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.
19 of 855 posts
Since GA contains the term “anthropology,” it is often asked in what sense we can call GA a “science.” As was made clear by a show of hands at the recent Ottawa conference, those who take an interest...
Because “Anglo-Saxon” analytic philosophy, even when it strays from logic to “ordinary language” and the linguistic pragmatics of Austin and his school, is fundamentally unconcerned with the...
At least until recently, when the political encounter with the Other has overwhelmed the earlier concern for the internal operations of Western culture, and by extension, of culture in general, the...
When I try to understand the besetting problems of what can still be called Western civilization, I am brought back to the unsettling fact that they tend to focus on the Jews. The recent conflict in...
Thinking about the material world is monistic; thinking about the human is dualistic. Our dualism is monism deferred; the transcendent overlay of representation shields us from the mimetic conflict...
This is an abridged version of a paper given at the recent conference on “The Political Dimension of Sacrifice” at Trinity College, Oxford, organized by Professor Johannes Zachhuber. *** Morality...
Although the term “white guilt” was inspired by the historically fraught relationship between America’s two principal racial groups, the phenomenon itself is more potent today in Europe than in the...
If we define philosophy , as in the previous Chronicle , as the attempt to persuade us, despite a lack of apparent evidence, that our own good, or highest interest, coincides with that of the...
We construct the notion of an esthetic as the basis, perhaps implicit as a formal doctrine, but surely conscious as a set of rules of thumb, of an artist’s esthetic judgment concerning his...
Les présocratiques dans le désordre. One point most strongly made in Scott Austin’s Parmenides (mentioned in the preceding Chronicle ) is his subject’s insistence on controlling predication....
In a posthumously published essay, “The unknown Xenophanes: an attempt to establish his greatness” (in The World of Parmenides , London: Routledge, 1998), Karl Popper presents Xenophanes as no less...
1. The Jewish problem with firstness Norman Podhoretz recently devoted a book to wondering Why Are Jews Liberals? (Doubleday, 2009), yet there is really no mystery about it. Jews epitomize the...
The chapter on narrative form in Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art , which I go over every year for my introductory French film class, refers to the central distinction between story and plot ,...
Sometimes I wonder how I could have devoted so much time and energy to a project whose ultimate embodiment was a fairly standard film biography, Carole Landis: A Most Beautiful Girl . A recent...
This Chronicle originated as a talk delivered at the second GA Summer Conference at Chapman College in June 2008. Since the original text was not as rigorous as I would have liked, I asked Andrew...
This is the very slightly emended text of the talk given at the third annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference at Ottawa on June 19-21, 2009. While apologizing for its length and...
The sad death of Michael Jackson at 50 reminds me of the last time I wrote about celebrity, on the occasion of Princess Diana’s death 12 years ago. At that time, influenced by the high status that...
The just-concluded GA Summer Conference at the University of Ottawa was the most significant public event in the world of GA since I began developing these ideas in 1978, over thirty years ago. The...
The subject of transcendence must be dealt with very carefully, for the transcendent is, leaving supernatural beings out of consideration, coextensive with the human. There is no way to describe a...