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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Probably the most famous line in Gustave Flaubert’s voluminous correspondence is the following: L’auteur, dans son œuvre, doit-être comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout, et visible nulle part....
The late David Graeber, an anthropologist previously perhaps best known for his role in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and his co-author, archeologist David Wengrow, provide food for thought for...
Sometimes it pays to listen to the terms in which the man in the street debates the West’s current crisis of confidence. In a recent Townhall online column , in order to refute Ibram X. Kendi’s...
As an indication that René Girard’s intellectual influence has in effect outlasted that of French Theory, an article by Andrew Doran entitled “Christians Need to Confront Anti-Semitism” in the...
One might think it unnecessary to return to a subject I have covered repeatedly, but I believe that the constant rethinking of what I conceive as the key moment of hominization is a good thing....
The Image : Modernity and the Loss of the Sacred&rft.source=Anthropoetics&rft.date=2022-10-05&rft.identifier=http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/?p=6733&rft.language=English&rft.au=Eric Gans"> A recent...
Dara Horn, born in New Jersey in 1977, has made a name for herself with five novels on Jewish themes, novels all very different from the “Jewish-American novel” of Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer,...
Back in the days when I wrote in French, I published a little book called Le paradoxe de Phèdre (Nizet, 1975), which included a separate essay entitled “Le paradoxe constitutif du roman.” My...
As I noted in The End of Culture (1985), menin, the first word of the Iliad and thereby of high Western culture, refers to Achilles’ “rage” at his humiliation by Agamnenon, who took Achilles’...
I was very pleased to note Adam Katz’s reaction to Chronicle 752 suggesting that GA’s relationship to religion would be a good subject for a future Summer Conference. Adam subsequently proposed a...
Prologue Thirty or so years ago, before UCLA had a religion program, there was an informal group of faculty that met every week or two to discuss religion. It was chaired by David Rapoport, a...
For Adam Katz There are two categories of taboos. The first, the most obvious, are the hard taboos whose violation is met with by violence, such as that visited on Salman Rushdie or the staff of...
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God Why is it not absurd to claim that John 1:1’s...
The previous Chronicle brought out a curious opposition, exemplified by the different receptions of Girard and Derrida, on the one hand, and GA, on the other, between two forms of dépassement :...
Over the years I have devoted a good number of these Chronicles to the victimary strain of modern Western Leftism, whose increasingly solipsistic turn has suggested to me that it may truly be the...
In his final work, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe (Princeton, 2022), published posthumously with the aid of his son and others, Marshall Sahlins returns to the sacred, the element of...
I was happy to see on the GAlist some vigorous discussion of Chronicle 747 , where I proposed an analysis of Wokeness as the form of the epistemology of resentment/victimary thinking/Left ideology...
I have lately taken to calling the basic operation of generative anthropology originary phenomenology, by way of insisting on the relative rigor of a procedure that formulates a hypothetical...
In the previous Chronicle I attempted to make the case for grounding generative anthropology in a form of introspective reflection called originary phenomenology , based not on an intuition of our...
As explained in the previous Chronicle , ever since Alain Cohen pointed me toward Watzlawick et al’s study of “pragmatic paradox,” I have viewed paradox, at first vaguely, then more fundamentally,...
… préserver la sacralité du pouvoir (Le Figaro, September 10, 2022 ) Given that René Girard’s death coincided with Chronicle 500 , I found it disturbing that just as I was beginning work on No....
In 1999, Cambridge University Press posthumously published anthropologist Roy Rappaport’s magnum opus, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity , whose major thesis is that religion and...
Although today language seems to us more natural and certainly more essential than religion, which all but a few of its practitioners confine to a limited set of practices while we use language...
As I have been recently insisting, Christianity, although in many ways the world’s most sophisticated religion, the root of the modernity now spread with unequal success throughout the world, is at...
1. Fukuyama forever? The purpose of GA is to provide the minimal set of presuppositions that permit a plausible hypothesis of origin for language and the rest. But the fact of having invented...
With the lifting of most travel restrictions, we were able to hold our first conference in three years in what the French call le présentiel at the University of Ottawa. It turned out, however,...
However detailed the account we can give of the “big bang” that inaugurated our universe, and whatever theory may emerge of the bang’s own emergence from some previous state, we will necessarily...
Despite the naive literalness of his notion of the end of history , I have remained loyal to Francis Fukuyama’s central point, which is a dogmatic version of Winston Churchill’s more appropriately...
Resentment is an attitude toward one’s fellows that stands on the border between animal and human. If we consider the serial organization typical of the higher apes, the ability of individuals to...
for Marina Ludwigs Not having traveled abroad since 2019, after this year’s GASC in Ottawa, I took advantage of Marina’s kind invitation to a little conference on “The Event” that she had organized...
If Hillel’s (negative) version of “the golden rule” can be called “the whole Torah,” then the scenario of the originary hypothesis can equally well be considered “the whole of anthropology”: the core...
The characteristically human configuration of the scene , normally with a central focus of attention, but whose authority may be relaxed to the point of a decentralized “happening,” implicitly...
The sacred, in its simplest sense, is the restraining force on human appetite that gives birth to desire, mediated by the world of signs. Readers of these Chronicles will have remarked that over...
Marina Ludwigs’ forthcoming Stockholm conference on “the event” provides a propitious occasion for reflection on what it means to talk about “the event,” not out of a mania for proliferating...