Concept
Omnicentrism
The post-sacrificial condition — every individual as potential center, never to be sacrificed
Ask AI about OmnicentrismAI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. Verify claims against the archive passages and linked texts below.Every human being on the originary scene faces the center as an equal — equal not in power or ability but in their shared prohibition against appropriating the object and their shared participation in the sign. This equality-on-scene is the origin of what will eventually become the moral recognition that each person is inviolable, cannot be sacrificed, has a kind of sacred immunity that cannot be violated by any merely human authority.
The Christian revelation. Center Study follows Gans in identifying the Christian revelation as the specific historical moment when omnicentrism becomes explicit: the recognition that every individual is potentially a center, that the God who has died for each is equally present to each, that no hierarchy can claim the authority to sacrifice any member of the community. The Incarnation — God occupying the human center — is the theological expression of omnicentrism: the center descends to the periphery, making the periphery potentially central.
Omnicentrism and anti-centerism. Omnicentrism is frequently confused with anti-centerism, but they are opposites. Omnicentrism affirms the center while extending its immunity to all individuals; anti-centerism denies the legitimacy of any occupied center while covertly occupying one. The victimary politics of modernity conflates the two: it presents the denial of any legitimate center (anti-centerism) as the extension of sacred immunity to all (omnicentrism). The confusion is productive for those who wish to occupy the center while denying that they do.
Omnicentrism and succession. If every individual is potentially a center, the question of succession becomes: who is capable of occupying the center without violently centralizing it? The omnicentric condition does not abolish succession; it requires that succession be managed without violence and without the permanent exclusion of any member of the community from the possibility of future centrality. Democratic succession is the attempt to institutionalize omnicentric succession — to make the center transferable without violence, to any capable occupant.
The imperative of omnicentrism. The moral imperative that follows from omnicentrism is not equality of condition but equality of standing: everyone must be treated as a potential center, as someone whose scenic position cannot be simply eliminated. This is not the same as saying everyone must be equal in power, wealth, or achievement. It is the minimal moral requirement that no one be sacrificed — that the center's claim to distribute does not extend to the right to eliminate those who cannot receive the distribution.
From the Archive
“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 sacrificed or violently centralized. We owe the God who has revealed this to us everything, which is to say all that makes up our own centrality.”
“A completely marketized order is, as Eric Gans has pointed out, an "omnicentric" one. In that case, one's response to the emergence of new resentments or conflicts is to seek or create new centers. But any new center must draw upon the resources and authority of some existing center. At the very least, it must employ the linguistic reserves of existing centers.”
Key Texts
Omnicentrism as the post-sacrificial recognition of universal potential centrality.
The esthetic as omnicentric — the sacred extended to every individual's imagination.
The practice of centering as the post-sacrificial exercise of originary standing.