Eric Gans's weekly column on culture, desire, and the originary hypothesis — published every week from 1996 to 2019. An essential running commentary on contemporary thought through the lens of Generative Anthropology.
With reference to the link between ancient Israel’s firstness and antisemitism as we read in the Chronicle of Saturday, December 7th, 2024, I find this priority as too abstract a notion to arouse...
Preamble In Chronicle 749 , I noted the strange fact that the publications over thirty years apart containing what I considered my two most original ideas—an “originary hypothesis” of the origin...
The idea of questioning another’s “agency” is contrary to our common-sense perspective on human actions, which, aside from purely reflexive acts like pulling one’s hand out of a fire, are understood...
In 1993, “paleoconservative” Sam Francis gave a talk entitled “Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A.” that was reprinted in the July 1994 and more recently in the January 2023 issue of Chronicles magazine—not to...
Probably the most famous line in Gustave Flaubert’s voluminous correspondence is the following: L’auteur, dans son œuvre, doit-être comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout, et visible nulle part....
The late David Graeber, an anthropologist previously perhaps best known for his role in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and his co-author, archeologist David Wengrow, provide food for thought for...
Sometimes it pays to listen to the terms in which the man in the street debates the West’s current crisis of confidence. In a recent Townhall online column , in order to refute Ibram X. Kendi’s...
Language This English proverb is often traced to Plato’s words in the Republic (369c): … τῷ λόγῳ ἐξ ἀρχῆς ποιῶμεν πόλιν : ποιήσει δὲ αὐτήν , ὡς ἔοικεν , ἡ ἡμετέρα χρεία . …let us...
Thank you George Floyd for sacrificing your life for justice. For being there to call out to your mom—how heartbreaking was that?—call out for your mom, “I can’t breathe.” But because of you and...
Like most people who have had the good fortune to live in times of peace, through most of my existence I assumed that the conditions of my own life were normal and required no particular set of...
As has never been more evident than today, history, particularly political history, is always smarter than “smart people.” When the intelligentsia all start to repeat the same ideas, you can be...
As its name makes clear, Generative Anthropology is a science of beginnings, of January rather than December. Given its somewhat cynical watchword, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” it...
My original intention for this talk was to celebrate, with a couple of years’ leeway, the 50 th anniversary of Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie, which appeared in 1967. Derrida was, along...
Preamble One of the problems that has slowed the development of GA is that the academic world as currently constituted is ill-suited to provide it with a potential audience, whereas its potential...
Whenever I feel guilty for not having exhaustively researched one of these Chronicles , I remind myself of Georg Lukács’ chapter on the essay in his 1914 Die Seele und die Formen . Lukács calls the...
The term ecumenism makes one think of a feel-good “conversation” between a rabbi, one or more Christian churchmen, an imam, a Buddhist… And the kind of generalities that come out of such...
Adam provides here the clearest and most strategically plausible program I have seen for Generative Anthropology, not merely to survive but to contribute fundamentally to human self-knowledge. He...
In answer to those who criticize Generative Anthropology for not being empirically based (and without going into the epistemological problems that this concept raises), I prefer to say that GA is a...
From Mark Steyn’s June 16, 2014 column: The world is decaying into twin totalitarianisms. On the one hand, the Islamic imperialists on the march through Iraq and elsewhere, insisting that Islam is...
Some time ago I described myself in Chronicle 433 as a kind of exiled French intellectual, “bracketing,” as they say, the new-world unsophistication that justifies, or at any rate corresponds to,...
The relevance of GA to the human predicament is demonstrated by the fact that we ever return to the struggle between love and resentment. Abstractly it is easy enough to take the side of love, but in...
Let me begin by recalling the GA definition of firstness: priority as a mimetic model that in the overall context of moral reciprocity is a form of deferred equality: the temporarily exclusive...
Since GA contains the term “anthropology,” it is often asked in what sense we can call GA a “science.” As was made clear by a show of hands at the recent Ottawa conference, those who take an interest...
Before the recent presidential election, I contemplated writing a Chronicle assessing the candidates, but there never seemed to be a clear role for GA in making such an assessment. And whatever my...
This Chronicle was inspired by John Haught’s Is Nature Enough? (Cambridge UP, 2006—recommended to me by Andrew Bartlett). Haught’s variant of “process theology” is the first defense of belief...
Although language and the other forms of human representation are now recognized as unique in the animal kingdom, exploration of the specifically anthropological ontology characteristic of the...
How does Heidegger come to speak of Being? “Being” is in the first place a word, an element of language that cannot be understood before one understands what language is. But what does it mean to...
Briseis is revealed as Achilles’ heel in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy , a postmillennial retelling of the plot of Homer’s Iliad . This new revelation ought to be enough to delight both those familiar...
The following is the first half of a talk given at the annual meeting of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, June 4, 2004: Although it might seem that our mimetic...
The following is the second and last part of a talk given at the annual meeting of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, June 4, 2004: But, as one often hears,...
I have pointed out previously in these Chronicles that the victimary critique of institutions that dominated the postmodern era has lost its epistemological power to discriminate between victims...
However necessary the turn from nihilism to the affirmation of life may be in the intellectual world, in the domain of practical politics it is truly a question of life or death. The great conflict...
Our most difficult yet most necessary exercise is to put ourselves in the place of those who want to kill us, not to espouse their resentments, but to affirm through this encounter the unity of the...
As one gets older, one grows more appreciative of life. I doubt if I would have conceived the same admiration for the beauty of Carole Landis had I encountered her twenty or thirty years ago....
What has made the Jews a privileged object of collective hatred is their paradoxical place in the history of religion. Their historical role as the first people to worship a unique, universal deity...
The fundamental human paradox is that language is timeless but its users are not. The only way out of this dilemma–one that will bear witness neither to our immortality nor to our simple...
One way of describing the trouble with the Humanities today is that those who are clever are wrong and those who are right are dull. Last year, the appointment of my friend, former student, and...
In my previous Chronicle , I distinguished GA’s anti-apocalyptic perspective from the apocalyptic one that Girard conserves from the Judeo-Christian tradition. This distinction extends to that...
The following reflections on antisemitism emerged from my course European Studies 102 and were developed in a recent talk to the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion . * * * * * What is most...
RvO – By suggesting that the ultimate value of the originary hypothesis is ethical are we not suggesting that the hypothesis has more in common with religion that with science? Nevertheless you...
The most profound difference between originary thinking and the other forms of contemporary thought lies in its minimalist concentration on the mimetic foundation of human interaction, in contrast...
This week’s column is the first in a projected series of exchanges on the subject of Generative Anthropology . Our purpose is to clarify the fundamental ideas involved, so your feedback will be...
RvO – Minimal anthropology. This is an important principle for GA . The idea that anthropological investigation should be guided by not an ontology, but by a hypothesis , the only epistemological...
Since the beginning of the postmodern era after World War II, culture has increasingly been oriented toward youth. One of the defining experiences of my own youth back in the fifties, to which I have...
Here, finally, is my promised analysis of I love you . In How to Do Things With Words , J. R. Austin divided sentences into two types. A constative tells you something about the world that is...
I promised in the last News & Views page to begin a column that would provide views rather than just news. I have decided to call it Chronicles of Love and Resentment because these are the two...
In my previous column, I said that resentment, because it is less originary than love, can be articulated more sharply. Jenny’s song , from which I quoted a line, ends with the heroine sailing off...
This quarter I’ve been teaching an undergraduate seminar on Ideas of Love , a topic not unrelated to that of this column. In the context of our readings, I thought I’d say a few words about the...
After body-piercing , what is left to write about but politics ? Is it possible to be above politics ? Clearly this is not just a theoretical question on the American scene today. The hope of an...
The early Christian theologian Tertullian , when asked how he could believe in a God who allowed himself to suffer the supreme humiliation of crucifixion, is said to have answered: Credo quia...