Writing vs. Time History and Anthropology in The Works of Lafitau

Writing vs.
Time: History and Anthropology in the Works of Lafitau

Author(s): Michel de Certeau and James Hovde
Source: Yale French Studies, No. 59, Rethinking History: Time, Myth, and Writing (1980),
pp. 37-64
Published by: Yale University Press
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Michel de Certeau
Writing vs. Time:

History and Anthropology in the works of Laflitau
From seeing to book, and vice versa
In 1724, Joseph-Frangois Lafitau published Moeurs des sauvages

Ameriquains comparees aux moeurs des premiers temps, 2 Vol., in 40,
1100 pages. 1 Although the author was "one of the precursors of social
Anthropology,"2 and his work "the first blaze on the path to scientific
anthropology,"3 its publication is but a dot in the immense
constellation of the Enlightenment. Furthermore, only a detail of his
work will retain my attention here; the frontispiece chosen by Lafitau
for his book. An image. An almost nothing. And yet this emblem
operates as a mirror of a new "science of mores and of customs"4
where is perhaps already sketched (is it an effect of perspective?), the
anthropology which Boas will define as "the reconstruction of
history," a history for which the "inquiries are not confined to the
periods for which written records are available and to people who had
developed the art of writing." "
'Moeurs des Sauvages . . . , 2 vols. in-8' (Paris: Saugrain l'ain6 et Charles Etienne
Hochereau, 1724). I will quote this edition (volume in roman numerals; page in arabic
numerals). Another edition in 4 vols. in-8' appeared simultaneously at the same
publisher.
2A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, quoted in W.N. Fenton and E.L. Moore, "Introduction"
(cf. note 3), p. XXIX.
3W.N. Fenton & E.L. Moore, in J.F. Lafiteau, Customs of the American Indians
Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times (Toronto: The Champlain Society,
1974), p. XXIX. This translation of the first volume has one hundred pages of historical
and critical introduction (pp. XIX-CXIX), and is the best existing study of Lafitau. Cf.
also Michele Duchet, "Discours ethnologique et discours historique: le texte de
Lafitau," Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century, CLI-CLV (1976), 607-623, also,
Edna Lemay, "Histoire de l'antiquit6 et decouverte du nouveau monde chez deux
auteurs du XVIIIe siecle" (i.e., Lafitau and Gaguet), ibid, pp. 1313-1328.
4Lafitau, op. cit., I, 4.
5Quoted in A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Method in Social Anthropology, ed. M.N.
Srinivas (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1958), pp. 128 and 157.
37
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FRONTISPIECE OF THE I1724 EDITION
Michel de Certeau
The representation given by Lafitau sets forth the image of writing

and of time. In the frontispiece of 1724, their encounter takes place in
the interior of a closed space wherein are littered "vestiges" coming
from Classical Antiquity or from the Savages of the New World. "A
person in the posture of one writing" faces "time," an old man who has
the wings and gesture of an angelic messenger.6 The one holds the pen,
which creates the text, and the other, the scythe which destroys beings.
But these symbols, which are weapons as well, approach each other
without joining; the straight line of the pen is the asymptote of the
curve traced by the scythe:
They do not meet. A minimal distance separates the partners. A

fortiori the man-time does not touch the woman-writer. Only their
glances cross. But she does not look at what she is doing, and he does
6Cf. the frontispiece reproduced here, and the "Explication of the Plates and
Figures," in Lafitau, op. cit., I, non-paginated.
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not see what he is pointing to. Mediators exiled from their actions, the
two are there to permit the vision to become a text. The "mysterioUs
vision"7 ravishes the ecstatic genitrix who writes it unawaredly, and
she escapes time, who is its index. Hence the composition pivots
toward the upper part, a painting within the painting. This regulates
a movement which goes from seeing to writing. It is an Annunciation,
but one which concerns the "system" ("my system," says Lafitau),
painted in the clouds.
The importance which we must attach to this "representation" of
scientific discourse is attested by forty-one other "plates," filled with
various "figures. " Although carefully selected ("the plates which I had
engraved," he repeats), loaded with meticulous bibliographical
references, with erudite commentary at the beginning of each volume,
they were, however, insufficient according to Lafitau, who would have
liked more8 or better ones9; these plates form an iconic discourse
which traverses, from one section to another, the mass of the written
discourse. They punctuate it with "monuments," whose essential
value is in their belonging to the order of the visible. They permit a
reseeing. Or they allow the belief that one can see the beginnings once
again. This basis is essential to the production of the text. A visual
counterpoint sustains and foments the writing. The entire work obeys
the structure posited by the frontispiece as a relationship between the
"seeing" and the book.
In his "Explication des planches," Lafitau himself becomes ecstatic
before the "figures" he collected and which he alternately refers to as
"mysterious," "very singular," "among the most magnificent of their
kind," etc. '0 He conforms here to a very old ethnological tradition.
From Lery or Thevet to De Bry, things seen and seeable mark off the
writing, engendered by distance. White pebbles in the dark forest of
the text. Signs of a presence to these distant nations, and therefore of
7The word is Lafitau's, ibid.

8"I would also have had a Medallion of Commodus engraved, if I had had the
space ...." "I could also have had engraved here three very curious medallions...."
"I also could have had Roman Standards engraved," etc. ("Explication of Plates . . . ,"
op. cit., I, non-paginated).
9He notes, for example: "This Medallion was badly done by the Engraver; it is
better in Vaillant, Vol 2, p. 353," ibid.
'0Ibid.
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Michel de Certeau
the origin that is supposedly to be found there, the "figures" of the

Savage, from the sixteenth century on, were adorned with an
ambiguous beauty which contrasted with the "vices" amply described
in the books. " I Was writing expected to limit and even to exorcise the
prestige of seeing? Assuredly, the written demystified these images. It
detached the glance from them. But it did this as a textual commentary
twists the visual authority. In fact, in the manner of glosses engendered
by a juridical Code, by biblical documents or by a poem, the text
comments on these figures which have the force of "authorities,"
inasmuch as they conserve a visibility of origins. It is only necessary to
assure the "authenticity" of these iconic sources-the classic question
carefully treated in each case under the double aspect of the
ancientness (of the documents or of the savages), and of the exactness
of the reproduction. The written, therefore, refers to these
"authorities," which have the status of quotations; it compares them to
others in order to be disseminated around these pieces of evidence.
However "ethnological" it may be, it uses the procedures, therefore,
of law or of exegesis. But from this point the "monuments" are those
which render the beginnings visible. Relative to another conception of
history, they remain archeological; they make the Arche readable, the
beginnings of Time. It would also be an inversion of the function of
these texts to detach them from what we consider today as an
"illustration," that is, a commentary on the written.
Lafitau borrows a number of his tableaux of Americans from Lery,
Thevet, or De Bry, and he views these pieces-ancient or savage-as
fragments of the "vision," whose entirety is hidden from him by Time,
but whose scattered and precious "vestiges" remain. These are
"allusions," "symbols," "allegories," or "types." The Origin appears
once again. It insinuates itself into contemporary visibility as the initial
Big Bang of the cosmos can still be heard, a sound trace, surplus
and relic of the Origin, in the noises of today. To recall the expressions
tirelessly repeated by Lafitau, these "figures" allow us to "see" or to
" Cf. Bernadette Bucher, La Sauvage aux seins pendants (Herman, 1977); Frank
Lestringant, "Les representations du sauvage dans l'iconographie relative aux ouvrages
du cosmographe Andre Thevet," Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, XL
(1978), 583-595; or, earlier, the observations of Gilbert Chinard, L'exotisme amiricain
dans la littirature francaise au XVIe siece (Paris: 1911), p. 102.
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"glimpse" the beginnings of history. As bizarre as they may be, they

are not placed under the sign of that "monstrosity" and "absurdity"
for which fables or behaviors are criticized. On the contrary, they
seduce the writer. They emerge from an eroticism of the origin. They
offer that which one can still see of the "first times," as if through a
keyhole-according to the schema which is a primal scene of
"modern"' 2 ethnology.
There is, however, in these images something that should not be
seen: the nudity of the body. "These figures being too nude, decorum
has obliged me to have them dressed, as well as many others." ' 3 This
Jesuit brings order to his ancient figurines just as his colleagues of the
period dress the Indian women of the Reductions of Paraquay. The
beautiful Isis breast-feeding the bull is covered with a sackcloth.'4
Gods and goddesses, clothed, take ridiculous if not unrecognizable
postures. On the other hand, the engraver gives them a head when
Time had scythed it from them. 15 Symptomatic details. What Lafitau
wants to see are objects pregnant with meaning (insignias, cross, star,
crowns, coded gestures, etc.), and no longer, as had Lery, beautiful
bodies who continue the dances of the Golden Age as if they were still
ignorant of the avatars and the sin of history. He is looking for a
lexicon. He wants to read signs. In front of these vestiges, he is
possessed by a passion for meaning. He needs "figures that speak. " 16
And indeed, where those of antiquity are silent, destroyed by Time, he
turns toward the Savages, "monuments" too of the primeval age, and
still "speaking." Hence, they are readable. 17
The "word" (parole) which interests him is not voice (vox). It is
"teaching" (documentum). It is a bit of the truth of the "first times."
'2It is already so in the work of Jean de LUry. Cf. M. de Certeau, L'Ecriture de

1'histoire, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), pp. 215-248: "Ethno-graphie."
'3Lafitau, op. cit., I, "Explication of the plates . . . ," non-paginated. Lafitau and
his engraver are more scrupulous with regard to the ancients than with regard to the
savages, who are often left naked or clothed with the simplest covering.
140p. cit., I, p. 236, plate XII, fig. 2.
15 Cf., regardingplateXVII (op. cit., 1, 444): "The Vestalisheadless, buttheengraver
judged it appropriate to add one in his own way."
'6Lafitau, op. cit., I, 241.
'7Concerning this frontispiece, cf. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "Les jeunes, le cru,
l'enfant grec et le cuit," in J. Le Goff and P. Nora, eds. Faire de 1'histoire, vol. 3 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1974).
42
Michel de Certeau
But if the document has the force of presence (it is visible), it is only a
fragment (a "vestige"). In constituting the privileged quotation (as
before, the biblical verse or the article of the Code in the glosses), it
fosters a text, it calls, by what is missing there, for a discourse where all
of these primitive bursts of light are to be ordered in a "system." What
the eye sees is only the scatterings of what the book must produce.
Furthermore, from the seen to the written, the movement returns
inward. As a rule, the "mysterious vision" should cause the writing; in
fact, these are innumerable visual debris of inaccessible origin. And is
not the vision or the "system" finally but the mirror of the scholarly
writing? The sky which appears on the wall is a painting, not a day (the
light comes from the left). The woman-writer reads there, in ecstasy,
what she creates herself. Her book is projected on the laboratory
screen in a spectacle of meaning which is the narcissistic double of the
work. From seeing to writing, and from writing to seeing, there is
circularity in the interior of a closed space.
The Production Workshop
The frontispiece describes the operation involved in "recon-

structing history" in the laboratory. It depicts the history of a
fabrication, and not its discursive result. It is technological and not
speculative. Divided in two jointed spaces (the writer's room and the
painting of her vision), the engraving first represents, in the
workroom, the three elements destined to fight against depredatory
Time: an archival institution, the collection; a technique for
manipulating the material, the comparison; an author and generator of
the product, the woman writer.
1. A Locus: the Collection. The "archives" are strewn on the floor:
medallions and statuettes, maps and books, and a globe of the Earth.
The majority of these remains come from the ancient world. They are
disposed at the feet of the writer. Like a garden uniting plants from
all sorts of lands, the heteroclite museum appears encyclopedic.
But it presents a broken image from the past: a corps morcek,
disseminated fragments. The ravages operated by Time can be read in
this landscape of ruins. The frame of the work undertaken by Lafitau is
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an anthology of degradation. The signs of degeneration and of death, a

vocabulary of ruin, spell a primary experience of history. Now the reverse
of what had happened in the sixteenth century, the voyage, encounter
and marvel at different societies, no longer provides either the object or
the form to the discourse. No living person inhabits this learned man's
cell. All corps-a'-corps has disappeared. Nor is there anything to hear;
the only givens are these remains to be seen. Apart from the angels and
Time, the writer stands alone to (re)make a world out of relics.
Nonetheless, the collection is an institution. It results not only from
the "conservative" gesture, genealogical and familial, which fights the
effects of time, but also from a relation, "scientific" in nature, between
an abstract model (the idea of a totality), and a pursuit of objects
capable of realizing it. Apursuit (collating all the variants), is articulated
upon a selection (the definition of the series). The connection of these
two elements is the basis for the establishment of sources. In the case of
Lafitau, his "gallery" attests to the fashions among collectors who,
from 1700 to 1750, preferred the "ancient" to the medallions of the
seventeenth century and, from 1750, valued pieces related to "natural
history. "18 Here these three generations of collections are stratified: to
the medallions (Syrian, Egyptian, etc.), are added "several monu-
ments from antiquity" (statues of Isis, of Diane, of Horus, etc.), and
finally, adjacent, some "curiosities from America" (Iroquois tortoise,
Indian calumet). Each of these pieces is coded and commented
according to the best scholarship on antiquity or on numismatics: J.
Spon, Justus Lipse, La Chaussee, T. Hyde, J. Vaillant, etc., through
the Antiquite expliquee et representee en figures of B. de Montfaucon
(1717). 19 This apparatus of objects and of references has an
autonomous function. It has a system of its own. Into the solitary
chamber it insinuates interests of the present, economic as well as
intellectual, which impose themselves silently on the Work of the
writer. The debris of long ago arrives already selected and transformed
by a present which makes it the code of a contemporary history.
Erudition is not a robinsonade.
18 Cf. Krzystof Pomian, "Medailles/coquilles = 6rudition/philosophie," in Studies

on Voltaire and the 18th Century, CLIV, VI (1976), 1677-1703.
'9Cf. the "Explication of the plates . . ," I, non-paginated.
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Michel de Certeau
However, Lafitau's personal museum circumscribes a field of its

own. The material posited there, set apart, composes the scaffolding
for a text. They are instruments with which to write in a loose
grouping, like notecards in disorder before the arranging to be brought
about by the book. The frontispiece presents a selection of them
wherein one can recognize the "plates" of the work. At the bottom,
from right to left, we have a medallion figuring Isis and Osiris as
serpents;20 another medallion representing the goddess Astarte of
Syria with a cross;2' a sistrum22 on top of a map;23 a stone Hermes24 on
top of a "curious" medallion dating from Alexander II of Syria and
also representing Astarte carrying a cross;25 a medallion of Isis
Mammosa surrounded by symbols of the four elements;26 another map
and a book; a Diane of Ephesis with multiple breasts27 on top of a
Hermes;28 then another map and a pile of books indicating the very
numerous sources utilized by Lafitau (Kalin has counted 210), travel
narratives, works from antiquity, from the Middle Ages and modern
times through Bacqueville de la Potherie, Labat, Casaubon, Grotius,
etc.29 After the globe (placed in the axis of Time), we have, a little
higher, from left to right: another Hermes;30 a Horus Apollo with his
"hieroglyphic" symbols,3' before two stones, one pyramidal and the
other conic;32 and finally, a Canopus upon a griffon.33 The prestige of
Egypt, the Middle East, and late Hellensim, hence of a mythological,
historicized and edited antiquity, haunts this museum.34 The
landscape is constructed with what the seventeenth century considered
20I, 228; plate 10, fig. 5.

2 1. 444; pl. 17, fig. 10.
22J, 212; p. 8, fig. 3.
23Cf. the "map of America," I, 26.
241, 136; pl. 4, fig. 4.
251, 444; pl. 17, fig. 12.
261, 136; pl. 4, fig. 3.
271, 136; pl. 4, fig. 2.
281, 136; pl. 4, fig. 1.
29 Cf. K. Kahin, Indianer und Urvolker (Freiburg, 1943), p. 19, and the list in Fenton
& Moore, op. cit., pp. LX-LXII.
301, 136; pl. 4, fig. 1.
31J, 444; pl. 17, fig. 1; and I, 236; pl. 12, fig. 1.
321, 136; pl. 4, fig. 1.
33J, 444; pl. 17, fig. 7.
34Cf. Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition
(Copenhagen: 1961).
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as an index of primitiveness. Antiquity itself is a modern product.

The frieze of documents refers exclusively to the first volume, and
only concerns the plethoric chapter "On Religion,"35 one of the author's
obsessions. Of the three series which are interlaced there-
archeology, books, cartography-only the first is individualized; its
objects are like gems among the anonymity of texts and maps. These
jewels, relics for the eye and substances of the past, form the
privilieged instance. They show only things from antiquity, whereas in
his book Lafitau allots more than half of his plates to the Savages,
especially, and to China. The index is revealing. The "alteration" of
ancient monuments and the obscuring of their sense as a result of their
distance compels the use of the "supplement" furnished by the
Savages; Algonquins, Hurons, Iroquois come at a second level, as a
substitute for the first. They "supplement," that is to say they take the
place of, that which is lacking in the ancient treasures.36 They fill the
holes and "clarify" the obscurities.
But there is a difference of function between the ancient things and
the savage customs. The first have primarily the value of relics, the
second primarily that of "clarification" (lumieres). Archeology
presents to be seen what ethnology permits to be explained. Lafitau
writes: "I admit that if the ancient authors gave me some light to
support various happy conjectures concerning the Savages, the
Customs of the Savages gave me some light to understand more easily
and to explain several things which are in the ancient Authors. 37 The
comparison here points to the informative or explanatory value of the
"ancient Authors" and of these living texts which are the savage
customs; in Lafitau, the comparison is often favourable to the
Savages, who bring more "clarification. " With the ancients, on the con-
trary, (that is, not the books, but the monuments) one has less meaning and
more realp resence, i. e. the privilege of being able still to see the origins if
compensated by a lack of sense. Also, in the frontispiece, what we are
351, 108-455.
36Concerning the idea of "Supplement," cf. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie
(Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1967), pp. 203-204: "Ce dangereux supplement."
371, 3-4. Hence the numerous observations of the sort: "It is therefore
necessary to explain Herodotus on the custom of the Lycians of taking their mothers'
names by that which the Hurons and the Iroquois observe still" (I, 74; my underlining).
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Michel de Certeau
given to see are the ancient medallions and statuettes, as if the

''savage" supplement were either hidden behind them to fill the gaps in
them, or localized in the comparativist operation which allows access
to their explication. An effect of time, the division between seeing (yet
without understanding), and understanding (yet without seeing),
makes their combination necessary.
2. A Technique: Comparison. Two "genies" hold in their hands,
one a calumet of peace and a caduceus of Mercury, and the other, an
Iroquois tortoise and an ancient sistrum. They play with two objects
extracted from heterogeneous totalities. They "bring these monu-
ments together" and, says the Explication, they "help" the writer
"make this comparison."38 Furthermore, the "helpers," technical
mediators between the collection and the writing, perform before us
two comparativist "turns" which Lafitau did himself in his book,
"turns" of which he is rather proud.39 The "manipulation" they
represent consists in drawing from the stock of monuments, piled up
without chronological order, elements which are susceptible of being
formally compared and which fit together symbolically as general
categories. "Also," declared Lafitau, "in the comparison that I must
make, I'll not take it as a difficulty to cite customs of any land
whatever, without claiming to draw any consequences other than the
relation of these customs with those of the earliest Antiquity."40
Hence, the elements used belong to everyone and to no one. In the
end, they belong only to the origin, and to the writer who produces it.
To an historical problem (knowing origins), corresponds a method
which is not of the same order and which seeks to construct
"similitudes." The historical question receives a formalist treatment.
The comparison is a "relation" which plays upon other ones,
indefinitely, in order to generate Lafitau's "system," that is, "a whole
of which the parts sustain each other by the connections they have
between themselves."''4 The "system" is defined exactly like a text.
38J, "Explication of the Plates."

39Concerning the calumet and the caduceus: II, 325-330; concerning the tortoise
and the sistrum: I, 216-219 (cf. I, 26).
401, 45. Concerning "comparison" in the work of Lafitau, cf. also Sergio Landucci, I
filosofi e i selvaggi 1580-1780 (Bari: Ed. Laterza, 1972), pp. 247-260.
41 I, 4.
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Also, each comparison's role is to be, in this laboratory, a textual

"preparation" made by the writer's assistants. Little by little it
transforms the collection into a text. The latter will not be "sustained"
by the antiquity nor the social identity of the documents it treats, but
by "the relation alone" that it establishes among them. In principle,
therefore, it is the inverse of historiography, and it is not authorized by
the objects it cites, that is, by legitimation through the intervention of
the "referential" (it is the "real" which legitimates historiography,
"description, narration of things as they are").42 The text is not
authorized except by itself, inasmuch as it constitutes a distinct
"language" or system of relations. There is a continuity between
comparison and writing. The one produces the other.
The progressive production of the text through connections also
produces sense or "explanation." The writer's operators appear to be
angels as much as genies, and their message is born of comparison.
Before the dumbness of "things" (which no longer "speak" in the
epistemology of the eighteenth century), they are speakers, annun-
ciators of meaning, because they are comparatists. In unifying silent
vestiges, they compose the sentence of a message and, since the
relation they establish between two disparate "monuments" is
considered to be only one element of the system, they repeat, as they
manipulate the objects, the demonstrative gesture of Time; they refer
to an original "essential" which is, for Lafitau, a formal whole; they no
longer pronounce its loss, but its promise.
They are the evangelists of Time, who no doubt shows with one
hand what he destroys with the other, but who, on his deictic side,
covers the entire series (the axis), of the totalizing construction, from
the comparatist operations of the "genies" to the representation of the
globe of the Earth. On this line we go from the globe to the book, from
a system of places to a system of weaning, by the gesture which had
detached the objects from their places ("from any land whatever"),
and which poses a "sym-bolic" relation between these terms,
just like judgment has, in the Logic of Port-Royal, the function
of "comparing," "connecting," or "separating" unities or con-
42Furetiere, Dictionnaire universel (1690), art. "Histoire" (my italics).
48
Michel de Certeau
ceived "ideas," and, therefore, of affirming relations.43 The angel

plays the role of a copula. He is the "action"; for, he puts and holds
together objects or atoms of language detached from their respective
sites, and affirms a signification for them through an operation (at once
manual and intellectual), which in "bringing them together,"
transforms them into the terms of a proposition. The angel produces
the basic unity of the book. The discourse will be made from all these
angels.
3. A Genitrix: the Writer. The production cycle ends with "a person
in the posture of one writing." The subtle ambiguity of the expression
Lafitau uses in his text hides what in the image is manifest: this writer is
a woman. To this sole historical character on the stage correspond
many details of the frontispiece which specify the position of woman.
In the collection there are Astarte, the Isis Mammosa, the Diane of
Ephesis, covered with breasts, etc.; in the painting in the background
there are Eve the mother of men and Mary the mother of God.
Allusions to fecund maternity are strewn throughout the engraving.
They form a network of references and of mirrors around the central
figure. And so it is in the work of Lafitau, celebrated in particular for
having identified a "gynecocracy" or "empire of women" in the
Iroquois or Hurons like the Lycians, an originally matriarchal and
matrilinear system, where the "matrons" exercise the "principal
authority" (genealogical and political), and where men only have
power "by way of procuration. "44 We also see repeated here the
determination of the name via the mother in several societies (Lycian,
Jewish, Huron). Everywhere it is the mother who appears in the
woman. She is the master of political deliberation, of the family name,
of children and of marriage: in short, master of the symbolic order, as
well as of the "field" or of life. Lafitau himself adds writing to these
powers described in relation to primitive societies, and writing no doubt
recapitulates all of them.
Because if the mother/writing is in the center of the engraving, she
43A. Arnauld and P. Nicole, La logique ou I'art de penser, II, chaps. 2 and 3 (Paris:
Flammarion, 1970), pp. 151-159.
441, 460-481. Concerning the debate provoked by this analysis, cf. Fenton &
Moore, op. cit., CIII-CVII; John Ferguson McLennan, Primitive Marriage (London:
1865).
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is there as representative of the author. She marks the place of the

speaker in his work. She is the signature of the speaker. It is he, and his
generating power, who installs himself in this theater as the lone
historical actor. But he is there as a transvestite: "a person," says the
text; a woman in the frontispiece, a mother, according to the entire
context. A dream of being a mother in order to engender? There is a
"Schreberian" passion in Lafitau to write and to be a woman, and thus,
to fill all the lacunae wherein are introduced the "nothing" of an
emptiness, in order to oppose the production of the "system" to the
avatars of history and to substitute a totality of meaning for ruins.45
This celibate priest will himself be the mother of an anthropology, the
genealogical arche of a system. But, at the same time, what can he be
but the travesty of the Other, that is, either he will play the "matron"
who generates a real human order (whereas his book is only afiction of
the world), or he will mime the divine installation of a totality of
meaning (whereas his written work can only make believe that it
represents the Beginning)?
Besides the confessions revealed in this frontispiece-Lafitau's
dream about his book-one can read the new operation of writing
emerging in the beginning of the eighteenth century. Writing alone
remains productive at a moment when the presence of antiquity,
paternal tradition, collapses, when the savage speakers are no longer
anything but relics of an anthropophagous conquest, left in scientific
museums. Absence of father. Absence of brothers. Only their debris
remains, piled up together: the mother/writing, celibate machine,
must generate another world and make a new beginning. The law of
producing a text on the site of ruins imposes itself. Henceforth, it will
be necessary to create writing with the debris of the Other.
In fact, this new importance of productive work also indicates the
ambitions of an "enlightened" and "bourgeois" elite. Putting the
writer on the stage replaces sixteenth and seventeenth-century
engravings' representations of meetings between Europeans and
Savages, and makes a star out of a new hero of history: the power of
writing. In the text itself, the author always marks his place; he
45Cf. President Daniel Paul Schreber, Dendwdrdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken

(Leipzig: 0. Mutze, 1903).
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Michel de Certeau
underlines that which caused him "pain" or gave him "pleasure" ;46 he
specifies his intentions, his methods or his successes. These notations
make of the writer, or of his written production, an important, if not
essential, actor in the "narration." Writing means telling one's own
story. Thus, in the same period, the Canadian travel narratives (from
Champlain to Lahontan), describe at length the heroic trials of the
writer (where and when one wrote, in spite of the cold, during a brief
stop, with the sap of a tree, etc.), just as the gazettes alter the
"messenger" (just arrived from Naples or Amsterdam, contradicted
by another, etc.), into an actor by whom is added to the text the
irresistible epic of the text's construction.47 This structure is already
narcissistic. The producer shows himself in his production, but altered,
inverted into a woman and mother.
With the reintroduction of the speaker into the utterance, with the
heroization of writer-conquerors (or Amazons?), a new operation of
writing is indicated. Undoubtedly, it goes back to the sixteenth
century. The Reformers then thought to remake (reform) the
"corrupted" institutions, starting with the sacred Scriptures. The
Scriptures seemed to them a recourse from the decadence of the times.
But, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, erudition
continuously showed that the Scripture too was corrupted, deter-
iorated by history and rendered unreadable by distance.48 The original
project was maintained only by displacing it. Another writing,
artificially produced language, was to have the capacity to discipline
the chaos introduced by the past and to create a present order. The
impotence of Scripture against the depravity of institutions produced
by time gave way to campaigns for writing systems (scientific, utopian,
or political) to constitute a rational world. So to write is to make
history, rectify it, educate it: "bourgeois" economy of power through
46He thus mentions the authors who "caused [him] the most grief" (I, 547), or those
who brought him the most "pleasure" (II, 482).
47Cf., e.g., the research of Mme Claude Rigault (Univ. of Sherbrooke, Canada), on
the Nouveaux Voyages of Lahontan (1703). On the gazettes, cf. Pierre Retat and Jean
Sgard, eds., Presse et histoire au XVIIle siecle. L'annee 1734 (Paris: CNRS, 1978).
48Cf. Walter Moser, "Pour et contre la Bible: croire et savoir au XVIIIe siecle,"
Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century, CLIV (1976), 1509-1528; M. de Certeau,
"L'idee de traduction de la Bible au XVIIe siecle," Recherches de science religieuse, 66
(1978), 73-92.
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writing; "enlightened" ideology of the revolution through the book;

"progressist" postulate of the transformation of societies by scientific
"languages."49
Theories and Scientific Legends
At the strategic focus of the frontispiece, the matron/writing

engenders a bookish order. With the debris of heterogeneous pasts,
she fabricates a text that enunciates the law of history. But this work
obeys principles which are set apart in the upper part of the engraving.
Between the workshop and the "vision," between the description of
the operation and the painting of the theory, there is a disjunction
permitting a connection. Lafitau's scientificity is organized upon the
disjunction of these two spaces.
1. The non-lieu of theory: from Myth to Science. The separateness
of the representation (that is recessed into the wall), the "vision," is
strongly emphasized by its framing; it is set off from time, from that of
past societies and from that of the writing operation. This "different"
space is neither a landscape (the room is closed), nor an apparition, but
a mural painting, a sort of "trompe-l'oeil": abstracted from the
chronological order, it is an order of principles. Two superimposed
circles of clouds surround two couples. One of them, Adam and Eve, is
separated by the tree of knowledge; the other couple, the arisen Man
and the Woman of the Apocalypse, is separated by the monstrance, an
abstract tree marked with a central point, under the triangular emblem
of the Hebrew script for Yahweh. This allegory of the theories of the
work is an achronic tableau vivant.
From this point of view, the decisive difference between Lafitau
and the comparatist tradition of Huet lies in replacing Moses with
Adam and Eve. A "theoretical" figure of the origin is substituted for a
historical character. The figure represents the monogenistic principle,
postulate of the work. But this is at the lower level of the formal
painting, as a corollary of the upper level, like a lock-chamber; in this
way the theory posits inside itself its own relation to exteriority and to
49Cf. M. de Certeau, L'Ecriture de I'histoire, 2nd. ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), and
"Des outils pour 6crire le corps," Traverses, 14-15 (1979), 3-14.
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Michel de Certeau
time. Lafitau takes care, furthermore, to mark his distance from his
comparatist predecessors, a fundamental distance. Just as he sets aside
Moses, from whom Pierre-Daniel Huel claimed all religions derived,
Lafitau plays down the authority of the Bible because it is too
"localized" (there were societies before Israel), too "positive"
(general principles are needed), and too close to the "fables," whether
savage or Greco-Roman, that he judged to be "absurd." 0
In the place of the Bible, there is a "system." An epistemological
break is indicated by the fact that the theoretical tableau is detached
from any historical positiveness. "Demonstration" will no longer be,
as with Huet, based upon points of chronology. It ceases to be a war of
dates, from which Moses always had to come out more ancient than his
supposed descendants. It becomes the deployment of operations that a
conceptual corpus is able to organize given certain materials. Defined
by a group of principles and hypotheses, that is, by transparent, "clear
ideas" which no longer permit the ruses of hermeneutics to play upon
the opacities of an authorized text, theory has no place in time or
space. It is a non-lieu. The origin is a form (a network of formal
relations), and not a date, a personage, or a book of history. It consists
more in what scientific research gives itself as work rules than in what it
receives as the law of a history.
In fact, the setting apart of theory is a scientific gesture
indissociable from a more global historical gesture that sets the writer
apart, that cuts him from his social ties and attachments, and
constitutes him as a proprietor of an autonomous workshop. It was
necessary that a "clear" field be circumscribed where writing might
claim the right to freely establish its rules and to control its own
production-it was necessary that there be this gesture, alternately
"Cartesian" and "bourgeois," founder of a science and of an
economy-so that, in principle, cut off from its genealogical debts, the
writer might give himself, in an ahistorical tableau, the whole of his
postulates, criteria and theoretical choices. Then his work no longer
501, 10-60. Cf. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Demonstratio Evangelica (Paris: 1679);

Alphonse Dupront, P. D. Huet et 1'exegese comparatiste au XVIle sikle (Paris: 1930);
and the great synthesis of Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il nuovo mondo. La nascita
dell'anthropologia come ideologia coloniale: dalle genealogie bibliche alle teorie
razziali (1500-1700) (Florence: La Nuova Italia Ed., 1977), especially pp. 544-613.
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depends on a particular tradition or on his fidelity to his first fathers.

The rupture and the crumbling of the genealogical pressure go
together with the establishment of a scientific insularity.
The "son" of a history is therefore replaced by an operator and an
observer. There is no father in the frontispiece of Lafitau (1724), just
as there is none on Robinson Crusoe's island (1734). That a
Christianity received by "filial" tradition should have been altered into
a producer with the intent to organize practical considerations was, for
Lafitau and Defoe, the effect of this technical and individualistic
isolation.51 The writer is the mother and the beginning of a world; he
symbolizes the absence of the (genealogical) other on the productivist
stage where man can play as a transvestite the role of the genitrix: he
thus gives witness to a conquering bourgeoisie and to the science it
rendered possible.52 He dehistoricizes the tradition upon which he
claims he no longer depends and which is coming apart under his eyes,
transformed on the one hand into a multiplicity of objects-vestiges,
and on the other into fiction or a theoretical tableau. There is no longer
workable historicity where there is denial of relationships of
belonging.
Opposed to the disorder of the collected vestiges, the painting
presents, according to theoretical importance, the "ideas," qualified
as "clear and distinct," which regulate the production of the work and
constitute together the equivalent of an "original writing. "52 Kalin
distinguishes 1) two theories: (a) the physical and spiritual conformity
between the Indians and the inhabitants of the old world, (b) the single
origin of mankind and the peopling of the Americas across the Bering
Straits; and 2) two hypotheses: (a) the initial revelation of a
monotheistic religion, (b) the regulation of the sexes by marriage since
the most distant times.54
These positions are summarized in an iconic "abstract": a lone
5 Cf. Homer 0. Brown, "The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe," ELH
(1971), 562-590; Curt Hartog, "Authority and Autonomy in Robinson Crusoe,"
Enlightenment Essays (1974), 33-43; etc.
52J, 109, 116, etc.
53Cf. Margaret Hogden, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries (Philadelphia: 1964), p. 268.
54K. Kahin, op. cit., p. 30; cf. Fenton & Moore, op. cit., pp. LXXIX-LXXX.
54
Michel de Certeau
original couple, man and woman. This emblem indicates the strategic
role played by kinship systems in Lafitau's analysis-a role which has
as a postulate, for Lafitau as for later ethnologists, an exclusion of
genealogical dependence. It is as if kinship became an object of study
when it was excluded from the scientists, as "subject," and no longer con-
cerned Lafitau. The couple serves as a model of all sorts of "connections,"
"relationships," and "comparisons." It is given in two forms, one
celestial and the other terrestrial. These forms also give shape, in the
case of the clothed couple, to the old world and religious antiquity,
while the other, almost nude, to the new world and savage primitive-
ness. The one leads, by the monstrance, to the cipher of the Absolute;
the other, by the serpent, toward temporal degradation. The hierarchy
of places of meaning applies, therefore, to geographical places. The
difference, however, "returns to the same." The same couple
reproduces itself from a celestial cloud to the other, terrestrial cloud;
the distinction between them resides only in accidental variants which
introduce, into the model, heterogeneous spaces wherein oneness
reproduces itself. The theory thus bears within itself the explanation of
contingent diversities which are, as are diseases, structurally effected
by the historical context. With her look fixed upon the models, the
writer will know how to/will have to recognize them in their avatars.
By the rules that it gives to the analytical operation (postulating a
reproduction of the same structure and functions, yet permitting the
totalization of the variants and the reduction of differences to a unity),
the painting of the principles also posits the conditions which render
possible an anthropo-logy, that is, a discourse on Mankind in general.
The form of this discourse remains "theological" while the content
emerges as scientific. The mixture is the same; far from hiding it,
Lafitau claims full responsibility for it. He is still a missionary. As an
apologist, we find in his work the characteristic habit of furnishing a
pre-established, accepted architecture in an apparently "modem" way.
But scriptural modernity is not, for him, only an appearance. He takes
it seriously, and it metamorphoses his discourse. Also, more important
than the author's intentions, the question arises as to what status to
give to a dogma transformed into theory. The process which produces
this "laicization" is clear: to de-realize, that is, to de-historicize an
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economy of salvation is to change it into an allegory of a body of

principles. But here we have a discourse (often the case since Plato)
which makes of a belief the dwelling (or mythos) of a reasoning (or
Logos), and which sketches the formalism of a science in space and
expresses it in the vocabulary of a religion. It asks about the place of
theory, or of this kind of theory.
According to Nietzsche, the wearing away of a metaphor alters it
into a concept.55 Likewise, recognized beliefs, in "being worn,"
progressively cease to articulate the thinkable, and would be trans-
formable into a rational system. The space occupied by the realities on
which they depend is then changed into a "place" which modernity
calls "mythic," that is, a place in which to write. The place is held by the
beings (more or less incoherent and dominating) to which the believers
were attached as to an insurmountable and historic place, an "alterity"
which empties itself yet remains there, vacant in the middle of a world
full of things, a place henceforth given over to writing, which indexes
an absence in substituting for it a production. Principles can and must
be attached at this place of the greatest emptiness (heaven, the origin,
etc.), the principles of a scriptural autonomy (by choices, postulates,
definitions, etc.), and the principles of readability or of a "seeing" (by
"theory," which refers one to a "vision")-principles which replace
the dependence and belief formerly articulated upon a "historic"
existence of the Other (spirits, gods, in short, a Paternity).
This metamorphosis and occupation of the space of the Other by
theoretical writing presents three characteristics which are to be found
whenever reason transforms into a myth the real on which a belief
depends; for the believable is substituted the readable/visible; for the
historical, the speculative; and for the non-coherence of different
wishes (or beings), the coherence of principles by which a thought
gives itself, as in a mirror, its own project. Fundamentally, these three
procedures of philosophical allegorization come back to the installa-
tion, according to the norms of a new tenant (i.e., of a science), of the
place where the evacuation of the Other furnishes writing with a site.
55Cf. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1972), pp.
249-273, regarding texts of Hegel and Nietzsche concerning this "wearing"
(Abnutzung).
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Michel de Certeau
In this place, disaffected and abandoned by belief, theory has,

however, the form of a history which does not acknowledge itself. It is
produced there as autonomous, but it denies the "believing"
historicity, the place of which it has taken and upon which it still
depends. Although there are multiple variants of this process,56
Lafitau himself makes us participate in the very moment of the
transition. He says he is, he wishes to be, a believer. But whatever
docility he manifests with regard to the religious authorities,57 relates
to his "job" of priest, his social position, more than his thought. Not
that he denies Catholic dogmas. On the contrary, he affirms them-
but detached, transported to a theoretical level where they no longer
have weight as "literal" history. His tableau is still a religious painting,
and it is already the allegory of scientific principles. Neither entirely
the one nor entirely the other, it is a double play of representation, an
unstable moment. And Lafitau will appear too "credulous" to the
"Atheists" he combats. Yet (after initial praise addressed by the
Jesuits of the Journal de Trevoux to the work of their colleague before
its publication), he is not safe enough for royal and ecclesiastical
censors to authorize the publication of his second, more ambitious
work on primitive religion.
Perhaps in this displacement of a theology toward an anthro-
pology, his voyage to and sojourn among the Iroquois is inscribed into
the text. The distance, separating him from the universalistic
pretentions of his religious tradition, would translate itself for him by
an internal uprooting that altered its locus and transposed "his"
Christianity into scientific theory. Lafitau's discourse would be the
writing of his story, the index of a non-lieu between two ideological
pressures and two cultural worlds.
2. Time Dead. The last figure in the frontispiece is Time, mediator
between the laboratory and the painting. Time points, yet by his
561n Freud (Totem and Taboo), or Durkheim (Les formes 66mentaires de la vie
religieuse), this way of transforming "primitive" belief into a space in which to write
theory (psychoanalytical or sociological), can be found.
57I, 13: "When it is a question of Religion, I profess to be so little attached to my
ideas that I am ready to retract...."
580n the reactions of contemporaries and on the immobilisation, then disappear-
ance of the manuscript, cf. Fenton & Moore, op. cit., pp. LXXXIII-CII, and
XLI-XLII.
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presence he seems to prevent seeing. He indicates the Origin, but he

turns his back to it. He serves as a shifter between the two halves of the
frontispiece and he alone crosses the border separating them; but, at
the same time, the view of the writer must cross this opaque body in
order to contemplate the "vision." Uncertain guide, a path descending
and climbing similar to Jacob's ladder, Time is a crossroads upon
which the principles lower themselves to their "vestiges," and the
scriptural operation rises up to the "system." Through Time is
produced, equally, the historical deterioration and the theoretical
reconstruction of the "same" Model.
Apparently, the edge of the space occupied by this figure is
neutral-neither the one nor the other, but between the two. In fact,
time has the attributes of death. It is not only because he, too, is a
devastator. It is also because producton fights against him and aims in
the end to kill time: a combat of the pen and the scythe. Between the
formal painting and the book, there is this always reemerging gap to be
reabsorbed, analogous to a permanent lapsus; history shatters the
original writing and creates lacunae upon which the anthropological
construction stumbles. This in-between space separates the pre-
established model and the produced discourse.
A priori, the project sketched by this engraving is different indeed.
Like former Utopias (that of Thomas More, for example), it has two
halves whose difference must be overcome by the text. 9 It is certainly
no longer a question of two "parts," one referring to the old world, and
the other to the new, as was the case with More's Utopia, but rather of
a division between the system of principles and the erudite practice.
The resolution remains, however, fundamentally identical, even if the
contents have changed; it consists of the making of two (spaces) into a
single text, a single rationality. These two halves must coincide in
order for the book to render the system readable in the vestiges, and in
order for the shattered real to become, through the book, the visibility
of the system. An adequation of sense (given by the painting) and of
the visual (furnished by the collection), Lafitau's science ought to
allow the exact juxtaposition of the two squares which compose its
59Cf. Louis Marin, Utopiques: jeux d'espace (Paris: Ed. de Minuit), especially
chap. 1.
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Michel de Certeau
engraved representation. Such would be the true anthropology.

Yet nothing of the sort takes place. A spoiler, a diabolical tendency
of division, time will inscribe itself onto the anthropological text like a
foreign law, by insufficiencies of information, by deficiencies of
argumentation, by a demonstration that only appears coherent. There
are alterations everywhere that oblige the proofs to be no more than
"conjectures,"60 hazardous detours that trace the indiscreet inter-
vention of an alterity in the scientific discourse, and punctuate it with
shadows, with distortions, with approximations by which returns a
third, repressed term, the disquieting familiarity of Time. This time-
dead, posited as such by scientific work, appears as a phantom on the
stage. It organizes the very discourse which had expelled it. Like the
statue of the commander in Moliere's Don Juan, or the apparition of
the murdered father in Shakespeare's Hamlet, it reintroduces, to the
mother-writing, a law foreign to scientific production. Chronos is here
the ghost, the devourer of children-books, the incongruous visitor in
the celibate solitude of the work of reconstructing debris, fantasmaticof
the Other in the middle of this insular laboratory. Thus the absence of the
other is soon marked in Robinson Crusoe as the trace of a bare foot,
troubling the rational order imposed by the productivist and scriptural
activity of the conqueror without a father on his atopical island.
Perhaps the curtain bordering the engraving indicates the
difference between the plan and the actual discourse. The space
combining the painting and the workroom is, by this notion, changed
into a stage. Lift the curtain. It is only a theater. It is destined to make
us believe what the discourse will not make us see. Time is
domesticated by the image, presented as though he were the Angel
and the messenger of the System he shows. The two volumes of the
Moeurs refer rather to his dark side, to his scythe, whose shadow
overruns the pen and whose staff cuts the writer's table. The text does
not give what the representation promises. Or rather, the representa-
tion offers only what the writer Lafitau wanted to believe and to make
us believe, what the public, also, wants to believe: an image of
science-an image so enticing that it does not stop returning through
the centuries with all kinds of gnosis which claim to kill time in order to
60i, 4; etc.
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produce the formal system of an absolute knowledge detached from

history. From Plato to Levi-Strauss, models of this gnostic scientificity
are not lacking. They have as common characteristics that they
develop from a collection of fragments, bringing from the referen-
tial the tableau of distinct and "clear ideas" by which the order of a
reasoning is affirmed. But each time the insinuation of temporality
into this articulation compromises the structuralist harmony of these
two "halves" and reintroduces the relationship of a positive science
with that which it must make believe about itself, that is, with that
rhetorical power over its historical milieu in order to supplement the
deficits of a rationality.
The Silence of the Space Between
The "space between" wherein resides a dead and ghostly time also
indicates to us, as readers of the Moeurs des Sauvages, where we are to
situate the springboard that lets the work function as a "system." A
ruse is the condition of possibility of this science. This ruse is an art of
playing on two places. Undoubtedly, we will thus find again, though in
a different way, the comparatist technique of the "connection." The
genies who combine a calumet with a caduceus or a tortoise and a
sistrum illustrate the art of articulating reasoning (their angelic
message) by the manipulation that creates a relation between two
terms. In this regard, they are only the metonymies of the more
general process generating Lafitau's book in the space between consti-
tuted by various types of disjunction; for example, between the laboratory
and the painting, or between the civilized "Atheists" and the religious
savages. These oppositions, very different in nature, require the same
tactical operation. The position of Time, analogous to that of the
genies, but at a higher level, one which concerns the ordering not
merely of pieces of the collection, but of the science, is itself a variant
to be included in a strategy everywhere repeated. The manner of
producing the discourse remains formally identical, despite the
differences of terrain, of content, and of problems. Such is the case
with Lafitau's method, like the monogenistic principle which it puts in
functional order and which, it has been noted, remains "the same,"
however varied or altered its manifestations might be.
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Michel de Certeau
This intellectual strategy is ultimately simple, in spite of the

subtlety of its modalizations. On the basis of a binary given (the one and
the other, the practices and principles, etc.), it plays one upon the
other, but by a particular indirect means which consists of recognizing
in the one what is lacking in the other. It thus makes possible the
construction of a science which, filling the deficiencies of one with the
positive aspects of the other, situates itself between them as their
meaning. Because the discourse is neither the one nor the other (it is
neuter), it enunciates the one and the other (it is totalizing).
We have seen how this procedure "compares" ancient activities
and savage customs: the ones, visible and authentic relics of a past that
is, however, difficult to understand; the others, more "illuminating"
witnesses coming from a primitiveness that is, however, substitutive.
In what relates to "the earliest times," each series of vestiges furnishes
to the other what it lacks. Thus, the living (Savage) permits the dead
(ancient) to "speak," but the Savages are not heard except as voices of
the dead, echoes of mute antiquity. This complementarity defines the
place of the work and emerges as a combination of an archeological
history and an ethnology.6'
The same function projects the formal painting upon the
laboratory and in the collection: the sense, which the accumulated
debris lacks, has as a corollary the referentiality (factual proofs and a
"real" vocabulary), which the principles lack. Between the two, the
book presents itself as an utterance of principles in the lexicon, at first
scattered about, of monuments and customs. It is located at the exact
linking of the two formations, like the design of their "symbolic"
overlapping.
This overlapping is presented in multiple forms, such as the
relation of seeing and understanding, or the status of the text between
a theology and a science. It derives from the historical conditions
under which Lafitau worked. His book was born of a relation between
"Savages" of Nouvelle-France and the "philosophers and sophis-
ticated people" of France; that is, a link between the first,
"barbarians," but witnesses to a primitive if "spoiled" religion, and
6I On the posterity of this problematic, cf. E. Lemay, op. cit., 1325-1327.
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the second, "atheists" but "civilized." He plays the ones against the
others in such a way as to produce "the lesson" to be drawn from their
complementary deficiencies. This "lesson" articulates the mono-
genistic principle in "enlightened" language. By its nature, it is
addressed equally to both worlds. Necessarily solitary in this position
no longer belonging to one or the other (there is no institutional
reference in the frontispiece) and establishing himself in a cell (with all
the apparatus of eremitic insularity of olden days: angels, the phantom,
the vision, the book of meditation), the writer is already the "Lazarus"
to whom Levi-Strauss will compare the ethnologist, returned from the
dead to the living, but endowed with a knowledge that is unparalleled
and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.62 His discourse is
supposed to fill the lacunae of both halves of the world by the chiasma
of which he is the mediator.
The locus is unique and extraordinary. The theological ambition to
say everything in the name of the founding Word takes on the scientific
form of a writing that replaces the enunciating voice of a world by the
indefinite sewing together of fragments and that is no longer
authorized by a full Word but by the limits and the absences of pieces
disseminated over a geography similar to a degenerated language. The
curtain lifts to frame this feminine work with texture, necessary and
possible because of the lacunae.
Silence reigns on this stage. How could it be otherwise, where the
breaking apart of bodies (individual and social), creates the space and
the condition of writing? This wordless production makes the
difference of treatment between "customs" and "fables" understand-
able. Some are "illuminating," the others "absurd," a Homeric
adjective to designate them. Lafitau's lucid attention towards social,
political, or religious practices contrasts with his "pain," and his "pity"
and his scandalized irritation (he is "shocked"), before these "very
ridiculous and very insipid fables," "gross and criminal superstitions"
invented by the Greeks and Romans or by the Savages. 63 Altogether,
he finds the silent to be significant and the spoken to be intolerable.
62Claude Levi-Strauss, "Diogene couch6," Les Temps modernes, (March, 1955),

1187-1220.
63Cf. I., 44, 93-95, 390, 454-455, etc.
62
Michel de Certeau
The mutism of monuments and customs allows writing to inhabit their

silence. On the contrary, obscene and prolific, the fable (fari, to
speak), encumbers with noisy subjects the stage where the text of sense
can be produced only with objects; the fable disturbs and "shocks" the
celibate operation. The voice is the other. With it, there is a return of
an eroticism whose elimination conditions the scriptural work. For
Lafitau as for Fontenelle, who in the same year published De l'origine
des fables, a repulsion connotes the "mouth to mouth" of the oral
tradition.64 What emerges from this mouth is only a regurgitated
"alteration." The only "speaking" witnesses are silent monuments.
The repression of bodies is the conditon of writing, which takes their
place. And is the rejection of fables a sign not only of an
incomprehension, of an erroneous judgment, but also the postulate of
a science? The fables must be silent if enlightened knowledge is to
make the vestiges "speak" in its way.
More generally, this silence of the living conditions the central and
unique position of the writer-who occupies both the masculine and
feminine roles-, and situates the ancient and the savage. It
simultaneously uses "civilized" and "barbarous" nations, and silences
the ancients or the savages so they, in turn, silence the "Atheists." This
'science of mores and customs" is established in a solitude where there
is nothing other than its operation. The frontispiece already shows this
by bringing together, asymptotically, the pen and the scythe, writing
and death. To be sure, the same pairing concerns not only Lafitau, but
"enlightened" knowledge about Mankind; by denying the historical
conditions of man's production, by locating itself in the "neuter" of a
between-the-two, this discourse postulates an end to history. The
ambiguity of Lafitau's personal position made him a discoverer as well
as a founder of this anthropological writing. He "betrayed" the
64Lafitau: "This tradition passing from mouth to mouth receives in each some
alteration and degenerates into fables so absurd that one can report them only with
extreme discomfort" (I, 93). Fontenelle: "It will indeed be worse when they (the first
stories), will pass from mouth to mouth; each will take away some little bit of truth, and
replace it with a bit of falseness...." ("De l'origine des fables," 1724), in Oeuvres
compltes, ed. G.B. Depping (Geneva: Slatkine, 1968), vol. 2, p. 389. Also in
Fontenelle, moreover, "history" is a writing which is installed in the place of the oral
"story" and substitutes the production of a "verisimilitude" (a fiction of truth) for the
-absurd" derivations of genealogical transmission (cf. ibid., p. 388ff., and "Sur
l'histoire," in Oeuvres completes, op. cit., pp. 424-429).
63
Yale French Studies
the presupposition of what he started. His emblem of a pioneer is

equally the lapsus of a scientific ambition. Too obviously, no doubt.
This embarrassing witness therefore had to be disowned by the
intelligentsia that he hoped at once to serve and to conquer.
translated by James Hovde
64

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Writing vs.

Time: History and Anthropology in the Works of Lafitau

Writing vs. Time:

From seeing to book, and vice versa

In 1724, Joseph-Frangois Lafitau published Moeurs des sauvages

FRONTISPIECE OF THE I1724 EDITION

The representation given by Lafitau sets forth the image of writing

They do not meet. A minimal distance separates the partners. A

7The word is Lafitau's, ibid.

the origin that is supposedly to be found there, the "figures" of the

"glimpse" the beginnings of history. As bizarre as they may be, they

'2It is already so in the work of Jean de LUry. Cf. M. de Certeau, L'Ecriture de

The Production Workshop

The frontispiece describes the operation involved in "recon-

an anthology of degradation. The signs of degeneration and of death, a

18 Cf. Krzystof Pomian, "Medailles/coquilles = 6rudition/philosophie," in Studies

However, Lafitau's personal museum circumscribes a field of its

20I, 228; plate 10, fig. 5.

as an index of primitiveness. Antiquity itself is a modern product.

given to see are the ancient medallions and statuettes, as if the

38J, "Explication of the Plates."

Also, each comparison's role is to be, in this laboratory, a textual

42Furetiere, Dictionnaire universel (1690), art. "Histoire" (my italics).

ceived "ideas," and, therefore, of affirming relations.43 The angel

is there as representative of the author. She marks the place of the

45Cf. President Daniel Paul Schreber, Dendwdrdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken

writing; "enlightened" ideology of the revolution through the book;

Theories and Scientific Legends

At the strategic focus of the frontispiece, the matron/writing

501, 10-60. Cf. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Demonstratio Evangelica (Paris: 1679);

depends on a particular tradition or on his fidelity to his first fathers.

economy of salvation is to change it into an allegory of a body of

In this place, disaffected and abandoned by belief, theory has,

presence he seems to prevent seeing. He indicates the Origin, but he

engraved representation. Such would be the true anthropology.

produce the formal system of an absolute knowledge detached from

The Silence of the Space Between

This intellectual strategy is ultimately simple, in spite of the

6I On the posterity of this problematic, cf. E. Lemay, op. cit., 1325-1327.

62Claude Levi-Strauss, "Diogene couch6," Les Temps modernes, (March, 1955),

The mutism of monuments and customs allows writing to inhabit their

the presupposition of what he started. His emblem of a pioneer is

translated by James Hovde

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