Concepts

"Gans assumes that the mimetic crisis is organized around some object of appetitive attention—most likely some food sourc…"

"The center is whatever interferes with violent centralization."

""Deferral," meanwhile, perfectly captures the position within the act itself, along with its fundamental contingency, be…"

"The sacred is an indirect, unaware representation of sociality, since the human contribution to the construction of sacr…"

"That which we desire and that therefore thrusts itself upon our attention, is given excess desirability through our mime…"

"Appetite becomes "desire," that is, a social phenomenon involving one's relation to others and not merely the object its…"

"What we speak of as ritual is distribution from the center returning to the center including the process of distributing…"

"In the sparagmos, the tension generated by the prior restraint is loosened, and so this danger does present itself as th…"

"This first sign is an "ostensive" sign, which means it says nothing "about" anything, it just indicates and preserves me…"

"The burden of this book is to follow those trails and work out a social, political and cultural theory, or, as I will ca…"

"A sign has meaning insofar as it can be repeated, which is to say, repeated as the same sign. We can go further and say …"

"An idiom is this articulation of group membership, the sharing of a sacred center, and its anthropological "surplus," or…"

"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…"

"The imperial order institutes a juridical order in order to replace this asymmetrical reciprocity with symmetry between …"

"Thinking through the center, and the transactions humans have with the center, reveals the "economy" as nothing more tha…"

"The Big Man, through enterprise, discipline, and what Gans calls "producer's desire" accumulates goods and prestige that…"

"This is what creates the possibility for each and every one of us to become a center — that is, as one who is not to be …"

"I can't recall any discussions in GA that take the notion of the "scenic" literally enough to consider that scenes need …"

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

"So, I can now replace the clumsy "occupant of the center" with "pointman," as a more resonant and less technical-soundin…"

"Considered at its most minimal, language is grounded, as Michael Tomasello along with Eric Gans has shown, in joint atte…"

"Resentment is our scandalized reaction to the existence of situations where this symmetrical configuration is not mainta…"