Derrida himself hardly possesses an explanation of the law
against incest. He suggests that this law escapes “traditional
concepts” and is “probably... the condition of [these con-
cepts’] possibility” (Writing 283 ). That “probably” is a telltale
indication of Derrida’s uncertainty. According to Derrida, the
incest taboo lies at the root of all knowledge, but its function
remains unclear.
Derrida presents Lévi-Strauss in “Structure, Sign and
Play” much as he does in Of Grammatology.Lévi-Strauss looks
to him like a mistaken, if inventive, empiricist, a believer in
those outmoded entities, facts and evidence. Immersed in
fieldwork, the famed anthropologist doesn’t care about ideas
as much as he should. Lévi-Strauss, Derrida charges, retains
“old concepts... while here and there denouncing their lim-
its, treating them as tools which can still be used” ( 284 ). Lévi-
Strauss, in this respect a typical anthropologist, falls back on
empiricism: on the facts of tribal behavior and belief, as if
these facts were prior to the concepts he uses to explain them.
“Empiricism is the matrix of all faults menacing a discourse
which continues, as with Lévi-Strauss in particular, to consider
itself scientific,” announces Derrida ( 288 ). The “discourse”
Derrida speaks of here is structuralism, whose proponents
might be surprised to find it tarred as empiricist. He contin-
ues: “On the one hand, structuralism justifiably claims to be
the critique of empiricism. But at the same time there is not a
single book or study by Lévi-Strauss which is not proposed as
an empirical essay which can always be completed or invali-
dated by new information” ( 288 ).
The contrast is stark between Derrida’s attack on Lévi-
Strauss’s empiricism, for him a grave intellectual fault, and his
respect for Emmanuel Lévinas’s empirical emphasis, which in
Derrida’s estimation constitutes a permanent challenge to phi-
96 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology