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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This piece was originally written for a French publication, but although the novel it concerns was twice translated into French in the 18 th century, it is unknown in France today. Trevor Merrill...
On March 1, hundreds of thousands of Instagram viewers mourned the death of a pygmy African hedgehog named Biddy whose owners, better known as his “parents,” had made him an international...
On Wednesday evening, April 8, Stacey and I attended a presentation at the campus research library by the UCLA Center for the Digital Humanities (CDH) entitled Creating Knowledge, Creating Bridges ....
I first heard the expression “digital humanities” when the UCLA Humanities Computing Facility changed its name a few years ago to the Center for the Digital Humanities. I was naive enough to think of...
In perusing several issues of the Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ), I soon discovered that the articles it contains, as opposed to the engaging presentations of DH research at the Creating...
The oxymoron “digital humanities” embodies what is perhaps the fundamental human problem of our age, one that GA can hopefully help us to formulate with a modicum of supplementary clarity. What C. P....
I have always defended Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that liberal democracy is the most stable and efficient form of social organization, and that in consequence it will eventually absorb all others....
The concept of firstness as has been developed in GA over the past few years stands in binary contrast to the “moral model” of symmetrical reciprocity. The latter evokes a symmetrical exchange of...
Over the past year or so the deterioration of campus discourse in the face of militant victimocracy has coincided with the increased virulence of Islamic jihad in both the Middle East and the West....
One of the insistent themes of deconstruction in its earliest phase was the medium of communication. Although the paradoxically presented “non-concept” of différance that defined écriture was...
Since the ninth edition of the Generative Anthropology Summer Conference is coming up, I thought I’d try to articulate as convincingly as I can why I have retained my faith in GA for over thirty-five...
The most concrete definition of the word paradox is as a statement that “contradicts itself,” that is, whose truth value cannot be determined because it entails its opposite, the simplest example...
Readers of these Chronicles know of my disappointment with our current president; elected as a figure who would heal our racial wounds and transcend partisan differences, he has implemented a...
In December 2014, the Association recherches mimétiques held a one-day colloquium on Girard and Sartre at the (new) Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Preparing my paper gave me the opportunity to...
The current situation in American universities has gone beyond the point where righteous indignation, ironic mockery, or any other comparable rhetorical reactions are worth expressing. I am beginning...
I have long defended in these Chronicles (e.g., Chronicles 35 , 247 , 344 …) the fundamental point of Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that liberal democracy constitutes the ultimate form of human...
[Before the debate] Donald Trump’s recent successes demonstrate the limitations but also the reality of the reaction against the victimocracy. To oppose victimary thinking it does not suffice to...
The cognitive content of religious discourse, when it is taken seriously at all in the secular world, is generally limited to the moral domain. If religion gets any credit at all among the...
for Martha Girard Just at the point of starting this 500 th Chronicle , I learned of the death of René Girard, without whose inspiration these Chronicles , if written at all, would surely have...
At the seventh GA Summer Conference in 2013, I gave a talk expressing my disappointment with Mind and Cosmos (Oxford, 2012) by NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel. In his effort to escape mindless...
It is curious that in a world increasingly dominated by identity politics , no one appears to reflect on the near-exclusively ascriptive form (i.e., referring to a predetermined and virtually...
The Hebrews were the “first nation,” but Christianity presided over the emergence of the first nation-states, which combined a national government with a universal religion whose “kingdom was not of...
The complexity of the title of this Chronicle is sufficient indication that it does not represent a fully matured idea, but one of those intuitions it seemed useful to follow as a way of...
The ninth GA Summer Conference took place on June 5-6, 2015, in the near-idyllic setting of High Point University, NC. This was the third meeting sponsored by Matthew Schneider, who has done more...
Readers of these Chronicles know what to think of the victimary: of its origins in the Holocaust, of its turbocharging when victory in the Cold War no longer gave “capitalism” the benefit of an...
As Western civilization’s hold on the world becomes more uncertain, victimary thinking, the propensity to consider every human interaction as a confrontation between an oppressor and a victim,...
The idea that religion is a functional component of human society is well known to evolutionary psychologists such as Pascal Boyer and religious sociologists such as Rodney Stark. Although none of...