Concepts & Glossary

"The originary scene is a transition from the animal order governed by the Alpha to a human order governed by the center."

"A minimal, formal definition: an event is an occurence which cannot be sufficiently accounted for by what has preceded i…"

"The center is what makes any mutual understanding (any joint attention) possible, so disclosure is aimed at interrupting…"

"That the first sign—inaugurating the human—would be a sign of deferral is rich in consequences insofar as it defines rep…"

"The sacred is what holds our joint attention and enables us to attend to each other’s attending to."

"My starting assumption is that humans are mimetic beings: we learn everything we learn by imitation."

"Desire is generally understood in distinction from need, and in that way its specifically human quality is brought out—d…"

"This is the point of Philip Rieff’s notion of “charisma”: the magnetic effect of a display of deferral and discipline be…"

"Ritual is an exchange with the center: the participant fulfills some command of the center while making a request of the…"

"Gans hypothesizes a “sparagmos,” a violent tearing apart of the central object driven by resentment at the object for “r…"

"The assumption, drawn from the originary hypothesis, that the ostensive sign is the primary linguistic form, with the im…"

"What originary grammar does to help us articulate rather than simply list the verbs in the metalanguage is ground verbs …"

"A sign is the deferral of violence."

"It is now clear to me that the conversion of ritual/myth into practice/hypothesis implies the opposition to narrative, w…"

"An idiom is a mode of language use constituted through use and therefore more fully available the more embedded in the s…"

"And dedicating oneself to setting relatively immobilized “pieces” of language back into motion seems a good way of think…"

"Carl Schmitt took the Greek word “nomos,” usually translated as “law,” but in a broad sense including “norms,” to refer …"

"the mode of succession is the most important question for assessing a social order—how is the center transferred from on…"

"My original formulation of “firstness,” that is, the claim that someone on the originary scene had to emit the sign firs…"

"But it seems that a time will come when the second option is chosen, and the ruler, whether the traditionally anointed o…"

"In order to make it the point, we can begin by pointing out that power comes from the center, and the center comes from …"

"the juridical is the form taken for the settling of resentments and since it has become the indispensable form for doing…"

"Credit is the monetization of debt and succeeds previous forms of expressing obligation like honor—it is only when the c…"

"Money is the concrete realization of this sign of recognition; it bears a “meaning” but as opposed to the ordinary sign,…"

"Modern capital is the power to abstract individuals, groups and perhaps most importantly of all, entire disciplines, fro…"

"The Big Man himself emerges out of the process of imperative exchange: in the gift competition, whereby various tribal c…"

"The post-sacrificial, or omnicentric social order makes us all centers—we have last names, ID numbers, histories in publ…"

"I’ve suggested before that center study (I won’t complain if anyone wants to continue calling what I’m doing “GA”) might…"

"The human is modeled on the non-human center—this is why I call the human science I am presenting here an “anthropomorph…"

"Technics is the continual reinscription of the scene—scenic design practices are events within scenes that design scenes…"

"Indeed, technology is the dominant form of power. If technology presents itself to us as an enormous system of interlock…"

"So, originary media is a network, a set of invisible lines we could hypothetically draw connecting the sensorium of each…"

"The market is constituted by its anxiety about its own future existence."

"The discipline is a social form that keeps “drilling down” below ever lower thresholds of significance, and this activit…"

"The only way to provide sovereignty with an appropriate form of justice is to give discursive articulation to the differ…"

"I am going to call this figure whom we should be seeking out and in seeking out hypothesizing regarding the conditions o…"

"I have argued previously for the priority of “attentionality” over “intentionality”—attention must precede intention, an…"

"Victimary thinking is, most fundamentally, resentment towards civilization—a resentment only possible for the civilized,…"

"Scapegoating is also always against the center--even when the occupant of the center leads it. The claim implicit in sca…"

"Liberalism is the political theory justifying this state of affairs, which means that the purpose of liberalism is to en…"

"I noticed that the Christian concept of the “Katechon,” or the restrainer of the AntiChrist, was a very near synonym to …"