Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“The minimal scripture is the originary sign, the name-of-God whose status as the “word of God” derives from the force that turns the gesture back upon itself as a sign. From the institutional standpoint of ritual, this utterance is constrained by the event as a whole, but from the formal standpoint of language, it is in principle a free act whose meaning is constrained by its situation in the event, so that the freedom to utter the sign outside its originary context does not entail the freedom to alter what it signifies. The sacred inheres in the “profane” use of language in the constraint of meaning that binds the sign independently of any ritual context. This minimal sacred inherent in the laws of language is too weak to support a god or a law of ritual sacrifice; it can guarantee only the most parsimonious of anthropologies. The promise of generative anthropology is that its minimal hypothesis of the common origin of the sacred and the significant offers the most favorable basis for common understanding between those who believe that God created humanity and those who affirm that humanity created God. Enjoy this column? Yes No Δ”

— Eric Gans, Return of the Sacred I – The Sacred and the Significant · Saturday, December 17th, 2005 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment