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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There are several watersheds in human history, although I do not think very many. I tried to give an account of the watersheds of Western civilization from an “esthetic” point of view (today I would...
As we all know, there is no sufficient explanation for the success of a work of art; given any explanation, we could always construct a work that satisfies the terms of the explanation and yet does...
In the preceding Chronicle , I attempted a schematic originary analysis of the three Abrahamic religions. Here I would like to focus on the distinction between the Jewish and Christian modes of...
At the recent GASC conference at UCLA (June, 2013), the discussion turned to the originary scene as an instance of what anthropologist Michael Tomasello calls a joint or shared attentional scene. The...
Every literate person has a secret list of books that every literate person is assumed to have read but that he has not. And occasionally in a weak moment he reveals a little piece of the secret, a...
One would not be risking much to wager that mildly curious newcomers to the Anthropoetics website who feel anxiety about climate change and global warming, the razing of rainforests, the dying of...
There is a time in life, which one might call “retirement,” when one is no longer willing or able to maintain one’s commitment to a “profession,” however defined, so that one can no longer...
Although the details are still being worked out, I am currently in the process of retiring from UCLA. This does not mean the end of my intellectual activity; in fact I have never published so much...
We’ve lately been hearing a great deal, including at this year’s GA Summer Conference, about the struggle of the humanities to keep up with the sciences, or “STEM” (science, technology, engineering,...
I have always been unhappy with the notion of the meme . Back in 1999, I wrote Chronicle 173 entitled “Toujours le Meme” [Always the same] where the Franco-English play on words expressed my...
In order to emphasize the sacredness of the words of language, beginning with the first, I have adopted the custom of speaking of the originary sign, the key innovation of the hypothetical originary...
October’s already half-forgotten “government shutdown” was universally credited as a major defeat for the Republican party, and above all, as a tactical error that kept attention away from the...
Text of a talk delivered at the seventh annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference, held at UCLA from June 27 through June 30, 2013. I had heard so much about how Thomas Nagel’s new book,...
Readers of these Chronicles know that I have often spoken about the victimary nature of the postmodern era. No doubt victimary tendencies were present from the outset. The birth of the human,...
This is the text of Peter’s “Introduction to GA,” delivered on June 27, 2013, at the opening of the 7th Annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference at UCLA: There have been many attempts to set...