Friday, November 11, 2011

Post-...um...brevity

Just in case you were looking for a one-sentence description of post-structuralism (and I know you were), Adam Shatz provides one in an LRB review (which is also otherwise worth reading) of a new biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss:
Inverting Lévi-Strauss’s favoured terms, Derrida and his allies celebrated diachrony over synchrony, events over structure, the exception over the rule, the periphery over the centre, the variable over the invariant. 

I hope to have cleared a few things up.
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3 comments:

  1. Francis Sedgemore12 November 2011 at 03:08

    "celebrated diachrony"?

    Beg pardon? I had a dose of that diachrony last year, and fucking unpleasant it was too. What does the missus have to say? She's a doctor, she should know.

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  2. JCWood12 November 2011 at 16:44

    She reminds me that good hygiene is the best prevention for diachrony.

    Glad to know you've recovered. That can be nasty...

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  3. Francis Sedgemore12 November 2011 at 16:48

    "She reminds me that good hygiene is the best prevention for diachrony."

    I've never been so insulted in all my life!

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