Page 114 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes he points out that the incest prohibition is both. As what can't be thought within the opposition
of these concepts, the prohibition "precedes them, probably as the condition of their possibility."
Such study deconstituting the founding concepts of the history of philosophy exceeds facile attempts
to go beyond philosophy.
L-S uses as methodological tools concepts whose truth can no longer be affirmed . . . and persists
in this double intention:
on the one hand, he envisions an integration of sciences to be carried out by the exact natural
sciences, "the reintegration of culture in nature and finally of life within the whole of its physico-
chemical conditions"; on the other hand, he set forth methodological "bricolage"--to use whatever
is at hand, eclectically, adapting, pluralistically. Actually, every discourse is bricolage: the bricoleur
constructs the myth of the engineer (who allegedly sets up a self-constituting language); and thus
the bricoleur is not radically different from the "engineer."
Transition to a second thread.
L-S describes bricolage as mythopoetical.
L-S's work reflects on its own language as abandoning "all reference to a center, to a subject, to a
privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute archia. Thus, from The Raw and the Cooked:
The "key" myth is irregularly placed among neighboring ones (i.e., does not function in any
central way).
Myth is not centered/sourced, so mythology must not betray it by a centered discourse. Mythology
"intended to ensure the reciprocal translatability of several myths." The science here has no center,
subject, author. Myths are anonymous; the audience become silent performers.
Thus ethnographic bricolage as explicitly mythopoetic makes the need for a center appear
mythological, makes the need appear as an historical illusion.
There are risks. What will distinguish a higher quality of mythopoesis? This is an inevitable
question which requires thematizing the relation of philosophy and myth, without which attempts
to go beyond philosophy end up being merely bad philosophy--empiricism--and note L-S's
consistent claim to be presenting empirical science, as proposals that can be revised by a more
complete sampling of a totality of data which it is useless or impossible to require as prelude.
But non-totalization can be determined from the standpoint of the concept of play--which field
excludes totalization, since there is no center which arrests and grounds the variability of the
structure. This is the movement of supplementarity--the sign that replaces the center is added as
a surplus. L-S: to sustain the required complementarity of signifier and signified you need a
supplementary ration of signification. Mana, for example, is "force and action, quality and state,
noun and verb; abstract and concrete, omnipresent and localized." Its function is to endow a
signified with added content.
Such a term as mana opposes "the absence of signification without entailing by itself any particular
signification." The overabundance of the signifier is the result of the necessary supplement to what
is finite [and lacks a center]. Therefore play is important in L-S. Play is always also caught up in
tension. Play is in tension [first,] with history, which has always been conceived as "a detour
between two presences." There is a risk of historicism (a moment in the history of metaphysics):
with new structures arising on account of change and in radical discontinuity, e.g., L-S on the
origin of language--"born in one fell swoop." There is also a tension between play and presence. It
is necessary to think the play of presence and absence radically--on the basis of play, not on the
basis of presence (in spite of L-S's nostalgia for exemplary societies).
There is an alternative: Nietzschean, affirmative, joyous, uncertain, play, surrendering to generic
indetermination and the seminal adventure of the trace.
There are two interpretations of interpretation:
1. deciphering a truth;
2. affirming play beyond man and humanism.

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