La escalera de Witgenstein o Cómo dejar de rompernos la cabeza con la eficacia simbólica

Abstract

An inquiry about «symbolic efficacy» reveáis the phantom, reflected on, constitued character of the subject. This is not a peripheral, picturesque matter in our field(s), but rather a strategic indicator of the most basic level in any anthropological scrutiny; i.e., an indicator of anthropology's core: of the priority of meaning over subject, which correlates with the abrupt, total emergence of meaning. Such emergence is, at the same time, that of the separation between the signifier and the signified, as well as the separation between two types of women as established by the prohibition of incest. This twofold and coincidental split (an embodiment of the opposition between Nature and Culture) is the starting point of any classification, of any classificatory order, that opens up, with its articulations, the realm of the sacred.