The kind of writing: anthropology and the rhetorical reproduction of postmodernism

Albert Doja (1)

1 Université de Lille

In a now much read critique, Derrida claimed to show the weakness and the supposed contradictions of Lévi-Strauss's interpretation of writing and his characterization of modern industrial society by the pathology of written communication. Lévi-Strauss is tweaked for ethnocentrism, subjectivism, empiricism, truism, archaism, primitivist utopia, epigenetism, sloppy thinking, theology and metaphysics, in short for everything at odds with what normally stands as Lévi-Straussian analysis. It is my contention in this paper to argue that, by misconstruing Lévi-Strauss's actual theoretical and epistemological contribution to general knowledge, Derrida's reading of Tristes Tropiques is exemplary and influential in that it joins together all the essential didactic elements of 'deconstructionist' criticism, and seems to be what exactly 'lit-crit' deconstructionism is all about, which in the last analysis turns into an arrogant scholastics that only ignorance or deliberate misinformation could allow.

Mots clés: Criticism; Deconstruction; Writing

Mots clés: Derrida; Lévi-Strauss

Domaines: Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie; Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences

Albert Doja. The kind of writing: anthropology and the rhetorical reproduction of postmodernism. Critique of Anthropology, 2006, 26 (2), pp.157-180. ⟨10.1177/0308275X06064993⟩. ⟨halshs-00405948⟩