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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David P. Goldman, aka “Spengler,” is no doubt the most widely read and sophisticated pundit of our time. If only for revealing to me the pianistic genius of Yuja Wang (see Chronicle 664 ), I would...
for Pierre Whalon God, or rather, nature . This Spinozan formula suggests that the sharp distinction between a personlike God and an impersonal Nature governed by “chance” is but an illusion. Just...
for Leslie Lamport The GA-AI relationship is not one that we should expect to have a clear answer to. A point I made long ago that continues to demonstrate its accuracy is that to attempt to declare...
The great tradition of Western philosophy or metaphysics, first formalized poetically by Parmenides and given its institutional point of departure by Plato, provided the model for (Western)...
I spent the first years of the new century adapting to a new marriage and to a new phase in my career at UCLA in which I was no longer in full harmony with my profession. UCLA had always treated me...
A hypothesis can only be actualized by a act of faith or “suspension of disbelief” that assumes it true and tests it in the domain in which it can be falsified. This domain is usually the real...
Like most writers, I tend to refer back to those who were active when I was developing my own ideas, whence my frequent references to Girard and Derrida, or to earlier writers such as Durkheim and...
« La violence barbare du Hamas est sans excuse mais elle n’est pas sans cause. » “The barbaric violence of Hamas is without excuse but it is not without cause.” Quoted by Nicolas Baverez, « Notre...
The Sacred and the Communal Will That there is nothing more fundamental to the human than the sacred makes it not the easiest but the hardest thing to conceptualize. Forgetting all we know about...
As I pointed out in Chronicle 777 , the opportunity born with the smartphone for everyone, even many of those without electric light or running water, to possess their own screen/scene may well...
Memes On May 12, 2023, René Girard was immortalized in a New York Times crossword puzzle as the theoretician of mimetic desire. Specifically, the clue to 28 across, Philosopher Girard who coined...
Whether we like it or not, the Jews are the sacred people of Western civilization, which remains for the moment the world’s dominant civilization. And just as the word sacré in French means both...
In its core meaning, providence defines an essential quality of the sacred/God that provides for humanity, such that obedience to the imperatives of the sacred is understood as aiding us to...
The Origin of Language (TOOL), published in 1981 by the University of California Press, is the only one of my books that was promoted by the publisher; an advertisement with my picture even appeared...
Although René Girard never actually spoke of an originary event, he clearly thought of his scapegoat model as the equivalent. He saw the advent of “emissary murder,” the collective killing of a...
Is it useful to seek a connection between my upbringing in the Bronx during the silent generation and the “new way of thinking” I named generative anthropology ? Certainly not in the sense that GA...
For Adam Katz “Who loses, wins.” This little paradox was the theme of L’idiot de la famille , Sartre’s three-volume work on Gustave Flaubert, father of the modern novel. Girard might have called it...
On one of those conservative websites that I follow to boost my morale, I recently read a piece that reminded me that GA has a potentially healing role to play in the current moral sickness that is...
Even for the most enthusiastic partisan of GA, its apparent disconnection from the nitty-gritty of anthropology in the traditional sense is bound to pose a problem. Readers in humanistic fields...
It would have been easy to predict the socio-political effect of the rocket explosion on the terrain of a Gaza hospital on October 17. As I tried to explain in Chronicle 785 , the power of...
Our Current Malaise Victimary thinking, the vicarious espousal by the privileged of the righteous resentment of ascriptive minorities, can be seen as a perversion of what most distinguishes American...
Christopher Rufo’s The Cultural Revolution: How the Left Conquered Everything (HarperCollins, 2023) tells the story of the Left’s “long march through the institutions”: der lange Marsch durch die...
Resentment is as old as humanity; it expresses the individual’s scandalized reaction to what he perceives as a violation of the symmetry defined in the originary scenic configuration in which mimetic...
When I came to UCLA in 1969, Existentialism was still the dominant philosophical current, and Sartre the best known philosopher, particularly in the French Department, whose leading figure was the...
Le Figaro , France’s conservative daily, published on May 1 an article by literary critic Marin de Viry deploring the interruption of the Cérémonie des Molières , the French equivalent of the Tony...
At a time when the AI world is looking forward to reaching not merely superhuman intelligence but “sentience,” it seems useful to seek in the originary hypothesis a minimal model of human...
We may say that the scene of consciousness, or scene of representation, is in itself paradoxical. For if consciousness is an individual phenomenon, such that its extension to groups is always...
For René Girard on his 100th birthday The Genesis account is distinguished from other creation stories by an intuitive imperative of minimalism, of which the reduction to One God is only the most...
The previous Chronicle’s discussion of the limits and possibilities of AI provoked some discussion that suggests the need for a more rigorous set of categories, an ontology, of what I shall call...
for Denise Sollenne Readers of these Chronicles will know that Tom Bertonneau, one of the four founders of Anthropoetics (and the creator of its name) passed away in 2021 at the age of 68. His...
A Nov. 17 article on Newsmax.com by Marisa Herman titled “High Levels of Solar Activity Could Knock Out Internet for Months” reminds us that solar flares, which are a regular occurrence, are capable...
For Stacey and Missy Since a French novelist, Annie Ernaux, won the 2022 Nobel Prize, while many followers of French letters thought the controversial Michel Houellebecq was more deserving, this...
In my work in generative anthropology (GA) over the decades, I have emphasized the necessity of referring to the originary hypothesis as providing a model for the basic forms of human culture. I am...