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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By forty, you learn to live with yourself; at sixty, you have to bet on yourself, on your own unique set of limitations. You may be able to push them back a little, but you’re surely not going to...
In Hegel’s world of thought without language, the paradoxical effect of language on the world it purports to describe is fully recuperated in the fuite en avant of the dialectic, within which art...
Like it or not, film is the basic narrative form of our time, a position it achieved with the establishment of the feature film toward the end of WWI and consolidated in the sound era. Film’s...
It is fitting that Sigmund Freud, the great psychologist of the scene, should be the first thinker to construct a genuine scene of human origin. Hobbes (see Chronicles 176 and 215 ) situates the...
My first book of Generative Anthropology, The Origin of Language (TOOL), was published in 1981. At that time, there was not a great deal of literature about language origin. Everyone quoted the...
I have often referred in these Chronicles to Francis Fukuyama’s idea, first articulated in 1989, that the fall of communism represents the “end of history,” having always found that strong,...
In Chronicle 209 , I proposed the term post-millennial to describe the era now emerging from the victimary shadow of post-WWII postmodernism. (To the same end, but from a very different point of...
The novel is the literary form adopted by the emerging bourgeois self-consciousness of the early modern era. The novel gives the différance of human language its formal correlative; its sheer...
I had already completed a draft of this Chronicle before the events of September 11, but its subject-matter is not altogether irrelevant to the questions posed by these events to our...
Like the celebrity, the hero exists for his public as an incarnate representation. But where the first inhabits a disordered world of gossip and anecdote, the second is the protagonist of a clearly...
A recent email from Marina Ludwigs raises two significant objections to the reflections on “negotiational” justice developed in last week’s Chronicle : First, Marina points out that, in the area...
Marina Ludwigs is proposing a dissertation at UC Irvine that will explore both Generative Anthropology and Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (SZ) [ Being and Time ] as joint bases for an anthropology...
Many of these Chronicles have been devoted in one way or another to defending consumer society against those who affect to despise it. Resentment of the wealthy aside, the intellectual loathes...
Teaching an undergraduate course on the novel reminds us of how little effect a century of “literary theory” has had on how we read. Lacking our dubious skill in dealing with novels as “texts,”...
The Institut d’Etudes Politiques , better known as Sciences Po , is the most central of the Grandes Ecoles where the French governmental and administrative elite are educated, or, as the French...
The sign designates what is there in such a way that it is no longer necessary for it to be present. The linguistic sign has vanishingly little substance; it is part of a system within which even...
In the previous Chronicle I referred to the insufficiently appreciated privilege granted to most of us of dying in bed at what used to be called a ripe old age . When I was young, 70 was...
Scapegoating or “emissary victimage” is the defining operation of René Girard’s originary scene. The proto-human group, caught up in the violent chaos of “mimetic crisis,” finds unanimity by...
I should say at the outset that I am not good at telling stories. Finding the story-teller’s position too perilously hierarchical, I prefer to improvise an answer, interject a witticism, make up...
At a meeting of the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion , it was pointed out that the Chinese term dao (formerly tao ), usually translated “way,” also has the meaning of “discourse.” I found...
I had finished a draft of my next Chronicle when the catastrophe occurred. I was born three months before Pearl Harbor and now have lived to see even greater devastation inflicted on the city of my...
In Originary Thinking , I distinguished the neo-classical esthetic, covering the period following the institution of Christianity (what Hegel called the “Romantic” era), from the classical...
In Chronicle 248 , I suggested that the newly begun “post-millennial” age requires a negotiational concept of justice to take the place of the redistributive concept that dominated the previous...
Giambattista Vico’s reputation as a thinker rests on a set of powerful ideas derived from his historically unique insight into the generative relationship between the sacred, language, and human...
I suggested in Chronicle 224 that we are leaving the victimary postmodern era and entering a “post-millennial” era of non-victimary dialogue. What seems more likely is that we are leaving the acute...
Early this month, I flew to Long Island, NY for the funeral of my last uncle, Martin Gans, my father’s younger brother, who died at the age of 86. My parents, through a not altogether fortuitous...
Twenty-odd years of originary thinking have given me ample occasion to reflect on the resistance it encounters among academics. Personal equations aside, the basis for this resistance would seem to...
The beginnings of full-fledged market society in the early part of the nineteenth century coincided with and were so to speak emblematized by a new systematization of linguistic knowledge. Wilhelm...
My first reaction to the September 11 attacks was to call them “nihilistic,” since they sought destruction for its own sake. On reflection, however, I think we should see these attacks as motivated...