Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“The first signing gesture is a renunciation of designs on the central object and consequently a source of pacification. In a situation of potential conflict in which all are rivals, the signer renounces appropriating the object in order to designate it as what cannot be appropriated, hence as the source of the group’s resentment. The resulting sparagmos discharges this tension both appetitively and aggressively. By opening up the new “vertical” dimension that creates the human, the First creates an indefinitely imitable gesture that defers resentment, and at the same time inaugurates an interdiction that is not a mere inhibition stimulated by a more powerful member of the same species, but a product, indeed, the very definition, of intentionality , Sartre’s pour-soi . Yet the aborted gesture is nonetheless at a second remove a potential source of resentment. Unlike the appropriative gesture it replaces, it demands attention, the joint shared attention unique to our species. We cannot assume that the First was singled out in the originary event, for if he met with any resistance he could not have inaugurated a symmetrical exchange. But if this originary firstness was uniquely successful, it is because it was uniquely able to designate for the first time the central object as a privileged target of the love-and-resentment that is sacred significance. Once the scene of representation exists, the one who reveals it to the others, while transferring his firstness to the center, is also reinserting himself in an already-existing relationship to that center, and effectively proclaiming his own derivative firstness in the human sphere—the prototype of the role of big-man .”

— Eric Gans, Religion and Firstness · Saturday, September 12th, 2015 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment