Besides the tension between play and history, there is also the ten-sion between play and presence. Play is the disruption of presence. Thepresence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive referenceinscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Playis always play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radic-ally, play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence andabsence. Being must be conceived as presence or absence on the basisof the possibility of play and not the other way around.

But in the very first pages of the ElementaryStructures Lévi-Strauss, who has begun by giving credence to these con-cepts, encounters what he calls a scandal, that is to say, something whichno longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition he has accepted,something which simultaneously seems to require the predicates of natureand of culture. This scandal is the incest prohibition. The incest prohibitionis universal; in this sense one could call it natural. But it is also aprohibition, a system of norms and interdicts; in this sense one couldcall it cultural

and this is why I called it a sediment, since the food itself becomes no more than an indeterminate bed-rock)

We find again here this disease of thinking in essences, which is at the bottom of every bourgeois mythology of man (which is why we come across it so often)

The literary scholar of the twenty-first century can no longer be content with anecdotal evidence, with random “things” gathered from a few, even “representative,” texts.† We must strive to understand these things we find interesting in the context of everything else, including a mass of possibly “uninteresting” texts

lose reading is not only impractical as a means of evidence gathering in the digital library, but big data render it totally inappropriate as a method of studying liter-ary history.

After the first death, there is no other

The majesty and burning of the child’s death. I shall not murder The mankind of her going with a grave truth Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath With any further Elegy of innocence and youth.

breath

daughter

dead

Deep

Never until the mankind making Bird beast and flower Fathering and all humbling darkness Tells with silence the last light breaking And the still hour Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

sackcloth

sow

salt seed

shadow

Shall

of the ear of corn

last light

Bird beast

mankind making