Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“For generative anthropology, guilt is best understood as a correlate of participation in the originary sparagmos. We understand guilt not as an emotion but, like resentment, as an existential attitude or disposition , a function of the structure of the scene. Where Freud puts the father at the center, in our more parsimonious configuration, originary resentment is directed at the sacred center as such. (The Girardian scapegoat is an emanation of this resentment rather than the other way around.) Since the central object, but not central Being, is destroyed in the sparagmos, originary resentment is followed by originary guilt , both of which are directed not at fellow humans on the periphery but at the sacred center itself, which mediates all interhuman relationships. The Ten Commandments make this mediation evident, if not explicit, by listing first crimes against God, then crimes against other humans. The representation that sacralizes the object anticipates its desecration; the sacred feast is a guilty celebration. Freud’s originary intuition is justified, except that guilt is not a derivative of the Oedipus complex but of our coexistence with the sacred. Guilt is the awareness inherent in the sign that its user is complicit in the destruction of the sacred object. The resentment previously focused on the object is now directed at the sacred itself as a being or force that interdicts the full possession of this object .”

— Eric Gans, Originary Guilt · Saturday, April 15th, 2006 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment