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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The fundamental human paradox is that language is timeless but its users are not. The only way out of this dilemma–one that will bear witness neither to our immortality nor to our simple...
This month I attended for the third time the annual meeting of The Colloquium on Violence and Religion ( COV&R ), an organization, founded in 1991, dedicated to the advancement of the “mimetic...
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France , the author’s only important work of political thought, has assured him a place in the Pantheon of modern conservatism. Burke’s critique,...
At least since the publication of Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel in 1947, the best-known moment of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit , not to say of all his works, is...
In a famous phrase in Tristes tropiques , Claude Lévi-Strauss, speaking for the anthropological/ethnological community, called Rousseau “our master and our brother.” With respect to the standard...
If we seek the one word that insists most sharply on the contrast between the human and the non-human, that word would be scenic . The human is the scenic animal; everything that uniquely...
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (MD) is one of the most formally provocative and, to my mind, one of the best films of recent years. Its self-deconstructing narration is one of the finest...
Today when we are asked to name the most significant philosopher of the nineteenth century, we are likely to choose a man who was not a professional philosopher at all, whose work is aphoristic...
The usefulness of periodization depends on the complementarity of the ethical and the esthetic. As a first approximation, let us say that art deals with the difficulties or paradoxes inherent in a...
Originary thinking provides an anthropological grounding for Kantian morality, as expressed in the fourfold formulation of the categorical imperative in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals ,...
The esthetic is most simply defined as a form of experience in which a representational sign is perceived as a necessary constituent of its imaginary referent; the result is an oscillatory movement...
Kant locates the esthetic effect, defined as “pure pleasure,” in the faculty of judgment, which he situates midway between the understanding, whose concepts make sense of the natural world, and...
Although the concept of “representation” (Vorstellung) occupies an analogous place in critical philosophy and in generative anthropology as an activity limited to what Kant calls “rational...
I have, as they say, a visceral dislike of victimary rhetoric, the sanctimonious denunciation of white guilt in others, or in “ourselves–as I , if not you , have acknowledged.” One cannot...
Reality TV shows are not the most popular programs on TV (in the December 2, 2002 Nielsen ratings there is only one such show– Survivor , ranked eighth–in the top ten). But these programs arouse in...
As I attempted to show in a recent article , René Girard is Durkheim’s true successor in the anthropology of the sacred. Durkheim was the first to understand the function of the sacred-bearing...
As I pointed out in Chronicle 183 , the concept of unanimity has a particular resonance for Rousseau as well as for generative anthropology. Near the beginning of his literary career, in the...
[T]he most important and vital distinction between the sublime and the beautiful is certainly this: . . . whereas natural beauty . . . conveys a finality in its form making the object appear, as it...
Coincidentally, while I was reading Nicholas Boyle’s Who are we now? , discussed in Chronicle 265 , I was also plowing through Winston Churchill’s six-volume memoir of World War II. The two...
Gilles William Goldnadel’s Nouveau bréviaire de la haine [ New Breviary of Hatred ] (Editions Ramsay, 2001–the nouveau is a reference to an earlier “breviary” by the anti-Semitism historian Léon...
Speculation on the origin of humanity and its institutions does not begin in the Enlightenment; it is at the heart of all culture. But in the Enlightenment, for the first time, this speculation...
The other night I watched two films. The first was His New Job , an early Chaplin film from 1915; the other was the recent Monster’s Ball that won Halle Berry her Oscar. These two films seemed...
Thanks to Gil Bailie of the Florilegia Institute, I recently had the opportunity to read Nicholas Boyle’s Who Are We Now? (Notre Dame, 1998). Boyle’s survey of the contemporary historical...