The Opposite of Everything is History
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
What remains after structure collapses.
What begins as a system of oppositions—raw and cooked, myth and meaning, structure and freedom—unravels across nine recursive movements. This episode enters the elegant collapse of structuralism, tracing not a theory, but its residue. Through Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gregory Bateson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gayle Rubin, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Sylvia Wynter, and Édouard Glissant, we follow a shift from form to relation, from certainty to flicker.
This essay does not explain. It listens. It does not resolve. It disturbs. It follows structure until it can no longer hold—and then it asks what flickers after: silence, relation, and the right to opacity.
Why Listen?
- Learn how structuralism framed cognition through oppositions
- See how poststructuralism undoes clarity from within
- Feel the shift from pattern to residue, from system to echo
- Follow the drift from myth to opacity, from form to relation
Further Reading
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Bibliography
- Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked. University of Chicago Press, 1969.
- Rubin, Gayle. The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex. In Toward an Anthropology of Women, 1975.
- Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
- Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press, 1997.
- Wynter, Sylvia. Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom. New Centennial Review, 2003.
Bibliography Relevance
- Claude Lévi-Strauss: Introduced structuralism, analyzing myths through binary oppositions in The Raw and the Cooked.
- Gayle Rubin: Explored the "sex/gender system," critiquing how gender roles are constructed and maintained.
- Jacques Derrida: Developed deconstruction, challenging the idea of fixed meanings in texts.
- Édouard Glissant: Advocated for the "right to opacity," emphasizing the importance of cultural diversity and relation.
- Sylvia Wynter: Critiqued Western humanism, highlighting the coloniality of being and advocating for new humanistic paradigms.
To listen is to leave the frame.
#Structuralism #ClaudeLéviStrauss #Poststructuralism #JacquesDerrida #SylviaWynter #ÉdouardGlissant #GregoryBateson #GayleRubin
