The Sacred in Generative Anthropology
The sacred in Generative Anthropology is neither a supernatural category nor a mere cultural convention — it is bound up with language from the very beginning. As Katz writes, drawing on Gans's account, the sacred "reproduc[es] the configuration of the originary event in a more or less formalized manner as ritual," while language, by contrast, "is typically a one-on-one phenomenon; as a self-contained gesture that has renounced any role in worldly action, the linguistic sign has no minimal energy requirement"1. The sacred is thus originally the shared attention of the community to the central object, formalized through repetition into ritual — and this means, from the very first human gesture, the sacred and the sign are inseparable.
Yet the sacred is not exhausted by ritual institutions. Katz argues that "The sacred inheres in the “profane” use of language in the constraint of meaning that binds the sign independently of any ritual context.," adding that "this minimal sacred inherent in the laws of language is too weak to support a god or a law of ritual sacrifice; it can guarantee only the most parsimonious of anthropologies"1. This is a crucial move: even after ritual institutions have dissolved, the sacred persists as a structural feature of language itself — the constraint that keeps a sign meaningful across contexts.
This creates the central problem for thinking about secularization. As Katz observes in Secular Thinking, "the originary hypothesis finds the origin of the human, of language, and of the sacred in a single gesture," which means that "if the sacred is thus bound up with language from the beginning, how can secularization even be imagined? Wouldn't secularization have to conceal other modes of sacrality, or perhaps negations of existing modes of sacrality—and therefore be nothing but nihilism?"2. Secularism, on this account, doesn't eliminate the sacred so much as redistribute and conceal it.
The sacred is also inseparable from the community's relation to its center. In The Transdisciplinarity of the Hypothesis, Katz specifies that "a sacred center is one to which the members of the community bring sacrifices, that is, part of the possessions the acquisition of which they owe to the central being," and that under these conditions "ritual is effective, not because of any magical or supernatural effects attributed to it, but because it brings about the “miracle” of a successful distribution of the social product."3. The sacred, then, is what makes collective life possible by organizing desire and deferring mimetic conflict through a shared orientation toward the center.
What crystallizes the question most sharply is the oscillation Katz identifies at the heart of any attempt to think the sacred systematically. He writes: "We seem to be caught in an oscillation between “everything is sacred” and “nothing is sacred."2. The originary hypothesis does not resolve this oscillation by choosing a side; instead, it locates the sacred as the minimal, irreducible structure of any scene in which a sign is shared — the constraint that makes meaning, community, and deferral possible at all.
Excerpts
"The sacred 'reproduc[es] the configuration of the originary event in a more or less formalized manner as ritual'; meanwhile, 'language, in contrast, is typically a one-on-one phenomenon; as a self-contained gesture that has renounced any role in worldly action, the linguistic sign has no minimal energy requirement.' But the qualification, in a part of the passage referring to the sacred I omitted, that 'The sacred tends to inhere in stable religious institutions' [emphasis on 'tends to' mine], points to the possibility of a form of sacrality that need not inhere in ritual."
The Esthetic, the Sacred, and Originary Modernity · PDF Read →
"The equivalent but also the 'supersession' of secularism for center study… is what Eric Gans in The Origin of Language calls the “lowering of the threshold of signification” which makes the development of language possible and allows for the establishment of scenes outside of the formally ritual one. Not every gesture and reference is an immediately life and death situation—which means we provide ourselves with spaces to anticipate and mitigate in advance the life and death situations which will surely continue to arise. But then these other scenes are more in the penumbra of the sacred than outside of it—and the existence of a center implies the possibility of being at a greater or lesser distance from it."
Secular Thinking · Substack Read →
"The originary form of human interaction and engagement with the center is ritual. Again, there are, obviously, innumerable ritual forms throughout the history of humanity (and yet there are always rituals). But, for originary thinking, there is a simple, irrefutable and extraordinarily useful definition of ritual: a repetition and commemoration of the originary event itself."
The Transdisciplinarity of the Hypothesis · Substack Read →
"On the originary scene, and in the ritual orders preceding kingship, it is the Being at the center, different from if intimately connected to the community who poses an obstacle to desire: this being is resented for blocking our desire, but also loved for providing a pathway toward fulfilling it."
The Transdisciplinarity of the Hypothesis · Substack Read →
"It is in the successes of disciplinary spaces that we see the retrieval and restaging of the originary event. The same patience, or deriving from deferrals, is involved in the attempt to establish meaning even in what we take to be non-scientific spaces. It is the disciplinary stance that replaces the sacred, and this means the disciplinary stance must be eminently non-destructive and must be able to find a home in ritualistic and juridical spaces."
Disciplinarity and the Center · Substack Read →
"Any manifestation of the sacred by definition excludes any other manifestation—even if one accepts that there are various names of god(s) constituting various communities how does one get from there to the concept of “the sacred”? We seem to be caught in an oscillation between “everything is sacred” and “nothing is sacred.” And out of these questions must issue implications for our current social order, which certainly claims to be secular and to make firm distinctions between secular and sacred, relegating the latter to the “private” realm."
Secular Thinking · Substack Read →