Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“Department of French University of California at Los Angeles Los Angeles CA 90095-1550 gans@humnet.ucla.edu Originary Thinking includes a chapter entitled “Narrativity and Textuality” that accorded the latter, as befitted the trend of the time, what seemed a definitive priority over the former. In our textual age, story-telling seemed a naïve activity grounded on the illusion of a historically self-displacing present. I explained the deconstruction of narrative in originary terms as the revelation of the primacy of the sign’s “textual” detemporalization of practical appetitive time over its narrative retemporalization as the object of a worldly-biographical quest. The originary hypothesis proposes the minimal conditions for the generation of the transcendent sign. But these pre- and therefore extra-human conditions cannot be reproduced from within the human; they can only be represented, that is, imitated with more or less accuracy. The representations that accomplish “the deferral of violence through representation,” the endlessly renewed process of generating transcendence out of immanence, are what we call “culture.” The basis of the transcendent vs immanent dichotomy is the linguistic relation between sign and thing, which is doubled as signifier vs signified. This archetypal dichotomy is an anthropological artifact; it is with the human that the sign was introduced into “nature.””

— Eric Gans, Originary Narrative · Fall 1997 · Anthropoetics