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“I hate travel”

“I hate travel”. Claude Lévi-Strauss and the journey of the 20 th century November 24, 2003. “Claude L. Strauss,” 1908-. 1938. 1990. The mythic CLS. I was a Teenage Structuralist. Saussure, Troubetzkoy, Jakobson, Lacan, Kristeva, Lévi-Strauss… Not things, but relations

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“I hate travel”

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  1. “I hate travel” Claude Lévi-Strauss and the journey of the 20th century November 24, 2003

  2. “Claude L. Strauss,” 1908- 1938 1990

  3. The mythic CLS

  4. I was a Teenage Structuralist • Saussure, Troubetzkoy, Jakobson, Lacan, Kristeva, Lévi-Strauss… • Not things, but relations • The linguistic analogy

  5. The chess example

  6. Structures as relations • The cryptographic eye • Substitutability, equivalence and function • “Pish” and “Foof”: contacts among systems that are differently-organized • A contact zone between epistemology (the question: what can we know?) and politics (the question: how can we act to bring about the good communal life?)

  7. “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)

  8. 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 • Compare Richard: “The breath of mortal men”

  9. Is this relativism? • The short answer (according to me): no. • Need to see the “relation” at the core of “relativism” • The interesting questions follow after we admit relativity. • Difficulty of negotiating the boundary zones of a “system” • Examples of sound change, dialect, translation

  10. France, 1955 • Sartre, existentialism, and new humanism: philosophies of freedom • The Left: the party and the march of history • Anxiety about technology • Decolonialization

  11. Dien Bien Phu | Algeria 1954 1957-62

  12. “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?

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