origin of Languages, Chapter VIII) [pp. 30-31]
.” 4
It is therefore a declared and militant Rousseauism. Already it imposes on us a very general
question that will orient all our readings more or less directly: to what extent does Rousseau’s
appurtenance to logocentric meta-physics and within the philosophy of presence—an
appurtenance that we have already been able to recognize and whose exemplary figure we
must delineate—to what extent does it limit a scientific discourse? Does it necessarily retain
within its boundaries the Rousseauist discipline and fidelity of an anthropologist and of a
theorist of modern anthropology?
If this question is not sufficient to link the development which will follow with my initial
proposition, I should perhaps recapitulate:
1.that digression about the violence that does not supervene from with-out upon an innocent
language in order to surprise it, a language that suffers the aggression of writing as the
accident of its disease, its defeat and its fall; but is the originary violence of a language which
is always al-ready a writing. Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss are not for a moment to be
challenged when they relate the power of writing to the exercise of violence. But radicalizing
this theme, no longer considering this violence as derivative with respect to a naturally
innocent speech, one reverses the en-tire sense of a proposition—the unity of violence and
writing—which one must therefore be careful not to abstract and isolate.