The systematic treatment — an originary grammar of the center, deriving language, personhood, and institutions from the originary scene
Gans, in _The Origin of Language_ , hypothesizes in a remarkably thorough and precise manner the development of the more developed speech forms out of the original ostensive sign. I will present this...
_The Use of a Center_ Act so that there is no use in a centre. Gertrude Stein. If you act so that there is no use in a center, your action would be dissolving all possible, all imaginable, uses in...
The proximal cause of the breakage and spillage of the sacral order is money and capital. For secular theory, labor, property, money, the market and capital are the real underpinnings—the...
In large part this book is a critique of (strategy for entering and transforming) the secular disciplines. The project, or imperative, implicit here is to roll back the power circulation that takes...
Remember that the metalanguage of literacy I have extracted from David Olson’s work aims at constructing a simulated scene upon which the writer and readers stand, observing whatever is represented...
Once a human occupies the center, the most difficult political, and maybe human, problem, is how to replace that occupant when the time comes, as it must. We could assess different governmental forms...
We can see the different speech forms as different media, even in the sense that each can be used to channel the others in revealing ways: you can point at something in order to ask a question about...
With concepts like “nature” and “justice,” it becomes possible to model social relations on desacralized terms, in accord with the reduction of these and related concepts to their most minimal...
There already is such a hypothesis, and has been for forty years; this hypothesis is the starting point of this book, and following its implications, or at least one set of implications, will be its...
You can say the king should rule because someone must occupy the center, and the occupation of the center relies upon unanimous attention involving the suspension of resentment toward the center; and...
Insofar as a social crisis is transcended or resolved, it is done so through a retrieval of the originary scene. The retrieval of the originary scene means an assembling by deferred desire for some...
We inherit from metaphysics the possibility of replacing any word, phrase, gesture, or movement with a declarative sentence, or a string of declarative sentences, and then replacing the words in...
All of this becomes problematic once sacrifice has ended, and imperative exchange has given way to what we could call “interrogative imperativity”: rather than giving to the center what it instructs...
Detecting and articulating boundaries is an aesthetic question. Aesthetics is located on the originary scene, in the oscillation of the attention of the participants between the sign put forth by the...
The civilizational problem we have here, at least in the Western world (and therefore the rest of the world, which has all been at least in part modeled on Western norms) is that of the imperatives...
Social thought has an obligation to maintain linguistic presence, and the way this is done is through a minimal vocabulary distinguishing one mode of thought from another, and sustained consistently...
The scene on which one sees what one is simultaneously shown has been the concern of scripture: this is what is entailed in a “revelation.” One some level, we know that we ourselves don’t completely...
It should be clear that I'm not calling for the restoration of the sacred, but for the increasingly rich direct representation of our sociality. The sacred is an indirect, unaware representation of...
What is a center? Whatever can invoke and be referenced by an ostensive sign: the center is both cause and product of the sign—as cause it subsists beyond any particular reference, and as product it...
I suggested above that the exemplary secular subject is the usurper—from everyone’s perspective, everyone else is in a position they wrongly occupy. This is a condition of universal resentment—open,...
I mentioned earlier that in the earliest communities, the center is far more “dramatic,” which is also to say, far more “human,” than the actual human margin. As David Graeber points out, it is not,...
The Origin of Language A New Edition Eric Gans Introduction by Adam Katz Spuyten Duyvil Editor’s Introduction: The Origin of Language and the Anthropological Imagination Foreword Chapter 1:...
Act so that there is no use in a centre. Gertrude Stein. If you act so that there is no use in a center, your action would be dissolving all possible, all imaginable, uses in a center. If there’s a...
“Alienation” is a word that hasn’t really gone out of style. It seems to apply just as well to today’s labor conditions, people’s relations to unresponsive, even hostile governments, the desiccation...