Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“This is the beginning of “shared attention”: the reciprocal exchange of the sign becomes the means of communicating and reinforcing the newly sacred or interdicted status of the object, whose very desirability is the source of its inaccessibility. This first phase of the originary event ends with the participants symmetrically arrayed on the periphery of the newly sacralized object, whose appropriation they must for the moment defer. Thus the alpha-beta pecking order is superseded by a new social order of reciprocal equality, that found to this day in hunter-gatherer societies. I will deal with the second phase of the event, the sparagmos , in a moment. In order to create a sign one requires a moment of hesitation, of deferral , to translate Derrida’s pregnant term différance . Girard recognizes this in his own way by describing the moment after the lynching of the emissary victim as the first moment of non-instinctive attention . Except that there is really nothing to attend to except the victim’s scattered and fragmentary remains, and that the natural outcome of a sparagmos of this kind is dispersal. The Girardian scene can nonetheless be easily transformed into that of the originary hypothesis if we take the sparagmos not as the key moment of the process but as its concluding phase, its consequence and reinforcing result, since it provides the group with appetitive satisfaction.”

— Eric Gans, The Originary Hypothesis (Stanford version) · Saturday, November 20th, 2010 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment