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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Quels qu’aient été le moment et les circonstances de son apparition dans l’échelle de la vie animale, le langage n’a pu naître que tout d’un coup. Les choses n’ont pas pu se mettre à signifier...
In tragedy, it is easy to distinguish the two forms of mediation or identification experienced by the spectator. On the one hand, as a rule we want the hero to fulfill his desires or in any case to...
Perhaps the most persistent undercurrent of postmodern thinking has been the seemingly incompatible insistence on the necessity of narrative on the one hand and its infirmity on the other. At every...
The “Generative Anthropology Thinking Event” (GATE) held in Vancouver from July 26 through July 29 was probably the most significant event in the history of GA since its inception. Unlike the GA...
Ever since the French Revolution, we have been in the habit of describing politics as a battle between the Right and the Left, as though this were an anthropological truism. The fact that this...
I take Eric Gans’ latest Chronicle ( #341 , “Victimary Extinction or Religious Survival”) to initiate a displacement of White Guilt from the center of our discussion, insofar as contending...
Ostensive Freedom Freedom is the subject of Kant’s third antinomy or “Conflict of Transcendental Ideas” in the Critique of Pure Reason : on the one hand, “There is no such thing as freedom, but...
On peut dire les choses les plus opposées au sujet de l’époque que nous vivons, et elles sont également vraies. C’est la plus exaltante et c’est la plus effrayante. Il nous faut penser à la fois...
The Girardian theory of tragedy considers the tragic form as expressing a delusion concerning the heroic stature of its protagonist. His personal qualities, the fatality of his agon and its usually...
For generative anthropology, the unique human capacity for transcendence , access to a domain of non-material beings (ideas, signs, gods), arises in the originary event as a means to defer mimetic...
For some time I’ve been having a little discussion with Adam Katz about the roots of White Guilt that I thought I would share with the reader. I have been claiming that WG is rooted in real physical...
The other day my and Anthropoetics’ old friend Andrew McKenna was sufficiently irritated by a piece in the March 4 New York Times magazine to send it to me as material for a Chronicle . The...