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.
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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...
Since the Supreme Court currently has on its docket a case involving assisted suicide for the terminally ill , it seems like an appropriate time for some originary analysis of the ethical problems...
Judge Robert Bork , the conservative jurist best known for having been Borked by the Senate out of a seat on the Supreme Court, expresses in his recent book, Slouching Toward Armageddon , an...
Nearly a half-century ago, the French novelist Nathalie Sarraute described our postwar era as l’ère du soupçon –the age of suspicion . Discourse, particularly narrative discourse, could no longer...
There has been much talk recently in conservative circles about civil society , the set of institutions intermediate between government and the individual. The vagueness of the term is not...
The minimal core of what is being sought, found, and denounced in the victimary discourse that dominates cultural studies today is exclusion from dialogue . The repeated accusations of sexism,...
The market, the locus of exchange, is the most general model of human interaction. Conversations are markets, professions are markets: markets are everywhere human beings interact. Each brings...
Readers of Pascal will recall the famous passage about les deux infinis , the infinitely small and the infinitely great. Telescopes and microscopes revealed to Pascal’s generation dimensions of...
1 My first point about the current presidential campaign is that, more even than the last one, it is being reported from an almost exclusively metapolitical perspective. That is, instead of...
The recent discussion on the GAlist initiated by Yue-hong Zhang concerning Fauziya Kasinga , a young Togolese woman who came to the US illegally to avoid FGM ( female genital mutilation or...
When I go running late Saturday afternoons I always listen to Garrison Keillor ‘s A Prairie Home Companion , a sophisticated show designed to be heard out on the prairie by college-educated...
When I was working on The Origin of Language in the late 1970s, the material available gave so vague an idea of the relation between language and human evolution that I decided to omit all...
A number of readers of these columns have confided to me that they prefer those about love to the others. I think this is because love possesses spirituality . The spirit is the agency that...
The other evening I was given another chance to understand why I don’t like Woody Allen . His 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors follows two men–a successful ophthalmologist ( Martin Landau ),...
This first anniversary of these Chronicles is an appropriate moment for taking stock. Has this column been of cultural value? in other words, has it helped to promote the cause of love over...
A recent post by Jim Collins to the GAlist asks a question fundamental to the intellectual status of generative anthropology : in what sense, if at all, is the originary hypothesis falsifiable...
People often ask why GA remains attached to the notion of an originary event , a hypothesis they find so strong that it resembles an act of faith. I have given many defenses of the plausibility of...
The discussion started by Column No. 29 on the abortion issue gave me the idea of developing my ideas on sexual difference a little further. I have resisted the temptation to call this column...
I turned fifty-five this week—the fateful age at which they begin to offer you senior citizen discounts and call you fifty-five years young . As a little compensatory birthday present to myself,...
One thing modern feminism has sensitized us to is the anomaly of male generation . The twin roots of our culture, the Hebrew and the Greek , both imperialistically attribute generation to the...
Why should we take mimesis as the specific difference of the human? Doesn’t that imply that we all just copy each other? René Girard will go down in history as the person who rediscovered this...
Last week’s column on falsification touched on the subject of minimalism, or Ockham’s razor . In the realm of hard science, there is a trade-off between minimalism and falsification, simplicity...
Can we still create masterpieces ? Culture is everywhere, but great artworks seem to be things of the past. The reason is not that our artists or writers have become less proficient. Why should our...
Few activities are as absorbing to the participant yet as uninteresting to the nonparticipant as computer programming. For a couple of years after I got my first computer in 1984 (a Kaypro 10 running...
I’d like to use this first column of the year to tell my readers why they should be interested in generative anthropology . Although the most spectacular element of originary thinking is the...
Mimesis makes a solitary animal behave differently in the company of his fellows. But the collective context of animal ritual–for example, sexual combat in the mating season–never reaches the point...
I began these columns, and gave them their title, as an attempt to affirm love over resentment . But a glance at the news should convince anyone that it is resentment rather than love that makes...
Originary thinking is radical thinking, not just in the etymological sense of the word radical , but in comparison with the timid thought modes of the day. Contemporary thought, whatever label it...
Ever since my schooldays I have been sympathetic to the proposition that great art is no longer conceivable, that we are reaching the end of culture . This is perhaps the simplest way of defining...
Last week’s column on sports narratives touched on a subject that it is worthwhile to explore in more general terms: the central or originary function of narrative. As we have become increasingly...
Recently, Yue-hong Zhang brought to the attention of the GAlist a controversy sparked by Alan Sokal , a physicist at New York University, who submitted to the journal Social Text a parodically...
Just as history is seldom made by nice people, the sacred is rarely found in comfortable places. That is its cruelty, the cruelty of our own desire. The masters of culture, which today means...
The first group one thinks of on hearing the term self-righteousness is what is known today as the Christian Right . One imagines Jesse Helms fulminating against obscene artworks, or Pat...
Most talk about God is childishly anthropomorphic : God is pretty much like us, except that he is immortal, omniscient, etc. This lends credence to the facile Freudian idea that God the father is...
I have noticed in a number of contemporary films, particularly those written or directed by Quentin Tarentino , a new twist on the old cinematic conjunction of love and violence. To take Pulp...
Despite recent high-profile incidents, the United States remains relatively invulnerable to terrorism. No terrorist can hope to modify our governmental system or even our foreign policy. Terror in...
If generative anthropology is indeed a better way to think about the human , then it should be able to shed light on contemporary moral controversies on issues such as homosexuality , assisted...
A few years ago, a political scientist named Francis Fukuyama achieved instant fame with an article proposing that the demise of the Soviet Union signaled the end of history , or in Hegelian...
From the beginning, our use of representations has been anthropological . We seek the truth about ourselves in order to defer the violence through which we risk destroying ourselves. Natural...
The Olympic Games supply an appropriate occasion to think about the cultural importance of sport. You didn’t get to see much sport in NBC ‘s coverage, but that too is relevant to our discussion....
The recent comments on the GAlist concerning the ethical problems engendered by the market are a good illustration of the peculiar difficulty that attends any attempt to theorize this institution....
Blaise Pascal , who lived at a time when mathematics was beginning its qualitative advance beyond the Greeks in modeling the real world, was the last great mathematician who was also a great thinker...
The purpose of these columns has been not merely intellectual but spiritual: the subordination of resentment to love , the critical function of all cultural activities. Different institutions...
The originary hypothesis is situated at the frontier of the humanities–the world of meaning–and the human sciences–the world of facts, at the point where transcendental meaningfulness emerges...
What exactly does a literary work do for us ? Is there a difference between art and entertainment in this regard? Let us begin with Aristotle ‘s classic definition of this function as catharsis...
I The depth of general resentment may be measured by most people’s willing identification with the violent centrality of popular culture. Mel Gibson ‘s self-directed performance in Braveheart is...
Denial , Freud’s Verneinung , or in French, la dénégation, is one of the more popular terms of our pop-psychology vocabulary. To be in denial is to refuse to accept one’s responsibility for a...
The marketplace of ideas is increasingly dominated by victimary experience . Culture has always been sacrificial , but it has now become self-consciously so; its purpose seems no longer, as in the...