Adam Katz and Dennis Bouvard: Author and Pen Name in Center Study
Adam Katz is an academic and theorist affiliated with the Department of English at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, who has developed and elaborated the transdisciplinary framework known as Center Study — itself an extension of Eric Gans's Generative Anthropology. Katz's work ranges across originary grammar, political theory, economics, language, and juridical order. The archive identifies him as the author of the book Anthropomorphics and of numerous academic papers published in venues such as Anthropoetics, treating subjects from mimetic crisis and the originary scene to sovereignty, resentment, and the structure of the sacred center.
Dennis Bouvard is a pen name used by Adam Katz for his Substack writing. The Substack introduces the author simply as "Dennis Bouvard. Author of Anthropomorphics"1 — making the connection between the pseudonym and the book explicit. Under the Bouvard name, Katz applies the originary framework to more contemporary and applied questions: technology, governance, currency, AI, data, succession, and geopolitics. The Substack voice is somewhat more essayistic and speculative than the academic PDFs, though it draws on the same conceptual vocabulary of scene, center, deferral, and resentment.
The distinction between the two names thus tracks a distinction in register and venue rather than in intellectual identity. As Bouvard, Katz writes, for instance, that "The “center” refers, most “centrally,” of course, to the originary object, which is both the thing we attend to and the meta-person we obey and participate in."2 — a formulation that is continuous with the theoretical core developed in the academic PDFs. Across both identities, the animating concern is the same: how the originary scene of human emergence — mimetic crisis deferred by a collective gesture toward a center — unfolds into language, politics, economics, and culture.
The GABlog posts, by contrast, appear under Katz's own name and often take the form of dialogues or exchanges with Eric Gans, the founder of Generative Anthropology. As one GABlog post notes, a given Chronicle "is a continuation of a running dialogue with Adam Katz concerning GA's relationship to politics"3 — situating Katz as Gans's primary interlocutor and collaborator within the tradition. The archive as a whole — GABlog, Substack, PDFs, and Anthropomorphics — thus represents the accumulated output of a single researcher working across multiple platforms and under more than one name, with Center Study as the unified project.
The single passage that most economically captures who Bouvard/Katz is and what he is doing comes from Infra-Humaning: "You really must clear out all foundational categories to take on the originary hypothesis—you have to make a kind of (negatively capable) leap of faith that sets aside “irritable questioning” (does it match this or that archaeological evidence; is it materialist or idealist, etc.) to see that there’s simply no other way to account for the simple fact that humans can point to something and affirm that it is the same thing."
Excerpts
"Welcome to Center Study Center by me, Dennis Bouvard. Author of Anthropomorphics"
Originary Hypothesizing · Substack Read →
"Adam Katz Department of English Quinnipiac University Hamden, CT 06518"
From Habit to Maxim: Gertrude Stein and Originary Language · PDF Read →
"Chronicle 344 is a continuation of a running dialogue with Adam Katz concerning GA’s relationship to politics. A future Chronicle will deal with the question of freedom ."
Chronicle 344, 'Right and Left' · GABlog Read →
"The 'center' refers, most 'centrally,' of course, to the originary object, which is both the thing we attend to and the meta-person we obey and participate in. It is these two 'features' of the 'center' that get separated as, over time, humans come to 'turn their back' on the center as issuer of imperatives so as to attend to the more singularized object of attention."
The Sample as Our Donation to the Center · Substack Read →
"We start with a scene, an event, a threshold, and an iterable gesture. The composition of the scene raises all kinds of difficulties, as I've discussed in my recent The Contingency of the Hypothesis and in my engagement with the ongoing work of Eric Jacobus, but these difficulties all emerge from the basic question of how best to conceive of mimetic rivalry issuing in a crisis, and identifying the resources within the scene for derailing the crisis."
Infra-Humaning · Substack Read →
"You really must clear out all foundational categories to take on the originary hypothesis—you have to make a kind of (negatively capable) leap of faith that sets aside “irritable questioning” (does it match this or that archaeological evidence; is it materialist or idealist, etc.) to see that there’s simply no other way to account for the simple fact that humans can point to something and affirm that it is the same thing."
Infra-Humaning · Substack Read →
"This is to announce the appearance of a new Chronicle of Love & Resentment ( 341 ) by Eric Gans (“Victimary Extinction or Religious Survival”). Adam Katz’ response (“The Crisis of Firstness”) is expected on Saturday, March 31."
Gans & Katz on White Guilt · GABlog Read →