《Lévi-Strauss》.pdf

E L E A N O R K A U F M A N Lévi-Strauss, Deleuze, and the Joy of Abstraction GILLES DELEUZE INSISTS AT DIFFERENT points that the most radical possibility for thought (if not politics) is to become more, not less, abstract. It is this poten- tial for becoming more abstract that I will locate as the hinge point between what might be narrated as Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and Deleuze’s poststruc- turalism: in short, Lévi-Strauss never fully crosses into the promised land of abstraction, remaining too insistent on the return to the concrete, whereas Deleuze insists on the need to bring the concrete back to the abstract. This is not to claim that the so-called poststructuralist moment ever really left the funda- mental orientations of structuralism (and the mark of this non-abandon is the con- tinual tension in both domains between the drive to the two- or four-part schema and the concomitant appeal to the univocity of the one single term that encom- passes everything). Moreover, traversing both French structuralism and “French poststructuralism” as it extends from Jean-Paul Sartre to Deleuze and on to Alain Badiou, is a preoccupation, often not acknowledged as such, with the inhuman, making it a central term of what I would claim to be a continuous twentieth- century French philosophical project. Insofar as the inhuman numbered struc- ture would seem to reside at the heart of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology, we might also ask to what degree the “anthropo-” in anthropology is a misnomer. On the one hand, Lévi-Strauss embraces the inhuman structure in all its abstrac- tion, yet on the other he calls for a return to the concrete. By contrast, Deleuze will formulate a movement from the abstract to the concrete and back to the abstract, which has an even stronger affinity with Ka