2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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A NACLASTIC SUPPLEMENTS
hors). It is inherent in mythology itself, where we simply discover its pres-
ence. 42
The study of myths can be termed an “anaclastics” because, like the latter, it devotes
itself to the study of the medium through which myths’ content, e.g. themes and sequences,
are refracted and reflected to assume their final outward appearance. It is therefore irrele-
vant whether the point of origin of the rays is real or hypothetical, as Lévi-Strauss affirms,
since the object of interest is constituted by the pattern of refractions and not by the content
that is being refracted. It is the hubris of the philosopher that pretends to ascertain a final
original point: the mythological reflection is content to remain at the level of the phenom-
ena—e.g. the transmitted myths—and to study the visible transformations within an empir-
ically and historically given group. This provides a first element toward the explanation of
the epistemological issue: according to Lévi-Strauss, the objectivity of the structure can be
discovered from the outside, e.g. by an anthropologist situated outside the community up-
holding the myths, because the objectivity of the structure resides in its form, and not in its
contents. More precisely, the objectivity of the structure is to be found in the transforma-
tions that it operates on the elements that pass through it and gets diffused and refracted.
The results of the transformations themselves may be illusionary, insofar as they depend on
the postulation of an hypothetical source whose existence may be challenged and, in fact,
moved by a different analysis. Thus, for example, the analysis of the group of South-Amer-
ican myths as produced by a series of transformations organized along the triplet Raw/
42. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le cru et le cuit, …, 13, 20; Engl. tr. 5, 12. Emphasis added. The definition of the
analysis of myths as “un-terminable” refers of course to the psychoanalytic distinction first discussed
by Freud in “Terminable and Interminable Analysis.” The psychoanalytic therapy, like mythology, can
be ‘unendlich’ because the concept of a “normal ego (Ich) of this sort is, like normality in general, an
ideal fiction,” according to Freud, who adds that “every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the
average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser
extent; and the degree of its remoteness from one end of the series and of its proximity to the other will
furnish us with a provisional measure of what we have so indefinitely termed ‘alteration of the ego’.”
Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth
Press, 1964) v. XXIV, 235. See also the essential disturbance of the Ego contained in the essays
on the disease of civilization and the use made by Lacan, especially in La direction de la cure. Note
also that Freud introduces the concept of “alteration of the Self, in the mentioned essay, to explain this
phenomenon, a concept with obvious similarities to the refractive and anaclastic features of Lévi-
Strauss’s medium of mythology.