For our close reading we turn to Derrida. Violence is invoked by Derrida as fundamental to the process of writing. In a deconstructionist critique violence, which is synonymous with the act of writing, is essential to understand the written also as always-already dead. In his critique of Lévi-Strauss in Chapter 1 The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-Strauss, Culture, Writing, Derrida comments on violence and language in relation to Lévi-Strauss' anthropological and ethnographic study which is highlighted in his “A Writing Lesson.”
On Page 112 Derrida lays out three forms of violence, or more carefully “arche-violence[s].”:
“There was in fact a first violence to be named.”- Naming, a suturing within language.
“Out of this arche-violence [naming], forbidden and therefore confirmed by a second violence that is reparatory, protective instituting the 'moral,' prescribing the concealment of writing and the effacement and obliteration of the so called proper name which was already dividing the proper...(emphasis ours)”- This second violence unlike naming is the prohibitory act, the law which enforces the “concealment” or “effacement” of the first violence, or naming. In this act the violence is always-already inscribed because the prohibition brings that which is prohibited to light.
“Out of this arche-violence...a third violence can possibly emerge or not (an empirical possibility) within what is commonly called evil, war indiscretion, rape; which consists of revealing by effraction the so-called proper name, the originary violence which has severed the proper from its property and its self-sameness.”- This third violence is that which ultimately undoes the prohibition of the second violence “by effraction” revealing the “proper name.”
It seems that Derrida reveals that Lévi-Strauss is engaged on the this third level or tertiary violence in his “Writting Lesson” or in the act revealing the proper names of the Nambikwara. Are we to interpret his “Lesson” or the game he plays as violence of this third order? If so, does the deconstructionist critique remove all value of Lévi-Strauss' anthropological theoretical work? Is he not any different from his “American” counterparts who simply mark the “savage” with difference?
In addition, in what sense is Derrida in naming violence, and particularly these three violences (mainly the tertiary which exists only as an “emiprical possibility”) committing the violence he speaks against? How is Derrida to escape the act of violence, or in the act of writing is there only violence, the process of violence always-already occurring within the act?
