Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“For originary thinking, there are really two revolutions in human history, distinct but related. First, the occupation of the sacred center by a human being, first of all the individual referred to be anthropologists as the “Big Man.” This revolution unites distribution and political power at the center, and, as I mentioned in my previous post, initiates a line leading from the Big Man, through ancient sacral and divine kingship, through the modern day presidents and prime ministers. On the originary scene, and in the ritual orders preceding kingship, it is the Being at the center, different from if intimately connected to the community who poses an obstacle to desire: this being is resented for blocking our desire, but also loved for providing a pathway toward fulfilling it. Ritual and myth concern themselves with these lessons in deferral and acquisition: one must pay the center and show proper devotion to it, and one will be rewarded, even if not exactly in the way one anticipated. But once a human being occupies the center, the center can be (because it already has been) usurped. The community can now be ranged against the center in a way it couldn’t have been previously. One significant difference between Gansian Generative Anthropology and its Girardian predecessor in mimetic theory is that whereas Girard places the scapegoating “mechanism” at the origin of the human, Gans places it here, in the centrality of the human charged with mediating between the divine and the human.”

— Adam Katz, The Transdisciplinarity of the Hypothesis · Jul 03, 2021 · Bouvard Substack