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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Briseis is revealed as Achilles’ heel in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy , a postmillennial retelling of the plot of Homer’s Iliad . This new revelation ought to be enough to delight both those familiar...
The following is the first half of a talk given at the annual meeting of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, June 4, 2004: Although it might seem that our mimetic...
The following is the second and last part of a talk given at the annual meeting of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, June 4, 2004: But, as one often hears,...
At this year’s annual meeting, held during the first week in June in the unobtrusively spiritual setting of Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R) showed encouraging...
A positive recent development in the quest to extend the methods of biological evolution to the phenomena of human society is the renewed respectability of the related categories of functionalism and...
I have a pretty good gay friend who hasn’t answered my last couple of emails. He may be out of town, or his computer may be down, but the most likely explanation is that he was offended, perhaps...
If the fundamental difference between high and mass/popular culture is that popular culture indulges resentment and high culture defers it, what does this imply about the defining intersubjective...
On the evening of February 9, 1964, 73 million Americans—about a third of the U.S. population at the time—tuned in to the Ed Sullivan Show to see the Beatles’ North American television debut, and...
The most striking feature of the reactions to Chronicle 308 is how unexceptional it has become to characterize the endorsement of an incumbent president supported by somewhere around 50% of the...
For over a year I have been gathering data about Carole Landis in preparation for a book that I await only family data to begin writing. After watching all her films, viewing hundreds of her...
In early September I participated in a colloquium on esthetics in Porto Alegre, the southernmost large city in Brazil. On this occasion a young scholar from Rio named João Cezar de Castro Rocha...
What keeps me writing these Chronicles is my conviction that the originary hypothesis and the corollary ideas elaborated here are a new beginning in human thought. One accomplishment of this new...
The 2004 election is more significant than any since the end of the Cold War. Irrespective of the Administration’s tactical errors in Iraq, the two parties and their respective “red” and “blue”...
I sometimes reflect on the fact that I belong to the last generation that knew an era yet untouched by television and ball point pens, let alone calculators, copy machines, computers, cell phones…....
The politics of the past few years, dominated by the reality and threat of Islamic terrorism, seem designed to persuade us of the primacy of resentment in human affairs. People who are willing not...
After many years interpreting literary texts for publication and in the classroom, I am struck by two things: how much one can say about them, and how recalcitrant they are to any kind of rigorous...