Author: staceymeeker

Preamble

In Chronicle 749, I noted the strange fact that the publications over thirty years apart containing what I considered my two most original ideas—an “originary hypothesis” of the origin of language (The Origin of Language, UC Press, 1981), and a theory of antisemitism (with Adam Katz: The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism, Brill, 2015)—were neither adopted nor refuted by specialists in their respective fields, but simply avoided. I interpreted this not as a personal rejection, but as the result of having in both cases infringed taboos by dealing too insistently with subjects that could, for very different reasons, not be attacked in such a positive manner.

Human language has generally been understood as not having a distinct origin, but as emerging gradually from animal signals—this despite Terrence Deacon’s assertion in his The Symbolic Species (Norton, 1997) that human language is located in a different part of the brain from such signals.

As for antisemitism, the “oldest hatred,” it is certainly acceptable to deplore it, and to describe in detail its many historical manifestations, but, as I discovered, seeking to explain it made its specialists uncomfortable, as though suggesting that there were reasons for it were a step toward finding it acceptable.

Language origin, the origin of the indubitably human, is, or should be, the ground of anthropology, whence these Chronicles’ attempts to sustain the field of Generative Anthropology. But following Hamas’ barbaric pogrom in Israel on October 7, 2023, antisemitism, from a matter of largely theoretical interest in the generations after the Holocaust, has abruptly revived and spread throughout the “free world,” shocking those of us who naively thought that such a repulsive spectacle of massacres and rapes proudly recorded and disseminated by the perpetrators themselves would outrage the citizens of Western-style nations, only to discover that the reaction in virtually all of them, even before Israel began its counter-offensive, was to sympathize with the Palestinians, the barbarity of whose actions was taken as proof of the cruelty of their oppression by the Israelis in the Gaza “open-air prison”—where, as seldom pointed out, previous to the pogrom there were no Israelis at all.

Thus explaining antisemitism had suddenly become an urgent necessity.

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Given that in the decades during which I reached adulthood, the horrors of the Holocaust had apparently reduced antisemitism to irrelevancy—I can recall, as a small child just after the war, viewing Hitler as a comic figure—my generation experienced the largely sympathetic reaction to Hamas’ barbaric incursion as a wholly unexpected lesson in this “oldest hatred’s” persistence. As a supplementary personal irony, since the pogrom, Columbia and UCLA, my first and last university homes—both formerly particularly welcoming to Jews—commonly top the lists of schools where antisemitism has been the most egregious.

The difference between the academic taboo on claims to have discovered the origin of language—one that goes back at least to 1866, when the Paris Société de Linguistique declared the subject off limits—and the visceral reluctance to explain, and thereby risk appearing to justify, the “oldest hatred,” reflects the vast difference between our relationships to human prehistory and to history itself. When- and wherever it first appeared, human language was able to evolve as an increasingly effective communication system selecting for improvements in human intelligence as a result of its original success in restraining mimetic aggression. No doubt some languages are more prestigious than others, but that difference is understood as reflecting the historical prestige of their users, not as intrinsic to the languages themselves.

Whereas the firstness of the Hebrews in bringing the One God to the West is a civilizational fact, one granted maximal salience by the worldwide success of Christianity which, while claiming to supersede Judaism, never denied its Jewish origin, nor that of human/divine Jesus himself.

And thus, whenever we cite a date, we measure the time before or after the birth of a Jew; whenever we mention a day of the week, we honor the Hebrews’ six days of creation and one of rest. Today, partly in reaction to the Holocaust, the Catholic Church has come to accept the Jews as its “elder brothers”—yet, on the whole, the Christians of the West were far less repelled by the barbarity of the Hamas pogrom than by Israel’s response.

And thus, from the very first days of the war, the “free world’s” sympathy for Gaza’s population as the victims of Israeli “genocide” gave proof, shocking to many, that antisemitism, however suppressed during the generations that followed the Holocaust, had been in no way obliterated, nor apparently even diminished.

Clearly the idea attributed to Arnold Toynbee that once the Jews had their own state, they would be seen as a “normal” people like all the others, has been amply disproved. Nearly 80 years after its founding, Israel’s legitimacy remains eternally—and uniquely—subject to contestation, while recognition is lovingly granted the non-existent “state of Palestine.”

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While I was reflecting on this disturbing revelation, my ex-wife Michèle Hausser, who has lived in Israel for several decades, brought to my attention Belgian-Israeli businessman and Jewish leader Roby Spiegl’s particularly insightful analysis of the frustrating circumstances of the seemingly unending Gaza war. This French text of almost exactly 1000 words is available on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/roby.spiegel/posts/mon-analyse-sur-la-situation-du-conflit-isra%C3%A9lo-palestinien-isra%C3%ABl-se-trouve-auj/10163867718238991/  The author has kindly permitted me to make it available here to English speakers (courtesy of Google Translate, with a few emendations):

Israel finds itself today in a war from which it can neither emerge victorious nor withdraw unscathed. Not because it lacks military power—but because this war was carefully designed to be lost, whatever the outcome. October 7th was more than an attack. It was a trap. A shock designed to lock Israel into an impasse. By massacring civilians and kidnapping hostages, Hamas did not launch an offensive to extract concessions. It implemented a strategy of decay. A war without end, without a winner, without a horizon.

Hamas seeks neither a state nor a military victory. It seeks the disappearance of Israel, and for that, it is prepared to lose everything. Gaza can burn, its children die, its infrastructure collapse—it doesn’t care, so long as Israel bleeds. It is a sacrificial, nihilistic strategy, almost religious in its logic. And it rests on two pillars: military stalemate and the emotional manipulation of Western public opinion.

For the real battlefield is not the ruins of Gaza. It is television studios, social media, American and European universities, and the demonstrations in the streets of major cities. Hamas has understood what many Israeli strategists have underestimated: in a world governed by images, war is no longer won with tanks, but with narratives. Its strength is dramatic, not military.

By holding hostages, Hamas makes compromise impossible. By hiding in hospitals and schools, it makes any response unacceptable. Each Israeli action is twisted to appear as a moral failing. In this asymmetrical war, every military victory becomes a media defeat. And the world, saturated with images but deprived of context, reacts to emotions more than to facts.

This trap would not have worked without the collaboration of the Western democracies. By exerting pressure on the attacked country rather than the hostage-takers, they invert moral logic. By recognizing a Palestinian state without forcing Hamas to disarm, they offer a political reward to terrorism. And in doing so, they encourage its repetition.

We must also mention those whom Lenin called useful idiots. Some of them are, alas, found within the Jewish people or Israel themselves. Driven by almost sacrificial moral scruples, they seek at all costs to embody a form of ethical purity. Their demand is sincere—but so detached from reality that it has become blind. They analyze this war as if they were dealing with a European democracy, whereas they are facing a terrorist organization fundamentally alien to their mental framework. Added to this is sometimes a more subtle, less avowed motivation: the need to be perceived as “good Jews” in the eyes of their non-Jewish circles, to continue to be invited, congratulated, and listened to—on the condition, of course, that they show that they are not like the others, that they know how to distance themselves from Israel. This concern for social acceptability, however understandable, becomes politically dangerous when it endorses, even indirectly, the discourse of those who seek Israel’s disappearance. For Hamas does not need to be supported. It is enough for Israel to be weakened, delegitimized, isolated. And in this endeavor, any Jewish or Israeli voice that publicly doubts Israel’s right to defend itself becomes, in spite of itself, a lever for this strategy.

Let us be clear: a ceasefire accompanied by the release of all hostages, without Hamas’s surrender, is a mirage. Hamas has no interest in ending this war. The hostages are its weapons, its spotlights, its guarantees of survival. It will retain them, because their existence maintains the conflict. They were not taken to be freed. They are there to endure, to serve. And while this war of narratives rages, its effects do not stop at Israel’s borders. All over the world, and particularly blatantly in recent days, anti-Semitic acts are exploding: insults, attacks, boycotts of Israeli artists, intimidation of tourists, pressure within universities, attacks on Jewish businesses and schools. Radical anti-Zionism, staged by Hamas and relayed unfiltered by certain media outlets and activists, is being transformed into a palpable, concrete, daily hatred.

This climate of hostility is generating a deep unease within Jewish communities around the world. Many no longer dare to say they are Israeli. Others remain silent about their Jewish identity. This is no longer a debate about ideas: it’s about security. Symbolic, media-driven, and diplomatic violence against Israel fuels an unashamed anti-Semitism that endangers millions of Jews who have nothing to do with the armed conflict. It’s not just Israel that is being targeted. It is what it represents. And all those linked to it.

Henceforth, two paths—both tragic—present themselves:

– Continue the operation, at all costs, to dismantle Hamas down to the last tunnel, at the cost of countless lives, an increasing isolation, and with no guarantee of success.

– Or withdraw, leaving Hamas standing, and implicitly accepting that another October 7th is brewing.

It’s no longer a question of victory. It’s a question of form: which form of defeat is the least dangerous? Which loss is the least irreversible? In this trap where every move has been anticipated by the enemy, even courage becomes vulnerable. And perhaps the most tragic thing is this: Hamas’s strategy is working. Not because it’s brilliant, but because it’s allowed to work. Because we continue to judge Israel according to the criteria of a conventional war, when what it is facing is a machine for manipulating emotions, subverting morality, and exploiting compassion.

In this cruel theater, it’s not reality that matters. It’s the image of reality.

I yearn with all my strength for the return of all the hostages, of all our soldiers, and for the end of this conflict, which will allow an entire nation to rebuild and live as it has always desired since its creation: in peace and security.

Roby Spiegl

The dilemma so eloquently described here reflects the paradoxical role Israel has been forced to play in international relations by its embodiment of historical firstness with respect to what we can call the world’s transnational sacred.

And if the antisemitism that led to the Holocaust was that of the fantasy of the diaspora’s “great Jewish conspiracy,” of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as we see today, such imaginary scandals are as nothing compared to the scandalous existence of the restored “first nation” of Israel. All the points that Spiegl makes about Israel’s need to negate its “privilege” in showing the greatest care for its enemies, treating its prisoners’ maladies with maximum concern, are ironically confirmed by the viciousness with which such care and concern are responded to by its “victims,” by the shameless boastfulness of the perpetrators of October 7—in contrast to the Nazis who had sought to hide the evidence of their acts, which they considered, as made clear in Himmler’s famous Posen speech to the SS on October 4, 1943, as grim necessities rather than pretexts for ego-trips.

It is no accident that today’s rejuvenated antisemites obsessively describe Israel’s military operations as “genocide,” repeating this wholly inaccurate term far more insistently than a propos of any other post-Holocaust conflict, even the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda. We should understand this as reflecting the ultimate immaturity of the resentment inspired by “the first shall be the last.” For it is not ironic to accuse of genocide the descendants of the victims of the event for which the word itself was invented. It is to utter a schoolyard insult, as though hyperbolically mirroring the other kid’s accusation.

And Spiegl’s frustration reflects his understanding that having to explain such insults is already a sign of defeat. To accuse the Jews of genocide is to taunt them with their victimhood by turning it against them, by saying that it is the reality of the Holocaust itself that gives their enemies the right to use it against them—ultimately because it demonstrates that if they are indeed so much hated, it is because their firstness is in itself the greatest possible violation of the principle of human equality.

In a word, Hitler’s Final Solution was the definitive confirmation of Jesus’ words: the first shall be the last. How then dare the Jews resuscitate this firstness after the slaughter by achieving their millennial ambition of return! And the clearest guarantee of the verity of this accusation is that it is echoed less by the Palestinians’ fellow Arabs than by the enlightened leaders of European democracies, and confirmed by the fabricated images and distorted statistics published by the (Jewish-owned) New York Times.

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In short, once the “free world” reacted to the horrors of October 7 with revulsion, not at its perpetrators, but at Israel for having driven its enemies to the point where this was their only possible cry of distress, the die was cast, and all the consequences so sharply observed by Spiegl might have been foretold.

And so, as Spiegl himself appears to do in his final paragraph, we must abandon the notion of finding a “solution” to the problem of antisemitism, and simply continue to battle it whenever it emerges, putting out of our minds the chimerical hope of its ultimate conquest. So long as we rest on Sunday and calculate dates from year zero, the temptation to antisemitism will remain.

Yet even if they could, would the Jews themselves end antisemitism by renouncing their historical uniqueness—their sacred mission?

In the sciences, one does research by confronting new empirical phenomena, be they elements of physical or social reality. And to the extent that anthropology is a science, it must operate in this manner, by the examination of data relevant to some aspect of human culture.

Yet alongside the realm of empirical science, there is a key role for a generative anthropology tasked with constructing according to Occam’s razor a hypothetical scenario of the emergence of humanity.

In Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999), Roy Rappaport proposed language and religion as the coeval defining characteristics of the human. Taking this as our point of departure, generative anthropology seeks to define the parameters of this common birth. Save that in Rappaport’s formulation, we have replaced religion, which implies an established institution, with the collective/individual intuition of the sacred as the foundation on which religious institutions are constructed.

The human experience of both language and the sacred takes place on a scene on which worldly, practical activity is for the moment suspended. To use language, one defers physical interaction with a referent in referring to it by a sign. To experience a worldly being or person as sacred likewise is to separate it from everyday reality, such that actual contact with it, as in the Christian ceremony of communion, is experienced as miraculous.

Jacques Derrida’s neologism différance nicely captures the scenic separation inherent in both language and the sacred by taking advantage of the fact that in French, différer means both to differ and to defer. Derrida indeed exemplified this concept in a speaker’s need to defer his choice of a word in order to compare the different members of a paradigm, for example, in choosing the correct name of a color; but he failed to recognize it as the very principle of language, in which physical appropriation of an object is deferred in favor of designation by means of something different: the sign.

I believe that the authentic source of Derrida’s fame in the French Theory era was not his facility with cleverly named concepts, but what was in fact a powerful anthropological intuition. For it is indeed in the space of deferral, of the conscious renunciation of worldly interaction, that acts of language and worship take place; acts whose object, be it a linguistic referent or a sacred being, is conceived on a mental scene that defers such interaction for the sake of contemplation.

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The colloquium “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” co-directed by René Girard and Richard Macksey at the Johns Hopkins University in October 1966, by bringing to the US a number of adepts of French nouvelle critique—far more influenced by philosophy and the contemporary social sciences than Anglo-American “new criticism”—set the stage for a significant intellectual movement that would come to be known as “French Theory.” It would flourish in American universities from the time of the colloquium through the early 1990s, beginning its decline with the American victory in the Cold War that some saw as the “end of history.” By reconceiving what had previously been studied as “literary history” as a revelatory aspect of anthropological evolution, this movement generated excitement in both Humanities and Social Science departments. The study of literary texts—and by extension, other art-forms—was increasingly understood as providing a privileged access to the core of human uniqueness, or, to use Girard’s term, “fundamental anthropology.”

Although the term “French Theory” is seldom heard today, rather than dismissing it as one intellectual fad among many, I believe that this movement should be understood as a major step toward a truly fundamental anthropology effectively defining the human in terms of Rappaport’s twin rubrics of language and the sacred: by no means the “end of history,” but a great stride toward a new fundamental understanding of ourselves.

The American academics who lionized Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault displayed little interest in Girard, whose analysis of mimetic desire in his 1961 masterpiece, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, was seen as a brilliant piece of literary scholarship rather than as a major step toward a minimal definition of the human. And when, beginning with La violence et le sacré in 1972, Girard came to take an explicit interest in anthropological matters, his insistence on the exemplarity of “emissary murder” or communal lynching, which he saw (no doubt on the model of the Crucifixion) as the originary act of the human community, led to his identification with the “scapegoat mechanism,” rather than with the far more significant analyses of Mensonge romantique that defined the lives of literary protagonists by their need to transcend the strictures of mimetic desire.

For it is not difficult to extrapolate from Girard’s analyses in the earlier book the conclusion that mimetic desire, the product of our ancestors’ growing intelligence, could no longer be successfully restrained by the Pavlovian mechanism of reflexive inhibitions such as those that prevent male animals from killing each other in mating duels—that a wholly new conscious restraint had become necessary—in a word, that our need to counter the dangers of mimetic desire was what made us human.

The path to the true appreciation of Girard’s intuition of the fundamental role of mimetic desire in the human condition requires that we reject his vision of originary violence and instead conceive of the first authentically human act as the deferral of violence. In the serial pattern of ape distributions, the Alpha animal takes from the prey what he wants and leaves the rest for the Beta animal, and so on down the hierarchy, each step of which is established through pairwise challenges. In contrast, the originary hypothesis of Generative Anthropology proposes that when a group of proto-human hunters/scavengers encounter a prey to be divided, at a certain moment in history, the force of mimetic desire can no longer be restrained by reflexive inhibition, and the hunters all reach at the same time for the animal… at which point, seeking to forestall the conflicts perhaps experienced on previous occasions, first one and then another becomes conscious of the need to abort his attempt at possession, and as a consequence, the members of the group end up pointing at the animal, designating it to each other by an ostensive gesture.

This pointing gesture is the birth of language—and of the human. Each displays to his fellows what amounts to the first sign, a gesture that sacralizes its referent by conceiving it on a scene where none of the participants have the individual capacity to possess it. The event would presumably conclude with the emergence of an accord, ultimately shared by all, to divide the prey equally among them, as is done after a hunt in today’s hunter-gatherer societies. Occam’s razor obliges us to conceive these fundamental elements of the human in a minimal context, rather than add potential causal factors such as the acquisition of weapons or a drive toward “domestication.”

It is in the deferral of appetitive action that Derrida’s “philosophical” notion of différance finds its anthropological  basis. Humanity originates as a conscious community whose members have become able to defer their desire for a common object of desire by designating/sacralizing it by means of a sign.

Language and the sacred originate when the intensification of mimetic desire obliges its subjects to accede for their very survival to a new human world in which deferral/difference gives rise to what we call our conscience: a sense of a sacred interdiction obliging the individual to renounce his attempt at possession. Yet on a given occasion, the will to carry out this renunciation may not be forthcoming—whence the expulsion of the originary couple from Eden.

Conclusion

The idea of constructing a fundamental anthropology around the origin of language would have been inconceivable in the absence of either of the two branches of French Theory. Girard’s notion of mimetic desire defined the perturbing factor that made “instinctive” animal behavior incapable of regulating human conduct, and Derrida’s notion of deferral/différance pointed to the mechanism that, motivated by our ancestors’ growing sense of sacred interdiction, allowed our ancestors to avoid the potential conflict inherent in mimetic desire by substituting a sign for an worldly act of appropriation. In this way, Generative Anthropology’s originary hypothesis describes the simultaneous birth of the two elements of the human posited by Rappaport: language and the sacred, the sign, together with its motivation by the sense of sacred interdiction that provokes the originary deferral of appropriation.

The world of Science (with a capital S), after flirting with the Humanities during the French Theory era, has now returned to its materialistic purity, understanding the course of human history in terms of technology… and genetic mutation.

I

In the June 28 issue of New Scientist, the British Scientific American /Science News, we find an article entitled “How to think about…” that purports to give us the scientific lowdown on a dozen terms, ranging in technicity from Quasiparticles and Quantum Superposition to Mindset and Friendship.

And as expected, the non-impact of GA on the scientific discussion of the origin of human language is nicely displayed in Colin Barras’ “How to think about… Language,” the very first entry in the series.

We learn at the outset that, contrary to what we might think, animals can communicate all sorts of things without language, “from culture [?] to emotions and even morality [??].” Why then did humans alone take the trouble to evolve this complex system of representation?

The author offers—and then rejects—a preliminary answer on p. 31-2:

Psychologist Shimon Edelman . . . thinks language’s magical power . . . may have emerged 1.7 million years ago, when ancient humans began making stone hand-axes that are beyond the ability of non-human animals to reproduce.

But about a decade ago . . . Shelby Putt of Illinois State University . . . tasked 24 volunteers with learning to make hand-axes from an expert who either talked them through the process or merely made the tools in the volunteers’ presence . . . .  Surprisingly, both methods were effective.

So why then do we have language? The author suggests that the use of language “as a tool for communicating with others” may be secondary:

A third way to think about the evolution of language focuses almost exclusively on the way it can help individuals “talk” to themselves and organize their thoughts to undertake complex tasks.

According to some, including the linguist Noam Chomsky, this is what drove the evolution of language . . . . Instead, these researchers think language emerged as recently as 70,000 years ago [!!], perhaps simply because of a random genetic mutation that prompted brain rewiring.

And the author concludes:

Truth be told, there is still little consensus about quite how language arose. But if Chomsky and his ilk are right, if it didn’t involve magic, it might at least have involved a little luck.

So, to sum up, (1) we don’t need language to communicate “culture . . . emotions and even morality”; (2) nor do we need it to teach others how to make hand-axes. Indeed, as we are told the great Chomsky believes, it may well be the mere result of a “random genetic mutation”—in other words, not a necessary feature of humanity—that allows us to “talk to [our]selves.”

Thus, presumably, the source of the greatness of human culture that lets us send rockets to the moon (etc., etc.) is not really something our species needed to survive. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but language was born out of wedlock.

I don’t think I need insist on a comparison of this explanation to GA’s originary hypothesis. And yet it is offered not merely on Mr. Barras’ authority, but on that of Noam Chomsky and the entire linguistic and scientific community.

II

Two issues later, the July 12 New Scientist includes another relevant piece, this time a feature on pp. 38-41 by Jonathan R. Goodman, entitled “The enemy within,” presented as a “Big Idea” about the foundations of humanity.

Where the previous piece discussed language as only tenuously linked to the needs of human society, in this one, language is merely one among a complex of features associated with our “cognitive sophistication.” Goodman follows Richard Wrangham’s argument in The Goodness Paradox (Pantheon, 2019; see Chronicle 614) that humans “domesticated themselves” by overthrowing the “large angry dominants that ruled over their social groups.” But we were not thereby liberated from the “enemy within” that lives in each one of us as a desire to dominate his fellows. Goodman’s book, entitled Invisible Rivals: How we evolved to compete in a cooperative world, calls the resulting “practices, behaviours and institutions to maximize cooperation and thwart our Machiavellian tendencies,” by analogy with the immune system that protects us against cancer and other diseases, our “cultural immune system.” And not unimportantly, the first such institution he mentions is religion.

As I pointed out in the aforementioned Chronicle a propos of Wrangham’s argument, there is no sense in which language occupies a privileged position in this “immune system,” let alone its very center. Indeed, for Wrangham, it is rather our invention of weapons that was the primary stimulus to “domestication.” (Similarly, Eric Jacobus’ If These Fists Could Talk: A Stuntman’s Unflinching Take on Violence [2025], likewise attributes to our ancestors’ growing ability to use deadly force the stimulus that led us to become fully human.)

Thus “becoming human” is not dependent, as some have put it, on “crossing the Rubicon” that separates animal communication from language—which, as Terrence Deacon pointed out in The Symbolic Species (Norton, 1997), is located in a different part of the brain from animal signals. Nor is religion, seen as “promot[ing] cooperation” within our “immune system” presented as in any way dependent on language—or to put this more incisively, sacrality/deferral as the common element of both language and religion goes without mention.

Goodman’s final message is that:

A small proportion of people at the most competitive end of the spectrum will always try to game society. We must work together to stay one step ahead of humanity’s opportunistic nature. Without beliefs, norms and a proper understanding of human nature, we are at the mercy of our selfish biological heritage. Evolution has made us this way, but we can learn to overcome it. (41)

At this point, one would have expected Goodman to refer back to our “cultural immune system”—but this metaphoric reference to what is essentially an unconscious  mechanism would have exposed the weakness of his analogy, obliging him to articulate the relationships between, for example, language and religion—in a word, to perform the intellectual operations that, to my knowledge, only Generative Anthropology has not only deemed necessary but actually carried out.

III

Finally, I must point out, notably to those who have accepted René Girard’s late-in-life thesis in Evolution and Conversion (Continuum, 2008) that GA is a “Social Contract Theory,” that in fact what in GA drives the transition from animal to human and from signaling to language (and religion) is precisely the “Girardian” phenomenon of mimetic desire.

When I insist that language follows the old formula of Invention is the mother of necessity, I am referring explicitly to Girard’s point, as revealed in his masterpiece Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque—published during my first year at Hopkins in 1961—that the great novels of early modern Europe understood human life as centered on the problem of overcoming mimetic desire.

For the greatness of Girard’s book resides less in its value as “literary criticism” than in revealing that great literature is great because—like religion—it confronts humanity’s greatest problem, the one that, indeed, we discovered language out of the need to solve. Whence his choice to end the book with Alyosha’s promise of salvation in The Brothers Karamazov.

Girard’s refusal to see GA as an extension of his original intuition about mimetic desire reflected his suspicion of French Theory, which, following the Hopkins conference in 1966, had predominantly turned its back on his way of thinking to fetishize deconstruction, a creature of philosophy and linguistics indifferent to religion. Hence Girard remained throughout his life opaque to my efforts to elucidate the origin of language.

And indeed it is only since his death in 2015 that I have come to recognize the virtual equivalence between the Derridean concept of différance, which inserts language between desire and appropriation, and the sacred, which makes us consciously renounce our original act of appropriation, thereby converting its aborted gesture into a sign.

No doubt René would not have been convinced by this equivalence, and in any case it is too late to try. But I would hope his loyal followers will not make the mistake of using his discussion in his 85^th year with two anthropologists as a reason to turn their backs on Generative Anthropology.

Ainsi mourut la fille d’Hamilcar pour avoir touché au voile de Tanit.

Thus did Hamilcar’s daughter perish for having touched the veil of Tanith.

Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô (1862)

This year’s conference, whose cultural bonuses included a ballet and a Chopin concert, as well as a visit to Warsaw’s recently opened National Library Museum, went off smoothly under the direction of GASC President Magdalena Złocka-Dąbrowska. I was particularly gratified when, on the last day of the conference, three different speakers from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University made use of GA’s originary hypothesis to reach new understandings in their fields: Magdalena herself in Anthropology, Agnieszka Burakowska in Religion, and Felicja Okulicka-Dłużewska in Artificial Intelligence.

As I have pointed out many times in these Chronicles, GA’s originary hypothesis brings together the two elements that remained apart throughout the “French Theory” era, inaugurated at the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.” Throughout this period, René Girard’s thought remained peripheral to the “deconstructive” branch of French Theory led by Jacques Derrida. But since the turn of the century, with the decline in interest in the secular notion of deconstruction, Girard’s religion-based thought has reached a new level of popularity, making GA’s synthesis potentially more accessible to a broader public­—provided that interested readers are able to bracket Girard’s own dismissal of GA as a “Social-Contract Theory” in Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (Continuum, 2011).

Mimetic Desire and The Originary Hypothesis

The centerpiece of Girard’s thought, as established in his masterpiece Mensonge romantique et verité romanesque, published in 1961 during my first year at Johns Hopkins, is his notion of mimetic desire as humans’ chief source of potential conflict. By focusing on this problematic element of human relations, Girard was able to understand great “novelistic” (romanesque) literature as providing exemplary moral models for human behavior, in contrast with the “romantic lie” that encourages the individual to deny desire’s mimetic nature.

Building on Girard’s insight, generative anthropology shows how mimetic desire drove the human to distinguish itself from all other life-forms by its need to consciously defer rather than reflexively inhibit its potentially conflictive impulses. The peaceful appropriation of a common object of desire could take place only once potentially conflicting gestures of appropriation were aborted, converting them into the shared signs of designation that constitute the first signs of human language.

Sadly, Girard himself was never willing to understand to what extent his own thought was at the root of this founding anthropological vision.

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Let us now return to a domain that is familiar to all the creators of French Theory, including both the Girardian and the “deconstructive” school: Sartrean existentialism, with its ontological distinction between pour-soi and en-soi, which for Sartre distinguish the human from the animal mind. This dichotomy, established in Sartre’s 1943 magnum opus L’Etre et le néant, mirrors that defined by the exclusively human possession of language. Yet Sartre’s lack of any reference to language in this context, which surprises us today, is the very mark of the Western philosophical tradition, for which language is an instrument of thought rather than a generative force worthy of attention in its own right.

No doubt Sartre saw language as unique to humans, but he would never have thought to derive the freedom of the human pour-soi from the phenomenon of language, which he saw as one artifact of this freedom among others. The pour-soi’s freedom is that of a Subject whose thought is unbound by worldly limitations, including ultimately those of language itself.

Jacques Derrida’s work was the major revelation of the Hopkins conference. Generative anthropology relies on Derrida’s notion of différance (deferral/difference) in defining the specificity of the linguistic relationship between signifier and signified, thereby allowing us to understand its subsumption under an anthropological understanding of the sign, in contrast with the merely formal relations of structural linguistics. Yet Derrida himself never addressed language as an anthropological phenomenon. His primary example of différance was as a way of understanding the speaker’s need to choose from within a paradigm of words possible in a given sentence, such as the choice of what color-word to use to describe a given object. The idea that the use of words/ideas was itself the result of the deferral of an appropriative action toward the object is absent from Derrida’s reflections on this subject.

To sum up GA’s minimal hypothesis of the origin of language as presented in these Chronicles: when a group of proto-humans are attracted to a single object (e.g., the cadaver of a large edible animal), each individual’s sacred “conscience” leads him to abort his original gesture of appropriation, thereby transforming it into a gesture of designation, that is, an (ostensive) sign—subsequent to which the contested object can be divided equally among the members of the group. Language is in the first place a means of preventing conflict over a claim of possession, replacing it by a mutually shared and understood sign that temporarily “sacralizes” the desired object, deferring its appropriation by any individual until its equal division can be carried out by the group. Ceremonies of food-sharing remain as much an element of human life today as they were, in this hypothesis, for the first humans.

Why has this simple explanation of language origin never previously occurred to those who have reflected over the millennia on this question? And why has the originary hypothesis, whose first version I presented in The Origin of Language (TOOL—UC Press, 1981), met with so underwhelming a reception? The most obvious explanation is that the very idea of explaining in anthropological terms what was originally experienced as an effect of the sacred bears a stigma of sacrilege. For if the sign is indeed the first manifestation of the sacred, then to explain it in practical terms is a violation of what we have always understood to be beyond worldly explanation.

The Scene of Language

Let us now recall my earlier point about Sartre’s pour-soi/en-soi distinction’s purporting to define the specific difference between human and prehuman intelligence without the least reference to language. Somehow we are asked to believe that the sense of separation, metaphorized as the “empty space” or néant separating the human subject from the objects of his perception—in contrast with what is presented as an absence of such space between the animal and what it perceives in its surroundings—is wholly unrelated to the fact that humans use language to refer to objects of perception while animals do not. Indeed, the absolute nature of this distinction is constantly contested by ethologists, who refer to animal communication via aural, olfactory, visible… signals as forms of language, admittedly less “advanced” than human languages, but not of a fundamentally different nature.

All these refusals to understand the significance of the originary hypothesis can be understood as denials of the underlying ontological distinction between the human and the non-human, which is based on deferral and its resulting scenicity, the sense of implicit separation among human subjects that embodies the human sense of the sacred—and permits the flourishing of cultures that allow linguistic and related forms of communication to mediate relations among humans and the objects of their interest/desire.

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The famous rule established in 1866 by the Société Linguistique de Paris that:

la Société n’admet aucune communication concernant, soit l’origine du langage — soit la création d’une langue universelle

the Society does not allow any communication concerning either the origin of language, or the creation of a universal language

which places in parallel the utopian project of a “universal language” and the fundamental anthropological task of explaining the existence of real human languages, makes clear that the taboo on the latter project cannot simply be explained as an attempt to eliminate fantasy. On the contrary, it would be difficult to demonstrate more clearly the Société’s sense of the blasphemous nature of the attempt to reveal the secret of human language, which it is preferable simply to ignore than to seek to state it in affirmative worldly terms.

And thus the many books that claim to describe the origin of human language inevitably refuse to accept and explain its qualitative difference from animal communication systems—a point that I have discussed in reference to a number of such books in these Chronicles over the years; see for example “Conceiving Language Origin” (https://anthropoetics.org/views/vw528/).

Given the role of language as the most unambiguous sign of humanity, the world’s refusal to recognize what is objectively the simplest explanation of its emergence demonstrates the persistent power of the sacred as the means through which the human protects itself from the dangers of desire.

That, over 40 years after the publication of TOOL, only a handful of people have any idea of the originary hypothesis and its significance should suffice to convince the reader that the “secret” of the human/non-human distinction is really quite simple. It is the denial of this simplicity that explains its invisibility. In a word, it is the power of the sacred that resists what is experienced as the revelation of its secret—as when, in the last sentence of Flaubert’s Carthaginian novel, Salammbô dies from having touched the veil of Tanith.

It was René Girard who first pointed out the critical nature of the conflicts arising from the emergence of mimetic desire—conflicts for which only human language could provide a solution, or more precisely, a deferral. But sadly, the simple meaning of John’s revision of Genesis: En arché en ho logos—In the beginning was the Word/Language—eluded Girard, so that he was never fully able to separate the sacred, through which the human conscience expresses its love as rejection of rivalry with its fellows, from the violence incurred by disobedience to the sacred.

It is the taboo on understanding the sacred itself that remains the greatest obstacle to human self-knowledge. Yet I dare hope the reader will agree with me that the mystery of human language need no longer remain hidden behind Tanith’s veil.

I had nearly finished a Chronicle deploring the West’s lack of sympathy for Israel’s need to respond to the Hamas pogrom of 10/7, when on the day following the end of President Trump’s 60-day deadline for Iran to engage in serious negotiations to end its nuclear program, Israel decided, with the accord of the US, that it could not wait any longer to attack the personnel implementing this program as well as its key installations, with so far highly encouraging results. But as it would be premature to draw any conclusions while the fighting continues, we will instead pursue our meta-reflections about the origin of language.

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We must begin from the fundamental notion that language is not merely a signaling system, but a uniquely human mode of communication, one that, pace Chomsky, cannot be understood as principally a means of thinking. Indeed, we should note that the current revolution in AI has been brought about through the abandonment of logical/mathematical reasoning in favor of the imitation of empirical human linguistic practices as the only really useful guide to the construction of “authentic” sentences and conversations. Whence the apparent difficulty posed, ironically enough, by logical elements such as “not” in sentences (see https://www.newscientist.com/article/2480579-ai-doesnt-know-no-and-thats-a-huge-problem-for-medical-bots/), where the referents of such logical modifiers cannot be deduced merely from their proximity to words in the sentences of the corpus at the source of the AI engine.

And I am sure all users of AI systems based on the Large Language Model have noted that they make logical mistakes of the most elementary nature. For example, tell the AI that you are seeking a three-letter word to fit in a crossword puzzle, and half the time it will give you a two- or four-letter word—a mistake beneath the intelligence of a literate 6-year-old.

I mention this simply to point out that whereas in mathematical calculations we have no need to reflect about “thinking” as distinct from mechanical calculation, what we do with language cannot so easily be mechanized—indeed, in principle, perhaps not at all, although the machine imitation may well be sufficient for most purposes.

I half regret having entitled my first GA book The Origin of Language (UC Press, 1981; henceforth TOOL), since this suggests a historical solution to the question, as though I claimed to have found archaeological evidence of the very moment in which human language came into being. And it is no doubt because of the absence of concrete evidence of this Ur-moment that the book’s originary hypothesis has provoked so little reaction in academic circles. As a professor of linguistics said to me dismissively some years ago, “you can’t prove it.” As if the absence of empirical evidence of a kind that would be virtually impossible to produce invalidates the search, not for the chronologically first use of human language, but for a minimal hypothesis of its emergence. And by extension, as if, in the absence of such evidence, no useful purpose could be served by seeking a minimal formulation of the difference-différance brought into the world by the invention of language, whatever the details of its spread from its original place(s) of discovery to the rest of our species.

For the difference between human language, along with the rest of the culture that emerged in company with it, and the purely physiological developments that along with their behavioral extensions can explain the evolution of the various capacities of living creatures, is that language carries with it the potential, unpredictable from its earliest manifestations, to create parallel worlds of representations, with analogies in what we call the “arts” as well as in a limitless number of collective behaviors, from religious rituals to political structures, all mediated by the scenic interaction of its users. The (human) scene, even more than its signs, is the fundamental creation of language. This is clear from studies of animal behavior which show that the configuration of a scene is impossible for them, as witness the entirely one-on-one transmission by the “explorer” honeybee of the instructions for locating its newly discovered source of pollen to the rest of the hive.

That the notion of human scenicity has remained unexplored in relation to language and culture generally is explicable as a consequence of the general view of language as a technique, one largely limited to humans, but which scientists are most willing to attribute to other animals on the evidence of what appear to be complex and sophisticated signaling systems, as though the lack of anything even minimally comparable to human culture among even the highest primates did not make clear that an essential component that language uniquely possesses—precisely what I call the scenic—is missing from non-human systems of communication. That in TOOL I situated the declarative sentence which marks the “maturity” of human language at the end of an evolving series of syntactic forms leading from ostensive to imperative and finally to the declarative as the response to a “failed” imperative, that is, as a linguistic response to a worldly demand, that creates for the first time a genuine linguistic dialogue, as opposed to what had previously remained in practical terms a signaling system, allows us to understand the role of the declarative on the human scene in a way that treating it as the incarnate expression of a “truth” does not. It is not to downplay the importance of logic to observe that it must emerge from the practical functions of language, and that the possibility of this emergence depends on the scenicity that creates among humans a new form of mutual presence.

And in turn, the recently observed power of the screenic to interfere with the interactive element of the scene by allowing the individual to create a solipsistic imaginary universe that he can people with his own choice of characters is clearly a major factor in today’s loosening of the social bonds among members of human communities, a factor surely connected to, among other disquieting developments, the sub-replacement birthrates of industrial societies. All the more reason to focus our attention on the scenicity that has since the origin of our species held human communities together.

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To conclude this brief reflection, I cannot help returning to what was for the postwar generation a key document of human self-understanding: Sartre’s L’être et le néant, or Being and Nothingness, first published in 1943 under the German occupation. The book’s key anthropological insight is the opposition it draws between the pre-human en-soi (in-itself) and the human pour-soi (for-itself). These terms are translations of Hegel’s an Sich and für Sich, but Sartre gives them an anthropological twist, one that, as I discovered in preparing the 2024 GASC in Tokyo, was the result of his contact in Paris in 1928 with Japanese philosopher Shūzō Kuki, whose understanding of “nothingness” was strongly influenced by Buddhism. The contrast between the nonhuman world of the en-soi that in Sartre’s imagination has no “free space,” so that everything is “jammed together,” and the pour-soi where there is a space of freedom between the mind and its objects is a fascinating subject of reflection. This physical imagery, very much akin to that used in Buddhist texts to describe the openness of what I would simply call the scene of the language-enabled mind, is contrasted as the uniquely human freedom that makes humans capable of conscious reflection as opposed to the limitation of other creatures to reflexive reaction.

What is most fascinating of all is that Sartre, while attributing to the open space of the pour-soi the freedom that makes us human, never made the connection between this openness and the scene of language. His vision of human subjectivity is so to speak naturalistic, without any debt to human culture. It is as though freedom cannot be made dependent on anything other than itself, with the consequence that L’être et le néant unfortunately remains a work of philosophy in the narrow sense, all the while its specific analyses, often fascinating in their detail, emphasize the freedom that humans alone possess in virtue of the scenicity that, as we have seen, is the direct product of the deferral by which humans have learned to avoid conflict.

And this deferral in turn depends—to evoke a quality utterly foreign to Sartrian thought—on our sense of the originarily sacred nature of our separation from the object of contemplation in the mode that Sartre describes as the pour-soi, which poses a desired object on a scene accessible only via a sign that communicates to others its sacrality, its necessarily deferred accessibility. It is indeed difficult to imagine the hostility with which Sartre would no doubt have reacted to this anthropological analysis of his most important philosophical work.

The two preceding Chronicles have taken as their presupposition that the emergence in our universe, first of self-perpetuating and then of self-reflecting creatures was a quasi-inevitable product of “matter” itself, using this term to include as well energy that physicists oppose to it at the first stage of ontological differentiation.

None of this explains the origin of the universe, but clearly no such explanation can be satisfactory, given the absence of preconditions determined by other means. Or as Heidegger might have put it, we have no ground for discussing “why there are essents (Seiendes) rather than nothing,” and this would be true even if the latter were no more complex than an electron—which for all we know may be as complex as a galaxy if we could observe in in sufficient detail. Such speculations serve only to discourage the “ontologist,” but hopefully the universe as we know it permits more useful reflections on its composition.

If indeed the universe is limited to that initiated by the “big bang” some 13 billion years ago, then the obvious ambiguity of our understanding of it, which becomes increasingly insistent with every new discovery on the path to the “theory of everything,” would almost suggest its creation, not by the divinity of the Old Testament, but by a trickster god, not necessarily malicious, but bent on maintaining a paradoxical relationship to the creatures who attempt to decipher it: the more they learn, the number of parameters necessary to incorporate this knowledge, rather than decreasing to the speculative minimum of a “theory of everything,” continues to increase. One wonders how Einstein, were he to return among us, would situate the spukhafte Fernwirkung of quantum entanglement in today’s context of “dark matter/energy” and the uncertainty of the cosmic constant.

My conclusion from reading popular science periodicals over the past 70 years is that the distance between the scientific and the popular understanding of fundamental physics has not ceased to increase. And this suggests to me not that writers are increasingly less capable of explaining the science in terms accessible to the layman, but that the scientific “facts” themselves are increasingly distant not only from the layman’s empirical knowledge but from his intellectual imagination. Years ago, we knew that in an atom, protons and electrons weren’t little spheres spinning around a nucleus, but had the impression that this image, analogous to that of the planets of the solar system, described the atom well enough so that we could understand its basic construction and how it combined with other atoms to form molecules, compounds, and the rest. Today “dark matter” suggests no image whatsoever, and physicists admit that they really don’t know what it is themselves. No doubt this development reflects “progress” in our attempt to understand how matter/energy is composed. But what guarantee is there that this substantial chronological period of a human lifetime, which has combined (1) vastly increased knowledge of the universe with (2) vastly less total understanding of the universe, is in the process of coming to an end?

My physicist neighbor, who retired from UCLA not long after the COVID epidemic forced him to teach his classes in the format the French call distanciel, tells me that young physicists are greatly encouraged by the new research possibilities opened up by the recurring signs that there remains much—and perhaps ever more—to discover, and consequently, that funds for further research will continue to be forthcoming. And there is little doubt that many new discoveries will have a strong potential of leading to practical applications, bearing the promise of technological progress and financial gain. Indeed, our failure to achieve the “theory of everything” is in fact a positive result; any kind of “end of history” would destroy our sense of time as necessarily productive of increased understanding and progressive improvement, as has been the case ever since the big bang. Nevertheless, the sense that the stronger the light we shine into the darkness, the deeper this darkness recedes, offers an irresolvably ambiguous satisfaction.

The providential sacred

Although we tend to think about the sacred only in the narrow confines of organized religion and its rituals and doctrines, in fact the sacred, the object of Pascal’s pari, dominates our existence, in which each human being experiences a personal emergence into what we call “sentience,” self-consciousness not simply as proprioceptive sensation, but as the articulation on an interpersonal scene of representational interactions with fellow humans subject to our conscience of “good” and “evil.” It is through the acquisition of language that the infant becomes a full-fledged human being, acquiring the moral différance that separates him from other animals. And as we have seen, the obvious explanation for this development is the need to counter the threat of mimetic desire to the stability that, unlike humans, animal societies are able to acquire via reflexive, unconscious inhibitions.

Pascal’s point that il faut parier, that the individual must bet on God’s existence, can be stripped of its supernatural elements, including that of the soul’s immortality, without losing its pertinence. On the contrary, what we must bet on is not that God will give us the chance to spend eternity in Paradise, but simply the eternity of the sacred itself—our sense of right and wrong. Our faith in the persistence of the sacred is our wager on the “eternal” capacity of the universe to maintain the existence of our species, contingent on our respect and general observance of Hillel’s summary of the Torah: don’t do to another what you wouldn’t want him to do to you.

Seen in this light, the question of “the existence of God” can be understood in cosmic terms, yet without requiring us to attribute a human-like self-consciousness to the organization/organizer of the universe. We have no knowledge and indeed, no expectation, that the universe itself possesses self-consciousness. All we know is that, in its originary formation—assuming we can even speak of an “origin” either in or of time—the human was a realizable possibility. And given that, to again return to Hillel, our existence indeed depends on a moral principle, the idea of a benevolent God who serves as our example is anything but an arbitrary myth, however fantastic may well be our various religions’ and individuals’ conception of its incarnation. This is not because we have arbitrarily created, like the horse- and ox-gods of Xenophanes, sacred beings in our own image, but because our conscience, our moral sense, is experienced as in harmony with the universe that has nurtured our species, and whose rootedness in the nature of matter/energy itself is illuminated by evolutionary theory as driven by its tendency to form complex structures under the tautological rule of “the survival of the fittest,” leading from the first particles/waves to ourselves and probably beyond.

The sacred, in a word, is inherent and incarnate in our universe, and the simplest demonstration of this truth is the existence of beings—at the very least, ourselves—who are, in whatever terms, aware of it. As for whether the evolution of such beings as we will conquer ever higher summits, destroy their world, which will have to begin again from a lower level, evolving in endless cycles of growth and destruction, “only time will tell.”

Every field of research has its own way of classifying its objects, according to the factors relevant to the components and configuration of these objects in time and their interactions with other objects. But from a human standpoint, that is, with respect to the scenic self-consciousness that we have observed only in our own species, the number of essentially distinct categories of beings that we encounter is very limited. “Animal, vegetable, or mineral” may be too simple, but it suggests that the number of practical alternatives with which we can compare human self-consciousness is very limited.

In the first place, there are physical (“mineral”) objects, “things” that have no status as unified organisms, even if their place in the universe may lead them to acquire a certain level of complexity and structural integrity, allowing us to differentiate between the structures and the structural complexity of such things as electrons, atoms, molecules, rocks, planets, meteors, stars, galaxies, black holes…

Then there are organisms, examples of life, which maintain equilibrium conditions with respect to their surroundings, and employ for this maintenance specific channels of exchange of matter and energy with their environment. Their complexity is such that they can no longer depend on external material conditions to reproduce them, but can only preserve their necessarily complex configurations by generating near-copies from within themselves. Whether “animal” or “vegetable,” such self-reproducing living beings may be said to constitute the second level of our ontology.

With minor exceptions, animals can be differentiated from plants by their mobility, making their interaction with their environment qualitatively more complex. Hence their acquisition of sense-organs of far greater discriminatory power than those of plants. What concerns us here in particular is their capacity to represent their environment by means of these organs, whereby they attain a higher level in our ontology. Where a plant has only the crudest “awareness” of the outside world, the survival of most animals is dependent throughout their lives on their ability to observe and react to changes in their environment, often on a short-term basis.

The more advanced animals also possess means of communication with their fellows: chemical, visual, tactile, or auditive. I have always insisted that such communication systems, whatever their complexity, are not at all comparable to human language, but are in effect signaling systems. Animals exchange signals, but they do not “converse” as humans do, for they do not share a scene of representation such as exists between any two users of language. How do we know this? We have only to observe the advantage of humans over other creatures in the domain of modification of their environment. Clearly the ability to represent the world to ourselves has led us to continually improve our means of interacting with it, which in the case of other animals produces complex structures via the evolution of stereotyped actions with only minimal possibilities of innovations transmitted across generations.

Given our millions of years of experience with “mineral” and “animal/vegetable” beings, it seems clear that in our world only humans are capable of dealing with their environment through representations on a shared scene that permits the accumulation and preservation of information concerning worldly beings; but this ability to accumulate knowledge begins with the act of communication of information to other members of our species. The fact that, in the hypothesis of GA, the potential for intraspecific conflict, which in other creatures is regulated by the evolution of biological inhibitions, cannot ever be fully eliminated, is the primordial stimulus to our species’ creativity—as well as the source of a latent danger of self-destruction, a plausible scenario of which exists since the creation of nuclear weaponry.

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With the development of machines that can manipulate representations rather than simply worldly objects, the question arises of whether this allows us to conceive of a higher ontological level than that which we have attained. The fact that, within a few years of the creation of generative artificial intelligence based on large language models and capable of “conversing” with the human user, our sense of ourselves as belonging permanently at the top of the hierarchy of beings has been deeply shaken, poses a new kind of question to any anthropology: Is it then our “destiny,” by learning how to represent and how to manipulate representations, or think, eventually to render our nature as naturally evolved self-reproducing living creatures capable of representation/communication and hence of “sentience” no longer necessary to the attainment of this highest level of our general ontology?

Many fear that “intelligent” machines with circuits vastly more productive than our neurons will, in tandem with the development of robotics permitting the manipulation of natural objects, surpass humans in the next centuries, if not decades, in virtually all of our abilities, leaving us to imagine whether the machines will learn how to reproduce themselves without our aid and become our masters. Thus we wonder what we can possibly do to prevent this, short of aborting the further development of AI—which given the competition between nations would require an implausible good-faith agreement to limit activities that already generate vast amounts of wealth and power. Unlike the danger of human self-annihilation, which at the very least cannot appeal to our instinct of self-preservation, we might well find the supersession of humans by intelligent machines seductive—at first, at least, before the machines decide to relegate us to the sidelines as objects of study and amusement, or choose to eliminate us altogether…

Yet from the standpoint of our general ontology, a machine performing the same functions as a human, only far faster and more accurately, would still not inaugurate a truly new category of being, since the difference between “natural” and “manufactured” components would not change the fundamental character of its activity—any more than a computer program champion at chess or Go would be doing anything essentially different from the human whom it is now assured of defeating. Although AI can support an indefinite number of levels of recursion, these are merely extensions of the “recursion” inherent in representation itself: the ability to represent both the object of representation (signified) and the sign that represents it (signifier).

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The reader familiar with GA will no doubt ask what is the place of the sacred in the world of artificial intelligence. After all, in our anthropology the sacred—in its origin, the deferral/différance of potentially conflictive action—is the very source of the néant that creates the scenic space within which the representational sign alone connects the (human) subject to his (desired/deferred) object.

In Chronicle 703, the basis of a Zoom contribution to a session of the 2021 Girardian COV&R, I suggested that if “intelligent machines” were to compete with humans, they would have to be programmed to experience the equivalent of mimetic desire and its resulting resentful conflict. In the absence of such a configuration, the machine’s only “experience” of desire and resentment would be that accessible in texts and images, in which their real-world signifieds would exist only in representations. The current AI chat- and imagebots illustrate this situation, using words and/or images expressing emotions of all kinds that reflect no corresponding modifications of any internal state of the bots themselves.

Thus it seemed clear that programming such configurations as “desire” and “resentment” would involve a whole new level of simulation, of a higher level of complexity than, for example, creating the cyber-equivalent of pain to make a robot “reflexively” avoid touching hot surfaces. And even were this possible, it is not clear in what sense it would constitute an ontological advance beyond what humans experience already.

No doubt it is foolhardy at this early stage to deny any conceivable future possibility to artificial intelligence, and more reasonable to assume that if we can think of adding a feature to it, a means can be found, whether useful or not. Being able to perform the equivalent of mental operations billions of times faster than living creatures will surely permit manipulations of reality inconceivable at our current, still rudimentary, stage of cybernetics. And as to whether the enlarged universe that includes our AI inventions might come to posit a transcendent force or will on which they would feel obliged to rely in their attempts to defer internal violence, it seems much too early to speculate on the answer.

Darwin’s theory of evolution, as we know, was received by religious believers as a blasphemous denial of the existence of a benevolent divinity, creator of the physical world but above all of living things, and beyond that, of self-conscious humanity. And whereas at the outset of the modern era, Spinoza had simply removed the question of sacred intentionality from consideration, Darwin gave the drive to self- and species-perpetuation of living things, however it may have arisen from the lifeless universe, the central role in the “origin of species” and ultimately in “the descent of man.” The religious opposition to Darwin, which has not altogether ceased to exist, is in its minimal core the denial of such “intentionality” to matter, including that which leads to self-reproduction, or life. For the anti-Darwinists, the drive to perpetuate the species must be infused into matter “from above”—for matter in itself supposedly cannot acquire intentionality.

It is conscious intentionality that is at the core of what we call the sacred, and its primary gesture is what Derrida called deferral, différance, the interruption of the “natural” implementation of the drives that we understand as the impulses of our en-soi or merely physical being. Animal drives are subject to inhibitions acquired as the result of unhappy experiences associated with the attempt to carry out these drives in a given circumstance. Although Derrida himself saw différance as the source of what Sartre would have called the exclusively human pour-soi in contrast with the unreflective en-soi, in the larger scheme of things, he never concerned himself with the implications of the fact that the différance of the “natural” drives, as contrasted to the Pavlovian inhibition as a conditioned reflex, is a conscious act that marks a more advanced evolutionary phase, one that we must call in the absence of other examples the human.

The rest, as they say, is in the details. But once in possession of this fundamental understanding of what might be called “general ontology,” all the rest becomes understandable in every aspect except the details. In Chronicle 840, a propos of Pascal, I provided the skeleton of this idea, which I will develop here a bit farther. But it must be understood that this general theory, like GA’s theory of the origin of human language, is, except for the (unexciting?) details, quasi-tautological. Once one accepts that the possibilities of the stuff in the broadest sense of which the universe is composed included from the beginning the inherent possibility of self-organization and -reproduction, and then of the capacity to map the outside world onto a scene that would eventually allow creatures to talk about it, then to think about it, the rest is all details. And as we appear to be seeing, at least so far, the more such details we learn about the universe, the less we seem to know about it, as though our awareness of its inherent complexity can only increase the more we learn—an idea already implicit (for the first time?) in Pascal’s meditations on the “two infinities.”

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The sacred may be understood as the representation on the scene of consciousness of the néant that Sartre (via Buddhist influence—see Chronicle 806) intuited as an empty space separating the willing subject (pour-soi) from the objects of its potential actions—starting, in our hypothesis, from the recognition that the human individual must subordinate his appetites to the needs of the community, his desiring complicity with which adds to these appetites a potentially conflictive mimetic element. It is necessary for humans, as opposed to less complex creatures, to be able to represent these desires to themselves so as to be able to judge on a case by case basis to what extent the pursuit of their satisfaction is possible.

As for the details of how this function is implemented in the human body/brain/nervous system, we can only bracket such questions in the context of a general anthropology uniquely concerned with the overall architecture of the human, realizing that this general understanding is on the one hand “parasitic” on the physical mechanisms through which it operates, yet on the other, can only be grasped in its overall purposes by means of such generalizations. What we call generative anthropology is an attempt at the most general possible explanation of our species’ functioning that permits us to mark the historical stages of its development—it being understood that such explanation is always speculative, given that it is writing a history that ever remains in progress.

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So the question arises: what more remains to be said? Might the foregoing perhaps be construed as an involuntary demonstration that generative anthropology as I have conceived it is situated at the wrong level of generalization? Certainly, if asked why GA’s theory of the origin of language and of related developments such as scenicity remains virtually unknown, the average thinker/academic informed of these developments would agree that GA is situated at the wrong level of generality. With respect to language, for example, GA fails to intersect with either historical or structural linguistics. How can professional linguists be expected to accept this material within the realm of linguistics when they can find no use for it in the context of their research activities? And this is all the more true in the realms of physiology, psychology, psychiatry; or social anthropology or the study of religion…. GA takes for granted that phenomena like the scenic can remain in a kind of species memory to influence future actions, without in the least concerning itself with the details of its implementation in the bodies and brains of the creatures in question. And that GA claims that it suffices to draw the ultimate conclusions from what Pascal might have called the “infinitization” of the universe: of matter’s tendency, given sufficient time, following the tautological principle of “the survival of the fittest,” to create increasingly complex and durable structures with new levels of feedback/self-consciousness—this can be said to demonstrate merely that GA lacks any connection with truly creative thought that, firmly grounded on empirical data, generates new theories about the concrete steps in this demonstrably endless evolution.

Yet I would reply that such trans-empirical thinking, grounded only on the presupposition of the existence over an indefinite period of time of a universe of “stuff” capable of forming indefinitely complex and enduring configurations, on reaching the point at which there emerge creatures like ourselves, capable of re-presenting their observations of and about this universe in a form communicable to other similar creatures, thereby permitting them to create a praxis whose overall purpose is to incite a yet more effective evolution of their own fitness, collectively but also individually—that such thinking is the only objective ontology of which such a universe is capable. If, for example, the conflicts to which this process leads among different populations of these creatures may lead to setbacks and even—as the invention of nuclear weaponry has made possible—to the mutual destruction of a given set of such creatures, that should not prevent the eventual emergence of another group yet more fit to survive. Should we not then assume that, so long as the universe continues to exist, the survival of the fittest will continue to operate and, given presumably “endless” time, will necessarily generate ever more successful creatures, whose intelligence will have resolved, by means we cannot yet anticipate, the problem of mimetic rivalry that threatens the persistence of the human species?

Yet we cannot know a priori is whether such a process will eventually succeed in transcending the possibility of self-destruction, or whether on the contrary this possibility will ultimately put an end to the “survival of the fittest” by channeling its fitness into producing a force of destruction more powerful than the originary principle itself. Or else we may speculate that, given an unlimited amount of time and matter, either a positive outcome would emerge, putting to rest the ultimate danger—although clearly we cannot demonstrate the impossibility that at some future point the danger would again reappear—or the underlying process that has permitted this “Darwinian” evolution would itself terminate in destruction, followed perhaps by a new beginning from the original point of departure.

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The human, and/or any similar creatures that may have reached the stage of deferral, language, and the sacred, can only be conceived as capable of self-destruction. Yet we cannot at this time conceive that such creatures could reach the point of being able to destroy, along with their species and its creations, the universe itself. For, were such self-annihilation to be the destiny of the universe, in the time that has already gone by it would already have occurred, and we ourselves would not exist.

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Unless, as did the Hindus, we conceive the universe as subject to presumably unending cycles of creation and destruction. Such hypotheses are indeed advanced by scientists such as Roger Penrose. But given that any such hypothesis, which denies in principle the existence of a unifying dialectic uniting the cycles in a single history, requires that each one leave behind no evidence of itself, the revelation of its truth can take place only outside the process itself, in what we may call the province of the sacred.

The British author and journalist Melanie Phillips is perhaps the most visible embodiment of what I would call the post-Holocaust Jewish conscience in the English-speaking world—a conscience that was deeply shaken by the unexpected eruption of latent antisemitism in response to Hamas’ barbaric massacre carried out in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Phillips has admirably articulated the shock felt by diaspora Jews who, after living through nearly eighty years during which the ever-present memory of the Holocaust had made antisemitism generally unfashionable, discovered that this new atrocity, rather than arousing sympathy for its Jewish victims of murder, rape, torture, and mutilation, had quite the opposite effect.

Her latest book, The Builder’s Stone, (Post Hill Press, 2025), had apparently been conceived before 10/7, but its writing was very much influenced by it; it focuses on the crisis revealed by the pogrom and the world’s reaction to it in the context of what we can still call Western Civilization. Phillips’ vision of the progression of Western history is much the same as my own, as was her shock at seeing the world’s largely sympathetic reaction to Hamas’ massacre while condemning Israel’s “genocidal” actions of self-defense. I was glad to see that her overall perspective on both the central role of the Jews/Hebrews in Western civilization and what should be done in this current crisis are very close to mine, all the more so in that we come to these judgments from very different backgrounds and theoretical presuppositions.

Although “firstness” is not one of her terms, Phillips clearly understands that within the Jew-Greek foundations of Western culture, the Hebrew component is not so much more important as more fundamental—as we might surmise simply from the fact that unlike the Jews, the Greeks are not subject to pogroms. Phillips emphasizes throughout the importance of the Hebrew Bible as the basic document of our civilization, not as a result of its implications for the afterlife or the nature of God’s transcendent existence, but as providing the foundation(s) upon which Western societies were constructed: on the one hand, the Ten Commandments and rules of moral conduct, on the other, the accounts of the relatively undespotic kingdoms that governed ancient Israel—models that were very much at the core of the nation-states that emerged from the Middle Ages to inaugurate the modern world. And she sees, I think quite rightly, that the postmodern West’s loss of self-confidence, centered on its tendency to no longer see in its hegemonic success, as it had in the aftermath of WWII, the proof of its value for humanity, but rather that of its sinfulness in exploiting and victimizing the rest of the world, has led it to return with a vengeance to its “originary resentment” of the Jews.

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Phillips’ sense of Judaism has much in common with my own. No doubt the historic primacy of the Hebrews is the simplest demonstration of its “elder brother” status among the Abrahamic religions and their cultures. But in the spirit of GA, this chronological precedence is most significant for its minimality. As Phillips points out, Judaism is more concrete and less speculative than its Christian heir; as I like to put it, there is nothing in Judaism that requires its faithful to pronounce “Credo quia absurdum,” or in more Biblical language: “Scandal to the Jews, folly to the Pagans” (1 Corinthians 1:23).

Judaism is an essentially this-worldly religion, concerned with taking the most banal daily activities as occasions to remind the Jew to think at every moment of his duty to the divinity and to his people. Nor is there a Hebrew Divine Comedy; Jews talk casually about the afterlife, but Judaism is concretely concerned with our lives on earth, and most crucially, with preserving the continuity of its generations.

And thus it is that this most persecuted minority in world history survived stateless over two millennia, always as a tiny minority, yet always visible enough to attract the resentment of the majority. For the central component of the misleadingly named phenomenon of “anti-Semitism” is not prejudice against “Semites,” but resentment of Judaism’s historical priority—of its firstness—by a good percentage of the world’s population. Resentment, which differs from jealousy in its perversity that while envying the apparent success, or self-satisfaction, of its object, it desires to destroy the latter rather than (save secretly and unconsciously) to take its place.

One of Phillips’ main points is that the “Westphalian” system of nation-states that has spread across the world from the West took the Jews for its originary model, a nation being a people defined as at base monocultural, sharing not just a religion but an overall cultural heritage. And she notes further that the modern political models that succeeded those of the medieval era are likewise largely dependent on Old-Testament sources—blended of course with those of Greece and Rome.

And when in her conclusion, Phillips proposes the Jewish people and its religion as a model for the salvation of the West, this in no way excludes members of other religions. Following the Jewish model in this sense does not mean forcing non-Jews to celebrate the Jewish festivals or obey the 613 mitzvot of Jewish law, but going back to the roots of the sacred in its focus on maintaining a harmonious community grounded on a solid family structure that preserves its continuity through the generations. That Orthodox Jewish communities are more coherent and (outside of Israel) have a far higher birth rate than most others has meant that over the past few generations, the Orthodox—who are also far less likely to marry out of the faith—make up a much higher percentage of Jews than in the past. And similar has been the case in contemporary Christianity; not just Mormons and Catholics, but all Christians for whom religion is truly part of their lives and who consider themselves part of a religious community bend their efforts toward preserving their communities by raising children in the faith.

The role of Judaism in the modern world—as the Torah had already suggested—is not to attract converts and seek to become the religion of the majority, let alone of the entire human race, but to serve as “a light unto the nations,” who need not merge with the Jews to be inspired by their example. There is clearly a desire today for a return to a stricter and more cohesive sense of religion, not out of mere nostalgia but from a sense that such cohesiveness is really the test of the sacred in all its manifestations: Can this body of doctrine and practices hold the community together even in this time of resentful skepticism, so that it may serve people of other faiths, not as a source of proselytization, but simply as a model.

The problem of theorizing religion will always be inextricably paradoxical: the element of belief cannot be derived from a definition of the divinity, however subtly put together. That is indeed the unique paradox inherent in the word God, and why the Jews avoid not only speaking but even writing it, putting G-d or Hashem (“the name”) in its place to show that no sign, no word, can designate the divinity in the same way that a sign can designate the objects of our world. It is in this sense that Judaism can claim to minimize religion’s paradoxicality and, in contrast to Christianity, adhere most closely to the core notion of the sacred by its minimization of absurdity.

The anomaly of Judaism as a model for religion in general is precisely that it refuses to play the role of such a model. Reducing Judaism to the Golden Rule as in Hillel’s aphorism is valid only in the context of the Jewish—or an equally coherent—community. No doubt the Golden Rule remains the ultimate moral truth of the sacred, but if it could simply enforce itself as a universal rule of thumb, reducing the sacred to a moral principle, humanity would never have needed any religion at all. Hillel’s point is deliberately paradoxical because the Golden Rule could only have been offered as summarizing in a few words “the Law and the Prophets” in a society whose culture was dominated by this or another Law and Prophets. And although Phillips herself does not enter into these anthropo-philosophical questions, I think she would not disagree.

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My only substantive divergence from Phillips’ perspective is that of one who, without seeking a chimerical “end of philosophy,” believes that philosophy must accept its anthropological destiny—as Jacques Derrida would have done had he accepted GA’s interpretation of la différance as motivated by the need to avoid mimetic conflict. In this perspective, the specifics of the Jewish community that make the Golden Rule more than an abstraction need not be spelled out along with the Rule itself, but must be understood as the unspoken, even unspeakable accompaniment to its abstract formulation. The Jews’ relationship to Hashem is no more paradoxical that that of other peoples to their divinities—save that, experiencing itself as the primal transcendence of idolatry in the context of what will become Western civilization, it is the most minimal. Thus, precisely because Judaism emphasizes the impossibility of comparing Hashem with any worldly being, this truth once taken for granted, the Jew’s relationship to God becomes familiar, not to say “egalitarian,” in the sense that, as in various midrashim, one can argue with him as if with a neighbor, all the while simply talking for granted his transcendent status.

For the two modes of relationship are not at all incompatible. Once we simply take for granted that G-d is eternal and we are mortal, we need not share Achilles’ resentment of this immortality, for our two roles, in no way comparable, cannot become rivalrous. Need not—or perhaps we should rather say no longer, since that moment in Genesis 3:22-3 when G-d expressed the fear that once mortals eat of the Tree of Knowledge, they will eat of the Tree of Life and live forever—and as a consequence, threw us out of Paradise.

This does not make HaShem a fiction, but simply a being of another nature, the embodiment of the sacred—about whom we are guaranteed that, unlike the Christian sacred, he cannot, or rather, will not, take on human form and descend among us, as though, like the peoples about to be dissolved in the newly formed Roman Empire, we needed to be reminded that we too, despite our imperfection, possess a share of his divine nature.

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To put this in broader terms, I think we need to discover/invent a way of talking about the sacred that does not immediately pose the question of belief, as though “bracketing” one’s religious convictions ipso facto made talking of the sacred impossible. It is notable that even Christianity, however founded on its affirmation of “absurd” beliefs, nonetheless emphasizes the eternal consequences for the souls of mortals not so much of maintaining these beliefs as of living up to them. Ultimately what matters is Imitatio Christi; acting toward others with charity is the real point of Christian life, as illustrated in Leigh Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem” and countless similar examples.

The anomaly of Jewish exemplarity, which by discouraging direct rivalry is as a consequence all the more productive of resentment, should be seen as exemplary of the constitutive paradox of the human condition, far more complex and tenacious than the not-so-simple problem posed among individuals by mimetic rivalry. It is the enduring success of Israel that more than anything else has provoked the current crisis of the Westphalian system of nation-states, whose Achilles’ heel had always been its susceptibility to anti-Jewish resentment. In its 2023 pogrom, radical Islam revived the dormant virulence of this Western resentment by layering a Hitlerian passion for the destruction of the Jews on top of its rejection of Westphalian pluralism in its drive toward an Islamic “end of history.”

It is for this reason that the achievement of a true peace in the Middle East that welcomes a restored Israel among the Abrahamic religions is crucial to sustaining our faith in our human future.

I cannot help interpreting as a “sign” that, a few minutes after publishing Chronicle 845 questioning the West’s ability to defend itself against enemies so barbarous that they oblige us to give the Nazis credit for trying to hide their crimes rather than recording them with GoPro cameras, I learned that a Pulitzer Prize had been awarded to Palestinian author Mosab Abu Toha for his essays published in The New Yorker “on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience,” as though it were the duty of Westerners to demonstrate their sympathy for the victims of Israel’s response to the unprovoked slaughter and torture of over a thousand of its citizens from a perspective that is essentially that of their murderers. Which is as good a demonstration as any of the need for Judaism to survive alongside Christianity—and a lesson to the Jews of today as much if not more than to the Christians.

It is infinitely sad to see Jews, and Jewish-based businesses and organizations such as the New York Times, that still have not learned that self-hatred will not save them in a world that they themselves have encouraged in its denigration of the fundamental Jewish valorization of ourselves on the pretext of avenging the West’s historical victims—toward whom its long-past behavior, wholly typical of its age, need not be defended save in that its consequences have been beneficial to all.

And of all peoples the Jews are truly exemplary in this regard. The settlers who displaced, often brutally, the so-called Indians, (whose cruelty, like that of Hamas, indeed reflected a lower level of civilization that that of the West), did not find their models in the Jews, who were not themselves the original Hebrews who conquered the territory of Israel from their rivals, but those who were first defeated and then expelled by the Romans, and who paid for any arrogance they may have been guilty of in the days of the Temple(s) with two millennia of exile devoid of military power.

And it puts once more in question the ultimate value of the West’s unquestioned superior ability to understand and control the natural world and to create the world’s freest known societies in the face of the crude power of radical Islam’s claim to love death more than we love life—to truly be willing to sacrifice their lives for their belief, however absurd, in the definitive truth of the Koran, with its promise of an Islamic “end of history.” I do not think that we should explain this Pulitzer merely as an abject gesture of submission toward our potential conquerors, whose inferiority in the technical sphere is made up for by their unshakable faith in their cause. It is a gesture whose abjectness is at the same time a sign of admiration toward those whose acts, however unspeakably cruel, do not, unlike ours, involve the least recoil from the utter engagement of their bodies and souls, not in a Pascalian wager, but in a primitive and all the more unshakable certitude.

That it is we who have invented these “weapons of mass destruction” is but one more example of the folly of intelligence that fails to control its products. Israel’s enemies are like a society of illiterates that wins the world chess championship by kidnapping their opponent’s best players. Perhaps Allah told them, “Bide your time, let the unbelievers create terrible means of destruction, for you alone, through your boundless faith in Me, are worthy to control them.” After all, the supreme principle of the sacred is the survival of the community, not of the individual. The sadistic barbarism of Hamas should not lead us to forget that its actions are wholly focused on the triumph of the human species in what its partisans believe is its highest, and therefore most durable form, irrespective of the individual fates of its partisans. The question we have to answer, and “we” includes the ignorant mobs who self-righteously urge us to support the victory of the “Palestinians” over Israel, is whether this is indeed the element of humanity that we deem best suited to carry forward its banner toward the future.

As for the alternative anti-Western model represented by China and North Korea, these so-called “Marxist” tyrannies rely less on faith and more on naked coercion. It is indeed difficult to evaluate the degree of subjective belief in the minds of those who follow this path; is the “wager” of these populations in any sense a free choice? And above all, is this model’s success at all self-generating or does it necessarily depend upon exploiting the “softness” of the Western culture that has struggled to defeat its jihadist enemies? Would China threaten the US’s dominance had it not been able to easily steal so many products of Western creativity? But can we truly imagine a showdown comparable to that of WWII in which an alliance of Western nations could defeat their Eastern and “Southern” rivals by sheer superiority of firepower and resolve?

Would it not be the greatest irony of all if the West had been eliminated before the last round of the “final conflict,” given that, after all, Islam and “Marxism,” the two remaining contestants, can both trace their origins to the Hebrew God? Neither is conceivable without the West—without the Hebrews, nor without the Jews, if only as the seemingly imperishable residue of the latter.

Concerning the Jews, Jonathan Foreman’s “The Untold Story of How Israel Failed on October 7” in the May issue of Commentary is a devastating critique of the Israeli strategic negligence that allowed the success of the Hamas invasion on October 7, 2023, at the root of which was the deadly combination of overconfidence in their own forces and underestimation of the determination of their enemy—as though nearly 80 years of survival had somehow demonstrated that Israel no longer faced existential danger.

And even now, one wonders if the IDF will, by finally winning the war they have been fighting for over a year and a half, provide the much-needed demonstration that, as in the pre-Oslo past, the dominant surviving element of Western civilization will be Judeo-Christian and not Islamic. Islam can learn to live with this, just as the Jews were forced to learn to live in Christian society, but it must be forced to recognize its necessity.

The West’s indulgence in its pseudo-masochistic enthusiasm for the barbarism of the jihadis is a betrayal of civilization itself. Its shamefulness reflects what we may hope is the final decadence of the epistemology of resentment, which in its beginnings at least reflected genuine grievances—the proof being that it had not yet converged with antisemitism in its “autocritique” of Western civilization.