{"id":1657,"date":"2022-05-05T10:02:17","date_gmt":"2022-05-05T15:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1657"},"modified":"2022-05-05T10:02:17","modified_gmt":"2022-05-05T15:02:17","slug":"the-real-universal-no-3-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/the-real-universal-no-3-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Real Universal, No. 3 &#8211; Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/05\/threatened-amazon-awa-family-hunt.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1658\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/05\/threatened-amazon-awa-family-hunt.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1900\" height=\"1268\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/05\/threatened-amazon-awa-family-hunt.jpeg 1900w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/05\/threatened-amazon-awa-family-hunt-300x200.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/05\/threatened-amazon-awa-family-hunt-1024x683.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/05\/threatened-amazon-awa-family-hunt-768x513.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/05\/threatened-amazon-awa-family-hunt-1536x1025.jpeg 1536w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2022\/05\/threatened-amazon-awa-family-hunt-800x534.jpeg 800w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1900px) 100vw, 1900px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>4.2<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If the term \u201cpost-structuralism\u201d has ever referred to any titles in particular\u2014if post-structuralism, that is, has had not just canonical texts, but name-generating ones\u2014then surely it refers to the attacks that Derrida launched against Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss in 1966 and 1967. \u201cStructure, Sign, and Play\u201d goes after \u201cstructural or structuralist thought\u201d in its very first sentence; its opening claim is that \u201cstructure\u201d is as old as the West, an encumbrance, therefore, an unthinking conceptual reflex, one more bad habit picked up in childhood, the philosophical equivalent of chewing your nails. This \u201cwould be easy enough to show,\u201d we read in the lecture, which formulation is Derrida\u2019s preferred way of not showing something.<a href=\"#_edn1\" name=\"_ednref1\">[i]<\/a> It\u2019s not clear, anyway, that Derrida is right about this. An etymological dictionary will tell you that the word \u201cstructure\u201d is Latin, from <em>struere<\/em> \u201cto build,\u201d and so not, in fact, ur-Western\u2014old, sure, but not Aegean-old. It will also tell you that \u201cstructure\u201d goes back to the Indo-European root <em>stere-<\/em>, meaning \u201cto spread or stretch out,\u201d which also gives us Greek <em>stronymi <\/em>or \u201cstrew,\u201d in which case we would have to conclude that the word \u201cstructure\u201d has \u201cstrewing\u201d as one of its closer cousins. Structure and dissemination are thus not the antitheses that deconstruction takes them to be, but in fact variants of one another, two different ways of naming a collection of scattered points. Anyone wanting to toss out the one on the grounds of its metaphysical antiquity would, to be consistent, have to discard the other, as well.<\/p>\n<p>The attack on L\u00e9vi-Strauss then continues in <em>Of Grammatology<\/em>, where the anthropologist serves as Derrida\u2019s one great example of a living, breathing gramophobe\u2014all the evidence he has, really, for the claim that a writer could still in the late twentieth century rise to prominence by systematically dishonoring his own medium, that someone trained as a philosopher could take to print in ink-loathing praise of <em>peuples sans \u00e9criture<\/em>. L\u00e9vi-Strauss had reported seeing an indigenous man in Brazil, living far from white settlement, wielding fake writing as a weapon against his fellows, trying to bolster his authority over them by pretending to read wordless scratchings on a page. Reflecting on that scene some days later, he had concluded that this incident revealed something important about all writing: namely, that some of its political effects depended not at all on <em>what<\/em> it said, but merely on the performance of the saying; that writing communicated the power of the writer before it communicated anything else. You can tell that the power of the writing is independent of its words because it seems to operate even when there aren\u2019t any words.<a href=\"#_edn2\" name=\"_ednref2\">[ii]<\/a> Such is the argument that Derrida was out to defeat. And to the extent that L\u00e9vi-Strauss was uniformly regarded as structuralism\u2019s standard-bearer, that defeat would do more than any other event in recent French philosophy to bring into view the possibility of what we might call thought after L\u00e9vi-Strauss and what we have called post-structuralism, which is the name we give to sundry radical French philosophers when assimilating them to Derrida.<\/p>\n<p>But then if you\u2019re going to call deconstruction and the rest \u201cpost-structuralist,\u201d you also have to let \u201cstructuralism\u201d suffice as a descriptor for L\u00e9vi-Strauss\u2019s work. This means, in turn, that if you emphasize <em>other<\/em> features of L\u00e9vi-Strauss\u2019s system\u2014or if you simply recognize other keys to L\u00e9vi-Strauss\u2019s renown in the mid-1960s; other features, I mean, of his public profile\u2014then our conception of deconstruction will shift accordingly, and maybe our conception of post-structuralism, as well, should it be shown to have been surpassing other things, too, in the process of outstripping <em>la structure<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Anyone with enough time can confirm through a course of reading the broad outlines of L\u00e9vi-Strauss\u2019s philosophical project. The trick to reading L\u00e9vi-Strauss is to realize that he was, despite himself, a big-historical thinker. Structuralism, officially anti-historical, houses within itself a whopping-great story about What Has Happened to the World Over Time, and it is these disavowed historical claims that underwrite its rejection of history in favor of myth. Those claims are by now pretty familiar. L\u00e9vi-Strauss begins with the anti-humanist theory of (European) man that we associate above all with Heidegger and the Frankfurt School: of Promethean man, in other words, an Ahabian humanity driven to master the world, all-conquering, determined to murder the very ocean, self-subordinating, too, constructing the technologies and institutions that \u201cdestroy innumerable living forms,\u201d and then capturing itself in its own disastrous machinery.<a href=\"#_edn3\" name=\"_ednref3\">[iii]<\/a> Many have come to the conclusion that there is a basic ambiguity in L\u00e9vi-Strauss\u2019s arguments or that he wants to have it both ways. No French writer of his generation wrote as ardently against ethnocentrism or against the late Victorian habit of ranking the world\u2019s peoples, and if we take L\u00e9vi-Strauss at his word, then we shouldn\u2019t be able to rank the West any more than we can rank the Bantu or the Inuit. Or rather, we shouldn\u2019t be able to <em>demote <\/em>the West. European civilization should settle in as just one more culture among others, with conventions of its own, cognitive customs (called \u201cscience\u201d), narrative customs (called \u201chistory\u201d), and so on. But there is, of course, a second sense in which L\u00e9vi-Strauss\u2019s structuralism takes European culture to be unique, after all\u2014uniquely diseased, uniquely alienated, estranged from the fundamental ways of relating to others and to the non-human world that are preserved by tribal thought. Structuralism was thus energized by a remarkable combination of features: a Frankfurt-style critique of instrumental reason\u2014or a Heideggerian critique of productivism\u2014grafted upon an anthropologist\u2019s regard for indigenous ethics, though it\u2019s not hard, of course, to see how these would go together: the comprehensive rejection of European thought sponsors a rigorous survey of the non-European kind.<\/p>\n<p>The subtle point about structuralism, then, is that it meant not only to report on the thinking of pre-literate societies, but also to replicate that very thought for the people of Europe and North America\u2014to teach someone who would otherwise be reading Salinger and Nabokov to think again like an indigenous person. It\u2019s not just that L\u00e9vi-Strauss was an eco-thinker in the ordinary sense, though he could usefully be revisited under that rubric, given that he was trying to spell out a conservationist approach to thinking itself, an approach to thought modeled on the conduct of people who live amidst scarcity, on the recycler\u2019s approach to objects, therefore, in which thought can be reconditioned and repurposed and so does not require endless innovation or concept-production, where you sift through the intellect, take what you need, combining one fistful of concepts and images with scraps of other such, cinching together out of the leavings of former reflections a not-exactly-new thought-object better suited to the task at hand. The idea, at least, is that such tinkering is what thought actually does, only we don\u2019t know this because we chronically overestimate the mind\u2019s novelty and independence. But then equally it is what thought <em>should <\/em>do\u2014adapt, sort through its already existing riches\u2014rather than engineer a single intellectual innovation determined to drive all others from the field. Structuralism, which is another name for <em>pens\u00e9e sauvage<\/em>, offers itself as the very model of extensive and non-hierarchical cognition, the thinking of concrete possibilities, permutations within generous limits, social and cultural variety, solutions other than the one we opted for.<\/p>\n<p>All I mean to say is that it is important to recall just what Derrida, in 1967, was attacking by attacking L\u00e9vi-Strauss. A person, of course, would have to have read deeply in L\u00e9vi-Strauss to put a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 together.<a href=\"#_edn4\" name=\"_ednref4\">[iv]<\/a> But it is enough to thumb through his UNESCO writings\u2014among the most widely read anti-racist tracts to come out of Europe after the war\u2014to find sentences like this: \u201cThere is no justification for asserting that any one race is intellectually superior or inferior to another.\u201d Or this: \u201cThe original sin of anthropology \u2026 consists in its confusion of the idea of race, in the purely biological sense, \u2026 with the sociological and psychological productions of human civilizations.\u201d Or this: \u201cIn actual fact, there are no peoples still in their childhood; all are adult, even those who have not kept a diary of their childhood and adolescence.\u201d \u00a0Or again this: \u201cWe may note that acceptance of the Western way of life, or certain aspects of it, [by non-Westerners], is by no means as spontaneous as Westerners would like to believe.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn5\" name=\"_ednref5\">[v]<\/a> Alternately, a person reading <em>Tristes Tropiques <\/em>in the 1950s might have remarked that in its opening chapters L\u00e9vi-Strauss violates his own chronology in order to let the reader know that he was friends with Andr\u00e9 Breton, with whom he was in exile in New York, the two men having met unexpectedly on the anti-fascist refugee ship that carried them both from Marseilles to Martinique.<a href=\"#_edn6\" name=\"_ednref6\">[vi]<\/a> This early French reader, moreover, would likely have known something that a belated Anglo reader could easily miss\u2014that the Surrealists were themselves ardent anti-colonialists; that anti-colonialism, more than a rather generic united-front communism, was the distinguishing drift of Surrealist politics\u2014which means, in turn, that when L\u00e9vi-Strauss drew attention to the Breton circle as one of <em>Tristes Tropiques<\/em>\u2019s more relevant contexts, he was requesting that his readers see that book as an extension of the French avant-garde\u2019s repudiation of high Europe. Structuralism asks to be seen as a restaging of a Surrealist action from 1925, in which Breton and his friends disrupted a Parisian literary banquet by sneaking into the hall and tucking into each place-setting a flyer that began: &#8220;We profoundly hope that &#8230; colonial insurrections will annihilate this Western civilization whose vermin you defend. &#8230; We take this opportunity to dissociate ourselves publicly from all that is French.\u201d Read in this context, L\u00e9vi-Strauss\u2019s output looks like a multi-volume companion piece to the exhibition that the Surrealists mounted in 1931, called \u201cThe Truth about the Colonies\u201d\u2014totally direct that exhibition was, no poetry needed, not Surrealist, but realist. One could go on. A \u201860s-era reader of <em>Tristes Tropiques<\/em>\u2014Derrida, say, when preparing the <em>Grammatology<\/em>\u2014might have recalled the much discussed Manifesto of the 121, co-written by a young Surrealist and revised by Breton himself, calling for organized resistance to the French government in Algeria and aid for the independence movement there.<a href=\"#_edn7\" name=\"_ednref7\">[vii]<\/a> One detail in particular stands out: It was on that journey across the Atlantic, alongside L\u00e9vi-Strauss, that Andr\u00e9 Breton first made the acquaintance of Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, who became Surrealism&#8217;s most important exponent outside of Europe and who was already publishing a journal called <em>Tropiques<\/em>, which then furnished L\u00e9vi-Strauss with half his title: <em>Tristes Tropiques, Troubled Tropics, Tropics of Woe, Despairing Equator<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Deconstruction, we can now say, came into the world as an attack on anti-colonial anthropology. Not that Derrida was the first person to disagree with L\u00e9vi-Strauss\u2014hardly. His method had already faced a strong challenge from the Left, where it was said that structuralism was a device for downplaying conflict, for minimizing the fractures and struggles that agitate and occasionally transform even non-literate and stateless societies. Many readers on the Left have always felt that structuralism was guilty of overstating the ability of culture, art, or myth to produce stability in a society by imaginatively reconciling its real antagonisms.<a href=\"#_edn8\" name=\"_ednref8\">[viii]<\/a> But then L\u00e9vi-Strauss had also faced a challenge from the Right, which accused him of being a self-loathing Westerner driven by anti-civilizational prejudice, a temperamental and aestheticized primitivism that would say anything, opportunistically and unaccountably, in order to make tribal people look better than the Belgians or the Lyonnais.<a href=\"#_edn9\" name=\"_ednref9\">[ix]<\/a><\/p>\n<p>It is this second line of argument that Derrida took up in 1967. What we\u2019ll want to note first is that indigenous peoples are never <em>not <\/em>at issue in <em>Of Grammatology<\/em>, from beginning to end, albeit in ways that can be a little hard to spot. Indians don\u2019t appear by name until the chapter on L\u00e9vi-Strauss, but they hang silently over the entire book, since they can\u2019t help but be Derrida\u2019s test case, over and over again, for his signature claim that there have never existed societies without writing. Take the following sentence: \u201cEven before it is linked to incision, engraving, drawing, or the letter\u2026, the concept of the <em>graphie <\/em>[the unit of a possible graphic system] implies the framework of the <em>instituted trace<\/em>, as the possibility common to all systems of signification.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn10\" name=\"_ednref10\">[x]<\/a> The word to pay attention to is <em>before<\/em>: Even before the letter, before writing in the ordinary sense. Derrida has to grant that there have existed oral societies even in the process of negating that claim. The same holds true for the the prefix <em>arche- <\/em>in the term <em>arche-writing<\/em>; it, too, points to <em>indios<\/em> and islanders. In some contexts, of course, <em>arche- <\/em>just means \u201cvery ancient\u201d or the \u201cfirst,\u201d and if that were true here, <em>arche-writing <\/em>would refer to \u201cthe rudiments of writing\u201d or \u201cur-script,\u201d hence maybe to Babylonian accounting methods, except Derrida exploits a permanent ambiguity in perceptions of the primal, which ambiguity follows on from the simple observation that the prototype of a given thing is often unlike that thing\u2019s common form, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability. The earliest version of x both is and isn\u2019t x. What Derrida also calls \u201coriginary writing\u201d thus carries its own negation inside itself: writing-before-writing, which is also writing-that-is-not-writing, which is also indigenous writing or the writing-of-people-who-don\u2019t-read. If you were to substitute \u201cIndian\u201d for \u201carche-\u201c every time you saw it, it would become rather easier to reconstruct Derrida\u2019s historical claims: arche-writing, Indian writing, un-writing.<\/p>\n<p>The first of Derrida\u2019s complaints is thus easy to guess: L\u00e9vi-Strauss is to be rebuked for stupidly believing that the Nambikwara didn\u2019t know about writing until he showed up with his notepad. If you\u2019ve read any Derrida at all you will have seen this thesis coming, though even in that case, the \u201cViolence of the Letter\u201d will give you a chance to confirm your hunch that Derrida can make his signature argument only by proclaiming all marks to be writing: vegetable-dye tattoos, zigzags on squashes, wolves urinating on rocks. The idea is that the precolonial Nambikwara could have gained insight into writing by watching a jaguar claw significance into tree bark.<a href=\"#_edn11\" name=\"_ednref11\">[xi]<\/a><\/p>\n<p>It is, however, Derrida\u2019s second argument, the one about violence, that you might not have seen coming. L\u00e9vi-Strauss, after all, had wanted to specify the forms of oppression that Europeans have inflicted on the non-European world, and to point out that this oppression was not just material, but cultural and cognitive, as well. And to this Derrida replies that the violence at issue was <em>not<\/em> Europe\u2019s fault, that colonized people were already oppressed before their conquerors arrived, overcome from the start by \u201cthe originary violence of language which consists in \u2026 classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute\u201d\u2014the direct address\u2014and so using words to subsume the world in generalities.<a href=\"#_edn12\" name=\"_ednref12\">[xii]<\/a> Here, at the very latest, we are forced to conclude that Derrida has fundamentally reversed tack on radical philosophy\u2019s usual wildcat genealogies of \u201cmetaphysics\u201d or \u201cWestern thought.\u201d For if deconstruction is right, the problem with \u201cWestern thought\u201d is not its addiction to theoretical, philosophical, or scientific knowledge (which has its home in writing &amp;c); nor are we meant to contemplate the ways in which writing everywhere produces new forms of hierarchy: scribal elites, ranked degrees of literacy, preferred positions for the hyper-literate, &amp;. The most serious problem with \u201cWestern thought\u201d is that it encourages one to believe that there is also something other than \u201cWestern thought.\u201d The polemical thrust of early deconstruction in its struggle with anthropology boils down to the idea that there is no position outside of the violence perpetrated by meaning-making people from which one might in good conscience struggle against London or Paris.<\/p>\n<p>This is not an argument that will withstand even basic modes of scrutiny. One can, of course, indict L\u00e9vi-Strauss on charges of a generic Rousseauvianism. If you\u2019ve already decided that Rousseau was a chump and Alp-climbing hippie, or if you think that anyone who prefers indigenous people on any grounds is indulging in so much noble savagery, or if you think that smart and convivial Indians are <em>only<\/em> ever stock characters, then nothing L\u00e9vi-Strauss says is going to change your mind. But the details of Derrida\u2019s objections won\u2019t hold up. Nor is this a subtle point. It\u2019s enough to go and read <em>Tristes Tropiqes <\/em>to see that Derrida is wrong about L\u00e9vi-Strauss. The big point should be apparent, in fact, to anyone who knows anything about structuralism, even second-hand. L\u00e9vi-Strauss, after all, is not dreaming of a paradisical spoken language in which words were still full, directly attached to the world\u2019s furniture, capable of presence. Quite the contrary: He accepted Saussure\u2019s position, which Derrida also misrepresents on this point. The most basic move of structuralist anthropology was simply to extend the Saussurean account of language to tribal societies, precisely in order to <em>defeat <\/em>the idea that language worked differently for indigenous people\u2014to show that tribal people, too, existed in culture and not nature, that they were semiotic peoples, all peoples being semiotic, intensely and intricately coding the world in language via differences that were not positivities. When Derrida attributes to L\u00e9vi-Strauss the opposite position, he is simply inventing things that his rival does not say.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s even worse on the matter of violence, because the evidence could not be clearer. Derrida says repeatedly that L\u00e9vi-Strauss is pushing some stupid myth in which native Americans are fundamentally peaceful, which then allows the anti-colonial anthropologist to claim that white people introduced violence to the Americas. And again, this simply isn\u2019t what L\u00e9vi-Strauss is claiming. In the chapters immediately surrounding \u201cThe Writing Lesson,\u201d L\u00e9vi-Strauss describes an orphan trampled at a dance; \u201cchildren often hitting out at their mothers\u201d; a little girl who says: \u201cWhen I\u2019m big I shall kill all the wild pigs and all the monkeys\u201d; hunters who think they will be reincarnated as predatory cats; and those same hunters\u2019 belief that any woman who pries into the secret rites of men \u201cshould be struck down at once.\u201d He also notes \u201cthe speed with which [the Indians] pass from cordiality to hostility.\u201d He recounts the making of poison. He even describes how the Nambikwara, by their own admission, \u201cmurdered\u201d some Protestant American missionaries. It\u2019s just that L\u00e9vi-Strauss asks us not to judge them for this, construing that killing as a spontaneously anti-colonial act, and so shrugging good riddance to this Presbyterianism-on-the-march, even though he is pretty sure at one point that his hosts are about to kill him, too.<a href=\"#_edn13\" name=\"_ednref13\">[xiii]<\/a> That last episode, where L\u00e9vi-Strauss anticipates his death at Indian hands, appears in \u201cThe Writing Lesson\u201d itself. Nor does L\u00e9vi-Strauss then turn around and incongruously describe his hosts as pacifists. He doesn\u2019t say much more than that he liked them\u2014that they were \u201ccharming,\u201d that they goofed around a lot, that they seemed to enjoy each other\u2019s company.<a href=\"#_edn14\" name=\"_ednref14\">[xiv]<\/a> Post-structuralism\u2019s founding arguments rest on errors of the most elementary kind.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref1\" name=\"_edn1\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[i] See \u201cStructure, Sign, and Play\u201d (1967), in <em>Writing and Difference<\/em>, translated by Alan Bass (1978), (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 351-370, quotations at p. 351.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref2\" name=\"_edn2\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[ii] See \u201cThe Writing Lesson\u201d in <em>Tristes Tropiques <\/em>(1955), translated by John Russell (New York: Criterion, 1961), pp. 286-297.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref3\" name=\"_edn3\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[iii] L\u00e9vi-Strauss, <em>Mythologiques, III, L\u2019Origine des Mani\u00e8res de Table<\/em> (Paris: Plon, 1968), p. 22.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref4\" name=\"_edn4\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[iv] In addition to <em>Tristes Tropiques<\/em>, a person would need to have read <em>The Savage Mind <\/em>(1962), (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) and the late talks on <em>Myth and Meaning <\/em>(New York: Schocken Book, 1979). It would also help to read David Pace\u2019s <em>Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes <\/em>(London: Routledge, 1983) and the biography by Patrick Wilcken (New York: Penguin, 2010).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref5\" name=\"_edn5\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[v] Levi-Strauss, <em>Race and History<\/em> (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), p. 5 (quotations #1 and #2), p. 19, p. 31.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref6\" name=\"_edn6\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[vi]\u00a0 L\u00e9vi-Strauss describes his meeting Andr\u00e9 Breton in <em>Tristes Tropiques<\/em>, p. 26.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref7\" name=\"_edn7\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[vii] On the politics of Surrealism, see Mark Polizzotti\u2019s <em>Revolution of the Mind<\/em> (New York: Farrar Straus, 1995), pp. 235-240 and p. 601; also Jody Blake\u2019s \u201cThe Truth about the Colonies, 1931: <em>Art indig\u00e8ne<\/em> in Service of the Revolution\u201d in <em>Oxford Art Journal<\/em> 25:1 (2002), pp. 35-58.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref8\" name=\"_edn8\">[viii]<\/a> See for instance Maurice Godelier\u2019s \u201cMyth in History\u201d in <em>New Left Review <\/em>1.69 (1971), pp. 93-112.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref9\" name=\"_edn9\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[ix] See esp. Roger Caillois\u2019s two-part essay \u201cIllusions \u00e0 rebours,\u201d in <em>La nouvelle nouvelle revue fran\u00e7aise<\/em>, December 1954, pp. 1010-1024 and January 1955, pp. 58-70.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref10\" name=\"_edn10\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[x] <em>Of Grammatology<\/em>, p. 46.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref11\" name=\"_edn11\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xi] See also <em>Points<\/em>, p. 84.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref12\" name=\"_edn12\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xii] <em>Of Grammatology<\/em>, pp. 111-2.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref13\" name=\"_edn13\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xiii] <em>Tristes Tropiques<\/em>, p. 274; p. 276; p. 281; p. 282-3; p. 284-5; p. 290.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref14\" name=\"_edn14\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>[xiv] ibid., p. 285.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I found the photograph at the top in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.co.uk\/photography\/2020\/11\/extraordinary-images-of-life-within-an-isolated-tribe-in-the-amazon?image=threatened-amazon-awa-family-hunt\"><em>National Geographic<\/em>.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; 4.2 If the term \u201cpost-structuralism\u201d has ever referred to any titles in particular\u2014if post-structuralism, that is, has had not just canonical texts, but name-generating ones\u2014then surely it refers to the attacks that Derrida launched against Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss in 1966 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/the-real-universal-no-3-part-2\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1657"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1659,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657\/revisions\/1659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}