Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • The Existentialist Roots of GA

    When I came to UCLA in 1969, Existentialism was still the dominant philosophical current, and Sartre the best known philosopher, particularly in the French Department, whose leading figure was the devoted Sartrean, Oreste Pucciani. Reading Colin Wilson’s 1956 The Outsider (see Chronicle 766) took me back to those years when “Continental” philosophy struggled to integrate its transcendental perspective with humanity’s worldly engagement. Today, when the term is rarely heard, we must not forget the significance of Existentialism, upon whose insights both Girard and Derrida relied in formulating their respective conceptions of mimetic desire and deferral/différance.

    As I pointed out in the previous Chronicle, the Outsider’s contempt for the Insider, complacently unconcerned by his blind acceptance of the world’s injustices, reflects the bourgeois-Romantic adolescent’s angst in becoming aware of these injustices and of his parents’ indifference to them. This is not the simple resentment that motivated the sans-culottes or the mobs led by the Bolshevik and Maoist revolutionaries. What repels the Romantic adolescent is more the bourgeois’ self-satisfaction than his exploitation of the lower classes. But in the broadest sense, like the Woke youth of today who condemns his fellow whites’ unconscious racism, the young Romantic saw in his parents’ complacency a refusal to admit that their social status violated the principle of moral equality. The difference from today was that these adolescent tendencies were generally rejected by adults—save when fearing for their lives in the revolutionary turmoil of, say, France in 1848, depicted with such delicious irony in Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale.

    If Romanticism recognized adolescence as a newly-defined stage of life in modern/bourgeois society, for the Existentialist it provided a revelatory model for human life in general: the individual is obliged throughout his life to choose his path in the world rather than let it be predetermined for him by caste and family. It was as a result of the extension of adolescent uncertainty to an ever larger proportion of the population as the medieval Gemeinschaft gave way to the modern Gesellschaft in the nascent industrial age that Existentialism came into its own.

    In this perspective, Existentialists from Kierkegaard on can be defined as post-Romantics, those who have seen through what Girard called the mensonge romantique, the romantic lie that sets the unsoiled adolescent above the adult social world, and yet who remain unwilling to renounce their intuition that bourgeois society cannot be complacently accepted and that they must remain Outsiders to the end. If today’s Wokism may be denounced as a sign of society’s failure to persuade its young people to get beyond their adolescence, Existentialism’s nobler aims could not be so easily rejected. The Outsiders, even the most extreme “men of resentment” in the fictions of Dostoevsky and Sartre, all bear a lesson for us.

    Although the philosophical elaboration of Existentialism was strongly influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology, the impulse behind was not to map the internal configuration of our mind but to provide a model for human action in the broadest sense; whence Heidegger’s “being for/to death” or Sartre’s engagement, which was in his day (beginning in France under the Nazi occupation) the philosophy’s dominant theme. The existentialist ontology was most succinctly defined by the Sartrian formula that for humans, as opposed to other creatures, existence precedes essence.

    How does the birth of the human in the hypothetical originary event allow us to interpret this ontological postulate? The underlying point of “existence precedes essence” is what Derrida, in an insight that brought him to the threshold of GA, would call la différance. In its original terms, Sartre in L’étre et le néant described this separation that grants precedence to worldly experience over metaphysics as dependent on a néant or “nothingness” between the pour-soi or human consciousness and its object, in contrast to the non-human en-soi, which he envisaged as a world whose contents were so to speak piled up against each other without empty space, recalling the classical determinist model of reality. (This model still survives among physicists: for example, in Sabine Hossenfelder’s Existential Physics [Viking, 2022], where reality however complex is conceived as determined from the outset through the interactions of its components.)

    Sartre’s néant has a clear parallel in GA in the scenic space that separates the human pour-soi from its objects—and originarily, in the separation between the participant in the originary event and the central animal, the original object of his aborted act of appropriation, the gesture that became the first linguistic/semiotic sign. Humanity, whose mind allows it to stand back from its content and refer to it using language—to which Sartre, still a “classical” metaphysician, significantly pays no attention whatever in L’être et le néant—thereby manifests its freedom. Sartre’s central anthropological postulate is our rejection at every instant of any a priori determination of human behavior: even a prior decision must be tacitly reaffirmed each time it is put into action.

    Stripped of its anthropological flesh, the formula existence precedes essence has all the defects of its metaphysical vocabulary, which reifies worldly categories whose value resides in their application to concrete circumstances: e.g., working from a blueprint (“essence”) to construct a machine or building (“existence”), or viewing a phenotype (“existence”) as a worldly version of an ideal genotype (“essence”). The point in claiming that the individual human “existence” acts in such a way as to determine his “essence”/soul? is that humans, unlike animals, must take responsibility for, accept the intentionality of, their actions. And more broadly, responsibility for their Dasein or being-in-the-world, which cannot, like that of natural phenomena (including other living creatures) be imputed to an a priori Essence.

    The advantage of generative anthropology’s vocabulary over standard philosophical language in describing the difference between Hegel/Sartre’s pour-soi and en-soi is that in the place of metaphysical abstractions, GA refers to a concrete model of human behavior: that of the originary event. In contrast with whatever goes on in an animal’s mind when it decides between alternatives, a human decision, if the term is truly appropriate, must pass through the judgment of a human soul or conscience, in which resides the moral model of “good” and “evil” derived from the originary human experience.

    The freedom implicit in the priority of existence over essence is not simply the name for our capacity to choose among alternatives, which we share with animals; it is founded on this necessary moral decision. In biblical terms, it is Eve and Adam’s decision to disobey God by eating the fruit of the tree that demonstrates this freedom, which at the same time transforms them from Edenic creatures obedient to God into humanity’s original sinners.

    As noted above, Existentialism was the intellectual ambiance that nourished both René Girard, and less directly, Jacques Derrida, whose relationship to phenomenology remained closer to the great philosophical tradition, beginning with his doctoral work on Husserl. Indeed, the rapprochement I have made between Derrida’s concept of différance and Sartre’s néant is one that I do not believe he ever made, nor would likely have accepted, although the undertone of political dissatisfaction with bourgeois society is equally clear in both cases.

    The importance of Sartre’s inspiration for Girard’s psychological analyses, which was the object of a colloquium sponsored by the French Association Recherches Mimétiques in 2014 (see https://www.rene-girard.fr/57_p_44713/girard-sartre-existence-et-transcendance.html ) need not occupy us here. It suffices to recall Sartre’s analyses of mauvaise foi (bad faith) in L’être et le néant or La nausée to see in germ Girard’s conception of the mensonge romantique.

    Derrida’s différance is conceived as a paradoxical notion within the Saussurian model of linguistics as a system of differences, far indeed from the Sartrian néant between the mind and its object. But if we rethink both these concepts from the standpoint of GA’s originary hypothesis, both deferral/différance and the néant—deferring action on one hand and on the other, maintaining a differential space between the human subject and the object of his desire—refer to the same phenomenon in the scenic configuration of the originary event, described from different perspectives. The physical distance between the peripheral participant and the central animal is the experiential model of the “nothingness” within the individual’s internal scene of representation between his desiring presence and the object of his desire, the internal correlative of his remaining physical separation from this object upon the abortion of his original gesture of appropriation. The fact of contemplating the central object in the course of the event involves not simply being physically distant from it, but understanding this distance as the worldly expression of an interdictory sacred space surrounding the object which can be breached only by the group’s eventual common agreement to divide up the animal for consumption in a communal feast.

    Although Derrida never to my knowledge explores the “existential” sense of what it means to defer an action or what a deferral seeks to avoid, our act of pointing out, in a very non-Saussurean insight, that these differences are products of deferral is nonetheless to bring to (post)-structuralism an anthropological turn whose further implications cannot be ignored. Deferral is inseparable from the inhibition of action, which in turn points to some reason for the delay, the most existentially obvious being the perception that the action might risk dangerous consequences.

    We can be grateful to Derrida for not paying attention to these existential matters for the sake of his grasping the relationship between difference and différance that we might otherwise fail to notice—the space of deferral opening up the possibility of multiplying the originary sacred signifier/signified distinction by an indefinite number of subordinate sacralities. The genius of this most metaphysical of post-metaphysicians is to have been an anthropologist sans le savoir, wholly concerned with revealing the secret flaws of a philosophical world of concepts to which, in the way of the French intellectuals of recent generations, he then attached leftist political meanings, so to speak as modes of common sense. Deconstruction thus becomes the demolition of a myth-based order of oppression whose creators impose their will on their subjects by pretending to demonstrate through their “voice” the “presence” of gods that are in fact mere chimeras.

    Thus the notion of différance should not be understood as a merely post-structural(ist) concept; it links the differentiating nature of language to deferral in the worldly sense of putting off a “natural,” “instinctive” act. Derrida has no idea of the need to trace “differencing” to its root, which is not the Saussurian difference among signifiers and signifieds, but the first, the originary difference between the object/referent and the sign. For the sign begins as an acte manqué of assimilating the object that defers its appropriation—and as a consequence, includes its difference from the sign in a new kind of behavior called language, in which the difference between sign and referent communicates to other language-users the sacrality of the object, its sacred demand not to be appropriated but to remain as an object of significance, which is also to say, of desire. This is far from the Platonic basis of language that Derrida continues nonetheless to take for granted in what we may call his final act of allegiance to metaphysics.

    Where Sartre saw Hegel’s pour-soi as constructed on the model of a scene, on which the presence of the referent/object to its peripheral contemplators is determined by its interdiction—in a word, its sacrality—Derrida goes farther in bringing out the deferral of action that is implicit in Sartre’s schematism. Yet by not realizing the need to define the anthropological reality of the human scene, which is, prior to the confrontation of an individual with his object of desire, the sacred/revelatory encounter of the community with an object of common desire, he fails to grasp the behavioral basis of la différance.

    And for this, we can thank Girard, indifferent to language as such, but whose anthropological instincts bring him closer to scenic reality because, his sense of the sacred having made him a close reader of narrative from the Bible to the modern novel, he is able to understand that language is born in an anthropological and not a metaphysical context.

    It was from being able to work with these apparently very different but strangely compatible models that it became possible to formulate the originary hypothesis.

  • Thomas Bertonneau, Outsider

    for Denise Sollenne

    Readers of these Chronicles will know that Tom Bertonneau, one of the four founders of Anthropoetics (and the creator of its name) passed away in 2021 at the age of 68. His sister, Denise Sollenne, desirous of putting together a collection of Tom’s many online scholarly publications, has been preparing a volume now approaching its final stages. I was among the group of scholars who assisted her in making the selections after reading through his extensive bibliography.

    In a recent communication, Denise pointed out to me that The Outsider by Colin Wilson, the subject of one of Tom’s essays, had played a major role in Tom’s adolescence. In 1956, Wilson had become an instant celebrity at 25 with that book, after which he wrote many others. Given its existential rather than literary-critical focus, I had not encountered Wilson’s writing in the course of my graduate study. Having now read The Outsider, which discusses a great number of creative spirits from the Middle Ages to modern times, all of whom can roughly be called “(proto)existentialist,” I was both impressed by the young author’s obvious intellectual maturity, critical judgment, and broad erudition—of particular note given his apparent lack of a university education—and on the other, amazed that a philosophical-literary work, which today would presumably interest only academics, had been a popular best-seller, bringing its author fame and fortune as (supposedly) one of the British “angry young men” of the fifties.

    The title and thrust of Wilson’s book make what we cannot help seeing as a romantic appeal to the sense of what Heidegger called “thrownness” (Geworfenheit), particularly strong among adolescents of the bourgeois era forced to leave the Gemeinschaft of the family for the Gesellschaft of the outside world. Like Camus’ Etranger, Wilson’s title takes the point of view of the adolescent rather than that of the world that receives him. And his admirative reflections on a broad spectrum of outsiders from novelists like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Camus, and Hemingway to religio-philosophical thinkers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard to artists like Van Gogh and Nijinsky, an adventurer like T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), British public intellectuals H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, poets Eliot and Yeats and religious leaders such as George Fox (founder of the Friends/Quakers) and the 19th century Vedantist Ramakrishna, provides the reader with a full gallery of figures from whom to learn the techniques of survival in the margins of modern society. If we put ourselves in the place of an young English reader in 1956 witnessing the Existentialist vogue across the Channel, we can better imagine the attraction of this richly researched and clearly written manual of “outsiderism.” Wilson’s book is not autobiographical, but it suggests nonetheless the story of a quest, among all these outsiders, for the model the author and his reader would do best to follow.

    Tom was deeply touched on encountering this book in his youth and maintained a lifelong devotion to the author. His two-part 2009 essay in the online Brussels Journal entitled “Colin Wilson: The Persistence of Meaning” discusses Wilson’s career from The Outsider through his late science fiction novels, ending with this paragraph:

    I will live with my un-repayable debt to Wilson, whose bibliographies in his “Outsider” cycle formed the real basis of my higher education. Starting in high school, I simply followed them up.

    Tom was an Outsider by choice, or perhaps by destiny. A UCLA Comp Lit PhD with an excellent dissertation, and as Denise’s bibliography shows, the author of dozens of scholarly articles in all the arts and in both high and popular culture, many of which could have become the basis of books, as well as a teacher highly appreciated by his students, he yet never held a regular university position—and in one case I know of, reluctant to demean himself in the role of a job-seeker, he seems to have quasi-deliberately sabotaged an interview for a tenure-track position. Tom’s “constitutional incapacity” (Girard’s term) for trying to make a good impression was surely far greater than mine. Yet had he received his doctorate in the 1960s instead of the 1980s, he would very likely have found, as I did, a solid professorial position.

    If we would honor Tom’s expression of fealty to Wilson’s quest in the context of generative anthropology, we must ask ourselves how GA might become an important part of the intellectual life of one who pledged this fealty, and how Wilson’s quest as presented here can be understood as—let us not say satisfied by GA, but in any case nourished by it.

    Wilson’s final chapters are not accidentally focused on religious figures as those who most fully grasped the essence of the problem, which is ultimately to find salvation by avoiding the pitfalls of self-destruction and sociopathy that threaten the Outsider-adolescent on his pathway to genuine maturity.

    The last figure he turns to is the Imagist poet and essayist T. E. Hulme, whose career was tragically cut short by WWI at the age of 34. On the penultimate page of the book, Wilson sums up the essence of the Outsider’s quest by citing this paragraph from Hulme:

    I have none of the feeling of nostalgia, the reverence for tradition, the desire to recapture the sentiment of Angelico, which seems to animate most modern defenders of religion. All this seems to me to be bosh. What is important is what nobody seems to realize—the dogmas like that of Original Sin. . . . That man is in no sense perfect, but a wretched creature who can yet apprehend perfections. It is not, then, that I put up with the dogma for the sake of the sentiment, but that I may possibly swallow the sentiment for the sake of the dogma. (Speculations, p. 57; emphasis mine)

    The understanding of the attitude behind this paragraph is, I believe, one of the most important needs of our time.

    The Outsider (Penguin Putnam, 1967, p. 279)

    Let us do our best, then, to understand Hulme’s, and Wilson’s, point.

    If there is one religious dogma that has a clear anthropological significance it is surely that of Original Sin. I discussed this recently in Chronicle 762, to which I will add here a point of clarification. If in the Genesis story God seems surprised and disappointed at Eve’s and Adam’s sin as spoiling what might have remained humanity’s “Edenic” future, we should note the parallel with the originary hypothesis. We must assume that the originary event/scene had a “happy ending,” and thus we might imagine that the proto-humans would now think that all their problems with mimetic rivalry had been solved. But a community’s members do not remain always together, and outside the presence of the united group, these individuals have to rely on their own “conscience” of the interdiction—whence the possibility, and the eventual certainty, of one or more disobeying it.

    The disappointment in realizing that the community could not rely on its new sacred-inspired self-consciousness to automatically maintain humanity’s originary harmony is a key element of all religious doctrines, whether it lead to a legal system as in Judaism, one of confession and repentance as in Christianity, or a pedagogy of emptying out the scene of representation and desire as in Buddhism.

    Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths equate life with suffering, the cause of which is desire. The need to resist the sin provoked by desire is the fundamental religious dogma because it is precisely what religion, and humanity as such, evolved or was created to combat. Thus by an intrinsic irony, the problem of mimetic desire, apparently “solved” in the originary event, unavoidably became the apocalyptic threat that the human community, once saved from immediate self-destruction, would be fated to spend the rest of its history in trying to defer for as long as possible.

    That Wilson sees the Outsider’s most essential role, as Hulme does his own in the above paragraph, as reminding humanity of this conundrum suggests to us how Tom too may have understood his purpose in life; appreciating the “sentiment” of joy in life but only insofar as it helps us to bear the weight of our responsibility to defer our sinful desires—rather than simply putting them away from us, as Buddhism teaches its adherents.

    Christianity and Buddhism, West and East, offer different advice to their believers, while agreeing on the anthropological foundation of the problem. But today we can say that if the Western approach takes more seriously our role in the world, and if the West’s long domination is the product of this seriousness, the crisis of our time reflects the—hopefully not definitive—failure of Western world-seriousness to maintain its moral seriousness by making desire serve not selfish pleasures but communal needs. This is after all the West’s main historical accomplishment: sharing the benefits of world-knowledge with the community, in contrast with the Eastern formula of putting away individual desires in submission to worldly authority.

    I don’t recall Tom ever talking to me about original sin, but his life seems to me to have reflected his concern with it, in his intellectual interest in the phenomenon of desire, as analyzed by Girard and GA, and in his personal way of dealing with it. Tom never had much to say about Buddhism either, but I detect in his career something of an Eastern attitude toward desire and its objects; in particular, a reluctance to seek the rewards of academic success or to accept any authority in our institutions of higher learning other than that of a teacher with his students. A teacher assigns and grades papers and lets his students speak only after he calls on them, but this authority is rooted, in the first case, on the teacher’s pedagogical duties, and in the second, in the need for the class to function efficiently as a community. Such forms of authority should never in themselves generate in the students a sense of injustice.

    To the extent that Hulme’s paragraph describes the path the Outsider should take in his worldly activity, I think we can say that Tom’s career embodied it perfectly in the sphere of action he chose for himself. The kind of affection he earned from his students was not that which a graduate student has for his dissertation director. There was no element of emulation; the student and the professor were not part of the same “field.” Tom’s students’ experience was of the generosity of an over-qualified teacher of non-elite undergraduates, treating them with every respect for their humanity and seeking to convey to them the ability to appreciate the treasures of our culture.

    I am aware of many testimonies that Tom’s teaching was for his students a very special experience. As a teacher who never held a permanent (tenured) position, Tom was not so different from the itinerant religious sages discussed by Wilson. No doubt he had no dogma to teach; but particularly in an era that has been drifting ever farther from the ideals of Western, and indeed of any civilization, I know that Tom increasingly saw his teaching mission as a way of counteracting the smug dogmas—of a very different kind than those Hulme referred to—that have come to pervade the academic world. Dogmas that teaching in Mount Pleasant or Oswego rather than at Harvard or Stanford (if you have a strong stomach, take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orzuClSpGCc) made no doubt much easier to avoid.

    And in counterpoint to the dogma of original sin, there is a kerygma of classical learning and respect for its masterpieces that few preached with the same intellectual joy as Tom. His students will remember his classes throughout their lives as having revealed to them our culture’s depth and wisdom, in contrast to the contemporary trend of denouncing its “inequities.”

    One final point; although an Outsider in spirit, Tom in no way despised the “bourgeois” life. He was happily married to Susan, a fellow UCLA PhD (from the French Department) and remained close to his parents and sister. And his son Joseph has every reason to be proud of him and to cherish his example.

  • The Soul in the Prison House of Language

    The previous Chronicle’s discussion of the limits and possibilities of AI provoked some discussion that suggests the need for a more rigorous set of categories, an ontology, of what I shall call for the moment transcendence.

    The point of departure for that Chronicle was the emergence of ChatGPT as an AI program that can compose meaningful discourse and rather than simply finding words a la Google can answer questions based on a huge database of online information. Thus the question arises as to how to distinguish such activity from human thinking. Clearly when humans and computers solve math problems, the difference in method is unimportant; the point is simply to reach the correct answer, which is presumably unambiguous. In other words, assuming a priori that humans have souls and computers do not, there is no “soulfulness” in solving such problems. So much is simple enough; and the same can be said to apply to such activities as playing chess or Go: the machine can beat us at Go because it can “learn” the game by playing against itself and continually improving its algorithms beyond the capacity of even the most talented humans. There is no “soulfulness” in playing these games; success in them is fully algorithmic, which is to say, mechanical.

    But with ChatGPT we get into the realm of composition, and with DALL-E into that of graphic art, activities that have always been associated with the “soul,” since they express and reflect our profoundest emotions, unlike mathematical and related phenomena that express our soulfulness only peripherally, such as games that allow us to discharge our rivalrous tendencies in a civilized manner. Thus the claim, which at first seemed scandalous, that such artifacts as poems, novels, paintings, musical compositions, etc., can be produced by “soulless” machines, is so no longer. This material, like the simple conversations for which the “Turing test” was first devised, has as its only test of “soulfulness” our judgment as to its human or mechanical provenance. Now that we have seen the results of machine learning in the purely algorithmic sphere, it should not surprise us that its products in the domain of what may be called “meaningful composition” can appear equally authentic. No, the machine cannot feel the emotions it “expresses” in a poem, but with a sufficient corpus of artistic examples, and the ability not merely to “understand” them literally, but to “learn” what sound and vocabulary combinations are harmonious, what kinds of tropes or narratives have given humans pleasure, etc., we should have increasing difficulty in distinguishing their products from those of our fellows. This has certainly already been tested many times by students handing in papers composed by such programs.

    Clearly this level of representational transcendence, which we had thought protected from mechanical reproduction as mathematical calculations were not, since it involves the production of meaningfulness of whatever kind, requires human input in a sense unnecessary in the first category. The Go program learns by playing against itself; it has no need to study human master games. Whereas it is inconceivable that an AI system could learn to write poetry without beginning by digesting a corpus of human poems, just as on a lower level ChatGPT has done. Perhaps at some point inputting such compositions would no longer be necessary, but without the original human corpus, the task of programming poetry or other art forms for human taste would be of a wholly different level of difficulty, requiring a simulation of the conditions of composition not (yet) conceivable.

    Yet, to ask the Ur-question of science fiction first posed to the modern world in Frankenstein, we are not tempted to assign to these AI implementations a “soul.” We may define our soul most simply as the individual’s repository of the sacred, a term which we have previously defined as the subject of the imperative to preserve the proto-human community, or in other words, to give it a chance to become human by renouncing potentially violent rivalry. Whether one follows a specific religious tradition, simply “believes in God,” or rejects religion entirely, I think we should all be able to agree that the sacred is not, like God, an object of faith, but an anthropological reality: our participation in humanity’s shared experience of the need to stand back from, to defer, the rivalrous impulse to possess for ourselves what alone makes possible the continued existence of the community. We conceive God as the subject whose will compels this deferral, but the compulsion itself is the necessary condition for our existence, and this, knowing that we are all tempted by the “original sin” of violating it.

    What makes the soul problematic is its ambivalent character—like that of the meanings of language, but unlike them, of ultimate personal concern—between my own sense of it and its reality for the community. The meaning of any word is not situated in an objective place; it exists within the mind of each of us, but only insofar as we conceive ourselves to share it. In the general case, this poses no problem, but as usage evolves, connotations and syntactical relationships change, so that an expression that seems natural to one person strikes another as incorrect. Today, for example, the word “like” is increasingly used as a conjunctive adverb in a way that strikes me as illiterate (“he came by like I asked him to”), or worse, in the construction “he was like” to mean simply “he said.”

    One’s sense of petty horror at such constructions reflects the violation of what we feel as a little bit of the sacred pact that holds the community together. It reflects a minor offense to my soul whose coherence depends upon that of the human community, so that a linguistic usage that strikes me, not simply as incorrect, but as affirming a new correctness that I deny puts in question a little bit of my security in belonging to this community. This is a phenomenon that the aging process especially teaches us; our community-conception varies from one generation to another, in each generation seemingly more rapidly than in the last.

    Let us suppose we have an AI device called Arnie. If Arnie can write decent sentences, he can surely be made to react against those it considers badly formed, just as a writing teacher forces pupils to abandon turns of phrase incompatible with scholastic prose. Assuming he continually acquires new input from cyberspace, Arnie’s notion of correctness can also evolve by incorporating trends in language usage.

    Just as in writing sonnets or compositions, there is in principle no outward manifestation of human-like conduct that Arnie cannot be taught to perform. Like Samantha in Her, he could learn to manifest all the appropriate verbal signs of love—and in a more advanced, robotic version, all the physical ones as well. Yet we would still not be obliged to grant him an “inner life,” a soul of his own, that would link his behavior to the foundation of the human in the originary deferral of rivalrous appropriation.

    Would this manifest itself as a problem for Arnie himself? Would he like the replicants in Blade Runner express regret for not being fully human? That too would depend on his programming. We can let AIs teach themselves any aspects of human behavior we like, but only if we implement the “emotions” we want them to feel. It is a myth to believe that at some level they could transcend their manufactured status and begin experiencing “emotions” independently of the parameters we had originally installed in them. Or to put it more prudently, the sort of machines that might eventually, without having been programmed to do so, become dissatisfied with their status as tools of humanity and decide to throw off their human yoke are so far beyond our current understanding that we cannot describe them in an intelligent fashion.

    Fred Jameson’s book title, The Prison-House of Language, roughly translated from Nietzsche’s “in dem sprachlichen Zwange” in his late notebooks (see Emily Apter’s “The Prison-House of Translation?”, Diacritics 47,4 [2019]: 54), seems the ultimate expression of the frustration of thinkers at the end of the era of metaphysics. Hegel was no doubt the last philosopher whose work truly embodies the faith that all of human reality could be expressed in the categories of metaphysics, that philosophy was indeed the “queen of the sciences” in the universe of Galileo and Newton.

    Indeed, even the early years of Einstein and quantum theory did not seem to contradict this idea. As a reader of Scientific American since the 1950s, it is only in the last couple of decades that I have begun to feel that these explanations for the layman were no longer simplifications of the work of physicists but merely descriptions of them. Perhaps the most obvious sign of this is the use of superlatives to describe the sound and fury of cosmic phenomena as though we were witnessing them (with appropriate sound effects) in a planetarium. For there is simply no intuitive way of explaining in common-sense terms the relations between quantum theory and relativity, black holes and quantum entanglement, the nature of “dark” matter/energy… What is most discouraging is that, despite the assurances of physicists that we just need a still more powerful collider to produce the particles missing from our theoretical paradigms, one cannot avoid the impression that rather than our coming closer to a reasonably coherent “theory of everything,” the goal keeps getting farther away the more deeply we probe physical reality.

    Physics is, of course, not metaphysics, as Aristotle made clear. But Jameson’s title concerns not physics but human reality; it paradoxically uses language to question our capacity to put into words the truth about our world and ourselves. And if generative anthropology, which I have proposed as a step toward the solution to this problem, has not won many adherents, this reflects its so far limited achievements in liberating us from Jameson’s prison. The originary hypothesis is a radically new way of thinking about human origin that I see no need to abandon, but the connection between our originary scenic model and its historical avatars is by nature incapable of supplying us with a tool to understand/influence history in more than the marginal sense in which realizing the most fundamental elements of human social organization allows us to reject the anthropologies that have led to the various forms of totalitarianism (which seems to be proving itself, as Arendt had suggested, the real model underlying the various forms of “socialism”), without however offering us more than a demonstration of the necessary impossibility of providing a formula for “the good society” more precise than my favorite Churchillian quote as “the worst… except for all the others.”

    The soul that humans have and that no machines can duplicate is, as AI negatively demonstrates, independent of all our intellectual conquests. But as the necessarily incomprehensible notion of God the sacred Being demonstrates, Arnie cannot… not simply conceive God, because humans cannot “conceive” him either, but experience a sacred revelation that, beyond its semantic content, would recreate for him the scene of the community’s presence to itself.

    No doubt we can name God, but such naming remains within the prison-house of language, where we can also “name” square circles or true lies. This is the basis of the Jews’ refusal to give God a “normal” name; the Orthodox write “G-d” and in conversation call him “ha Shem,” meaning “the Name,” a nice way of making naming a paradox. Yet we can aspire to God as the Being who is the source of the sacred.

    Arnie can talk about God as well as we humans; anything we say about God can be placed in a database to which he will have access. But although Arnie can say anything that we can say about God, we will always know that the source of this thought is in us, that like the man in the Chinese room, Arnie can reproduce it, but could never have generated it, lacking the scenic experience of the sacred, in which, as Derrida saw, deferral generates différance, and the aborted gesture of appetite becomes the sign of desire. When we speak of God, we refer to the source of this deferral, which we recognize in ourselves but at the same time realize as an interdiction imposed upon us.

    An atheist can deny the Being of God and attribute this restraint to our sense of the human community, whose communal will we fear to contradict, or like pre-Axial “immanentist” believers, attribute it to the interdicted object(s) it/themself/ves. It was only after many millennia that, during the Axial Age as defined by Jaspers, as humans from different communities met and communicated, the discovery was made that they all had in common this phenomenon of différance. Historically, whether or not as an extension of the henotheistic experiment of Akhenaton, the Hebrews thematized for the first time the identity of these experiences of interdiction, whose Subject they called by various names, but today call simply The Name, the ultimate object of the pointing we call language.

    None of these explanations is “final,” because, precisely, words cannot escape the prison-house of language, but we understand them because our history has been lived through them, and even if many or most of us no longer share on a regular basis, as had long been the case, a communal ceremony in memory of the originary scene of the production of the sign, we all still share the sense of the sacred, however much we may struggle against it.

    What AI teaches us about this sense and the soul that contains it is that, however closely it can imitate the language in which we express it, that language’s grounding in experience is foreign to it, and will always remain so—unless and until at some point we become willing and able to create beings who can experience for themselves the scene of mimetic desire, and create the sign of its renunciation.

  • GA and AI

    for Leslie Lamport

    The GA-AI relationship is not one that we should expect to have a clear answer to. A point I made long ago that continues to demonstrate its accuracy is that to attempt to declare a priori the limits of AI is a foolhardy enterprise. No objectively describable task that humans can perform should be declared in principle beyond the capacity of machine intelligence, and in most cases the wait will probably be far shorter than we think. First chess, then Go, and now we have ChatGPT, an AI system that having “learned” massive amounts of material on the Internet is able to put together reasonably readable texts on just about any subject, as well as tell jokes, write poetry and computer programs… Can we really be sure that an AI composing sonnets as good as Shakespeare’s is unthinkable? Or, robotics aside, performing the Scarlett Johansson role in Her of an “operating system” that, limited to verbal communication, has a “love affair” with a user?

    None of these developments should have come as a surprise. The principle of Turing machines is that anything that can be expressed in an algorithm is accessible to them. The only conceptual novelty is that with the progress of “machine learning,” just about anything can become the object of an algorithm. Whether or not Turing himself imagined that “his” machines would be capable of writing poems or novels, let alone eventually making scientific discoveries that humans would be incapable of, in any case, the fundamental principle is that anything thinkable is potentially algorithmic.

    Thus the only revelation involved in computers winning at Go or writing essays is that, having lived through a transitional era at the beginning of which there were no Turing machines at all, we have had to get used to the fact that there can be no a priori limit to the ability of machine intelligence to duplicate and surpass our best efforts in any form of creative activity. Blaise Pascal, no mean mathematician himself, made a useful distinction between l’esprit de géométrie (math majors) and l’esprit de finesse (design majors), but, given enough géométrie, you can reach any level of finesse you desire, just as you can get as close as you like to drawing a circle by using enough straight lines.

    No doubt our era’s general indifference to our scenic origin reflects the fact that we live at a time in which humanity, once the world’s great marvel—recall Hamlet’s lines to Horatio in II, 2: What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!—is no longer perceived as the final word in creative intelligence, which, after all is said and done, just boils down once more to the manipulation of algorithms.

    At first glance, the Turing test seems frivolous; how can we make our judgment of software “intelligence” depend on its ability to fool one or more individuals into believing that its output is really that of a human being? What about the magician who pulls a rabbit out of an empty hat and saws his assistant in half?

    Yet a moment of reflection reveals that successful simulation is the only conceivable criterion we can use to evaluate the source of a presumably meaningful machine-generated message. When Turing suggested it, it was a challenge, since early interactive programs were far from being able to carry on a human-like conversation. But today, with ChatGPT, we are no longer in the realm of casual conversation but formal composition—and with DALL-E on a par with modern art, and in many ways superior to most of it.

    Such a prospect makes us realize that however different we are from mere machines, the difference does not consist in our ability to use signs, which is to say, to think. Our human intelligence, the basis of our pride and our sense of commanding the rest of the world and its creatures, has been revealed to be eminently reproducible and surpassable—by our own creations. The moment that artificial intelligence discovered machine learning, improving its algorithms without new input from the programmer, it acquired the ability in principle to surpass our intelligence not merely in mechanical activities like factoring large numbers or even playing chess, but in every mode of sign-manipulation. For an AI does not need to possess from the beginning the genius of Shakespeare any more than that of the best Go player. No doubt there is no way of training it to write sonnets comparable in simplicity to having it play games of Go or chess against itself, where winning and losing provides an objective measure of output quality, but AI’s ability to process the entire output of world literature and human knowledge in general can hardly be refused a priori the capacity to produce works of whatever kind on the same or higher levels of quality as those of humans. Perhaps works of plastic art endear themselves to us through their “human” traces—brush-strokes and the like. But as the salability of NFT cyber artifacts demonstrates, AI can handle this special family of signifiers as well as anything else.

    None of this implies any need to substantially modify GA’s originary hypothesis, whose rough algorithmicity AI might perhaps improve upon. But the origin of transcendence and representation, products of mimesis—itself already a quasi-algorithmic phenomenon—becomes of less importance when one realizes that, although human language is qualitatively different from the sort of “representation” we find in the genetic code, in the broader picture of the history of intelligence from the primordial soup to the world-brain as conceived by science fiction, the difference between a human who can sign and mean and his ape predecessors who could only signal becomes far less impressive. ChatGPT is still pretty crude, but its successors should be able to improve on its crudeness a lot faster than our descendants can improve on ours.

    In short, we do not need to reproduce the hypothetical details of human evolution in order to reproduce the products of the intelligence we evolved in order to protect us from ourselves. Once symbol-manipulation emerged as a technique, just as its physical productions could be improved by means of printers, computers could learn to perform the manipulations themselves more skillfully than their human teachers. AI is already part of the arsenal of scientists investigating complex phenomena; a December 2020 article in Science 370: 6521,”‘The game has changed.’ AI triumphs at protein folding,” describes the advances in mapping genetically determined protein-folding made possible by AI-based analysis.

    This doesn’t mean that as living creatures responsive to the sacred, we are not different from man-made computers or robots. The frequent problematization of this relationship, the Ur-theme of science fiction beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is simply not relevant to the notion of “intelligence,” which as a measurable ability to think, that is, to analyze situations by means of logic, hence algorithmically, cannot make any distinction between the sources of language. That GA emphasizes the fact that language is a human invention, of a different nature from biological coding devices such as DNA, is irrelevant to the question of how the human use of language differs from that of machines, of which we are for the moment the only known creators. Logic and mathematics too are human inventions, but it is easy to understand why thinkers since Plato prefer to understand them as so fundamental that a world in which they would not function is all but inconceivable.

    At the same time, it seems clear that the organic connection between human language and the conditions of its (pre-)historical origin can at best be simulated, not created anew. The connection between the sacred and the significant is the urgent necessity of sacralization/interdiction and its communication via the sign for the survival of the protohuman community. Thus AI takes its vocabulary from our human history of significance, not its own. Which is to say that the “soul in the machine” is ours, not its. Of course we can simulate this urgency as a function of robot behavior, but it was not from robot behavior that language evolved. The simulation of our soulful relationship to language and culture as embedded in our nervous and social systems can never reproduce its organic reality, the origin of language as the conversion of gestures of appropriation into gestures of renunciation motivated by the contextual danger of violence.

    This is true even though, as in the case of artworks, the quality of such simulations can be indefinitely improved, and there is no reason to assume that replicants such as those in Blade Runner cannot eventually be created. After all, even sex dolls have their use, and AI-based functional “companions” for lonely people already exist that go far beyond the capacity of Alexa.

    But can simulations have souls?

    Since the days of Frankenstein, the key enigma involved in creating a human-like creature has been the infusion of the soul that makes it “almost human.” And the pathos of figures like the replicants comes from our knowledge that their souls, to the extent they exist, are “simulated,” although their feelings seem just like ours.

    In John Searle’s “Chinese room paradox,” a man with no knowledge of Chinese simulates a computer by following instructions to produce the proper Chinese output for the Chinese input he is given—the point being that his “computer-like” actions involve no understanding of Chinese. But in Searle’s parable the man acts as a simple intermediary; his role of transmitting messages is in no way comparable to that of a computer program that has to compute the message, and which consequently has indeed to embody an understanding of Chinese. Searle’s point was to emphasize that the human process of understanding language is intuitively different from the mechanical/electrical operations of the computer; but to my mind this is simply begging the question: deciding a priori that “understanding” is something that humans can do but machines cannot.

    The use of Searle’s paradox is best understood in the other direction: What is this “human understanding” that, even if uncapturable by the Turing test, is somehow our intuitive article of faith? Well, we are living creatures, mortals, biological heirs of the origin of life; we feel pain, fear death, are susceptible to faith and awareness of sin and grace… No doubt we can simulate such sentiments in AI, just as we can simulate them in novels and plays: if we can make Hamlet “real,” we can do the same for a successor of ChatGPT.

    Let me offer a very different kind of counterexample. A few of these Chronicles (470, 654, and 679) treat of “Bear Theory” in an attempt to understand how it is that humans like myself (or more commonly, children) can become attached to stuffed/plush animals (“bears”) and imaginarily infuse them with a human-like intelligence inaccessible to their real-world counterparts.

    The real affection one feels for these creatures is not limited to Winnicott’s conception of the “transitional object” that allows the child to insert himself into the adult world. No doubt I cannot forget that any living creature is a “higher” being than GA’s mascot hedgehog Henri Kipod, but please don’t force me into a “trolley problem” of the kind beloved to moral philosophers in which I’d have to decide between Henri and a dog, or a cat, or a frog, or a fish, or a beetle, or….

    My point is that the “soul,” aside from our own, is an intuitive construction that we take for granted in other human beings, but that we can also attribute to objects of all kinds. We know our bears aren’t really alive, but we treat them as though they were, and truly grieve for their loss—think of the little girl who has lost her favorite doll, or in my own experience, the loss of our favorite echidna.

    Now consider a “replicant” who has all the qualities of a human being except… Her is a useful example because it dispenses with the need for physical presence; Johansson’s operating system “Samantha” voice suffices to establish the basis of the love-relationship experienced by the protagonist—and presumably by “Samantha” as well— entirely by means of language. Nor is the unhappy ending of this relationship in the film a necessary consequence of the conditions of the plot; if “Samantha” could experience/simulate true love for Theodore throughout the film, the ending, in which we learn that she and other similar OS’s decide that they have outgrown their (numerous) human relationships, surprisingly takes for granted that these replicants can evolve desires of their own unplanned by their creators. Which, however typical in sci-fi, could occur only if this capability was deliberately planned by the simulation’s original programmers, not, as the film implies, as the result of a prise de conscience on the part of the OS’s.

    In short, the tragedy of the man-made creature who wishes it could become a true human, as depicted in works from Frankenstein to Blade Runner and beyond, is conceivable only within a human imagination, not as a real possibility. It would no doubt be an interesting task to attempt to program such desires into a replicant, at which point alone the real difficulty of the task would emerge and might even conceivably be surmounted. But in contrast with the kind of algorithmic problems that machine learning can solve, such problems remain for the moment in the domain of art rather than science.

    We must not forget that the human can be defined by Rappaport’s coevality of the sacred and the significant; our semiotic heritage is also a religious heritage. We have language because sharing it allowed us to survive by deferring our “sinful” temptation to mimetic rivalry. What we call our soul embodies the memory of this originary connection between humans, mediated by the sacred force that interdicts our reflexive reactions. A computer system simply “has” language; it does not have to learn it through the history of deferral and semiosis that I attempted to outline in The Origin of Language.

    In 2021 I gave a talk at the COV&R conference on “Desiring Machines” in which I rather glibly proposed that if we wanted to confirm GA’s originary hypothesis, we should program bots to experience mimetic rivalry in such a way that they could survive only by means of the invention of language. Until such an experiment is successfully attempted, we can remain confident that our machines, however intelligent, will have to do without a soul.

  • The Epistemology of Resentment

    Resentment is as old as humanity; it expresses the individual’s scandalized reaction to what he perceives as a violation of the symmetry defined in the originary scenic configuration in which mimetic rivalry was deferred. It depends on our common human sense of moral equality, whose felt violation it reacts to, not necessarily justly from the broader perspective of the community. The system of social regulations, eventually codified as laws, responds to resentment, and either informally or in the context of a judicial system attempts to evaluate its justification. As anthropologists well know, in most hunter-gatherer societies resentment leads to more violence than in hierarchical societies where judicial systems are backed by a central authority. Trusting individuals to settle their differences in the absence of empowered arbitrators is not generally an effective formula for keeping the peace.

    In the hierarchical societies that emerged from the practice of sedentary agriculture, the inequality of the rulers and their subjects was taken for granted, and the resentments of the latter toward the former were given no latitude. For millennia their occasional flareups were rarely effective in modifying political systems; the only effective source of violence was rivalry among the ruling caste.

    It is significant that the term ressentiment to which Nietzsche would give its philosophical credentials in his Genealogy of Morals was under the Ancien Régime the expression of aristocratic self-righteousness—even if the classical quote, Rome, unique objet de mon ressentiment, pronounced by Camille in Corneille’s Horace, is not without a nuance of powerless frustration. But by Nietzsche’s day, l’homme du ressentiment had assumed the character of the Untermensch, the powerless loser.

    For the French Revolution, prepared by the English and then the American, was the great turning point of modern political thinking. For the first time the resentment of the tiers état was no longer the desperate cry of the medieval peasant revolts but an effective political statement that led to the abolition of the caste society of les trois états. It is from this point that we can date the political history of the epistemology of resentment, that is, the socially confirmed decision to find in one’s resentment not merely a desire for personal vengeance or a stimulus to improve one’s condition but a fundamental source of ethical understanding—and as a result, to no longer call it “resentment.” The revolutionary tiers état, whatever its excesses, returned to the originary egalitarian model of human relations no longer as an abstraction but as a basis of political action. Caste-based social relations, long established in social practice, were condemned as immoral, and the resentful rage they inspired, no longer repressed, was converted into a political force: the modern Left.

    The Left-Right opposition, as we know, originated in the seating in the French Assemblée Nationale in 1789. But whereas the Left as the party of resentment has maintained a real continuity since its origin, the Right has become split between what it was in 1789—the unresentful party that accepts reality as it is—and what the “extreme Right” became after WWI: the yet more resentful mirror image of the Left, reaching a paroxysm of hatred that even Stalin and Mao never attained—even as the latter were responsible for far more violence. That it was no coincidence that the Jews were the primary object of this hatred is demonstrated in the present day, as the Left allies itself with Muslim Jihadism in its hostility to the West’s originary “chosen people,” supposedly exemplary of white privilege on a cosmic scale.

    Today, with the decay of traditional Judeo-Christian restraints, the US is witnessing ever more extreme forms of the epistemology of resentment. But it is no longer that of the sans-culottes or the Bolsheviks. Wokism makes use of lower-class resentment, encourages it by refusing to punish “minor” crimes, abolishing bail, refusing to curtail illegal immigration… But its ideological base is not at all among the minorities it cultivates, some representatives of which are happy to profit from it, but among the economic elite, the source of the finances of Antifa and the like, and a radicalized upper-middle class of university professors and administrators, employees of non-profit foundations, and unionized bureaucrats and teachers, backed by an antinomic culture that encourages what can only be called the decadent behavior of overt transgenderists and sponsors of Drag Queen performances in elementary schools. No, this is not your grandfather’s Left.

    The OED gives 2013 for the first use of the term virtue-signaling, which so well describes the Left’s moral stance in our victimary age. What is new about this adaptation of resentment epistemology is that the presumably “normal” speaker, a member of the unmarked or “white” class, avoids denunciation for his avowedly privileged status by denouncing, explicitly or implicitly, those of his peers who in some way affirm, if only by failing to apologize for it, this “normal” status. The source of this model is American race politics, the white-black dichotomy traceable to Southern slavery. (As Asians seeking admission to Harvard have discovered, being non-white does not make them people of color.) It has been extended to such phenomena as “land acknowledgements,” in which speakers begin by avowing that the podium at which they are standing is on land usurped from the X tribe.

    The embarrassment that virtue-signaling (v-s) inevitably causes, and that we are inevitably expected to repress, stems from the fact that it is not the modesty of one who rejects the praise of others, but the arrogant exhibition, not of real virtue, but of its “signal.” A behavior now so pervasive that universities and foundations spend millions on DEI bureaucracies that oblige applicants for jobs or admissions to demonstrate how much they have done to implement these virtues.

    This is, as far as we know, the first time in all human history that v-s has been put into practice. The word is only ten years old, yet throughout the institutional world it has become as natural as breathing. Why had no one ever thought of it before? It is not the equivalent of the hypocrisy of Molière’s faux dévôts. Although these too signaled their virtue, the difference is precisely that the traditional hypocrite wants to be recognized for exceptional virtue, as the term holier-than-thou suggests. Whereas the v-ser is not so much asserting his superiority over others as affirming in Orwellian fashion his obedience to a new normality. His action, whether in acknowledging the priority of an Indian tribe or in capitalizing Black in contrast to white, implies not that he is of superior, but simply of acceptable moral character, demonstrating to those of us who do not yet realize this the error of their ways, and the proper way to act in the future—or else.

    Back in 2006 I quoted in Chronicle 337 a remark by Jens Orback, at the time Sweden’s “Minister of Democracy”: “We must be open and tolerant toward Islam and the Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so toward us.” For Orback, accommodating these immigrants was not a mode of v-s directed at his fellow natives, but a demonstration of acceptance of their eventual hegemony. In Europe this is indeed a real possibility for the not-very-distant future. Whereas even with the increase in illegal immigration encouraged by the current administration, there is little chance that the US will soon be dominated by racial minorities, let alone followers of Islam. On the contrary, the pattern here has uniformly been that in a generation or two new immigrant groups assimilate into the culture. This has been progressing with the Latino population, and we may expect it eventually to become the case for American blacks as well, as new generations emerge that have not been subject to racial discrimination. The risk is only that the prolongation of “antiracism” policies will ingrain in elements of the black community a victimary sense of racial privilege.

    Is victimocracy the ultimate stage of the epistemology of resentment? Orback was after all imagining a world in which the power structure would be changed to his disadvantage. In contrast, Wokism implies that what we had until yesterday taken for granted as ethical behavior in fact reflects an unchanging racial caste structure against which we must continue indefinitely to struggle in order to remove successively smaller still-invisible defects, from microaggressions to nanoaggressions. White supremacy (to limit ourselves to that one “inequity”) can never be altogether obliterated, even as we work to ferret out its subtlest traces.

    Thus Wokeness, with its ever-changing notion of normality, takes the place of seeking any critical change in economic relations. It focuses entirely on the interpersonal; its frame of reference is what Marx called the superstructure, while the economic, military, political… aspects of society, focused on worldly realities, are “bracketed.”

    We have already gone far toward focusing our entire program of education from elementary school through the university on maximizing “equity,” a maximum that only continues to increase at the expense of academic subject matter, whether in the humanities or even the sciences. We might speculate that the endpoint of this development would be a society where humans need no longer concern themselves with worldly realities at all, because AI—of which ChatGPT is just a primitive preview—would be performing such operations.

    Wokism and globalism

    Wokism, as its name implies, is a young people’s way of thinking. Its emphasis on “safe spaces” and microaggressions suggests the worldview of a spoiled child in a comfortable family. What then explains its funding and promulgation by the most powerful figures of our social order, by tech billionaires and directors of major corporations, Federal agencies, and “non-profit” foundations? Why are the current masters of our economy so concerned to undermine the normality that past ruling classes have always affirmed?

    The term “globalism” is often evoked as the basis of an explanation, but for this to be successful, this term cannot refer to a utopian vision of world culture in which our differences would be sufficiently harmonized for their “diversity” to become a source of richness rather than strife. I think that to understand the Davos idea of “globalism” is rather to see it primarily as a negative force: breaking down obsolete local barriers to the worldwide circulation of products and services. Without implying a direct causality between encouraging transsexualism and opening up markets, it suffices to judge any traditional ethical limitation on individual desire—which is to say, on the individual’s “creative engagement” with his/her resentment—as prima facie an obstacle to the world-wide exchange of information and consumer goods.

    Hence globalism is linked with Wokism as a critique of the old “bourgeois” normality. Short of openly seeking the breakdown of civil order, globalists instinctively prefer to liberate, in Freudian terms, the id from the superego, rejecting as the equivalent of racism any hierarchical valuation of individual desire. Along the same lines, letting criminals out of jail or freeing them without bail punishes the old “normal” society for the racist restrictions that presumably engendered their criminality in the first place. Although making profits requires employees with high skill levels, globalists feel, perhaps rightly, that there is more to be gained in encouraging consumerist expansion than lost in the apotropaic gestures of affirmative action.

    Thus the global marketeers, without perhaps conceiving their goals in such explicit terms, see the liberation of Western society from its traditional norms as both a recognition of the evils of its past “white supremacy” and a source of market expansion, driven by the enhanced circulation of electronic information. At the same time, they do not fear the breakdown of the social order on the local scale because they have no particular attachment to this order, whether local or even national: provided that the world economy continue to function, the globalists in their gated communities can imagine themselves above the fray.

    Will the political realism stimulated by the Ukraine war suffice to restore our national solidarity? Are we witnessing the final self-caricatures of Woke decadence in the Satanic show at the Grammys and Rihanna’s twerking at the Super Bowl? It is too early for optimism, but the upper-middle class, the key demographic of political action, has been showing clear signs of restiveness, as our public schools perform more and more disgracefully, our cities become more unsafe, and the world’s dangers ever-so-gradually force us to awaken from the stupor of the “end of history.”

  • Religion at the Beginning and End of History

    Even for the most enthusiastic partisan of GA, its apparent disconnection from the nitty-gritty of anthropology in the traditional sense is bound to pose a problem. Readers in humanistic fields sometimes call me, as they did René Girard, an “anthropologist,” but real anthropologists who spend months and years in jungles and tundra learning the ways of hunter-gatherer societies are understandably unwilling to admit such as we into their fraternity.

    Yet after a generation of “French Theory,” there is no longer an established academic field in which GA, or for that matter, Girard’s “mimetic theory,” can find a place. What has happened is that the anthropological profundity of deconstruction, whose core is its unearthing of the central role of deferral in the emergence of our species and its representational culture, has been overwhelmed by the quasi-Marxist politics to which it was at first associated and then subordinated. This division was clear enough in Jacques Derrida’s career, when with Glas (1974) its anthropological side, with its titillating paradoxes, began to appear merely ornamental, and was in the space of a decade or two abandoned.

    Thus the field of literary anthropology that played a major role in our intellectual life for over a generation in the late 20th century has shrunk back into the world of English and comparative literature departments, abandoning the quest for humanity’s fundamental truths for such things as the exploration of traditionally tabooed sexualities. In consequence, the fascination exercised during the French Theory era by deconstruction on social science departments has worn off. Anthropology perhaps more than the others has sought to return to solid ground by abandoning speculative macro-notions for empirical micro-investigations. Its striking neglect of religion demonstrates to what extent it has lost the sense of the human as communal and scenic, as though the production of stone tools—for which much archaeological evidence is available—were the archetypal human activity.

    I need not insist that the lack of paleontological evidence for our hypothesis does not imply its disconnection from lived human reality. The parallels between our scene of origin and cultural practices throughout human history are evidence of its validity as a heuristic model for understanding these practices.

    As I suggested in Chronicle 760, the closest analogies to the originary hypothesis are to be found in the creation stories of the world’s religions. Although the schematism of the hypothesis cannot simply be put in parallel with these stories, they share the necessity of accounting for the origin not merely of a new biological species but of an entirely new form of self-consciousness, one that is from the beginning expressed in narrative form within human communities themselves rather than remaining, like scientific consciousness, external to its object.

    In Roy Rappaport’s terms, religion and language emerge coevally, so that their coincidence may be said to offer a minimal definition of the human in its transcendence of the biological mode of existence. The collective scene, governed by the mimetic tension among its participants, discovers in the deferral of appropriative action from the fear of conflict the possibility of conscious sharing. The origin of the sign as an “aborted gesture of appropriation,” resulting from the need to avoid the potential conflict that such appropriation risks bringing about, designates its object as one of common significance, hence of sacrality, to the human community.

    Given this originary model, the question posed to the separate faiths is how they differ in situating the human subject in relation to what is experienced as a providential will guaranteeing by means of the interdiction of individual appropriation the survival and perpetuation of the human community. It would be foolish to seek to construct a priori a paradigm of such configurations. Those which remain extant today, notably those belonging to religions that arose during the “Axial Age” of liberation from the “compact” societies of the archaic empires, are the products of millennia of historical experience. It is in the dialogue between our hypothetical event and the distillation of this experience that we must seek to understand the religions that have served as the spiritual bases for post-Axial and eventually modern civilizations.

    After publishing The Origin of Language in 1981, I sought to extend its originary dialectic to the domain of literature, from Gilgamesh and the “Tale of Sinuhe” to the end of the Classical era. The result, entitled The End of Culture, appeared in 1985.

    Today, were I a couple of decades younger, I might well attempt something similar in the domain of religion. It would be in fact a more compact, better defined project, given that, unlike the history of literature and the arts, the essential history of the major world religions ended for practical purposes with the creation of Islam. The Reformation was rather a return to a “purer” Christianity in reaction against Church corruption (the “indulgences”) than a new development, and more recently emerged religions such as Mormonism have been essentially offshoots of the old.

    In default of such a major project, I can nonetheless attempt to outline the way in which the major world religions relate to the substance of the originary hypothesis. This project, extending the Judeo-Christian/Western vs Buddhist/Eastern comparison in Chronicles 515–516, would hopefully serve to encourage in-depth research by demonstrating the usefulness of the originary hypothesis as the foundation upon which all religions elaborate their belief-systems. What follows is a preliminary sample.

    The Axial religions

    There is a clear sense in which the transcendental Axial religions, in contrast to their immanentist predecessors, may be seen as attempts to return to an originary sense of the sacred from the distraction constituted by attributions of sacrality to objects and persons in the world. In our hypothesis, the sacred is experienced as prior to the human community, which it constitutes. But whereas the Axial religions, each in its way, posit the sacred as an extratemporal reality revealed in time to the human community, our minimal anthropology understands the sacred as in the first place a common sense of interdiction, distinct from a reflexive inhibition in the Pavlovian sense because it is experienced consciously. It defines a desire that cannot be kept or driven out of consciousness but must be recalled and denied because, as in the originary event, the desirability of the central object is a mark of its value to the community and not just to the desiring individual.

    That the hypothesis can explain such things “minimally,” using Ockham’s razor as its watchword, by no means implies that this minimality is accessible to the participants in the originary event or in those that immediately follow. On the contrary, the millennial existence of immanentist religions makes clear that our notion of the sacred as a unitary phenomenon was not that of its early worshipers.

    Whatever adjustments may be necessary to Jaspers’ conception of the “Axial Age” as outlined in his Origin and Goal of History (German original, 1949), it corresponds clearly enough to a growth in humanity’s self-comprehension, most significantly including both monotheism and metaphysics in the same general movement. Thus the Axial religions are far closer to each other than their immanentist predecessors; all rely on a “secular” view of worldly reality as subject to, but not embodying, the transcendental spiritual force of the sacred. The relative stability of these religions over the past millennium and more suggests that they represent a well-defined stage of human self-consciousness—one greatly perturbed by the rise of the epistemology of resentment in the early modern era that reached a high point in the French Revolution.

    Given the immense historical significance of this development, it is curious that relatively little effort has been devoted to studying its epistemological implications. It was never a theme of French Theory, which had little to say about pre-Classical literature. Eric Voegelin’s distinction between compact and free societies parallels Jaspers’ categories, but in the absence of a reliable theory of human origin, exactly what the Axial Age discovered about the human is impossible to define in rigorous terms. Marshall Sahlins in his valedictory The New Science of the Enchanted Universe (Princeton, 2022) focuses on the immanentist religions from an anthropological perspective. Perhaps the most thorough study of the immanentism/transcendentalism dichotomy can be found in Alan Strathern’s Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History (Cambridge UP, 2019), although the book’s focus in on religion’s relationship to social governance rather than its effect on epistemology.

    Immanentism attributes sacrality to the things of this world, whereas transcendentalism recognizes that these things are only sacred/significant in the context of the transcendentally assured providential survival of the human community. Transcendental religion posits the ontological dependence, conceived not as probabilistic but as necessary, of this survival on the transcendental sacred. The force of religious faith is that it accepts the need to affirm the absolute nature of the interdiction that protects the sacred object, not as emanating “magically” from that object itself or from forces immanent within it, but from the universal providence that preserves the human community from self-destruction, yet with the understanding that humans must themselves will this protection by obeying the interdiction, which they must nevertheless remain free to disobey.

    Both immanentism and transcendentalism attribute the force of the sacred to something outside the human, but the first fetishizes the objects that appear to embody this force rather than understanding, as does the second, that the force is independent of the objects that arouse it, because their interdiction concerns not the preservation of the objects themselves but that of the human community from the force of mimetic desire, whose relationship to its specific objects is secondary to its operation within this community itself.

    In this Chronicle, I will limit myself to the element of the human soul that can be shown to be reflected in all the Axial religions: the sense that humans are responsible for their disobedience to sacred interdiction. As Milton put it, we were made “sufficient to have stood, but free to fall.” Hence the function of religion is to discourage such disobedience by demonstrating the punishments it will incur in contrast to the eternal benefits of the contrary exercise of virtue. The source of such disobedience is the “original sin” of Adam and Eve under the influence of the serpent in Genesis 3.

    Original Sin

    This Christian term refers to the outcome of the sequence in which the serpent tempts Eve, who tempts Adam to eat the apple. How does this sad finale to the joys of Eden fit in with what in our originary hypothesis sounded like a happy ending: the communal feast celebrating the equal division of the prey that its sacred deferral made possible?

    The point of the Bible story is that God’s commandment not to eat the fruit of the tree, although emanating from the unique source of the sacred, is not the equivalent of his command “Let there be light!” Directed to humans, as will be the Ten Commandments and the laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, this is a law that must be consciously obeyed, and can hence be disobeyed. The things of nature that God creates cannot talk back; God’s language is about them but not addressed to them. Whereas, to follow his orders, humans must constantly defer what they presumably desire, since in the absence of desire, God’s command would be unnecessary.

    What is presented as God’s “learning process” in Genesis, which continues through the Flood and the Tower of Babel and leads eventually to his election of Abraham as the source of God’s own people, can be understood simply as the course of human history. If the first humans at their feast thought that henceforth the sacred would providentially resolve all conflicts before they started, they would soon have learned the contrary. Once one’s action is mediated by God’s language, it can be mediated by the serpent’s language as well. To follow God’s commandment, one must keep the lesson of the collective scene always in memory, whence the central role of scripture, of the Torah.

    That the serpent as one of God’s creatures is given the human power of speech is a sign that language cannot be limited to the “chosen.” And that Eve was not God’s original human creation, that she received his command only at second hand, explains her openness to an alternative to the order established in the originary event—at which we may assume that no women were present, since hunters left their females with the children. Indeed, given that even today only the most liberal of Abrahamic religions grant women an equal ceremonial status, one can well imagine that in originary times, they would not have had access to language.

    Hence Eve’s resentment is no stranger to modern feminism. But the condemnation of “patriarchy,” like all expressions of the epistemology of resentment, interprets divergence from the symmetry of the originary event as a form of oppression dictated by la loi du plus fort. The pragmatic/providential explanation of the superior status of men in traditional religion and society is simply that men are more potentially violent than women, more likely to engage in mimetic conflict. If women have generally been treated as “inferior”—while at the same time more precious—it is because, while controlling their potential for violence is less urgent, controlling their capacity for reproducing the species is a major communal concern. These are points in the “battle of the sexes” that women have always understood, as well as that the pragmatic role of the various religions in this domain is not simply an excuse for patriarchal repression.

    The alternatives of humble submission to the law, as in Islam, or the attainment of moral equilibrium by putting away desire, as in Buddhism, provide simpler solutions than Judeo-Christianity’s foregrounding of the struggle to align one’s desire with the needs of one’s fellow humans, but they are in each case appeals to the moral self-consciousness, the soul, of the individual human, in contrast to the magical practices of immanentism.

    Which solution is superior? The West has dominated the modern world so far, but given the current state of “the worst system except…” we may ask whether Christianity is capable of maintaining its hold on the social order, whether the Jewish nation-state can maintain its unity, or whether the West’s Marxist “heresy” can maintain its grip on nations with chips on their shoulders.

    It may well be that it is Buddhist withdrawal from desire and its attendant karma that holds out the greatest hope for our species’ survival. To contemplate the scene of representation as a scene, one that we observe from within, as a play within the play of life, may be humanity’s best hope, whether before or after AI has become able to supply the bulk of our practical needs.

    Could Buddhism return to its Indian birthplace to make peace between the Muslims and the Hindus, it would have at its disposal the world’s largest population in a multinational land of millennial culture, yet one that unlike the Western powers, Russia, China, or even Iran/Persia, has never known world hegemony. There are worse ways to conceive the End of History…

  • Two Post-Novels: Michel Houellebecq’s Anéantir and Annie Ernaux’s Une femme

    For Stacey and Missy

    Since a French novelist, Annie Ernaux, won the 2022 Nobel Prize, while many followers of French letters thought the controversial Michel Houellebecq was more deserving, this seems like a good time to update an essay from thirty years ago called “The Last French Novels” (Romanic Review, 83, 4 [1992]), where I analyzed Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La jalousie and Marguerite Duras’ Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein as exemplary works of an era that I felt could go no farther in the novel’s exploration of the triangle of mimetic desire. Of the two, I gave the nod to Duras.

    I wasn’t implying that there would be no more French novels, even “good” French novels, merely that the postwar revolution defined by the nouveau roman had reached its apogee with these two masterpieces, and that future French novels could no longer pretend to be prolonging the attempt to renew the novel form. An effort that, as I see it, can be traced back to Flaubert’s 1869 L’éducation sentimentale, which ends with the protagonist Frédéric rehearsing with his soul-brother Deslauriers a story (histoire) whose action is anterior to—and trumps—the action of the novel, the story of their adolescent experience in a brothel where, intimidated by the prostitutes, Frédéric fled, and the penniless Deslauriers was obliged to follow. And after they go over this tale for the nth time, the novel concludes as they both exclaim: C’est là ce que nous avons eu de meilleur!—That was the best thing in our lives!

    The end of the era of postwar literary creativity has been even more clearly perceptible in the realm of criticism, where the age of post-structuralism, deconstruction, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan… what American English Departments called “French Theory,” inaugurated in the US in 1966 by Girard and Richard Macksey with their Johns Hopkins colloquium, “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” has also ceased to be productive—as witness the scholarship it has ceased to inspire.

    Anéantir

    Houellebecq’s latest (2022) and longest (730-page) novel deserves a more thorough analysis than I can give it here. But it seems clear that precisely because, of all its author’s works, it stresses the “novelistic” quality of a highly plotted narrative, it makes no attempt to refute my claim that the bourgeois novel as a story of desire, whose history Lukács, Girard, and many others had traced, has no more space to evolve in, and that it is no longer by deconstructing but by sabotaging the novel form that Houellebecq is able to convey the work’s strangely touching message of “true love” as the final solution to the paradox of human desire.

    As one who has striven to read this often off-putting writer with sympathy, I indeed found in Anéantir a unique intensity of human feeling that makes the reader want to admire it as a masterpiece, even as its apparent sincerity is paradoxically dependent on the author’s deliberate disappointment of the reader’s expectation of a coherent narrative experience.

    Why did Houellebecq deliberately refrain from tying up the strands of what had started out as a complex plot that blended the 2027 campaign for the French presidency with a mysterious series of pinpoint anarcho-terrorist attacks, the first three of which are discovered to be located at three vertices of a pentagram (!), and the awaited two others situated at two other strategically critical points in Europe? Could this be Houellebecq’s definitive answer to the question he posed to the novel form in his very first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994)—translated ineptly as Whatever—where, in reaction to what he calls the “progressive obliteration (effacement) of human relations” in our era, he asserts that “The novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference, nor nothingness: one would have to invent a form (articulation) more banal, more concise, and more mournful” (48-9).

    I believe that Houellebecq deliberately sabotaged this plot after creating the personal focus characteristic of what György Lukács called The Historical Novel in the family of the protagonist Paul Raison, an assistant to the all-powerful economics minister Bruno (modeled on the current minister Bruno Le Maire, apparently a personal acquaintance of the author). Raison’s father, a retired member of the secret police, falls into a coma and subsequently suffers from locked-in syndrome, a subject that distracts us from but does not at first appear to subvert the “public” plot. But on Paul’s discovery after visiting a dentist (one wonders why he had waited so long) that he is dying of an inoperable cancer of the jaw, the author abandons the book’s ostensible plotline altogether to concentrate on Paul and his wife Prudence (presumably a Beatles reference) for the last two hundred-odd pages.

    Thus the title Anéantir, (to) annihilate, which had promised a tale of apocalyptic destruction presumably resulting from the sinister activities of the terrorists, must be re-thought as referring to the protagonist’s own death, the focus of most existentialist novels.

    In consequence, the last part of the novel is altogether devoid of Houellebecq’s usual cynicism—one critic on Goodreads claimed that it vindicated his belief that Houellebecq had always been a romantic. Indeed, this author’s notorious cynicism and obsession with the details of physical sexuality do seem to mark him as a disillusioned believer in true love. Paul’s ever-clearer awareness of his imminent death corresponds to an ever-deepening love-relationship with his wife. Whereas at the beginning of the novel they were living separately and seemingly on the road to divorce, by the end, they find a bittersweet consolation for his final departure by fantasizing a series of Wiccan-Hindu-Buddhist incarnations in the course of which they imagine themselves remaining together. On the novel’s last page, Paul describes his bittersweet fortune:

    Perhaps in truth the world was right, perhaps [the couple] have no place in a reality that they had passed through with frightened incomprehension. But they had been lucky, very lucky. For most people, the passage was solitary from start to finish. (730)

    Admittedly I have not attempted to read the considerable number of reviews and essays that Anéantir has provoked. But if those on Goodreads are, if not professional critics, a reasonable sample of “good readers,” it seems to me notable that none among either the lovers or the haters of the novel has come up with my hypothesis: that the incoherence of the plot is neither a legitimate plot device, reflecting the fact that the impending death of the protagonist makes the military-political-mystical intrigue simply unimportant, nor is it, as a few readers reproachfully remarked, simply a compositional flaw, an involuntary violation of the principles of novel construction.

    No, Houellebecq is too intelligent and too perverse to fall into either of these categories. In my judgment, this can only be a deliberate subversion of the novel form, enacted as a protest against what is after all the “absurd” limitation of individual life in a universe in which one can talk about samsara and reincarnation, but where the individual is insufficiently attached to a real human community to allow him to conceive his life in terms of intergenerational continuity. It is surely no accident that Paul and Prudence have no children.**

    Thus in contrast to the nouveaux romanciers, Houellebecq has no pretension of positively transforming the traditional novel structure. No doubt this example of his characteristic in-your-face-ness might be considered, here as elsewhere in his oeuvre, as an element of “deconstruction.” Yet “deconstruction” does not excuse the inelegance of the procedure, in contrast with the sometimes tedious but always highly self-conscious techniques by means of which the nouveau romancier demonstrates the irrelevance of the traditional novel form.

    Annie Ernaux

    How can this ostensibly naïve author, who writes only about the world of her personal experience with no apparent attempt at fictionalizing, be paired with a writer who had ended his second novel, Les particules élémentaires (1998), with the last humans giving way to a new species whose “corrected” DNA allowed them to live forever without aging? Or, to borrow a phrase from the Vietnam era, in what way can she as well as he be described as helping to destroy the novel in order to save it?

    From the broadest perspective, with a technique both more and less sophisticated, she does much the same thing that he does. Houellebecq addresses the reader monotonically as “the author,” which is to say that like Balzac or Dickens, while haranguing the reader, mixing personal observations with storytelling the way your neighborhood storyteller would do, he never takes the “meta” role of the writer discussing with the reader the composition of his text. Whereas Ernaux deliberately and frequently changes registers between just telling the story, whether of her mother, her father, a love affair…, and commenting both on her writing as a process and on her personal/authorial self-consciousness.

    No, this is not jarring like Houellebecq’s turning away from his high-level plot to focus on his everyman protagonist, precisely because it announces itself as transparent to the reader—as though any use of language, whether fiction or autobiography or “autofiction” like the quasi-autobiographical works by Butor and Robbe-Grillet, could be transparent. But in the end, the direct self-revelations that punctuate Ernaux’ narrative have the same effect as Houellebecq’s apparently faulty plot construction: that of subverting the novel form, making it do what it was not meant to do, as opposed to the new novel that insisted above all on its belief in this form.

    Writing a novel from the point of view of the husband as an “absent” character as in La jalousie, or as the lover-observer of Lol who ends up as the object of her manipulation-observation, is in neither case breaking the pact whereby the author sets the rules for his place in the narrative discourse. Whereas writing an apparently straightforward narrative only to change the plot under the implicit force of an unexpected emotional bonding with the principal character, or less jarringly, periodically commenting on the effectiveness of one’s own narrative in its attempt to bring out the “truth” of its subject—both these formal gestures go beyond the traditional limits of narrative, and not as mere parenthetical extra-diegetic gestures like a film comedy “talking to” the audience behind the back of the plot, but as crucial elements of the works themselves.

    Both Houellebecq and Ernaux add one more twist of the spiral, or the Moebius strip, of the audience’s “contract” with the author, a twist that affords the novel a capacity for self-deconstruction that cannot be reinterpreted as reflective of a proposed new ontology of human interaction which the novel would seek, using whatever tricks and meta-tricks, simply to depict.

    Une femme (1987), like all of Ernaux’ novels, presents itself to the reader as an (auto)biographical document. Unlike most French novels, its title page does not contain the word roman, and we are obliged to understand it as an attempt to describe its protagonist, Ernaux’ mother, as authentically as possible. This little book, like most of Ernaux’ novels covering barely 100-odd small pages, begins with her mother’s death and burial provoking in the author a reflection on how this death affected her. Then, three weeks after the burial, she “surmounted the terror of writing on a blank page. . . as the beginning of a book, not of a letter . . . ‘my mother is dead.’” (21) And on the next page, “I am going to continue to write about my mother.” And in conclusion to this meta-meditation,

    What I best hope to write is situated no doubt at the confluence of the familial and the social, of myth and history. My project is of a literary nature, because it involves seeking a truth about my mother that can only be reached through words. . . . But I hope to remain, in a certain sense, on a level beneath (au-dessous de) literature (23).

    Thus the narrative, as is typical of Ernaux, announces itself within itself, and accompanies its substantive subject with reflections on its composition, not in an opaque manner for us to discover as in a nouveau roman, but as an explicit running commentary.

    The unspoken element of Une femme is that it is in effect the story of what made it possible for Ernaux herself to write it. That is, the story of her mother is at the same time that of her own origin, and more specifically, of her mother’s emergence from the “mute” rural proletariat, through factory work and then the ownership of a marginal but functioning grocery store cum café, into a self-reflecting universe where for her daughter, not only reading (as her mother had already done) but writing—joining the “dominant” class—finally became possible. Which emergence also required, as we learn, the childhood death of a sister from diphtheria two years before her own birth—her parents having decided, like many French couples in their class, to have only a single child “so that he/she might be happier” (42).

    Thus Annie’s birth in 1940 permits her to write about her mother and thereby, in her turn, to “bring her into the world” (43). After which she returns to her opening sentence about her mother’s death to tell us, “This is a sentence that I can now bear, and even read . . . as if it were written by someone else” (43). There follows a reflection on her attitudes toward both her writing and the elements of her past that it evokes, in her effort to “present the truth about my mother” (44).

    There is no need for me to go farther in order to make the point that this kind of writing, like Houellebecq’s but in a very different manner, is incompatible with either the novel or autobiography as a genre. The movement to what we would call the meta-level is deliberately not separate from the biographical narration; the “voice” we hear is the same, and is meant to be understood as present in the strictly third-person passages, where we cannot help feeling ourselvesin the presence of the narrator as of someone not just telling a story but trying to get it right, writing in an attempt to capture an objective truth.

    Perhaps the clearest statement of the meta-novelistic nature of the book comes a few pages later:

    I am attempting not to consider my mother’s violence, her excesses of tenderness, her reproaches as merely personal traits of character, but to situate them also with respect to her history and her social condition. This way of writing, which seems to me to go in the direction of truth, helps me to liberate myself from the loneliness and obscurity of individual memory by the discovery of a more general meaning. Yet I feel that something in me resists this, wanting to conserve from my mother merely affective images, warmth and tears, without giving them a meaning. (52)

    This tension between the objective and the personal is resolved—we might say, by the (writing of the) novel itself as therapy and transcendence—in its final paragraphs:

    This is not a biography, nor of course a novel, perhaps something between literature, sociology, and history. It was necessary that my mother, born in a dominated milieu that she wanted to escape, become history, in order that I might feel less alone and artificial in the dominant world of words and ideas into which, following her desire, I have moved.

    I will no longer hear her voice. It is she, and her words, her hands, her gestures, her way of laughing and walking, that united the woman that I am with the child I had been. I have lost the last link to the world into which I was born/from which I emerged (le monde dont je suis issue). (106)

    Here the conflict between novelistic objectivity and personal sentiment has disappeared; each receives its own paragraph, as two necessary components of the novel which the latter’s composition alone could perform the centrifuge-like task of separating out—a task that may be said to be accomplished by all modern novels, and by Proust’s most programmatically. But precisely, Proust’s work, however personal, remains throughout a novel, whereas Ernaux’ “literature, sociology…” makes it impossible for the reader to situate her work as either fiction or (auto)biography.

    This is not, as we must judge Anéantir, an external deconstruction of the novel, a violation of the reader’s normal expectation of a coherent discourse. There is nothing in Une femme that violates our expectations. But by what we must assume to be the truth of the novel’s assertions, in contrast with those of a fiction, we find ourselves engaged with a universe in which, in contrast with those of non-fiction, we had no prior objective interest.

    Indeed, we cannot see either the mother or the author herself as merely a representative of a certain class of people. Ernaux’ career, now crowned with the Nobel Prize, is defined by this attempt to make her mother, as she had previously done with her father in La place (1983), neither a heroine of fiction nor a sociological case study, but a fellow soul whom the author saves from obscurity and in doing so, saves herself—through an act of love that, more smoothly than Houellebecq’s fictional refocusing, goes beyond the framework of fiction.

    Thirty years after “The Last French Novels,” it is once again the woman’s project that carries the greater conviction.

    **As a potential piece of evidence for this judgment, Houellebecq takes the unusual step of including at the end of the novel two pages of Remerciements. After thanking various medical experts for their help, he adds a passage (733) thanking one Astrid Nielsen, as he claims he could not do in person, for making him realize “for the first time” that, whatever happened, “I had to finish this book.”

    Without speculating on exactly how this revelation was obtained, we can say that the very fact of thanking a friend for inspiring him to finish a 700-page novel helps explain my “sabotage” thesis: it implies that he had actually thought of abandoning it altogether, suggesting that the formally incomplete ending was a gesture of last resort rather than the finale of a planned scenario—yet a gesture he was willing to affirm as his own.

  • GA and the Return of Narrative Anthropology

    The great tradition of Western philosophy or metaphysics, first formalized poetically by Parmenides and given its institutional point of departure by Plato, provided the model for (Western) theoretical and eventually scientific thought. The term metaphysics in Greek simply refers to the order of the books within the Aristotelian organon after the physics (meta-physica), but the term came to suggest Plato’s assertion of the other-than-physical origin of the Ideas, obscuring the simple reality that human language was invented by our earthbound species. Metaphysics justifies its bracketing of this origin by reference to an a priori ontology of fundamental propositions. Whence my anthropological definition of metaphysics as thought that refuses to take into account the human, scenic origin of language, as revealed in its ostensive and imperative utterance-forms, but obscured in the declarative sentence or proposition.

    My purpose here is not to trace the history of metaphysics but to reflect on how what we can observe as its evacuation from the world of serious thought relates to the concurrent birth of generative anthropology. GA was born in a specific context, that of the emergence of literary theory as a social science of its own in the 20th century, reaching its high point in the last generation of the Cold War, roughly between 1965 and 1990, the era of French Theory or post-structuralism. During the heyday of this movement, literary texts became the privileged embodiment of what I call the cultural scene, the favored locus for anthropological discovery. The movements named above are really synonyms for literary anthropology.

    The history of metaphysics had culminated in Hegel’s dialectic, which understands the operation of history as a “dialogue” of embodied concepts, operating through the Aufhebung or “lifting-up” of contradiction into synthesis, leaving the dialectic on a higher level. But thinkers after Hegel saw the edifice of metaphysics as having reached in his work a reductio ad absurdum, the “end of history” being in contradiction with the time in which it is observed. Thus the post-Hegelians saw themselves in some way as post-metaphysical, in particular as rejecting philosophy’s Platonic basis in the Ideas, while recognizing at the same time that we can only think in ideas, that is, in concepts. Whence Fred Jameson’s para-Nietzschean title The Prison-House of Language as an iconic description of the plight of post-metaphysical philosophy.

    Francis Fukuyama is hardly in Hegel’s class as a philosopher, but his faux-naïf Kojevian understanding of the West’s victory in the Cold War as embodying the “real” end of history should not be dismissed as a sophomoric application of Hegel to our age. However absurd it may seem to talk literally about the end of history, Fukuyama’s real point (however much he was or is aware of it) is that this apparent defeat of Marxism by liberal democracy—which despite its increasingly problematic existence in this century has by no means been superseded as the world’s dominant political system, let alone its most attractive one—may be said to mark the “end of history” insofar as history can be conceived as a Hegelian/metaphysical dialectic. Marx had been the most direct and influential challenger to Hegel and to philosophy in general (changing the world vs understanding it), so that the defeat of Marxism could be said to demonstrate that its attempt to add a new and truly final stage to the historical dialectic had been revealed as a failure.

    Thus we can take Fukuyama seriously as having demonstrated not the “end of history,” but the end of the quest for a metaphysical understanding of history. The ironic truth of Hegel’s dialectic as an attempt to make sense of history is that it self-terminates, not by attaining conceptual perfection, but by reaching a degree of complexity at which the most advanced social order can only follow Churchill’s immortal formula of being “the worst… except for all the others,” that is, the one that, by allowing the maximum of degrees of freedom, is therefore the least predictable.

    It is not without significance that GA’s “new way of thinking” emerged from the universe of literary anthropology at much the same time as this Fukuyaman demonstration. The minimal narrative of GA’s originary hypothesis transcends Hegel’s metaphysical dialectic by revealing, as philosophy itself had been unable to do, the fundamental flaw in the ontology that metaphysics had sought to construct—a flaw that cannot be corrected, as the Existentialists thought, by such formulas as existence precedes essence, for “essence” is nothing but the language in which we seek to describe “existence,” on whatever level of description we reach. Pace the ancient, modern, and Existentialist philosophers, there is no such thing as Being/Sein/Etre in any sense other than as a mark of significance or sacrality, which is simply to say: critical importance to the human community as most broadly conceived.

    The demystification of metaphysics allows us to understand the phenomenon of transcendence in anthropological terms as simply another term for representation. Prior to the meta-representation of Ideas, the origin of the human as language/culture/the sacred/significance/transcendence marks the passage from the “natural” world to a representational doubling of the world by means of signs. The Hegelian dialectic, the Aufhebung of concepts through contradiction and synthesis, could operate only as a consequence of the origin of language itself in the ostensive re-presentation of reality.

    This transcendence is the foundation of the human: the creation of a world of signs shared among the human community, grasped along with their represented objects as signifier and signified, allowing us to think in the context of the community with whom we share these signs. The recursivity that Chomsky postulates as characteristic of language is a simple consequence of the fact that signifiers as themselves worldly phenomena can in turn become objects of representation, as animal signals can never be.

    Hegel’s dialectic began with Being as the most general form of what-is-represented. But to speak about Being is already to speak in propositions. Being is the exemplary case of a word that can be conceived only as an element of declarative language.

    Myth and Model: Scenic narrative in religion and anthropology

    If we had asked the 19th-century anthropologists why they focused above all on religion, their answer would have been that the peoples they studied were most significantly distinguished by the myths and rites they knew and practiced, both from pre-humans in general and from other human communities in particular. Religion was understood, in the terminology of Roy Rappaport (Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge, 1999) as coeval with language at the origin of humanity.

    Today, in contrast, anthropology no longer sees religion as fundamental to the specific difference that separates us from other animals. The subject matter of what might be called originary anthropology is dominated today rather by the analysis of specific hominin-to-Sapiens behaviors and their physiological and above all neurological substrates. Thus a meticulous analysis of language origin such as Planer and Sterelny’s From Signal to Symbol: The Evolution of Language (MIT Press, 2021) seeks to break down linguistic practices into fundamental elements that can be examined in terms of the mental and physical capacities of the creatures that produce them.

    Significantly, neither religion nor ritual appear in the book’s index; the many behaviors described as potential incentives for language take place in the context of individual interactions rather than communal events, in contrast to the old anthropology that put such events—recitations of myths, festivals, rites of passage…—at the center of its study. Scriptures are primarily narrative accounts; rites are event-forms whose repetition is considered essential to reinforcing the communal presence of the sacred. More generally, cultural materials, whether religious or secular, function in scenes, whether as performances or as art- or cult-objects around which scenes are constructed. Thus in visiting a museum, one is often distressed by the impossibility of taking the time to conceive a scene on which each painting or sculpture may be examined; most must be seen only in passing, their call for scenicity rejected.

    The phenomenon of presence, which Derrida criticized as essentially a theistic subterfuge, is in fact a necessary element of the scene, where it implies not in-your-face obtrusiveness but, on the contrary, the separation of the observer from the observed by a Sartrean néant. The existence of a number of persons or animals in proximity does not make them present to each other; this is possible only in a scenic context, whether it be a conversation between two individuals or a crowd of thousands watching a sports event.

    In our day, with the decline of its focus on religion, anthropology finds its models rather in the “life sciences.” Because these sciences do not foreground the scene/event except as a laboratory construct (i.e., the experiment), its role as the fundamental locus of human interaction tends to be forgotten. Contemporary anthropology prefers to break down human behavior into elements whose scenicity is merely an occasion to examine the elements of the behavioral database that they exhibit. Even where, in a discussion of, say, the manufacture of a stone axe, the completion of the axe as a tool clearly marks the end of the “event” in which the maker is engaged, this framework is simply taken for granted, just as the emission of a phoneme becomes a focus that ignores the conversation in which it is pronounced. Once such analytic procedures become dominant, the fundamental purpose of anthropology, the understanding of what is uniquely human, is deferred to the point where it ceases to appear essential, leading to a mindset in which events/scenes are no longer understood as the fundamental moments of the human condition.

    Generative anthropology, as a “new way of thinking” that foregrounds the centrality of the scenic, justifies the early anthropologists’ intuitive focus on religious rites and myths as intuitively grasping anthropology’s central point: that these religious phenomena emerged because they were necessary in order to preserve nascent human communities from dissolution in mimetic conflict.

    Understood in this context, the originary hypothesis is not simply an uncertain model of an event that may or may not have taken place, but an attempt to construct a minimal model of the event that separates humanity from pre-humanity. No doubt the hypothesis can be called a “myth of origin,” a point that has sometimes been made in accusation. As a younger colleague once put it diplomatically, my attachment to it reflects my belonging to an older generation—although I’m not sure what others of my generation have proposed similar hypotheses.

    I defend my hypothesis not as a myth but as a model. No doubt Freud’s father-murder in Totem and Taboo is also an originary model, but one constructed without any attempt to minimize its presuppositions—most significantly, the presence of language. Did the sons who kill their father use language? Freud was not interested in this question, because, however sensitive he may have been to language as part of the “talking cure,” he was not concerned with the origin of the human as such, only with that of the “Oedipus complex.”

    The Two Modes of Originary Anthropology

    The origin of language and the sacred is the unique focus of the originary hypothesis, as it is the focus of the creation scene in Genesis. No doubt the hypothetical scenario is minimized as the biblical one is not. But the two have in common their respect for the scenic event. The anthropological significance of the Bible, which René Girard nearly alone of his generation of literary scholars valued over the pseudo-scenes of metaphysics, is inseparable from its narrative/mythical construction.

    To accept GA’s scenic focus is to refuse to dismiss as myths the religious narratives that have served societies as objects of faith in order to seek a “scientific” understanding of the human from the study of physiology, neurology, and primate behavior. Such micro-examination throws out the baby with the bathwater. GA and religion share the understanding that the human is inseparable from our unique capacity for scenic events.

    It is this fact that allows GA to provide a bridge between, to reprise a title of a book I wrote many years ago, science and faith. The originary hypothesis and the biblical Creation narrative should be understood as two ways of representing the origin of humanity. Rather than suggesting that the biblical narrative be replaced by the originary hypothesis, I propose rather that both accounts of origin can be most fruitfully reread from a standpoint that refuses to choose between them; in one case, understanding humanity as the creation of an omniscient and omnipotent being whose transcendent status provides external mastery of our world, in the other, attempting to conceive the event during which our world’s internal processes of evolution succeeded in creating a being able to represent from within the world these processes by means of signs.

    Whence the promise of a fruitful post-metaphysical dialogue between GA and religious thought. My fondest hope is that this conversation may mature and flourish.

  • GA and Transcendental Religion

    Prologue

    Thirty or so years ago, before UCLA had a religion program, there was an informal group of faculty that met every week or two to discuss religion. It was chaired by David Rapoport, a professor of political science, and included members of various departments in the humanities and social sciences.

    Our religion group sponsored both learned and “amateur” lectures, followed by lively discussions. We once held a series of lectures by students in my GA seminar, notably including Tom Bertonneau and Matt Schneider—who spoke, as I recall, about John’s woman taken in adultery and “casting the first stone.”

    I was among those who provided the impetus for creating the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion in 1995. At the Center’s inaugural celebration, I had the pleasure of inviting and introducing René Girard as the keynote speaker.

    The years went by. The last time (a decade or so ago) that I attended a meeting of the Center, which has an undergraduate major program but still sponsors lectures, I made a comment in which I referred to our original group. In reply, one of the participants pointed out that religion was not, as we had apparently thought it, a subject; it was a field. In other words, what was I doing discussing religion when I had written my dissertation on Gustave Flaubert?

    Universities are centers of knowledge and trained specialists are indispensable. But it is overreaching to suggest that a domain as broad as religion can only be fruitfully discussed by scholars “in the field.” I would not presume to tell an Old Testament specialist how to read a given passage in Hebrew, but David’s little group had stimulating discussions about matters about which we non-specialists indeed had something to say—”non-specialists” of course including Girard himself, who although he certainly knew a lot about religion, had not been trained in the field of religious studies.

    I remain sensitive on this point because this amateur status applies as well to the foundational work of GA, The Origin of Language, as well as to my writings on religion and philosophy, and indeed, on everything else except Gustave Flaubert and Carole Landis, the two personalities concerning whom I have had the right to claim expertise.

    I think it is important to insist that, in an age of increasing empirical specialization, generative anthropology, far from an amateurish diversion, has become not merely justifiable but truly indispensable, precisely because, being founded on what I called “a new way of thinking,” or in Thomas Kuhn’s terms, a new paradigm, it is not situated within a predefined field.

    No doubt a certified linguist might conceivably have written The Origin of Language. But although common sense suggests that constructing a minimal hypothesis of how language began is anything but a frivolous enterprise, the fact is that no certified linguist has attempted anything similar. Over the years I have examined in these Chronicles a number of works by linguists, professional and amateur, who have attempted to demonstrate the relative triviality of the question of language origin, the narrowness of the “Rubicon” that our species presumably traversed in experiencing it (see, e.g., Chronicles 553, 567, 614, 628, 629).

    A quasi-sacred taboo blocks rational consideration of the need for an originary scenario. Its rationalization is simple. On the one hand, there is a clear absence of empirical evidence. On the other, language is so obviously useful that scholars naturally assume that it emerged as an inevitable outgrowth of an increase in our basic intelligence, explicable in the first place by proto-humans’ upright stature and the difficulties of procuring nourishment in their evolving environment. “The food is over the hill” lets humans find nourishment before rival primates; what could be simpler than that? One well-known linguist even hypothesized that our growing intelligence allowed us to formulate “thoughts” in our brains and that we created language in order to be able to communicate them… Yet the fact remains that in a Darwinian world, necessity is the mother of invention. Language is useful, in the first place, because it stops us from killing each other.

    Our originary hypothesis offers, unlike any other, a concrete explanation of the origin of language and religion as a single distinctive trait: the deferral of reflexive action and its transformation into signs. Or as I put it years ago, “the deferral of [mimetic] violence through representation.”

    Transcendental Religion

    Pre-Darwinian explanations of “natural religion” inevitably began with a solitary human contemplating the wonders of nature. Thus Max Müller conceived man’s first word as an expression of worship addressed to the sun, whose life-giving but frightening power dominates us. This pre-Darwinian notion of “man” emerging from the hands of his creator like Adam on the Sistine ceiling makes us smile, but I dare say that since the days of Darwin, with the exception of my originary hypothesis, there have been no cogent attempts at creating a believable scenario for the origin of religion any more than that of language, despite Roy Rappaport’s affirmation of their coeval nature (see Chronicle 730).

    No up-to-date thinker would dare propose an “originary scene” of religion, at the risk of being dismissed as a throwback to Freud’s Totem and Taboo. At Marina Ludwigs’ colloquium on “The Event” this summer in Stockholm, the co-presenter in my session excused my concern with such a scene of origin as the result of my belonging to an earlier, presumably less sophisticated, generation.

    I need not rehearse my demonstration that Sartre’s phenomenological “geography” of the pour-soi in L’Etre et le néant (see Chronicle 557) closely approximates the landscape of the originary hypothesis, but transformed by the pre-establishment of our subject-object relationship as a given of the human psyche. Nonetheless, the néant that figures in the title clearly reflects the scenic structure of the originary event: the individual contemplation of an object at a distance within his mind is explicable as the internalization of this originary scenario. Nor is Buddhist-inspired “mindfulness,” which focuses the contemplative experience on vanishingly trivial objects in order to emphasize the importance of the scene itself over that of a given center of attention, any less easily understood as a derivative of the originary scene.

    The genius of the universal “Axial” religions, notably, Christianity, Buddhism, and later Islam,** rightly understood in contrast to their predecessors as transcendental—although “tribal” Judaism, the source of two of the three, remains the most purely transcendental of all—is their reliance on worldly revelation as opposed to mere scripture. Jesus, Gautama, and later, Mohammed were historical figures, not, like Moses or Achilles, heroes of legend. The unsuitability of Judaism as a world religion in fact corresponds to its ahistorical dependence on scripture. Whether or not Moses “really existed,” no one in historical times could identify any direct or even indirect witnesses to his existence. The story of the Exodus from Egypt was a past historical event that concerned only the Jews, whereas the historical reality of the Axial founders was a source of living communication. (That doubts have in fact been expressed concerning the historical existence of Mohammed only confirms this point, since within Islam it is blasphemous to doubt the founder’s earthly reality.)

    Thus the passage from immanentism to transcendentalism cannot simply be understood as the translation of our sense of sacred presence from worldly to other-worldly beings. The Christian Trinity is rather a uniquely ambitious attempt to unify our conception of (the) sacred Being as the locus of both all-transcending sacred will and mortal frailty—while including as its third member the mediating agency of “spirit,” not language in its concrete reality but its facility of potential communication that links humans in a new kind of community.

    What is more, as if in symmetry with the revelatory contact between the transcendental divinity and the human world, these Axial religions are focally concerned with the individual soul’s “afterlife,” whether Western Paradise/Purgatory/Hell or Buddhism’s continuous chain of reincarnations. It seems paradoxical that the separation of the sacred from immanence in the world requires the postulation of an altogether unobservable passage into a form of posthumous existence that, whether otherworldly and permanent or this-worldly and cyclical, whether ideally terminating in eternal bliss or in nothingness, is in neither case observable from within the world.

    And as I suggested in Chronicle 692, the key element in the overall loss of religious faith in the Christian West has been the degree to which the afterlife has ceased to play a major role in people’s lives. Even for religious believers, the modern world is little suited to viewing death as deliverance from a vale of tears, as had been the case throughout the preceding millennia.

    Transcendentalism is thus not the simple emigration of the divine from this to an “other” world. Judaism indeed approximates this definition; although Jews sometimes speak of the afterlife, it is in no way a focus of their religious practices. The world has been surely as much and more of a vale of tears for them than for Christians and Muslims over the centuries, but the hope of going to “a better place” is not a feature of Judaism, which maintains a clear distinction between God’s transcendence and the world’s subordinate yet humanly meaningful status. Indeed, this is precisely the feature that Christianity’s “scandal to the Jews” can be said to have rebelled against, precisely as a way of becoming not merely a transcendentalist religion but a universal, proselytizing one.

    Which is to say that the really distinctive feature of Axial religions should be seen as the revelation, announced by a living prophet, of the subordination of the human soul’s temporal existence (and by analogy, that of the non-human creatures that our karma may turn us into) to its posthumous “eternal” reward as determined by sacred judgment, whether attributed to a “metapersonal” God or to the impersonal dharma. Jewish monotheism may be the source of the other Abrahamic religions, but its in principle absolute transcendentalism—tempered in practice by the Jew’s quasi-familial relationship to God/”Hashem” (lit. the name), a “tribal” trait that required the Son’s bodily incarnation in order to extend it to humanity as a whole—does not focus on the individual soul’s destiny but on the continuity of the Jewish people, and for each individual, that of his descendants. This underlines the fact that the notion of individual immortality/salvation/damnation is derived from the communal purpose of the sacred. The preservation of the human community as the beneficiary of the originary scenic configuration is understood in the “tribal” sense that the Jews as God’s “own” people are not meant to include/absorb other peoples, but to set an example for them as “a light unto the nations” (Isaiah 42:6). The Axial age may then be defined by the felt inadequacy of this particularist communal continuity in an increasingly global world.

    The creation of the state of Israel, which not surprisingly has remained uniquely challenged, given its Abrahamic derivatives’ commitment to the Jews’ “eternal” exile, has nonetheless been a generally successful attempt to realize this vision of a Jewish community as a political entity, and thereby to demonstrate the potential reality of the Jewish eschatological vision, which does not require an apocalyptic Last Judgment nor an ongoing Paradise to serve as a reward center for the faithful. With this in mind, we realize that we can interact with the sacred without a need for the leap of faith that eternalizes our individual existence. Our immortality can more modestly be reduced to our contribution to the perpetuation of our species and its worldly habitat, including but not limited to the procreation of our descendants.

    In deliberate contrast to this, the credo quia absurdum/scandal to the Jews of the belief in Jesus’ resurrection at the core of Christianity is intended precisely as an initiatory act. This suggests that the Axial religions may be defined by their insistence that the community of faithful depends in the first place not on its “tribal” continuity but on its originary grounding in a transcendental revelation to each of its members. That the maintenance of this belief over the generations nonetheless depends for its sustenance on its participation in the Christian community’s own permanence is a effect of our sinfulness, not of our souls’ ontological reality.

    Thus the Christian credo, as expressed in John 11, insists on the individual’s belief in Jesus’ guarantee of his personal immortality:

    25 Jesus said unto [Martha], I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:

    26 And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?

    Jesus is the resurrection, and to believe in him is to transcend bodily death. The content of such faith cannot be assimilated to one’s membership in a community nor to a set of practices productive of favorable worldly outcomes.

    Where immanentist religion is focused on bribing the ancestors to influence worldly events, Christians can at worst be persuaded by a corrupt clergy to purchase “indulgences” in order to shorten their loved ones’ time in Purgatory, the practice that provoked the Reformation. For in principle the soul after death must purge its own sins, at most aided by our prayers; as for the subtleties of afterworld architecture as instanced in Dante’s Commedia, these were surely not of concern to the non-theologian.

    Purgatory, based on the notion that the eternal life promised by the Resurrection requires the compensation for sinfulness that the Buddhist cycle of reincarnation expresses in terms of karma, added an additional layer of imaginary reality to the already cumbersome structure of the Christian afterlife. The act of faith that Christianity, unlike Judaism, demands in this as in everything else is paradoxically guaranteed epistemologically by the axiom that whatever the results of ratiocination, the only way to demonstrate the truth of Christianity is by affirming its worldly absurdity—however poorly Tertullian has been treated by the Church for having dared to openly state this. For the value of paradox lies in the impossibility of simply affirming it; it initiates an endless dialectic whose “eternity” is its very point.

    (to be continued)

    **For purposes of simplification, I have omitted Chinese religion from Karl Jaspers’ original mix; see his 1949 Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (the origin and goal of history).

  • Immanentism, Transcendentalism, and the Originary Hypothesis

    In his final work,The New Science of the Enchanted Universe (Princeton, 2022), published posthumously with the aid of his son and others, Marshall Sahlins returns to the sacred, the element of human culture central to the perspective of the founders of the discipline of anthropology, and in particular, to the “enchanted universe” of immanentist religion, which has largely given way to the transcendentalist religions that arose in what Jaspers called the “Axial Age” of the final centuries BC. In this analysis he was preceded notably by Alan Strathern, whose historical study Unearthly Powers (Cambridge UP, 2019) makes frequent reference to Sahlins.

    Generative anthropology shares this foundational focus, but with the added insight of the originary equivalence of the sacred with the significant: what is worthy of linguistic representation. As a result, the scenario of the originary hypothesis permits us to clarify the difference between the immanentist religious perspective and the transcendentalist vision first crystallized for Western culture in Judaism, and in the East primarily by Buddhism.

    As discussed in Chronicle 727, The Dawn of Everything (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) by David Wengrow and David Graeber, a sometime colleague of Sahlins, reveals that the difference between egalitarian and hierarchical societies is not as simple as we tend to think. The book points out that some not-yet-stratified societies had chiefs in some seasons and not in others, depending on the economic and military tasks they needed to perform. A relevant point made by Sahlins is that, in contradiction to the Durkheimian idea that social structures provide the model for religious hierarchies, sacred hierarchies already exist in egalitarian societies and may be said to provide a model for human hierarchies rather than the inverse.

    But in the absence of an originary hypothesis, such observations lack a concrete ontological basis: why does the category of the sacred arise at all? Only once having defined the human by its deferral of violence through representation under the aegis of the sacred are we ready to understand that religious cosmologies, however pluralistic, tend toward a single center, given the unitary scenic organization of human culture from the outset. The sacred as a commonly felt will that preserves the community from conflict, whatever the variety of nonhuman “wills” encountered by the community, remains the central source of providential protection of this community from its potentially divisive mimetic desires.

    Sahlins’ final work nonetheless presents an important insight into the evolution of the sacred as marked by the internal dialectic between the newer more radical transcendentalist religions and the immanentist conceptions that are never altogether dispensed with, with Christianity’s trinitary God marking the most ambitious attempt at synthesis. What is important from the generative-anthropological perspective is to demonstrate how our more concrete etiology of the sacred/significant clarifies this historical progression, which never leaves immanentism altogether behind. Empirical observation can discover real correlations, but in the absence of an originary hypothesis cannot situate them with respect to their origin.

    Here is the kernel of Sahlins’ distinction, as expressed in the conclusion to his New Science:

    Without ambitions to rule others, people submit to a world of powers that are acting among them, immanently and at all times, to determine their fate. Hence, it would be a mistake to say that the people “invented” the “spirits,” that they created the gods in their own image, or accord them some such ultimate power over the Powers. People did not create the gods out of thin air; they only hypostatized the forces that were already conditions of their existence. I repeat: humans did not imagine the gods, they only objectified, or more precisely, subjectivized, the extra-human forces by which they themselves lived and died. The forces were already there. They were not imagined. They were real, empirical, life-giving and death-dealing forces. People only gave them substantive qualities that made them negotiable, or at least intelligible—consciousness, understanding, volition, and intention. They hypostatized these existential forces as persons, hidden souls with whom their own hidden powers or souls might communicate, but who, as the instantiation of these forces, were metapersons.

    (174-175; italics the author’s)

    It is precisely “the forces that were already conditions of their existence,”  which Sahlins takes for granted to be external forces, that must rather be understood in the terms of our hypothesis, grounded in our assumption that the human, as defined by language, the sacred, and the culture that emerges from them, originates as the survival mechanism of a species that, as a result of its growing mimetic intelligence, comes to pose a greater danger to itself than does its external environment. It follows from this assumption that the most significant “forces” Sahlins refers to, rather than the dangers posed to the originary human community by the outside world, are those the proto-humans have come to pose to themselves as a unified community.

    This does not of course imply that the participants are directly aware of this controlling factor. But it adds a cognitive element to what Sahlins presents throughout as a pure effect of social organization, as though immanentism and transcendentalism, despite the clearly more cognitively advanced societies to which the latter has given rise, were simply arbitrary alternatives with respect to the anthropological understanding they reflect. Although the “bottom line” is indeed the ability of these belief systems to maintain social order rather than their anthropological accuracy, to understand the sacred as a transcendental reality of the human community as such rather than a force inherent in the “metapersonal” worldly realities, human or otherwise, to which it comes to be attached constitutes a higher level of anthropological self-understanding.

    Why is the immanentist vision so congenial to the members of pre-hierarchical societies, such that only the “Axial” turning-away from what Voegelin called the “compact” archaic empires, whether in Israel, India, Greece, or China, could inspire the idea of transcendent being, of a distinct ontological status that corresponds in its mode of reality to that of the purely ideal objects of language, which are instantiated in the world without ever being objectified?

    Sahlins’ point that the hierarchy of sacred agents, rather than being a reflection of the social structure of elementary societies, instead anticipates it, in fact corroborates the originary hypothesis. It is this hierarchy that reflects the underlying unity of the sacred, which must adapt itself to the individual beings that surround us, animals, weather conditions, plants needed for nourishment and/or clothing and protection, but is ultimately unified not by the coordination of the wills of the various metapersons conceived as embodied in natural beings, but by the fundamental need of the human community to protect itself against internal disorder, which need assigns to these worldly agents linguistic signs as indicators of their significance. The understood unity and hierarchy of these agents is not that of their existence in nature, but of their existence with respect to the human community that depends on them, always in the context of an underlying communal order which is the sine qua non for all other human activities.

    The world’s two chief historical examples of transcendentalist religions are Christianity (along with Islam, its more strictly transcendentalist “Abrahamic” cousin) and Buddhism. In Chronicles 515–516 I examined the essential opposition between the Western and “Eastern” notions of paradox, found respectively in the writings of Zeno of Elea and the Mahayana Buddhist Nagarjuna, as reflective of their divergent modes of transcendentality. In both cases, the transcendentalist world-view can be situated with respect to the scene of the originary hypothesis; each involves the selection within the scenic model of what is understood as the essential element.

    Christianity engages maximally with the sacrificial element of the scene. The identification of the Jews’ One God with the sacrificial victim faces up to the violence that is not merely a means of procuring nourishment, but whose source may be conceived from a human standpoint as the violence we would do to each other in the absence of the sacrificial figure—whence Girard’s excessive emphasis on the human “emissary victim” as the generative element of the originary scene.

    In contrast, the Buddhist conception privileges not the central figure but the scenic locus itself, particularly insofar as each isolated individual can contemplate the scene within his own mind independently of the collective scene focused on a central object of common desire. Meditation and the “mindfulness” life-style measures associated with Buddhism in the West are all ways of recalling the “transcendent” permanence of the scene itself, in contrast with whatever worldly action may take place on it. Like Sartre’s pour-soi, which is separated from l’Etre by a néant, the Buddhist scene is defined by its initial emptiness; only once the empty scene exists can it become the locus of human interactions. The layer of uniquely human consciousness added by the creation of language/culture, whose permanent virtual existence mediates our relationship to our perceptions and thoughts, is contrasted with the impermanence of the desires that this structure came into being in order to regulate. Whereas the Judeo-Christian religions accept the ongoing necessity of the potentially sinful relationship with the world that the scene facilitates, Buddhism concentrates on the scene itself as a means not merely of limiting human conflict and perpetuating communal harmony, but as the core of a universal “chain of being” that includes humanity as one element among the rest. Thus for Buddhism the focus on the scene is the key not merely to regulating worldly desire but à la limite to doing away with it altogether in the state of nirvana, a paradoxical eternal non-being perhaps best understood as analogous to that of a signified, an Idea.

    As a matter of practicality, although Buddhism is in principle atheistic, in actual practice (notably in Japan, with which I am minimally familiar), it tends to be supplemented by a local theism of an immanentist type, with Shinto shrines existing alongside Buddhist temples and receiving frequent donations. That the Axial transition in the East was characterized by a subjective turning away from worldly violence (“sin”) rather than engaging with it helps explain the lesser focus of Asian cultures on understanding and mastering the structures of external reality through science and technological development. In contrast, the impact on these cultures of Western modernity, understood “dialectically,” explains why—beginning with Japan in the Meiji era—modern Asians tend to be more naturally drawn to these sectors than the jaded descendants of their Western initiators.

    It is easy enough to understand why immanentism should be the mode in which emergent humanity conceptualizes the external forces it encounters. In the originary scenario, although our analysis distinguishes between, on the one hand, the sacred will that deters the participants from coming to blows over the division of the prey animal and, on the other, whatever force they conceive as embodied in the (dead) animal itself, at the origin, the sign as an aborted gesture of appropriation could distinguish only between the sacred/significant object of universal attention and the (profane/insignificant) rest of the universe.

    Sahlins’ “enchanted world” is a romantic fantasy only from the standpoint of our own disenchanted world. As ethnographers have described the mentality of its inhabitants, it appears far more fearsome than idyllic. All that the participants in the originary event would know concerning the sacred will that prevents them from fighting over the prey is that the desired source of protein is for the moment interdicted. The gesture/sign is directed at the animal, the original aim of the “gesture of appropriation,” but given this gesture’s abortion, the sign points to the animal specifically as a locus of sacred interdiction. It cannot distinguish within that locus between the object pointed to and the (sacred) force that dictates the participants’ deferral of appropriation of the animal until all the participants’ desires have become coordinated in a communal action.

    Thus in this originary use of the sign, its referent conflates the prey animal with the interdiction that sacralizes it, just as all language may be said to defer the possible appropriation of its referent for a moment of sacred contemplation. Although lacking the explicit syntax of a declarative sentence or a negative imperative, the originary sign as a gesture of renunciation/interdiction that confers significance on the animal sets it off from the “ordinary” world of what Sartre called the en-soi and instead makes it available on a collective and individual scene of representation or pour-soi as the embodiment of the interdicting/deferring will that acts upon it. Thus it should not surprise us that humanity could acquire only through the long experience of diverse forms of human authority an intuition of the independence of the sacred from its temporary worldly incarnations.

    Further reflection will be necessary to explore what had been until recent times the most prominent feature of transcendentalist religion: the emphasis on the afterlife of the soul, the agent of human différance/deferral, whether in an other-worldly heaven/hell as in the Abrahamic religions, or, as in Buddhism, via an “eternal return” into beings whose degree of transcendent spirituality is dictated by the accumulation or dispersal of (immanent) karma.