We can hear another dry priest in Lévi-Strauss. Having reached the Finale of his tetralogy, he feels the need to describe himself as “someone who has never felt the slightest twinge of religious anxiety.”³⁹⁹ What a steadfast intellect, in one who for years and years, with the painstaking devotion of a new Linnaeus, had drawn out the taxonomic table of myths where the tribes of the “savage mind” had summoned up their gods! And yet, so long as he remains in the pure vegetable and mineral purity of myth, Lévi-Strauss is swept along by a sure and unconditional passion to reconstruct those astonishing architectures that unconsciousness protects from the vicissitudes of life. If in fact some errant phenomenon of “the life of the emotions” were to emerge too insistently in the myth, Lévi-Strauss would not concern himself in it, but would leave that task to the care of priests of another, darker kind: “Any phenomenon of the life of the emotions which does not reflect, on the level of consciousness, some important event hindering or accelerating the work of understanding, is not a matter for the social sciences; it belongs rather to biology and its discussion must be left to others.”⁴⁰⁰ There is something, however, in those final pages of Mythologiques that still disturbs him—and constantly reemerges in the experience of his savage thinkers as well as in the sharp comments of certain academic colleagues: ritual. Driven by a sad compulsion, those subjects who elaborate myths have always tended to celebrate rituals. Lévi-Strauss observes them with sympathetic embarrassment, and finds in their ceremonial actions that “characteristic mixture of stubbornness and ineffectiveness which explains the desperate, maniacal aspect of ritual.”⁴⁰¹ We feel ourselves here in a vein close to that of Freud’s observations on obsessive actions, on the neurotic “ceremonial” as a descendant (and progenitor) of “religious practices”: “Any activities whatever may become obsessive actions in the wider sense of the term if they are elaborated by small additions or given a rhythmic character by means of pauses and repetitions.”⁴⁰² Contained here in one sentence are the two peculiarities that, according to Lévi-Strauss, in the end prove essential in the ritual: “fragmenting” (in Freud, the elaboration of “small additions”) and “repetition.” What is the purpose of these two elements? Before the glory of the Discontinuous, before the majestic procession of binary oppositions that constitute the algebraic building blocks of civilization, ritual continues to bear witness to the unhappiness, the obscure nostalgia that is not satisfied by the Discontinuous. Using a theatrical ploy worthy of a Wagnerian end-of-act climax, Lévi-Strauss reveals here a thought that had been bothering him like an unwelcome companion: ritual not only doesn’t duplicate the myth being acted out (which would be a horrible contaminatio), but actually chooses to go in the opposite direction. The ritual seeks to regain the “fluidity of the real” (this is what the Red Sea is now called, after centuries of intellectual sobriety). Ritual seeks to plunge us once again in that mobile element that “constantly tends to escape through the mesh of the grid that mythic thought has placed over it so as to bring out only its most contrasting features.”⁴⁰³ A desperate venture, which obliges Lévi-Strauss to resort to the language of the “life of the emotions” (here too an age-old abrasion has produced this formula), which is now set out menacingly, and in the very way that Freud had earlier described: “Ritual, by fragmenting operations and repeating them unwearyingly in infinite detail, takes upon itself the laborious task of patching up holes and stopping gaps, and it thus encourages the illusion that it is possible to run counter to myth, and to move back from the discontinuous to the continuous.⁴⁰⁴ Its maniacal urge to discover the smallest constituent units of lived experience by fragmentation and to multiply them by repetition, expresses the poignant need of a guarantee against any kind of break or interruption that might jeopardize the continuance of lived experience …