Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“Deferral of appropriation constitutes the object as sacred. But once appropriation has been deferred, sacrality is no longer perceived as a quality of this object, but of the Being only contingently incarnated in it. When we renounce the appropriation of the object of our common desire, this desire inspires us to attribute to it a power that is by that very fact no longer a simple emanation of the object itself. Interpreted in practical terms, representation of the object removes its immediate danger to the community. But then that danger, which is experienced as the sacred, is no longer merely that of the object. As the sparagmos becomes immanent, the sign is increasingly less the signifier of the object qua object and more the “name-of-God” that designates the Being in which the danger of mimetic violence transcendentally or “immortally” inheres. In the spirit of the “return to Girard” of Signs of Paradox , we may rename the “aborted gesture of appropriation,” the “ deferred gesture of appropriation,” for the horizon of Derrida’s paradoxical temporality is the violence of the sparagmos. The sign is “but” a deferral of violence, the human is “but” an ever-extended hiatus between natural appetite and its violent demultiplication through desire, that is, through the very representation that had deferred it. 2 In this perspective, the sign’s representation of the object may be assimilated directly to Girard’s semiotically undefined “designation” of the victim.”

— Eric Gans, Originary Narrative · Fall 1997 · Anthropoetics