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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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...
The recent Indian nuclear test, which took place after this Chronicle was conceived, reminds us of the possibility that future generations may look back with nostalgia on the foibles of our...
Resentment is the one category that cannot be deconstructed. Nietzsche , who discovered the power of resentment, was destroyed by it at the same time. For to discover resentment in another is at the...
In a more or less egalitarian society, where people are loath to give credit to others’ ideas without the guarantee of “expertise,” originary thinking is vulnerable to the accusation of being purely...
In the heat of defending the Western political economy against the mindless hostility of victimary thinking, it is difficult to avoid compensatory sacrificial gestures of one’s own. But no political...
One thing demonstrated by the reactions to the previous Chronicle is the classical lesson that rigorous thinking is incompatible with the “passions” of political rhetoric. The most egregious use...
To experience the long-awaited Starr report on Bill , Monica , and the cigar in Paris is worth a semester-length course in French civilization. The papers all published lengthy extracts, and...
Perhaps the most remarkable retailing trend of the past few years has been the rise of semi-wholesale stores such as Smart & Final, Home Depot, or Office Depot that sell to both small businesses...
Some recent discussion on the GAlist has prompted me to attempt to clarify my position through an anthropological reading of the fundamental text of originary Christian theology–and of originary...
Few philosophical controversies better illustrate the French expression dialogue de sourds [dialogue of the deaf] than the “mind-brain problem.” The two camps are typically represented in the April...
I finally caught Kenneth Branagh ‘s full-length Hamlet on cable this week. I’m not sorry I missed it in the theater; a four-hour film is too exhausting to watch away from home, and Branagh’s...
The sense that there are two sides to the relationship between individuals and institutions is a peculiarly Western phenomenon, grounded on the historical circumstances of the dissolution of the...
(With my apologies to David Rapoport and his colleagues in the Department of Political Science .) The term political economy suggests that the fundamental social articulation is that between...
Rereading Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique the other day, I was struck by the emphasis on methodological rigor. Linguistics was to offer the example of a true, “hard” science among...
The postwar revision of the traditional relationship between speech and writing was inaugurated by Roland Barthes’ Le degré zéro de l’écriture [ Writing Degree Zero ] (1953), which first gave...
In the second of these “personal” columns, Chronicle 113 , I related the minimalism of GA to the minimalism of the Bronx itself, with its status as a way-station between (for my generation) the...
As I begin the fourth year of these Chronicles , I am more convinced than ever that the ethical models or “anthropologies” that we create are framed as solutions to our personal situations in the...
I doubt that academic humanism’s current obsession with Freudian vocabulary will redound to its credit in future generations. The substitution of “Phallus” for “Being” in presumably respectable...
This Chronicle is dedicated to Doug and Hélène Collins , my recent hosts in Seattle. It contains a number of ideas that emerged from my conversation with Doug following our viewing of Saving...
Concerning the question of whether computers can think, the intellectual community seems divided between those who love computers and say they can, and those who hate computers and say they can’t. I...
Rereading recently a couple of chapters from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick ‘s Epistemology of the Closet (U of California, 1990), I was struck by the power generated by her single-minded determination to...
In preparing last week’s Chronicle on Steven Spielberg ‘s Saving Private Ryan , I had occasion to review Spielberg’s preceding World War II film, Schindler’s List, as well as his more recent...
Our waning victimary era has been boundlessly indulgent toward crude renditions of resentment from those it identifies as oppressed. A recent example is Girls’ Town (1996), where a band of friends,...
In the summer of 1995, I devoted the seventh of these Chronicles (the second most popular of all) to the phenomenon of body piercing . Recently, Tobin Siebers asked me to contribute a chapter on...
This summer New Literary History will publish an article by Anthropoetics collaborator Richard van Oort on GA and esthetic phenomenology. In conjunction with this, the editor has kindly asked...
I have not been a regular viewer of a TV series since I watched I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners as a little boy, but I will admit to being something of a fan of Seinfeld . Although this year’s...
In last week’s column, I touched on the question of the erotic content of the practice of body piercing . This week I would like to reexamine the question of the erotic from the standpoint of...
A successful film, especially a successful low-budget film, is always more than the film itself; we are forced to interpret such films not as self-enclosed artworks, but as cultural events....
At the end of last week’s column, I suggested that more could be said about the relationship between market society and liberal democracy. Since I have been dealing with these matters elsewhere, it...
There may be other Chronicles on this subject. Much more could be said of the Bronx Romantic ‘s disillusionment with liberalism. The academic, especially in the humanities, swims in a sea of...
We have all heard hypocrites invoke God to guarantee their selfish ends. In such cases, it is easy to take the superficial Nietzschean view of God as simply a rhetorical trick by means of which...
Next Wednesday is the 86 th anniversary of the sinking of the British passenger liner R.M.S. Titanic . This year, the nation’s attention will be more intensely focused on this grim remembrance than...
One is easily tempted to invert the ubiquitous rhetoric of “silenced” or “subaltern” voices into a litany of lamentations about the fate of “white males” and majority culture. But neither of these...
The other day I became one of the last people on the planet to watch Titanic. Matt Schneider in Chronicle 132 (April 11, 1998) having already provided a persuasive anthropological explanation of...
To Matt and Ann Schneider, without whom I would never have gotten to the top of that hill The other day, Matt Schneider was kind enough to show me around the new Getty Center , the...
Michel Foucault’ s essay “What is an Author?” has been one of his most widely read pieces since its appearance in Josué Harari’s Textual Strategies (Cornell, 1979), and it was as such that I...