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
The relevance of GA to the human predicament is demonstrated by the fact that we ever return to the struggle between love and resentment. Abstractly it is easy enough to take the side of love, but in...
Let me begin by recalling the GA definition of firstness: priority as a mimetic model that in the overall context of moral reciprocity is a form of deferred equality: the temporarily exclusive...
1. Antiquity: the ungraspable paradox It is problematic to speak of antisemitism in antiquity. The Jews’ adoption of monotheism does not appear to have impinged upon the discourse of the...
There are two basic approaches to the question of antisemitism. This duality reflects, as might be expected, the paradoxical nature of the phenomenon; why is there a single word in our vocabulary for...
A recent issue of Nation magazine (Jan. 2, 2012) includes an essay by its principal art critic, Barry Schwabsky, that begins with some observations about Conceptual Art and moves from there to...
Some people have attributed the recent murders in Aurora to “radical evil.” I think there is indeed a sense in which this category applies, but a concept with so many connotations must be defined...
Since the most obvious difference between René Girard and myself in the religious sphere is that he is Christian and I am Jewish, I have often thought that this contrast might be a privileged way of...
I have sometimes tried the patience of the readers of these Chronicles by lamenting their paucity, for which I have all too many explanations. But rather than explore the pathology of the “Bronx...
Let me begin by making a central distinction between two modes of theoretical discourse about the world that supplement the “practical” uses of language. (The latter are essentially, as in...
Firstness creates a double bind, or pragmatic paradox, more than it creates any “idea.” If, as Eric Gans argued again most recently in Chronicle 420 , to persecute Jesus is to worship him, likewise...
Out of nostalgia the other day I ordered from Netflix a documentary ( Project Nim ) about Nim Chimpski, the sign-language chimp that some starry-eyed 70s researchers tried to bring up as a human...
The other day I learned from an acquaintance in Austria of a description of me he had posted on a blog devoted to evolutionary science called Menschliches Verhalten in evolutionärer Perspektive...
Marcel Mauss’ Essai sur le don ( The Gift ), first published in 1923, is a modest yet seminal little book that brought to the world’s attention a fundamental mode of human interaction. Mauss’...
[Those not familiar with the originary hypothesis are referred to the description on pp. 12-18, and in particular pp. 14-15, of my on-line monograph, The Girardian Origins of GA (available for...
Given the essentially (“ontologically”) egalitarian origin of the human and the enduring ethic that derives from it, we have apparently set ourselves up from the outset for an unending moral problem...
I regret having waited for so long to explore the issues raised by the integration of the difference between the sexes within GA’s egalitarian, reciprocal vision of the human. Adam Katz’ addition of...
In her 1973 The Origins of Totalitarianism , Hannah Arendt explains the virulence of modern antisemitism by the fact that the Jews, who had played an important role as international intermediaries...
The following is the first half of my talk at this year’s joint annual meeting of the Generative Anthropology and Conference (GASC–our sixth) and the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R) at...
This is the second part of the talk delivered at the joint COV&R-GASC meeting held in Tokyo July 5-9. The first part is found in the previous Chronicle . *** Girard’s remarks on the Holocaust...