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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My original intention for this talk was to celebrate, with a couple of years’ leeway, the 50 th anniversary of Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie, which appeared in 1967. Derrida was, along...
Preamble One of the problems that has slowed the development of GA is that the academic world as currently constituted is ill-suited to provide it with a potential audience, whereas its potential...
Whenever I feel guilty for not having exhaustively researched one of these Chronicles , I remind myself of Georg Lukács’ chapter on the essay in his 1914 Die Seele und die Formen . Lukács calls the...
As readers of these Chronicles know, the idea of “firstness” was introduced into the originary event by Adam Katz in his article “ Remembering Amalek: 9/11 and Generative Thinking ” in...
I Marina Ludwigs pointed out to me that in my previous Chronicle ( 633 ), I used the term “Being” in two somewhat different senses: You say: “The presence of the sacred, which we too easily call...
Everyone recognizes that there is a qualitative difference between human language and animal communications systems, but while the methods of empirical science can conceive of emergent structures,...
In this year’s GASC talk in New York, and in a few recent Chronicles , I have alluded to the limitations of the hard-science approach to language origin, which eschews any allusion to an event of...
Recent Chronicles have explored GA’s roots in (French) Theory, our understanding of which benefits from including within it Girard’s thought, however marginal it was to the (left-wing) concerns of...
In contemplating today’s de-humanized humanities we can only lament the era of French Theory, whose leftism was intellectual rather than thuggish, and which despite its preciosity produced works of...
I have always had a certain sympathy for films about the drag world (I’ll just mention Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and The Crying Game ; if the IMDb had a better search engine, I would name a...
The left-right dichotomy originated in the French Revolutionary Assemblée Constituante in 1789, with the defenders of the monarchy on the right, and those opposed to (resentful of?) the royal veto...
Politics, in its most basic sense, is the art of doing what Rodney King deserves immortality for insisting on in a particularly difficult moment: that we all just get along . The bottom line in all...
The immediate inspiration for this Chronicle was an essay by “Spengler” (David P. Goldman) from a June PJ Media article entitled “Why the British Monarchy Still Matters” [...
Although my academic training did not include film studies, which back in the 50s and 60s was not a normal component of humanities programs, I spent a good part of my last two decades at UCLA...
Years ago, I found Eric Voegelin’s characterization of the Enlightenment as “Gnosticism” curmudgeonly, to say the least. After all, the Enlightenment’s arrogant hostility to religion does not cancel...
It has been a long time since I last opened Blaise Pascal’s Les pensées , which is a fragmentary set of notes rather than a completed work—for a project not in philosophy, but Christian apologetics....
In the previous Chronicle , I cited, as a counter-example to the continued vigor of film, the sorry state of lyric poetry. The explanation I suggested is that there is a self-aware community of...
I have for various reasons never been attracted to analytic philosophy. Not only is my intellectual background “continental” rather than “Anglo-Saxon,” I have always been skeptical of...
The simplest way to understand the coupure épistémologique that separates GA from philosophy/metaphysics is that it is defined by the very material of The Origin of Language : the hypothetical...
I cannot claim expertise in any of these fields save the last, and there only in my own domain of generative anthropology. But if we would advance beyond the dialogue de sourds of warring...
Henri Kipod Since Adam Katz is running the GASC conference this year, which is focused on the “linguistic turn” directly linked to the postwar victimary developments that led to Girard,...
“The Pharmakos” of Plato Suppose Plato tried to set up a dialogue with a partisan of Victimary Thinking (VT), so that Socrates could set him straight about the dangers of using “never blame the...
Words are only words, and their etymology is no guarantee that they bear an “essence” beyond what is traceable to their historical origin and its originary roots. But given its history, sovereignty...
The other day I made a trip to Royce Hall, the building that houses what is left of the UCLA French Department, to participate in a discussion of a paper on “The Soul” by my former Dean, Herbert...
The just-concluded GASC in my hometown of New York City stands out even among the series of successful conferences of recent years. As these conferences have progressed, their focus on the theory...
The other day I had a conversation with K, an old friend I have known since I came to UCLA in 1969. Although she reads my Chronicles on occasion, she is by no means a practitioner of GA, and this...
One of the unexpected pleasures in going through a number of books on language origin was coming across the following passage from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ (CLS) Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss...
In the previous Chronicle , I tried to find in the recent history of Israel a source of optimism concerning the future of the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage as a necessary, if not necessarily...
When we think of paradox, we are likely to think of “This sentence is a lie” or some other example of self-reference. One can buy books of paradoxes of various degrees of elaboration. And one of my...
René Girard used to make light of the originary hypothesis by calling it a “social contract,” implying that GA’s originary event consisted of a bunch of people in the “state of nature,” tired of...
Responding to strictly linguistic studies of language origin is simple enough, for such studies have few points of contact with GA. Even in the area of the origin of utterance forms, which makes up...
The West’s current cultural-political crisis, as is typical of critical situations, has no clear precedents and must be continually rethought in the light of large and small revelations. A recent...
Last week I spent a good deal of time working on a Chronicle about the victimary “Zeitgeist” that has taken over much of our culture. Yet I ultimately found that expressing once more my opposition...
I was struck by Adam Katz’s reaction to my recent series of “philosophical” Chronicles . He found the last one, about the Phenomenology , more focused than my previous remarks about Descartes and...
I – Necessity is the mother of invention Derrida conceived la différance as the opening-up of a paradigm. As opposed to the reflexive association of stimulus and response, as in our example of an...
We should conceive of the originary différance or space-time of deferral that enables the conversion of a practical movement of appropriation into a new mode of communication, the symbolic sign ,...
I often get the impression that the longstanding principle of not multiplying unknown entities (call them “parameters”) beyond necessity is today considered an obsolete, pre-cybernetic idea. For...