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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In answer to those who criticize Generative Anthropology for not being empirically based (and without going into the epistemological problems that this concept raises), I prefer to say that GA is a...
It would be a tedious exercise to attempt to count the number of times in history, or even in the past century, that a “crisis of civilization” has been declared. The human has never been stable;...
Whereas philosophical explorations of human language such as that in Charles Taylor’s recent The Language Animal (Harvard, 2016) never propose anything like an originary hypothesis, having no...
This election season, the candidacy of Donald Trump has provoked a crise de conscience in the ranks of conservatives. But whatever our sympathy for those who banded together to oppose Trump in the...
When scientists extrapolate from empirical data to probabilistic speculations, I don’t consider that they have any more authority than laypeople. When I read about theories that deduce from the...
Although I was not as surprised as some, I can’t say I anticipated that Trump would win the “blue wall” states that gave him victory. But beyond the cordiality shown by all sides in the aftermath of...
My recoil from social media save in their most marginal form (a very spare LinkedIn account and a membership in Schoolmates.com) is probably understood by younger generations and most of my...
It always comes back to the originary scene and to the invention of language. Every use of language reinvents the doubling of referential reality by the sign that is the distinctive mark of human...
I have often attributed the failure of generative anthropology to achieve popularity to my ineptitude for publicity. But if as I (we?) believe, GA is a genuine “new way of thinking,” a breakthrough...
This Chronicle is the third in a series we might call “GA and the Rest” (Part I: Chronicle 444 , Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos ; Part II: Chronicle 490 , Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature...
Smaller than some previous conferences, and including as appropriate a considerable Girardian component, GASC X in Nagoya was nevertheless in many respects the most GA-focused of all. Although a...
[Continued from Chronicle 515 ] What does this comparison tell us about the two cultures that have created these paradoxical formulations? Zeno’s paradoxes reflect his place in the history of...
There are a number of clichés about learning from history, notably that if you don’t you’re condemned to repeat it, but the more profound sense of the expression is that human history is our only...
Not having commented on the presidential campaign since last August ( Chronicle 493, “Reality Politics” ), now that the decisive moments are approaching, I thought an update would be appropriate. In...
Having done some recent readings in cognitive science, the titles of which I will leave diplomatically unmentioned, I am struck by these researchers’ neglect of religion when they come to speculate...
I promised to make some final comments about the coming election; please excuse their desultory nature. History no doubt involves a certain degree of randomness, but the unsatisfactory nature of...
“Scandal to the Jews, folly to the pagans” (1 Corinthians 1:23) Many years ago I wrote an article with this title ( Diacritics 9, 3, Fall 1979) about Girard’s vision of Christianity in Des choses...
Last August, at a time that already seems far distant, I expressed in Chronicle 493 what might be called a bemused interest in the fact that the two most prominent figures then in the news, the...
Back in 1948, Dwight Waldo coined the expression “administrative state” to refer to the concentration of authority, including effectively both legislative and judicial powers, in the executive in the...
Since I ceased teaching nearly three years ago, I have spent a good deal of time catching up on authors I had earlier neglected and rereading old classics—not all of which have lived up to their...
To exemplify the postmodern era, one must rely on intuition. There are no postmodern norms by which to measure an artist’s achievement, even to the extent that we may speak of the modern style as, at...
Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque , translated under the mindlessly alliterative title Deceit, Desire, and the Novel , appeared in 1961. It was René Girard’s first book, and I would be very...
Some decades ago, when I was still naïve enough to think I could win a competitive grant, I proposed a study of resentment, beginning with Achilles’ “rage” and running through Hamlet down to...
I hope readers will excuse the desultory nature of these reflections inspired by the recent election and its immediate aftermath. 1. Faith in democracy Although it is not immune to the lessons of...
A couple of years ago we were inundated with books attacking belief in God. Now it seems the hot topic is human language. Language has been a perennial subject of philosophers since the “linguistic...
Why is it important to concern ourselves with the origin of the human? Is not the mission of human science to study humanity in its present reality, with all study of the past being merely of use in...