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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Language This English proverb is often traced to Plato’s words in the Republic (369c): … τῷ λόγῳ ἐξ ἀρχῆς ποιῶμεν πόλιν : ποιήσει δὲ αὐτήν , ὡς ἔοικεν , ἡ ἡμετέρα χρεία . …let us...
Thank you George Floyd for sacrificing your life for justice. For being there to call out to your mom—how heartbreaking was that?—call out for your mom, “I can’t breathe.” But because of you and...
in memoriam René Girard When I was in school, I learned about white Caucasians and black Africans and yellow Asians and red American Indians. But skin color was not the same as race; darker-skinned...
The prehistory of generative anthropology, beginning with René Girard’s Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque in 1961 and its theory of mimetic desire, puts mimesis at the core of our theory of...
What the originary hypothesis adds to the social sciences is a criterion that distinguishes between the human and what preceded it in qualitative as well as quantitative terms. Clearly there is a...
A Note on Originary Phenomenology Years ago when I first conceived the originary hypothesis as a theory of language origin, my chief concern was to understand how language might have begun and...
It is a truism, although not often recognized explicitly as such, that morality and ethics are not equivalents. This is not a mere matter of definition. As I think can be admitted without discussion,...
The term firstness suggests unproblematic seriality: the first is followed by the second and the third, presumably of the same qualities as the first, only a bit less exemplary. Yet seriality as a...
This year’s GASC conference, organized by Roman Katsman and sponsored by his home institution, Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, had been postponed from last year, and we had hoped to hold it...
What was already the generally received perspective on language origin at the time of the publication of The Origin of Language in 1981 has since hardened into a tacit denial of any qualitative...
In 1971, René Girard inaugurated a new anthropological conception of the sacred with La violence et le sacré . When I published The Origin of Language ten years later, I had little idea that the...
Paradox is less an idea than an anti-idea. Plato would have had no place for it, although Zeno, like the Buddhist Nagarjuna, much appreciated it. The one certain thing we can say about paradox is...
Just as the third millennium began in 2001, so the twenties of our century begin in 2021. However arbitrary these divisions, we should always welcome any opportunity to wipe the slate clean, to...
Four years ago, in Chronicle 535 , later incorporated as “A Derridean Parenthesis” in the 2019 edition of The Origin of Language , I translated and discussed the last paragraphs of Derrida’s “La...
Recent discussion on the GAlist points to an epistemological crux: to what extent does the originary hypothesis itself depend on the success of this governmental structure, which as Adam Katz rightly...
How does generative anthropology free us from the limitations of metaphysics, the domain of classical philosophy from Plato on, characterized by a faith in the independence of linguistic...
A long history could be written about the efforts to escape from the “prison” of metaphysics by Marx, Nietzsche, the Existentialists… and finally, the French Theorists—our ancestors. This Chronicle...
The core of generative anthropology is its insistence on providing an anthropological basis, demonstrated or hypothetical, for the Ideas that philosophy and social thought have long sought to derive...
In a comment on Chronicle 692 , Adam Katz raised an important question: how can the procedure of originary phenomenology be applied to the universal human sense of ancestry? Whether or not...
Henri Bergson is barely remembered today outside of France, and if at all for his theory of the comic in Le rire : Du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant , the humiliation of life through physics, as...
As I whimsically speculated at the end of the previous Chronicle , the current debacle of Western civilization—from which I still hope, without much confidence, that it will recover—strikes me as...
for Adam Katz In a response to Chronicle 705 (“The Jews”), Adam suggested that the uniqueness of the Jews should be “thought in terms of some particular, ongoing, historical relationship between...
I’m sure many of you share my experience of never having read some books that have been so widely talked about that one feels no urgency about reading them. This was long my case with George Orwell’s...
It had been seventeen years since my last talk at COV&R, and given the Zoom connection, the physical distance was ironically maintained, although my location in Sugar Creek, MO was only about 480...
As I have had occasion to remark, GA is an outgrowth of French Theory, a French Theory that includes René Girard, not as a marginal too-easily-readable figure, but as the Judeo-Christian...
Last week’s Chronicle 687 elicited reactions from two distinguished colleagues that revealed the need for a clarification of GA’s epistemological status. In contrast with the two opposing...
In the previous Chronicle I emphasized the significance of Christianity’s insistence that we believe not merely in God, whose human-like qualities can be assimilated, as in Durkheim, to the sacred...
In memoriam Thomas Bertonneau, 1953-2021 Concerning our beleaguered nation, an astute commentator wondered: “Are the ones in charge very confident or desperate, or some bizarre combination of both?”...
NB: I began this Chronicle before the recent rioting in the Capital and the CCP-like reactions it has provoked in the woke community. I will leave this subject for a later Chronicle , remarking...
Xenophanes: (15) Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen...
For Srulik I have long been a fan of Caroline Glick, the Chicago-born Israeli author of The Israeli Solution, and the sharpest commentator I know on Israeli politics and international relations....
As I have complained too many times, Adam Katz’s and my book, The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism (2015), although sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism...
In Chronicle 681 , I proposed that the originary experience of the sacred was as a will countering our individual desires but permitting the peaceful distribution of food among the original human...
I have adopted the term humanist to describe GA in contrast with today’s social-science anthropology, whose tendency, in contrast to that of the discipline’s 19th-century founders, is to reduce the...
It is impossible to truly stand back from politics and take an “objective” view, since unlike Voltaire’s Micromégas, we are not from Sirius. But it is worth the effort to step back far enough to...
Although generative anthropology is based on a scenic hypothesis rather than empirical observation and confirmation, its phenomenological nature brings it closer to natural science than to...
As I recounted in Chronicle 504 , the name I first chose for this “new way of thinking” was genetic anthropology, translating the French word génétique , whose use is not confined to the...
If we define religion as an ensemble of doctrines and practices that derives its legitimacy from one or more revelations each experienced at a particular time and place, we can understand the...
My objections to René Girard’s scapegoat model of the originary human scene should not be taken to imply that the sacred and human violence are not intimately related. But violence is sacred only in...
It has become common to speak of a plurality of sexes, with new ones being discovered all the time. But loose talk of free choice of sexual identity in such domains as Facebook hides the real crux of...
Some questions have recently been raised on the GAlist concerning my claim that wokeness is a radical development of the epistemology of resentment, which may be defined as the critique of ethical...