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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One point that has sometimes been made against Generative Anthropology is that the originary hypothesis and the mode of analysis that derives from it limit the universe of discourse to a single...
One of the simplest ways to begin to explain the prevalence of White Guilt in our era is that victimary thought, however “unmanly” and even cowardly it may be from the perspective of action, depends...
Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive thought, despite its often arch presentation (not to speak of the tiresome word-games it has inspired in lesser minds), contains the most profound anthropological...
The current flurry of Girardian activity in France gives new visibility to the critique of Generative Anthropology by the proponents of mimetic theory. As I see it, Girardians (and Girard himself)...
The central Girardian critique of generative anthropology is that it fails to account for scapegoating. If we claim that the originary sign embodies an agreement to defer violence, how can we explain...
The impetus for the first important mode of postmodern thought was given by the fateful encounter of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and linguist-poetician Roman Jakobson at the New School for...
As I see it, the most urgent task of our originally Western but now global civilization is to defend itself against victimary thinking, the White Guilt that tempts us to leave it undefended by making...
In 1962, J. L. Austin published a seminal little book entitled How to Do Things with Words in which he proposed the idea of the performative , a “speech-act” that not only said something but did...
At the recent American Comparative Literature Association meeting at Princeton (about which I may have more to say in another Chronicle ), Adam Katz and I discussed among other things the...
Richard Rorty’s February Comparative Literature lecture at UCLA prompted me to take a closer look at his best-known and most influential book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, henceforth...
Every day is the end of history, just as it’s the first day of the rest of your life. All that we know from the past is being fulfilled; all the past can tell us is being revealed–until tomorrow’s...
To be fooled twice is shame on me . This Chronicle is dedicated to my dear friend B, through whose agency Woody fooled me yet again. Several years ago in Chronicle 67 , I condemned the...