ABSTRACT
First of all, even in the case of mythical and fictional thought, meanings and events are normally inseparable. There are no events outside the assignment of meanings, and there are no construable meanings not ultimately including some reference to an active rearrangement of things in time. The salt passes after I have asked for the salt to be passed: it is a mineral, but also a condiment, subject to meaningful convention. The situations where one deliberately drains events of meaning in order to confront their strangeness, as in physical or even historical science, or inversely one abstracts events from the normal course of events through mimicry in order to heighten meaning, as in drama, are clearly secondary and parasitic. Thus in the case of new legends, ideologies and fictions, one legitimately asks after the real occasions that have helped to give rise to such novel configurations of sense.
