Author: staceymeeker

Recently Richard van Oort (who needs no introduction to readers of these Chronicles) expressed some concern with what I shall call in DeManian terms the “resistance to GA.” Why aren’t students of culture convinced of the necessity of an originary hypothesis? Why do they choose the inelegance of cultural empiricism over the minimalism of originary thinking? Even independently of scenes of origin, why is the mimetic theory of desire not preferred to the mythical mishmash of Freudian doctrine with its Lacanian and feminist overlays?

The simplest answer is that the problem is essentially political: the intellectuals who study culture, if only to justify their status as intellectuals, are suspicious of any theory that appears to validate the hierarchical reality of the social order by deriving it from originary necessity. Hence they prefer to consider the ideal of reciprocal morality as an unexplained transcendental imperative against which all societies come up short rather than a model guaranteed by our originary use of language. As a result, they see history as moving toward an eschatological horizon defined by the establishment of a static egalitarian utopia rather than an unending dynamic process of deferring conflict through representations that provide the differential basis for further conflict and for new representations.

But Richard might still wonder why we need the minimalist hypothesizing of GA in order to defend the movement of history.

If the study of culture were truly a science, the debate over GA would be conducted quite differently. If the minimalism of the originary hypothesis has not been accepted, it is not because a more parsimonious hypothesis has been found, but rather because, in the matter of fundamental anthropology, “scientific” neutrality is felt to be better served by disallowing any hypothesis at all. That each is in fact operating under his own implicit–and no doubt far from minimal–hypothesis is acceptable, since under the circumstances, he can make no attempt to impose it on others.

This de facto situation is so close to the originary hypothesis in its more recent formulations as to make their essential difference all the more apparent. The hypothesis, contrary to what many think, does not require “belief” in a particular scenario of the originary event. It affirms rather that the most parsimonious version of any given anthropology is the one that constructs such an event in such a way as to include all the elements that are essential to its vision of the human condition.

The originary hypothesis is not reducible to any given scenario or set of scenarios. What it does affirm, and what is really the bone of contention, is that an analysis of cultural phenomena implies an anthropology the foundations of which may be specified. It is this specification that is felt as restrictive. But failure to do so is not an act of “freedom.” However one proceeds in an analysis, one ends with a finished text from which an implicit anthropology or vision of the human may be inferred even if it was not thematized at the outset. As anyone who has ever written a doctoral dissertation knows, you write the introduction last, and you often discover in writing it a set of basic principles rather different from the set you started out with.

To refuse to define basic principles at all is, in effect, to impose another set–quite often, in our still-modernist era, a set that has ostensibly little to do with anthropology. GA’s problem is that it is indeed an anthropology, that it affirms that culture is made by people, “selves” if you like, whereas our cultural specialists have been deconstituting and deconstructing the Self–first the bourgeois Self, then any Self at all–for the last 150 years.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Here is a footnote from Paul de Man himself, the ultimate master of modernist criticism whose vast learning and extraordinary intellectual finesse (and, I might add, helpfulness to his students) were undeniable, whatever one thinks of his wartime publication record. This little gem is found in “Lyrical Voice in Contemporary Theory: Riffaterre and Jauss” (in Lyric Poetry Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker, Cornell, 1985), a exemplarily enigmatic article that sheds considerable light on the master’s denunciation of ethical readings of cultural texts as illusions of “blindness” that the critic’s “insight” can discover only at the price of an unnamable “blindness” of his own. (GA does not find this paradox fearsome because it understands that culture deals with it not by endlessly going round in circles but, if one can pardon the Hegelianism, dialectically. Whether or not we eventually blow each other up, we know a bit more about ourselves than our ancestors, and we are better off putting this knowledge at the service of a constructive rather than a nihilist vision of the human.)

Rather than being a heightened version of sense experience, the erotic is a figure that makes such experience possible. We do not see what we love but we love in the hope of confirming the illusion that we are indeed seeing anything at all. (n. 14, p. 63)

De Man is speaking here not of a love affair but of a line from a poem by Victor Hugo, “j’aime le carillon” [I love/like the carillon]–whence his reference to the erotic as a “figure.” Yet his text refers to the erotic in general; that is, it expresses an implicit anthropology.

The first sentence that calls the erotic a figure asserts a generality not incompatible with originary anthropology: the erotic is “figural” in de Man’s vocabulary in the sense that it depends on representation, and therefore on the paradoxical interaction between representation and what it represents. To write “I love the carillon” is not to make the imaginary carillon more vivid (“heightened version of sense experience”), but to provoke in us the “transcendental” imagination that there “is” indeed a carillon rather than the mere signifier on the page.

But the second sentence, whatever the author’s intention, goes beyond the realm of writing. “We do not see what we love” because love and seeing are on two different planes: we see materially but love transcendentally, that is, love is mediated through signs. “Seeing anything at all” is an “illusion” because “anything” in this context belongs to the sign-world rather than the real world. “To see anything” in this sense means to have an experience of meaning, and for de Man, the conjunction of experience and meaning can only be illusion–the literary text simply makes the illusion convincing.

All these categories cry out for a generative explanation. Why? Because only thus can they be left in their DeManian paradoxicality while being understood at the same time in their human reality. No, we cannot have love without signs, but why do we have signs in the first place? How can it be said, without contradicting de Man’s essential point, that God is Love? The transcendental realm of the sign is not, cannot be, simply independent of the human, as de Man and, in the last analysis, all modernists think; but it is not, as humanists like to imagine, simply human either. The sign is both of us and beyond us. But this is a sterile paradox unless it is given meaning within our fundamental anthropology–unless, in a word, the transcendental can be shown to emerge from worldly immanence precisely in the locus, in the “moment,” of the human. Which is the very content of the originary hypothesis.

I’m not sure how many deconstructionists the above argument would persuade, not to speak of their successors, the multiculturalists who would find in its very sophistication a sign of Eurocentric bias. But I hope, at least, that I have persuaded Richard van Oort. If I can’t convince Richard of the intellectual validity of GA, then I’m really in trouble!

Last week’s New Republic (September 8 & 15) contains a lengthy review (pp. 29-38) by Margaret Talbot of Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend by Karen Essex and James Swanson (General Publishing Group). Like the book itself, the review is a piece of nostalgia, including three photographs of Ms. Page, who flourished as “America’s underground pin-up queen” from 1950 to 1957. Although I was sixteen in 1957, certainly old enough to appreciate such materials, I must admit having no memory of either the name or the body of Ms. Page, whose dark page-boy makes her look (especially in one photo with glasses) like my idea of Lois Lane. But my subject here is not Bettie Page, but the widespread nostalgia for a sexually more innocent age, as expressed with some poignancy in the article’s final paragraph:

Finally [the Bettie Page photographs] are tinged with pathos, since they are survivals of a time when fetishism and exhibitionism and ordinary sexual adventure really meant something, when their setting was the cheesy chiaroscuro world of roadside motels with linoleum floors and vinyl furniture, not the fake expensive world of fashion magazines and rock videos, a time before pseudo-porn seeped into advertising and was made pleasant and normal. These images remind us what it was like when erotica was mostly hidden. There are many reasons to oppose repression, but in the universe of repression, one learned the twin arts of fantasy and mystery. Bettie Page always seemed so good when she was being so bad. It is a paradox made of distinctions that we have almost completely destroyed. Poor glutted smirking us. If we cannot be bad, how will we be good? (38)

Ah, how innocent things were back then! We have heard this so many times it sounds like a truism. But this kind of thinking is both pernicious and false. Contra Ms. Talbot, I think we are privileged with a far better chance than our fifties counterparts of transcending our “glutted smirking” side and of giving the “ordinary sexual adventure” we call love its best chance of success.

This way of writing about pornography is based on an extremely narrow idea of the erotic, one that could be summed up in the phrase “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” It implies that once one has seen a depiction of a normally hidden part of a woman’s body or of some particular sex act, then that body part or that act loses its interest, no longer “really means something.” There is an interesting glissement in this passage between the seepage of pseudo-, that is, softcore porn into advertising, videos, etc., and the general availability of hardcore porn which indeed is still set, mutatis mutandis, in the same “cheesy” world as the softer stuff of forty years ago–for that kind of erotica, although a lot easier to find than in the old days, is still “mostly hidden.”

But my critique is independent of this nuance. Because Ms. Talbot has an understanding of sexuality divorced from the idea of love–which I am sure she considers a “good thing” to add to the sexual mix, but clearly not an essential component–she not only fails to note the present era’s progress on the sexual front, she fails to understand that pornography and even what used to be called “perversions” themselves pay homage to the sexual ideal of mutual love: the mutual gift of sexual pleasure without the abandonment of mutual care.

My first point is that the generalization of sexual knowledge–through the media and the education system as well as pornography–spells not the universalization but the end of the “smirking” attitude, which is predicated rather on the rarity of this knowledge. No doubt the distribution of sexual information to the young has its problems; sex education in the lower grades is offensive, less in my mind through any direct psychological damage to the children involved than through the disrespect of our educational institutions that this kind of instruction inspires in them. This aside, the advantage that accrues to society from the dissemination of sexual knowledge is in foregrounding the difference, which previous societies tended to elide, at least above the lowest social levels, between sexual knowledge in general and “carnal knowledge” in particular.

That in the good old days one had real knowledge only of one’s presumably unique sexual partner–knowledge that such as Bettie Page hinted at but never revealed–is a limitation rather than an advantage. A look at the “marriage manuals” of past generations will convince anyone both that explicit sexual knowledge has always been of value and that the pudeur of the past made such knowledge difficult to obtain in a safe and respectable context.

What does one “know” when one sees a naked body or a sexual act? The general conformation of the organs, the general procedure of the act. But acts of love are not general but particular. One does not love the loved one’s body less because one has prior knowledge of bodies in general. The generalization of sexual knowledge among adults is conducive to reverence for one’s Other not as a generic sexual being but as a particular person who does not lose his or her individuality in moments of sexual intimacy. It is no doubt regrettable that some of this knowledge is obtained by means of posed images of real people: pornography is not a nice industry. But as a form of degradation, it is certainly preferable to the widespread prostitution that was the past century’s way of spreading sexual knowledge to the male population, while keeping “respectable” women in the dark as much as possible.

Let me not be misunderstood: I am not writing “in favor of” the distribution of pornography. But this distribution is a fact of our lives, and, aside from keeping it out of the hands of small children, attempts to arrest it in the age of the Internet are bound to be ineffective and to produce more harm than good. I would suggest that, like many objectionable forms of knowledge, beginning with that obtained in the felix culpa of the Fall of Man, sexual knowledge is ultimately more a blessing than a curse.

My second point is that pornography, as well as perversions like bondage, pedophilia, and the like, however reprehensible or even criminal, should be considered as manifestations not of “evil instincts” but of deviated desires for love. This does not mean that all such acts should be tolerated; but if we understand them in this way, we are less apt to mislocate the source of human evil in sexuality instead of in our desiring nature in general–a tendency that has been paradoxically encouraged by the Freudian mythology that dominates our era. Even the aforementioned biblical scene of the Fall often alluded to in support of this view suggests quite the opposite. The eating of the forbidden fruit is in no way sexual; it is a simple act of resentment. Only after the Fall does sexual desire become dangerous and shameful. It is desire as such that is the human problem; sexuality, because it is desire for another person, intensifies the inherently problematic nature of human desire, but it is not its source.

We should see love as the “natural” telos of sexual activity, and understand perversions in terms of the deviated means they use to reach this telos. Pedophilia, to take a particularly distasteful example, deviates the exchange of love to a child whose innocence of sexual desire substitutes for innocence within sexual desire. The child is in this respect a “fetish,” a sign of innocence used as an instrument rather than a person. We will condemn the pedophile with a better conscience, and perhaps even give him some hope of being cured, if we separate innocence from childhood and consider it as a rightful quality of sexuality rather than a naive illusion.

Similarly, sexual bondage perverts the mutual caring that is essential to sexual love. Here we are on more familiar cultural terrain; the complaints of Petrarchian poets about their love’s cruelty are less controversial than Humbert Humbert’s paean to Lolita. What lover would not suffer for his beloved? but asking her to whip him is, once more, “fetishizing” this suffering in a voluntary act as opposed to a context where suffering would serve a real purpose. (This is, to my mind, what “fetishism” really is; the current fascination for things and sexual organs that passes for a theory of fetishism is, on the contrary, fetishism itself. Sexuality, like all things human, is essentially interactive.)

When I look through the best-sellers in an airport news-stand or flip through the magazines at the supermarket check-out counter, I am always struck by the importance popular literature gives to love. In magazines like Cosmopolitan or Glamour, it may be cloaked in a mask of hedonistic sexuality. But beyond the recipes for multiple orgasms, these publications are primarily focused on finding and keeping the right person, not merely as a spouse, but as one’s “true love.” However corny this term appears in an academic context, it sells in a popular one because true love, in all its simple transparency, is what people want–it is what we need.

In our time, when the decline of the institutional sacred puts an ever-greater burden on the couple, I think we should be grateful for any form of knowledge that allows us a better chance of seeing and valuing the uniqueness of another person. We should not abandon the ideal of sexual innocence–au contraire–but it should be asserted en connaissance de cause, after sexual knowledge rather than before; only thus can the superficial cynicism of the “glutted smirking” response be disarmed.  It is preferable that we appreciate and defend the virtues of love out of knowledge–even knowledge obtained from the unsavory purveyors of post-Bettie Page erotica–rather than out of ignorance.

The accidental death of Princess Diana leads naturally to a reflection on celebrity that we are obliged to take up for the very reason that “the crowd” has been reflecting on it and that we are all, in one way or another, part of the crowd. That there is no simple way to describe our form of participation in mass phenomena is perhaps the most significant revelation of such an event. One cannot ignore it; there is too much publicity. One can refuse to be deeply affected by it; but refusal is a marked position within the situation opened up by the event, the unmarked position being the expression of sorrow. Yet it is superficially arch to deduce from this our slavery to the media. The use of GA is precisely in shedding light on situations of this sort, where we are obliged to sort out the different layers of our relationship to the scene of representation.

The lowest level of discussion is exemplified by innumerable media pundits telling us how much “we” identified with / loved / will miss the Princess, who filled the necessary function of bringing glamour to “our” otherwise banal lives. This form of discourse is at best naive and usually condescending, since the pundit’s celebrity identification exists only to permit him to speak for “us,” as Victor Hugo spoke for the voiceless masses of the nineteenth century; we may take for granted that, unlike “ours,” the pundit’s life is something other than banal. As the pundit’s listeners, we are told what “we” think; our very reaction to this “supplementary” telling, even if positive, deconstructs the superficial naivete of this mode of discourse.

A more sophisticated approach is exemplified by William Pfaff’s column in the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, September 3. Pfaff rejects the idea of involuntary “identification” as crudely condescending; he claims that “we” follow the lives of people like Di only because “it was a great story,” and that indeed, if anyone’s life is “empty” and needs filling, it is not ours but that of the celebrity, whose “narcissistic” addiction to the obsessive publicity represented by stalkarazzi has here led to a sad conclusion. While Pfaff is right in taking the naive we-sayers to task, I do detect a whiff of resentment in his paradoxical reversal of the dependency role. Most people would unreflectively consider the celebrity obsessed by public attention to be less mimetically dependent than the “fan” fascinated by the celebrity: if the first is a slave to mimetic desire, she is individualized by it in a way inaccessible to the second. There is indeed something abject about the public appetite for celebrity, although its specific nature has not been grasped by either of the above analyses.

An apparently more useful way to talk about celebrity from an anthropological perspective is to note its resemblance to the sacred. But the word “sacred,” like the quality it designates, hides as much as it reveals. In particular, it hides its mimetically interactive character. Both the naive pundits and Pfaff construct a model of an essentially dual relationship between “the public” or “we” and a celebrity such as Princess Diana. Adding the term “sacred” does nothing to change this: to claim that “we” treat celebrities as sacred, or that on the contrary we just consider them sources of “great stories,” does not answer the question of why or how we relate to sacred beings at all. What good does it do me to “identify” with someone who knows nothing of me? to “believe” in a celebrity / divinity I have no contact with?

Readers of this column may have guessed that the inadequacy of these dyadic subject-object analyses lies in their failure to grasp the triadic nature of desire. My relationship to a celebrity, or to the sacred that he or she incarnates in however diluted a form, cannot be understood in dyadic terms. The value of celebrity, the sacral aspect of which is enhanced in the present case by the sacrificial resonance of accidental death, lies in making us aware by concrete example of the mimetic structure of our relationship to the sacred–but not so aware that this awareness does not require elucidation, since the triangularity of desire is always hidden from our experience even when we “know” it to be present.

Why do we “identify” with celebrities? Why shouldn’t we simply resent those whose visibility, as the very word “celebrity” implies, need not be justified by any noteworthy achievement? If this person, arguably no more unusual than myself, is famous while I am not, what explains his or her value to me? The answer to this conundrum is that we identify with the celebrity against our own milieu. The teenager who takes a rock star as his “role model” in opposition to parental norms is a familiar example. But it should not be taken to imply that celebrities are useful only for purposes of generational or other group definition. The celebrity helps me to define myself even against my contemporaries who identify with that very same celebrity. In this case, our common relationship with the celebrity approximates our originary relation to the sacred, which is in principle the same for everyone. You and I worship the same God, but he mediates our relationship by lending to my actions a transcendental significance–even if he does the same thing for you. The sacred defers our potential mutual violence because the sacred is accessible only as (indefinitely reproducible) representation, not in its (scarce) reality.

The frustration I still recall from my childhood with a way of avoiding direct competition may well have been the original germ of my interest in Girard’s mimetic theory of desire. It works this way: Suppose Jane scores 95 on a math test on which Joe scores 90. She expects Joe to show her the deference due her superior achievement; but instead, he tells her, “You’re not so great; my friend Jack scored 99!” She expected to be able to profit from dyadic comparison with Joe, but discovers that, from his perspective, she is symmetrical not with him but with his other acquaintances, among whom she is not the best. Now Jack, who is best of the three at math, is a person of some rarity; we might even call him, on a local level, a celebrity. He may not really be Joe’s friend, may not know him at all–indeed, he may not even exist–but his even imaginary existence is useful to Joe, not because he “identifies” with his success, but because he can use it as a weapon against Jane.

No matter how tenuous my connection to the celebrity, the simple invocation of a name preserves me from the direct competition of my fellows. Alice may be prettier than Betty; but Betty’s movie magazine depicts the girls she “really” identifies with, who are, needless to say, far prettier than Alice. Charles is buffer than Dan, but the guys in Dan’s physical culture magazine make Charles look skinny. One identifies with celebrities precisely to the extent that one feels the need to define oneself against one’s own milieu. This is what is meant by the oft-stated opposition between the “emptiness of my life” and my fantasy of the celebrity’s fairy-tale existence. But it isn’t emptiness but plenitude that disturbs me–the plenitude of the world of Others. Celebrity-fantasy, indeed, any kind of fantasy, doesn’t fill an empty space; on the contrary, it helps me separate myself from the evidence of my mediocrity that those close to me provide. If I were a hermit, I’d have no need to fantasize about celebrities.

None of this should lead us to deny that figures like Diana are loved, albeit not with the reciprocal human love that has motivated these columns. The quasi-sacred presence of a celebrity makes us potentially more tolerant and even loving to the very neighbors with whom we would otherwise be in conflict, just as love of God makes humans potentially more tolerant and loving to each other. Yet neither can we deny that the celebrity-sacred, even or especially when practiced by the intelligentsia, is a degraded, “sacrificial” form of sacred, just as Arnold-movies and the like, even or especially when cultivated by the intelligentsia, are degraded, “sacrificial” forms of art. All the camp sophistication in the world can’t make my “relationship” with someone like Diana more than a stylish version of Joe’s ploy against Jane. The postmodern age is allergic to centralized exemplarity. Only in death–and especially in unnecessarily early death–can a celebrity come close to a moment of genuine consecration.

The real lesson to be learned from “our” cult of celebrity is that we cannot simply go without sacrality. Postmodern cynicism and demystification have lost their edge and become merely perverse forms of naivete. Yet traditional religions have their limits, and the newer religions strain our credulity.

But sacrality, properly understood, is nothing other than reverence for the personhood of what cannot simply be appropriated by our appetite. Christianity has already taught us that the highest form of worship is that which understands the humanity of the sacred center. The best way for us to extend the Christian lesson of post-sacrificial sacrality into the postmodern era is to conserve our worshipful energy for those closest to us, those alone whom we can really love because we can expect them to love us in return.

My colleague David Rapoport of the UCLA Department of Political Science, the founding director of our Center for the Study of Religion, was recently kind enough to invite me to an upcoming conference on democracy and violence. The following sketches an originary analysis of democracy along the lines of what I am preparing for this conference.

Modern liberal democracy was declared a few years ago by Francis Fukuyama in a famous article–and how many articles become famous?–to signify the “end of history.” This rash and paradoxical Hegelian claim aroused much controversy. Whether it requires that historically existing liberal democracies succeed in the face of the resentment they generate among the less successful, or that they indefinitely avoid destructive conflict among themselves, these are points Hegelians may wish to debate (A: If the real is rational, historical success is indeed crucial; B: But at the “end of history,” in the realm of freedom, the real need no longer be rational; history has taught us all we can know of rationality). But no one has really been able to attack the author’s central thesis, which is, “history” aside, that liberal democracy is the ultimate form of social organization and cannot in principle be improved upon.

Liberal democracy contains two essential components: (1) a free market economy, however qualified by political intervention, and (2) a democratic political system in which sovereignty ultimately resides in the citizenry as a whole and is regularly expressed in elections. Whatever the details, the essential feature of democratic politics is that only elected officials exercise political (legislative or executive) power, and that their election is always for a limited term.

Political theorists generally ignore the analogy between these two central institutions. Both the market and the elective political order are decision-making mechanisms that produce unanticipated results by aggregating the inputs of many individual participants. Both market prices and election returns are the resultants of a multitude of individual decisions, and neither can be determined in advance. Just as each citizen casts his vote as he sees fit, each participant in the market buys and sells as he sees fit, in both cases, of course, within the limits of what is available to buy, sell, or elect. But where there is demand, whether for goods or for political programs, the principles of both institutions dictate that someone will attempt to supply it, since “the people”‘s demand is the ultimate source of all power.

Why do these institutions fit so well together that we characterize the system that combines them as “ultimate”? In both cases, decisions are made in what seems intuitively to be the most “natural,” least constrained manner. At a given moment, the best price or course of action might be one dictated by an enlightened despot; but in order for the latter to impose his choice, he must have means of affirming his legitimacy as decision-maker independent of the will of the citizenry, who have no outlet for their resentment if they disagree, whereas in an elective system, all have had their chance at electing him and will soon have the opportunity to elect someone else in his place, and in a free market, buyers and sellers determine prices among themselves.

Democracy indeed seems more “natural” to us today than other systems, yet this was hardly the case in the past: in most places and periods of history, there have been no democracies at all, and people expected to be governed independently of their will by a single ruler and/or an elite oligarchy. If we feel able to affirm nonetheless that democracy is a “natural” institution, it is because we feel that any other system requires greater expenditure of real or potential physical violence in order to maintain itself. When we form voluntary organizations, our first impulse is to conduct business, whether as a collectivity or under the leadership of officials, according to the “one person, one vote” principle; any other procedure would reflect overt or implied coercion. Similarly, any spontaneous meeting of buyers and sellers will lead to a “free market,” different only from the “capitalist” free market in its local nature which limits the knowledge of supply and demand accessible to the parties to the transaction.

This suggests that both markets and democracy are minimal institutions, points of least resistance or “valleys” in institutional space. But neither this assertion nor that of their compatibility is an empirical statement, however they may be supported by empirical evidence. The same is true of our “moral sense” that all persons are essentially equal and in the general case should have equal rights. We can construct a “social contract” or even, a la John Rawls, an “original position” to make this point, but our intuition of human equality clearly precedes these artificial constructions, which are only meant to permit us to explore the consequences of this intuition.

In contrast to these a posteriori constructions, GA’s originary hypothesis constructs a plausible model of a minimal event that could indeed have given rise not only to our “moral sense” but to all the fundamental cultural elements–language, religion, art…–we share with other human beings. We need not “affirm” that such an event took place; we merely claim that its reconstruction offers the most parsimonious set of assumptions from which to derive what we know about the human-in-general. In the case at hand, in opposition to social-contract “scenes of origin” with which it is sometimes confused, the originary hypothesis explains in actu the connection between linguistic competence and moral equality that is implicit in the “natural” democratic slogan “one person, one vote.” What is “natural” about both the market and democracy is that they embody originary human reciprocity, which is not a biological but a cultural trait, one inherent in the symmetrical interchange of language. Our hypothesis explains as well why the slogan was not long ago “one person” but “one man,” in other words, why women were not only not included in the original notion of human equality but were denied voting rights in democracies until extremely recent times. In contrast, the a posteriori rationalism of the “original position” can only condemn earlier democracies for “sexism,” as though the passage from “one man” to “one person” were the simple rectification of a moral error rather than the result of a rational historical process.

What is to be learned from the historical origin of democracy in the late sixth-century Athenian polis? Politics as a self-consciously independent activity does not exist in predemocratic societies, where relations of power are inextricable from the system of ritual distribution. In primitive hunter-gatherer societies, this system is symmetrical, “equalitarian”; with the advent of agriculture and the accumulation of surpluses of food and consequently of labor, the ritual center becomes a source of redistribution, controlled at first by local “big-men” and eventually by a palace hierarchy such as prevailed in Greece in the Mycenaean era. The key step in the creation of Athenian democracy was Solon’s abolition of debt-enslavement (seisachtheia) at the beginning of the sixth century B.C.; the democratic citizen is “free” (eleutheros) because he has been freed from dependency on the ritual distribution system and its persisting aristocratic remains. This is a historically new conception of human identity: the citizen is an independent producer who is the master of his labor and can only be imposed upon through democratic decisions of the community within which he participates equally.

For the first time, the alienation of individual freedom to the center that is a necessity of all social organization becomes a reflective, voluntary act rather than one imposed by the sacred necessity of deferring violence. But political liberation is achieved only through the prior economic liberation of the citizen from the remains of the ritual distribution system. Some features of this liberation anticipate and even exceed those of the Early Modern homo economicus. The Athenian citizen was not, like the Roman, subordinated to a family he was obliged to perpetuate. Athenian parents could disinherit their children; conversely, there was no equivalent to the Roman patria potestas that affirmed the authority of the father over his adult sons. (See Raphael Sealey, The Athenian Republic, Pennsylvania State UP: 1987, chap. 2.) No doubt the Athenian economy was not the ever-expanding free market of “capitalism,” if only because it was largely driven by the need to bring in slaves from the empire to replace the free unpropertied citizens in performing labor for the rich. But the essential compatibility between economic and political freedom does not depend on capitalist accumulation; it suffices that the economy be composed of individual agents liberated from the preestablished identities defined by the old palace redistribution system and the aristocratic rule that followed it.

Athenian democracy is of world-historical importance because it is the first form of social organization that consciously implements our originary intuition of human linguistic reciprocity. In Athenian politics, the violent agon of physical conflict was deferred, not by ritual prescription, but by its systematic transformation into the peaceful agon of words. Aeschylus’ Eumenides celebrates this revolution in human self-consciousness. Democracy is the ultimate political form because it directly implements the primary function of human culture: the deferral of violence through (the free exchange of) representation(s). But the Athenian experience shows that this is only made possible by the citizen’s economic liberation from the constraint of ritual distribution. It is this originary potential connection between democracy and the free market that is realized in modern liberal democracy.

If one thing has preoccupied me since my college days, it’s the distinction between high and popular culture. I have never been impressed by theories that disparage this distinction as a deluded reflection of hegemonic oppression of one kind or another, nor by those that purport to oppose an authentic popular culture to the “mass” culture purveyed by the elite as panem et circenses or “repressive tolerance” in order to divert the proletariat from its true revolutionary vocation. On the contrary, the opposition of high to popular art belies demystifying analyses of the social order as a mask for the will to power. High art has an elevating quality that it seems to me churlish to deny; in contrast, popular art, whatever its pleasures, is self-indulgently resentful. This is not the end but the point of departure of my analysis, but I cannot accept a model of culture that fails to account for this opposition.

More recently, I have come to feel that the postmodern era no longer tolerates the notion of high art, and that what is left of its heritage–in music, poetry, the plastic arts–has become so narrow in its appeal to “specialists” that it can no longer claim to elevate the soul. This artistic heritage has retained the ascetic relation to desire that has always characterized high art, but the askesis it asks of us seems to prepare us less for a chastening of our desire in the real world than for a demonstration of our superior esthetic sophistication. Asceticism become its own raison-d’être is just inverted hedonism, as Baudelaire recalls to us in a deliberately archaic mode: …la Sainteté / Comme en un lit de plume un délicat se vautre, / Dans les clous et le crin cherchant la volupté [… Sainthood / As an esthete stretches himself in a featherbed / Seeking sensual pleasure in nails and horsehair]; and ultimately, the hedonism is transformed by the iron laws of mimesis into mere snobbery. No doubt this has been a feature of modern art since the days of Proust’s Mme Verdurin, but by now this feature has come to dominate all others…

But the passage of the years (I turned 56 this week) has led me to revise this perspective. I would make a case for the persistence of the impulse to elevation rather than of high art per se. The notion of esthetic “height” that implies invidious comparison with “low” or popular art is no longer tolerable; an impulse to elevation is a movement, not a fixed location, a goal rather than an a priori given. Above all, the esthetic question of elevation comes down to the ethical one: what is elevation for? what model of human interaction does it contribute to? And once again, I find this model not, as in the past, in public relationships but in those of intimacy, as epitomized by the communication-structure of lyric poetry, although by no means limited to it.

The originary moment of high culture is the movement of renunciation, of deferral through representation; that of popular culture, the movement toward the division of the sacrificial spoils, the sparagmos. The latter is, we should not forget, still a movement-toward and not the real thing, although in the orgy of the “carnavalesque” it can get pretty close. Just as, in Northrop Frye’s schema, the tragic is part of a cycle represented in toto in “romance,” the ascetic high-cultural moment is part of the same overall sacrificial movement as the appetitive popular one; hence its foregrounding calls forth accusations of hypocrisy. But high culture does not deny sacrificial violence; it merely asks us to stand back from it enough to accept our complicity in denying the (real or virtual) humanity of the victim, whose position it forces us to understand from within.

But the tragic lesson of high culture has been put in question by the postmodern age, when there is no locus of authority. The old high culture depended on the unreflective acceptance of the public esthetic scene, whose “classical” esthetic authority beyond the esthetic subject himself enforced the refusal of desire. This authority of the esthetic reached its highest point of tension in the modernist era and was destroyed, no doubt forever, in the Holocaust and its victimary aftermath.

But now that the dust has settled, we realize that we cannot simply renounce the high-cultural ideal. In the first place, we continue to cultivate its works as a “canon” that, whatever the contortions of modern cultural politics, is far from abandoned. As has been pointed out by astute commentators, in recent years, Hollywood has given more emphasis to Shakespeare than many English major programs. Classical music continues to flourish, even if its audience is not vast. We must therefore ask ourselves into what ethical context the lessons of these high-cultural works are being inserted–without one, they would lose their audience and become mere objects of antiquarian study–and what works are being or might be created specifically for this context.

In recent Chronicles I’ve been developing some ideas on lyric poetry that I won’t rehearse here in detail. The core of my argument is that our postmodern era is characterized by (1) individual specialization, which in itself requires of each individual a certain “elevation” above the general norm, and, concomitantly, (2) globalized mass media, which render the public scene incapable of giving the individual spectator more than “symbolic” hints of ethical liberation or, in other terms, whose “stars” can no longer be exemplary in any full-bodied ethical sense, so that (3) the intimate world of the couple becomes a minimal cultural unit required to generate its own set of meanings, supplying a new “private-public” model of cultural elevation to replace the traditional high-cultural public one lost to the mass media. The intimate world thereby becomes the ethical context for a new concept of cultural elevation centered on one’s privileged conversation with the Other rather than the community as a whole. (More on this in future columns.)

In this model, lyric poetry, already structured by intimacy, becomes the exemplary high art of our time. But the model can and of necessity will be extended to the other arts. The apparent contradiction of an art that circulates among the public precisely because it denies its public nature is in fact a productive paradox typical of market society, which never tires of selling us the authenticity of the noncommercial–where “the priceless costs a little more.” The blare of the media brings to consciousness the “private-public” specificity of a genre like poetry. And the new medium of the Internet supplies the ideal means for “private-public” communication, of which, dear reader, this Chronicle is a perfect example–written for and read by a few hundred people, yet virtually accessible all over the world. Still in its infancy, the Internet’s virtues as a medium are handicapped by the difficulty in finding and sorting what it makes available. As increasingly better indexing services develop in the coming years, theoretical activities like this column, as well as the Net’s many and varied esthetic ventures (numerous in the domain of lyric poetry) will increasingly be matched with their potential audience.

What is the relevance of all this for Cultural Studies (CS)? The very name, historical considerations aside, suggests the utopian ideal of a universal method for studying cultural phenomena, high, low, or “middlebrow,” without an a priori judgment of status. In practice, of course, CS has tended to emphasize popular phenomena generally neglected by university scholars and, perhaps even more characteristically, has attempted to juxtapose these phenomena non-hierarchically to the works of traditional high culture. But these operations presuppose a still-unquestioned structure of scientific “study” in which the “student”–modeled on the (etic) ethnologist rather than on the (emic) interpreter of sacred texts–is fully independent of the “culture,” even if the latter be the student’s own–as if we could have our “own” culture in the postmodern age.

The place where “elevation” enters cultural consciousness is in the (emic) relationship between a member of a society and the sacred means by which that society defers violence. But with the decline of public high culture, the old “emic” style of cultural analysis declines as well. To study culture is increasingly to externalize it, to “eticize” it–in a word, to do CS.

But the very self-consciousness embodied in CS calls forth, in good Hegelian fashion, the antithetical self-consciousness of “emic” cultural intimacy. “My own” culture becomes the culture that cannot (yet) be studied, that mutates into ever-new forms as soon as the legions of CS catch up with and formalize it. This self-conscious doubling of the general anthropological relationship between the “irrational” cultural and the “rational” economic spheres implies a heightened cultural acceleration in which CS becomes the cultural self-consciousness of the rationalizing marketplace, killing and packaging a living culture that continually recreates itself anew.

Today it is only in the smallest units, for which the couple provides a minimal model, that the continuity of such creation can be assured. But this is also to say, in more positive terms, that increased economic rationalization provokes the indefinite proliferation of cultural creativity in these smallest units. An incipient “post-postmodern” era may well be devoted to working out the consequences of this new situation.

I have a graduate student, whose name will go here unmentioned, who snickers every time I mention words like “ritual” or “sacrifice,” and breaks into a big smile at “anthropology,” with or without “generative.” My student smiles at GA in the same way as we react to the fanatic who gives the same answer to every question–say, the antisemite who blames everything on the Jews. In her perspective, “anthropology” is my mantra, “ritual” or “sacrifice” my a priori answer to every cultural question. This is the simplest form of comedy, what Bergson called du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant [the mechanical adhering to the living]; we anticipate the other’s “mechanical” response and reward ourselves with laughter for our good judgment.

She is not unique; I still recall my late colleague Joe Riddel referring to Girard’s La violence et le sacré as “the sacrifice book.” People like Riddel belong to the world of demystifying “theory” within which, since the days of Raymond Picard’s dinosaur-literary-historian Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture (1965)–and its far milder equivalents here from text-respecting New Critics–there has been virtually no conflict. Some people attacked deconstruction when Paul de Man was found to have written that antisemitic article, but decon’s mainstream critical successors in the various victimary-identity collectives have no quarrel with its attacks on “phallogocentrism,” which they merely deflect in a more obviously political direction. “Theory” is not something to smile at; it is built on politically sensitive dichotomies that make each text into a minefield–woe be it to the neophyte who chooses hegemony over oppression, the symbolic over the imaginary… Its Manichean dualism violently rejects GA’s minimalist monism.

Generative thinking strikes the impatient mind as reductive thinking, an arbitrary grid placed on the blooming buzzing confusion of empirical reality. Why not just be cultural empiricists and talk about stories, films, even religious rites, “in themselves,” without any a priori preconceptions? If it’s all “human” anyway, what do we gain by deciding before we start that the human has certain “originary” structures and hypothesizing what they might have been, or by reminding ourselves that esthetic forms derive historically from sacrificial ritual?

But the point isn’t just to say “sacrificial,” but to show how a given story is structured sacrificially. Tracing the cultural work’s originary derivation doesn’t rob it of its specificity but situates it in human history. This is the “Hegelian” aspect of GA; a historically existing reality is defined by its place in our open-ended movement of deepening ethical self-consciousness and the ever-new degrees of freedom it permits us to generate.

The skeptical cultural empiricist might reply that the visible traces of historical derivation contained in cultural works are sufficient to our understanding of them; those traces that have become so obscure that only cultural “archeology” can detect them are by that very fact no longer relevant. In analyzing a Hollywood film, it’s only necessary to examine it in the context of other films to which it makes reference; to go back to film’s sources in literature, let alone in sacrificial ritual, just introduces extraneous categories that history has in fact refined out of existence. Sure, Arnold blowing away bad guys is a sacrificial gesture, but neither the filmmaker, the spectator nor, the empiricist will claim, the analyst, has to know about this, because it’s been “discounted” by the film’s cultural context. The term “sacrifice” adds nothing to “blowing away bad guys,” because the latter implies all we need know of the sacrificial–all we need to know, that is, to produce the next Arnold film, where the bad guys’ costumes and the technical means of their annihilation will be different but the formula will be the same.

This is not a trivial challenge. I would even say that it is more serious than the challenge posed by “theory,” whose appetite for demystification is directed at a narrow university-based clientele. Cultural empiricism, in the person of my skeptical student, forces us to rethink the purpose of cultural analysis and how reference to the originary function of cultural phenomena (“originary analysis”) can help us to accomplish it.

The answer clearly cannot be given in the abstract. If all we know about a film is that Arnold “blows away bad guys,” a reference to the sacrificial can be no more than a pointer in the right direction. The value of GA’s minimalist anthropological paradigm is not in reducing the diversity of the cultural to a predictable set of originary structures, but permitting us to grasp the consciousness of and concomitant freedom within the originary structure embodied by the cultural work. As I have been emphasizing in recent columns, the cultural sphere functions only by supplying ever new degrees of freedom or “empowerment” to its audience. Some of these imaginary freedoms may be trivial indeed, but even Arnold’s “blowing away” will not work at the box office unless there is some new technological or other wrinkle that enriches the spectator’s imagination, his virtual toolbox of meanings.

Originary analysis cannot substitute for historical research; the more links one knows of the chain connecting the specific historical work to the origin, the more clearly one understands its unique contribution to the generative process. But without an anthropological paradigm, historical analysis has no overall point; it merely relates works to their ancestors by ad hoc criteria. Originary analysis allows us to see the persistence of the originary function of the work underneath its historical modifications and to understand these modifications as modes of cultural self-consciousness that permit the creation of ever-new meanings and means of meaning-production.

Some examples are in order. I’ll first briefly remind the reader of my recent discussion of Hamlet. Here the sacrificial structure of tragedy is evident, but that’s not what’s interesting about this play. My student may snicker at “the deferral of violence through representation,” but in Hamlet one sees this not merely in the overall structure of the play, but in the hero’s new way of representing the scene of representation to himself, self-consciously deferring the violence of his revenge and thereby enriching the cultural imagination. Another case I’ve discussed is that of Madame Bovary. Here again, Emma’s death at the end is “tragic,” including a Romantic element of ironic disillusion–her deathbed laughter at hearing the blind beggar’s song. But that’s not the original feature of this novel, which lies rather in Emma’s ability to defer her final self-sacrifice through her creativity in assigning significance to actions and persons with the aid of consumer goods. Hers is a less self-conscious reflection on the scene of desire, but it is a reflection nonetheless, one with a vast future ahead of it.

For a final and more probatory example, I take not a single work but a century of literary history dear to my scholarly heart. How can we understand the evolution of nineteenth-century French lyric poetry from Romanticism to Symbolism? No overview can do justice to any single poem. Yet such analyses are necessary if we are to have any notion of literary history. When one reads a poem by Lamartine or by Mallarmé, one wants to have a preliminary idea of its place in the tradition to which it belongs. What is needed is a general framework within which the evolution of the various elements of lyric can be understood.

Arguably the central element in all this poetry is the elegiac celebration by the male poet of a victimary female figure. This is already a favorite theme of the 18th century (Chénier, Parny…), but it is given a new strength by Lamartine, whose Méditations (1820), 19th century France’s first poetic best-seller, center on the poet’s love for his late mistress. Of these twenty-four poems, one, “Le lac,” is remembered far better than any other; it is structured as a scene of sacrifice in two temporal moments, the first, where the poet listens to his mistress lament the passage of time on the lake, and the second, when he returns, presumably after her death, to the lake shore and “speaks” the poem. The lake’s closure allows the poet to assimilate Nature to the scene of ritual generation of meaning.

If we now turn to Mallarmé’s late poetry, written eighty years after the Méditations, we find scenes of a female and, finally, a male figure’s sacrifice, often but not always through drowning, as the foundation of the symbolic order exemplified by the constellation Ursa Major (best known for the seven-star “big dipper”). The personal story of poet and mistress, the pictorial tableau, the appeal to nature are gone, replaced by the overtly speculative interrogation of an empty scene as the locus of a foundational sacrifice at the origin of meaning.

An empirical analysis could discover parallels in theme and structure between the two poets; but only from a generative standpoint can we understand the elimination of the personal as a deepening of anthropological self-consciousness, which is at the same time ethical self-consciousness. This deepening is concomitant with the sharpening of the poet’s critique of the centralization of the object of sexual desire on which lyric poetry itself depends. Where Lamartine laments Elvire’s “natural” death, Mallarmé describes this death as the result of violence. His final abandonment of the sacrificed female (siren, “nixe,” or Amazon), implicitly condemning the male-voiced lyric tradition for its exploitation of the woman-Other’s physical mortality, is thus a liberating or “empowering” gesture on the plane of gender relations.

Mallarmé’s poetry is the clearest example of the informing of literary production by anthropological self-consciousness; he discovers and expels the sacrificial element within lyric in the course of reflection on lyric itself. The modernist lyric, on whose turning-away from love poetry Mallarmé (via such writers as Valéry and Eliot) was arguably the central influence, is still reluctant to return to it, no doubt for fear of endangering the empowerment he effected.

There is no formula for the generation of new cultural works; it is rather these works that generate new possibilities for giving meaning to experience. Works of popular culture, such as the latest Arnold epic, can be created without fundamental anthropological reflection; but only through such reflection can the process of creation be renewed through self-understanding and raised thereby to a higher ethical level. Whether or not this is now taking place, it is crucial to leave the possibility open for the future. In particular, as I have also been saying recently (see Chronicles 96 &103), I think the time is ripe for a post-Mallarmean renewal of the lyric tradition in the context of today’s less sacrificial, more reciprocal gender relations. A prospect that even my skeptical student might find intriguing.

GA aficionados may be a bit perturbed by the recent emphasis on love, knowing that the originary scene is supposed to turn on the deferral of violence through representation. So I thought for this week’s Chronicle to return to some fundamental GA matters, in hopes of clarifying the familiar Girard vs Gans question of the originary status of violence. As it will appear, this clarification also makes clearer our originary notion of love.

For non-GA aficionados, I’ll explain briefly that René Girard’s originary model involves the deviation of the generalized aggression of mimetic crisis onto a marginal figure who comes to be unanimously blamed for whatever provoked the crisis, and whose destruction (“lynching”) brings it to an end. For Girard, this scapegoat or emissary victim (which in neither Girard’s scheme nor mine need be a human being, although Girard doesn’t appear to accept this) inaugurates signification posthumously; his remains are the first signified. My view is that the originary scene of humanity can’t be a scene of wordless violence. Because what makes us human is our use of representations, we become human upon emission of the first sign. In GA’s originary scene, this occurs as the members of the group hesitate in their individual attempts to appropriate the central figure; as each sees the others move toward it (the “gesture of appropriation”), they each individually abort the gesture, which becomes by that very fact a sign of their renunciation of the center as an object of appetite, and thereby its representation. Within this minimal scene we may go on to situate the sacred, the religious, the moral, the economic, etc.

In my recent book, Signs of Paradox (Stanford, 1997), I announce a “return to Girard” in which I emphasize the violence of the sparagmos or tearing-apart of the central object subsequent to its representation or “naming” by the aborted gesture of appropriation. Once the sign has reassured the participants that they will not themselves suffer the victim’s fate, they can appropriate it in approximately equal parts (Homer’s “equal feast”) in a way that provides the model for sacrificial ritual.

This is reasonable as far as it goes, but it can be recast in a more inclusive form if we note that the prehuman situation before the aborted gesture must have been characterized, by the very logic of my argument, by attempts to appropriate the central object without the prior reassurance given by the sign. Between the time when an alpha animal maintained the group’s pecking order and the restoration of order through the reciprocal emission of the sign, there is an indeterminate period of “mimetic crisis,” whether purely imaginary, or, as we may well follow Girard in assuming, real. The paralyzing fear of the rivalrous violence to which appropriation might lead, or in simply mimetic terms, the blockage of action through the impossibility of mutual imitation, could arise only subsequent to this crisis, to which this blockage puts an end. Thus we may conceive the sparagmatic violence of the group appropriating the object as surrounding the peaceful moment of language and deferral as an electron “surrounds” its nucleus; it is everywhere at once within a certain zone surrounding the center. The Girardian refocusing of the group’s aggression on the emissary victim precedes the emission of the sign; the Gansian sparagmos of the already-designated central figure follows it. But at a close enough proximity to the emission of the sign, both forms of sparagmos become indistinguishable.

In the hesitation introduced by the sign is all human language and culture, which matures as the representational element becomes more insistent and more elaborate. This is the originary moment of mutual love among the members of the group, but we should emphasize the mediation of this peripheral love by the central figure. At the moment of emission of the sign, this figure is not a mere scapegoat blamed for the crisis that provoked his selection, but a sacred object inaccessible to the participants. It is in this inaccessibility that we discover the sacred otherness of the Other that we later find in our fellow humans. The moment of language, signification, culture, in a word, of the human, is one of peaceful deferral surrounded by violence “on all sides.” It is valuable to identify this moment as that of love in order to emphasize the priority of the sacred over the human in this intimate domain as in so many more clearly cultural ones; what is centralized is sacred before it is human, as the eighteenth-century thinkers Vico and Rousseau had already understood.

The difficulty of this originary concept of love is its distance from our own experience. The familiar complaint about the pansexualization of our culture reflects as it misinterprets our tendency to associate sexual desire with any intense experience of otherness. This tendency is indubitable, but to interpret it as a sign of superficiality is itself superficial. “Superficial” desire is that of the mensonge romantique, desire mimetically induced for an object seen only through illusion, such as Emma Bovary’s desire for her lovers. On the contrary, I would claim that sexuality permits an authentic experience of originary love that would otherwise be limited to a spiritual elite. The most significant effect of pansexualization is not the spread of pornography, sexual harassment, or illegitimacy, but the generalized expectation of love in sexual relationships. This is anything but a pernicious development, even if it provides a less stable foundation for the family than the respect for lineage and the arranged marriages it motivates.

But what sexual love tells us about sacred love today was originally, and traditionally, learned by other means. It seems strange to us that the rise of sexuality to cultural predominance could be a “late” development, since sexuality is a fundamental biological phenomenon. The myths of psychoanalysis help us to cope with this disparity by anachronistically sexualizing human origin as they do individual ontogenesis. But sexuality is not in essence a collective phenomenon; the single center vs multiple periphery structure of the scene of representation is not natural to it. In this light, it is significant indeed that through the expedient of making all the women in the group into a single collective object under the control of the “father,” Freud’s own attempt at a sexually motivated scene of origin attributes to its “object” the divisibility characteristic of the edible rather than the sexual. This is not only contrary to current eth(n)ological knowledge, it is a maximal rather than a minimal hypothesis, requiring a tremendous tension between the hypothesized one-many structure of sexual relations and the one-on-one pairing to which demography would naturally conduce.

As I have stated in my books and articles on GA, a minimal hypothesis of human origin must situate its founding event at the most critical or vulnerable rather than the most biologically fundamental locus of the prehuman social order. Violent rivalry among males poses a real danger to the social order that has no analog in male-female sexual-reproductive relations. The emergence of sexual interdictions and patterns of exchange should be understood on the model of the originary interdiction of the sacred center rather than vice versa. Neither for GA nor for the Bible is the sexual shame experienced by Adam and Eve an originary sentiment. On the contrary, their shame is the result of their prior disobedience of the sacred interdiction of the tree of knowledge. Adam and Eve have not become human sign-users through a mimetic intensification of sexuality; they are ashamed of their sexuality because they recognize it as provoking desire, which, as they have learned as a result of their disobedience, is dangerous and must be deferred–for example, by putting fig-leaves over the offending organs to defer both their sight and their activity.

We err by thinking of the originary scene as a kind of preformed embryo of human history. Our originary intuition of linguistic reciprocity explains our sense of morality just as our originary intuition of the inaccessibility of the center explains our sense of the sacred; but the joining of reciprocity and sacrality in human love is exemplary not of a lost originary fulfillment but of the inexhaustible capacity of human history to create new degrees of freedom and through them, new insights into our potentialities. In reconstructing the originary function of the different traits that characterize the human, we should not project onto the origin what only the pain of history has taught us to combine. The creation of the modern couple bound not merely by sexual desire but by the hope, and often the at least partial fulfillment, of mutual sacrality, is the really significant, if generally unheralded, achievement of our society’s “pansexualism.”

And for this, even if we must suffer the proliferation of Freudian and Lacanian myths of origin at the expense of originary thinking, it is a price worth paying. As our public rituals distance themselves from us more every day, we ever more desperately need the enrichment of intimacy that only the continuing evolution of love makes possible.