Claude Levi-Strauss

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 369:

The key example Žižek takes from Levi-Strauss is his famous analysis in Structural Anthropology concerning two different groups from the same tribe, each conceiving of their village in a different way. Žižek's point is that the 'truth' of the village is to be found neither in some reconciliation of the two competing versions nor in some neutral, 'objective' overhead view, but in this very split itself: 'Returning to Levi-Strauss's example of the two drawings of the village, let us note that it is here that we can see in what precise sense the Real intervenes through anamorphosis' (p. 312). This will be related by Žižek to that fundamental 'split' of sexual difference, where again the 'truth' is not to be found in some reconciliation or putting together of a whole, but in the antagonism itself. As he asks: 'How ... are we to understand the "ahistorical" status of sexual difference? Perhaps an analogy to Claude Levi-Strauss's notion of the "zero-institution" might be of some help here' (p. 309). Žižek will use Adorno's analysis of the social in exactly the same sense as that of Levi-Strauss here.