In Thomas Meaney’s review of Patrick Wilcken’s biography of Claude Levi-Strauss in The Nation, Levi-Strauss becomes a prism through a host of French intellectuals can be understood:

For French academics and intellectuals coming of age in the 1960s, it was difficult to avoid the impression that Lévi-Strauss, by painstakingly drawing lessons from indigenous peoples from across the world, was working on a much grander scale than Sartre. “Bus-stop queues, strikes, boxing matches—the examples out of which Sartre built his ‘philosophical anthropology’—seemed provincial in comparison to structuralism’s global reach,” writes Wilcken. While Sartre concentrated on working out the problem of individual emancipation within the narrow confines of the Western philosophical tradition, Lévi-Strauss, by peeling back the divergent expressions of a common human nature all over the world, was able to reveal how much of Western culture was an unhealthy aberration. This self-critical stance in the face of other cultures became a more compelling form of anticolonialism than Sartre’s calling for third world revolution from his table at the Café de Flore. Ours was the only civilization, argued Lévi-Strauss, whose attempts to release humanity from the bonds of nature led to gross delusions that have underwritten everything from the destruction of the environment to the Holocaust. To Sartre’s “Hell is other people,” Lévi-Strauss answered: “Hell is ourselves.”

The other reason for Lévi-Strauss’s unlikely triumph was that structuralism served as a convenient halfway house for disenchanted Marxists. Those who had lost faith in the iron laws of historical materialism during the war now placed their bets on structuralism as a more credible form of social criticism for resisting the advances of Anglo-American liberalism. Structuralism also exercised a hold on their minds because its core concept of social codes was a closed system invulnerable to empirical testing. Its “imperialism of significance,” as René Girard has called it, could explain almost anything, and turned Lévi-Strauss’s corpus into the intellectual buffet from which the next generation selected its defining ideas. For Lacan, structuralism revealed the system of symbolic forms that the mind unconsciously mapped onto reality. For Althusser, it helped explain how the capitalist mode of production drew on an intricate code of agreed-upon meanings that bore little relation to the actual reality of workers. For Foucault, who was deeply attracted to the antihumanist element in structuralism despite claiming not to be a structuralist, Lévi-Strauss showed how concepts like “madness” were arbitrary constructions whose salience depended on a complex web of shifting social values. Meanwhile, Barthes used its more formal techniques to unveil the realist conceits of the modern novel and champion the “novels-without-a-subject” of Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Levi-Strauss, in his turn, became a ‘school of one’:

Still, the fusillades Lévi-Strauss aimed at his critics didn’t deter him from settling into his own brand of conservatism toward the end of his life. As Wilcken points out, Lévi-Strauss père’s reverence for established forms reasserted itself with renewed force in his son, whose youthful taste for the avant-garde proved to be spent. In 1980 Lévi-Strauss voted against Marguerite Yourcenar’s nomination to a seat in the Académie française because it went against “centuries of tradition.” (Yourcenar was the first woman to be elected.) A backslide into traditionalism is not unusual among old men. But less expected was that Lévi-Strauss’s scientific work would later be co-opted for explicitly conservative political ends: in the ’80s, French deputies quoted from The Elementary Structures of Kinship in their arguments in favor of traditional marriage as the cornerstone of the Fifth Republic.

Wilcken concludes his biography on a dismissive note. “Lévi-Strauss ended up as a one-man school,” he writes, “peddling a type of analysis that had become so utterly idiosyncratic that it was impossible to build on.” But his frustration with Lévi-Strauss’s overall project is understandable. The scientific side of Lévi-Strauss expected his work to be superseded, but in practice he stubbornly resisted updating his thinking or responding to revisions proposed by thinkers like Noam Chomsky and Clifford Geertz. In Wilcken’s telling, Lévi-Strauss comes to resemble a medieval scholastic, rummaging through structures of his own imagining as he twirls three-dimensional “myth mobiles” that hang from the ceiling of his office. The best Wilcken can say, in the end, is that “in a world of ever more specialized areas of knowledge, there may never again be a body of work of such exhilarating reach and ambition.”

Further reading:

1. Janet Maslin review in The New York Times
2. David Lan in The Guardian
3. Colin MacCabe in The New Statesman
4. Peter Mandler in The Literary Review
5. Andrew Hussey in The Independent
6. Adam Kirsch in Tablet Magazine
7. Peter Wilcken celebrates CLS’s centenary in The TLS
8. Ramona Koval talks with Patrick Wilcken on ABC’s The Bookshow

From an interview with Lee Rourke at bookslut:

Can boredom ever lead to anything good, and if so, what?

Again, not that I read him that much, it was Bertrand Russell who said that “boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.” Not that I’m in any way shape or form a moralist, or The Canal imparts any form of moral guidance, but if I imagine that we could simply break things up into things that are deemed “good” and “bad” then I would concur with Russell and argue that good things happen when we try to embrace boredom rather than fight it. I think boredom, when we allow its indifferent space into our lives, can lead to a greater perspective on things; it allows us the mental sovereignty to observe and ponder things at a slower pace, away from modern distractions, which are only designed to quicken time anyway. It always amazes me that people want time to move quickly, to speed things up every day of their lives, to wile away their evenings and weekends doing things that are considered exciting and solely designed and conceived to pass the time for them, and then, when all this is over, at the end of there lives — what a surprise! — they wonder to themselves why things have passed them by so quickly. What’s all that about?

From the LRB diary section:

I’ve never warmed to Clapham Common much: the area immediately beside Clapham Old Town is a gloomy scrag-end of grass, pinioned by Charles Barry’s impressively ugly Woman of Samaria, a statue-cum-fountain that features a pious looking Late Victorian nudie menacing a crippled crone with a ewer. I’ve never actually seen so much as a piddle of water emerge from Barry’s fountain, which, as statuary commissions go, must have been a bit of a busman’s holiday for the designer of the Houses of Parliament, since he lived at a house called The Elms on the north side of the common.

Looming up from behind a screen of dank trees you can see the neoclassical bulk of Holy Trinity (1776), which, although it postdates the establishment of the Clapham Sect, nonetheless always speaks to me of a certain stolid fusion of Anglican piety and good works. I suppose a more programmatic urban walker than me would be inclined to traverse the common following a sectarian ley-line, the one that connects – for example – Pepys’s house in the Old Town with the site of William Wilberforce’s on Broomwood Road on the west side. But while Clapham – like any other inner London suburb – has enough density of cultural associations to warrant an In Our Time of its own, it’s an axiom of city life that wherever you actually live tends to become purged of anything much save dog walks and school runs, paint shopping and child-exercising.

Has bad philosophy killed the Booker prize? | Books | guardian.co.uk

Recently, the British philosopher Simon Critchley gave a lecture at the inaugural Speakers’ Corner held at the Paradise Row gallery in East London. There’s something a little out of the ordinary right there. It’s that juxtaposition of the words “British” and “philosopher”.

It sits uncomfortably with me. Why is that? Is it because British philosophers have, for so long, been inching down the blind alley of analytical philosophy, the foundation for our current avoidance of anything that might seem esoteric, or – dare I say it – continental? Or is it because we are force-fed something else in its place: a slick, concise, quick-fix philosophising that’s grounded in fact and not too time-consuming to read? Whatever it is, I’m positive such inert scepticism governs our philosophical and literary judgment in this country. It’s the reason that the recent Booker prize shortlist, which reflects our deeply conservative, philosophy-lite tastes, is such an embarrassing failure.

I first read the work of Simon Critchley when the novelist Tom McCarthy gave me a sneak-preview transcript of their joint New York Declaration: INS Statement on Inauthenticity (it was announced by the International Necronautical Society [INS] in the Drawing Center, Manhattan on September 25th, 2007). I was immediately hooked when they declared: “For us, art is the consequence and experience of failed transcendence … art’s dirty secret is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments that attempt to cover over the traumatic event of materiality.”

Critchley’s entire oeuvre to date, similarly to the novels of McCarthy, is a call against the stuffy, reductive thinking that has haunted a British establishment that sides with form at all costs. When the Booker prize prize judge and novelist Louise Doughty writes: “The ability to come up with a good plot and create a good structure are great literary qualities – it is not just about how to make a finely turned sentence. The ability to move a story on in an engaging way, and the creation of character – these are great literary skills,” I begin to understand the kind of Idealism the INS is rallying against.

Critchley’s thinking explores the “circularity of ethical experience” and the motivational forces behind political action – predominantly disappointment, both religious and political, as he argues in Infinitely Demanding. In Things Merely Are he examines the “the situation of the relation of philosophy and poetry” through the work of Wallace Stevens, ultimately arriving at an acceptance of materialism in literature. For Critchley, material reality is a “trauma” that literature must “navigate”, allowing “things to be in their irreducible materiality” – something he has explored himself in a series of experimental writings with McCarthy and the INS.

It is somewhere within the navigation of materiality that I feel the future of the British novel lies. If literature is to evolve in this country it should put aside its traditional empiricism and strive towards radical contemporary philosophies and the esoteric, as far removed from us as they may seem. Sadly, the Booker prize is a reflection of a massive wrong-turn in our literary and philosophical culture. We have ventured no further than a conservative, establishment cul-de-sac of un-acceptance: we simply do not do philosophy that veers away from the tried and tested. We’ve got to get out of the anti-philosophical avenue our wrong-headed literary culture is pursuing.

Critchley is right when he says that all philosophy “begins in disappointment”. It is this same sense of disappointment that should encourage us to explore his work further.