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.
33 of 855 posts
With reference to the link between ancient Israel’s firstness and antisemitism as we read in the Chronicle of Saturday, December 7th, 2024, I find this priority as too abstract a notion to arouse...
Preamble In Chronicle 749 , I noted the strange fact that the publications over thirty years apart containing what I considered my two most original ideas—an “originary hypothesis” of the origin...
I usually read Peggy Noonan’s weekly “Declaration” in the WSJ with sympathetic skepticism, but in her September 27-28 column on the memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, entitled...
In the sciences, one does research by confronting new empirical phenomena, be they elements of physical or social reality. And to the extent that anthropology is a science, it must operate in this...
As a subscriber to Scientific American since 1954, “Thinking without Words” on pp. 86-88 of the March 2025 issue struck me as a useful illustration of what GA’s perspective can add to the standard...
I had nearly finished a Chronicle deploring the West’s lack of sympathy for Israel’s need to respond to the Hamas pogrom of 10/7, when on the day following the end of President Trump’s 60-day...
to the memory of Charlie Kirk One more Jew vs Greek, sacred vs worldly question, one that reflects the fact that once the sacred reaches maturity—a matter for l’esprit de finesse rather than...
For a logician, a paradox is just a disguised contradiction, like the town where the barber shaves everyone who doesn’t shave himself, in which case the barber himself… Which simply means that to say...
When I began this little series of Chronicles , I hadn’t given any real thought to the interaction of the Jews and the Greeks as it played out in history, having simply taken for granted the...
As reported by the Jewish News Syndicate on January 14, 2025, a recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League shows that world antisemitism has increased, that young people are more antisemitic than...
There is a sense in which my defense of the Jews as the innocent victims of undeserved hatred might be taxed as unfairly tendentious: that, as my own writings demonstrate, the Jews have an unfair...
The world of Science (with a capital S), after flirting with the Humanities during the French Theory era, has now returned to its materialistic purity, understanding the course of human history in...
As mentioned in the previous Chronicle , my interest in paradox and in what Goldmann called the “tragic” worldview ( vision du monde ) goes back to my years at Johns Hopkins and to writings...
The British author and journalist Melanie Phillips is perhaps the most visible embodiment of what I would call the post-Holocaust Jewish conscience in the English-speaking world—a conscience that was...
Every field of research has its own way of classifying its objects, according to the factors relevant to the components and configuration of these objects in time and their interactions with other...
Darwin’s theory of evolution, as we know, was received by religious believers as a blasphemous denial of the existence of a benevolent divinity, creator of the physical world but above all of living...
The two preceding Chronicles have taken as their presupposition that the emergence in our universe, first of self-perpetuating and then of self-reflecting creatures was a quasi-inevitable product...
I have long had a special admiration for the French mathematician and religious thinker Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who understood better than any of the other pioneers of modern science and...
A couple of Chronicles ago I mentioned Blaise Pascal’s idea of the “two infinities,” a conception that can be said to inaugurate the era of modernity. For despite the limited nature of microscopes...
Ainsi mourut la fille d’Hamilcar pour avoir touché au voile de Tanit. Thus did Hamilcar’s daughter perish for having touched the veil of Tanith. Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô (1862) This year’s...
The theologies of established religions enshrine and interpret specific historical experiences that cannot simply be deduced from first principles, whether those of GA or an alternative theory of...
To understand the deeper implications of the West’s double heritage, we must defamiliarize ourselves with the facts and judgments we have long accepted as givens and attempt to reconstruct our...
In reaction to the worldwide triumph of the smartphone, a few years ago I created the term screenic to designate the dominance of the screen in today’s culture. (“The Screenic.” Mimetic Theory and...
In Chronicle 840 concerning 17 th -century French mathematician/religious philosopher Blaise Pascal, I referred to his conception of the bet ( le pari ), in which he applied his pioneering...
A very old friend, a former 6 th grade schoolmate, having read my latest Chronicle , commented: “I guess I am not convinced that there is a God so I have a problem with the sacred in many ways.” In...
The preceding “Pascalian” Chronicles (840, 841 and 842) exemplify paradoxical analogies of the sacred in the real world, something that Pascal himself did not state explicitly, yet illustrated by...
Love and resentment, understood not as emotions but as moral judgments, are the two poles of relations with our fellows that emerge from GA’s scene of human origin. The basis of love in this sense is...
Although my first reaction to Trump as a political figure was that his aggressive posture reminded me of Mussolini, I was very soon attracted to what I saw as his near-unique intuitive hostility to...
I have great respect for the British popular science weekly New Scientist , which is much sharper than the Scientific American that I’ve been getting since Junior High, and I think it is...
The Jews and the Greeks are universally understood to be the two peoples most directly responsible for the foundations of Western Civilization, the first for its religious and the second for its...
I cannot help interpreting as a “sign” that, a few minutes after publishing Chronicle 845 questioning the West’s ability to defend itself against enemies so barbarous that they oblige us to give...
is antisemitism?&rft.source=Anthropoetics&rft.date=2025-02-13&rft.identifier=https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/?p=7528&rft.language=English&rft.subject=Chronicles of Love and Resentment&rft.au=Eric...
Polytheistic Prologue Xenophanes’ famous claim that “if cattle, horses, and lions had hands, they would draw and sculpt gods who looked like themselves,” can equally well be understood as a...