On what basis can anyone make such judgments other than
empirical observation? If Derrida has a different hunch about
the Nambikwara—if he sees them, for example, as malevolent
and solitary—it would have to be substantiated by what could
only be called an empirical account (whether from his own ex-
perience, if he were to journey to the Amazon, or from other
travelers’ reports). Derrida seems to want to change the rules
of the human game, replacing the kind of experientially based
suppositions we usually make with the strict results of philo-
sophical analysis. But he fails to suggest how this might hap-
pen: what a more rigorous or philosophical approach to judg-
ing others and their societies might look like.
What especially rankles Derrida, one might guess, is that
Lévi-Strauss links his praise of the Nambikwara to a critique of
the academic philosophy that he had immersed himself in at
the École Normale Supérieure before becoming an anthropol-
ogist. In Tristes Tropiques,Lévi-Strauss scorns the metaphysics
he studied as a young man, seeing it as vacuous and ineffec-
tual. When he plots his escape from French academic life and
into the wilds of Brazil, he is on a search for a superior, more
deeply felt way of life. Thankfully, he is able to escape what
he calls the “claustrophobic, Turkish-bath atmosphere” of
philosophical reflection for the “open air” of anthropology
and the truly social disciplines of Marxism and psychoanaly-
sis, which (Lévi-Strauss asserts) confront actual experience as
philosophy does not. Having found his vocation as anthropol-
ogist and bold investigator of the wild life in the tropics,
Lévi-Strauss derides what he deems the sterile intellectual
contortions of Husserl and Sartre.^1 Lévi-Strauss’s slurs on phe-
nomenology and existentialism were not forgotten by Derrida,
who takes his revenge on behalf of the philosophers in Of
Grammatology.
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 89