Radical Dualism: : A Meta-Fantasy on the Square Root of Dual Organizations.

[Place of publication not identified] : Hatje Cantz, 2012.

1 online resource

dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts ; 56

"The name of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died exactly two years ago to the day on which I write these notes (October 30, 2011), has become emblematically associated with what some call, disdainfully, "binary thought." Structural anthropology would evidence a reactionary partiality for dual, symmetrical, static, and reversible oppositions, and for the analogies of proportionality that one can build with them, such as totemic systems. The French anthropologist would thus be a kind of champion of the binary system (or of the binary machine, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would have said), conceiving it at the same time as the elementary schematism of human semiosis and as the final reduction of every metaphysical system. This image, however, belongs more to certain simplistic versions of structuralism, both inside and outside anthropology, than to the modus operandi of Lévi-Strauss himself. For him, much to the contrary, a binary opposition is anything but a simple, or simply dual, object, or even simply an object; perhaps it may not even be an opposition at all. It is worth noting that Lévi-Strauss ends the two phases of his monumental study of mythology at a time when structuralism had reached full theoretical maturity, with warnings about the limits of both the resources (and vocabulary) of extensional logic and the very notion of binary opposition for coping with the multidimensional relationships that perfuse and constitute mythic matter. But since his very early papers, he drew attention, on the one hand, to certain non-commutative, irreversible, and heterogeneous aspects of mythic transformations and, on the other hand, to the precarious and as often as not illusory nature of the comprehensiveness and equipollence often attributed to the symbolic dualities that recur in human societies..."-- provided by distributor.

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Sociology.
Sociologie.
sociology.

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Marten, Cordelia, contributor.
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Sauerländer, Katrin, contributor.
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