ABSTRACT
The notion of societies formed by contract posits law as the transcendent, universally valid, and transtemporal horizon of the contents of contracts. Recent structuralism identified the social fabric with the system regulating the exchange of words, women, goods, and services. An anorganic body is not defined by its constitutive organization, but by its states. Society is not a network that gets elaborated in the measure that individuals exchange women, goods, services, and messages with one another, and, in the delay between giving and receiving, contract obligations that are represented by claims. Savages do not belong to society as persons, individuals, juridic subjects, but as organs attached to the full body of the earth. Savage society is constituted by the coupling of voice with hearing: Primitive cultures are epic, narrative, oral cultures. The markings with which savage societies record, channel, regulate the coded flows of the energies produced in the couplings are not read.
