Remembering and Dismembering Derrida’s Reading of Levi Strauss
Remembering and Dismembering Derrida’s Reading of Levi Strauss

Summary/Abstract: The excitement about poststructural theories has subsided, yet a proper critical assessment of their significance is still lacking. In order to question the revolutionary potential still attributed to deconstruction, I propose a close reading of Derrida's deconstruction of Levi-Strauss in his 'Structure, Sign and Play in the History of Human Sciences'. My purpose is to draw attention to the ways in which Derrida, the champion of difference, ends up by re-affirming a thoroughly repressive logic of the same, a gesture which, in my opinion, makes Derrida guilty of the Eurocentrism of which he accuses Levi-Strauss. I will argue further that his radical suspicion and injunction against reminiscence are comparable to a forced conversion recorded in the myth of Orpheus. The dismemberment of Orpheus may be understood as an outward projection of the violent interruption of his mourning for the past, of the inner fragmentation resulting from forgetting, and Derrida's recommendation of free-play, like all other poststructuralist endeavors to 'de-originate' the individual, are the latest version of this ancient cultural crime.

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