Claude Lévi-Strauss: the rude, the crude, the nude, and The Origin of Table Manners

Claude Lévi-Strauss belongs with the founding patriarchs of Jewish intellectual culture in the Diaspora, with Marx and Freud. He is to anthro-pology as they are to sociology and psychology. Structural anthropology is the last of the classic ideological “remedies” for the cultural status-wound inflicted on intellectual Jewry by its emancipation into the West. In comparison with Western modernity, Lévi-Strauss—his religion, his people— appeared backward, “primitive.”

His revered teacher, Emile Durkheim, believing in historical develop-ment, had founded French scientific sociology with his first great work in 1893, The Division of Labor in Society, in which he analyzed the modern-ization process as a development from tribal or mechanical solidarity— which he illustrated chiefly (as a son of rabbis) by copious Old Testament references¹—to modern civil societies in the West, which he called “superior societies.” It is significant, recalling the old dispute over the word “betterment” (Verbesserung) in Dohm’s title, that the subtitle of the first edition of Durkheim’s Division of Labor—namely, Eiude sur Torganization des sociétés supérieures—was subsequently dropped. Lévi-Strauss experienced such “developmentalism” as demeaning, much as today in Latin America Marxist intellectuals derisively reject the whole “developed-underdeveloped” paradigm of modernization by calling it des-arrollismo.² All our teachers, Lévi-Strauss recalls, were “obsessed with the notion of historical development.”³ Experiencing the same status-wound that would later lead members of the Jewish community to bitterly resent Arnold Toynbee’s reference to observant, Orthodox Judaism as a “fossil,” Lévi-Strauss, though an “unsynagogued,” secular Jewish intel-lectual, turned decisively against the whole idea of social evolution, even

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in its modern and “relativized” form (what is now called “the new evolutionism”). His deeply oral imagination—he castigated the “cannibal-instincts of the historical process,”⁴ as he would later code myths under the categories of “the raw and the cooked”⁵—spat out Western civiliza-tion and the vaunted meaningfulness of historical experience. “My intelli-gence is neolithic,” he announced; “to reach reality we must first repu-diate experience.”⁶

Lévi-Strauss attributes this fundamental insight to Karl Marx–who also repudiated appearances—to whom he considers himself to be in pupillary succession. Falling back on the anthropological language of “initiation,” he writes:

When I was about seventeen I was initiated into Marxism by a young Belgian socialist whom I had met on holiday…. A whole new world was opened to me. My excitement has never cooled: and rarely do I tackle a problem in sociology or ethnology without having first set my mind in motion by reperusal of a page or two from the 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte or the Critique of Political Economy.⁷

Lévi-Strauss, by thus rooting his ahistorical] structuralism in Marx, inadvertently unpacks the historicism and idealism at the root of Marxism. Historicist idealism is an ideological strategy, used by both the old aristo-cratic “insiders” and the new ethnic “outsiders,” for recouping from the status-humiliations of modernity. Cultural and subcultural dispossession are a “wound in the heart.” Structuralism, like Marxism, is an ideology of subcultural despair, an uneasy melange of cognitive relativism and ethical absolutism.

The component of positivism in Marx—his hard-boiled, hard-nosed “materialism”—is small indeed compared to the logicism—his “contra-dictions” talk—and idealism. It is not for nothing that Talcott Parsons, after briefly analyzing Marx as part of the positivistic tradition, breaks off his analysis: “Further discussion of Marx will therefore be postponed until his relation to idealism can be taken up [in chapter 18,”The Idealistic Tradition“]. He is one of the most important forerunners of the group of writers … to be dealt with under the heading of idealism.”⁸ The curious paradox of Marxism which Michael Polanyi has identified as constituting the secret of its appeal, namely, “sceptical fanaticism”— characteristic also of that other product of Jewish intellectual culture in the Diaspora, Freudianism—is itself rooted in large part in the fact that Marxism is a theoretical “conceit”⁹—that is, a violent yoking together of theoretically unmediated components (positivism and idealism) which

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appeals to an intellectual clientele at once cynical about the “situation of social action” and utopian about the “ends of social action.”

Thus, the allure of these ideologies for a dissociated theoretical sensi-bility consists in their appeal to moral passion in the language of social science. A passionate social conscience is licensed as dispassionate cogni-tive science. In “scientific” socialism as in “scientific” psychoanalysis, the normative and the cognitive are conflated; “the fire and the rose are one.” A pitilessly punitive and sceptical objectivity unmasks a given world of fact; a homeless revolutionary longing projects a new world of value.¹⁰ Members of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, for example— Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and others—considered their effort to com-bine elements of Marxism with Freud’s psychoanalysis in developing “criti-cal theory” to be the work of “unattached” and “universalistic” radical in-tellectuals. The Frankfurt Institute members are famous for their indignant repudiation of all sociology-of-knowledge attempts to relativize their radical-ism by exploring its possible connections with their cultural marginality and ethnicity.

Members of the Frankfurt circle, its historian Martin Jay notes, “were anxious to deny any significance at all to their ethnic roots. … [Felix J.] Weil, for example, has heatedly rejected any suggestion that Jewishness—defined religiously, ethnically, or culturally—had any influence whatsoever on the selection of Institut members or the de-velopment of their ideas. What strikes the current observer,” Jay continues, “is the intensity with which many of the Institut’s members denied, and in some cases still deny, any meaning at all to their Jewish identities.”¹¹¹² In this “vehement rejection of the meaningfulness of Jewishness in their backgrounds” on the part of Frankfurt’s “critical theorists,” in this insistence on their own “total assimilation,” Jay argues, “one cannot avoid a sense of their protesting too much.”¹³

It is important to note here that, excepting the case of Walter Ben-jamin, there was no open break, by Frankfurt circle members, with their parents or with the Jewish community. On my analysis, there existed all the shame and anger at the vulgarity of the parental “bourgeois materialism” as there had been in the case, for example, of Helene Deutsch; but—unlike Deutsch, and like Rosa Luxemberg—this hostility

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was displaced from Jewish bourgeois society to the permitted target of the larger Gentile society. It is highly significant that the radicals of the Frankfurt Institute (again, with the exception of Benjamin) precisely did not carry their rejection of “the commercial mentality of their parents,”¹⁴ to use Jay’s phrase, into outright personal rebellion. Of equal significance is the obverse fact: these well-to-do business-oriented Jewish parents of the Weimar ’20s and ’30s did not, for their part, rebel against the radical mentality of their sons but, on the contrary, generously supported them —as affluent suburban parents were later to support their New Left activist offspring in the American ’60s¹⁵—in their “higher” calling.

What had been published by Marx openly and publicly in 1844 on the “Jewish question” would be written discreetly in 1946 by Hork-heimer in a private letter to Leo Lowenthal: “The Jew is the pioneer of capitalism.”¹⁶ The difference is that the Marxism of the Frankfurt circle is a refined or bourgeois Marxism. Frankfurt Marxists, as Edward Shils notes, are “Edelmarxisten.”¹⁷ Marx’s “bad taste” was his insistence on saying in public things others would only say in private. He repudiated, in other words, the core differentiation of bourgeois society, that “division of labor” it had institutionalized as its “solution” to the discontents of modernity: the bifurcation of life into private and public “spheres.”¹⁸

A private solidarity with the close-knit bourgeois Jewish family (pace Marx’s revilement of “bourgeois familism”) was dutifully protected; the Marxian strictures of “critical theory’ were conspicuously reserved for, and publicly directed against, the larger bourgeois Gentile society, where estrangement and”alienation" were both normal and subculturally “nor-mative,” being defined as “exile.” There was, for example, some transient “initial friction” between father and son, Jay relates, when Max Horkheimer, the Frankfurt Institute’s most important director, decided not to follow his father into manufacturing:

The one real period of estrangement that did occur between them followed Horkheimer’s falling in love with his father’s gentile secre-tary, [Maidon], eight years his elder. He married her in March, 1926, at about the same time that he began teaching at the university… . It was apparently much harder for his parents to get used to the idea that Horkheimer was marrying a gentile than that he was becoming a revolutionary."¹⁹

It is the ironic fate of Marx’s communism, as of Freud’s psycho-analysis, that they came to embody and express the normative and cul-tural differences they were designed to deny and transcend. “Both sys-tems,” in Stanley Rothman’s view, "deny the reality of cultural differences, affirming instead a universal ideology applicable across cultures and

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across ethnic lines. What better way to end one’s marginality than by undermining the categories that define one as marginal?“²⁰ It was rela-tively late in his intellectual life that Lévi-Strauss was to settle on an intellectual tool, structuralism, that would put an end to the trauma of status-loss inherent in Jewry’s entry into the modernized West in the nineteenth century.”Anthropological analysis tends, admittedly," Lévi-Strauss writes toward the end of Tristes tropiques, “to enhance the prestige of other societies and diminish that of our own: in that respect,” he con-cedes, “its action is contradictory.”²¹

To escape from this contradiction, Lévi-Strauss constructs the an-thropological ideology of “structuralism.” In this way he tackles the contradiction inherent in the anthropological version of the paradox of “sceptical fanaticism,” namely, that while fiercely critical—even culturally subversive—of Western usage (moeurs) and modern society, he became, in the face of other, exotic, and earlier cultures, uncritically accepting, whatever their defects. “At home,” he writes in Tristes tropiques, “the anthropologist [read: Claude Lévi-Strauss] may be a natural subversive, or convinced opponent of traditional usage: but no sooner has he in focus a society different from his own than he becomes respectful of even the most conservative practices. … How shall we have the right to fight [these conservative abuses] at home if, when they appear elsewhere, we make no move to protest? The anthropologist who is a critic at home and a conformist elsewhere is therefore in a contradictory position”²² since, in terms of his “cultural relativism” (“scepticism”) there can be no privileged or absolute values (“fanaticism”). “There is only one way,” he concludes—going back through Marx to Rousseau, “our master and our brother”—“in which we can escape the contradiction in the notion of [the] position of the anthropologist, and that is by reformulating, on our own account, the intellectual procedures which allowed Rousseau to move forward from the ruins left by the Discours sur Vorigine de Vinégalité to the ample design of the Social Contract, of which Emile reveals the secret, … and [thus] discover the unshakable basis of human society” in “the neolithic age, … that myth-minded age.”²³

Soon after writing Tristes tropiques, Lévi-Strauss underwent a kind of conversion. The whole normative status his teacher Durkheim had given to the societies of historical, modernizing, Western civilization, call-ing them "sociétés supérieures,’ was repudiated. The tetralogy of Lévi-Strauss completed in 1971, Introduction to a Science of Mythology, seals that repudiation.²⁴ In the first volume, The Raw and The Cooked (1964), an ancient theme of Diaspora intellectuality puts in its appear-ance (recalling Freud, Marx, and others)—-namely, Part 2, which begins by

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coding Bororo myths, with high Parisian irony, under the category of “The ‘Good Manners’ Sonata” (pp. 81-133), with a subdivision on “Childish Civility” (pp. 108-20). Echoes of Marx and Freud can be heard in Lévi-Strauss’s obsession with the raw, the coarse, the vulgar, the naked, and their transformation-mediation-sublimation into the cooked, the refined, and the clothed.

In 1968 Lévi-Strauss published the third volume of his Mythologiques. Its 475 pages carry an astonishing title: L’Origine des maniéres de table: The Origin of Table Manners. Replete with references to the De Civilitate Morum Puerilium of Erasmus, the volume culminates in a seventh part, “Les Régles du savoir-vivre”, in which the neolithic “know-how” of living (savoir-vivre), which is the morality encoded in myths, is pitted against the modern Western “know-how” of behaving (savoir-faire).

If the first two volumes of his Introduction to a Science of Mythology unpack the “secret logic” at work in mythical thought, Lévi-Strauss’s third volume reveals the morality that also lies hidden in mythology—-a moral-ity, Lévi-Strauss tells us, “as remote, alas, from our morality, as its logic is from our logic.”²⁵ True morality, the morality “immanent in the myths” of “savage peoples,” is based on a “deference toward the universe.” Our morality, the morality of “mechanical” civilization, is a code of “good usage” (bon usage) based on our fear of the impurity outside ourselves.²⁶ Modern Western savoir-faire inverts the true order of savage savoir-vivre. We must quote at length the concluding sentences of Lévi-Strauss’s Origin of Table Manners in which Sartre is made the spokesman for the Western civilization the anthropologist contemns:

If the origin of table manners or, to speak in a more general fashion, the origin of good usage, is to be found, as we believe we have demonstrated, in that deference toward the world which constitutes le savoir-vivre, namely, to respect our obligations to it [ie., the world], it follows that the morality immanent in myths runs exactly opposite to the one we profess in our time. It instructs us, in any case, that our formula “Hell is the others” is not a philosophic prop-osition but an ethnographic testimony on a civilization. From in-fancy, we are socialized to be afraid of impurity coming from outside ourselves. When savage people proclaim, on the contrary, that “Hell is in ourselves,” they offer us a lesson in modesty which one wishes we were still capable of understanding. In this century in which man has made it his business to destroy countless living species, so many societies whose richness and variety have con-stituted from time immemorial his most splendid heritage, never has it been more necessary to insist, as the myths teach, that an integral humanism begin not with man, but by putting the world before life, and life before man, and respect for other beings before the love of self…. [Man] must cease appropriating the earth as a thing and behaving in relation to it with neither shame nor reserve,²⁷

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French ethnologists and anthropologists were unprepared for such a | book, with such a theme, bearing such a title: The Origin of Table Manners. ’An obsessive theme of Diaspora intellectuality—morals versus manners, the hypocrisy of civility, the triviality of etiquette—surfaced once more and, once again, became the target, both as fact and as symbol, for that ressentiment harbored by emancipating Jewry against the complex code of interaction ritual which governs the “relations in public” (as Erving Goff-man calls it) of the members of Western bourgeois society. “I am often struck,” an American Jewish literary intellectual writes,

by how eager we are to reveal all sorts of ugly secrets about ourselves. We can explain the hatred we feel for our parents, we are rather pleased with the perversions to which we are prone. We seem deter-minedly proud to be superior to ourselves. No motive is too terrible for our inspection. Let someone hint, however, that we have bad table manners and we fly into a rage.²⁸

If we allow “table manners” to stand as a synecdoche for propriety, good usage, and civility in general, as Lévi-Strauss does, the anthropolo-gist, at this not uncommon charge against “his people,” did a slow burn which resulted in the magnificent Origin of Table Manners.

The work culminates with a sermon, addressed to the West, on the nature of true deference and demeanor, in which the rules of “how to live” of so-called peuples sauvages are put into the lists against the rules of “how to behave” of so-called civilized peoples. Lévi-Strauss has managed to extract from his descriptive “science” of mythology a normative morality in terms of which he grades our civilization. He gives it a zero for conduct: zéro de conduite.

As early as 1959 Lévi-Strauss had laid out his program for the Mythologiques in a discussion with Georges Charbonnier broadcast over French radio. If, he said then, “we want to understand art, religion or law, and perhaps even cooking or the rules of politeness, we must imagine them as being codes formed by articulated signs, following the pattern of linguistic communication.”²⁹ But of greater interest is Lévi-Strauss’s alleged reason for turning the relation of savage “good usage” and civilized “good usage” into a relation of “hateful contraries.”³⁰

The criterion used is the differentiation of the Western, presumably Christian, abhorrence of “Vimpureté du dehors,”³¹ of dangerously im-pure natural substances coming in from the outside (de dehors), in Contrast to the modesty of the savage, who is in mortal fear of contaminat-

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ing nature and men with the impurity inside himself. There are two direc-tions of defilement, then: pollution can come from within (de dedans) or from without (de dehors).³² It is exactly here that we make a decisive discovery about the origins of the Lévi-Straussian fascination with table manners and table etiquette. In one of those rare passages in which he speaks of his early youth, Lévi-Strauss writes:

My only contact with religion goes back to a stage in my childhood at which I was already an unbeliever. During the First World War I lived with my grandfather, who was the rabbi of Versailles. His house stood next to the synagogue and was linked to it by a long inner corridor. Even to set foot in that corridor was an awesome experience; it formed an impassable frontier between the profane world and that other world from which was lacking precisely that human warmth which was the indispensable condition to my recognizing it as sacred. Except at the hours of service the synagogue was empty; desolation seemed natural to it, and its brief spells of occupation were neither sustained enough nor fervent enough to overcome this. They seemed merely an incongruous disturbance. Our private religious observ-ances suffered from the same offhand quality. Only. my grand-father’s silent prayer before each meal reminded us children that our lives were governed by a higher order of things. (That, and a printed message which hung on a long strip of paper in the dining-room: “Chew Your Food Properly: Your Digestion Depends On It.”)³³

The desolation, the absence of fervor, the “incongruous disturbance” are not surprising. It is the long strip of paper that arrests our attention. On it, a kind of: dietary law of propriety stares down on the dining room table. A hygienic imperative instructs the children in the bon usage of eating and chewing. Moreover, the food is seen under the aspect of its potential endangerment to the digestion, if not the health of those who consume it.

This is the earliest cited case in Lévi-Strauss’s own life of “that com-plete inversion” he speaks of in The Origin of Table Manners, in which good manners become a hygiene of self-protection against external threat.³⁴ The analysis must be pursued to its final term. The very criterion Lévi-Strauss uses to castigate Western table manners—and its good usage in general—is identical with that which Jesus first used in castigating the ritual purity of the Jewish Pharisees. By declaring that it is not the evil that comes into man from the outside (en dehors) but that which comes from within (de dedans) that defiles, Jesus made the decisive break with Judaism. Thus Max Weber—and this is the only case known to me where he lays aside his Wertfreiheit—writes in Ancient Judaism:

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Precisely with regard to ritualistic (Levitical) purity, even Jesus’ message took quite a different course [from the Essenian ethic]. The monumentally impressive lordly word, “not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth” and out of an impure heart (Math. 15:11, 18f.) meant that for him ethical sublimation was decisive, not the ritual surpassing of the Jewish purity laws. And the anxious segregation of the Essenes from the ritualistically impure is contrasted by his well-ascertained unconcern in having intercourse and table community with them.³⁵

In the concluding passage to Lévi-Strauss’s masterwork, The Origin of Table Manners, we thus find ourselves in the presence of an episode of un-usual significance in the intellectual culture of the Diaspora. In this passage the “lesson in modesty” taught by the myths, and which the great Franco-Jewish structuralist puts in the mouths of his neolithic savages to be leveled as an indictment against Western, modern, Christian civilization is identi-cal to the “monumentally impressive lordly word” that Jesus first raised against the Torah of the very Judaic civilization to which Lévi-Strauss, by descent, belongs. Contemporary biblical scholarship validates Weber’s iden-tification of the distinctive element in the mission of the historical Jesus. Ernst Kdsemann, a post-Bultmann “form critic” writes of the same text Weber refers to (Matt. 15: 11, 18ff.) that

Matthew obviously thought that Jesus was only attacking the rabbin-ate and Pharisaism with their heightening of the demands of the Torah. But the man who denies that impurity from externa] sources can penetrate into man’s essential being is striking at the pre-suppositions and plain verbal sense of the Torah and at the authority of Moses himself…. For Jesus, it is the heart of man that lets impurity loose upon the world…. By this saying, Jesus destroys the basis of classical demonology which rests on the conception that man is threatened by the powers of the universe and thus at bottom fails to recognize the threat which is offered to the universe by man himself.³⁶

Lévi-Strauss has, in effect, transformed the experience of religio-cultural inferiority into an incognito: in the persona of his suppositious Savages he castigates the West for “habituating us from infancy [dés”Penfance] in the fear of impurity from outside [de dehors]“³⁷—much as his grandfather’s dining room injunction and his rabbi grandfather’s kosher laws had instructed him in the ritual fear of the impurity of certain foods. We may repeat here about Lévi-Strauss what Etienne Gilson says_of his Sorbonne philosophy teacher of long ago, the idealist Léon Brunschvicg:”What he objected to in Christianity was what it had re-tained of Judaism."³⁸ This strain of secular Jewish Marcionism runs strong in French intellectual Jewry, from Bergson and Brunschvicg through Simone Weil to Lévi-Strauss.³⁹

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Lévi-Strauss’s master, Durkheim, had written that “Judaism, in fact, like all early religions, consists basically of a body of practises minutely governing all the details of life and leaving little free room for individual judgment”⁴⁰ (my emphasis). Lévi-Strauss could perhaps live with the fact that Durkheimian modernization theory had turned his ancestral religion into a species of “early religion.” What he could not live with was that which Durkheim actually wrote—and which is bowdlerized from the original in the preceding, standard translation: “Le Judaisme, en effet, commes toutes les religions inférieures …”⁴¹ (my emphasis). The essential thrust of all the work of Lévi-Strauss, as much for the educated lay reader as for professional colleagues, is put in lapidary form by Sanche de Gramont: “There are no superior societies.”⁴²

The demeaning status-implications of Western modernization theory, the place it assigned to Judaism and, by implication, to Jews, was the bullet Lévi-Strauss could not or would not bite (in common with all the classical. Diaspora ideologists). This fact, I believe, is what sent him (a) back to the primitives, and (b) up into the platonic heaven of ahistoric structuralism. It is the conviction of Talcott Parsons, voiced at the August 1973 meeting of the American Sociological Association, that Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, by leaving both social structure and history behind, and by analyzing the culture-value system alone—the element of “myth”—constitutes a “regression” from the more full-bodied theory of human action of Durkheim. The above analysis places that “regression” in the sociology-of-knowledge context of Jewish Emancipation as a status-ordeal.

There is a respectable tradition that views great works of art as issuing from the psychological traumata of their creators (this is the view of Edmund Wilson’s Wound and the Bow, for example). Sociocul-tural wounds, it is my hypothesis, lie behind the ideological creations of the giants of the Jewish Diaspora. In Freud and Marx, as we have seen, the “inferior” Jew loses his inferiority and the mighty goyim are brought low. The “final triumph” of the Freudian hermeneutic, with its remedial reading of social delicts as medical symptoms, is its transvaluation— “the implication,” Goffman tells us, “that socially improper behavior can be psychologically normal … and socially proper behavior can be truly sick”⁴³ (my emphasis). The “final triumph” of Marxism is Marx’s refusal to give a remedial and apologetic reading of the economic behavior of the Jews, describing it with unembarrassed bluntness, only to turn around

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and make this crude Judentum⁴⁴ the very stuff (Unterbau) of the bour-geois civilization of the goyim. It is a failure of understanding that sees in Marx’s conviction—that stripped of his sublimations and refinements a Gentile is as avaricious as a Jew—an offense only to Jews. “Christianity,” Marx writes, “overcame real Judaism only in appearance. It was too refined, too spiritual, to eliminate the crudeness of practical need except by elevating it into the blue. Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, and Judaism is the vulgar practical application of Christianity.”⁴⁵⁴⁶ Like theodicies, the sociodicies of the Diaspora giants cope with the problem of pain, suffering, and evil. Each bestows meaning, and thus “solves” the tsuris of Galut, the status-loss of Emancipation, the humiliations of “assimilation” (“imitation”), the embarrassment of being defined as “primitive.” If, as E. M. Forster said, “Coarseness reveals; vulgarity conceals,” Freud, Marx, and Lévi-Strauss struggle to redefine the post-Emancipation situation in terms of the Jewish pariah, the Ostjude: He becomes—like Rousseau’s “natural” man—-an instrument of critique of the Jewish (and Gentile) parvenu. He may be a “primitive” and crude; he is not hypocritical (Freud’s “ethic of honesty”). .

A sociocultural status-humiliation of this character provides the motivation-nexus, the subcultural climate and provenance, of the work of Lévi-Strauss. Clifford Geertz, in attempting to understand the dramatic transformation that took place in the work of Lévi-Strauss between the personal and elegiac Tristes tropiques (1955) and the “high science” of La Pensée sauvage (1962)—which led into his science-of-mythology tetralogy—asks: “Is the transmutation science or alchemy? Is the ‘very simple transformation’ which produced a general theory out of a personal disappointment real or a sleight of hand?” Is Lévi-Strauss writing science, Geertz concludes by asking, or is he, “like some uprooted neo-lithic intelligence cast away on a reservation, shuffling the debris of old traditions in a vain attempt to revivify a primitive faith whose moral beauty is still apparent but from which both relevance and credibility have long since departed?”⁴⁷

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In the final chapter, “Finale,” of the final volume (1971) of his tetralogy—L’Homme nu (Man Nude, or Naked Man)—Lévi-Strauss, in a moving and eloquent passage, claims that all the binary oppositions in the myths that his four volumes have disclosed and inventoried derive in the end from a “fundamental, generative opposition,” an “antinomie premiére”—that, namely, voiced by Hamlet: “To be or not to be, that is the question.”⁴⁸ Again we witness here a metaphysicization of his masters, Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. Their famous work of 1903, Some Forms of Primitive Classification: A Contribution to the Study of Collective Representations, was a kind of epistemological study of the origin of the universal fact that all peoples classify, divide, and arrange the world into categories: classes, genus, species, varieties, equivalences, binary oppositions. They found the origins of classifications—even logical and ontological ones, like being and nonbeing—in the social ar-rangements that constitute a society both within itself and vis-a-vis other peoples and societies. Here we see once more what Talcott Parsons re-marked as Lévi-Strauss’s “regression” from Durkheim. By rooting all the social and natural oppositions in the “primal antinomy” (antinomie premiére) of Hamlet’s soliloquy, Lévi-Strauss bids a final farewell to the stubborn empirical dimension of the social sciences, a dimension that defines and entraps man into history and its rebuking artbitrariness and humiliating reversals.

By means of the universal and ahistorical “idealism” of the ideology of structural anthropology, the early involvement of Lévi-Strauss with the fact of his Jewishness, the ancient “Jewish problem,” has disappeared. The “primal antinomy,” the primary “donnée” of the socialization of Jews in the West in the post-Emancipation era—-namely, the “primitive classi-fication” of the world into “goyim” and “ourselves”—has been swallowed up and assimilated, sublimed into the lofty binary oppositions of nature and culture, raw and cooked, night and day. Taking our cue from Lévi-Strauss, who concludes with a citation from a hero of literature, Hamlet, we end this section with a quotation from Alexander Portnoy, not the least of whose kvetches to his parents concerns the “primitive clas-sification” or “antinomie premiére” they had instilled into him: “The very first distinction I learned from you, I’m sure, was not night and day, or hot and cold, but goyische and Jewish!”⁴⁹⁵⁰