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.
36 of 855 posts
Like most people who have had the good fortune to live in times of peace, through most of my existence I assumed that the conditions of my own life were normal and required no particular set of...
As has never been more evident than today, history, particularly political history, is always smarter than “smart people.” When the intelligentsia all start to repeat the same ideas, you can be...
As its name makes clear, Generative Anthropology is a science of beginnings, of January rather than December. Given its somewhat cynical watchword, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” it...
Prologue Decades ago, when I was naïve enough to apply for research grants, I proposed a study of resentment as a central literary theme. I began with what seemed to me the striking observation...
Given that in the previous Chronicle I suggested that GA return to its roots in literary study, whose anthropological riches are potentially inexhaustible, this seemed an appropriate moment to...
Six years ago, in Chronicle 470 on “Bear Theory,” I focused on the essential qualities of the relationship between a human and a “bear,” essentially a plush animal of whatever species that one...
In my previous discussion in Chronicle 654 , I tried to show that our relationship to bears (understood as stuffed animals of any species) allows us to understand, and in a way to participate in,...
The fundamental characteristic of all human communities is their ability to communicate through language. Animals too have their “languages,” but human language alone is not bound by genetic...
The notion of firstness was first introduced into GA by Adam Katz as an “amendment” to my original conception of the originary event in his article “Remembering Amalek: 9/11 and Generative...
1. Metaphysics = Thinking sans Anthropology ( Was heisst Denken? ) There was a time when thinker and philosopher were more or less synonymous, and the list of great thinkers of past centuries...
It seems increasingly obvious with the years that the postwar phenomenon, rather too diffuse to be called a movement, of la nouvelle critique, and subsequently of (post-structuralist) “French...
When I wrote my dissertation on Gustave Flaubert’s adolescent writings ( The Discovery of Illusion , UC Press, 1971), I found the Freudian “family drama” useful in making sense of these...
If we truly believe in the ultimate salvageability of Western and of human civilization, we have to be able to “get to the bottom” of problems in order to face them effectively. The ever-festering...
Whatever bad things one can say about French Theory, its more illustrious practitioners were both scholarly and inventive. They did considerable research and drew insightful conclusions, even if in...
There is certainly no lack of victimary thinking in Europe, particularly with respect to migrants from Africa and the Middle East, or in Britain from the Indian subcontinent. And in certain respects,...
This Chronicle is dedicated to Ian Dennis, Secretary-Treasurer and general mainstay of the GASC, who introduced me to the writings of Eileen Chang (1920-1995), aka Zhang Ai-Ling. Having spent my...
for René Girard The association of art with mimesis goes back to Plato and especially Aristotle, and Girard’s notion of “mediated desire,” by whatever name we call it, was far from unexplored...
In times like these, one hopes the pain will stimulate rethinking that will make the world better in a time-frame that makes sense to us as individuals. The destructive power of today’s weaponry...
It is a category error to seek to prove whether or not God exists . The one thing we cannot possibly prove about God is that “he” is a not only transcendent but independently existing agency,...
For Matthew Taylor The holiday of Simchat ( Simchas in the old days) Torah, which fell this year on October 11, celebrates God’s gift of the Torah to the Hebrews. It involves scrolling back to the...
The previous Chronicle left us at the moment of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. This episode has given rise to countless “anthropological” interpretations. But what interests us is less...
In Chronicle 640 I pointed out the paradoxical impossibility of discoursing objectively about antisemitism, given that the mere fact of discussing it implies the “election” of the Jews that is its...
Made in Heaven? —A Trinitarian Theology of Marriage (Chronicle no. 678)&rft.source=Chronicles of Love and Resentment |...
Is the originary hypothesis just a synonym for common sense? Forgetting about the specifics, its core is the irruption of the “vertical”/transcendent into the “horizontal”/material world; individual...
Given my thesis that love is “the transcendence of resentment,” one might ask why both in the name of these Chronicles and in the last two of them love precedes resentment. No doubt in the first...
The interest of esthetic criticism, which made it for a generation or two a privileged source of anthropological reflection, lies in its intuitive link with the transcendence that is human culture;...
Back in 1988, at a time when my old friend Doug Collins used to invite me regularly to speak at the University of Washington in Seattle, I gave a talk entitled “The Anthropological Idea of God.”...
In 1988, I gave a talk at the University of Washington entitled “The Anthropological Idea of God,” in which I defined this “idea” as the subsistent center of the scene of representation , the point...
Firstness has been since the beginning both an essential and a problematic human characteristic. The originary hypothesis begins the human story with the abandonment of the Alpha-Beta pecking order...
As if on order, the media supplied a perfect illustration of the connection, whose falseness does not remove its persuasiveness, between Christianity and victimary ideology: Giants’ Sam Coonrod had...
Faintly detectable signs suggest to me that perhaps the time is coming in which GA can play a significant role in the world’s intellectual life. As I have pointed out in a few recent Chronicles ,...
This “plague year” seems an appropriate time to attempt to clarify what exactly I mean by paradox, and why I consider it, properly understood, as the minimal criterion of the human. Paradox...
Desire and the Sign In the previous Chronicle , I avoided speaking of desire in order to anchor the notion of paradox in the phenomenon of representation. Yet desire, as opposed to mere...
Much as I admire Yuja Wang and deplore the victimary sanctimony that has replaced Judeo-Christianity among our Belmont class, I am not really rooting for China to take over the USA’s role as the...
Untergang? (Chronicle no. 666)&rft.source=Chronicles of Love and Resentment |...
Along with the improvements in quality of life that Steven Pinker is perhaps the only respected thinker who dares take seriously—living twice as long as our great-grandparents, universal indoor...