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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The term ecumenism makes one think of a feel-good “conversation” between a rabbi, one or more Christian churchmen, an imam, a Buddhist… And the kind of generalities that come out of such...
For a certain time I have sensed that GA’s failure to be taken seriously by the professionals of the social sciences is not merely a product of its practitioners’ lack of professional standing. No...
This title is deliberately provocative. I am mindful of Richard’s van Oort’s boutade that GA wouldn’t be of much use in a foxhole, but the originary hypothesis does imply, if not a full-fledged...
John 1:1 — In the beginning was the Word: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος Few biblical passages or theological statements are more familiar than this one. Readers of René Girard will recall that he uses this...
(Keynote lecture, Warsaw GASC, 2018) For the past couple of years I have done a good deal of research for these presentations, learning about Buddhism for our Nagoya conference and Anna Wierzbicka...
In the previous Chronicle 575 , I attempted to show in what way GA simplifies and unifies the various discourses humanity has elaborated in order to explain its existence. Theology, philosophy, and...
The esthetic is the most mysterious of anthropological categories. Indeed, given that language itself produces esthetic effects, there is no aspect of representation that does not touch on the...
Whether God exists is a matter of faith, but the nature of God’s or the sacred’s being is of importance to believers and non-believers alike—a fundamental task of GA being to show that this...
Since Chronicle 582 on Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (Yale UP, 2018), I have gone through some issues of First Things , and have been impressed by the number of references to...
GA is not meant to replace the social sciences. But it can be of help in the empirical study of humanity by posing a minimal core of cultural behavior that supplies the framework of a human ontology....
I have spent the past few weeks proofreading, and rereading, past Chronicles , looking for formatting and other errors, and have now gone through three quarters of them. Corrections are thankfully...
The nice thing about religious discourse is that it puts everything in human terms. Once God has finished his creation, the world has become a human-friendly place, and fixing up the equations—the...
The opposition between the ostensive and the declarative elements of culture is not one of linguistic forms, but of fundamental modes of human communication. The root of human culture is the birth...
In the years preceding my discovery/invention of the originary hypothesis, I was strongly influenced by two modes of thought. First, on coming to UCLA in 1969, I met Alain Cohen, then a recent UCLA...
There would have been no difficulty in realizing the “moral model” of human reciprocity on the originary human scene. The beginning of representation that is the basis of human culture can only have...
It is Generative Anthropology (GA)’s ambition, not to synthesize the substance of these discourses, let alone to “inter-disciplinarize” them, but to trace them back to their originary roots and...
I The greatest confusion about the human is in its origin, whose specificity our secular age does so much to evade. One might in fact define the secular as the state of denial of a scene of...
The historical variety of esthetic forms is beyond the scope of a book, let alone an essay. The originary hypothesis is not a formula for reducing all cultural productions to a limited set of...
It is not surprising to learn about a crisis in liberal democracy, given that, as politicians, commencement speakers, and clergymen so often tell us, the liberal-democratic system depends on...
1. Qui perd gagne [the loser wins] Jean-Paul Sartre deserves much more attention than he gets today, not simply for historical reasons as the world’s leading intellectual in the postwar era, but...
Around twenty years ago I found, to describe the originary hypothesis, the notion of the “little bang,” as so to speak a dialectical synthesis of gradualism and catastrophism. At the time, I was...
If you asked why after 40 years the originary hypothesis remains almost totally unknown, the average intellectual would no doubt respond—as I will always remember Franz de Waal responding wordlessly...
I’ll keep this one short and sweet. “Mrs.” Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65) has since her own day or shortly thereafter been placed in the second tier of English novelists, not because she was a woman,...
It would be nice to think that since GA constitutes a genuine advance in human self-understanding, it should be able to contribute to the defense of Western liberal democracy. It has allowed us to...
Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (Basic Books, 2018) The contrast between this book’s refreshing exhibition of Burkean common sense and the broad-brush anthropological theorizing behind it...
In The Origin of Language (TOOL) I described institutional and formal representation as the two primary heirs of the originary scenic event. In the institutional case, the community or some...
The return of the word “socialism” in the victimary era is no mere throwback; the word itself has been altogether transformed. In the notion of “democratic socialism” as propounded by Bernie Sanders...
It has become a cliché of history as a political morality play that every power relation be judged as that between an oppressor and a victim. Which is to say that, with the exception of “people’s”...
As I’m sure readers of these Chronicles have noticed, it is difficult to write about the victimary without falling into a resentful tone that sheds more heat than light on the subject. What this...
The originary hypothesis, the core of generative anthropology, is so simple that many mistake it for a return to the pre-evolutionary speculations on language origin of Condillac or Herder, whose...
Part I – 2008 and the American Scene An unrepentant Democrat recently shared with me for the first time the thought that PC was a disgrace to our politics. At the same time, he preferred to dismiss...
The felix culpa of humanistic anthropologies, whether theology or philosophy or generative anthropology, is that they explain things that work only because they have not been explained, and thereby...
No discussion of firstness can be complete without a mention of the Jews. The uniqueness, for better or worse, of the “first nation” needs no demonstration. Nowadays it is infelicitous to say...
In Chronicle 586 I attempted to describe in terms as neutral as possible the victimary religion, begun in the Enlightenment, but radicalized after WWII. Instead of fading away with the waning of...
In a conversation some years ago, Richard van Oort made the point that GA is not a religion and would be of no use in the proverbial foxhole. What is a religion supposed to do for you in that...