{"id":10813,"date":"2011-01-25T15:09:34","date_gmt":"2011-01-25T14:09:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mono-1en-1544"},"modified":"2011-01-25T15:09:34","modified_gmt":"2011-01-25T14:09:34","slug":"claude-levi-strauss-the-poet-in-the-laboratory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/2011\/01\/25\/claude-levi-strauss-the-poet-in-the-laboratory\/","title":{"rendered":"Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss died a little over a year ago at age 100, he
\n\tleft behind a curious and contested legacy. For the French, he was the
\n\tintellectual equivalent of royalty. In 2008, editions of his works were
\n\tpublished in the gilt-lettered Pl\u00e9iade<\/em> collection, an act of
\n\tcanonization rare for a living French author; in his last appearances on
\n\ttelevision, he was less a commentator than an object of veneration;
\n\tshortly before the end, President Nicolas Sarkozy paid him court to wish
\n\thim happy birthday. “All French anthropologists are the children of
\n\tL\u00e9vi-Strauss,” proclaimed Le Monde<\/em> in its obituary\u2014which was an
\n\tunderstatement, as there is scarcely a field in the humanities and
\n\tsocial sciences L\u00e9vi-Strauss left unaltered. His ideas about myth
\n\tdramatically collapsed the distinction between European high culture and
\n\tso-called primitive society, and weaned a generation of French thinkers
\n\toff Marxist orthodoxy and Sartrean existentialism. Though he did not
\n\tlike to claim intellectual patrimony, the careers of Jacques Lacan,
\n\tRoland Barthes, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault are impossible to
\n\timagine without him.<\/p>\n

\tBut for readers outside France, including many Anglo-American
\n\tcritics, the nature of his achievement is harder to define. No one
\n\tdoubts L\u00e9vi-Strauss was the author of important works and the purveyor
\n\tof powerful insights, but the suspicion remains that behind his
\n\tfantastically rigorous analyses of Amerindian culture there operated a
\n\tdeeply impressionistic and idiosyncratic mind at odds with any general
\n\ttheory. Some accused him of reducing the meaning of human existence to
\n\tan arbitrary stock of contrasting flavors: the raw and the cooked, the
\n\tfresh and the rotten, the wet and the dry. Others took his structuralist
\n\tprogram to be a scientific alibi that concealed his fundamentally
\n\tartistic enterprise. This was a man, after all, who once, while in the
\n\tmiddle of the Amazon, wrote a tragedy about Augustus, and whose magnum
\n\topus, the four-volume Mythologiques<\/em> (1964\u201371), was composed in a
\n\tseries of musical movements that promised a key to all mythologies. For
\n\tsuch critics, the very scale of L\u00e9vi-Strauss’s ambition belongs to a
\n\tparticularly heady moment in French thought.<\/p>\n

\tPatrick Wilcken’s new biography, Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory<\/em>, is an ambitious attempt to navigate between these two extreme perspectives.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Link<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss died a little over a year ago at age 100, he left behind a curious and contested legacy. For the French, he was the intellectual equivalent of royalty. In 2008, editions of his works were published in the gilt-lettered Pl\u00e9iade collection, an act of canonization rare for a living French author; in … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"koromo_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-blog","koromo-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post\/10813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post\/10813\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}