The Originary Sign Beyond the Scapegoat
Center Study's revision of Girard begins at the structural level: the originary hypothesis displaces the scapegoat mechanism by demonstrating that the sign, not the sacrificial victim, is the founding human act. As Katz writes in Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline, "it is that iterated sign that makes it possible to account for why even the scapegoat scene Girard constructs could be memorable, and accrete new layers of ritual and myth; and if Girard's scapegoat scene requires the sign, then the generation of the sign no longer requires the scapegoating"1. The logical priority is reversed: Girard's scapegoat event presupposes the capacity for shared symbolic attention that only the originary sign can explain. Once the sign is posited as primary, the scapegoat becomes a downstream, contingent application of a more fundamental human capacity rather than its origin.
The second line of revision concerns the epistemological and political consequences of Girardian mimetic theory. In One Originary Thinker's Account of the U.S. Election, Katz notes that "scapegoating has no epistemological value — it offers no help in providing accounts of reality and preparing for future events." The Girardian framework, powerful as it is at demystifying archaic violence, cannot generate knowledge; it can only expose the mechanism of victimization. Center Study, by contrast, builds toward a transdisciplinary science grounded in the originary hypothesis — one that can actually produce predictive, juridically actionable accounts of collective life.
This limitation shapes the sociology of Girardian community itself, and Katz is direct about it in The Originary Hypothesis in Itself: "Once you identify scapegoating as the predominant but now discredited way of organizing communities, you can organize intellectual and sub-cultural communities around exposing and resisting scapegoating. It's easy enough to identify who is being scapegoated at a given time, or at least to agree on who is the socially recognized scapegoat, and check and police each other through periodic quasi-ritual cleansings of scapegoating tendencies"2. The irony Katz identifies is pointed: a community organized around detecting scapegoating reproduces the very logic of collective accusation it claims to oppose. The Girardian community mimics the ritual structure it critiques.
Center Study's alternative is grounded in the scene of the center rather than the scene of the victim. In GA as the Thinking of the Center, Katz argues that what is actually needed is "a genuine resentment on behalf of the center"3. Where Girard sacralizes the margin by tracing all cultural order back to sacrificial exclusion, Generative Anthropology insists that the center is the site of the sacred, not its negation. Resentment properly oriented does not dissolve the center but reinforces it, converting mimetic rivalry into deferred, productive attention. This is what Katz means when he describes the broader Center Study project as "transdisciplinary originary inquiry" — the center is not to be abolished but refined, made more explicit, more juridically accountable, and more capable of sustaining succession.
The sharpest crystallization of the difference appears in Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline, where the logical consequence is stated without qualification: "if Girard's scapegoat scene requires the sign, then the generation of the sign no longer requires the scapegoating"1. This single reversal — sign over victim, center over margin, deferral over sacrifice — is the founding move of Center Study's departure from and transformation of the Girardian inheritance.
Excerpts
"And it is that iterated sign that makes it possible to account for why even the scapegoat scene Girard constructs could be memorable, and accrete new layers of ritual and myth; and if Girard's scapegoat scene requires the sign, then the generation of the sign no longer requires the scapegoating."
Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline · PDF Read →
"It's very hard to imagine building a community around the originary hypothesis. Here is where the Girardians have a huge advantage. Once you identify scapegoating as the predominant but now discredited way of organizing communities, you can organize intellectual and sub-cultural communities around exposing and resisting scapegoating. It's easy enough to identify who is being scapegoated at a given time, or at least to agree on who is the socially recognized scapegoat, and check and police each other through periodic quasi-ritual cleansings of scapegoating tendencies. Since Girard plugged his mimetic theory directly into Christianity, the Girardian community can be organized as a faction within Christianity, or as a form of leftism with a family resemblance to Christianity."
The Originary Hypothesis in Itself · Substack Read →
"Here, we might have an argument over whether the liberal democratic order does do anything other than provide simulations of scapegoating events so as to protect us from actual ones. I think it has to do quite a bit more, because scapegoating has no epistemological value–it offers no help in providing accounts of reality and preparing for future events."
One Originary Thinker's Account of the U.S. Election · GABlog Read →
"The only non-religious thought capable of combatting materialist lowering on its own terms—that is, the terms of the very constitution of the human—is the generative anthropology of Eric Gans. Gans is the author of the “originary hypothesis” regarding the origin of language, which for Gans is coeval with the origin of the sacred and of language. Gans presupposes the anthropological model of Rene Girard, for whom the mimetic character of humans (and first of all the advanced hominids who were our immediate predecessors) means that deadly conflict is endemic to the human condition. If I imitate you, I learn to desire through you—I want what you want."
The Anthropoetics of Power · PDF Read →
"For white guilt, the center is the source of pollution, not sacrality; sacrality is to be found in defending the victims of the center; and the most exemplary victims of the center are precisely those driven to extremes by the extreme violence of the center. It is in confronting white guilt that we will discover what we really need: a genuine resentment on behalf of the center."
GA as the Thinking of the Center · GABlog Read →
"Eric Gans’s account of his articulation of Rene Girard and Jacques Derrida points us in two extremely interesting directions. First, through th Derrida, to the “linguistic turn” in 20 century thought, that not quite conclusive blow to traditional metaphysics, which imposed the recognition that every concept is constituted by the subordinate term to which it nevertheless claims priority; second, through Girard, back through a history of inquiries th (including Freud and early 20 century anthropology) into constitutive violence, into what we might call that in the archaic world which our modernity leaves us least prepared to see."
Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline · PDF Read →