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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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...
In the spirit of knowing one’s enemy, I recently read Andrew Macdonald’s The Turner Diaries (1978), an eschatological tale of the White takeover of the US and the world–which requires...
My friend and fellow Anthropoetics board member Matt Schneider had an interesting take on the first OJ trial, the outcome of which he predicted from the beginning. As he saw it, the acquittal...
Last week’s New Republic (September 8 & 15) contains a lengthy review (pp. 29-38) by Margaret Talbot of Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend by Karen Essex and James Swanson (General...
As promised, I have been reading and thinking about Cultural Studies ( CS ), less in the context of the place of the Humanities in the contemporary university than in that of originary thinking....
Omigod, GA is cool. Human life, like all life, is rooted in material needs, but human culture needs desire to propagate. GA builds on the fundamental insight into the behavior of our species...
If one thing has preoccupied me since my college days, it’s the distinction between high and popular culture. I have never been impressed by theories that disparage this distinction as a deluded...
The phenomenon of Cultural Studies (CS) has been spreading through the Humanities like kudzu through our inland waterways. Although I’m no expert on the subject, I’ve been doing a little...
Since this is my last Chronicle before reaching triple figures, I hope the reader will forgive me if it waxes a bit prophetic. The expression Era of Suspicion ( L’ère du soupçon ) is Nathalie...
The current debate about Darwinism might surprise someone who thought that only obscurantists still resisted the theory of evolution. In its most general, that is, cosmological, sense, this theory...
GAlist subscribers who may recall my promise / threat to return once again to the Princess Di matter in the wake of the UCLA Daily Bruin ‘s coverage of the UCLA Center for the Study of...
In Leo Braudy ‘s minor classic of film theory, The World in a Frame (1976), the author establishes a dichotomy within classical cinema: Renoir’s films are open , Lang’s and Hitchcock’s ,...
There are few subjects that cry out for originary thinking as much as the relationship between religion and cosmology. The other evening I chanced on a National Public Radio (NPR) discussion...
In reaction to last week’s column, Bill Mishler of the University of Minnesota remarks that “Medical science has shown itself capable of modifying the biological givens of the situation… babies can...
The cinema constantly reminds us of the enduring role of gangsters in our popular culture. The other day I saw Casino , a drawn-out remake of Goodfellas , where Joe Pesci reprises his now-classic...
Perhaps no periodical article since Francis Fukuyama ‘s career-making piece on the “End of History” has aroused such widespread attention as George Soros ‘ “The Capitalist Threat” in the February...
In my last Chronicle , I criticized Marcus Borg for reducing Jesus to a “spirit person” and neglecting his fundamental revelatory message: God is love. This week I would like to articulate...
A couple of people have expressed surprise that the only reference in these Chronicles to the Heaven’s Gate incident has been an oblique remark at the end of Chronicle 87 (on Herostratus ). My...
No. 87: Saturday, April 5, 1997 The aspiring youth that fired the Ephesian dome Outlives in fame the pious fool that raised it. Colley Cibber: Richard III , act iii. sc. 1. Äußerstes...
I have a graduate student, whose name will go here unmentioned, who snickers every time I mention words like “ritual” or “sacrifice,” and breaks into a big smile at “anthropology,” with or without...
GA aficionados may be a bit perturbed by the recent emphasis on love, knowing that the originary scene is supposed to turn on the deferral of violence through representation . So I thought for this...
I too often let my readers forget that the original point of these columns was to chronicle a spiritual itinerary consisting, hopefully, of provisional triumphs of love over resentment. Resentment...
When I began this series just two years ago, I never expected it to reach one hundred. But habits grow on you, and after a while, writing these columns began to structure my week and even my...
Jesus was a peasant–which tells us about his social class. Clearly, he was brilliant. His use of language was remarkable and poetic, filled with images and stories. He had a metaphoric mind. He was...
The concept of “identity” is no longer an easy one to define. The nineteenth-century idea of identity, as illustrated in the biographical cast of the novels of the period, was ever-evolving, but...
Chronicle 108 , inspired by the death of Princess Diana , presented some reflections on celebrity and its mediating function in social relations. To sum up,my thesis was that we identify with the...
The accidental death of Princess Diana leads naturally to a reflection on celebrity that we are obliged to take up for the very reason that “the crowd” has been reflecting on it and that we are...
While talking with Tom Bertonneau the other day, the conversation turned to the obvious and therefore invisible fact that great nineteenth-century art of every kind, from poetry to painting, gave...
Optimists are irritated by pessimists who condemn the present as a fall from the past. But to criticize the pessimists is to condemn at least one class of people as inferior to those of the past,...
My colleague David Rapoport of the UCLA Department of Political Science, the founding director of our Center for the Study of Religion, was recently kind enough to invite me to an upcoming...
Two weeks ago, in Chronicle 111 , I developed the idea of GA as an individual creation attributed to “Bronx Romanticism.” Since the chances are that the reader is not from the Bronx, I thought...
I have been arguing for the past twenty years or so that Generative Anthropology is, insofar as the term can be used in human science, essentially true. But the current trend of autobiographical...
Un pauvre diable d’homme, qui a eu ce qu’on appelle une bonne fortune, est souvent bien infortuné, surtout s’il a le malheur de voir sa maîtresse tous les jours. Il y a une certaine amabilité qu’il...
As promised, here are some ideas on how the apparently high-cultural activity of writing poetry might survive the “end of culture.” The problem posed by high culture to our era is its one-many...
Humanities professors have so long considered artworks as objects for academic study that we tend to forget the naturalness of interpretation. Tear a couple of us away from our word processors and...
In her talk on “witnessing” that concluded the UCLA GA – Religion series last month, Stacey Meeker suggested an interesting paradigm. If we consider the scenic center in its capacity as the...
The most significant of generational watersheds may well fall between the prewar generation and that of the baby-boomers . It separates those of us whose primary experience of resentment is...
Recently Richard van Oort (who needs no introduction to readers of these Chronicles ) expressed some concern with what I shall call in DeManian terms the “ resistance to GA .” Why aren’t...
Last weekend, the graduate students of the UCLA Department of French held their second annual conference, entitled States of Identity , complete with guest speaker, local faculty respondents, six...
A couple of Chronicles ago, I referred to the technological progression from nineteenth-century panoramas and magic lanterns to modern film (and recordings). With each generation, our ability to...
In Génie du christianisme [Spirit of Christianity] (1802), his attempt to rekindle interest in Christianity after the “godless” century of the philosophes , Chateaubriand counseled a critique...
The other day a graduate student I consider intelligent referred to himself as a locus traversed by a set of discourses ; or rather, it was not “himself” but “his self” to which he so referred. In...
This Valentine’s Day column is about a new vision of love. Can it be a coincidence that the last two French films I’ve seen, French Twist ( Gazon maudit ) and Café au lait ( Métisse ) end with...
We have all participated in conversations among members of a certain group–family, racial, ethnic, sexual, what have you–that deal with the real and imagined foibles of the members of another. In...
The cleverest definition one might give of the postmodern is that it is the period that permits its thinkers the maximum of cleverness in defining it. Since the postmodern is the era of our own...
Humanistic study is under threat today in our universities. With the decline of Europe-centered Western high culture, it is no longer clear why we need a host of separate departments named for the...