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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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...
It is both easy and hard to believe that my first book of Generative Anthropology was written over twenty years ago, before the term itself was invented: The Origin of Language (TOOL), published by...
I recently returned from Emory University in Atlanta, where I attended the annual meeting of the Girardian Colloquium on Violence and Religion . This year’s topic was “violence reduction in theory...
I have just finished teaching the French Department’s introductory “theory” course this quarter. It began with the usual suspects, from Saussure and Lévi-Strauss through Derrida, Foucault, and...
Perhaps the deepest motivation for Generative Anthropology is the need to raise the level of our discourse about the existence of God , which habitually begin by defining “God” and then go on to...
One way of defining the end of history is as the moment when it becomes impossible to tell stories about humanity as a whole, what Jean-François Lyotard called “ master narratives .” The source...
I was recently asked to read a set of applications for a local postdoctoral fellowship on the theme “Sacred and Profane. ” There were fifty-nine applicants in the modern period, recent and incipient...
To accept that the democratic market system is here to stay, that there is no more stable system available to human social organization than one that allows for the free exchange of goods and...
At the time of the Littleton episode, I felt I had nothing to add to a discussion that, however necessary, also seemed necessarily incapable of defining the “real” problem. But seeing the other day...
The recently revived inquiry into the origin of language has its roots in the Enlightenment . The eighteenth century saw numerous works explicitly devoted to the origin of language(s) and still...
Few indeed predicted that after the moderate disaster of the 1998 elections, the narrow Republican majority in the House would hold firm in passing an impeachment resolution against President...
I was recently asked to review The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), the latest book by Derek Freeman, the New...
Although I cannot claim to have predicted the apparent victory in Kosovo , and although I deplore its muddled strategy and the government’s failure to put its case before the public, I do feel some...
Although not one of the big-name philosophes , L’Abbé Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780) has a claim to the title of the most significant philosopher of the French Enlightenment. Condillac’s...
Chronicle 178 dealt with the first paragraph of the second part of Condillac’s Essai sur les connaissances humaines (1746), the preliminary description of his famous thought-experiment in which...
Claude Lévi-Strauss ’ famous remark that Rousseau was the first real anthropologist is the founding text of deconstruction , in the sense that a grain of sand is the founding particle of a pearl....
Pity plays a central role in Rousseau ’s originary anthropology. It is the fundamental “natural” relation between humans prior to the introduction, with language, of even the most elementary form of...
Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages is the Urtext of deconstruction. Like many a posthumously published work, it is characteristic of its creator to the point of caricature. Although its...
Johann Gottfried Herder’s prize Essay on the Origin of Language (1772) is the definitive rejection of Condillac’s Enlightenment model that seeks to derive human language from natural signs. This...
Max Müller , editor of the Vedas , was the most important Sanskritist of the nineteenth century and arguably its major figure in the study of religion as well. Despite the naivety of his ideas about...
I entitled this series “Chronicles of Love and Resentment” because, however much we want to promote the values of love, we are all creatures of resentment. It is impossible to react to the resentment...
Last week the UCLA French Department was host to Marcel Bénabou , an eminent member of a group of twenty-odd French writers called Oulipo , short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle or...
Most conservative publications use the term “ postmodern ,” often in association with “deconstruction,” as if it belonged wholly to the Left . In this perspective, the postmodern is less an...
The term “culture” is indelibly ambiguous. In the narrow sense favored by the general public, it is a system of esthetic representations that functions to defer violence. In the broad sense used by...
The recent decision of the Kansas Board of Education to remove the theory of evolution from the high school science curriculum has made creationism front page news. Articulating the reaction of...
In a comment on Chronicle 157 (“The Voice of Authority”), Don Socha observed that the historical model for the thinker who stands “outside of the authority of specialization” and emphasizes the...
Some years ago, a reviewer of one of my books spoke of Generative Anthropology as a “big bang” theory of human origin. Even the motto I have chosen for GA echoes this slogan: The fox knows many...
Lately I have been making a serious effort to understand why, nearly forty years after Girard ’s Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque and twenty after my The Origin of Language, the mimetic...
As everyone who studies the subject knows, the origin of language was banished from the arena of scientific debate by the French Academy of Sciences in 1866. When I published The Origin of...
During my first weeks of reading through the recent literature on the origin of language, the progress in scientific research in the various relevant domains did not seem to have resulted in any...
Readers of these Chronicles know that the originary event is the hypothetical origin of all the categories of human culture and, most particularly, of language and religion . In The Origin of...
If any cultural phenomenon must be thought about it is religion, which is a name for the set of practices that have held human communities together throughout most of human time and space. Because...
In Double Business Bound , René Girard gives a mimetic analysis of Act II, scene 3 of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme , where the philosophy master intervenes in an argument between the...
Ever since Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976) floated the idea of a cultural unit called the meme analogous to the biological gene, the term has been used in many places with...
There is something to be said for the pragmatist notion that no ideas are true or false in themselves, that what counts is whether they “work.” The real question is what counts as “working”? Many...