Notes

Slide Show

Outline

1	“I hate travel” Claude Lévi-Strauss and the journey of the 20^th century October 31, 2002
2	“Claude L. Strauss,” 1908-
3	The mythic CLS
4	I was a Teenage Structuralist Saussure, Troubetzkoy, Jakobson, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss… Not things, but relations The linguistic analogy
5	The chess example
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7	Structures as relations The cryptographic eye Substitutability and function “Pish” and “Foof”: contacts among systems that are differently-organized
8	“Items” and “operations” Vocabulary and grammar Individuals and their combinations (e.g., marriage laws) Signifying elements (motifs) and myths Or, translated into chess talk: Pieces Moves Plays (states of play) Games (series of states and outcomes)
9	Where necessity resides Identity the counterpart of difference, and vice versa Look / see / watch / observe… Male / female, civilized / primitive Identity emerging from difference, not vice versa Pawn and penny
10	Is this relativism? Need to see the “relation” at the core of “relativism” Difficulty of negotiating the boundary zones of a “system” Examples of sound change, dialect, translation
11	France, 1955 Sartre and new humanism The Left: the party and the march of history Anxiety about technology Decolonialization
12	Dien Bien Phu \| Algeria
13	“I hate travel” What kind of travel does the narrator hate? Why? What happens when this narrator moves from place to place? What here is “non-travel”? What, if anything, stays put?