The Bricolage of a Myth: Re-reading Derrida Reading Lévi-Strauss Fifty Years After

Of all the presentations at the 1966 symposium ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’, none have been so thoroughly mythologized as Jacques Derrida’s reading of Claude Lévi-Strauss in ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences’. With this paper, Derrida was said to have unseated Lévi-Strauss from his privileged position in ethnology, prefiguring a more thorough critique that would appear later in Of Grammatology. However, looking past the now-hegemonic memory of these critiques reveals more nuanced and problematic operations in both writers’ work than the popular histories allow for. By reconsidering Derrida’s readings with a closer attention to Lévi-Strauss’s writing, augmented by an alternate perspective offered by Audre Lorde, one can begin to unravel the texts in question from the myths that have grown around them in order to better understand the role of ethnocentrism and self-criticism in the work of both thinkers.