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.
18 of 855 posts
I have pointed out previously in these Chronicles that the victimary critique of institutions that dominated the postmodern era has lost its epistemological power to discriminate between victims...
However necessary the turn from nihilism to the affirmation of life may be in the intellectual world, in the domain of practical politics it is truly a question of life or death. The great conflict...
Our most difficult yet most necessary exercise is to put ourselves in the place of those who want to kill us, not to espouse their resentments, but to affirm through this encounter the unity of the...
As one gets older, one grows more appreciative of life. I doubt if I would have conceived the same admiration for the beauty of Carole Landis had I encountered her twenty or thirty years ago....
What has made the Jews a privileged object of collective hatred is their paradoxical place in the history of religion. Their historical role as the first people to worship a unique, universal deity...
PNG image (900K) Other Photographs Few readers will be able to identify the subject of this photograph: Carole Landis , who committed suicide on July 5, 1948 at the age of 29. Hers was a name I...
My interest in Carole Landis may remind those given to literary analogies of old Faust’s infatuation with Helen of Troy. However, I am not awaiting from Carole the kiss that will make me immortal....
A sensitive reader of these Chronicles remarked to me that of all of them, Chronicle 280 about Carole Landis is suffused with the most genuine emotion. It is indeed strange and wholly...
The Landis photograph of Chronicle 280 made real to me as never before Proust’s description of things of beauty–whether a petite phrase of music or an 8×10 photograph–as hostages that...
Of the nineteenth century’s two great pourfendeurs of metaphysics, whereas Nietzsche opposes to metaphysics a theory of the scene from which its pretended objectivity derives, Marx ignores the...
C’est la lutte finale Groupons-nous, et demain L’Internationale Sera le genre humain! ‘Tis the final conflict Let each stand in his place The International working class Will be the human...
The fundamental hypothesis of generative anthropology is that the function of representation in general and religious representation in particular is to defer mimetic violence. Although René Girard...
(This and the following Chronicle are taken from a lecture delivered at the recent COV&R meeting in Innsbruck.) Of the various institutional criteria of the human–language, religion, art,...
(continued from Chronicle 286 ) As we all know today, Marx’s analysis, brilliant as it was, was simply wrong. The market is not tied by “the iron law of wages” to eking out a “falling rate of...
As readers of these Chronicles know, I consider the Holocaust to be the inaugural moment of the victimary era from which we are now emerging. But what we are emerging into is not so clear. The...
What symbiosis between narrative and life permits us to conceive of a “life-narrative”? Why is the information content of a book, some 100,000 or 200,000 words (I won’t hazard a guess as to how many...
In last week’s column, I had occasion to remark that the best designed typology of religious phenomena cannot make up for a deficient theory of origin. Scientific studies of, or better put, around...
This week’s Chronicle is the continuation and conclusion of Chronicle 283 , which critiques three attempts to explain the origin of language. * * * My fourth example is Bernard Comrie’s...