Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“Recasting sacred and profane as a Saussurean paradigm of differences would only weaken the truth that lies behind Durkheim’s words: the sacred is the sole category of significance and it emerges not in opposition to another category that we call the profane but in opposition to the insignificance of the rest of the world. The paradigmatic experience of signification is not the division of the world between up and down, left and right, hot and cold, ... but between the sacred that captures and holds our attention and everything else that does not. Thus Durkheim’s fortunate unawareness of his contemporary Saussure and of the “structuralist” paradigm of differences in which the sacred-profane distinction might have found its place allowed Durkheim to grasp and appreciate, expressed in however unsatisfactory a fashion, the asymmetry of the absolute distinction between sacred and profane. 3.”

— Eric Gans, Emile Durkheim, Originary Hedgehog · Saturday, January 9th, 2010 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment