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Have you translated this: [http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2302/2302katz/](http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2302/2302katz/)

First of all, I put “liberal democracy” in scare quotes because I would like to defy anyone to give it a clear definition, and one that applies across the range of countries currently included under...

I agree with all this, but I'm not familiar with the study you're referencing. Race realism is important in challenging "blank slate-ism" and the subsequent implication that group disparities are resu...

I’d like to work with a few passages from Eric Gans’s latestChronicle of Love & Resentment(#549)to address some critical questions regarding morality and equality in originary thinking. Needless to...

No, I have no big ideas about China--I'm following Gans here in seeing China as the most obvious example of an at least potentially successful authoritarian order. The twitter feed of "scientism" also...

We know that we can reach agreements with people, because we all the time act in accord with others’ tacit and explicit consent. We know that there must be some explicit dimension to our agreements...

What, exactly, is power? Who obtains it, who holds it, how is it manifested and used, how is it transmitted, and why? Power, as de Jouvenel says, is credit, which suggests that the origin of power is...

I don't think we can speculate too much on this. I think the old Trotskyist idea of a "transitional program" is actually a good approach. For them, the point was to make demands that made sense within...

They talk about it in terms of breaking down hierarchies and distributing power, ultimately to individuals, but it sounds to me like "genetic takeover" is a way of consolidating hierarchies by limitin...

There’s an important critique of Israel that I’ve seen circulating for a while and has been detailed in several books (which I haven’t yet read)—it’s a critique I think I would agree with but treat...

It is already implicit in my argument, but is not necessarily thereby obvious, that a large part of the attraction of exposing the products of discipline as stolen centrality is that it opens up...

Substituting the notion of “sovereign equality” for “equality of outcome” would complete the articulation of liberty and equality I argued for in “The Mistake of Liberal Democracy,” and clarify the...

I have always been dissatisfied with the use of the term “ostensive” to designate the originary sign. Yes, the sign is ostensive—it involves, necessarily, some kind of pointing—but it is not only...

I may be very naïve, but I think (have thought for quite a while) that there is a very simple answer to the question Gans poseshereregarding intellectual exchanges with the social science. In fact,...

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=6808&sec_id=6808

https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/double-helix/v12/katz.pdf https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/double-helix/v12/katz2.pdf Center Study Center is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and...

A word on the title—“cybernetics” is essentially the same word as “governance,” and since I want to reject philosophically implicated terms like “theology” and “anthropology” and foreground the...

Thanks!. Fixed.

It is a marker of the deadening of thought, not increased moral sensitivity, that it is now commonplace to condemn or support one side in a war based on which side suffers the greater number of...

One of GA’s important insights is that a conversation, as an exchange of words, is analogous to other forms of exchange including market transactions. And that such exchanges function to defer...

To replace victimary politics, without attempting to resuscitate liberal politics, I would propose a kind of apocalyptic politics. “Apocalypse,” after all, just means “revelation,” which would mean...

Neither could Girard, at least as far as I know. He arrives at a conclusion I suspect both Girard and Gans might endorse.

http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/video.php?id=1035(Dawn talks about Richard Ramirez, LA serial killer)-eric gans

The new issue of NER:http://www.newenglishreview.org/And here’s the link to my essay:http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=4788&sec_id=4788

There are a few categories central to originary thinking: center-margin, vertical-horizontal, sign-object. We can multiply such categories, adding rather obvious ones which are probably already...

Exclude from your discourse all imperatives, implicit and explicit, to third parties. No “x must realize,” or “y needs finally to understand,” or “we have to demand that z…” Nobody really has to do...

47 US Senators just did something unthinkable: they sent an open letter to Iran’s Ayatollah-led government pointing out that the agreement said Ayatollahs are (apparently) about to conclude with the...

My thinking about the centrality and fragility of the juridical causes me to revise my understanding of power as “centered ordinality.” Power is ordered through imperatives, command and obedience...

Retrieving the category of “civilization” as a central term in the human sciences provides us with a way of revisiting familiar historical periodizations and, ultimately, answering the most important...

By now there can be no doubt that the Occupy Wall Street movement represents the opening of a new strain of American terrorism. There’s no way of knowing how extensive, effective and destructive it...

I'm not sure, but wouldn't the judiciary be "priestly"? If it's just workers, warriors and priests, where else could we put the judges? My question here is whether intellectuals, in some sense, have...

I just saw this post. I don't see a problem here. Ostensives and imperatives are necessarily performative acts--Austin's example, "I now pronounce you man and wife," i.e., a speech act that doesn't de...

There are people working within GA who are liberal individualists on precisely the grounds you give here--that individuals, not as an ontologically primary category, but as a historical development, a...

Our "mimisms" will always be located, and they can be traced as far back as might be necessary to pursue a particular pedagogical project. It may very well be the case that in our gestures and habits ...

I think the focus on ontology is especially important here, because any description of a specific situation will be determined by the ontology you bring to it. Whether you think a group or an individu...

We all know about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (and if you don’t, you can google it)—it’s really Whorf, who was a student of Sapir’s and greatly expanded a couple of much more tentative suggestions...

The title of this post was actually the thought that got me started on the “hypothesizing the present” post, which, however, ended up going in a different direction. Coming across the following...

I'm looking forward to it.

Eric bases his Unified Field Theory on the Originary Hypothesis, which is so original that it has resisted assimilation to contemporary academic discourse, not to mention popular news or culture. We...

Interesting guy--knows Girard, GA, my stuff. Here's his twitter: ​ [https://twitter.com/AbhayVenkatesh1](https://twitter.com/AbhayVenkatesh1)

It is only possible to engage in peaceful activity insofar as someone protects that activity from those who would interrupt it violently—to rob or coerce or take revenge on one or more of the...

Modern history begins with the first elites to use the high-low vs. the middle logic first deployed by the king to question the legitimacy of the monarchy itself. The absolutist monarch consolidated...

I don't think we can see the sovereign as the subject because there is no constitutive (reciprocally defining) antagonist--the bourgeoisie has the state, king, aristocracy and/or superstitions (or wha...

The moral and intellectual innovations of the Axial Age—from Confucianism and Buddhism in the East to philosophy and monotheism in the West—create an interesting dilemma in thinking through the...

It may be that for some “absolutism” might simply be an argument for one form of government over others—as if an absolute monarch with complete sovereignty over a population with no power and no...

Thanks. It should be interesting, even if I'm not quite sure what you're getting at. That will become clearer in time, I assume. But I won't say anything more about McIntyre's politics until I know mu...

A partial summary of David Graeber on markets and money, with some additions: Markets are created and maintained by sovereigns. Money is used first of all for internal bureaucratic accounting in the...

Let's say that different enterprises, individually or conjointly, found educational institutions, allowing for free or at least affordable education for 1,000 children (perhaps subject to admissions t...

We know that something happened because we have relied upon someone who saw it happen and recorded and reported it (even in cases where we know what happened as a result of recordings made by some...

The destruction of sacral kingship, “the political common sense of humankind,” has driven us mad. That’s what happens when functioning common sense is destroyed. We need some way of restoring a...

Bertrand de Jouvenel, in his historical account of the rise and metastasization of state power,On Power, finds in the origin of absolutism the very defect of unsecure power that leads to the...

It is in the nature of the declarative to both supplant and appropriate the ostensive. The declarative comes into being by deferring some imperative and, first of all replacing it with the...

This deserves a blog post or more, so I'll give it some thought and write on it.

You're right that "qualities" is too vague. The real point is that subjects can't respond to a perceived crisis in the way the Big Man did, by seizing the center. The problem is that seizing the cente...

Yes, that's right. I would also say it's a product of collective intentionality, which means it possesses a kind of intentionality of its own (the kind of intentionality we could attribute to God). Th...

I suppose I assumed that it goes without saying, but in discussing groups it should be remembered that every group has a more or less mythicized founding event, involving a “nomos,” in Carl Schmitt’s...

I’ve just read Gregory Lobo’s essay in the most recent Anthropoetics, “Homo imaginatus: Generative Anthropology, prefrontal synthesis and the origins of the human,” which includes a critique of the...

My reading of the event of 9/11 was that it would either lead to the abolition of victimary discourse or accelerate the unraveling of American and Western society. My reasoning was that the only...

If the determinist hypothesis were true, and adequately accounted for the actual world, there is a clear sense in which… the notion of human responsibility, as ordinarily understood, would no longer...

If we can’t distinguish between defending, or at least accepting, someone’s right to say something, on the one hand, and agreeing with them, on the other, then liberalism, in the classic...

The left’s propaganda offensive in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision affirming the religious rights of business owners to not subsidize forms of birth control that violate their...

“An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer. And you choose that object to concentrate upon which will best focus your consciousness. Every real discovery made,...

Yes, because linguistics has always essentially "forbidden" any inquiry into the origin and development of language. It takes fully developed languages as its starting point. So, insofar as they analy...

Most commentators and, I assume, most citizens, are still in the habit of referring to the “American people” as the protagonist in the election drama: will the American people go along with this,...

This is a central moment, the crescendo of her diatribe against the alt-right, but what, exactly, is she getting at:This is part of a broader story — the rising tide of hardline, right-wing...

An Introduction to Disciplinarity Adam Katz Department of English Quinnipiac University Hamden, CT 06518 Adam.Katz@quinnipiac.edu In his 1968 “Introduction” to his study of The Civilizing Process,...

Killing time on Yahoo a few days ago, I came across anarticleabout the latest development in the (thankfully, seemingly settled) feud between Seth Rogan and Katherine Heigl regarding the 2007 film,...

The political theory being worked out in my posts for this blog derives from a hypothesis regarding the origin of language. I refer to Eric Gans’s originary hypothesis all the time, of course, along...

alsovery interesting and instructive:What does the Alt Right want?Strong, high trust communities for our people: we reject immigration and favor homogeneous societies.Protection from Third World...

http://jcrt.typepad.com/jcrt_live/2009/08/eric-gans-likes-to-speak-of-his-originary-hypothesis-regarding-the-origin-of-language-as-a-new-way-of-thinking-i.html

Wouldn't the novice also miss the Spring issue when the Fall is current?

The latest issue ofAnthropoetics, Spring 15:2, is now available at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1502/index.htm .The table of contents is listed below.Table of...

I have to admit I was a always a little tentative about the title of my book, even though it seemed to me appropriate and necessary. My thinking was that while anthropomorphizing was a very common...

“Anthropology” suggests a fixed human nature but, for that very reason, an endless oscillation between that human nature and the myriad varieties of human order, belief and practice (which is exactly...

_The Use of a Center_ Act so that there is no use in a centre. Gertrude Stein. If you act so that there is no use in a center, your action would be dissolving all possible, all imaginable, uses in...

I fell a bit behind in my reading of theChronicles of Love & Resentment, and so I just got to the extraordinarily interestingChronicle# 388, “Ecriturefrom Barthes to GA,” and wanted to make this...

Below is the paper I read today at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism’s conference on Modernity.” It was a rather interesting conference, which I will perhaps feel...

Here is my proposal for that International Conference on Anti-semitism I mentioned on the GAlist a while back. We’ll see what they make of it.This paper will offer an account of contemporary...

The first essay, based on the abstract, ends where GA begins. It's amusing that the second essay sees the claim of a singular (rather than gradual) origin as evidence of "Eurocentrism." Anyway, as B...

When I listen to Michael Bloomberg, I hear a very wealthy and powerful man who, whether out of a lack of self-awareness or indifference to the effect of his attitude on others, sounds very much like...

One broadly, maybe even universally held agreement among “postliberals” is that, contra to liberalism, a properly ordered polity would have a unified project that would command unanimous consent,...

If you read French, probably--otherwise, I would say the collection entitled *In Search of Coherence*.

I’d like, briefly, to propose a way to think about President Obama.  I would first like to summarize or reaffirm (insist upon?) the argument I have made so far regarding Obama’s rise and the wild,...

Attentionality and Originary Ethics: Upclining Adam Katz Department of English Quinnipiac University Hamden, CT 06518 Adam.Katz@quinnipiac.edu However paradoxical it may seem, I venture to suggest...

AuditioningAbsolutism has its own version of natural selection. In his essay in the new journalThe Journal of Neoabsolutism,Reactionary Future(drawing upon the poster/tweeter scientism) distinguishes...

Note taken.

Or we're uncommon as well.

Eric Gans’s readiness to put “liberal democracy in question” would have already made his most recentChronicleof great interest, but his subsequent “supplement” made it absolutely essential to address...

Yes, but that's a lot of people giving out a lot of "titles" (and revisiting and revising them regularly, presumably). I agree with you regarding the basis for the awarding, and ultimately delegates o...

Eric Gans’s latest Chronicle, “The Administrative State and the Victimocracy” raises a set of interrelated questions which GA urgently needs to turn its attention to. I’m going to focus on the...

I’m probably one of maybe a few dozen people who remembers Louis Althusser’s critique of “historicism” in Marxism—what Althusser was targeting (as a way, probably, of gaining some distance from...

Proponents of the originary hypothesis find themselves arguing for the discontinuity of humans with non-human animals far more often than we find ourselves arguing for the continuity between the two...

What would it take to get a job at Breitbart?

I thought I’d give this post-election commentary game another spin.  Two things occurred to me:  first, that Barack Obama, for a while at least, will be able to do pretty much whatever he wants (and...

The law of mimesis dictates that what another does you do, and what another does to you you do to them. For originary thinkers, the iconic form of this law is manifested on the originary scene—one...

We are in the steepest economic downturn since the 1930s, in or verging on another Great Depression; and, yet, there are signs daily that we might be starting to emerge from the recession by Spring...

The GABlog? No.

Transcendence suggests something outside of us sustaining us; presence involves all of us sustaining the same object of attention.This mutual attending is overlapping and continuous—your attention...

Anything we would need the state for, anything the state would do, can ultimately be reduced to intelligence. The state needs to defend the country and the borders, and in doing so needs to mobilize...

Desiring to educate myself in economics, so as to speak (and think) intelligently about current events, I have subscribed to the Mises email list, receiving a daily column.  I’ve been reading Hayek...

I wrote this review essay over a year ago, in hopes of landing a quick publication. The trajectory of my argument was crystal clear to me. I triedContagionand a few others, but no bites. Among the...

I’ve been using the phrase “post-sacrificial culture,” generally in conjunction with the “Axial Age acquisitions,” to refer to the breakdown of the “imperative exchange” constitutive of sacrifice....

Not quite yet, at least not beyond the occasional improvisation, but this is something I am thinking about.

This is a term generally credited to Michel Foucault, to describe what comes after the “disciplinary society,” when social institutions no longer just normalize subjects but intervene in the...

Book Review: Nemesis: The Jouvenelian vs. the Liberal Model of Human Orders, by C.A. Bond Adam Katz 177 pages Ebook $9.95 Print: $15.95 The way people speak about their relation and attitude toward...

It's actually not published yet, so maybe wait before disseminating it beyond here.

The basic premise of much current brain research seems to be that the brain is a biological computer and evolution is the programmer. Theoretically, then, we should be able to find the codes and...

I think this is a very interesting article by Eric Gans; perhaps others will find it so too.

I’ve been working with the hypothesis that we find, in late 17th century England, the near simultaneous emergence of capitalism as the Bank of England is established and becomes the creditor of the...

It’s never been more obvious that mainstream conservatives take the moral superiority of communism over fascism as a sacred principle.This observation, from Nick Land’s “Outsideness” twitter feed,...

One of the most popular scientific axioms is that correlation is not causation, but if this is still true it soon will no longer be. If you have enough correlations (data collection) and the...

Marxists have an answer--you obtain objectivity by throwing in your lot with the proletariat, the objectively revolutionary class. Which means you're only stepping outside in the sense that your theor...

When I go to the store to buy a loaf of bread, I have to pay the supermarket because I am not performing any equivalent service for them, or because, as is the case in David Graeber’s “communism,” we...

Thanks. Yes, this is the argument I would need to counter or incorporate. I start from the assumption that the market could--and necessarily is--dialed up or down in accord with state imperatives, so ...

Since it seems obvious to speak about liberalism as a derogation from a period of more secure and legitimate authority, it follows that we have had secure, absolutist rule, have somehow lost it, and...

If the metalanguage of literacy is both the equivalent and the vehicle of theimperium in imperio, the ethical practice that follows is reducing the metalinguistic dimension of language to its most...

Any center is fit out with a link to the origin—therein lies its power. Even more, any center is itself an origin, an ever emergent origin. Any use of a sign entrains the entire history of sign use...

Power entails, first, occupying the center and, second, using that occupation to direct attention to another center. It’s like a conversation where you first need to get someone to pay attention to...

The danger of titling one’s political position “centerism” is that it is bound to be confused with “centrist,” which will undoubtedly one day become a synonym for “stupid.” (Even spellcheck wants it...

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, the assumption that there is something like an inner circle that invents the sign and then "initiates" the others into it would be the best way of having absolutist GA...

Reactionary Futurehas been addressing the liberal prioritization of culture and religion over politics, as pursuant to the absolutist rejection of “bottom-up” in favor of “top-down” understandings of...

We can model all centrality on the originary scene, where all participants constitute themselves as members by representing and imitating the desired and (therefore) forbidden central object. On this...

_The participants in the event are critically concerned with avoiding conflict. The equal production of the sign and the subsequent equal division of the central object are the necessary means to...

If the speaker can have meta-awareness of himself, he could also have meta-meta-awareness and meta-meta-meta-awareness, and so on. He could never get to the intention of actually putting forth a lingu...

Liberals always discuss these attempts by China's rulers to deal with serious problems with a mixture of horror and ridicule, but they seem pretty interesting to me. Is it better to expose the adulter...

The latestChronicle of Love & Resentment, entitled “The Final Conflict,” is now available.-eric gans

Chronicle 344is a continuation of a running dialogue with Adam Katz concerning GA’s relationship to politics. A futureChroniclewill deal with the question offreedom.-eric gansbuy somacheap somabuy...

Chronicle345, which explores the relationship between the varieties of firstness, is now available.-eric gans

This newChronicle,which elaborates on some of the ideas in the preceding (as well as in “Originary Narrative” andThe End of Culture)is now available...

The latestChroniclepresents some reflections inspired by the recent GATE conference held in Vancouver BC in late July. It is available athttp://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw347.htm.-eric gans

Chronicle348 deals with the question of human freedom from the standpoint of the linguistic forms discussed inThe Origin of Language(UC, 1981). It is available...

Chronicle353 (“A New Way of Thinking”) is now available at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw353.htm It outlines some basic ideas concerning the novelty of GA with respect to other ways of...

The latestChronicles, 354 (“Universal Anthropology”) and 355 (“A New Mode of Being”) are now available athttp://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw354.htm and...

The latestChronicles, 356 (”The Question of Transcendence: An Update”) and 357 (”The New Anthropic Principle”) are now available athttp://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw356.htm and...

The paradox of civilization is that renunciation leads to benefits. This must be true even of earlier social forms, what our forefathers insensitively called “barbarism” and “savagery,” to some...

Humanity presupposes the deferral of violence; society presupposes shared norms enhancing and regularizing the capacity to defer violence; civilization further presupposes entire zones of existence...

The more deferral of desire leads to prestige and wealth, the more civilized the community. The result is a infinitely extendable chain of actions leading to measurable results: in the degree zero of...

Classicism is the imperative to refer one’s work to a model; not just any model, but the best model, which represents the heights of human excellence, which is to say a more permanent human reality...

This is the paper (leaving aside any last minute editing) that I will be reading (via Skype) June 9 at the 11th annualGASC Conferencein Stockholm.Cognition as Originary MemoryThe shift in focus, in...

It's not so directly political, although it gets very political indirectly near the end, but I though it might be of some interest.

I've been remiss in not mentioning this guy before. I never see anyone else refer to him, but he's written quite a few books by now and he does strong scholarly work within a power-realist frame that ...

The 2016 American Presidential election is shaping up to be a remarkable, entirely unanticipated event: it is possible that we will see a direct, sustained and escalating confrontation between the...

I think that to solve this problem we will have to accept Andrew Willard Jones's critique of the concept of "sovereignty" (it's not really "his" critique, of course, but an old one). Sovereignty by de...

The originary hypothesis can yield for us a phenomenology and poetics of everyday life, and perhaps it can even do so in a manner respectful of reality, which is to say that doesn’t complain about...

Yes, of course.

For a while, “competence” has been a weapon used by the Left against Republican Presidents.  It began with the Dukakis campaign, I think, most immediately as a way of distracting attention from the...

Here is a paper I presented to a crowd of four people at the College English Association Conference on Thursday in one of my academic “specialities,” Composition Pedagogy:Composition Pedagogy and...

A single sample includes the whole. This sentence is advocacy for a wild form of thinking, one involving abduction and an endless range of constantly re-examined (even self-re-examining) hypotheses....

The most destructive thing about liberalism is the systematic falsification it imposes on all of reality. One could say that this has gotten worse—that, for example, mid-20thcentury liberalism didn’t...

Yes, GA must be both. Thanks for that--you framed it in a way I didn't see, but can see. GA must "conquer" everything--tradition, technology, media, money... and what about war and imperial order, w...

From status to contract, from tribe or family to individual, from established hierarchies and dependencies to unrestricted movement—that’s the trajectory of modernity. The logic of this...

Maybe discussions about how the Republicans can climb back into power as soon as possible are the worng ones to be having.  Maybe some kind of more or less left-wing rule, antipathetic towards...

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=5370&sec_id=5370

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=5083&sec_id=5083

It might be best to think of markets as networks. The word “market” tends to evoke a society of randomly distributed individuals, each with some property, but with none of them related to any other...

I would like to roll some of my recent reflections on the victimary, the alt-right and related matters into this very fruitful way of thinking about the victimary from Eric Gans’s...

Hamlet, before following his father’s ghost’s demand to avenge his death, decides to put on a play. The play is to reproduce the event of Claudius’s murder of his brother, Hamlet’s father, and the...

We're mimetic beings, from top to bottom.

The value of anything owned, which is to say, how much money someone will pay for it, is discounted against expected future earnings. This is simple and generative formulation of Bichler and Nitzan’s...

Yes, you can download it through library genesis. What's important, I think, is that there is no longer a quarantining of anti-liberal thinking. You can present its existence as a "phenomenon" that w...

If you look at the way you frame things in (1), I think you can see the answer to your question. Liberalism thinks we need to describe the *morality* of ruling in declarative terms--but there's no men...

Question 1 is important. Gans has addressed it lots of times, and I do at length in my introduction to a book I edited, *The Originally Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Human Inquiry*. But, to get a...

Another urgent post by truepeers over at Covenant Zone:http://covenantzone.blogspot.com/2008/01/are-you-next-after-me.html#links

Carl Wennerlind, in his Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720, observes that the emergence of journalism in the wake of the political duopoly of Whigs and Tories resulted...

Let’s start with a little utopian vision, one which I’m borrowing from someone who gave a talk at a GA conference some years back along those lines. He wanted to argue for the possibility of...

The best way to replace the liberal order would be one modeled on the paradox of identity. We all know this one: you have, e.g., a ship, and you replace one plank, and then another breaks so you...

Really? I didn't know that was important to them.

The MacNeil-Lehrer newshour, which I’ve watched over the years as a reasonably fair-minded program, has an interesting way of covering the recent Israel-Hezbollah conflict. They begin with one of...

Since I’m now going to speak of a debt to the center, one extending from the originary event to the latest Quantitative Easing of the Fed, the question of data as currency can be further clarified....

If markets are made, they can be made in more deliberate and constrained ways; if they can be made increasingly constrained and purposeful, they will in effect be replaced. Money is already data,...

Returning to Zack Baker’s and my [“There is No Economy But Only the Debt to the Center”](https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2802/ap2802katzbaker/) is a way not only of continuing to explore the notion...

Here I’ll attempt to synthesize a couple of fairly new concepts that I’ve so far introduced separately but must be made part of the idiom of Thirdness: the definition of the modern (only the modern?)...

(For those who would like to comment on the GABlog specifically, I have set up reddit page: https://www.reddit.com/r/GABlog/comments/6kukdg/debts_and_deferences/)David Graeber’sDebt: the First 5,000...

I agree with you--I hope I get at the difference you point to by distinguishing between "honor" and the "honor system."

Marx and Engels have been heavily criticized for not providing a detailed model of the communist society they hoped would succeed capitalism, but on this point, at least, they were right. Leaving the...

Any rules will be part of a tradition of practices, a tradition which also determines how the rules are to be read. We could say that we are just resituating the potential imperio in imperium by sayin...

The declarative sentence makes explicit what remains implicit in ostensives and imperatives. Ostensives and imperatives “work” because a whole scenic configuration is already in place and goes...

Yes, in the first passage you quote I'm not representing the thinking of an activist but, rather of those downstream form the activist. Still, if you ask the radical feminist to explain what, exactly,...

We think in language, which means we think almost exclusively in declarative sentences. We hear and read lots and lots of sentences throughout our lives; we remember very few of them, but we distill...

Why did Bernie Sanders acquiesce in the commandeering of his recent speech in Seattle by a few Black Lives Matter brats? The BLM actions were clearly unpopular with the crowd, and from the commentary...

There's a lot worth watching here. Thomas Wictor's twitter feed is also an interesting source.

Jurgen Habermas saw the differentiation into various spheres of life, whether in terms of public and private, or the different forms of experience like cognition, aesthetics and ethics, as central to...

Yes, but also when we speak about them non-casually.

I’ve been limiting my discussions of media by assuming it is the sign and sign system that is the media while it is, in fact, the form of deferral created by that particular sign. It is the deferral...

Yes, but I think the NRA will win this one. There's some kick left in the middle yet, and the NRA is the toughest middle we have in the US. And without that much elite support, as far as I can see.

When you “signify” in any way, there are two ways of thinking about what you have done: first, you have conveyed or communicated some meaning, or content, in a package, so to speak, to be delivered...

I assume none of us Generative Anthropologists would assert that the “Jersey Girls” are enjoying to an unprecedented degree their husbands’ deaths; or, to take an earlier example, that Timothy...

I’ve been working for a while with the assumption that the “Axial Age” created the conditions for the generation of a new, post-sacrificial morality. Sacrificial morality relies, ultimately, on human...

Where do opinions, ideas, beliefs and arguments stand within the production system of modern life? Everyone has ideas, opinions and beliefs, and everyone makes arguments all the time, but through...

I’ll return to my “[ergodic hypothesis](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/ergodism)” and assume, contra “grammaticalist” assumptions regarding the endless possibilities of uttering new sentences,...

Dialectics is the rendering of paradox pragmatic. There are two ways of thinking about dialectics. One is as a mode of generating new ideas through probing, critical dialogue, in which each side...

A semiotic history of the world would trace the gradual process of distancing from the ostensive and imperative via the declarative, along with the efforts, within new forms of declarative culture,...

I would like to use Eric Gans’s most recent, and for me extremely illuminating, Chronicle of Love and Resentment, to continue my series on civilization. (And, following Gans, I hope this will...

To continue articulating in a more thorough way the transitions from ritual, to juridical, to scientific scenes, and to do so without forgetting the reciprocal imbrications of them all (we’re never...

The Big Man, in archaic social orders, becomes big by out-gifting his competitors. This out-gifting must be understood not simply as giving out goods, but as including “services,” and above all the...

A recent essay inThe New Atlantis, “Saving Science,” by Daniel Sarewitz, makes the important argument that the goals of scientific disciplines cannot be set by the disciplines themselves, which...

Here’s the trick: you need a term of anathematization, like “racism.” You start with some act, group or individual that is rejected virtually unanimously (like the Holocaust and Nazis, or lynching...

In my previous post, I discussed two forms of rebellion against the victimocracy: the anti-SJW strategy of the blog Vox Populi (by Vox Day) and American white nationalists. I thought afterward that I...

Sovereignty is incompatible with democracy, but contemporary politics often make the most ardent advocates of majority rule the most insistent upon a reclaiming of sovereignty. This is most obviously...

Jewish law, which is very flexible, would have to find answers to these questions. The Mishna, I believe, lays out in some detail the relation between the king, the priests and the judges, and I assum...

I’ve been overlooking the most obvious and (materially) important thing the center does: distribute. Examining the way all distribution is from the center will take us a long way towards addressing...

Two starving men will fight over a loaf of bread without us having to assume mimetic rivalry. But if one of them gets the bread and eats it, and then the other sneaks up behind him later and kills him...

Eric Jacobus [has suggested](https://ericjacobus.com/the-art-of-violence/the-roba-hypothesis-of-human-violence/) a modification to the originary hypothesis which I have been thinking about for a...

Economism has always been associated with reductionism—in the case of Marxism with the assumption that all social and cultural practices could be read directly off of the class position of the...

sure

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgMwUV1wnYoThis segment from the Daily Show records how the Zuccotti Park occupation was geographically divided by class into “uptown” and “downtown”; a division...

Eric Gans – Chronicles of Love and Resentment 337: Saturday, August 5, 2006One of the simplest ways to begin to explain the prevalence of White Guilt in our era is that victimary thought, however...

To speak of “imperative freedom” as “freedom from another’s intention,” which is to say, Isaiah Berlin’s “negative freedom,” interestingly sets up a line separating two ways of thinking about...

…by playing in accord with his own rules.  More precisely:  we demand an apology from every Muslim cleric, every Muslim head of state, every Muslim legislator, editorialist, you name it, who has...

I appreciate Eric Gans’sdetailed responseto my blog post(In)equality and (Im)morality, and am glad to respond to at least most of the issues he raises there. Part of the problem here is that, as...

He's very deeply invested in seeing "market society" as the telos of the originary scene. It was there from the beginning, as you can see from the concluding chapter of The Origin of Language. So, he ...

In my day job, I often imagine a writing assignment that would have students unfold an entire discourse from a very limited starting text, ideally a single sentence. This would be done by making...

I’m going to follow up here on what have been prominent, but subordinate reflections on aesthetics in some recent posts. It’s always good to go back to the beginning: in this case, Eric Gans’s...

For Bernard Stiegler, technics is the externalization of memory. The first form of memory, characteristic of the most primitive forms of life, involves the transmission of genetic information...

There is an issue I have been thinking about, on and off, for about the past 15 years, but that has rarely found its way directly into my writing. My interest in this issue dates to some work I did...

Event, Origin, Center Let’s start with “journalism.” You watch a cable or news show, or read (probably online) an article in a newspaper, and there’s a “story” there. Maybe a story buried under...

Barack Obama seems to be composing the most generic, centrist establishmentarian cabinet possible.  Most conservatives seem to be pleasantly surprised and most leftists seem to be suprisingly...

All discourse is with and of the center; all exchanges are of and with the center; all discourses are mediating exchanges with and through the center. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the human is...

Working consistently with mimetic theory would assume everything we do is imitation and should therefore be described in those terms, or in terms that could readily be converted into mimetic ones....

Liberal democracy is predicated upon the severing of liberty and equality. For liberty and equality to be sustainable, they must be reciprocally defining and supporting: I can only be free together...

In the interests of minimalism and dropping extra weight as we try to stay above water I would suggest that all the morality that we need can be summed up in the injunction not to feed your fantasies...

It’s very interesting to explore forbidden topics—not only is the field wide open, with fundamental questions barely touched on, but there is the added, “meta” topic of all the ways we talk about the...

For Robert Filmer, leading figure in the absolutist tradition (and polemical target of John Locke), all rule is monarchical, and all monarchical rule is paternal. The legitimacy of absolute rule...

J.L. Austin, in originating the concept of “performative” speech acts, considered such acts to be “felicitous” or “infelicitous.” Performative speech acts effect some change in the world, rather than...

David Gelernter, in the course of explaining the appeal of Donald Trump as the anti-PC candidate, offers an excellent diagnosis of what he correctly calls “the biggest issue facing American today.”...

How do we solve problems, especially technical problems—but that means all problems, because technics is nothing more than the construction, maintenance, and modification of the scenes upon which we...

Desires are results of participating in a tradition, and in expressing their individual preferences people are mostly unaware of the various traditions they are essentially vehicles of, much less how ...

Anna Wierzbicka sees her discovery of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage containing all the words found in all languages to be a continuation of Gottfried Leibnez’s project to develop an alphabet of...

_We are already data waiting to be recorded. We are not individual substances, but manifolds of differences that are bonded socially and intersubjectively by the manner in which such manifolds of...

According to a new pedagogical technique, called “flipping the classroom,” instead of using class time to provide the educational content (the lecture) with out of class time (homework) used to...

The basis for critiques of civilization (in general or in any particular incarnation) has always been “nature.” Conventions and culture, if not ritually prescribed, could be other than what they are,...

In his just publishedChronicle, “Originary Demography” (http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw339.htm), Eric Gans concludes that the aging, demographically suicidal cultures of Western Europecan...

The fulcrum of any regime is the security force that maintains public order. The sign of regime change is that the security force is replaced or, far more common, stops obeying one master and starts...

Once the sign has done its work on the originary scene, that of arresting the forward, convergent movement of the emergent community toward the central object, the members of the group will, indeed,...

Sacral kingship is weakened, ultimately fatally, by the elevation of the king beyond the reach of the community—that is, once the king is no longer available as a scapegoat. If the king is no longer...

So, if I ask "how autonomous does the market have to be" I suppose the answer would be "how big a price are you willing to pay?" You are pointing to choices the state would have to make if its prefere...

I thought this passage from "Panopticism" might be interesting in thinking through the political origins of the sciences, e.g.: "the sciences of nature, in any case, were born, to some extent, at the...

Equality as a goal of human relations is chimerical and delusional. It’s just a way of organizing war parties. But inequality presupposes a kind of relationship that we could call “equality,” but...

We can consider the emergence of the Big Man out of the primitive egalitarian community as the beginning of civilization. With civilization comes the placing of some individual at the center of the...

The blog is giving me too many problems in posting a comment, so i'll post it here: A very interesting discussion, but wouldn't it help to provide at least one suggestion for possible reforms, even i...

Thanks to the previous post, I don’t have to provide a link toChronicle339, “Originary Demography.” NowChronicle340 is available athttp://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw340.htm. Entitled “Frère...

There’s an anomaly in the canonical three branches of government of the modern liberal constitutional order. The executive and the juridical descend rather directly, and in still recognizable form,...

Let’s say neoabsolutism is the organization of those who seek out commands from the central authority, in distinction from those who make demands upon the central authorities. In distinction from,...

to be clear: the publication, not the need for martial law, is in a conservative journal.

On one hand, nothing is more familiar to us that our own consciousness, which can we safely assume is essentially similar to that of other humans. It seems equally obvious that we have free will. I...

The OWS movement has staked its existence on the issue of inequality of wealth, as evidenced by the “we are the 99%” slogan. The issue of equality goes very deep; the most powerful political...

For years I have been convinced, and I remain convinced, that there is a simple and infallible way of breaking the victimary spell:  for the “dominant” to use their power to defend those who are the...

I don't know what "NAP" refers to, but regarding liberalism more generally, here is how I would distinguish GA: liberalism is a model of order out of disorder (individual, disconnected "units"), while...

Within the originary configuration, we are all located on the margin, sharing our love and resentment toward the center.  The effect of the history of de-ritualization, grounded in the Judaic and...

I'm pretty sure timelyinquisitor has one of Andrew Bartlett's essays in mind--Bartlett speaks about the "computational model of mind," in part making the kind of argument you're making here--as you bo...

The more someone insists that the security services and various elites, operating through obscured and camouflaged channels, have in fact artificially produced what we take to be the history of the...

This is to announce the appearance of a newChronicle of Love & Resentment(341) by Eric Gans (“Victimary Extinction or Religious Survival”). Adam Katz’ response (“The Crisis of Firstness”) is...

Some here might find this Chronicle interesting. I suspect the following paragraphs are entering the liberal vs. absolutist GA discussion: To begin anew: the human is defined by the transcendental st...

http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw598/http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw600/

Hi Everybody,The 4th annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference (GASC) 2010 is shaping up to be a very exciting event, with presentations from many of the regularAnthropoeticcontributors and...

Hi Everybody,The 2010 Generative Anthropology Summer Conference Website has a tentative schedule available online. A couple of late submissions are not on there yet, but be assured that they will...

Dear Colleagues,The deadline for paper submissions for the 4th Annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference (GASC 2010) has been extended to March 15th. We still have room in the program, and we...

The website for the 4th annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference, 2010 is now available:http://people.westminstercollege.edu/faculty/pgoldman/GASC_2010/index.htmlOur conference this year is...

The Linguistic Turn and Generative LiteracyI’m going to begin with the assumption that the linguistic turn entails the rejection of any attempt to find legitimation for what we say in language in...

That's the "generative" part. The "literacy," more specifically, is the "detachability" of any utterance from its author.

The only thing to do is to create spaces for the training of writers, with writing understood as the maintenance of data security, as the participation in scribal-archivist-philological-programming...

Generative Anthropology asthe One Big DisciplineAdam KatzDepartment of EnglishQuinnipiac UniversityHamden, CT 06518Adam.Katz@quinnipiac.eduIf the originary hypothesis entails that all human...

This is very important. Not only do less powerful states get modeled on the more powerful ones as part of the formation of alliances and rivalries, but when a specific class gains power in one state i...

Rene Girard’s take on the Passion is, on one level, desacralizing. The Gospel narrative of Christ’s persecution, torture, and execution reveals the perspective of the victim—the victim of sinful men...

The Democrats have always been the party of the outsiders (not exactly the "lows," but I suppose various high-low coalitions)--slaveowners, then Southern whites, along with ethnic immigrants in the no...

I think all originary thinkers should be interested in this brilliant post by truepeers over at the Covenant Zone blog (I put in the permalink John provided in the comments to this entry for those...

They're certainly not bothering much with subtlety any more.

An exchange I have been having with someone very familiar with GA regarding issues of antisemitism, victimary thinking, etc., raised the question of how we account for group belonging in terms of the...

http://jcrt.typepad.com/jcrt_live/2009/04/habit-and-errors-and-composition.html

When institutions fail, we must direct our attention toward habits–habits are foundation of institutions, which essentially codify and police habits, and which must fail when habits degenerate; but...

Health care, as we speak about it today, is a completely modern phenomenon. Hippocrates aside, if you go back maybe 150 years, doctors had no effect on their patients: your chances of recovery if you...

I think anyone working at a university can tell you that the consistent effect of new rules regarding various "social justice issues"--"rape culture," racial insensitivity, "LGBT" and trans stuff--is ...

You will have anthropological and linguistic assumptions one way or another. You can come by them haphazardly or reflectively. Haphazardly means just trying out whatever seems convincing to whomever y...

The greatest, and no doubt most thankless, service the Israelis could provide for humanity in responding to the Hamas massacres would be to set a precedent for abolishing the politics of hostage...

This will be an experiment in applying originary analysis to an ongoing historical event–that is, the kind where facts undermining the very premise of your analysis might emerge before you’ve...

One extremely important contribution made by the alt-right and neo-reaction has been the enormous enrichment of the vocabulary we have available for studying social actors and actions. Neo-reaction...

I looked up Milner's kindergarten on Wikipedia but don't get the reference.

The comment below is very good and especially interesting for me is the last few paragraphs (on identification with the one super-protohuman), which puts things in a way I hadn't quite seen them put b...

Yes, and the complex criss-crossing of imperatives show the potential of this mode of analysis. We all follow the imperatives of dead people, including rulers--of course, some play a greater role than...

A couple of pieces from today’sLA Times:1. Rosa Brooks’ column is a good place to find an unsubtle expression of what passes for a “progressive” perspective. A few days ago, she suggested that...

The notion that far more social possibilities exist than the liberalism of the last couple of centuries would have us imagine helps us as well as Graeber. Imperial Energy might point out the complete ...

The hunger artist of Kafka’s story ultimately reveals that he has spent much of his life eating no more than was absolutely necessary to barely stay alive not as an astonishing feat of asceticism but...

Yes, for the most part. The mistakenness/presence dialectic I explore here is meant to account for the relationship between mimesis and the center. Mimesis produces the center through the crisis of th...

I’ve just finished reading Thorstein Veblen’sThe Theory of the Leisure Class.Obviously, I can’t claim that this puts me in the vanguard of anything, but I found his organization of economic analysis...

In my previous post I found myself in possession of a neat and very promising distinction between the ritual/myth nexus, on the one hand, and the practice/hypothesis nexus, on the other. This means...

Chronicles of Hypotheses and Practices. I've been questioning basic GA concepts like "resentment," "desire" and "love." "Resentment" is especially problematic--I've pointed out many times that it ne...

This post will deal with the implications for knowledge production of the meta-practices of converting the ritual-mythic nexus into practices and the Big Scene into an articulation of centripetal...

Yes, this is a very good reading. The model needs to be placed against narrative altogether, in a specific sense that I'll be working out soon.

It’s interesting to see people get offended and angry in online discussions—they curse each other, threaten each other, try to demean and humiliate each other. In other words, they act according to...

Thank you.

OK, you're welcome. We'll see where it goes.

I don't know, we'd have to hear a bit more about it--does he come back to it--I stopped listening at 2:22:34.

I'm working on the ontological and anthropological questions now, and think there could be a range of absolutist models. So, while I find these discussions about cameralism very interesting, I don't h...

We are all products of the center; we all want to participate in the center. Any discussion of who any “I” or “we” had better take that as its starting point. Any individual life can be traced from...

The absolutist theory of sovereignty makes it possible to solve a problem that not only has never been solved but has never even been adequately formulated, even though it was first posed during the...

I have worked with the notion of “idiom” rather than “theory” or “knowledge” because I want to defer the possibility of any metalanguage that is not convertible into the language it describes along...

A while ago, partly because my reading of Peirce got me interested in probability and knowledge, and partly because my work as a college writing instructor got me interested in the formulaic nature...

I think that Jean-Francois Lyotard, with his concept of the differend, identified the central problem bequeathed to us by the enslaved debtor’s (anti)imperial imaginary that emerged at the end of the...

I’ve been reminded lately of Goodhart’s Law, that once the measure becomes a target it becomes useless as a measure. I can say that my incessant focus on the linguistification or semiotization of...

Any act of signification aims at changing the field of probabilities within which it is situated. I’m working with the assumption that the traditional model of how this is done, which is modeled on...

The originary hypothesis creates a “new way of thinking,” as Eric Gans has so often said.A way of thinking involves a new vocabulary and grammar; it puts words to new use, generates new questions and...

These videos are time capsules. But you might find Jacobus's book interesting.

In situating the juridical in between the ritual and disciplinary as a mode of ordering both more historically contingent and more essential to imperial tensegrity I confronted an interesting...

Yes, but the betting will be on the judgments made by the Thirdness team, which will always be parallel or "adjacent" to actual events. I don't see a way of making it work with betting on events, beyo...

Girardians have been excited about this for years. I don't think it makes any difference--it's just for "proving" things when talking to people who see biology as the ultimate proof of all things huma...

Is there a single political theory, ancient or modern, that has anything useful to say about immigration? Probably, but I don’t know of it. I suppose it’s because the United States (and then the...

The only real fight against the victimary entails dismantling the entire “non-discrimination” regime put in place after World War 2—it means giving up on, and accepting the reversal of, the abolition...

If politics is no longer “declarative” but, rather, increasingly ostensive (the initial move of the SJW is “point and shriek”[Vox Day]), our inherited political vocabulary of “principles,”...

My writing is heading toward total, wall-to-wall idiom. Think of language as tiles and every space as walls. Perhaps this can be seen and shown in my recent posts, especially the ones not explicitly...

Pretty much "yes" to both questions, with an exception for a few philosophers who are already not really philosophers, like Peirce and Wittgenstein. Philosophy has its origins in "what do words mean,"...

The JCRT Live Blog no longer seems interested in my posts, so I figured I’d post here the last one I wrote for them:Imperativity“He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well...

Very glad to do it. Your English is obviously way better than my (essentially non-existent) Spanish, so I couldn't really read your blog. I hope we stay in communication, and please let me know if I c...

Derrida and post-structuralism are really not that important. Gans takes from Derrida the notion of "deferral," but revises it so that it's not just inexplicably part of the way language works but gro...

How far has any mimetic theorist taken the notion of mimesis not merely as an originary anthropological concept, and a source of conflict, but as the basis for any morality or understanding of...

If they're tiring they can be overlooked, right? There's no need to resent them. But keep in mind that for Gans resentment is not exactly a "bad" thing. He has said many times, and in important contex...

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/8375/sec_id/8375Plus, a brief mention here:Secular Illusionsby Rebecca Bynumhttp://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/8727/sec_id/8727

The notion of viewing the government as a corporation is foundational for NeoReaction and Absolutism, having first been proposed by Mencius Moldbug and presently being revisited byImperial Energy....

Maybe you're right. I don't rule it out, but generating possibilities is helpful in thinking it through. In a country without a hereditary monarchy, in particular one that's never had one, a (for exam...

http://jcrt.typepad.com/jcrt_live/2009/06/indicative-culture.html

At fairly regular intervals, it seems, I find myself returning to what we might call David Olson’s “originary prose scene.” I’m referring to that place in _The World on Paper_ where he models the...

I return to the question of what, exactly, is the originary hypothesis, and what kind of discursive (or idiomatic) possibilities it initiates. My longstanding position, while I was working within GA,...

If our starting point is the center, it would make sense to speak of the capitalist, not in liberal bottom-up terms as a agent of private initiative regulated after the fact, but more as a kind of...

Eric Gans has been exploring the concept of the “sacred” in some recent _Chronicle_ s. This is obviously a welcome development and one to be followed, as it returns us to the fundamental concerns of...

The concept of data is extremely generative. Any time you focus on something with a question that brings some things into view and suspends attention to others, you generate data. When you generate...

I try to make the concepts I use include both the “is” and the “ought,” and to guide the transition from one to the other. So, when I speak of “singularized succession in perpetuity,” on the face of...

This was just great. I don't know anything about those memes you're referring to, but this is definitely a high level of understanding, and very clearly explained. People can do what they want--I woul...

By way of keeping up with the times and permitting more permanent contributions than the GA listserv: the GABlog!-eric gans

I would suggest Andrew Bartlett, who wrote the following book: [https://www.amazon.com/Mad-Scientist-Impossible-Human-Anthropology/dp/1934542350/ref=sr\_1\_1?dchild=1&keywords=andrew+bartlett+mad...

I’ve opened this post to discussion of Chronicles 399 & 400.http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw399.htm

I’ve mentioned a couple of times before that one of the favorite tropes of the alt-right is the use of Israel, partly enviously, partly mocking, always with some degree of resentment, as a model for...

We actually have an interesting case of incommensurability here. You insist that language is a "communicative capacity," just like other animals have "communicative capacities," only far more powerful...

I think it's a productive tendency, probably among others that will emerge. Absolutism can't be reduced to a literal restoration of legitimate heredity monarchs within a renewed Christendom, but I thi...

The Jewish revelation establishes the principle that all humans are created equal because and insofar as they are created in God’s image. We are all like God because God is equidistant from all of us...

No

The discourse of the center bypasses concepts such as “desire,” “resentment” and “mimesis.” Using these concepts, as I mentioned last post, exempt you from the very things you are describing: insofar...

We can't invent another way of thinking other than working through the resentments that get us thinking in the first place. The next couple of sentences suggest the possibility of working towards anot...

A sign is the deferral of violence. The first sign deferred imminent violence; subsequent signs may also do so, or they may defer intimations of merely possible violence, raising the threshold of...

Only after reading Eric Gans’s recent Chronicle (#403, “Heuristic Necessity”) did the obvious relevance of Gans’s definition of God as that word whose signified and referent are indistinguishable to...

Language is the best example of how, in Michael Polanyi’s words, “we know more than we can say.” Most of our linguistic knowledge is tacit, and the semantic distinctions built into the myriad...

Insofar as I have an epistemology it’s borrowed from Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion that truth is what will turn out to be the case in the long run by the community of inquirers, which in my...

I’ve mentioned before Johanna Drucker’s _Diagrammatic Writing_ , a book that “is as much about itself as a book can be,” (self) referring to every element of book creation and design while...

The declarative was invented in the course of deferring the imperative, so it follows that one trajectory of the declarative is to imagine the abolition of the imperative. Not of the ostensive,...

The last fourChroniclesare available on our website:No. 361, August 2, 2008: A Minimal Theodicy: God Helps Those Who Help ThemselvesNo. 360, July 19, 2008:Qui perd gagneNo. 359, May 31, 2008: Notes...

There are statistical disparities between groups in all areas of life: educational accomplishment, mental aptitudes, physical ability, and so on. We are now capable of measuring these disparities in...

Back to the question of pedagogical practices as currency, posing the problem of “units” of learning. Money is a bet on the future; more precisely, it is a partitioning and parceling out of the...

A sign has to have meaning before it can be true or false, and so setting one’s filters for discourse ingestion on meaningful/meaningless should be more effective than setting them for true/false....

As are all victimary movements. The articulation of hyper-civilized sensibilities and the barbaric lust for vengeance could not be made more evident than in a comment on a column by relatively...

I think this is a very interesting *Chronicle*. It begins by asserting that liberal democracy depends upon compromise, which means neither side sees itself as occupying an ontologically prior and priv...

I think that the central theoretical difference between GA as a liberal political theory and GA as a reactionary theory is that the former sees the marketplace as decentered and the latter contends...

I read the comic pages every day because they contain the best writing and art in the newspaper, but I have to take issue with journalist Roland Hedley in Saturday’s Doonesbury, who, in his interview...

It’s not long in any dispute before one side or another enlists the rules on his side: logical rules, rules of evidence, a theoretical method, rules of fair play, rules of the particular discursive...

The purpose of scenic design is revelation: scenes should be designed so as to maximize information coming from the center, which is to say anomalies generated by the selvings across those scenes. We...

It’s convenient and accurate enough to speak about the civilizational war in the West in terms of nationalism vs. globalism/imperialism or alt-right vs. SJW. A more comprehensive approach, though,...

It seems to me that the desire for fame and the corresponding resentment towards others for one’s anonymity that Eric Gans identified as “the fundamental human value” and the source of the “radical...

Jacques Derrida’s concept of “logocentrism” posits that Western metaphysics presupposes that writing is a representation of speech, and therefore approximates speech in a secondary, dependent way....

He's arguing that before they were in conflict they didn't even exist as separate categories--the point of the book seems to be to show how that worked.

I’m much more interested in what is going on in Wisconsin than in the Middle East. The Middle East is the business of Middle Easterners now—America gave up its pretentions as a superpower, or leader...

The centrality, to our political discourse, of Muslim terrorism based, not just on claims of retaliation for past or present transgressions, but on assertions of the universal jurisdiction of the...

At a certain point in thinking through the question of “gay marriage” I realized that there was a way out of the double bind the victimary continually, and usually successfully, impose upon the...

I’m going to follow up on this definition of the “market” that I offered in my “The Event of Technology” post: “what people without direct authority for maintaining the social center do with...

If there is, and must be, an unsupervised arena within a broader supervisory frame, then within that arena there is exchange and the reciprocal assessment of value. Even in a Soviet prison camp, priso...

First I've seen him

I found myself with the phrase constituting the title of this post at the end of my previous post, as a distillation of the pedagogical order to be strapped into the technomedia order, a distillation...

Continuing to pursue the Holy Grail, or the white whale, whatever the case may be: a complete, self-generating, perfomative discourse on language drawn entirely out of the originary hypothesis and...

The articulation of ritual, juridical and scientific scenes I’ve been working on the last few posts open up a new approach for a discourse on media. I’ve been working with the ritual/myth binary,...

I would like to complement [my earlier discussion of media](https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/media-as-infrastructural-translation), which situated the operations of media within a juridical...

It seems to me we have a very simple way of speaking about “media” in a way consistent with GA: the “media” is whatever enables the constitution of a scene. A sign directs participants on a scene’s...

I seem to remember Gans saying that, but I don't think he's ever really insisted upon it and, anyway, by "speech scene" I would mean articulate speech, so, long after the originary event. Ultimately, ...

The last (Grammar of Technology) post suggests avenues of inquiry that would tie together on a higher level all the center study idioms I’ve been developing the last few years. First of all, it opens...

Well, this account is friendly to Mercer, but makes it clear that Mercer, above all, is terrified of appearing to be out of the "mainstream." Vox Day was clearer about it--Mercer is a standard liberta...

without the sparkling clean conscience. I certainly agree with Eric Gans’s latestChroniclethat the emergent post-victimary tendencies, indeed, any post-victimary tendency, would have to re-privilege...

The Mercers seem to be pretty determined and fearless patrons

Mimesis, the Center and Auto-Immunology: A Review of Daniel Ross’s Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps Toward a Metacosmics. Open Humanities Press 2021. Adam Katz Department of English Quinnipiac...

There are two kinds of moral innovations: one, upward, in which more distance is created between desire and appropriation; and the other, downward, in which that distance is shrunken by the violation...

Let’s imagine a scene, let’s say an accident on the side of the road: a few people rush to the scene and start helping the victims; if a few more come and there is nothing more for them to do for the...

To act morally is to sustain the center, which means sustaining, repairing and extending the shared attention or linguistic presence that relies on the center. It’s possible to get more granular...

The ritual order provided models, along with comprehensive initiatory practices to enable members of the community to adopt and inhabit those models. The demise of the ritual order means the end of...

I actually didn't give it much thought, but "one" already takes it out of the second person into the third, so it's already general.

I’m planning to now transition into a series of posts that will be modeling the work of Thirdness, so as to make the project plausible and interesting, and highlight what is innovative in it. I have...

Starting to answer the question of how to model Thirdness, in particular the justice realizing into suspending notion of data exchange, quickly led to the conclusion that in the place of anything...

At one time I set myself the task of generating a discourse on social reality completely in terms of the originary hypothesis—that is, without any supplementations or borrowings from other social...

Let’s begin with some of what we know about money from Richard Seaford’sMoney and the Early Greek Mindand David Graeber’sDebt: The First 5,000 Years: it doesn’t emerge out of barter, through a...

The concept of “moral equality” is very similar to the concept of “social justice” insofar as both manage to be tautological and oxymoronic at the same time. “Justice” is intrinsically “social,” so...

If morality entails maintaining linguistic presence, then a further exploration of morality in these terms would look into the strengthening and extension of linguistic presence. We’re rarely in...

No theory of government could be more insistent than liberalism that government must be morally neutral, and not choose between different versions of the “good life.” And no form of government is...

An always accessible starting place for disclosing imperatives from the center is whatever you happen to be looking at, talking about, or thinking about at the moment. If you are looking at...

Hereis what is meant to be a more minimal (7 point) program aimed at creating a “big tent” for the Alt-Right. Particularly worth pointing out here is a direct approach to the question of internal...

One conclusion from the election results that conservatives seem to find comforting is that it still appears as if the U.S. is a “center-right” country.  The proof of this lies in polling revealing...

Declarative sentences appear to be representations of a reality independent of the speakers, and they are that, indirectly; directly, though, declaratives are inquiries into imperatives. To put it...

To imitate is to take imperatives from the actions or another—this first of all must be taken in a very literal and local sense: you see the other smashing a coconut with a stone and you are told by...

The thinking behind my most recent post was that the possibility of a systemic collapse of the contemporary market/democratic system can’t be discounted; that if such a collapse takes place life will...

Ultimately, it will be a question of which tradition can best synthesize or "translate" the others.

We live in a time when it is plausible to ask about every thought that comes into your mind, “who wants me to think that?” And, then, once you realize that, to inquire into the various means by which...

I suppose that all goes back to Stoicism and, yes, on an individual level that can be cultivated. That's part of what's involved in virtual or potential disciplinary space. It's a matter of controllin...

Everything is nothing but the unfolding of its event of origin. To know something is to know its origin; even more, it is to participate in its origin. Constitutive of the originary hypothesis is the...

Only the origin of a social order can "justify" that order. At the same time determining the "real" origin can be inconclusive and therefore divisive. Nor can we hold on to rituals that purport to go...

Like other formerly arcane theories that have now become part of everyday political discourse (e.g., the multiplicity of gender, the pervasiveness of implicit racism), “narratology” had a long...

The alt-right presents itself as a nationalist revolt against globalism; its most direct target, meanwhile, are the SJWs, or the victimocracy. We can square these claims by replacing “globalism” with...

Feminist critiques of liberalism (like, e.g., Carole Pateman’s) hit on a crucial point: by pointing out that the presumed or iconic liberal subject was the bourgeois male property owner, with no wife...

The alt-right is, as much as it is anything, a call to arms in defense of nationalism against globalism—or, more specifically, the “global elite,” the network of corporate executives, media owners,...

A large part of the problem with victimary thinking is that it, like any tyranny, prevents the system from receiving the feedback it needs. The more things that can’t be said, the more things people...

Back to the problem of the originary hypothesis as an anomaly. The originary hypothesis of the origin of language answers a question which is “real” by any measure: what accounts for the difference...

A very good start. I haven't read this book, but from other things of Dugin I've read, he also puts enormous influence on tradition. I would almost have expected him to name "tradition" the fourth sub...

I have been invited to blog at a new blogging site, connected to the on-line theory journalJournal for Cultural and Religious Theory(incidentally, a journal which I would imagine might be open to...

For anyone interested, I have a new blogging locale, on the Zombies Contentions blog (under Adam K). It’s more directly political, with only a hint of GA (but perhaps I’ll be able to thicken the...

A columnist’s commemoration of the first anniversary of the London subway bombing:I know, I know. Some of you will be shaking your heads now, saying, “Hey, give the Republican anti-terror strategy a...

Although not all academics are radical leftists, all radical leftists are academics, in the sense that they are accepted, and often feted, by the academy. I have long been struck by the extreme...

A headline in my local newspaper today proclaimed “Study finds storm [Katrina] hit blacks harder.”Is anyone else getting tired of these studies, which seem to be appearing in our news now on a daily...

David Olson makes nominalization, in particular the nominalization of verbs, central to his theory of the metalanguage of literacy. To review: the metalanguage of literacy supplements those elements...

I’ll begin by doubling or, maybe, by this point, tripling or more down on couple of basic idioms or hypotheses. First, and most central, singularized succession in perpetuity—recently, in the course...

Our understanding of victimary thinking cannot be considered complete until we have accounted for the category of “cool,” which has proven to be extraordinarily enduring and generative. I wonder how...

“The Muslim position is a powerful attraction for the marginal (collectively and individually) and the disaffected. What it lacks, in its obliteration of the anthropological connection between God...

This will be a short post. I think I have a simple way of addressing the issue of obedience and disobedience to the center more minimally than I have done so far. Both my recent incorporation of...

I will just mention that my reason for linking to this is that it's the first attempt that I've seen by a "legitimate" academic (i.e., Brahmin) to deal with thinking beyond the "establishment" right o...

Two speeches given the same day in response to the shootings in Tucson; one, by all accounts, brilliant, Presidential, conciliatory, the other, by most accounts, petty, small minded and self-serving....

I hadn’t fully realized it before reading the text of Obama’s speech in Cairo but what is certainly most interesting, in my view at least, about Obama’s rhetoric is his sense no issue has been...

Morality always has to be grounded in deferral--the deferral of some mimetic rivalry that would lead to a crisis of the community. In more advanced societies, this primarily means deferring scapegoati...

Islam has been making steady headway in increasing its numbers in the West not only through a higher birthrate but through conversion, which has apparently accelerated since 9/11.  I would present,...

For a while, when I was first familiarizing myself with GA, terms other than “deferral,” especially “resolution,” would creep into my thinking about the originary sign and scene, and noticing this...

Even a "native" king can be represented or "remembered" as a stranger king, for the reasons you give.

In the panel at the recent GASC conference on a Substack essay I wrote on “resentment,” I began by asking “what is the other of resentment” before realizing that an answer was built into the title of...

The word “cant” has two meanings, which are distinct but have an important area of overlap: on the one hand, “hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political...

I’ve centered the juridical, elevating it to co-equal status with the ritual and disciplinary, while recognizing that the juridical is both a later development (certainly than ritual, but even the...

A little kerfuffle in a tiny corner of the art/literary world seems to me to bear some significance worth exploring. The conceptual writer Vanessa Place has been removed from the Association of...

The proper use of the declarative sentence is, first of all, to expose the ostensives and imperatives embedded in another declarative sentence. A declarative sentence is the tip of an iceberg. It...

Thanks, glad to hear it (even if I can't take credit for it).

If power is subordinated to a higher principle or purpose, like freedom, or peace, or the greatest good of the greatest number, or equality, or the protection of rights, then it will eventually turn...

First of all, we just received a very valuable lesson in the efficacy of scapegoating:  the singleminded hatred of Bush cultivated by the Left over the past 8 years has translated directly into the...

http://www.newenglishreview.org/

According to Jacques Godbout, in his The World of the Gift, the distinctive form taken by the gift in the modern world is the gift to strangers—everything from philanthropies to blood and organ...

I'll mention that we have discussed the possibility of a new edition of *Originary Thinking*\--in principle, Gans would like to do it. Omnicentrism, yes, but some centers are more central than other...

One of the many interesting features of Colin Drumm’s doctoral dissertation, _The Difference Money Makes_ , is an extended discussion of the interlocking of problems of monarchical succession with...

Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage and her associated analyses of the English language should be devastating to the modern social sciences. All of those moral and political principles...

I am currently working with the hypothesis that since the fall of sacral kingship human beings have had no idea what we are doing, politically, and that post-sacral kingship history has been a...

I don't think networking provides the best criterion for locating the center--even keeping in mind that a revolution upsets the center, and may generate several possible centers. Washington was comman...

The new edition of *The Origin of Language* is out. I'm going to have a bunch of copies which I'm happy to sell at cost (i.e., to me) which is a bit cheaper than on Amazon, if anyone's interested.

We have an interesting paradox that follows from the originary hypothesis: we need to describe deferral, on the face of it a negation of action, as a mode of action, or agency. GA is going to...

I’ve been positing what would have to be seen as fairly radical “post-economics” theory in some recent posts and it seems like a good time to see if I can focus on it directly and in a sustained way...

Anyone interested in what my originary grammar is doing at the moment, here is my latest post on JCRT Livehttp://jcrt.typepad.com/jcrt_live/2009/03/originary-grammar-part-2.html

The highest purpose of political discourse is to expose the political imaginaries of everyone participating on the scene. How do you solicit someone’s political imaginary? Very simple—ask them what...

Looking it over, the problem is really with any explicit agreement: either the two parties themselves decide what it means, in which case each has an interest in its interpretation and you just genera...

Continuing the line of inquiry intitated by Eric Gans’ Chronicle, “The Four Freedoms,” we can suggest that the three main linguistic forms correspond to three modes of political accountability.  The...

Here’s a paper I just read at the American Comparative Literature Assoication conference:If the post-colonial is located within the common, if asymmetrical, mimetic space including colonizer and...

I’m going to keep at this until I get it right; “this” being the use of language as a model for technological and scientific inquiry. Let’s review: “technics” is the scenic design component of the...

The originary hypothesis repels the kind of initiatory revelatory “download” that is nevertheless the only way of understanding it. Eric Gans, and with him every participant in GA will insist that GA...

If you're getting objections at that level of technicality, then it seems to me you've already laid quite a bit of groundwork. What I'm seeing is mostly at the level of "this doesn't fit any philosoph...

A streamlined way to think about the political future is to figure out the various paths by which the originary hypothesis would be the unquestioned common sense of a new global order....

A while back, in a post entitled “A Unified Field Theory of the Left” I concluded with the following definition of the Left:The Left is obedience to the imperative to expose the products of...

In my latest essay for Anthropoetics, I argued for a language or semiotic based notion of ethics, piecing together the concepts of joint attention, language learning, disciplinarity, and what I...

Once you begin retrieving the concept of “civilization” as a core concept of social thought you start to suspect that most of the theoretical discussions of civilization, and many of the more...

The progression from defilement, to sin, to guilt serves an index of the progression from the ethical to the moral—that is, from imperatives issued by the center (and materialized in ritual forms) to...

The notion, put forward in Eric Gans’ latestChronicle(349http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw349.htm), that global warmism (as the latest and most succesful incarnation of the religion of...

The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in _Genesis_ has been a bit of a stumbling block for me since I started rethinking the Hebrew Bible in terms the realization that, first, it was...

Everybody is saying the same thing as everybody else: I’m going turn this into a theoretical starting point. It’s better than the founding principles or telos of any other mode of thought. It’s both...

Originary Technics A paradoxical effect of the spread of writing was to produce a conception of the self as constituted by an inviolable interiority: the subject who speaks (really, reads and...

Are you now, or have you ever been, a Zionist?That, today, would be the most likely form of that “infamous” inquisitorial query—there are many situations today in which very few people would be...

Metaphysics is the assumption of the primacy of declarative sentence.  What is the source of this assumption; and what is our concern with it?  Is it simply that metaphysics is wrong in its occlusion...

The Oulipo group has already spawned a variety of spin-offs: oubapo (comics); oupeinpo (painting); oucuipo (cooking); oumupo (music); outrapo (drama), and at least several more. All one needs to...

Just happened to come across a couple of tweets I thought people might find interesting. It's good to know who's talking about Neo-absolutism and GA. Cernovich's seemed to me probably part of some dis...

If the signifying paradox is constitutive of the human, then humanistic inquiry, or the human sciences, really involves nothing more than exposing and exemplifying that paradox in forms where it had...

I want to distinguish between an established, ordered space (the discipline), on the one hand, and the process of discovery that can and at times must run counter to that space (the disciplinary space...

Words like “spirituality,” “religiosity,” “faith” and so on, insofar as they refer to something, refer to a dwelling within and refusal to suppress the constitutive paradox of the human. That paradox...

Rituals are reproductions of the originary scene, at first aimed at reinhabiting the remembered scene to defer new instances of violence, and then to make the deity appear and bless and strengthen...

As I work to integrate debt and money into center study I get to the point where these concepts need to be articulated more fundamentally, in terms of originary grammar. For Brett Scott, the issuance...

The almost unanimous conservative euphoria over Rand Paul’s filibuster the other day seems to me an odd thing. More precisely, it seems to me delusional, and therefore demanding understanding. Much...

I’d like, here, to think through more thoroughly than I have so far the problem of identifying technology with the imperatives and doing so within the terms of originary grammar (the sequence of...

I have been using “perfecting the imperative” as an idiom for technology for a while now and have started to pursue it further in some recent posts, in part by refining it through the concept of...

I pointed out a couple of posts back that virtually the entire “spiritual” vocabulary we have inherited from scripture was derived from other socio-political institutional relationships: roughly,...

The world presents itself to us, through our signs, as an array of probabilities and thresholds. If there is a genuinely postmodern mode of thought, that is, one that comes after modernity, and is...

I think he passes a little too quickly over some of our present difficulties, but here is a powerful, unconflicted defense of the Bush Doctrine from the godfather of the neo-conservative...

A marginalist politics begins with the observation that any situation can be reduced to a binary:  do a or b.  Even there are, in principle, many choices, as soon as you inch closer to one the world...

We will only have moved beyond metphysics once we have inculcated ways of describing thinking as a series of moves with and within language and, more broadly, semiosis.  Anything is meaningful to the...

The most exemplary declarative probably issues from the ideal court when it simply declares what the lawis:  “statute x violates the First Amendment”; “y has no standing to speak here”; “fact z is...

What I called in my previous post (Political Syntax I) “mythical” declaratives I am now going to call “naive” declaratives; what I called there “legal” declaratives, I am now calling “normative”...

I take Eric Gans’ distinction between popular and high culture as axiomatic:in popular culture, the audience identifies with the lynch mob, while in high culture they identify with the victim.It...

A very thoughtful discussion of scapegoating and reality-avoidance in today’s world.http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/4884201.html

Eric Gans noted a while back that the first “market” was war, insofar as value is established through competition in a public space. According to that criterion the market can be traced further, to...

Michael Haneke’sCachéis one of the more interesting recent French films, even more interesting if you also watch the 20-minute interview with the German filmmaker. If I had more time I’d write...

Power has always been a bit of a mystery for political thought—some people do what other people say—why? Maybe because they will be harmed if they don’t obey—but that just means that the person...

I have always operated as if, since the originary hypothesis founds a new form of thinking that is essentially indigestible by the existing disciplines, and therefore necessarily at odds with those...

Eric Gans has a compelling hypothesis regarding the form of our present disorder that I’d like to give more consideration than I have done thus far. Gans has been emphasizing the enormous economic...

In hisChronicle of Love & Resentment No. 531 (January 14, 2017), “Paradox and the Sacred,” Eric Gans reminded us of the centrality of paradox to all things human. Mimetic structures are themselves...

http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2302/2302katz/

Power and ParadoxAdam KatzThe liberal world order presents itself as a vast mapping of“rights.” No political or social question can be discussedwithout being framed in terms of “rights”—someone’s...

Eric Gans published an essay titled “On the One Medium” in a book on Girard’s mimetic theory and media (Mimesis, Movies and Media, 2015) that I just had a chance to read and is worth discussing here....

I’ve written this post in response to the following comment on the Absolutist Neoreaction reddit page:I’ve noticed that even in your recent articles there’s something still off. That’s in regards to...

I have wanted to write an originary account of the health care debate for awhile, but perhaps this piece I wrote for the Zombie Contentions blog can stand in for it until I get arround to writing...

Idioms as samples and samples as currency: that’s the marker I’m going to lay down here. Currency can certainly be organized around bets on the future: that’s what derivatives are, and there’s a lot...

The more all activity is carried out through collaboration between well organized and future-oriented teams, the less money is needed to mediate exchange. It's not exactly barter or communal (e.g., li...

Equality simply means the same, in some respect. If you see equality as a value in itself, there’s no reason not to make people equal in more and more respects. Making people equal in more and more...

One of the major conservative objections to Donald Trump’s campaign was that his speech and action so often violated conservative “principles.” Any conservative worth his (or hers; or zir) salt can...

The question of whether to “privilege” production or consumption seems to have been definitively laid to rest—it was originally a Marxist inspired debate that became tangled and paradoxical to the...

Before and after will have been the same; the part of all is the same; doing and happening are the same. This is the basic programming language, which we can articulate with connectors like “such...

Technology is governance, and so is media. The study into the perceptual, cognitive, emotive, limbic and so on transformations wrought by the successive media, beginning with writing, then print, and...

I am trying to provide programming language for bettering our relation to the center. Humans have never left the originary scene; rather, humanity has been an ongoing attempt to better the terms of...

For originary grammar, the history of civilization is the history of the distancing of the declarative speech form from the imperative. In the mythical and magical world, declaratives are subordinate...

There's much to study there, but today's wasn't bad: Beautiful weather all over our great country, a perfect day for all Women to March. Get out there now to celebrate the historic milestones and unp...

Here’s the problem I’m trying to solve: absolutist ontology implies a specific way of thinking, which we could call “the supplementation of sovereignty.” This way of thinking assumes that the...

Jones's myth is a product of writing--that's where concepts referring to "inner" states and processes come from. Once you have these concepts you do have to posit something like "hidden episodes," and...

The question of speech or, to evoke post-structuralism, the sayable, is now to be pursued more thoroughly on the terrain of the expectant scene, credit and originary grammar. Obviously free speech...

The reason why there is such a thing as politics, which we might define as “consequential disagreements” (that is, disagreements whose settlement is imposed on all parties), is uncertainty about...

A simple way of distinguishing Left from Right: the Right believes in property and the Left doesn’t. What does it mean to believe in property? That there are things that can only be used and enjoyed...

We can concentrate all the modern, liberal freedoms and rights into the right to own property: that is, the granting of exclusive use to that which cannot be used without depriving others of its use....

What we might call the “cereal wars” has the Breitbart website pitted against the Kelloggs corporation, which has piously announced that it will no longer advertise on the honey badger website since...

The line of inquiry, which I suppose could be called “psychological,” but perhaps would better be called, using a term I have come across in some radical writers, “psychogeographical,” I have...

A few years ago, I saw someone with a T-shirt that had nothing but the words “Us vs. Them” on it. It seemed both meaningful and meaningless, so I gave it some thought. Us vs. Them is, first of all,...

John O. McGinnis’ “Age of the Empirical” in the new (June/July 06http://www.policyreview.org/137/mcginnis.html) issue ofPolicy Reviewraises some important questions for Generative Anthropology....

What is a man? What is a woman? What is marriage? It might very well be that asking these questions, much less trying to answer them, now counts as a micro-aggression in the University of California...

Here's the way I think about it. There is always a center in any human interaction. In hierarchical social orders there is a social center and this position is always occupied by a central authority. ...

I’m going to take a highly speculative look at a Biblical story that puzzles me, in part because I see so little scholarly interest in it despite its obvious (to me, at least) importance: Abraham’s...

It is becoming clear that a country can have Muslims, or it can have Jews, but it can’t have both. It may be when Muslims reach a certain percentage of the population, or when the Jewish/Muslim ratio...

It seems rather paradoxical to be a reactionary explicitly promoting absolute sovereignty while simultaneously being radically, inalterably opposed to actually existing sovereignty. If sovereignty is...

While commenting on a political blog recently (a habit I contracted during the election campaign and now find it hard to break) I was led to repeat an argument for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that I...

The ether is replaced by the constancy of the speed of light; phlogiston is replaced by oxygen; and, of course, geocentrism is replaced by heliocentrism. In each case, critical experimental results...

There's a probably minor technical problem with the blog--I asked Gans about it, and he said UCLA was doing some update and it should be working in a couple of days. More than a week later and it's st...

All exchanges end symmetrically, but, once they are no longer bound by ritual, they must begin asymmetrically.  If the forms of the hunt are prescribed, along with the manner of distribution...

The basic problem addressed by Tallis, it seems to me, is how matter becomes subjectively conscious. I say “subjectively” because we can’t directly observe the consciousness of another living being,...

In one of Kurt Vonnegut’s science fiction novels, some aliens hear the story of Christ, and their take on his story is that the people who crucified Jesus picked the wrong person to crucify, since...

How to replace a liberal democratic regime with an absolutist one? We’re clearly not thinking in terms of a revolution, which would replace the liberal democratic regime with an even more radically...

It’s common to hear some event or discussion denounced as a “distraction.” A distraction, presumably, from what is really important. A distinction between what is more and what is less important is...

I'm dealing with the problem of being unpredictable. Not in the sense of being random, but of having agency that can't be reduced to socio-political predictive mechanisms. Being unpredictable in this ...

All the civil society institutions are effective because they have allies within the governing institutions--in most cases, a majority, in some an overwhelming majority. (The civil society path may ha...

I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the past few posts the literary group Oulipo (the Workshop for Potential Literature), which devises rules and procedures for composing literary texts. I have...

The proper response to any claim we wish to take seriously is to inquire into its possible operationalizations.  If you mean wht you say, in other words, what would it mean–construct for me an event,...

I can't disagree with any of that. At some point Gans's books should be cracked. For thinking through absolutism and reaction in particular, I would recommend The End of Culture and Science and Faith....

Yes, I'll always be coming back to aesthetics. I've got some discussion of it in *Anthropomorphics*, where I focus mostly on satire, but that by no means exhausts the question. There's an argument to ...

Here is Eric Gans, back in 1998, presenting the problem of resentment in all its knottiness: Resentment is the one category that cannot be deconstructed. Nietzsche, who discovered the power of...

What should we do about resentment? Is there some non-resentful position from which we can ask that question? Interestingly, there may be: among the hundred or so flowers blooming on the right these...

Central to the GA form of Neoabsolutism is the elimination of what I call “supersovereignties”—disciplinary concepts, such as “justice,” “rights,” “equality,” “general welfare,” “popular will,”...

Myths=memes these days, don't they? Developing those seems like an independent sub-project, and one that probably has to come first.

In particular the last paragraph and the discussion of what might be involved in programming a computer to write novels (a very engaging question which I have decided, for now at least, to keep very...

The center is whatever interferes with violent centralization. Think about it this way: have you ever felt (and given into) the temptation to “pile on” someone who is being criticized, attacked, or...

I think the kind of organization we need is one that does nothing but declare its readiness to take power when the time comes. In the meantime, it does nothing but comment incessantly on the all the i...

Nationalism is where rivalries internal to a social order meet rivalries between social orders—where the internal rivalries are converted to and transcended by (originally through some more or less...

In a book written 28 years ago, David Pryce-Jones critically examined contemporary Arab societies, their pervasive violence and lack of economic-political progress. He also analyzed how the West...

A few posts back I suggested “pointman” as a possible title for the occupant of the center (so I don’t have to keep writing “occupant of the center”) but in doing so I continued to overlook the fact...

Yes

Sacral kingship is the political commonsense of humankind, according to historian Francis Oakley. In hisKingship: The Politics of Enchantment, and elsewhere, Oakley explores the virtual omnipresence...

The religious practices of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism are mostly ritual in many places. But there is a more spiritual strain found in certain sects and their texts: the idea that consciousness itself...

I would like to try out something new for the GABlog:  a minimal approach focusing on brief, sometimes enigmatic or paradoxical, sometimes exploratory, always compact “samples” of political thinking...

Anna Wierzbicka has updated and systematized the sapir-whorf thesis while also identifying a small number (~60) of "semantic primes" that are found in all languages.

I will lay down a marker right away—for me, the main criterion for supporting a Presidential candidate is that he or she knows what the left is; anyone who thinks that a Republican president will be...

Where is Trump’s extra-republican force,asksReactionary Future. Why not take advantage of the increasingly “interesting” Trump campaign to sketch out a preliminary answer? First of all, it’s the...

Don't know, but maybe the creation of conflict-free spaces--scientific, technological, economic modernity without political modernity. If they build it we'll see what the entertainment is like--maybe ...

I think this item is worth a little blog post. Indeed, that people spend their time doing things like this is what sustains my faith in humanity:Oulipo for the masses! This video of Rick Perry,...

One way of summing up my “dissidence” towards the “mainstream” GA represented by Eric Gans would be to distinguish between two ways of understanding “scenic thinking.” For Gans, it seems to me,...

I have never signed on to any political, ideological or spiritual position among those circulating on the right, like Prometheanism or Faustianism, in part because I would anyway have to translate...

It seems to me that we’ve gotten to the point, with the emergence of computing as a “metamedia,” where there’s no basis for distinguishing between “media” and “technology.” All media, including the...

Looking at it now, I would say it's best to understand it as bringing Buckminister Fuller's "technocracy," Veblen and Capital as Power's critique of capitalism as sabotage, and Peirce's understanding ...

The event/scene duality, then, is to run parallel to information processes sifting out noise from communication systems. Posing the problem this way (which must be done just to ensure GA’s...

Eric Gans has a “methodological” position that I would call “semantic leniency”—he’s very resistant to terminological debates, and the notion that developing greater conceptual precision (arranging...

Let’s stipulate that the kind of thinking representing in the letter below (in response to an article critical of “safe spaces” on college campuses), which I found on Mark Steyn’s website, is an...

Are there differences between human groups? A moment’s reflection leads to the conclusion that the question can never be definitively answered in the negative: even if contemporary research showed...

Secularism is a question regarding assessing the modern world but also one more specifically for the originary hypothesis which, you could say, brings secularization to its conclusion and thereby...

The notion of secure vs. unsecure sovereignty has been the most difficult absolutist concept for me to grasp. If sovereignty is conserved, isn’t it by definition secure—if the Supreme Court is...

When we speak about the “arbitrariness” of the sign, someone usually hastens to add that what is meant by that is, of course, its conventionality. “Arbitrary” is the right word, though, for what is...

Everyone is taking selfies, but does that mean that no one is selfy, that is, self-like, anymore? It’s a serious question, even if it is prompted by the hilarious new song (I suppose that’s what it...

For a while I’ve been working with a notion of “practice” dependent upon Alasdair MacIntyre’s definition, which views practices as intrinsically normative and embedded narratively in communal...

There is always a center—the origin of language, which is to say the origin of the human, lies in the shared “positing” of a center. Since then we have gone from one center to another, to another....

I think it will be in the relation between declaratives and imperatives. Instead of purely logical discourse (if x, then y), you have imperatives triggered by fulfilled hypotheticals: if x, do y. That...

The human is that being for whom repetition is problematic. 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 that the meaning of...

Back to this concept (see <https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-sufficiency-of-singularized-succession>) in the light of recent thinking on debt and the center and their implications for thinking...

Assuming the below is correct, does it make Trump more or less powerful? Thomas Wictor‏ @ThomasWictor Follow Follow @ThomasWictor More (7) Tillerson is actually [sic--acting] virtually autonomously...

One of the sponsors on Glenn Beck’s radio show (a show filled with fascinating, idiosyncratic sponsors) is in the “food insurance” business. You can imagine what that is, and you can also grasp the...

What would a market, built into which is an acknowledgement of the market’s dependence on central power, on the one hand, and the long term moral and ethical life of workers and consumers, on the...

You may be right but, as you say, the liberals and democrats would be flipped to absolutism and would therefore no longer be liberals and democrats. Perhaps they wouldn't put up such a big fight along...

In formalist terms, the left is the cadres of militants levied by those elites interested in furthering the power directly exercised by the state over the individual, by undermining intermediate...

At certain points they must recognize that they are dependent upon the very people they vilify and send their minions again. And not only the people--the norms those people represent and defend. All o...

Almost all political discussion today focuses on the official categories of liberal democracy—freedom, equality, consent— and, in particular, violations of these principles, which makes all such...

I suppose one would begin by looking more closely into that "grassroots organization."

My previous post set up a couple of paradoxes, which we can formulate as elements of a historical dialectic.First, I advanced the notion of history as a process of desacralization, or secularization,...

Here’s a simple way of crystallizing the politics of “anthropomorphics”: there is a vertical axis and a horizontal axis; on the vertical axis, we start with the minimal model of an issuer of...

“It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken unawares. Nations and women are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who came along could violate...

To see yourself as an “individual” is to see yourself as a center of attention, with as many qualifications (titles, formal associations, histories) as possible obscured—the more stripped of...

Universalisms and egalitarianisms are poisons injected into the social bloodstream. They are declarations of war upon anything “particular” and any form of (real or perceived) inequality. But all...

The anarchist always targets a specific institution--a business, law enforcement, a university. In each case, there has to be a command structure, however corrupted or degraded--something makes a univ...

All talk of centrality must come around to being talk of resentment as well. In Gans’s account of the originary scene, resentment kicks in immediately after the center is secured through the issuance...

The establishment of dynastic monarchies, while not to be completely ruled out, as it is the simplest way to guarantee the continuity of the sovereign power, cannot be relied upon as a means of...

Vox Day has often reiterated the Alt-Right position that that identity>culture> politics, along with the corollary that we have moved from an age of ideology politics to an age of identity politics....

On theSlate Star Codexblog, Scott Alexander recently posted an interesting review of James Scott’sSeeing Like a State. Scott is interested in the way in which states, especially modern states, and...

Once we jettison the consent of the governed as a means of determining the legitimacy of government it seems to me that we really have no alternative other than the right of conquest as the basis for...

The pride of the liberal social order is the “rule of law,” or rule by “laws, not men.” How laws can rule without men would be hard to explain. Needless to say, every law is enforced (or left...

The contention that absolutism means arbitrary and therefore irrational rule by the sheer will of one man can be refuted by exploring the necessary embedding of absolute sovereignty in a...

Carl Schmitt took the Greek word “nomos,” usually translated as “law,” but in a broad sense including “norms,” to refer to an originary division of land, a partition, by its first inhabitants....

I’m about a third of the way through Michel Foucault’sThe Courage of Truth.It makes me sorry Foucault didn’t live a few more decades—he was getting interested in some quite interesting things. This...

Very interesting--thanks. Maybe he's right to fear the global spread of regality. If they propose kings, we'll insist that everyone is "really" a king. I don't know why they'd expect to win that game.

Speech is effective, which is to say revelatory and transformative, when it points to some reparable failure of reciprocity—reciprocity that is acknowledged by he who is charged with the failure,...

I’m going to follow up here on the notion of the “grammatical stack,” or the imperative to “line up” the speech forms (ostensive>imperative>interrogative>declarative>imperative>ostensive) so as to...

There's one.

It seems to be pretty widely acknowledged (even by neo-cons like Bill Kristol and Matthew Continetti if only, in the case of the former, to applaud it) that elements of the intelligence services are...

I will look into it.

Wouldn’t the criterion for actions taken by a new Adminstration, bolstered by a solid Congressional majority, which wants to effect fundamental transformation of the American order without tarnishing...

This post could be seen as a “successor” to my previous post on model events insofar as it identifies the kind of event we should be looking towards as models.In arecent postI extended an argument I...

That's a great piece. The problem of succession has to be solved one way or another. If it's not solved by lot, then the successor will either be chosen by the sovereign or someone else. If someone ...

My reading of contemporary history places the events of 9/11 as the pivotal event in the postmodern world governed by Auschwitz theology.  9/11 had, broadly speaking, two possible outcomes:  an...

Whoever first started talking about “society” as a “system” has a lot to answer for. The notion that society functions automatically, that dysfunctions can be repaired, externalities absorbed and...

A central element of the “linguistic turn,” at least in its poststructuralist and postmodernist form, was the critique of “humanism,” taken to be the guiding ideology of the West in the post-WW 2 era...

My first impulse upon reading Eric Gans’ latest Chronicle, “The End of Ideology,” was to take issue with its central claim:  “that Obama’s election weakens the power of victimary thinking, both in...

Ta l k o f t h e C e n t e r ...the social sciences were born on the day when the 'origin of society' was consigned to a desk draw—to the file labelled 'fantasies.'         — Regis Debray Where...

As [Brian Roemelle](https://readmultiplex.com/) points out, at the center of technology now is prompt engineering, which is essentially the designing of search terms that would elicit results from...

In Eric Gans’s analysis, inThe Origin of Language(a new, streamlined edition of which is forthcoming), of the invention/discovery of the declarative sentence he identifies the first act of...

Nick Land, at hisOutside/Insideblog, strikes back againstReactionary Futures:To ignore the historical association of power disintegration with the emergence of self-propelling techonomic competences...

What we speak of as ritual is distribution from the center returning to the center including the process of distributing people so as to manage the distribution and return. Needless to say, this...

Obama is from the 80s Left, not the 60s; I’m not sure how much difference that makes, but it makes some, and seems to be worth a brief post.The 60s Left was actually quite diverse, unpredictable, and...

If we accept the originary hypothesis we accept that, at the most basic level of analysis, there are nothing but events.  Speaking of broader social processes, like the extension of the market...

The “classical” understanding of the aesthetic in GA is that it derives from the oscillation on the originary scene between attention paid to the sign pointing to the central object, on the one hand,...

A while back I worked on singling out [the idiom of...

I’ve discussed Vox Day’s declaration of principles of the Alt-Right and the theses regarding nationalism in particular, but VD’s declaration has been getting a lot of attention and may very well come...

Hillary Clinton has decided to tie Donald Trump to the Alt-Right so that she can run against it, thereby turning this election into a case (for those who remember the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race)...

I’ve been meaning to continue my discussion of the hidden infrastructures of civilization that the victimocracy has been seeking to suppress all memory of while in fact facilitating their...

5/9/25, 2:43 PMThe Anthropoetics of Power – The Journal of Neoabsolutism Page 1 of 23https://thejournalofneoabsolutism.wordpress.com/2017/05/02/the-anthropoetics-of-power/ The Anthropoetics of Power...

I don't think the sovereign can be a corporation, for this reason. The sovereign is a "legal entity," insofar as each new sovereign doesn't just spring from the ground and rule based completely on his...

Speaking intuitively rather than statistically, one effect of the recent fighting that gives me some ground for hope is that is has inaugurated a new sense of community among those who become aware...

When we speak about the absolutism of central power, the point is less that whatever the occupant of the center says goes (so that if something he says doesn’t go he must have said the wrong thing,...

Yes, there's some technical problem with the blog. I've notified Eric, and the guy who was responsible for managing it last time there was a problem, so I assume that whoever looks into these things w...

This gives me a lot to think about. Thanks.

Considered at its most minimal, language is grounded, as Michael Tomasello along with Eric Gans has shown, in joint attention—the capacity to pay attention to the same thing at the same time, to know...

No, the sentence works as far as I can see--is it the "attending to and neither controls" that seems a problem?

Thanks. I'll have to go back and take a fresh look.

As sacral kingship disintegrated, and the unity of the sacred and social centers was dismembered, the response in the late middle ages in the West was to retrieve the originary scene. Going back to...

That's a way of speaking about the originary scene--anything one says about the originary scene will be universal in the sense of applicable to all scenes. The Big Scene is specifically post-Big Man, ...

Do you know about this guy: https://www.amazon.com/Fascism-Total-Society-Codex-Fascismo-ebook/dp/B00FEZRRLQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1493841064&sr=8-2&keywords=h.r.+morgan He has about 5 b...

I have been diligently reading the post-mortems by conservatives and Republican partisans the past couple of days and one thing seems to me undeniable:  the Republican defeat means the end of the...

I’ve been insisting for some time that what makes language language is that we can say “this is the same.” No non-human form of communication allows for this. I’ll leave aside for now the question of...

A while back I formulated the concept of the “sovereign imaginary.” This concept represents the assumption anyone makes who expresses a desire or some resentment, who says “we should…” or “someone...

Well, first we need to keep our own thinking straight. I agree with your opening analysis, but the point is not to be pragmatic in that immediate way. It's a question of having a way of being consis...

It's a very promising line of inquiry. I think of centered ordinality as a way of representing hierarchy (first, second, third...), so I'm not sure every position within a centered ordinality has to h...

We’ve all heard people debate the question of whether Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” applies to the current “war on terror.” As in mostdialogues de sourdsthere is a better answer than...

These are not normal times.  It would be a mistake, I think, to see the Democrats gaining a majority in the House or Senate as the standard,...

Eric Gans, in his reading of theIlliadinThe End of Culture, identifies the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon as one between “value” and social order. “Value” here simply means being more...

I have just read _A Critique of Natural Language: Human Being: The Species that Begat Itself a Future_ , by Willem Ernst van der Roest. I did so because the book, published in 2010, was one of a very...

Thanks. No, I'm going with "Originary Hypothesizing" for now. Back to origins.

Yes, that's the way it works--the link is to another website--but I suppose you could just keep two windows open. For me the most important posts are the ones where I make originary grammar do some ...

Power operates top-down, but down below we can give power centers ready to be activated. Liberalism has infiltrated all institutions, but it can never completely conquer them because liberalism is...

In Nathanael West’s 1939 novelThe Day of the Locust, he poses the serious question, whether modern society is capable of deferring the violence that it provokes. Describing a mob scene at a Hollywood...

If declarative sentences are inquiries into imperatives, it is also through declarative sentences that we engage in inquiries into declarative sentences. We can hypothetically construct any sentence...

Power has to figure out what it wants. We can say, "power wants what will help it stay in power," but that just rephrases the question. How does power know *that*? Does power want to hold onto or incr...

Yes, what's most interesting is straightforward claim that only divine kingship could keep the debt system under control. Fast forward to today, and it becomes "a strong democratic regime," which is r...

One thing that all the American nationalists I have come across recently have in common is their insistence on non-intervention abroad. The nationalists can often sound like leftists in their...

I finished it much more quickly than I anticipated, so, here’s my paper (with a very slight, but significant change in the title) for this year’s conference at High Point. If you all read it in...

The disciplines claim knowledge of the mind, the social, religion, customs, the state, beauty and so on, as things in themselves, while for the disciplinary space of originary thinking the practices...

We are not free, autonomous centers of moral and intellectual activity; nor are we talking apes, whose behavior can be explained by its adaptability to evolutionary pressures, which have caused...

Not that specifically, not yet. I just read the Olson book recently. But I do always focus on an equivalent distinction: familiar/unfamiliar, grammar/meaning, or some kind of "translation" from one "l...

Post-gift economy, there are two ways of organizing economic relations:through the free market, or bureaucratically.Bureaucratic economics, the “command economy,” organizes distribution of labor and...

I made a comment on Matt's post, which hasn't shown up yet. I didn't save it, and it disappeared as soon as I submitted it, so if it doesn't show up in a while I'll try to reconstruct it and maybe pos...

The ends of humans lie in their origins: representation as the deferral of violence. Teleology and morality are fully implicit in the originary structure. The deferral of violence through...

The Esthetic, the Sacred, and Originary Modernity Adam Katz Department of English Quinnipiac University Hamden, CT 06518 Adam.Katz@quinnipiac.edu In a fairly recent Chronicle of Love & Resentment...

Insofar as power is desacralized, there is nothing but mutually hostile “interests” engaged in struggle over the decaying corpse of the social body; at the same time, power is never genuinely...

When i think of probability, I'm generally thinking of Peirce, without claiming expertise in his philosophy. But here, though, I don't think that's so important. What's important is, first, turning b...

Here’s an essay that raises the level of discussion, in many ways; note, also, its call for “anthropology” (even though it means that more in the sense of...

[Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison] Kevin Barrett told a Milwaukee talk show host in June that he believed that the U.S. government used “controlled demolitions with explosives” on...

Of course not–that’s why insults to the prophet need to be avenged.Now, I’m not saying that Obama wants insults to the prophet to be avenged, just that his way of thinking perfectly complements those...

The question it occurred to me someone might ask after reading my last post was, “can’t there be too much deferral”? After all, you eventually have to eat, or respond to a threat (or blow), right?...

Assume, as per the Girardian account of human origin, that there can be no originary scene without a scapegoat; further assume, contra Girard, that the crucifixion of Jesus was just one more in a...

Pursuing my distinction between hostage-taking, as the form of politics characteristic of barbarism (or the gift economy, or honor society), on the one hand, and submitting to the third party, as the...

It seems to me that Julia Kristeva was on to something important in her Lacanian-Maoist synthesis in the 60s and 70s, a synthesis predicated upon the notion that desire “pulverizes” what Kristeva...

Here’s why I talk so much, and so abstractly, about language: my goal is to develop a way of thinking that would really be a way of speaking and writing that would dismantle and reassemble the...

I’ve been stuck on my definition of technology (the primary one among others yet to be fully integrated) as the perfection of the imperative since I formulated it because, as I now realize, in part...

We all know Marshall McLuhan’s catchphrases: “the medium is the message,” “global village,” “the content of one medium is another medium,” etc. I don’t know of any theory of media that has...

No Jouvenel in index, but looks maybe interesting.

It's very hard to imagine a stance like this from a POC office holder in the Democratic party in the US. She's either more independent than anything we see here or the liberals in Canada are less tigh...

Steve Sailer speaks often of the alliance of the wealthiest and most powerful with the poor and marginalized against the middle—what he calls the high-low alliance (and sometimes “the coalition of...

There’s a kind of spatial problem involved with speaking of the center and I think I’m ready to resolve it at this point. What I mean is that “the center” is always what draws your attention right...

Eric Gans’ talk at the Ottawa GA conference on June 20 (http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw375.htm) articulated the problem of victimary discourse in relation to the originary scene in what, I...

Any functional sign must involve the following:1)The possibility of being a lie (I borrow this from Umberto Eco’sA Theory of Semiotics).There are better ways of putting this, as “lie” presupposes a...

A practice, as I have been using the term, is doing something so that something happens as a result of what you have done. The better the practice, the more it is reduced to only those means that...

Yes, a long time ago, and I also did some work on the paradoxes of self-reflexive narration. Yes, there's still a lot to do with paradox, which has always been central to GA, but I wouldn't have much ...

To my knowledge, no one has ever placed the transition of power at the center of political theory—neither as an explanatory principle distinguishing regime forms from each other, nor in normative...

This very vigorous and relentless probing of basic neoabsolutist concepts is very valuable, and we should always be doing that. The question of which unanswered questions discredit a theoretical disco...

A new journal:https://thejournalofneoabsolutism.wordpress.com

We'll have to think about what the counter-protests would be protesting, exactly. The grounds would be other than "equality," because the left can't be one-upped on that. It would have to be something...

I think you need to break it down into separate games, in each of which all of the players would have the same role--a game for kings, a game for capitalists, a game for generals, etc. If everyone has...

In his latest “Civilization in Crisis” Chronicle, Eric Gans addresses, forcefully and generously, the theory of the left I have been advancing in these blog posts. Gans seems to find my definition...

The Linguistic Turn and Generative Literacy Adam Katz Abstract: This essay argues that only generative anthropology can complete the “linguistic turn” that has dominated much of 20 th century...

Needless to say, the title refers to the Hebrew bible, about which I will now proceed to speak in highly hypothetical, but hopefully generative, terms. That central to the Bible is a covenant between...

I agree with your reading. Regarding mysticism, Jewish in particular, I've never gotten that interested in it and always thought it was played up by literary critics. Some of it is a way of talking a...

The United States is a pathetic joke of a country. Our political class (but who put them in office?) is paralyzed when it comes to crafting budgets, controlling debt, defending borders, developing...

The consequences, for political thinking, of my centralization of deferral, discipline and civilization in originary thinking, are clear, at least in outline: what is politically legitimate and...

Is there anybody who genuinely supports the free market?  That is, anyone who supports it when free market principles would forbid the bailout of failing financial institution costing one’s life’s...

“Meaning” has come to take on what seem to be two very different, well, meanings: on the one hand, it refers to the shared use of linguistic items—if we know what a word or sentence or passage of...

Formalist reactionary theory addresses the problem of divided, insecure and therefore incalculable power by proposing that all players in the social field be given, explicitly, “title” to the power...

Liberal democracy is constituted by the severing of equality and freedom, which become incommensurable “values” which need to be balanced and one of which must be given priority at any instant. This...

Inmy latest post on self-appification, I proposed that algorithmic inquiry begins with a model event on one side, and actual events on the other side, with the subsequent inquiry identifying markers...

The notion of sovereignty reaches back, in a various forms, to distant antiquity, as does the assumption that the monarch exercises complete power, unlimited by law, but the absolute right of kings,...

A simple way of settling, or at least minimizing, theological disputes, and especially the tiresome atheist vs. theist one, is by replacing the question of whether God exists with the question of...

SJWs always lie. Why? Because they have decided to denounce the differences in civilized capacities (and their fruits) produced by differential discipline as unjust expropriations. It’s not...

The Origin of Language A New Edition Eric Gans Introduction by Adam Katz     Spuyten Duyvil   Editor’s Introduction: The Origin of Language and the Anthropological Imagination   Foreword Chapter 1:...

Reactionary political thinking, which is characterized by the rejection of democracy and equality in favor of the promotion of and rule by the good (in the sense of proficient, intelligent and value...

The origin of the aesthetic lies in the oscillation of the participant on the originary scene’s attention between the sign (the aborted gesture of appropriation) put forth by the other, on the one...

I haven't seen much that has been ruled off-topic here, and i think everyone can agree on the importance of aesthetics. In a sense, I might agree with Gans, insofar as I think institutional spaces s...

The Axial Age can be defined as a new mode of rationality transcending ritual or a kind of secularization in which new modes of universal understanding transcend narrow or “compact” social groupings,...

The far Left and the Libertarian Right converge on the same enemy:the unholy alliance of the State and Big Business.On what victory in the struggle would mean they diverge:the Left, of course,...

Here’s a link to Truepeer’s originary reading of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s review of Lee Harris’ new book,The Suicide of ReasonatCovenant...

Politics is the establishment of an arena in which actors compete perpetually, but with distinctly marked victories and defeats determining the power to make and implement laws, before a qualified...

It is worth noting, about a month before the election, that the central issue in this election happens to be sovereignty. All of the issues Trump really cares about—immigration, trade, wars focused...

In my latest post, I focused on what might be entailed by acceptance of or resistance to the originary hypothesis; I’ll follow up on that now with the more blatantly marketing question, what can the...

Think about how medical treatment currently works—it invariably involves some kind of intervention from the outside. Of course, there’s preventive care, or simply taking care of yourself, by paying...

Ian Dennis, in his GA-informed book,Lord Byron and the History of Desire, concludes by countering an assertion from George Soros that we can have a market economy but not a market society. Dennis...

Thanks

Civilization represents a break from the hostage-taking mode of agreement constitutive of barbarism. Not necessarily a complete break, and never a permanent break, but “enough” of a break. Enough for...

The relations between the gift, the informal, and the formal, capitalist economy can bear a bit more discussion. It is not quite right to call the informal economy a gift economy—transactions will...

The elemental form of freedom is that of the discipline: a shared, inviolate and inexhaustible locus of attention. Sciences are disciplines, developing vocabularies and histories, and framing their...

Disciplinary spaces are both open and closed: when you just enter a disciplinary space, a space with a real focus, an evolved vocabulary, and means—both explicit and tacit—for rerouting the...

We could say that De Soto’s argument for formalizing the informal economy (see my discussion in the first installment of “The Right of the Idiom”) is an argument for integrating the gift economy into...

A few months ago I saw a student wearing a t-shirt with the words “Us vs. Them” on solid background (I don’t remember the color of the shirt or the lettering). It seems to me an example of minimalist...

I have been reading Hernando de Soto’sThe Mystery of Capital, and a striking convergence with Eric Gans’Chronicle#388 on writing suggests itself; and this articulation further intersects with a...

I was very glad to see Kevin Williamson’s article, “The Buchanan Boys,” in today’sNRO. At last, we are getting engaged: the “mainstream” right, represented most prominently by National Review, is...

“Redeem” is word with intertwined economic, political and religious meanings: it means to buy back or to pay off; it means to make up for; it means to buy or recover a slave or hostage; and it means...

Anyone familiar with TV crime shows knows how pervasive the figure of the serial killer has become in American popular culture, and how stereotyped—there is the imputed traumatic foundation of the...

In Terry Teachout’s recent article, he shows that past members of two great orchestras, in Vienna and Berlin, acquiesced and in some cases participated in anti-Semitism during the Nazi reign in...

As I mentioned in “The Originary Hypothesis in Itself,” a participant in the recent GA conference (Dominic Mitchell) referred to the “non-fungibility” of language. He used this term in the context of...

In the course of a recent exchange the discussion came to focus on whether the originary gesture of aborted appropriation could “scale up” all the way to global peace and cooperation, even if never...

Sometimes the Online Etymological dictionary is worth working through carefully. I’ve been centering the word “sample” for a while now, using it, essentially, as a replacement for “sign” or...

Thanks for the response. Yes, I know Mencken's Dictionary of the American Language, but it's been a while. I thought it was great. There should be a Menckenian faction of the DR.

A theoretical claim I have been making since I’ve taken up the originary hypothesis is that the originary scene has never closed. In other words, if we ask, when would the originary event be over and...

There is no inquiry that can’t be reduced to an utterance on a scene. The more you singularize the utterance the more you fill out the scene and filling out the scene evokes and invokes other...

I have relied a lot on the architecture of the declarative sentence, including for the purpose of parsimoniously accounting for the history of media, broadly from orality to literacy to whatever we...

The graded, or staggered, model of action I presented in my next to latest post, and which I have elsewhere called “centered ordinality,” can provide us with a model of thinking along with one of...

Sacrificial as generalization, nominalism as lowering the threshold. I hadn't thought about it that way, but it's interesting (and I suppose implicit in my post). Nominalism in general wouldn't mean l...

We can assume that in any advanced society all members are involved in asymmetrical gift exchanges with the central power, and what we can call an “incommensurable” gift exchange with the infinite:...

How do we recognize the truth? A statement refers to something in the world, and we look at (or for) the referent, and see whether it is there. Or, we look at the different parts of a statement, and...

This will be my first run at Benjamin Bratton’sThe Stack(2016), a book that is extremely interesting in its own right (and likely to continue to be so) while also representing a new area of...

Mumford, yes, Simmel, not really.

I came by the concept of singularized succession in perpetuity in trying to think through the furthest implications of the absolutist politics I wanted to give some finished shape to in completing...

Here’s the strongest argument on the side of those arguing for the spontaneous organization of social relations against those defending an absolutist ontology, which assumes the sovereign center is...

At least one form of modernity, and arguably the dominant form, the one in which the winners in the marketplace become indistinguishable from the state players who determine winners in the...

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Reactionary Future’s explanation for the Black Lives Matter riots brings out the strengths and distinction of absolutism as a theory of social order. I would here like to bring that explanation into...

“Donate your resentment to the center,” one of the first coined idioms of center studies, can now be given a more strictly economic meaning; i.e., it can be tokenized. “Resentment” remains an...

No way of thinking with any chance of helping change the world could ever come from within the established disciplines. One might even say the disciplines are designed so as to prevent the emergence...

Doctrine, theory, philosophy, principles, belief, ideology, etc.—my extraction of anthropomorphics out of GA as a more total reading of the originary hypothesis has been aimed rejecting or, better,...

Imagine a group of ten people. Nine of them, when food is presented, rush straight towards it and grab it greedily, shoving big chunks into their mouth as fast as they can. The tenth waits a minute...

This post continues the thinking initiated in“The Pursuit of Appiness”several posts back. What I want to emphasize is the importance of thinking, not in terms of external attempts to affect and...

I don’t have many good things to say about Woody Allen. For about 35 years now (starting with “Manhattan”) he has, with very few exceptions, in what seems to me the most embarrassingly self-occluded...

I have argued previously for the priority of “attentionality” over “intentionality”—attention must precede intention, and “intention” individualizes what is “joint” in attention, making it more of a...

As I survey the field of thinkers and doers determined not just to complain about “political correctness” but to undertake to destroy it (most exemplarily, Vox Day ofSJWs Always Lie) I notice one...

In the new _Anthropoetics_ : https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2802/ap2802katzbaker/ for free to receive new posts and support my work. Subscribe

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Share | | Subscribe to Chronicles RSS Anthropoetics XXVIII, no. 2 Spring 2023 There Is No Economy but Only the Debt to the Center: Money, There Is No Economy but Only the Debt to the Center:...

According to Marx, in his18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the peasants of France, even though they were the vast majority of the population, “cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.”...

I’d like here to outline a proposal for a company which would put into practice the trajectory of my thinking of the center up until this point, which could start small while containing the capacity...

This will be an essay in method—the method of designing and mining idioms that serve as currency. As part of the case for Thirdness, I proposed establishing bets on curated judgments that are as...

This guy has been working on picking up the slack: [https://onesubjectnotebook.wordpress.com](https://onesubjectnotebook.wordpress.com)

First, imagine a computer which includes complete monitoring of every internal electro-magnetic event, the transistors and memory and so on. We can see the physical arrangement and what happens in...

Once you find yourself in a “reactionary” position, even to the extent of arguing that the latest mode of “liberation” instituted a couple of years ago can and should be reversed you start to...

The most important and definitive thing the occupant of the center does is select the successor who will be most likely to select the successor who will be most likely… This may sound like a very...

The first writing is the first designation of property and the first token of exchange and issuance of debt. Implications must follow from this. When an entry is made of “3 cows” (with 3 ideographs...

We have almost no way, at any level of discourse, of referring to mental and psychological states (thoughts, feelings, desires) or qualities (moral and ethical, character, etc.) other than through...

Traditional logic, a central pillar of metaphysics, involves turning a subject-predicate relation into a definition, and then using that definition to “certify” another subject-predicate relation....

I'll mention it. I didn't know--I doubt he did.

Haun Saussy, in an excellent book on the relation between orality and literacy (and media history more generally), suggests a way of thinking about orality that reframes the whole question. Rather...

Thank you. Where is your work?

I’ve tried this before, and perhaps will have to again, but this is worth doing, even if it takes a few drafts.Most definitions of the Left focus on their obsession with equality, and that’s...

I want to bring into a single idiom the discourse on “media” developed in _Anthropomorphics_ and the discourse on “technics” initiated there but currently under significant refinement and...

The American left’s political program, especially but not only “democratic socialism,” is based on repairing “disparate impact,” which is a polite term for describing discrimination based on race,...

President Trump’s (central, animating) concern for sovereignty, while certainly not aiming at the abolition of democracy, allows us to see the way there through the extinction of the Left that...

Reactionary Futureregularly targets, more or less directly, the conservative aphorism that “politics is downstream of culture,” along with the alt-right version, “identity>culture>politics.” In both...

I’m going to work here on further approximating writing to programming. We have our three co-constitutive categories: ritual (ensuring it will have been the same); the juridical; and the...

I’m going to begin with something I’ve discussed many times before: David Olson’s contention that the scene of writing (it might be more precise to say the scene of prose) is predicated upon the...

I’ll be coming back here to issues addressed in a post from April 9, 2019,“The Big Scene is the Anthropological Basis of Anarchist Ontology,”and which I can now place in the context of the conversion...

Sorry for the repostings--I didn't see it under "New," only when I tried "Hot." If someone wants to delete the extras, please do so--I don't know how.

Here’s an extremely informative essay from the excellent Stanley Kurtz:http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/ID.1498/article_detail.aspAdam Katz

Yes, but i'll just say that as someone who has been trying for more than 15 years to break GA out of its obscurity, it's encouraging to see someone considering it important enough to publicly "debunk....

I think so too (although maybe not so directly connected t the Arab Spring), but what, exactly, do you have in mind?

Yes, there is something very performative (in the speech act theory sense) about what Trump is doing--pronouncement, personnel and policy are all sutured very closely together.

So, that's how bots work? Is it the advertisers that use them?

According to Wikipedia, "cautery can also mean the branding of a human, either recreational or forced." While we're using medical metaphors, "triage" comes to mind as well. Yes, a "fascist" strategy u...

I think we’re all going to be talking a lot about fascism for the forseeable future. Not Nazism, which is really a red herring here.Imperial Energyhas been posting on fascism, presenting a definition...

Eric Gans, in his most recentChronicle, made an argument for considering Donald Trump a “metaconservative,” concerned, albeit perhaps not explicitly, with restoring the structure of compromise and...

Do we need truth? This may be the most interesting of many interesting questions raised by Eric Gans’s latestChronicle, “Civilization in Crisis?”: “Today as at the first human scene, the primary...

What is true? Whatever enables you to further perfect your practice. You have a practice when you can point to something that happens that could only have been a result of something you did. So, if I...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6ZWjBgXFBo&t=57s

From the Reason website (https://reason.com/blog/2015/09/08/the-rise-of-the-culture-of-victimhood-ex):Over at the Righteous Mind blog, New York University moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt is...

In a very interesting (and short) book,Urban Planning for Murder: Murder Fact Event, Aristides Antonas argues that the governing logic of the city is to render murder anonymous, and therefore neutral...

Yes, but it's interesting that they only quote State Department officials, and no one actually in the administration. Technically, of course, the State Department is part of "the administration," but ...

I’m going to begin by doubling down on something I don’t recall mentioning for a while: the principle, or imperative, “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.” I won’t...

The idea that you are writing for a community in order to create value for them is right, and that you do that by pointing to some anomaly in the constitution of the field is also right. His notion of...

The recent dust-up between transgender activists and what I suppose we would have to call “paleo-feminists” (who are retrograde enough to believe that to be a woman is to have a vagina) brings to the...

We could see modernity as a kind of swerve (a “clinamen,” in Harold Bloom’s taxonomy of influence, for all you former English grad students) away from Christianity:  the model of Jesus on the Cross,...

In no particular order I list here, not the only lies spread by the Left (far from it!), but the ones that, it seems to me, have attained total coverage, i.e., that guarantee swift, coordinated,...

Not much new here for GAniks, but here’s my latest post over at zombies contentions:http://zombiecontentions.com/2010/04/18/how-about-victimary-progressivism/

Victimary discourse has its own critique of metaphysics, which I would translate into originary thinking as follows.  Victimary discourse is fundamentally anti-mimetic:  mimesis leads inexorably to...

There have been debates, going back to the 90s, at least, over whether ideologues and political figures should be held responsible for violent acts with which they can more or less plausibly be...

For a while I have tried to figure out how to define Barack Obama politically. “Socialist” is not quite right—he and his party are much more likely to coopt corporations than to take over ownership...

Victims/Perpetrators/Bystanders was the mapping of the world produced by Auschwitz, as represented by the historian Raul Hilberg. This mapping has become canonical, even for those unfamiliar with it,...

Violent ImaginariesPerhaps it has occurred to other members of the GA discipline that the negative pole of the event issuing in the originary sign, that is, the collapse of the proto-human community...

How so? I wasn't thinking about it in that connection. It interested me for two reasons: one, it suggests the possibility of a kind of "reformist" absolutism, that can "inhabit" any system and build u...

Eric Gans has defined metaphysics, historically the dominant mode of Western thought, as the belief that the declarative sentence is the primary form of language. In other words, metaphysics sees...

In my recent articles I’ve working with the assumption that human reality can be comprehended using the categories of the ritual, the juridical, and the disciplinary. I got there from the question of...

One could call it a first principle, and even set up a series of subordinate principles: there is the center, the center gives commands, there is a difference between the command issued and the comman...

I am trying to develop a mode of political thinking that is not a political philosophy. A political philosophy, like any philosophy, has “first principles,” and then starts “deducing” secondary...

Looks interesting--available on libgen.

Trump is supportive of the Saudi-Israeli alliance, which MSB has certainly advanced. Important elements of the state, supported by Obama, supported the Iranians against the Saudi-Israeli alliance. If ...

It may be possible that no one really likes “the market.” Eric Gans identifies as the “constituent hypocrisy” of Romanticism that the romantic stance is predicated upon resistance to the market in...

The spending doesn't need to be exorbitant or overly "conspicuous." Just steady and purposeful. In a deflationary economy, having a lot of cash socked away is good, because it keeps going up in value....

Yes, but your last sentence indicates that monotheism as discovered by the Jews presupposes empire, which is to say a worldly center that equalizes all the margins. (On this definition, any modern sta...

I think the answer to this is the construction of disciplinary spaces, which is, of course, going on. If you just blurt out in the twittersphere, "Obamacare bad!," yes, no one cares, but if you partic...

People acting together itself creates a reality--there is an agent in the world who wasn't there before, and there is therefore a world for that agent that wasn't there before. The center is what w...

I understand that there is a spy movie in which one of the spies is codenamed “Hedgehog” and his fellow spies ask, “what does Hedgehog know?” If anyone knows the movie, please share the title with...

[https://www.amazon.com/Kingship-Politics-Enchantmant-Perspectives-Past/dp/0631226958/ref=sr\_1\_fkmr0\_2?keywords=francis+oakley+sacred+kingship&qid=1555966786&s=books&sr=1-2-fkmr0](https...

There's no need to assume that in an absolutist order the sovereign is constantly deciding about everything afresh and constantly remaking the social order. If traditions continue, it's because the ru...

"Just want to make what we've already got more formal." That's a good way to talk about it. It sounds innocuous enough, but then we could have very interesting conversations about what "formalizing it...

First, a bit of a review of the alt-right, not in terms of beliefs, ideas or opinions, but as a product of the political field generated by the rise of the victimary. Victimary activists discovered a...

This is a little odd, for a essay claiming to break from liberalism: "A language and so a world of violence is being built, one greedy person at a time, one pornographic film at a time, *one racist at...

I would like to try to clarify what is originary and what is not.In one sense, all of culture is originary, in the sense that all of culture can be traced back to the originary scene. But that’s like...

There's no problem with Muslims in particular. I would put it this way: the center, in the sense of THE CENTER, to which all more local objects are ultimately tributary, is the imaginary of a ruler or...

It’s time to try something along the lines of Machiavelli’sThe Prince, or all those “mirrors for kings” they used to write in the Middle Ages—instructions and advice for restoring and maintaining...

I suppose that once we undertake to explain the sacred, we would have to explain it in terms of utility--the survival of the community is useful. The alternative would be to define the sacred as that ...

The King v. Burwell decision affirming the constitutional and legal rectitude of the federal government’s application of Obamacare provides official confirmation of what some of us have known for a...

I'll just mention that Gans has written quite a bit about the Garden of Eden story and it's all very interesting. Here is the most recent (it's two parts, and has a link to an earlier discussion): [h...

I'll add this: [https://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4167](https://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4167) [https://www.jstor.org/stable/41925304?seq=1#page\_scan\_tab\_contents](https://www.jstor.org/st...

I do have a Substack: https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/

The original TOOL and Originary Thinking are downloadable from the Library Genesis site

A masterly summary of the divide from VDH:http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjdhYTI3NWEyMzhkMGVmYjVmZDZkYzFiZmY1MmQzMGM=

As a vacation from the Middle East, this sample of Europe’s historical self-hatred is taken from an interview conducted by the leftish French weeklyLe nouvel observateurwith novelist and world...

Think of it as a first draft. This is probably Gans's most difficult book--a tough place to start. You can comment on his blog--I don't know if he follows this page.

Why Generative Anthropology? – Guest columnist: Peter Goldman Eric Gans This is the text of Peter’s “Introduction to GA,” delivered on June 27, 2013, at the opening of the 7th Annual Generative...

But where do you see this default love and default hatred?

say a few words about the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding “Obamacare”? I’m somewhat detached from it, more so than I would have expected, since I though the Court would overturn the law—I’m...

As readers of my blogging (here and at the JCRT Live blog) and my most recent essay inAnthropoetics(“Marginalist Politics, Originary Grammar”), are aware, I have been compelled to address the issue...

Is it that "good" and "bad" have cross-cultural meanings or that what is considered good and bad varies from culture to culture (and historically)? "Something" is at a minimum a "topic," something yo...

There is no “economy.” There is only, as there always has been, ritual distribution from the center. I’m a little embarrassed that it took me so long, even after replacing the vocabularies of...

The simplest way of speaking about thinking is as an internal conversation (usually, I suspect, if not necessarily, a dialogue). You begin by taking issue with what someone has said and if you can...

It’s the question of the day, and I think I have an answer that is equally descriptive and prescriptive, and will not become less true until we have won the war:We are at war with all those Muslims...

A very common comic device is to place a character who is locked into another, usually archaic or ridiculed, set of manners, habits and assumptions, in a group of normal people. (Don Quixoteis an...

To be a modern individual is to court, if only in the most distant, mild, or simulated way, the risk of being scapegoated.  This is the legacy of the Romantic stance invented by Rousseau, where, in a...

Among the earliest written sentences in the world were those carved into the base of statues of ancient God-Emperors, proclaiming, in the first person, the power, will or accomplishments of the...

I’ve come back on a few occasions to my critique of what I’ve called the “Big Scenic Imaginary”—that is, the representation of the world as a single scene on which unformalized agencies act directly...

An uncharacteristically ambivalent article byDaniel Greenfieldon David Horowitz’s FrontPage website today: usually, Greenfield charges straight ahead, target always in his sights, exposing...

I’ve got a new post over at zombies contentions, if anyone’s interested.

Another post at zombies contentions:http://zombiecontentions.com/2010/05/11/the-pot-calling-the-kettle-mob/

I’m up again at zombies contentions (a rewriting of my recent post here, without the theory). You can find your way, can’t you?