2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

234
S TRUCTURES (AND SPACES)
Thus, at the end of the journey across the myths concerning pottery, Lévi-Strauss does
not disclose the “meaning” of the original myth. Rather, he shows that there can be no an-
swer, no “meaning,” at the content level because the myth (as the ensemble of its variants)
rather organizes a series of contents. This organization articulates, in turn, the passage be-
tween nature and culture: “the lesson taught by these myths, say Lévi-Strauss, is that earth
must no longer be what men eat but must instead be cooked, like food, in order to enable
men to cook what they eat.” (234/176). The myths, in other words, articulate the distinction
between humanity and nature and since this articulation is governed by a series of transfor-
mations governed by the canonic formula, it follows that he canonic formula itself—inter-
preted as the general law presiding the very possibility of a distinction between nature and
culture and instantiated in mythical cycles—is what, ultimately, turns men into humans.
The formula, it is important to stress it for our current purposes, allows the transition
among myths through the transformation of the same theme across different codes and
across different cultural areas. This concept of transformation, in turn, is embodied in its
most salient form in the formula’s last element (F a-1(y)), where we witness what has been
called a “double twist,” or a torsion surnumeraire, which switches a function to a term (y)
and, at the same time, a term into its opposite (a-1). It is this double reversal that, by con-
necting different codes and different myths, allows the cycle to proceed from one step to
the next until, ideally, the closure of the set has been fully exploited with a return to the
point of origin. 22 This closure, however, is not static: it is not given once and for all at the
outset, It is, rather, dynamically reached by the myths that propel themselves forward, one
step at a time and from one move to the next, through the peculiar structure of the formula
that governs their development. In this sense, the canonical formula and its “double twist”
can be seen to play a role quite analogous to the “atom of kinship” that, as we saw above,
ties together different components of the social groups by regulating an exchange that re-
22. The numerous reformulations of Lévi-Strauss’s formula, like Mark Mosko’s, in “The Canonical Formula
of Myth and Non-Myth,” American Ethnologist, 18, 1 (1991) 126-51, that try to replace the problematic
last element with a simpler F x(a) : F y(b) . F x(b) : F y(b), and reducing it to a form of analogy miss,
therefore, its most important aspect.An important discussion of the intrinsic complexity of the formula
is contained in a special issue of L’Homme recently published: Emmanuel Désveaux and Jean Pouillon,
eds., La formule canonique des mythes, L’Homme, 35, 135 (1995).