Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“In order to account for formal mimesis, or linguistic representation, we have to allow as a logical and empirical necessity for the priority of behavioral mimesis–unformulated, instinctual, or genetic: we don’t yet know (1) –that humans share with the higher mammals from which we are descended. At stake here is our continuity with other living species, in terms of which alone our rupture with them can be imagined or rationally conceived. The first act of naming had to consist in behavior generating performative representation–speech acts–for the possibility of formal, abstract representation to arise at all. Gans hypothesizes the emergence of language from the protosacrificial destruction of a single victim whose appropriation by its predators is aborted by the very mimetic attraction it exercises upon them. The act of seizing the prey is transformed into a gesture, the ostensive sign, designating the prey to one and all as dangerous to appropriate by reason of the very attraction it exerts on all those surrounding it, on all those dangerously competing for its appropriation, on all those mimetically repeating the sign of its desirability. The use of signs emerges from this fundamental paradox of mimesis, whereby the model of our desiring behavior functions as well as the obstacle to its fulfillment ( Signs 20). The very act which reaches for the object generates competitors and–consequently, not subsequently–ensures thereby the impossibility of its completion; it compels the deferral of its instinctual aim, according to a mimetic dynamic that conforms to that of differance as described by Derrida: First, differance refers to the (active and passive ) movement that consists in deferring by means of delay, delegation, reprieve, referral, detour, postponement, reserving.”

— Eric Gans, Religious Differance · Spring 1998 · Anthropoetics