El significado del significado: Claude Lévi-Strauss según Octavio Paz

Abstract

The article analyzes the way in which Octavio Paz, in his 1967 book Claude Lévi-Strauss o el nuevo festín de Esopo [Claude Lévi-Strauss, or the New Feast of Aesop], presents and interprets the famous anthropologist’s work. In this essay, Paz summarizes the most important aspects of the structuralist method and introduces some critical observations, observations which may be one of the book’s greatest attractions. In effect, these criticisms permit exploration of the conflict between the perspectives that Paz’s reading implicates. Paz’s interest in the work of Lévi-Strauss owes much to the fact that structuralist anthropology offers possibilities for Rethinking the poetic experience. This results from the entry into crisis of other forms of considering poetry, forms that include the earlier “transcendental” and the current “imminent” forms. The article therefore also explores the relationship between the book and other writings by Paz, such as El arco y la lira [The Bow and the Lyre], “Los signos en rotación” [“Signs in Rotation”] and Corriente alterna [Alternating Current].