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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Not long ago, I received a feedback message from Scott Woodham asking me why I continued to insist on the distinction between high and popular art, particularly now that by my own admission “high”...
Watching the World Series (I need not tell you which team the Bronx Romantic roots for) reminds me that nothing is more serious than the cultural games that have allowed us humans to survive in the...
Rodney Cotterill ’s No Ghost in the Machine (London, 1989) is a scientist’s attempt to prove that there is no such thing as a soul . I often wonder exactly what people who write this way think...
Le corbeau ( The Raven or The Crow ) is probably the most controversial film in French history. It was made in 1943, under the German occupation–and for a German-owned production company–by...
Since these Chronicles often refer favorably to the market exchange system and less so to cultural phenomena hostile to it, people sometimes wonder what relevance the modern market might have to a...
For Durkheim , religion was in the first place a social phenomenon; he had little patience for discussions that focused a la William James on individual “religious experience.” But Durkheim’s...
I have always been a Yankee fan. My first baseball memories are from the 1949 pennant race, listening on the radio to the final two-game series with the Red Sox ; the Yanks came in a game down and...
The faith of GA, as I attempted to explain in Chronicle 200 , is that all thinking is “really” originary thinking. Such an assertion, if it is not to be mere rhetoric, should be followed by at...
Today the Humanities appear to be drifting in the direction of the social sciences. Textual analysis becomes every day less like biblical hermeneutics and more like archival research–when it...
Birthdays are happy moments, but each year more ironically so. Religion liberates us from this growing awareness of finitude. The sacred sign’s deferral of human violence becomes the originary source...
It is sometimes claimed that once one accepts the originary hypothesis there is nothing more to say about a given text save to translate it into the terms of the theory. In one of the first GA...
One could write a history, beginning in the Enlightenment , of the models of elementary human interaction, from Hobbes’ war of all against all through Rousseau’s pity, Hegel’s master and...
Chronicle 192 mentioned Emile Durkheim’s refutation of Max Müller’s “naturist” theory of religion, which boils down to the denial that the radical otherness of the sacred can be derived from...
Intentionality is characteristic of “systems” like ourselves that have intentions, which we may define as internal models of future states. Intentionality is complicated by the way in which...
In Chronicle 176 I spoke of Hobbes’s infamous picture of the “state of nature” in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” as the beginning of the originary anthropological...
In “The Unique Source of Religion and Morality” ( Anthropoetics , I, 1), I explained religious faith by the WWII dictum that “there are no atheists in the foxholes”: that one calls on God at the...
Why should anyone do a crossword puzzle? At best, you wind up with the answer you could find in the back of the book or in next week’s magazine. But it’s just because there is an answer that you do...
As the Middle East slips back into Intifada mode, I thought I’d say something before it’s too late about the current election campaign. One feature of American politics that Europeans have a...
I have claimed more than once in these Chronicles and elsewhere that the emergence of humanity cannot be understood simply in terms of the theory of evolution, and that “creation science,” whatever...
I’ve been reading a lot about “modules” lately. Many people postulate a language module; I haven’t heard of any who postulate a religion module. The one useful point I have seen made by cognitive...
Georges Bataille’s L’érotisme (1957), more graphically titled in the English translation Death and Sensuality , is a sloppily constructed work, lacking rigor and even consistency. Yet it still...
The May 8 Weekly Standard contains a summary of David Brooks’ recent best-seller Bobos in Paradise , an analysis of America’s “new upper class” of BO urgeois BO hemians. Brooks’ thesis is that...
One hindrance to GA’s popularity way back in the 20 th century was its tendency to arouse resentment. This is itself a convincing argument in its favor, but only for someone who already accepts...
Although the perceptive reader of these Chronicles may detect here and there faint traces of resentment, the Index reveals that I haven’t dealt explicitly with the subject for over three years....
How can we doubt the value of celebrity? Since human beings have always valued above all else the recognition of their fellows, what could be more desirable than to be “celebrated”? In a world where...
As we begin the third millennium, it seems clear that the novel has relinquished to film its role as the dominant narrative form. This is increasingly the case even in those emerging countries where...
The other day yet another white supremacist went on a rampage, killing five people of five different nationalities: Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, African-American, and … Jewish . Which led me to...
The postmodern era may be said to date from the end of WWII , determined by Hiroshima and even more importantly by Auschwitz . The end of full-scale war as a rational strategy–our debt to...
The first part of the title is meant to dispel any suspicions either that I think that victimary thought is about to disappear or that I am unaware of the irony of “killing” the victim by declaring...
Few arguments are more tedious than the one between partisans of the two possible ends of the millennium. After the more obvious end on December 31, 1999, we can all agree that January 1, 2001 erases...
Discussing David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise in Chronicle 208 led me to some further reflections on the distinction between the post-millennial bobos or “bourgeois bohemians” and their...
Now that Anthropoetics has gone through ten issues and the list of Chronicles nears two hundred, it seems appropriate to take stock of the GA enterprise and to draw some conclusions about its...