  Lacan characterizes his own work as fundamentally a return to Freud, albeit one that brings the insights of structural linguistics, especially Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, and structural anthropology, primarily Claude Levi-Strauss, into the domain of psychoanalysis. Even so, his returns are also revisions; he not only retrieves but renovates Freud's central concepts. According to Lacan, Freud's theory of sexuality anticipates a theory of signification that he could not yet elaborate. The anthropological and linguistic lineage of Lacan's thought is central to this conceptualization of a “symbolic universe.” Lacan explicitly endorses Levi-Strauss's conception of the transcendental law at the origin of human sociality as the incest taboo; he writes that “the fundamental or primary law, the one where culture begins in opposition to nature, is the law of the prohibition of incest” (Lacan 1992 [1986], 66–7). The intrusion of language and law institutes a break with nature, one that transfigures the world by imbuing it with meaning. Following the logic of Totem and Taboo, social identities are constituted on the basis of exclusions that establish kinship networks. These social bonds are maintained through mandates and prohibitions (what is required and what is forbidden), and in particular through the mandate of exogamy (with its structures of exchange) which determines that “the Oedipus complex is both universal and contingent” (Lacan 1991b [1978], 33): paternal prohibition provides the conditions for human sociality without the prohibition itself being innate. Lacan thus accounts for the transgenerational transmission of elementary structures of kinship without appealing to any natural necessity. Lacan takes this law of kinship (dictating desire and its limits) to be fundamentally co-terminous with the order of language since it is instituted through a symbolic articulation.