"French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous. Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth."

"And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don't dare use the word 'structuralist' anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism."

Said Claude Lévi-Strauss, asked, in the 1980s, about post-structuralists like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes.

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-structuralism... "Mythologiques" ... ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality.

"Mortality" is the last word of the obituary written by Edward Rothstein for Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died last Friday, at the age of 100.