I just thought that by seeing the grotesque human-as-sign as prior to the beautiful sign you are basically splitting the difference between the Girardian intuition that the human begins with human sacrifice and the Gansian retort that it must begin with representation, presumably of an animal.
If I did that, it was by accident. I've been thinking a lot about satire lately, which is something Gans never discusses to my knowledge, but wouldn't every aesthetic representation have to have a satiric dimension? Even if the point of art is to provide you with a new way of shaping your attention, there must be an implicit satire on your previous ways of doing so. Gans does talk a lot about irony, but it seems to me satire includes irony.
I was also rereading the esthetics parts of *Originary Thinking*, and the whole question of the oscillation between sign and object got more complicated. Nothing can be seen other than on a scene, so we need to posit a scene upon which this oscillation is viewed. And, then, what, exactly, do we count as the sign? It seems arbitrary to cut it off at just, say, the finger pointing. We should include the whole posture of the signifying body. After all, if you're on the scene, and you're looking at others, it's to tell whether they're advancing toward the object or maintaining a stance of deferral--the sign would be, you can tell they'd like to advance, as would you, but they're not. So, what would "oscillation" entail in that case? Etc.
But I wouldn't say the "grotesque" implies a body "prepped" for sacrifice. It's not stripped of its defenses, or singled out amongst the others. This is really the symmetry on the scene.
I don't think there was human sacrifice on the originary scene, or for sometime thereafter. But when thinking about how simple "egalitarian" societies are racked with violence because it is so easy to take offense over a "sign" that seems threatening, personally, or to the extra-mundane hierarchy of meta-persons, then aren't we thinking about the seed of what becomes human sacrifice with the advent of worldly big men? If so, wouldn't the grotesque human-as-sign, however symmetrically performed at first, suggest the ease at which one can resent those seen to be in the way of the sacred? Gans likes to point to the predominance of animal figures in cave paintings to argue against the idea that human sacrifice is originary. Fine, but what about the ubiquity of hand stencils alongside those paintings, or of mixed human-animal figures in mythology? Anyway human figures do appear in some pretty old, pre-big man, painting: e.g. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/science/2018/11/07/cave
Maybe--I see what you are getting at, I think. In early egalitarian societies, I suspect there was much more that was grotesque than beautiful or sublime--a lot of ridicule, casual cruelty, bullying, etc. The opening scene of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is very interesting in this regard, and I would assume Mel did his research. It's the kind of thing you could see being carried over into the kind of intense hazing of kings mentioned in the Social Matters essay sent today to the GAlist. And human-animal hybrids would certainly be more grotesque than beautiful--and there's nothing sublime about a raccoon for an ancestor. I also think it's very likely that pre-Big Man peoples actually took their mythology and rituals less seriously than later peoples, and probably didn't mind their rituals and stories shading over into buffoonery and lampoons. Well, I'll keep an eye out for further indications. There maybe is something overly solemn about the way we Gansians, and, even more, the Girardians, tend to view these early scenes.