Author: staceymeeker

Readers of these Chronicles will have noticed that in the past year or two they have been largely focused on the phenomenon of the sacred—the second, along with language, of the two “coeval” elements that, in his Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999), Roy Rappaport hypothesized as the basis of humanity’s uniqueness.

I had long ago written The Origin of Language (California, 1981) without the least ambition of founding a new branch or mode of linguistics; my aim had been to provide a minimal hypothesis of how language must have arisen among creatures who lacked it. And necessity being the mother of invention, this minimum had to be the most likely necessity that would oblige humans to create a means to defer potential conflict-generating acts of appropriation focused on desirable objects by interposing reference to them by means of signs that would leave untouched the desire-objects themselves. In short, humans learned to share signs, or words, in preparation for distributing their designata.

Our task with regard to the sacred was to understand it in the same context of evolving mimetic desire that attaches to objects or conditions whose desirability, however defined, makes them potential sources of danger to the community. And like language, the sacred must be approached from an originary perspective that seeks to minimize—as it were, to Occamize—the foundations of our anthropological understanding. Religious phenomena, like those of language, are products of the newfound neural complexity required to deal by means of conscious deferral with the dangers of mimetic desire, which humans could no longer handle as did their animal ancestors by means of conditioned “Pavlovian” reflexes. And just as it seemed obvious that language emerged in order to prevent conflicts arising over the distribution of scarce and desirable goods, so the sacred would likewise find its source in the need for a shared imperative that would enforce within the proto-human community the a priori equality that is the fundamental principle of morality.

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But there was no need for me to define this principle. The great rabbi Hillel—a near-contemporary of Jesus—had already done so with his “golden rule”: “That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn.” We should note that Hillel’s version of the rule is less ambitious than the modern, Christian version, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

I find frankly astonishing that this ancient teacher of the Torah had anticipated so closely the aim of Generative Anthropology: the reduction of the distinguishing categories unique to human culture to their minimal components, once more based on the need to defer potential conflict. This rabbinical formula, which does not mention God, is a minimal anthropological formulation of the sacred. As with language, the sacred too—and, we might say, God himself—arises in the first place in order to enforce the sacred principle of moral equality that guarantees peace within the human community.

And just as the explanation of the emergence of language was our need to recoil from a potentially conflictive act of possession to one of sharable designation, so that of the emergence of the sacred is essentially the same. In both cases, the objective is to defer selfish acts that risk damaging the human community by creating the potential for hostile reactions in others.

The Christian version of the Golden Rule reflects Christianity’s drive to go beyond mere deferral of conflict toward Imitatio Christi— the imitation of Christ’s love for mankind. Yet the primitive core of this act remains the need to avoid treating another as less worthy of consideration than oneself.

And of course the assertion that the entire text of the Torah, which Hillel had spent his life teaching and interpreting, can be summed up in this one sentence is by no means meant to diminish this text’s importance. On the contrary, it is because the study of the Torah and its commentaries is so important that it is all the more important to understand—very much in the same spirit as GA—its minimal moral core: not to treat another as one would not like to be treated—the same principle illustrated—but not articulated—in our scenario of language origin by the necessity of deferring what had begun as a selfish gesture of appropriation.

Thus the founding idea of GA, that the first signs of language originated as aborted acts of appropriation—acts of deferral—brings together the minimal and maximal degrees of the significant: from what we personally find at a certain moment desirable, to the ultimate, divine source of significance itself.

And on this example, we may hypothesize as the transcendental origin of the universe’s guiding principle what was summed up much later as the Darwinian law of “the survival of the fittest”—the law that dictated the increasing fitness of the material and then self-reproducing forms that led, over billions of years, to the emergence of a creature that could understand the principle of morality in its own terms, and thereby come to value the existence of its fellows as in principle equal to its own.

As to whether or not the Christian recommendation to think first of the other’s welfare should remain as a “supplement” to Hillel’s admonition, it seems to me that both are necessary, and that, even in a truly Christian world, the perpetuation of the “remnant” of Judaic focus on self-preservation is a necessary feature.

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It is upon this foundation, which I have striven to define in this Chronicle in the clearest and most minimal terms, that Anthropoetics has maintained itself over thirty years of biennial publication, with nearly two hundred articles, and that our annual GASC conference, where dozens of papers have been delivered, has been held every year (save the COVID year 2021) since 2007.

This joint account of the origin—coeval, as Roy Rappaport had intuited—of both language and the sacred thus completes the outline of the foundation of what I have been calling for so long Generative Anthropology.

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As I am sure readers of these Chronicles are aware, I cannot be indifferent to the near-invisibility of GA in the intellectual world, however much I feel I can leave this earth knowing that my explanation of the “origin of language,” more precisely, of significance/signification/sacrality as the origin of the human—where the sacred must be understood from a moral standpoint, like its quintessence Hillel’s Golden Rule, as a “transcendental” degree of significance—demonstrates its truth by its very minimality.

As I pointed out in Chronicle 870, to take Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, as the “originary moment” of modern philosophy demonstrates its anthropological non-originarity in taking “thinking” as a minimal, self-confirming affirmation—for clearly “thinking” requires a system of signs—a language, whose origin the philosopher has not explained, as though it were a category of the natural world. Whereas the originary hypothesis explains the emergence of this new dimension of (human) life in terms of what had previously been functions of the nervous system, driven by the need to regulate/defer a uniquely human mode of intraspecific mimetic conflict to generate an internal yet mutually communicable mental scene mediated by signs in which the world of experience could be thought—signs whose sharing makes possible the deferral of such conflict.

I have been struck by our epochal distance from the relatively recent era of “French Theory,” whose undoubtedly leftist flavor did not prevent it from exploring what might be called the “unconscious” of cultural works in an often sympathetic and revelatory manner. And I am confident in judging my teacher René Girard’s 1961 Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel) to be this era’s most fundamental contribution, not merely to literary/cultural analysis, but to anthropology as the science of the human, while being at the same time among its least dependent on either semiotic analysis or leftist political philosophy. Yet as those familiar with my history as “Girard’s first serious student” (dixit Benoît Chantre) well know, Girard never understood—and I would not grasp for many years the underlying reason for this incomprehension—the point of my interest in the origin of language, which my intuition as well as common sense told me was indeed the fundamental characteristic of the human, one shared in only its most superficial traits by even the most intelligent of our fellow creatures.

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My original intuition about language origin was that it was the product of a collective “mimetic” crisis brought on by the need to organize the distribution among members of a proto-human community of a collective good, most likely a hunted/scavenged animal that would have to be divided up among members of the clan or tribe. Apes, who occasionally engage in similar practices, have serial hierarchies determined by Pavlovian “conditioned reflexes” that localize conflicts, limiting them to contests for higher status (e.g., the Gamma ape challenging the Beta or Alpha ape), and thereby permitting their resolution without disturbing the overall orderliness of the group. But given the progress of mimetic desire, there must have come a time when such hierarchies could no longer remain stable in the absence of language and its associated self-consciousness.

When I first reflected on this question in preparing The Origin of Language (California UP: 1981), I essentially took this solution for granted, without reflecting sufficiently on the profound transformation that would be effected in both our nervous system and our social order by linguistic communication. And it was only years later that I began to understand the profundity of Jacques Derrida’s notion of deferral or différance, a pun based on the fact that the word différer in French means both defer and differ: the origin of semantic difference in deferral of worldly appropriation.

What is unique about language, in a word, is that its precondition is that the language-user has first (not inhibited but) deferred his “instinctive” gesture of possession inspired by an object of desire. By doing so, he creates in his utterance a new category of being, not simply a gesture or sound as a signal, part of the world of action, but a word, a sign that depends on—and brings into being—a new, wholly mental world, a scene of representation on which we share by means of words ideas or propositions about worldly objects—and by extension, about the “ideas” themselves—without physically involving them.

It is this scene that makes of humanity a new life-form. Indeed, we should be all the more aware of this today, when the supreme importance of the scenic element in human life has been made increasingly insistent through the proliferation of what I call “screenic” devices—from movie and TV screens to cell phones—that allow us to embody and view the universe as a humanly shareable scene.

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It was only a couple of years ago, in preparing our 2024 GASC conference in Japan, that I learned that the Existentialist notion of freedom as the effect on the human mind of the néant or nothingness, described by Sartre in his 1943 masterwork L’être et le néant as inhabiting the pour-soi  of human subjectivity, was in fact inspired by his discussions in Paris with Japanese-Buddhist philosopher Kuki Shūzō. Shūzō almost certainly impressed on Sartre the significance in Eastern thought of “nothingness” in the form of Nirvana, the closest thing to Buddhist Paradise. But this idea of le néant as the space of the pour-soi and the emblematic home of Sartre’s liberté must be understood anthropologically as the “empty” because wholly mental space of the language-mediated scene that we share with our fellow humans.

And the anthropological basis of what Sartre called “freedom” is explained by Derrida’s insertion between the mind and its object of the purely mental act of différance or deferral—aborting any attempt driven by “conditioned reflex” to seek to possess an object of (common) desire, which would risk generating conflict within the group.

Yet it is curious that what Sartre sees as nothingness, empty space, is indeed space in which action is suspended, but replaced, not by “nothingness,” but by the semiotic space of language. No doubt language is invisible, but it seems clear that Sartre’s intuition of “nothingness” is unconsciously a metaphor for the unworldly nature of language, using a word that is mere sound or inscription for a worldly object that one can desire—whether for food or for other purposes.

This curious use of “nothingness” can be best explained as an effect of the blindness of classical Western philosophy—one that the era of French Theory insisted on opening up to our sight—to the scene of language that exists only in our minds but that signs allow us to communicate to each other. And despite Sartre’s having enthusiastically adopted Shūzō’s very un-Western appreciation for “nothingness,” he never gives the least hint of grasping its anthropological sense as that of the “empty” space of the scene on which we share the signs of language and all of culture.

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It is to rectify the failure of philosophy whether of East or West to grasp the centrality of language, the world of signs, to the thinking whose universe the philosopher takes as his domain—a failure only partially rectified by the semiotic focus of the age of French Theory—that generative anthropology understands itself as not a philosophical but an anthropological project, one whose task is to restructure the human sciences, starting from the originary hypothesis as here described.

What explains this reluctance that, once revealed, seems difficult to understand—and yet  continues to express itself in the extreme skepticism encountered by the originary hypothesis among linguists as well as philosophers? Is it not obvious enough that without language thought beyond momentary intuitions is inconceivable, and that language is a phenomenon unique to humanity?

Linguists see language in a very different way from philosophers; it suffices to read Chomsky, for whom language is a technique entirely neutral in its content, and whose sole concern is with its internal structures for operating on this content. Clearly, linguistics’ approach to language is not one to which members of other disciplines have any right to object, even if the scientific apparatus invoked by linguistics is more akin to that of a natural than a human science. But is this explanation sufficient to let us understand the reluctance of students of language to do other than “bracket” the question of language origin as a quasi-irrelevancy, as if it were analogous to humanity’s need to build shelters or obtain food?

Signification and significance

To signify is to be part of the signifier-signified relation, that between a word or an analogous sign and its “meaning,” what it “represents” or “signifies” in a linguistic expression.

The originary hypothesis explains the necessity of language—recalling that necessity is (nearly) always the mother of invention—by the complication brought into proto-human existence by what Girard baptized mimetic desire, assisted in the proto-human nervous system by the emergence of “mirror neurons” that allow individuals to “mirror” and thereby anticipate the desires of others. The evolutionary advantage of this development was presumably in facilitating the discovery of food and other resources; if my neighbor is expressing (positive or negative) interest in some object, chances are I too will find it worth approaching or fleeing.

It seems obvious to assume that the growing intensity of mimesis, while thus favored for evolutionary purposes, would lead at the same time to increasingly frequent conflict over objects of mutual desire, and more particularly, would make increasingly difficult and eventually put an end to the possibility of regulating distribution within a group by means of a serial hierarchy of Alpha-Beta animals regulating distribution through reflexive inhibitions that reduce conflicts to challenges within a serial hierarchy.

Once mimesis attained a certain intensity, the possibility of such complications as coalitions would make the merely reflexive regulation of these challenges increasingly impractical, seriously weakening the group distribution system. It is at that point that we hypothesize that members of the group would come to have the best chances of survival if they were able—by conscious decision—to defer fighting over common desire-objects. We thus presume that they would come to abort their original attempts to possess these objects, resulting in what I have described as aborted gestures of appropriation, gestures akin to, and in my hypothesis the source of, what humans call pointing.

And the most striking and unexpected thing about human pointing is that no other animal uses it as a means to draw their fellows’ attention to the pointed-at object. None of our ape cousins obey the Zen quip: “look at the moon, not at my finger.”

Thus the key moment of the originary hypothesis is the transformation of pointing as an aborted gesture of appropriation into a deliberate signifier that has now acquired a meaning or signified; in a word—a word.

[to be continued]

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GA, which was originally modeled on the French anthropologie génétique, but which could not be called “genetic anthropology” since the English word refers to genes whereas the French includes the non-biological sense of genesis, has been from the outset an attempt at minimalism, relying on minimizing the number of components required to define the difference between the human and the animal, in particular with respect to our possession of (human) language. This attempt has been generally met with skepticism, as in “you can’t prove it.”

And I observed a yet more unfriendly reaction when I sought to find a similar minimal definition of antisemitism, if only to explain why both these attempts of mine at definition aroused much the same irritation among the cognoscenti, as though any such attempt was ipso facto oversimplifying. Indeed, those concerned about antisemitism reacted almost with hostility to my efforts, as though the very attempt at a definition were a kind of sacrilege.

Recently, having reached the final phase of my career, I have resuscitated this minimalism, having decided that in the age of AI, we should leave complexity to the computers and focus on sharpening Occam’s razor, making use of our uniquely human judgment.

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Jacques Derrida’s notion of la différance, “deferral,” provides a minimal explanation of “significance” as including, at a minimum, signification in the broad sense of requiring a sign to refer to a referent, and maximally, sacrality, as the mark of what can be possessed by the mind only under the strictest form of deferral of appetite, which Judaism magnifies by assigning to the divinity a name that cannot be pronounced nor, in the strictest interpretation, even written—its written sign being conceived as unpronounceable—such that it must only be even imaginarily spoken under deferral. Which is, after all, a maximal, hyperbolic expression of différance.

And Derrida himself, who withdrew a prior promise to discuss these ideas with us, could be said to be obeying the same principle. Indeed, his respect for the limitations of the philosophical stance, which in its pure form puts worldly sciences like anthropology “in parentheses,” was a supreme gesture of deferral—ensuring that never in his lifetime would he face a challenge to philosophy from… anthropology.

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These two disciplines, while clearly different, are not usually presented in the form of an either-or, as somehow mutually exclusive. And yet to examine philosophical discourse is to discover two implicitly antithetical understandings of language. For the anthropologist, language is an evolved behavior that must be explained as responding to a need emerging in the species’ worldly experience. That actual anthropologists have not sought a minimal explanation of language, which one might imagine should be the point of departure for their science, given that language is a/the unique distinguishing feature of our species, reflects the “social science” nature of anthropology, for which language and culture are givens, as established in the pre-Darwinian era in which anthropological investigations first took on a systematic form. In simple terms, an anthropologist does not begin by defining the minimal difference between humans and other animals, but with the study of prehistoric and then historical human societies. Which fact helps explain the skepticism that has met my attempts to define the minimal conditions under which human language, in contrast to animal communication systems, most likely arose.

As I observed in Chronicle 870, the modern philosophical tradition inaugurated by Descartes takes language-using self-consciousness as its point of departure, in particular for establishing the very sense of reality. Thus the cogito starts by affirming “I think.” Thinking, needless to say, requires language, but, also needless to say, the individual speaker uses language but does not think about it: it is a—in fact, the—means that permits him to confirm his being. That the acquisition of language is in the first place a historically determined phenomenon is understandably irrelevant to the philosopher’s self-consciousness, along with the—generally unmentioned—fact that human language is not innate but must be learned in childhood from adults. But the fact that language had come into being—needless to say, well before Descartes’ time—although it need not concern the philosopher, must concern the anthropologist, since it is a, if not the, defining attribute of humanity.

What might be called the constitutive myth of philosophy is the perfect lucidity of the philosophizing self, which begins with the, or a, cogito. But between the self and its self-expression in language there is of necessity a distance, a différance, given that this expression is not a spontaneous manifestation of the self, a secretion of its intimate essence, but a set of signs not innate but learned from others. The self cannot “express itself” spontaneously “in its own tongue”; it must be taught signs from a world that existed before it.

No doubt Descartes claims only to think, not to invent his own means of expression. But his thinking exists only as the product of a history in which language was first invented—presumably via a pointing gesture—and then improved over the millennia, reaching him in a mature, if never final, state. The significance of “think” as opposed, for example, to “breathe,” is that the I who breathes is not implicit in Descartes’ deduction, but only in its surrounding conditions, whereas thinking is the operation carried out by the sentence itself as a deduction: a, therefore b. Whether or not you are breathing is irrelevant to the necessity that, if you utter/think a syllogism, you are of necessity thinking—or in any case, your sentence is a thought. Hence, to follow the cogito’s logic, the thinker cannot deny that he thinks, and consequently that he… is. But the real point isn’t that someone could not nevertheless deny that he is, or even that he is thinking: at what point must you, my interlocutor, be able to oblige me to admit that I am thinking and therefore, that I am? The Pyrrhonism that Descartes seeks to refute has in fact an infinity of resources, since the interlocutor has no way of getting him to admit the truth of even the most tautological reasoning.

But precisely, there is no interlocutor but the philosopher himself, who is not perversely seeking to deny his “proof,” but only to persuade himself that he can be sure that he “is.” And curiously enough, the sense of mere existence does not suffice to “prove” this being; it could presumably be an illusion, whereas the sense of thinking is somehow unassailable, since merely thinking about whether the proof is valid implicitly admits… thinking about it… Yet to claim that thinking implies being as something more/other than thinking… ? How can one even conceive a demonstration of the truth of this assertion?

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What needs to be made clear is that one cannot “derive” the distinctive human traits of language/religion/culture from a solipsistic view of the isolated thinker in Descartes’ “poêle”  (a room heated by a stove). The very idea is absurd, since this family of human institutions is entirely made up of means of inter-human communication. Yet philosophers have been known to speculate about language origin as the result of a genetic mutation (the “language gene”), at first affecting discrete individuals but which must await the intermarriage of two such individuals in order to spread…

Whence the importance of constructing, not a “thought experiment,” but a plausible worldly scenario, as I have tried to do, that can be connected to actual human cultural practices and that illustrates the tried but true proverb, applicable to virtually all significant examples of human progress: Necessity is the mother of invention. If humans learned to defer their appetitive drives for the benefit of mutual communication concerning their objects, this deferral must have at some point become necessary, presumably in order to avoid intraspecific conflict.

As a result of the growth of our mental capacity, our sensitivity to the appetites of our fellow humans, and their conflicts with our own, will have reached the point that the merely reflexive inhibitions that Pavlov taught his dogs no longer sufficed to prevent conflict within the Alpha-Beta hierarchies that still functioned among our ape cousins. (Whether or not this occurred before or after we evolved “mirror neurons” that allowed us to anticipate these conflicts is a matter for paleontology that, at the very least, suggests a growing susceptibility to what Girard named mimetic desire.) What Sartre observed as the freedom of the human pour-soi finds here its anthropological basis. To defer an appetitive drive is not merely to postpone its satisfaction, but to free oneself from physiological pressure and to bring to bear one’s moral conscience, the most fundamental principle of which is Hillel’s Golden Rule, which affirms, all other things being equal, the equal moral weight of human desires. Thus a group of hunters surrounding their prey, and no longer following “instinct” to divide it up in hierarchical order of rank, learn to defer the distribution until all understand that the prey must be divided “equally” as much as possible, that it belongs to no individual, but to the community whose members must possess and consume it only as equals.

And in consequence, in the deferral of our drive to satisfy our appetite, we create what I have simply called the human scene, on which all cultural/communal phenomena from collective feasts to language to religion to the arts take place. This scene—whether in reality or in the creative imagination—must be understood as the privileged locus of cultural creation: of conversations, narratives, stories, works of religion, art and science… all that distinguishes humanity from other species. On this scene, appetites are deferred and appropriation is replaced by designation via signs, semantic or iconic—words or images or patterns of sound and/or color.

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I realize that the reader of these Chronicles has no doubt heard all this before in somewhat different words. Let us then consider this, at least for the moment, as a minimal statement of the principles of Generative Anthropology, in order that we may now move on to other matters.

For most people in the US, the world’s reaction to the Hamas-directed massacre of October 7, 2023, was a shocking revelation. Like nearly all Jews at the time, never having lived through an era of pogroms and persecutions, I could not imagine that the nation’s and the world’s near-unanimous emotion would by no means be horror at the gratuitously barbarous slaughter of hundreds of innocent people, but condemnation of the Israeli response even before it began. And, until the current conflict with Iran, the consensus throughout the Western world, let alone the Middle East, had been all the more that it was the Jews rather than their Muslim enemies who were to blame for “genocide.”

My reaction, once the surprise was past, has been to rethink in the light of this experience my previous understanding of the position of the Jews in Western culture, and by extension, in the rest of the world.

Many have reacted to this revelation by seeking the best means for dealing with this unexpected flood of antisemitic attitudes. I have my own opinions on this, but as a member of a generation of Jews that not only managed to avoid any serious expressions of antisemitic hostility but benefited far more than it suffered for its religious identity, and as one who has never held a mentoring role toward other Jews, I think it more appropriate for me to seek to profit from this new information on the level of theory rather than presume to offer practical advice to others.

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As I have pointed out in a number of these Chronicles, antisemitism, like language, is not fully understandable from the essentially solipsistic stance of the Western philosophical tradition. But this rapprochement hardly explains what anomaly is shared by the search for explanations of these two phenomena. Whereas language, unique to humanity, is easily enough conceived as its point of departure, antisemitism is a particular historical development that can hardly be considered implicit in human nature.

Yet this very fact points to the historical reality that in its turn provides the point of departure for our understanding of antisemitism. It is not monotheism as such that makes Hebrew religion unique. Indeed, the earliest human communities were presumably monotheistic, sharing a single sacred object or category. Polytheism, as a later development, was presumably everywhere the result of the fusion of smaller monotheistic tribes into larger ones composed of a set of clans, each with their own god/totem. This is clearly the case in the classic studies of Australian aborigines, and is reflected on a far more sophisticated level by the Greek pantheon brought together on Olympus.

In this context, the uniqueness of Hebrew monotheism appears to reflect its dialectical emergence from within a world of complex societies that negates and transcends their polytheistic fragmentation by reaffirming the originary intuition of the unity of the sacred. As I have pointed out elsewhere, this intuition was simply and sharply presented by Hillel in his “golden rule” that sums up the central principle of the sacred: do nothing to violate the moral unity of the human community.

For prior to any speculation on the status of supernatural beings, the sacred is, on a par with language, a defining universal of human behavior. This is not to dismiss the significance of the ideas of the world’s theologians, but merely to place them, once more, in the perspective of anthropology, outside of which the very possibility of conceiving supernatural beings has no worldly basis.

Thus, as Adam Katz and I proposed in The First Shall Be The Last: Rethinking Antisemitism (Leiden: Brill, 2015), the simplest explanation for the world’s persistent hostility to the Jews is their temporal, and thus unavoidably ontological, firstness. The Jews themselves need never have compared their religion to any other, and indeed, their proselytizing activities have never been more than modest, since Judaism has never outgrown its self-concept as a confederation of tribes descended from the sons of Jacob/Israel. But their very lack of concern that others share their beliefs, their very sincerity in turning their backs on all other religions, has naturally been interpreted by the latter as a sign of infinite arrogance.

And even if the Jews’ survival as a people despite their dislodgement from their native land to exist in exile for nearly two millennia could be dismissed as the persistence of a delusion, yet in both the West, where the Old Testament reminds the population of Christianity’s Hebrew filiation, and the Middle East, where the Koran constantly defines itself against both its predecessors, they have remained both Christianity’s and Islam’s eternal precursors and rivals, often defeated in history but never in their own souls—precursors whose persistent endurance is a living demonstration of their ability to withstand seemingly forever the ever-present lure of their two brother religions, which may have tempted some but never touched the core of their own—while surviving the ever-recurring pogroms by which both have attempted to destroy it.

Thus we have no difficulty in understanding that ever since Israel’s successful revival of Hebrew and its economic and intellectual success has transformed the Middle East, Islamic hostility has taken the lead in Jew-hatred, applying to it the barbaric standards of jihad—beginning with the absurd falsehood that Jerusalem was from the beginning a Muslim city whose Temple Mount—where the two Hebrew Temples had stood—must not be defiled by the Jews’ “filthy feet.” This is faith turned to utter perversion, belief not in faith’s miracles but in its denial of reality. That after the 1967 Six-Day War non-believer Moshe Dayan blithely allowed the Muslim Waqf to remain in charge of the Mount was a thoughtless and most unfortunate concession.

And so the “Al Aqsa Flood” demonstration on October 7, 2023 of jihad’s sadistic vigor, whose faith-driven denial of reality had yet remained beyond the limits of Jewish understanding, became the point of departure for a horrible correction of the consequences of Dayan’s error, a demonstration through mayhem and torture of Islam’s eternal right to this territory that it had in reality never possessed.

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This brief elaboration of Jewish firstness, trivially simple as it may appear, is really all we need to keep in mind to understand the overall architecture, if not the details, of the trio of “Abrahamic” religions and their dominance of what can broadly be called the “Western” world.

With the evolution of the sacred, as of human language, the moment of its creation can be seen in retrospect to contain implicitly within itself the rest of its history. Thus what brought forth both language and the sacred was the deferral of “instinct”—of Pavlovian automatism—through designation, pointing, in the place of appropriating, as both a semiotic sign and a gesture of renunciation. It is what Derrida called the différance, the willed deferral of our body’s response to its appetite, opening up a temporal gap of “freedom” that Sartre called the néant. In this moment, we react freely, (non-instinctually, non-appetitively), to an object to which we attribute significance, whether it be the passing significance of something we designate by an identifying sign, a word, or an object of maximal significance that we hold sacred. In either case, our appetitive reaction is deferred, and at the same time, the object is designated to our interlocutor(s), whether a friend in conversation or a communal collectivity, as in a religious ceremony, as one that we have renounced assimilating as a mere object of appetite.

Similarly, what the Hebrews discovered was not “the superiority of one god over many,” but the essential unity of the sacred. And as I have previously pointed out (see especially Chronicles 840 and 842)—and as Pascal had intuited—what the notion of a unique divinity has in common with the apparent “will” of the universe is that they both necessarily favor what can endure, so to speak by definition. Into a world characterized by ever-increasing entropy, what is favored to endure includes mountains and seas, but it also includes increasingly successful, and therefore necessarily complex, negentropic forms of matter—life-forms that can reproduce themselves and seek thereby an “immortality” that conquers time. But as we know from experience, such forms, as they become liberated from their instinctual reactions, also become “self-conscious” or sentient, aware of their temporal existence as individuals—and therefore of their eventual demise, even as their species endures—such that they experience it by anticipation as a loss, as their personal death.

Whence the link between our moral conscience, summed up in the “golden rule,” that contributes to the preservation of our species, and our awareness of our unique individuality that is, ironically enough, the product of our species’ superior negentropy, and understandably appears to each individual as in conflict with it. Indeed, as technology comes closer to reproducing the hitherto unique features of the human brain, it becomes conceivable to interpret the current worldwide decline in human birth rates as a reaction to our species’ increasing dissatisfaction with the necessity of “passing on” our roles in life to our heirs—in contrast, for example, to devoting our energies (as do a number of billionaires) to prolonging our own lives in principle without limit. We may call this selfishness if we like, but we cannot deny the right of its practitioners to seek to embody in their own lives the progress of our species toward mastering its environment and thereby indefinitely extending its lifespan.

And as a result, the religious assurance of spiritual-transcendental life-after-death, essential to both Christianity and Islam, seems increasingly less believable, in contrast with the survival of our cultural heritage emphasized in the essentially this-worldly religion of Judaism. Whence the increase in the anti-Jewish resentment we call antisemitism, whose ferocity is a measure of its half-perceived and angrily denied irrationality. Whence also the increased urgency for Islam of creating signs of the historical fulfillment of its most radical prophecy, the promise of its universal reign bringing about the “end of history,” when the paradisiacal state of those who sacrificed their lives for Islam’s triumph will be extended to an entire world purged of infidels.

Under these conditions, no falsehoods are too unreasonable in order to justify the conquest and destruction of both Judaism and Christianity, as well as the blatant denial of their history. Hence the return of the Jews to Israel and the founding of the Jewish state can only be understood in the jihadist context as the prelude to Islam’s final triumph, begun on October 7, 2023.

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But fortunately, the hope that the Middle East is in the process of embodying this triumph has now been shattered—one hopes, permanently—by our attack on Iran. It is now up to the USA, in alliance with Israel and hopefully other allies, to persuade Islam to renounce this unrealistic claim for the benefit of humanity and accept its place among the trio of Abrahamic religions that have shaped the civilization of the West and Middle East.

Descartes inaugurated modern Western philosophy with a curious syllogism: je pense, donc je suis. As though one could doubt one’s “being” without already… being! And above all, as though the language in which he expressed this idea could have existed if not preceded by the conscious deferral of his “Pavlovian” reflexive interactions with the outside world.

Western philosophy has been characterized by its refusal to consider the hypothesis that human language emerged in response to its speakers’ emergent need for a voluntary, self-aware mode of communication. The solipsistic vision of language espoused as a matter of course by post-Cartesian philosophers is that of a human being who, when faced with some element(s) of reality, whether internal or external, is driven to express his awareness/understanding of it, as though its interpersonal, communicative function were in fact secondary. But our originary hypothesis is surely more faithful to reality.

Humans learned to use language because they had first been persuaded by fear of potential conflict to defer their “natural”/appetitive relation to some object of (say, alimentary) interest when faced with the symmetry of another’s parallel relationship. Whereas animals are able to automatically avert such conflict via Pavlovian inhibitions, humans, being under greater mimetic tension and consequently less susceptible to physiological control mechanisms, have of necessity acquired the means to seek such avoidance consciously, while concomitantly making their choices known through the signs of language.

What I have found most revelatory with respect to the general resistance to GA’s theory of language origin is philosophers’ near-instinctive reluctance to understand thinking in Descartes’ sense as motivated from the beginning by humans’ need to avert potential conflict with their fellows. And indeed, all of human culture, from religion to art to politics, is focused on mediating our relationship with worldly reality by our need to bring to mutual awareness the possibilities of its peaceful sharing with others by means of meaning-bearing signs—in the first place, the signs of language.

Language must have emerged as a means of expression of what Jacques Derrida called the différance or deferral of our potential act of appropriation of an—appetitively attractive—referent by provoking in our emergent moral conscience a sense of interdiction. In the place of a possibly conflict-inducing action, the human emits a sign—the first version of which being simply an aborted gesture of appropriation, that is, an ostensive pointing—by means of which he shares that object’s “idea” or signifier (in thought and/or perception) with one or more others in lieu of securing it for himself. That this obviously plausible explanation for the need for language arouses so much resistance reflects the depth to which we have “repressed” language’s interactive nature, conceiving it as though it sufficed to understand its embodiment in the relationship between the signifiant and the signifié.

In this context, we should recall the great first-century rabbi Hillel’s “golden rule,” which he insisted was “the entire Torah”: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation, which expresses in a few words the means by which society is able to avert internal conflict.

Along this line, we can grasp this common element of deferral in its minimal and maximal forms: on the one hand, the temporary renunciation via the use of language of appropriating an object of common desire, and on the other, the collective worship by an entire community of a sacred object/being/divinity—while noting as well the common association of such worship with communal feasts in which the individual participants’ appetites are satisfied under the auspices of the presiding divinity/ies. (NB: This is being written on the Tuesday before Lent, or in French, mardi gras.)

The primary element in both cases is prevention of potentially violent rivalrous conflict over an object of desire by means of the deferral/différance of any individual attempt to appropriate it. Once we understand the originary model of linguistic designation as ostension or pointing, we must then recall that the fact that humans alone perform this act of establishing “joint shared attention” provides a simple demonstration that it is not enough to have fingers—or even point with them. “Look at the moon and not at my finger!” is not operative among chimpanzees. What humans have that our ape friends do not is a conscious awareness of the frequent need to defer individual possession of a designated object in order to avert potential conflict.

We should recall that in Genesis 2, God does not give Adam and Eve a power of instinctive avoidance of the fruit as a potentially conflict-generating object, but utters a verbal interdiction whose actualization requires their conscious decision to conceive and reject the fruit’s possession. This marks the emergence of human moral judgment—our “conscience”—and along with it, the possibility of its failure—of “sin.”

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In a word, our reluctance to accept a biological explanation of language origin as reflecting a new need, generated in humans by the increase of (mimetic) desire along with intelligence, is a product of our philosophical tradition’s focus on the human mind as a self-contained totality rather than the possession of an individual within a community of like individuals. And for the benefit of this solipsistic self-containment, we conveniently ignore the obvious fact that no human individual invents language as his own “tool for thought.” We are all taught language as children by adults, which is to say that from the very outset our minds are initiated by our elders into human specificity, marked by both language and moral conscience, or more broadly, religion—as intuited by Roy Rappaport in his Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999).

The solipsistic mind of “I think therefore I am” can arise only through a deliberate forgetting/”bracketing” of this originally communal origin—which not all that long ago commonly led to philosophical meditations on language origin in which a lone spirit sees or conceives something that he yearns to communicate with his fellows and thereupon invents language for that purpose.

Nor has modern philosophy, even when language-focused, fully disencumbered itself of this solipsistic fiction. Human speech was not invented by proto-philosophers motivated by the desire to share ideas about the world, but by apes in the process of outgrowing the stage at which Pavlovian inhibitions could protect them from intraspecific conflict, and who therefore needed a more subtle mechanism under conscious control for avoiding hostilities motivated by rivalrous appetites in the process of mutating into desires in which natural appetites were enhanced by mimesis.

I have always regretted that my late teacher René Girard, the pioneering theoretician of mimetic desire, refused to recognize the direct link between human language and both desire and its moral/religious antidote, leading to a quite unnecessary divorce between GA and “mimetic theory.” Hopefully the followers of these related ways of thought will one day come to recognize that there is no fundamental incompatibility between them.

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Once the causal link between the deferral of instinctive appropriation and language/worship is understood, the role of what we call “human culture” as a means for avoiding intraspecific violence becomes obvious. The scenic nature of all cultural phenomena, whether consumed in groups, as we assume was originally the case, or in more advanced civilizations, also by isolated individuals, needs no further explanation. Whether consumed in solitude or collectively, the content of any cultural experience is designed to reconcile the members of its audience in one way or another to some problematic aspect of human social interaction, whether through vicarious participation in a fictional world or more direct participation in a realized human collectivity, say, of worshipers. Or, for that matter, through its members’ participation in political activity explicitly designed to generate decisions concerning the conduct of their society.

I would stress that these generalities are outlined here merely as possible points of departure for specific analyses. The crucial point of these remarks is to rectify our anthropology: our fundamental understanding of the human, after centuries of what are at best the highly distorted visions of the foundations of the human and its culture entertained by philosophers.

Generative anthropology depicts the human social order as founded on conscious moral choices by which our conduct in various contexts should be judged, with the understanding that the originary function of language, and along with it, of religion and secular culture, is to facilitate these choices—starting with the minimal model that I like to illustrate by imagining two guests at a party who hesitate and then renounce attempting to take the last canapé on a tray.

Which is only to repeat that language, and in its wake, the whole sphere of culture that is unique to humanity, begins with the deferral, Derrida’s différance, of our instinctual animal interaction with the common objects of our desire.

Ever since the GASC meeting in Tokyo two years ago, I have been thinking about the possibility of expanding the scope of GA beyond the Judeo-Christian culture of the West. Having learned that Sartre’s foundational idea of nothingness/le néant as the bearer of the freedom of the human “for-itself”  or self-consciousness—different indeed from the simple concept of negation—could be traced to his conversations with Japanese philosopher Shuzo Kuki during his formative years in Paris, it has seemed to me that this encounter could become the point of departure for a broad-based comparison and synthesis of the world’s two most substantial cultural families. Indeed, the contrast between the purely negative emptiness of Sartre’s néant and the infinite potential that he nevertheless attributes to it—very much as understood in the Buddhist tradition—sums up in a neat schematism the contrast between the West’s focus on the need to negate and transcend what René Girard called mimetic desire and the East’s contrasting effort to dissipate desire in the infinite plurality of the real, as exemplified by the contrast between the two cultures’ approaches to avoiding mimetic conflict: in the West, the enforcement of interdiction; in the East, demystification of the mimetic sacralization of the desire-object.

Thus where Sartre emphasizes the “nothingness” of the pour-soi  (Hegel’s für-sich), which he associates with freedom—yet not with language!—in opposition to the unfree en-soi/An-sich, Buddhist culture sees the void not as the blankness of empty space offering freedom from desire, but as the terrain of desire’s infinite possibilities. And Sartre’s idea of freedom is itself made far more explicit by the relationship insisted on by GA between this freedom and the endless possibilities of language than by the mere negativity of the néant. That human language, along with the sacred focus on significance that accompanies it, is the anthropological source of the infinite resourcefulness Sartre finds in the néant is at the root of our originary anthropology.

Not being fanatically Hegelian enough to make of this East-West opposition one of those dialectical triads of which Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit is constructed, I will nonetheless go so far as to claim that the apparent debt of Sartre’s idea of the potentially infinite productivity of le néant to his conversations with Kuki in 1928 offers a persuasive explanation of the paradoxically both empty yet infinitely rich characterization of le néant in Sartre’s philosophical masterpiece that would otherwise appear anomalous, as well as providing an explanation for his failure to address the possible relationship between the freedom the néant provides the human pour-soi and  our unique possession of language. It is as though for Sartre humanity derives its capacity for transcendence from the mere absence of constraint by the “clutter” he describes in the realm of the en-soi rather than from our unique capacity to formulate, beyond the Pavlovian world of reflex, the deferred perception of reality that we find embodied in both sacred contemplation and linguistic designation.

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No doubt, given the potential richness of the domain I am here proposing for reflection and potential research, this subject deserves a more substantial introduction. My justification for the present Chronicle is that, being now in my 85^th year, I think it best to propose it as a question more than as an answer—as a point of departure for unlimited future reflections.

The affinity between GA and Japanese culture has become clear to me since the 2024 conference partly focused on philosopher Kitano Nishida. Starting in 2012, the GASC has now met in Japan three times (2012, 2016, 2024), more than in any other foreign country, with the real possibility of another meeting in the next year or two.

And whereas Sartre “Westernized” the notion of nothingness by emptying it of all conceivable content, to revisit his néant from a Buddhist perspective would be to relieve it of this need for utter austerity—in effect tempering rather than simply denying the for-itself’s mimetic temptation—and instead accepting the East’s refusal to draw a sharp binary contrast between the apparent freedom of Girard’s mediator of desire and the passive dependency of the mediated desiring subject.

In short, the Western/Hegelian dialectic of being and nothingness, desire and indifference, demands a transcendental resolution or Aufhebung of desire, whereas the Eastern perspective—as made clear in the West’s ever-popular Buddhist-inspired “mindfulness” training—is one of negotiation and compromise. The popularity in the West of such techniques is a sign that the binary sin-vs-salvation mode of Western religion must of necessity adapt in everyday life to its “Eastern” limits. For to model our lives on the—mostly tragic—exemplary figures of our culture would be inevitably to court grief.

How these narrative patterns are reflected in the history of the nations that view the sacred in either the Western or the Eastern pattern is a subject I have not even begun to explore, yet merely to encounter the possibility of a less binary interaction between “true” and “false” desire seems to me to open up a whole range of new research possibilities, as well as being a precious source of potential insights into our own life-projects.

And to return to the originary subject-matter of GA—the emergence of language as the privileged locus of humanity’s articulation of the sacred’s deferral/différance of desire with the realities and needs of the profane world—we must first of all ask what was the underlying motivation of the evolution of postwar thought that led to the European-American movement that came to be summed up (by Americans) as “French theory,” and in which can be found, on the one hand, Girard’s theorizing of mimetic desire and Derrida’s suspensive concept of différance, and on the other, a new focus on semiology and linguistics that replaced the language-blind vision of human consciousness in Western philosophy that led to Sartre’s paradoxically empty néant—also putting an end to the existentialist perspective that had dominated Western philosophy during the war and immediate postwar years.

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These are but preliminary suggestions, but whose serious exploration as potential paths of anthropological (self-)understanding strikes me as full of promise.

The course of history has been accelerating so fast that it is almost foolhardy to attempt to do more than comment on its day-to-day changes, but I thought it might be useful to take advantage of Trump’s recent flawless extraction of Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela to face trial in New York to suggest a perspective that can help us to evaluate its ups and downs. This Chronicle was composed before the onset of the recent turmoil in Iran, but regardless of the outcome of what we hope is an emerging political tidal wave, and of Trump’s role in its success or failure, it seemed to me worth focusing on a less crucial but wholly characteristic action of his that has allowed him to crack through the encrusted politics of post-WWII international relations.

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The present state of the world is increasingly a scene of rivalry between (A) a Western camp, dominated by the USA and Israel, and (B) an increasingly unified anti-Western one that includes notably Islamists, led until recently by Iran, with Turkey seeking to take over, along with China, Russia, and various “southern” nations in Africa and South America. (C) Europe, after long abdicating its role in international affairs to the US on the one hand and the UN-“Third world” on the other, is beginning to seek to get back in the game. The current state of Great Britain and France, if not quite Germany, shows them in the throes of political stagnation, nowhere better illustrated than by the French parliament’s recent withdrawal of its decision to advance the retirement age from 62 to 64—at a time when other European nations are setting it closer to 70.

The nations in the B group, dominated by philosophies that partake of the epistemology of resentment, find in militant Islam­—Islamism—its bellwether, if not its model, and in particular the guarantee for the vastly increased antisemitism of the group’s Western members, focused on the Israeli “genocide” of the Palestinians. The “Red-Green Alliance” links the Western political Left to the Islamist dream of world conquest, drawing strength (as well as cultural self-contempt) from the latter’s self-sacrificing religious fanaticism that justifies its followers’ claim to “love death” where the Judeo-Christian world—which they would reject—”loves life.”

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One of the strangest recent developments of this conflict has been the (re)emergence of a “right-wing” antisemitism that includes nostalgia for Nazism as well as Holocaust denial-minimization in its rejection of the mid-20^th century victories of liberal democracy on the American model. A lot of this playing at épater les bourgeois, stimulated by the internet-era mania for “self-expression” that favors the scandalous over the reasonable, can be used as a discovery-mechanism to ascertain the contemporary West’s degree of self-hatred: its rejection of Christianity along with Judaism. This nihilistic fondness for Mein Kampf and outlandish Jewish conspiracy theories stands in contrast to the at least nominal striving of both the green and red revolutionary modes toward an ultimate utopia, whether socialist or Islamic.

As Michael Doran suggests in “Giant Abroad, Midget at Home” (Tablet Magazine, January 2026), the hidden stimulus behind this tendency might well be traced to Tucker Carlson’s tenuous roots in the traditional Protestant American ruling class at the turn of the twentieth century, whose largely “social” antisemitism reflected a nativist reaction to the influx of European immigrants that ended with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924. Thus, knowingly or not, today’s Gen Z groypers identify along with Carson with that now-defunct ruling class’s contempt for the “plebeian” 20^th century wrought by European immigration, of which the Jews can be seen as the archetype.

Yet nearly every day serves to disprove Doran’s idea that Trump, while impressing the rest of the world, has become at the same time a “midget” at home by neglecting American voters’ increasing impatience with economic conditions.

As Jonathan Tobin writes for the Jewish News Service on January 6 in “Venezuela, Trump and the end of the liberal world order”, Trump’s unpredictable coup cut through the rhetoric of feckless diplomacy to reveal the obsolescence of the system of international law-and-order that had been inaugurated after WWII with the creation of the United Nations in the hope of establishing an international “community of nations.”

The flawlessly-carried-out kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and his wife with the purpose of dismantling the multi-billion dollar narco-terrorist trade that Venezuela has been providing, while hopefully initiating that nation’s liberation from a dictatorship that has driven perhaps a third of its people into exile, demands the same comparison to a post on X praising Hitler and blaming Churchill for WWII as to a “Democratic Socialist” speech condemning Trump’s act as in violation of “international law”: that between real action to solve the world’s problems and empty verbiage, whether “serious” or nihilistic. Doran has clearly been observing the social-media scene for so long that he has come to take it for the real world, when it is merely a self-mocking caricature of the realm of illusion that has emerged from the failed liberal dreams that built the UN, all too quickly transformed into the temple of world antisemitism.

Call it instinct or philosemitism, Trump has understood that antisemitism is no longer a foible of a semi-confident upper class, but a figure of the West’s death wish, and that to revel in one’s own society’s destruction is not a solution but a surrender. The “endless wars” of the Bush era failed because, in the spirit that founded the United Nations, they expected that the Western formula for the good society could be applied worldwide. What Trump has been doing is rather to confidently affirm the superiority of American values on the world scene. Neither Iran nor Venezuela can be said to “deserve” their current regimes, which was not true either in Saddam’s Iraq or Afghanistan, and it is not unlikely that Trump’s nearly casualty-free acts of aggression in both countries will ultimately have positive effects, given that, unlike the neocon wars, their aims are in synchrony with the fundamental social values of these nations.

John Podhoretz’ title says it all in his recent “Trump and the Gordian Knot” (Commentary, January 4, 2026). Slicing through the fatuous rhetoric about international law that permits the most egregious dictatorships and criminal enterprises to flourish, Trump dared to apply Alexander’s masterful example to Venezuela’s international drug trade by striking at its key figure, doing what had been supposed to be the UN’s job. Whether or not the end result will be a happy return to prosperity on the Western model may be yet unclear, but what justified Trump’s action is that only by demonstrating the continued strength of this model can the West, under the leadership of the USA, retain its position of world leadership.

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It pays to reflect on what this tells us about the political instincts of the American population in giving Trump his solid victory in 2024. To elect Trump was clearly not to make a safe choice; in the face of the obsolescence of the postwar world order, only audacity, egocentric as it may be, can find new paths. In this sense, Trump’s MAGA slogan is anything but empty bravado. When, as Doran’s analysis malgré elle makes clear, our real choice is between Trump and the puerile insolence of the groypers, there is really no choice at all.

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As readers of these Chronicles since 2016 will note, like most “brainworkers,” I have never taken Trump for a political ideal, in the way I might have felt about Reagan, for example. But his bull-in-the-china-shop antics, however I might on occasion find them egregious, reflect the kind of deal-making personality that alone in these times can break through the Gordian knots in which the post-WWII world has enveloped itself. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, as a relevant example, would have been unthinkable had Trump been president rather than Biden.

And although the consequences of Trump’s Maduro coup are anything but certain, the mere fact of pulling it off makes clear that, as Podhoretz realizes, the world of international relations today is so choked with irrationality that trying to solve the problems of Maduro’s illegitimacy by “diplomatic” means—certainly not the means he used to remain in the presidency after a lost election—would be in fact a category error worthy of an Orwellian satire.

Whatever else occurs, the USA, in Venezuela as in Iran, by the demonstrated skills of its military, have incontestably shown the world who is the “strong horse”—and as the Islamists know well, in an era of international tension, that is the closest we can come to certainty. So long as the US can convince its external enemies of this, it should be able to deal with the feckless partisans of the death-wish of Western civilization.

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I

The reader might wonder at my frequent reformulation with minor refinements of the originary hypothesis of Generative Anthropology. I cannot claim to have discovered the origin of language/religion/culture in the sense that a paleontologist discovers the skeleton of a new species of dinosaur. What I propose is a minimal hypothesis of the emergence of humanity, as defined by our ancestors crossing the “Rubicon” into a new sphere of interaction, characterized by (1) the voluntary interruption or deferral of a Pavlovian/”instinctive” act of appropriation, driven by the growing strength of what René Girard called “mimetic desire” that intensifies rivalry among those attracted to the same object, and (2) the designation—to be shared by others—of the deferred object of this appropriation by a sign, that is, of universal value to the proto-human community that forms around it and worthy of its unanimous contemplative attention. The aborted individual gestures of appropriation, by pointing to the object, each acquire the characteristics of an ostensive sign. Think of the gestures of two partygoers, both about to take the last canapé from a plate, who hesitate on seeing each other. The untouchable status of the object, extended to the community as a whole, is the origin of the sacred.

Given that the sign, in contrast with the original appropriative gesture, can be imitated without conflict by others, the scene thus created may be stabilized/ritualized by its repetition by the entire group. This is the minimal form of a scene of worshipful or religious attention paid by a community to a sacred central figure, whose eventual appropriation for alimentary or other purposes can only emerge as a communal effort.

What is essential to note is that the originary forms of both language and worship, the twin foundations of humanity, whose coevality Roy Rappaport postulated in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999), involve the static communal or scenic contemplation of a central object of attention.

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The neologism différance first appeared in an essay published in Théorie d’ensemble (Seuil, 1968) by the late 20^th century philosopher Jacques Derrida, a leading thinker of the era of French Theory in the US and in France. Derrida’s coinage takes advantage of the fact that in French, différer means both to differ and to defer. The point is that we first discover difference in the logical/semantic sense of distinguishing among different concepts and the signs that designate them through deferring the formerly reflexive act of attempting to appropriate what one finds appetitively attractive. It is through deferral in this sense that one is driven to contemplate the object of interest and thereby mark its distinction from other objects—in short, to begin the process of semiosis: the praxis of the philosopher.

Yet in Derrida’s essay, différance is presented as an always-already feature of a paradigm, a set of signs understood as potentially filling a “slot” in a sentence, such as a set of color-words from which the speaker must defer his choice in order to select the one that best describes a given object, rather than, as it must have been in its originary function, simply permitting the subject to focus freely on the object independently of instinctual drives, a phenomenon necessarily prior to the constitution of any differential paradigm.

In consequence, Derrida’s insight has not to my knowledge been applied to the analysis of the origin of language and culture in general. The simple fact is that no one appears to have previously pointed out that the originary use of a linguistic sign must be the result of conceiving the sign’s referent as (1) desirable (or “of interest”) and (2) improper/morally wrong for any individual to appropriate, thus implying that such appropriation must be deferred to a communal decision/distribution.

Hence we can state as the foundation of Generative Anthropology that the (linguistic/semiotic) sign is the consequence of this différance. And thus the pointing gesture that is the result of the abortion of an act of appropriation is “naturally” understood by the human spectator as an ostensive sign, a phenomenon (described as “joint shared attention”) that does not occur naturally among animals, even the great apes.

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That the sacred and the significant both derive from this deferred act of appropriation is obvious once one understands that the stasis thus brought about is the freedom of what Sartre called the pour-soi, transferring Hegel’s term für-sich from the purely conceptual realm to that of the scenic, the terrain on which a desired object is contemplated following the abortion of an act of possession.

In Chronicle 806 I discussed the probable influence on Sartre’s 1943 masterpiece L’étre et le néant of the Buddhist notion of nothingness/Nirvana as a space of liberation. What appeared normal in 1943, yet particularly surprising in the light of the ontology developed here, is that Sartre never reflected on the dependence of this liberation on the deferral of appropriative action, whose stasis makes possible the scenic state of contemplation—in which the unapproachable referent takes on the quality of sacrality, interdiction, inspired by the real or virtual symmetrical presence of (equally desiring) others with respect to the object. As a result, neither in L’être et le néant or elsewhere did Sartre ever connect the unique “liberty” he attributes to the human pour-soi with our unique gift of language.

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The conception of semiotic communication as originating in the deferral of appropriation is the sole theorization that unites (1) the insight of René Girard—derived from literary analysis—into the foundational importance of desire as a mimetic or “contagious” phenomenon, one attested by the multiplication in the proto-human brain of “mirror neurons,” beginning with the higher apes; and (2) the philosophical insights of Sartre and Derrida that describe a contemplative state (which we claim reflects the deferral of appropriative action) in which the emitter of a sign designates to his fellows the worldly reality that is the sign’s referent.

We all understand that the concept of sacrality imposes on the human community an interdiction of seeking to possess the object or creature it invests; but what had never before been clearly explained is that at its root this state of interdiction is common to both the forbidden sacred object and the “deferred” referent of a sign. Indeed, reading Sartre’s discussion of the pour-soi in the light of this elucidation makes it impossible to ignore that both the sacred and the significant are dependent on the non-appropriative différance between subject and object.

To sum up, the common foundation of language and the sacred in différance/deferral is the basis of human culture—the root of all that is specifically human. This is a foundational proposition of anthropology. It does not state an empirical fact, but affirms an essence: the human is what depends on this sacred/semiotic mechanism for all its modes of cultural creation and interaction—in the first place, language and religion. For sacralization is so to speak the passage to infinity of the mechanism of deferral found in ordinary signification.

II

But, you may be thinking, I have already said this in ten different ways; why should we pay attention to the eleventh? My answer is that twenty years ago everyone spoke of Derrida and deconstruction—now they all speak of Girard and mimetic desire. This is in a way a kind of progress; yet in another it is not. For Derrida’s sophistication cannot be thrown away for the sake of Girard’s simplicity. Of the two, no doubt Girard’s anthropology is the more fundamental; but his failure to appreciate the importance of language and its origin in deferral, in contrast with his preoccupation with the violent excesses of emissary murder in which mimetic desire overcomes the restraints of civilization, continues to limit the applicability of his fundamental insight.

Girard’s Mensonge romantique et verité romanesque (Grasset, 1961) is a great book because it discovers in the modern novel a model of human salvation through the overcoming of the romantic lie that denies the need to defer our mimetic temptations in favor of our common purpose: the perpetuation of our species through the continued refashioning of the means for the deferral of violence. But the apocalyptic tone of much of his later work, however apparently justified by events, abandons the positive humanism of his masterpiece for a pessimism in which deferral through signs and worship is neglected in favor of an insistent focus on violence itself and on the fear that it will be ultimately victorious.

Perhaps it will be; our attempts at theorizing are unlikely to change the world’s course. But I will evoke once more the example of Pascal’s pari, his bet on God’s benevolence—and in consequence, on that of the world in its ultimate reality—and affirm that our task as humans is to wager on this benevolence, for only thus can we do our very best to ensure our survival.

Whether with Generation Z modern humanity, as reflected in its negative birth rate and growing susceptibility to antisemitism, may have already started on the path of self-annihilation, we can only do our best on the premise implicit in Pascal’s pari: that the universe is oriented/was created in function of at least permitting our fulfillment; that the power, conscious or unconscious, that drives it has allowed us to become (as far as we know) its most advanced creatures, better adapted to it than any others. We must reject the apocalyptic intuition that we have overstayed our welcome and are fated to perish.

For what good would it do to prepare ourselves for our disappearance? Even were this somehow inevitable, we will still do best to follow Dylan Thomas’ deathbed advice to his father, to

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

The other day I chanced upon Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century and decided to reread it.

It describes the important role of the Jews in the founding and first generation of the USSR, followed by the departure of most of them, before and especially after its breakup, for either the US or Israel. Published originally in 2004, and from what I could tell, virtually unrevised in the 2019 second edition, it is indeed very much a tale of a single century.

Were it to be revised today, the role of the Jews in the current century would have to be described very differently. In particular, Slezkine’s typology that opposes the “Mercurian” Jews to the “Apollonian” Europeans, particularly the Russians, would have to make room for a more specific characterization of both the former and the latter. And particularly since October 7, 2023, to characterize antisemitism simply as the hostility of the “rooted” peoples to the “nomadic” Jews has been clearly shown to be insufficient.

That Slezkine could tell the story of the 20th century as that of the Jews as the ultimate Mercurians outpacing the sluggish Apollonians is of interest in itself. It demonstrates that our understanding of even the most fundamental human categories cannot remain fixed, that history always holds new surprises that reveal the ephemerality of the relations that had previously appeared fundamental and the undreamt-of importance of others that had been hidden or buried.

Thus it is not to make a damning criticism of Slezkine to remark that the book’s understanding of the role of the Jews in the modern world—from their “emancipation” at the time of the French and American Revolutions until the end of the 20^th century—is no longer compatible with today’s configuration. The past quarter-century has demonstrated that antisemitism is by no means a thing of the past. The Islamists’ long-prepared October 7 pogrom, far from repelling the majority of the Western population by its barbarism, inspired sympathy throughout the West as a cry for help by a “colonized” people against the society of “settlers” that had enslaved them. And throughout the subsequent course of the Gaza war, it was the Jews of Israel, not the Islamist authors of the slaughter, who were obsessively accused of “genocide.”

The Jewish century had become a distant memory.

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To speak of the Jews as “Mercurians” was to acknowledge that, by associating them with a “trickster” God, they had already been dispossessed of their rightful share of worldly property, driven from the land they once occupied, and condemned to work as intermediaries between those who retained their primordial “Apollonian” rights to their share of real property in both the literal and the figurative sense.

In a word, it was to accept as permanent the Jews’ expulsion from their homeland that was the originary effect of the resentment of Jewish firstness. That the Jews as the creators/discoverers of the One God considered their land as his gift provided an incentive to their potential rivals to seek to deprive them of it. It was the Jews’ own valuation of Jerusalem and Israel generally that made it mimetically attractive to everyone else. And their rivals being vastly more numerous than they, they could not expect to hold on to it.

At first, the Russian Revolution that abolished “Apollonian” private property empowered the Jews as uniquely able to maintain their “transactional” function, giving the society the product of their labor without accumulating it as “property” save on a personal level. Whence the very high percentage of Jews in the Soviet leadership in its first generations. As Slezkine points out, even Stalin’s purges in the 1930s did not greatly reduce the Jews’ proportional advantage over the other peoples of the Soviet Union in embodying socialist production divorced from Apollonian capital accumulation. Thus, having been prevented over the centuries by antisemitic resentment from accumulating property in the pre-socialist economy, the Jews became via the Revolution the models, and to a large extent the masters, of Soviet communism: this was the story of the “Jewish century.”

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But if even despite the disaster of the Holocaust, the twentieth century could arguably be called the Jewish Century, the obvious—and ominous—question that has arisen is whether the twenty-first—whose first year was marked on 9/11 with history’s most devastating demonstration of the destructive energy available to a religious faith whose adepts are willing to love death while their enemies cannot fully renounce their love of life—might deserve the title of the Islamic Century.

At first it had seemed that Bin Laden’s project, despite its near-total symbolic success, had served only to provoke the West to attempt to stamp out Islamism once and for all. And even the ultimate failure of the American efforts, even when aided by its allies, to defeat it in Afghanistan and Iraq or to reverse the result of the Islamic revolution in Iran, could hardly be said to demonstrate the ultimate viability of the Islamic dream—the conversion of the human race in its entirety into a single Muslim Umma.

And no doubt still today, this viability still remains far from having been demonstrated. Yet since October 7, 2023, its partisans can no longer be said to lack reasons to hope.

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Nothing in Slezkine’s book could have even begun to hint at the torrent of antisemitism unleashed by the October 7 pogrom. The preponderant reaction throughout Europe and the world to the vicious slaughter of 1200 Jewish civilians made it clear that traditional Jew-hatred, which everyone had assumed had been struck a mortal blow by the horrors of the Holocaust, was on the contrary potentially more powerful than at any time since the beginning of the modern era. The surprising breadth and strength of this reaction, strongly encouraged by the “liberal” press in both the US and Europe, revealed the subsistence of a reserve of antisemitic hostility that needed not even the stimulus of a first Israeli act of retaliation to unleash. (See Chronicle 785.)

The readiness to accuse Israel of “genocide” on the basis of Hamas’ own statistics of the civilian deaths attributed to its response to this unprovoked aggression revealed the depth of the resentment of the Jews that the Holocaust had forced the so-called civilized world to repress for nearly eighty years. It was as though everyone had been waiting for an excuse to throw in the Jews’ face this term of ultimate condemnation that they had been forced to recognize with the liberation of the camps in 1945.

All of a sudden the “progressive” vision of history as the continual replacement of old relations and attitudes by new, more efficient ones—the vision that The Jewish Century had shared—was suddenly cast into doubt, as the supposedly civilized world of Western-style nations instinctively sympathized, not with the Israeli victims of the barbarous pogrom, but with the Palestinian sufferings that had presumably provoked it. Jews everywhere were forced to realize that the slaughter of Israeli citizens, rather than making them objects of sympathy, had only served to demonstrate in the eyes of the majority of the nations of the world that the raping, torturing, and murdering “Palestinians” were in fact the innocent natives of the Holy Land striking back in justified frustration at their Jewish settler-oppressors—the new century’s Nazis. Every action of the IDF in response to this unprovoked invasion was viewed not as a response to prior violence but as an unprovoked act of genocide against the Palestinian people, the true natives of the land that the Israelis had sought to usurp.

It might have been predicted that the 20^th-century accession of the Jews to real political power and possession of their own nation would revive the old desire to turn the first into the last. Rather than their redemption from exile making the Jews “just like everyone else,” it made their newly-confirmed firstness scandalous and intolerable. How gladly the Europeans would have believed with Mahmoud Abbas that Al-Aqsa was the original temple in Jerusalem! If any nationality was susceptible to being hated for its victories, it was certainly the Jews.

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And thus Slezkine’s Jewish century was fated to end, along with the illusion of socialism as the final realization of the just society, with the accession of the third and last Abrahamic religion to exemplary status. Islam had built a social system on a faith founded, not like that of the Hebrews, on the firstness of their minimalist theology, nor that of the Christians, on the miracle of a new beginning of history, but on its believers’ self-denial for the sake of the Muslim Umma’s ultimate accession, not merely to exemplarity, but universality.

Islam’s place at the end of the Abrahamic continuum self-evidently explains why it has been able to inspire in the nations under its sway a level of sociopolitical organization beyond all comparison with the world’s other organized religions. The reader is referred to Maral Salmassi’s December 5 post on Substack, entitled “The United Nations of Sharia” for a straightforward explanation of how Islam has come to dominate the United Nations Organization, dating from the formation of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 1969, by nature of its existence as not simply a religion but an integrated religio-political system.

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Yet need this development be fatal to the freedoms evolved within the Judeo-Christian world? The new status of Syria under Ahmed al-Sharaa, still far from clearly resolved, offers an opportunity for the world to observe whether a reduction of the tension among the three Abrahamic religions over the next decades is possible.

To the extent that Islam might be able to reconcile itself to coexisting with the norms of the West rather than continuing to play the long game with which Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah et al. have sought to beguile it into renewing its ageless antisemitism, the common Hillelian-humanistic root of all three religions should be able to assert itself.

Seen in this light, Sharaa’s jihadist past is a qualification rather than an obstacle to a possible first step toward Abrahamic reconciliation. There is still room for hope that the three religions are secretly more ready to work together than the events of the last few years have suggested.