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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Adam provides here the clearest and most strategically plausible program I have seen for Generative Anthropology, not merely to survive but to contribute fundamentally to human self-knowledge. He...
One fact familiar to French historians that never seems to be mentioned in reference to the flourishing of authoritarian regimes nowadays is the victory of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in the...
As I hope my faithful readers notice, although my writings on the victimary are somewhat repetitive, each time I try to work through some new idea. The last time, it was the notion that as society...
Daniel Everett, a linguistic anthropologist whose work was given considerable publicity by Tom Wolfe in his The Kingdom of Speech (see Chronicle 525 ), has published the latest high-profile book...
When Trevor Merrill lent me his copy of Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon in Democracy (Encounter, 2016 [2012]), my reaction to the first chapters was that Legutko simply didn’t understand what “liberal...
The Generative Anthropology Society and Conference has now concluded its eleventh annual meeting, something few of us would have anticipated when Andrew Bartlett organized the first “GA Thinking...
The quasi-apotheosis of Xi Jinping at the 2017 Chinese Communist Party Congress is a useful occasion to reflect on the future of democracy and of the continuing validity of Francis Fukuyama’s thesis...
Of the relatively few students of René Girard who have attempted to build on his work, only Sandor Goodhart and I, to my knowledge, have been Jewish. But Girard himself always insisted on the...
It is easier to understand the domestic American situation than to conceive what might be the future evolution of “global” civilization. Clearly we are not yet ready for world government, and the...
The Wikipedia entry for “Populism” comes in at 35,000 words, and is of not much help to one seeking a coherent definition of the term. All political terms are vague, but the vagueness of this one is...
The “world” contains no paradoxes; paradox is a property of systems of representation. And humans alone possess systems of representation, or simply language , in contrast to the signaling systems...
The September 25 issue of the Weekly Standard featured “The Joy of Destruction,” a Girardian analysis by Joseph Bottum of the recent statue-destroying epidemic. Bottum sees this as uniting the...
Before I begin my “official” talk I would like your indulgence to address a couple of other matters: First of all, sadly, two people associated with GA have passed away since our last meeting; both...
Anna Wierzbicka (AW) makes Jesus’ doctrine of what she calls living with God, who is both a someone not like people and living , the key to all Jesus’ moral preaching, from the Sermon on the...
The other day Adam Katz, who has kindly read over my draft of the new edition of The Origin of Language (TOOL2), questioned my use of the term “aborted gesture,” since the gesture that becomes the...
Clint Eastwood’s four-Oscar-winning 1992 Unforgiven has one of the most watertight reputations among latter-day Westerns; some say it was the last “real” Western. So although my distaste for...
In Chronicle 527 I spelled out a point about antisemitism that everyone knows who writes on the subject, yet that is virtually never mentioned: that the term was not invented to stigmatize the...
Now that the GASC meeting is behind us, I would like to respond to Adam Katz’s argument in his June 2 blog “(Im)morality and (In)equality” that, to reduce his point to what appears to me its...
From a grammatical standpoint, operators are different from, but similar to, modifiers, traditional grammarians emphasizing the similarities, modern linguists, the differences. Negation is, in...
The negative ostensive is a new linguistic form, not merely a variant of the ostensive. The original imperative-ostensive dialogue took place around the successful presentation of the imperative...
The Declarative Model With the derivation of the declarative sentence we have reached the final moment of the dialectic of linguistic form per se. The chief obstacle to the comprehension of the...
The declarative sentence, as a “context-free” model of reality, offers us the possibility of an objective understanding of the universe. It is the foundation of scientific discourse, which makes...
The first TOOL was chiefly devoted to a discussion of the basic utterance-forms (ostensive, imperative, interrogative, declarative), speculating on how they might have evolved from the original...
In any account of the genesis of language one must assume that the first linguistic sign was both absolutely new, a “symbolic” sign (Peirce), yet as close as possible to what animals were capable of...
Thus far we have been concerned with the hypothetical preconditions for the existence of the ostensive utterance form. We now turn to the “linguistics” of what we can conceive of as “ostensive...
Linguistics even in our post-Chomskian era still takes NP + VP as the fundamental form of the sentence; anything less is a “defective” transformation. But once we attempt to explain how à partir de...
The Intentional Structure of the Imperative The intentional structure of the ostensive can be summed up in a few words: The speaker transmits to the hearer an immediately verifiable model of the...
The preceding discussion has shown that the requirement of human performance in the imperative is the source of the categories of tense, person, and governance that will become the touchstones of the...
The contradiction in the intentional structure of the imperative between the speaker’s and the hearer’s intentions reflects the fundamental asymmetry of the speech situation, which emerges at this...
By his acceptance of the speaker’s desire, the addressee of the imperative becomes not merely the latter’s hearer but his interlocutor. Thus he hears not only the utterance but the person, and by...
Il n’y aura pas de nom unique, fût-il le nom de l’être. Et il faut le penser sans nostalgie, c’est-à-dire hors du mythe de la langue purement maternelle ou purement paternelle, de la patrie perdue...
Having come to the end of this second edition of The Origin of Language (TOOL), the reader may wonder whether taking up this “new way of thinking” based on the originary hypothesis is worth the...
Origin of Language: Introduction&rft.source=Anthropoetics&rft.date=2017-02-02&rft.identifier=http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/?p=2644&rft.language=English&rft.subject=Chronicles of Love and...
Let me repeat the first sentence of the original 1981 edition of The Origin of Language (TOOL): Mysteries should not be multiplied beyond necessity . To the extent that the word mystery has a...
The most significant difference between this work and other accounts of language origin lies in its proposed outline, on the basis of the hypothetical originary event of language/culture, of the...
Last week’s Chronicle 569 was inspired by Phillip Cary’s exposition of Martin Luther’s “performative” Christianity. That led me to think about how the notion of the performative, not mentioned in...
For years my intellectual universe has been increasingly characterized by dissociation. On the one hand, nearly forty years ago I formulated a heuristic hypothesis that I believe revolutionizes our...
The originary hypothesis is close to forty years old, having first been formulated during my visit to Johns Hopkins in 1978. Not only have some of its basic constituents changed, notably the dropping...
Steven Pinker has famously noted ( The Better Angels of Our Nature , Viking, 2011) that despite all the massacres of the twentieth century, our lives are not only much longer, but much more peaceful...
Douglas Murray’s “One Hundred Years of Evil” ( National Review , 10/30/17) provoked a smile of déjà vu . Why indeed are the Nazis permanent figures of evil, when Communists responsible for far more...
A recent column (“The Democrat Patient”, National Review 1/31/17) by Victor Davis Hanson, perhaps the wisest of our current pundits, deplores the self-destructive anti-Trump passion that seems to...