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Thursday, November 12, 2015

The Unbaked, the Baked, and the Half-Baked

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:07 pm

Consider the trichotomy of the title as applied to the paragraph
by Adam Gopnik in the previous post (The Raw, the Cooked,
and the Spoiled
).

The following quotation seems to place Gopnik's words
among the half -baked.

"L'axe qui relie le cru et le cuit est caractéristique du passage
à la culture; celui qui relie le cru et le pourri, du retour à la nature,
puisque la cuisson accomplit la transformation culturelle du cru
comme la putréfaction en achève la transformation naturelle."

— Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paroles données, p.54, Plon, 1984,
     as quoted in a weblog

See also Lévi-Strauss's bizarre triangle culinaire  (French Wikipedia) —

The source of this structuralist nonsense —
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. “Le triangle culinaire.”
L’Arc  no. 26: 19-29.

The Raw, the Cooked, and the Spoiled

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

On the late French philosopher André Glucksmann,
a paragraph from The New Yorker

The style could be overwhelming at times, and was
often a more effective instrument of intellectual
pleasure than political persuasion. But, in return,
it produced a thousand small epiphanies—
for instance, his lovely mordant point, made at length
in one of his books, that between the “raw” and the
“cooked”—the simple binary beloved of structuralism—
there was always the “pourri,” the rotting, the rotten.
Our refusal to take in the rotting as a category of its own
was, he suggested, with a delighted literary grimace,
a kind of moral blindness, part of a fake dialectic that
blinded us to the muddled, rotting truth of the world.
The real world was not composed of oscillating
dialectical forces; it was composed of actual suffering
people crushed between those forces. — Adam Gopnik

See also

Click the above image for some backstory.

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