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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From Mark Steyn’s June 16, 2014 column: The world is decaying into twin totalitarianisms. On the one hand, the Islamic imperialists on the march through Iraq and elsewhere, insisting that Islam is...
Some time ago I described myself in Chronicle 433 as a kind of exiled French intellectual, “bracketing,” as they say, the new-world unsophistication that justifies, or at any rate corresponds to,...
The week before Labor Day, the world learned from the Japanese toy company Sanrio that the ubiquitous Hello Kitty is “really” not a cat but a little girl named Kitty White. This news elicited many...
If you Google victimary you will find that virtually every use of the term can be traced to the Anthropoetics website, mostly to these Chronicles . ( Victimocracy has a somewhat wider range.)...
Preamble The rules of logic and mathematics are not guarantees of anything more than their own consistency. They have no weight in ethical arguments, not even against illogic. The greatest...
[This text is a supplement to the introduction to a forthcoming work by Adam Katz and myself, tentatively entitled The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism . It draws a parallel between...
This is the text of my talk at the Eighth Generative Anthropology Summer Conference (GASC) held at Victoria BC in June 2014. It was adapted from my contribution to a colloquium on Girard and Derrida...
I have written a great deal, no doubt a bit repetitively, about the scene in Exodus 3 where God gives his “name” to Moses as a declarative sentence, ehyeh asher ehyeh. This is a passage that Martin...
A Tennessee College is Forcing its Faculty to Swear They Believe Adam and Eve Existed BY JERRY A. COYNE Things are in ferment at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee. Named after William Jennings...
I don’t usually pay much attention to diatribes against Israel, and one of the reasons I have remained loyal to the New Republic despite its unrelenting obsession with the latest forms of radical...
The original idea behind Generative Anthropology before it was called GA was to provide a minimal, or in other terms, a maximally parsimonious theory of the origin of human language, and thereby of...
Readers of these Chronicles will recognize the term “victimary,” which I have been using at least since 1996 (in Chronicle 38 ), and which has been the subject of the last two Chronicles . But...
In a recent piece in the National Review “Corner,” Victor Davis Hanson points out, a propos of the Ferguson incident, that the US is ceasing to obey the rule of law. Entitling his column “Living...
In the previous Chronicle I suggested that today’s “anti-Zionist” antisemitism represents a certain “progress” in relation to its earlier forms, directed at the medieval Christ-killer...
There are many ways to describe the human condition, or the human predicament, and it is traditional to repeat those of the philosophers. Yet the breakthrough inaugurated by René Girard is dependent...
Thinking about the story of Adam and Eve in reference to last week’s Chronicle has led me to the question of sin . I choose this old-fashioned term not only because it is the central element in...
My previous Chronicle dealt with sin and resentment but was focused on the contemporary problem of victimocracy, the empowerment of the resentment of presumably subaltern ascriptive social groups....
I thought I had said about all I needed to say about the dangers and the possible silver lining in the victimary politics of our era, but a recent conversation with Trevor Merrill led me to draw a...
The just-concluded eighth annual GASC conference at Victoria, British Columbia was a milestone in the slow but so far continuously positive-sloped evolution of GA, from its beginnings with The...
Moral equality and firstness, the values that define the human, are implicit in our use of signs, since we can all share them, but only occasionally create new ideas with them. The course of human...
Raymond Tallis’ Aping Mankind is a brief, written in witty, accessible style, against “Darwinitis and Neuromania”—the scientism that treats human consciousness as an emanation of the brain and its...
In the preceding Chronicle , I proposed that the best way to understand victimary thought in its radical antinomianism is as a new fundamental anthropology, albeit one that denies its “originary”...
Whatever the details, the central lesson René Girard teaches us is that the sacred is humanity’s way of controlling its own potential violence, and in the process, becoming human. In the everyday...
If all sins in the first place derive from originary resentment of the sacred center, reflecting the disappointment that one cannot possess the central object in its entirety but must content oneself...
In recent years a number of writers have attracted a good deal of attention by promoting atheism and denigrating religion, while others have defended religion’s contribution to civilization,...
Reflections on paradox The originary operation of language is paradoxical, or “paradoxical,” in its very essence, since the originary sign designates as referred-to-by-the-sign and thereby as...