Author: staceymeeker

In the years preceding my discovery/invention of the originary hypothesis, I was strongly influenced by two modes of thought. First, on coming to UCLA in 1969, I met Alain Cohen, then a recent UCLA PhD. Alain, who taught for many years at UCSD, acquainted me with the perspective of the Palo Alto school headed by Gregory Bateson, and in particular with a 1967 book by Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin, and Don Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication, which introduced the concept of pragmatic paradox, the typical example being the (Jewish?) mother who orders her son to “Be spontaneous!”

And then, in 1972, Girard’s La violence et le sacré appeared. This seminal work extrapolated the “novelistic” triangle of mimetic desire in Mensonge romantique into a fundamental anthropology which, however I have come to differ with it in detail, shares with GA the essential idea that our specific difference from all other creatures is that our greater mimetic intelligence makes the danger from our fellow humans of greater concern to us than the dangers of the environment—whence our need for “culture.”

My first application of the idea of pragmatic paradox was to esthetics, since it seemed intuitively obvious that, in contrast to “rational” uses of systems of representation to convey information or to derive true propositions from others a la Euclid, the imaginary world we conjure up in “consuming” a work of art—the absence of a universally appropriate word for this activity is itself indicative—arouses in us desires for “just deserts” for the characters, resolution for dissonances, etc., but whose satisfaction is not simply equivalent to the “esthetic pleasure” we find in the work. Indeed, in the “highest-cultural” case, that of tragedy, we feel ourselves obliged on the one hand to wish for the protagonist’s success and on the other to participate in his undoing. If at the end, Oedipus had decided to give up his search for the murderer and walked off into the sunset with Jocasta, Sophocles would have been competing not at the tragic but the comic festival.

To put in more abstract terms what tragedy has the advantage of making concrete: there is a difference of level between one’s “identification” with the protagonist and one’s “faith” in the author’s overall construction. As William Flesch (see Chronicle 554) would have it, we aren’t identifying so much as evaluating the morality of the results, although the mimetic nature of this process does provide some justification for the term. But what concerns us here is that the esthetic involves, like all paradoxical experiences, a relationship of inclusion. The Jewish mother wants her son to be spontaneous, but by thematizing this, she makes it impossible, because “spontaneous” means not previously thematized. And this twist can in fact be generalized to all cultural discourses, since literary characters are always described by the author as acting “spontaneously” within the limits of their world, whereas in reality their behavior is determined by his prior decision, just as the notes that follow each other “spontaneously” in a symphony are predetermined.

The esthetic is the most interesting and intentionally enjoyable mode of paradoxical experience, but paradox is fundamental to all representation, and of course to the sacred, as the mark of the scenic separation of the significant from the rest of the field of experience. All language obeys this paradox. If what a signifier designates is a signified, then it only can have come into existence along with the signifier. What I call the fundamental paradox of signification is, quite simply, that the sign designates its referent as significant, but given that “significance” is a category inaugurated by the sign, how can it already be a quality of what is designated as such? This is all the more obvious when it comes to the first sign, in our hypothesis the name-of-God, the quintessential paradoxical Being.

Paradoxes are obsessively frustrating since they constantly shift levels, demonstrating, when we would supposedly rather ignore it, that the ontological separation between signs and their referents is a fiction, one in the absence of which signs could not function, yet that cannot be given a basis in “reality.”

This might sound frivolous, but it is anything but a word-game: it is at the very core of human culture, and our reluctance to see this, in contrast with our meditations on the specificity of human consciousness since Descartes, is a futile attempt at demystification that only blunts our sensibilities.

It might be nice to find a better term than “paradox” to describe this destabilizing element, but its very coldness has an advantage, in comparison with terms like beauty, sacrality, numinosity…, which designate in more specific ways our attachment to the paradoxical spiral of self-inclusion. Indeed, to ask for a definition of paradox is to forget that paradox precedes any system of definitions, that it appears at the very origin of representation, of “symbolic” signs.

The Jewish Paradox

How odd
For God
To choose
The Jews
(antisemitic poem)

Over a dozen years ago, in the last talk I gave at COV&R, with the exception of our joint meeting in Tokyo in 2012, I attempted to explain the perennity of antisemitism through an analogy between the Hebrew discovery/invention of the One God and the famous Barber Paradox.

What does antisemitism have to do with paradox? Or to put it another way, what do Jews and “the Jewish question” have to do with paradox? But isn’t the very idea that there is a “Jewish question” paradoxical?

I realize that as myself a member of this religion—the only one that strikes me as wholly compatible with atheism—my writing on the subject cannot be altogether “objective,” and might strike non-members as parochial, Judeocentric. Well, that cannot be helped—nor has the solution adopted by some Jews, to distance themselves from any expression of national pride, let alone Zionism, done anything to prevent antisemitism in the past or present.

The uniqueness of the Jews is indeed a kind of “election,” not in the sense that it makes them a superior people, merely an exemplary one. No doubt the Hebrews, in part as a result of their long-nomadic status, did have an intuition of the uniqueness of God and, I think more significantly, of his lack of a vocative name. We learn this in what is for me the most significant passage in the Old Testament, Exodus 3:14, where God gives his name to Moses as Ehyeh asher ehyeh, “I am who/that I am.” There are after all historical reasons for the emergence of Judeo-Christianity as the foundation of the West, and whatever other merits the ancient Hebrews may have had, they certainly had some original theological ideas.

But the point I wish to make here is that in the context of a discussion of paradox as the fundamental “concept”/structure/configuration of culture, this history is secondary, or to put it another way, is already, toujours déjà as the Derrideans like to say, included in the subsequent phenomenon of election-antisemitism. No doubt the Jews might have ceased to incur this timeless hatred had they not been generally successful in their “Mercurian” endeavors (see Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, Princeton, 2004) but this too is merely a contributing—or corroborating—factor.

What then is it that the Jews are known/hated/envied for? Their firstness. The originary hypothesis proposes that the human originates by establishing an egalitarian society that supersedes the Alpha-Beta organization of higher primates. The superiority of the Alpha over the others is not a criterion of rulership or even leadership, but merely of precedence, a way of organizing a queue. At a bus stop, those waiting longest get on first; in situations where a queue must be created ab ovo, the simplest way to do it is to let the participants “fight it out among themselves,” as a result of which, the strongest will come first, and their hierarchy will remain stable, with the proviso that one always has a chance to improve his position by challenging someone higher up.

If humans are “too mimetic” to be governed by such a structure, it is because their supplementary mimeticism leads them to see the Alpha, at the moment of his taking the first share, not merely as first in line but as opposed to all the other members of the group. Whence the “mimetic crisis.” But, pace Freud and Girard, killing off the Alpha (or anyone else) does not resolve this problem. The only way to do so is through the emergence of a common sign that defers appropriative activity and permits its regulation by the group as a communal act, Homer’s “equal feast”—as various primitive societies have obligingly revealed to us, at least since W. Robertson Smith’s famous description of a camel sacrifice in his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites in 1894.

However, not only does this not prevent some from catching on to the new system faster than the others; it requires, as Adam Katz has pointed out, that some must have grasped the idea before the others. For the sign began as a new idea, an innovation, not the result of an instinctive learning process independent of consciousness. No doubt the firstness of the one or few who started it all was not honored in the final result, but it was nonetheless essential to the event itself. Indeed, the non-recognition of firstness in primitive societies is the major factor in their instability. Differentiation between the first and the others presumably acquired its institutional validation with the possibility of accumulating the results of one’s labor, as in Marshall Sahlins’ big-man scenario (see The End of Culture); and pace “socialism,” it has not lost it since.

Since firstness has been around since the beginning, and was incorporated into the fabric of society as soon as humans became able to accumulate wealth, why is it that the Jews have become in Western society, and now throughout the world, the exemplars and scapegoats of firstness?

It was the Jews who “discovered” the One God. The parallel I drew with the Barber Paradox was that in a world where men either shave themselves or let themselves be shaved, the Barber alone defies this dichotomy. The One God who reveals himself to Moses as I am that I am may be understood as choosing him, not for his superiority over others, but simply as the arbitrary bearer of the message that all named Gods have been superseded, or to put it more politely, that the essence of the central divinity requires that it not be the object of a vocative. Hence we may say that Moses has been assigned the task of “shaving” the population of its naïve concept of the sacred as having an “anthropomorphic” name.

Moses must shave himself as well, indeed, before shaving the others. But the fact that the One God has spoken to him, even if it be to deny his ontological identity with subordinate, namable beings, distinguishes Moses and his people from the others in the world to whom they are to transmit this revelation. How else, might one ask, could God communicate his unique, transcendental status to the world? But if God cannot be spoken to as if a member of a specific ethnic group, he has nevertheless chosen to speak with a member of a specific ethnic group, and this gesture of election can never be forgotten. Even if God’s message is that as the One God he is not on the same level as humans, be they Hebrews or anyone else, and cannot be spoken to as if he were, there is nonetheless one group of humans who has been singled out to receive this revelation in their language. The Hebrew “name” of God is unpronounceable; it is nonetheless not nonexistent.

Well, you might say, God’s “naming” himself as I am who I am is a revelation implicit in the transcendent sacrality/centrality of the divine, just as the “objective” declarative proposition was implicit in the deferral of the originary ostensive. No doubt, but the Hebrews thought of it first. God revealing his “name” to Moses is, put the other way around, the Hebrews revealing God’s unnamability to the world. And that is all they needed to be the “chosen people” and to inspire hatred throughout the generations.

As a supplementary, ironic confirmation of this, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now understand the postmodern victimary model, born from the ashes of the Holocaust and making “racial” firstness on the Nazi model an abomination, as itself being implicitly antisemitic from the beginning.

The record of the UN in condemning Israel to the near-exclusion of other nations is simply taken for granted. Even advanced European nations habitually condemn Israel, while generously financing and excusing the egregious rights violations, inefficiency, and corruption of the Palestinian entity that opposes it. This seems so natural that one scarcely needs to explain it, and until Nikki Haley, little was ever said at the UN in opposition to it.

The fact that the Palestinian Arabs are the only group considered refugees unto the nth generation is not explicable by any particular quality of the Palestinians themselves, but by the fact that the Jews cannot ever be considered at home anywhere on Earth. The “Wandering Jew,” independently of the specifics of history, is implicit in his chosenness. He is the ur-Mercurian, the one whose God has less than any other the right to a home.

No surprise then that UNESCO, along with Mahmoud Abbas, does not hesitate to deny the Jews’ connection to their own historical monuments. Is this Big Lie not itself a form of election? No other country not merely has contested borders but is simply not recognized by the very people they are supposed to participate with in a “two-state solution,” and who are in no way stigmatized for their unreasonableness.

It is in no way my desire to counter-stigmatize the Palestinians, who suffer more than anyone, as populations always do from the soft racism of low expectations, for being permitted, indeed, coerced to subsist on their victimary status rather than on cultivating their own talents—as do the many successful Arab citizens of Israel. My point is simply that all this is explicable by the simple fact that the Jews, Holocaust or not, have been chosen by history as the eternal souffre-douleur of firstness. Which only demonstrates the fundamental truth of Adam Katz’s insistence that, even in the originary event, someone had to be first.

Some final points. Since Freud, we have all been made aware of the therapeutic power of pragmatic paradox. But Freud’s system is relatively crude, since it allows the patient to anticipate the therapist’s imposition of a variant of the family drama: you hate your father and/or love your mother. By doing away with the family model, Girard’s triangle of desire exploits the paradox’s full potential.

You are told that in what- or whomever you desire you are really mediated by UnTel. And the more you deny, in what the French call la dénégation, the importance of UnTel in your life, the more you demonstrate just the opposite, like the poor hero of Notes From Underground walking up and down in front of Zverkov’s dinner party in order to demonstrate his indifference. Whether or not you were mediated by UnTel in the beginning, you certainly have become so at the end. QED.

If you think I’m exaggerating, talk to a few Girardians. Girard’s books have much more to offer than this, but the genius of this paradoxical system is largely what keeps people reading them. Which is, in a broader sense, the genius of Christianity: whatever egoism there may be in the preacher of the faith is subsumed in his service to Jesus as the ultimate, true Mediator.

On the contrary, a Jew writing about how antisemitism is understandable because of the paradoxical specialness of the Jews only generates hostility against himself and the Jews in general. That is, sadly, the genius of Judaism.

I make these points since at the moment neither religion seems to be doing very well in the contest with Islam, which takes the position that whatever the paradoxes of the “peoples of the book,” Allah has done away with them, un point c’est tout. If there is really only one God, then he doesn’t need a “name,” he’s just Allah. Keep it simple.

To put in more world-historical terms the point that Daniel Pipes has been making recently (see for example http://www.danielpipes.org/18285/why-palestinians-need-an-israel- victory) about the need for the Palestinians to accept their defeat by the Israelis, and with it, the permanent presence of the latter, before peace can come to the Middle East: The acceptance of the Jews as “just like any other people,” the end of the stigmatization of firstness, and thus the end of the victimary era and its (anti-)racism… this would be as close to the “end of history” as I can imagine.

I would love to share Pipes’ optimism. But it’s asking a lot of the Palestinians to be the first to understand, in an inversion of the way that Islam understands it, that this would be the one way to put an end to the chosenness of the Jews.

I

The greatest confusion about the human is in its origin, whose specificity our secular age does so much to evade. One might in fact define the secular as the state of denial of a scene of origin. Since the human is essentially scenic, in its relation to the world and more particularly to itself, that is, as a community, this is in effect a denial of any genuine explanation of our existence. The discoveries of paleontology will never tell us about the origin of the human scene, and that is in fact the very purpose to which they are put: to reduce the origin of the human to that of “any other” species. Just as the principle of uniformitarianism has generated millions of words on the subject of “life on other planets” in the absence of any evidence whatever, simply on the basis that if we find it here, it must be everywhere, so the same principle appears to insist that since the human is just another species, whatever is “special” about humanity is only “relative” and we need not add new ontological categories to account for it—certainly none in any way connected with its strange penchant for religious observance. On the contrary, the most serious case one can make in defense of religion is that it is the one domain that until now has remained faithful to the ontological specificity of the human.

I used to be troubled by the fact that, although after nearly forty years I am as certain as ever that the originary hypothesis is a milestone on the path of our self-knowledge, this very fact makes it altogether impossible that it will be accepted or even seriously considered in the near future by those who wield intellectual authority. But there is a great advantage in not being too visible in our world. To be left alone by “trolls” and other pests, yet able to communicate with those few who welcome such communication, is a wonderful status that I would no doubt appreciate still more if by some hazard I lost it, even for the sake of “glory.”

In any case, my subject here is not myself but the center of the human scene, which to distinguish it from other centers I will spell à l’anglaise (and also à la française) as the centre.

One might think that nothing is simpler than the centre of the scene: every kind of scene has a recognizable centre, or at least a mechanism for choosing successive centres, as in a debate or a festival or a simple conversation. But the real matter of concern is the centre “in-itself,” that is, not the object that first became the center of attention to the proto-human group, the object of the first sign and the concurrent deferral of appropriation, but the representational status of the scenic centre that subsists after the first “ceremony” had concluded and, according to our hypothesis, the group had torn the central animal into “equal” pieces.

The greatest problem that this configuration has posed to those who have reflected on the essence of the human is how to deal with the necessary difference of status between the peripheral emitters of the sign and the centre, which is from the outset the locus of significance, the sacred, and in our post-biblical minds, of God.

This problem of the origin of language and culture in the absence of a centre is addressed by Rousseau in his most significant proto-anthropological work, the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. One must recall to excuse certain awkward moments in Rousseau’s exposition that in the pre-Darwinian era, the human species was an anomaly, since it clearly had a history not implicit in its originary essence, so that the first humans had therefore to be imagined either literally as the Bible described them, or conceived as physically identical to modern humans yet originally without a culture, and in particular, without language.

In the Discours, Rousseau distinguishes between three stages of “early man.” Following the “state of nature” that preceded any kind of social order, the second, la société commencée, is the one best remembered and which bears the adjective “Rousseauian.” In this stage, humans are isolated and egalitarian. Their populations being thinly scattered over the countryside, no one is required to live under the domination of another, since if another tries to assert such domination, one has only to go elsewhere. Human interaction is primarily determined by what Rousseau calls la pitié, which is more empathy than pity, but which (in contrast to Hobbes’ war of all against all) keeps violence at a minimal level. Similarly, Rousseau conceives the origin of language as taking place between mother and child; here again he uses a category of differential human interaction that is devoid in principle of resentment or oppression. Clearly the absence of oppression in these societies is in Rousseau’s mind linked to the absence of a cultural/representational centre.

But then, the population increases, there is no more free space, and the Fall occurs when Le premier . . . dit “Ceci est à moi!”  What is interesting about this is that, however fanciful the idea of a sparse human population with no permanent social relations, it is nonetheless true that the simplest societies, hunter-gatherer groups without sedentary agriculture and who therefore accumulate no “surplus” beyond the immediate needs of consumption and shelter, although not without language and religion, are indeed egalitarian. The association between sedentary landholding and inequality is real, and as I have described it in many places, its most rudimentary form would appear to be that described by Marshall Sahlins in his 1972 classic Stone Age Economics, where in the islands of Melanesia, the “big man” who produces more than others comes to dominate the feasting cycle by providing other families with food, eventually (as Sahlins seems uninterested in investigating) taking over the ritual system before gaining other powers over his fellow islanders.

Jacques Derrida’s aim, in his postmodern classic De la grammatologie, is to show that language has always-already been “writing” from the first, that is, not immediate man-to-man but fundamentally hierarchical. He takes as his text the later, posthumous Essai sur l’origine des langues, where Rousseau, seeking to demonstrate the superiority of Italian to French music, attributes an idyllic form of centrality to “southern” societies, where meeting around the well that supplies water to the vicinity becomes the source of language, mate-exchange, and “festivals.” (The reader is referred to my discussion of Rousseau in The Scenic Imagination, Stanford, 2008, although it does not emphasize the advance constituted by this introduction of a centre.)

Derrida denies Rousseau’s sketch of an egalitarian scene of culture; language is not only always-already writing but always-already the non-reciprocal expression of authority. The centre, which, as our neo-atheists like to imagine, religions call God or something similar to mask the authoritarian nature of the tyrannies they are designed to disguise, is not really other than human, merely other than you and me, embodying the monstrous otherness of the sovereign, the man-who-plays-god. That the first human society was indeed egalitarian and that the originary concept of God, which is the basis of all others, even of those who identify God with the Emperor or Pharaoh, is of a being outside the human order, is incompatible with the political subtext of all postmodern political theory, which is that of “revolutionary” resentment. In the West, this resentment is henceforth bereft of the scientific veneer provided by Marx’s confidence in “capitalism’s” self-destruction through the “falling rate of profit” and other similar mechanisms.

Once one understands the suspicion of the centre to be the central postmodern theme, as though centrality were merely a synonym for oppression, one has come, if not to the end of philosophy/anthropology, then let us say, to the beginning of wisdom. It is sadly as though for Derrida, its discoverer, the différance that permits the existence of the sign, hence of the human, constitutes an original sin, a falling away from an ideal equality that must always be sought after, rather than, as it is in fact, the very principle that allows human equality to be conceived, that is, as the equality of worshipers around a center. The nature of this worship has evolved from idolatry to an object-denying reverence for the scene itself, as in Buddhism, or in the West, to an understanding of the essentially human locus of this divinity, even if necessarily other than any individual and mediated by the sign or “spirit,” as in the Christian Trinity. But its essential différance has always remained the same.

Thus to reduce our politico-philosophical disputes to geometry, the “atheistic” postmodern rejects the scenic configuration, which distinguishes ontologically between centre and periphery, as opposed to a mere scattering on a plane, where in the Hobbesian relations between any two elements, each exercises its “will to power” on the other, resulting in a battle for supremacy that ends in death or enslavement. The idea that the scenic structure that defines humanity is precisely the solution, however fragile, to this untenable situation is beyond the ken of these thinkers, who in their Nietzschean misery can be only God or nothing.

It is for me an irrefutable criterion of sérieux in this domain that one not dismiss religion as a sign of a lower stage of human understanding. Whether or not religious beliefs can one day be comprehended in a grand anthropological synthesis, the claim that the transcendence that they personalize or reify is simply a mystified human trait is quite simply a fallacy. The existence of a representational culture that is not inscribed in the genome of human individuals is not a chimera but a fact. What Plato reified as Ideas are quite simply a “secular” version of cultural transcendentality. The Hebrew notion of God is a more unified version of the transcendental that takes into account the primacy of the centre over its indefinitely multiple attributes. For Socrates/Plato the Good is, in any case, an Idea of a higher valence than that of more specific notions. We may say that the Judeo-Christian God is the transcendental guarantee of the Good, albeit not necessarily its agent—for, as Girard liked to remind us, “God lets his rain fall on the just as on the unjust.”

And if we ask why the notion of a transcendent center, which has sustained humanity for all these millennia, is no longer viable, one might hazard the guess that the West, after the horrors of the preceding century, has lost faith in the violence-deferring powers of its traditional religious conceptions of this transcendence, without as yet being willing to accept their supplementation, not to speak of replacement, by the purely anthropological construction that the originary hypothesis provides. Putting its faith in the “Enlightenment” opposition between religion and science, our intelligentsia takes the second as excluding the first, forgetting the Hegelian dialectic that allows the replacement of one idea with another only if it subsumes it in an Aufhebung that retains its essential content.

This “Hegelian” synthesis is no doubt the simplest expression of the mission of GA as I conceive it: to put an end to the war between man-creates-God and God-creates-man, and to promote dialogue between the two in the open-ended elaboration of the originary hypothesis.

II

To begin anew: the human is defined by the transcendental status of the centre of the human scene, which can be attained only through the deferral of appropriative action and its mediation by the sign, the aborted gesture of appropriation. Human beings come to usurp the central position in “sacred” kingships and empires, but the notion that human sovereignty is itself transcendental, rather than a role consecrated by the transcendental in the interest of the human community, leads to the leader-worship common to the totalitarian dictatorships of the past century and the démocratures of our own.

The originary hypothesis does not imply a particular political system. But I must say that I am thankful for the liberty that liberal democracy, even in its currently troubled state, allows me to investigate these propositions in a manner that no dictatorship would ever permit. Which is why, whatever technological progress may occur in dictatorships, they will never produce revelatory ideas of fundamental anthropology, and indeed have no desire to, since their very claim to legitimacy comes from the conviction that our “brave new world” is no longer what it once was, and needs no longer concern itself with its original anthropological foundation.

The centre as unique locus of significance is by this fact the focus of resentment. Its desirability makes the queue structure of animal hierarchy untenable, and focuses all attention on itself. The passage from the Alpha-Beta pecking order to the collective sparagmos at the origin of the human is what inspired the 20^th century’s two closest approximations to an originary hypothesis of the human, Freud’s father-murder in Totem and Taboo and Girard’s more rigorous scenario of “emissary murder” in La violence et le sacré— in neither case including what the animal hierarchy was originally designed to facilitate, the distribution of benefits, particularly of food, among the community.

I have often observed that today’s humans still follow the ancient patterns, and that the simplest way to understand the remote past is to appreciate its connection with the present. An example I have given many times, yet that is generally ignored by “real” anthropologists, is the phenomenon of the gift, analyzed by Marcel Mauss in his famous Essai sur le don. Mauss finds a curious pattern in primitive societies, where, by delaying reciprocation instead of engaging as we do in instantaneous “commercial” exchange, members of the group—in exchanging favors, children in marriage, ceremonial gifts—cultivate rather than minimize the relationship of indebtedness that non-reciprocal gift-exchange creates.

But this is exactly how we conduct our own social relationships: we exchange gifts on birthdays, we reciprocate dinner invitations rather than paying our host, and even our “capitalist” exchange-system is saturated with delayed exchanges of favors (“I owe you one”). Similarly, one who expresses skepticism about the crucial importance of food-distribution has only to remark that virtually every significant encounter among humans outside of the strictest professional relationships involves the distribution of food, whether feast, dinner, lunch, drinks, or coffee.

Thus Freud’s and Girard’s exclusive focus on murder is aberrant. It should be explained by their justified emphasis on mimetic violence as the primary obstacle to animal hierarchy. Freud’s “sons” resent the father’s monopoly of the women (Alpha primates do not habitually exclude other males from all access to females, but these proto-humans, being, as Girard would put it, more mimetic, are less tolerant of sharing). Girard’s model does away with the “family drama”; the scapegoat/victim is selected, on the model of the Greek pharmakos, as a stigmatized figure from the margins of society whose death is unlikely to be avenged. But whereas Freud’s model at least has a place for the primate Alpha, promoted to master of the harem, Girard’s wipes away all preexisting hierarchy in a “mimetic crisis” which, in his view, allows for the emergence of a new central figure and presumably a new divinity.

In neither case is the central function of the old system taken into consideration: the distribution of food. A more serious flaw is that neither propose an origin of human consciousness dependent on the unique human trait of representation. It is indeed curious that although philosophers since Descartes have concerned themselves near-exclusively with the reflective nature of the scene of consciousness (Je pense, donc je suis), even if, like Nietzsche, they affect to reject it as contre nature, these anthropological models both make guilt the source of this consciousness without considering that, in the absence of a prior interdiction, or in our minimal hypothesis, a moment of deferral, the violence of the murder would provide nothing to feel guilty for.

These matters can clearly benefit from much further research and reflection. Hence it would be helpful if we could stop wasting our time in discussions of the human that simply ignore what is essential about it. The essential traits I have described here require no neuroscientific investigation to be discovered, although such investigation could certainly tell us a great deal about their implementation in the nervous system. But until those who study the human mind have absorbed an equivalent formulation to Sartre’s néant that captures the deferral at the core of human symbolic thinking, they will continue to have nothing to say that bears on the essence of the subject.

To end on a more positive note: for many years, well before I conceived the idea of the originary hypothesis, I have had the intuition that paradox, however defined, is the distinctive element of human representational culture. I won’t trace the history of this intuition here, but will merely point out that it is this paradoxical element that natural science quite rightly seeks to expel, but that anthropology, in the broad sense in which I use this term, must continue to respect, all the more so given the apparent waning of the traditional Western religions that have maintained it in “supernatural” form. The paradoxical relationship between human periphery and sacred/significant centre is the crux of the matter. I will discuss this in a subsequent Chronicle.

The historical variety of esthetic forms is beyond the scope of a book, let alone an essay. The originary hypothesis is not a formula for reducing all cultural productions to a limited set of parameters, but rather for understanding the capacity of the human for the proliferation of degrees of freedom that constantly creates new parameters. This does not absolve us of the task of seeking the basic principles through which this historical liberation, as well as its not infrequent backsliding, manifests itself.

At the end of a ritual, there is a payoff. In the most common and fundamental rites, this is a communal meal, but we value other payoffs such as ceremonial honors, conferral of a new status, or even imposition of punishment, which satisfies the group that its laws must be obeyed. The end of an esthetic experience, in contrast, is just that; a cocktail reception after a play is not part of the play.

We must assume that the pleasure that artworks procure is ultimately the “same” cultural satisfaction as that of ritual: deferring the dangers of mimetic desire and reestablishing the human community. But as if in anticipation of the expulsion of sacrifice from religious ritual itself in the “higher religions,” the existence of “secular” art is an implicit recognition of our definition of the human as the species for whom internal conflict rather than the inhospitality of the natural world poses the greatest danger. We cannot live without eating, but what poses the primary obstacle to the satisfaction of our needs is our potential to do violence to ourselves, which must be regulated from without, even if from an anthropological perspective there is no transcendent order-imposing force other than that of the community itself.

Within the artwork, the single will of the artist has already guaranteed this order. It is up to the recipients of the work to judge whether they find it an effective organizing agent of what Georges Poulet called le temps humain, the human time that gives “meaning to life” in a sense not accessible to other species, that makes our lives “stories” that we seek to conceive as meaningful—and for which art provides models of meaningfulness. The closed human time of the artwork is a self-sufficient block, whether or not the work itself constrains the time of its consumption, as in the case of a film or work of music, or leaves it free as the time in which we examine a painting, or the hours or days during which we read a novel. In these cases, we construct the work in our imagination, and the time we spend constructing it is not the human time of the work.

As with religion, the revelations of art are not pre-formed in the experience of the originary scene, as homunculi were once thought to be in the germ-plasm, yet all artworks, like all religions, can be understood as interpretations of this scene. Which means, in the first place, that there are no a priori limits on the value to be assigned to an interpretation: some are clearly valueless, others acquire a value only après coup, and others are recognized as valuable immediately. But even the most established works of art remain of value only because new generations choose them to be so, as they choose anew their religious beliefs.

The origin of the linguistic sign coincides with the origin of human intentionality, and the freedom with which we choose to accept the “meaning” of the sign, a freedom that may equally well be called faith, as Derrida appears to have realized in one of his later writings (see Chronicle 340), is no different in nature from the freedom and faith by which we “believe in” God or accept the beauty of a work of art. But the faith of everyday language is closely bound to the practical world, where the truth-value of our assertions is not simply a matter of choice. We can choose to claim that 2+2=5, as in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and even choose it as an alternative to what has lately been stigmatized as “white” mathematical objectivity, but we can’t send rockets to the moon or calculate our taxes if we fail to accept the conclusions implied by the definitions and axioms of arithmetic, or by the constraints of the natural world. In the world of art, as in that of religion, no such rules apply. Thus a history of art, beyond a factual listing of works and their reception, is itself a faith-based process. Just as each new anthropology redoes past history in its image, so it redoes art history, and just as faith, however free, is accompanied by a sense of unprovable but real necessity, so it is with our faith in the temporal progression or regression of artworks.

Just as with religious belief, faith in art is the acceptation of an imaginary scenic world. Although the difference is real, one cannot deny the similarity between “suspension of disbelief” in a fiction and belief in a religious assertion. In neither case is there a demonstrable real-world guarantee of the signs we take either as true in reality or as true within the scene of representation—and I would insist again on how similar these acts of faith really are. The originary hypothesis explains the phenomenon of institutional representation as our cultural reproduction of the virtual agreement of the human community to share the effect of the sign, and thereby to find in its sharing a basis for common desire, deferral of appetite, reciprocal communication, and eventual shared satisfaction. Although the first sign defers the appropriation of a concrete object, what remains of the sign after the originary event no longer has this object to point to, and yet its reproduction in the appropriate context recalls the communal unity of the originary deferral of violence. God, or “God,” is the subject of the force that presides over this deferral.

How then should we situate the esthetic in history? At least since the Renaissance, Western culture has been aware that art cannot be understood, in any of its genres, as essentially a series of attempts to accomplish the same goal, as we can understand the history of mathematics or astronomy. Even if all art has ultimately “the same” aim, as the evidence for human monogenesis (notably the unity of human languages) suggests, at the very least the pursuit of this global aim cannot be understood in terms of the kind of progressive improvements we find in the practical, technological, or scientific branches of culture. Whence the inevitability of “movements” in art, particularly with the development of mass communications in the 19^th century. Just as the originary hypothesis throws a new light on behaviors without whose prior contribution to our history the hypothesis would never have been conceived, so we can understand the specificity of different esthetics, their “settings” of “parameters,” only retrospectively.

In the West, before the Greek city-states there was no “secular” civilization. Statuary was hieratic, and even non-mythical narratives could not escape the divine authority of the monarch, as illustrated by the Egyptian Story of Sinuhe, which ends with the protagonist, after an interregnum “time of troubles,” being admitted in an apotheosis to the favor of the Pharaoh. Societies with sacralized rulers could no doubt produce such things as work- or love-songs, but not major artworks separate from the world of ritual and yet deemed of sufficient significance, like the Homeric epics or Athenian theater, to warrant ritual-like public presentations.

In Originary Thinking (Stanford UP, 1993, henceforth OT), I proposed applying to esthetic history a single parameter that is relevant as well to the history of philosophy in the West. GA’s minimalism suggests that we take as the independent variable of esthetic history the place within the work of the esthetic/representational scene itself, conceived as the framework within which the work evolves. Just as all culture can be understood most economically as an interpretation of the event of its origin, so the only essential difference among modes of art concerns the way in which the scene is understood as itself an element of the work’s content. (We should note the analogy with the Russell-Whitehead derivation of the numbers in set theory: defining the empty set {} as “zero,” defining “one” as the set whose sole member is the empty set {{}}, “two” as containing the first two numbers {{},{{}}} and so on ad infinitum.)

In this perspective, the classical esthetic is the neutral point of departure of secular art. In this esthetic, the scene is not itself represented within the work. There are no “plays within plays” in classical theater, nor do any other classical forms “comment” on the aptness of their subject-matter for representation.

In OT, I called the art of the entire era that followed the classical era, neo-classical, taking the position that even medieval art, if not truly neo-classical in the literal sense of deliberately returning to and thus “quoting” classical modes, makes a meta– classical distinction between existence on and off the institutional scene, as opposed to the minimal formal scene shared by all. Christian civilization foregrounds the originally Hebraic notion of election, which it understands as interpellation, such as God’s to Moses in Exodus, not merely as passive anointment. Whence the iconic importance of the Annunciation, or the significance of Dante’s interpellation by Virgil at the start of the Divine Comedy. In the neo-classical drama of the Renaissance, the fatality of the tragic hero is directly associated with his or her going on stage in a metaphorical as well as a literal sense, whether in Hamlet’s final duel-murder scene or Phèdre’s return, believing herself a widow, from her suicidal depression to confess her love to Hippolyte, who unsuccessfully seeks throughout the play to flee the fatal world of the Racinian unité de lieu.

In the romantic esthetic, the self, so to speak aware of Hamlet’s predicament, chooses to see himself as fated to mount the stage of sacrality. What Girard called the mensonge romantique is the human subject’s notion that he is indeed motivated by such a “fatal” desire rather than by one imitated from the world around him. After 1848, the post-romantic esthetic expresses this disillusioned awareness, choosing in its “realist” mode precisely those who have no pretension of belonging on the sacred stage, although they may, like Emma Bovary, dream of nothing else.

Modernism seeks to reject these problematics and return to a naïve, neutral world where the fact of being “on stage” is no longer thematized nor privileged in any way. But in order to do this, the modernist must espouse a primitivism that denies the layers of cultural accretion that have brought modern humanity to the stage of post-romantic decadence. This esthetic of de-civilization has its political analogue in fascism. To take the stage simply because, like Nietzsche’s blond beast, one is there by right (for Nietzsche, only the man of ressentiment remembers the cultural past) is to incite a battle to the death for primacy, a return, in a world of deadly modern weaponry, to the enslave-or-kill politics of the archaic empires.

And so, following Auschwitz and Hiroshima, we finally reach the stage of the postmodern, which looks with skepticism at any attempt to relate the esthetic scene to the fundamental ethics of life. The postmodern sees art as a means to “express” whatever ethical position it advocates; it affects to understand all previous esthetics as having become available simply as styles that can be adopted without buying into the anthropology they once seemed to (and were often claimed by their adherents to) embody. Hence on the one hand, the creator is free from all esthetic constraints, but on the other, he is unable to know to what extent his choices are not dictated by previous esthetic experiences; the author is both master and slave of the artistic text.

Where we can or shall go from here, what further esthetics may be conceivable, is unclear. Is the postmodern truly a post-esthetic, the sign of the exhaustion of the esthetic “progress” that the modernists so strongly believed in? I will have some further speculations on this subject in a subsequent Chronicle.

The esthetic is the most mysterious of anthropological categories. Indeed, given that language itself produces esthetic effects, there is no aspect of representation that does not touch on the esthetic—which makes it all the more difficult to understand. It is most simply seen as a quality that inheres in certain objects (“the beautiful”), whether natural or created. Yet it is experienced as an effect on the perceiver rather than as the realization of an objective quality in the thing perceived (“beauty is in the eye of the beholder”). And we freely apply “beautiful” and similar terms not just to representations, but to attractive human beings, particularly those of the opposite sex, as well as to actions, landscapes, flowers, sunsets…

The esthetic cannot be understood without postulating an internal scene of representation on which the recipient of a sign, formal or institutional, or a worldly perception experienced as significant, “imagines” the referent of the sign. Although we cannot reject the analogy between our sense of beauty and the preference animals show for attractive features, notably in possible mates, as evidenced by the evolution of “esthetic” elements like the peacock’s tail that have no practical function, like all prehuman sign-systems, animal “esthetics” lacks the mediating element of the scene of representation. When we find beauty in a natural object, or in another person, we are not simply reacting to a stimulus, nor can beauty be equated with sexual attractiveness. On the contrary, the esthetic effect participates in the deferral of the appetitive, to the point where the reverence inspired by beauty inhibits desire—indeed, enhances it by inhibiting it, making it “transgressive.”

In the use of language to convey information, we do not dwell on the signs themselves, but use them as instruments to construct the thoughts they represent. We can leave it to the neuroscientists to discover how these thoughts are implemented in the brain, and in what sense it is useful to speak of a mentalese into which signs are “translated.” From my layman’s perspective, although one may usefully speak of a common signified represented in different ways in different languages (dog, Hund, chien…), and even à la rigueur of the Platonic “idea” of Dog, the idea of an internal Ursprache of the brain strikes me as an invitation to infinite regress.

The iconic representations of the plastic arts, the sounds of music that belong to what we can broadly call a representational universe although they don’t “represent” anything, have superficially little in common with the signs of language. What is constant in the esthetic effect across all these different arts is the persistence of the sign, or the natural object experienced as a sign—recalling that experiencing the central object as the signified of a sign rather than an object of appetite was in our hypothesis the originary human experience—in connection with the imaginary universe it evokes.

Music and language have little else in common, but in both cases, the attention of the recipient of an esthetic performance, incapable of the formal “transparency” possible with language, oscillates between the sign and the imaginary construction it evokes. In the case of a plastic artwork with no temporal component, the spectator constructs from the signs of the work an imaginary world. In classical “realistic” art, this world was modeled on the life-world; in non-objective art, analogously to music, the patterns evoked by the work are only partly or not at all mimetic of worldly experience, but in either case, the spectator must constantly return to the work to guarantee and verify his imaginary construction. In works that take place over time, this construction is constantly modified by continuous attention to the work itself in its temporal unfolding.

In either case, the sign-universe of the artwork or the natural object that we react to “esthetically” provides us with “entertainment” by immersing us in an imaginary world that we must rely on our experience of the work to provide. We are thereby “diverted” from the uncertainties of the life-world to the witnessing of one that, like the originary event, is or appears to be presided over by a single subject. The esthetic effect, that is, requires the recipient’s submission to the authorial will that presides over the work. Although we recognize the will of the artist as that of another human being, this mode of submission is nothing like the queue-structured submissive behavior of non-human animals; it is modeled on our relationship to the sacred subject that presided over the originary scene. A Pascal might ask how it is possible to remain an atheist and yet enjoy works of art; can we find it acceptable for our fellow humans to adopt a transcendental role to entertain us, yet reject the reality of the role itself in our life-world? Yet we can just as well take the opposite view, that a world ruled by God’s will is conceivable only as a fiction.

The oscillation of our attention between the details of the work and the imaginary construction it evokes in us is experienced as what I called in the previous Chronicle the closure of the artwork. In contrast, in the domain of religious ritual, the sacred presides over the rite but at no point do we imaginarily construct it. As opposed to fictional personages or such “objects” as musical sequences, the sacred remains beyond the signs by which we evoke it. Even in primitive religions, the “idol-worship” suggested by the condemnation of “graven images” is never more than a temptation for the worshipers themselves, taking the esthetic effect of the idol as proof that the sacred inheres in it rather than presides over it.

If we seek the origin of the esthetic effect in the originary event, it occurs at the moment at which the sign, which began as simply an appropriative movement toward a desirable object, becomes a means of designating it that re-presents it to the other participants of the scene. If it be asked, how can we know how such a moment would have been experienced, our answer can only be: by analogy with later esthetic experiences. But in the same way that worship inheres in the relationship of these first humans to the center inhabited by an object they cannot for the moment possess, the esthetic is inherent in the birth of the sign, in its becoming a Gestalt to be achieved as a representation of its referent. However formalized signs may become, they must be formed, and as such are in principle objects of care whose transparency to their object—the use of language that Sartre famously associated with prose—can be “opacified” with respect to any of their components. In works of art, literary as well as iconic, this opacification is the very point, since we rely on the details of the work to continually rebuild the static or changing objects of our imagination.

The problem with “understanding” art, like religion, is that institutional representation is not designed to “convey ideas” and cannot therefore be reduced to a schematic or algorithmic sequence. Whether the representations are passively received, like the elements of an artwork, or participated in, as in a religious ceremony, they cannot be understood as instruments for arriving at a conclusion that could be defined independently of them, as do in principle the elements of an expository discourse, most rigorously in the “hard sciences.” The interest of the “digital humanities” is that the practitioners of Big Data, by investigating the construction and reception of institutional representations without regard to the “emic” discourses by which we describe and discuss them, become able to discover parameters implicit in the composition of these representations of which their creators and/or consumers may never have been aware. On this basis, these researchers can entertain the project of one day constructing algorithms capable of creating artworks, and perhaps even religious systems, that rival those now in existence.

But it is best to suspend this discussion until any such algorithms have shown themselves able to do more than fool a few people into giving them a passing score on the “Turing test.” I think we can also postpone until then our decision as to whether we should just forget about originary anthropology and concentrate on “posthumanism.” Although to judge by the relative interest these subjects arouse, one gets the impression that we have already made this decision in advance. Perhaps, like certain cultures, human self-consciousness will reach senility without ever having passed through maturity.

To put the thrust of this analysis in the simplest terms: the esthetic and the religious are elusive because they are not meant to be understood in the same way that we can understand scientific discourse or, with all its paradoxes, that of philosophy. Religion is easier to understand than art because it bears its transcendental character on its face. The point of worship is to reinforce, or to put it more strongly, to regenerate, the numinous quality that in our hypothesis originally derives from the fear of violent disorder with the collapse of the primate pecking order. (Although this seems obvious enough, I have never once seen this point made by “professional” anthropologists, even those who are experts in primate behavior.)

But if the sacred is “just” the fear of disorder, how can we square this with our reverence for the divine? This is in a sense “the ultimate question” whose answer is “the meaning of (human) life.” But the originary hypothesis allows us, if not to determine this “meaning,” to define the limits of the human understanding of it.

The interval between fearing to grab for the meat and deferring one’s grabbing so that it becomes understood by the others as a sign is the birth moment of humanity. This is surely the most significant evolutionary development since the origin of life. But just as faith in uniformitarianism makes today’s scientists feverishly anxious to find life duplicated all over the universe, although no shred of evidence for extraterrestrial living creatures has ever been found (see Chronicle 513), it should be no surprise that we are even more invested in trivializing the human, reducing the emergence of language to just one step among others in primate evolution (see Chronicle 567 for a recent example). This Enlightenment skepticism is just the expression of the fear of the sacred by other means.

We worship God because by showing the proper respect for human origins, we maximize our chances of avoiding self-destruction. That doesn’t mean that religion is superstition, that “God is not good,” and other such nonsense. If we are truly humanists and want to do without God, we must find a way to show this same reverence to “man,” or “humankind”—but then there is no object of worship before us, since “man” is a concept that, unlike other species-concepts, cannot be understood by examining a single example.

This is not because humans are like ants that act only collectively, so that the anthill, not the individual ant, is the “real” living organism. On the contrary, humans alone are individuals. But their individuality exists only as part of a sign-sharing community. The inability to speak attendant on being brought up among animals like the “wild child” is a permanent exile from humanity. In order to show the proper reverence for what maintains the human community, we conceive of transcendental beings necessarily beyond any images we may construct of them.

When the Greeks made statues of the Gods and the Hebrews forbade them, their sacred transcendence was the same, although the latter’s iconoclasm reflected a clearer understanding of it. No Greek thought that the statue “resembled” Zeus or Poseidon; these were imaginings designed to provoke the effect of numinosity that arouses worship, and ultimately that reminds us that the human community is the product of a deferral of our “instincts” in the face of a force that, however anthropology may try to explain it, is knowable only in its effects, not in its “being.” Once one begins to understand this, the “unknowability” of religion and art are no longer mysterious. In both cases, it is their effect that is essential, and this effect is irreducible to a series of declarative sentences.

In the next Chronicle in this series, I will turn to the relationship between institutional representation and history.

In the previous Chronicle 575, I attempted to show in what way GA simplifies and unifies the various discourses humanity has elaborated in order to explain its existence. Theology, philosophy, and anthropology have as their explicit function to explain what can broadly be called the human world, in the first case, by describing what appear to be the transcendental forces that presided over its creation, in the second, by seeking the foundations of the mental processes of humans as “thinking” beings, and in the third, by seeking to extrapolate from the most primitive known forms of humanity to the origin of the human species as it evolved from our primate relatives.

Whether or not the reader is persuaded by our arguments, at the very least it is impossible to contest their applicability. In the first two cases at least, the unique specificity of the human is presupposed. Whatever divine beings are postulated, clearly only humans are able to speak of or to them, even if mythical discourse may include animals and inanimate objects among its actors. And philosophy may speak of “Being,” but only the human is aware of it; as Heidegger put it in his Wagnerian prose, man is the “shepherd” (Hirt) of Being—a relationship that GA expresses rather more precisely. As for anthropology, the very fact that of all species we alone can conceive of studying ourselves along with the natural world makes our uniqueness impossible to ignore, although many have done their best to do so.

To speak of discourse, religious, philosophical, or scientific, in terms of its content is to consider it as formal representation, that is, as language “transparent” to its meaning, signifiers designating their signified. But whereas the operations of formal representation can be addressed by examining the components of “natural” languages, all of which greatly resemble each other, and can in principle be translated into one another with only minor difficulties, the institutional realm, that of ritual and art, cannot be defined by such simple aims as “thinking” or “conveying information,” nor can its “grammar” be summed up in a compendious set of rules. Reproducing or repeating the originary event is very different from using a system of signs to communicate about the world, even about the human as part of the world.

Let us recapitulate what is formal and what is institutional in the originary sign. Its “formality” is its transparency to its “meaning.” The gesture that was to be part of an act of appropriation is separated from its original goal and comes to designate the appropriable object. The formal relation is not one of desire, but of communication, of the exchange of “information,” which in this minimal case is the information that this object belongs to a new category, which we may call indifferently the significant or the sacred. The object of the first sign stands in an entirely new relationship to its designators. What guarantees the experience as historic, for the first time establishing it as an event in collective memory, is that it defers the potential of mimetic conflict, inaugurating a mode of communal appropriation that takes the place of the queue structure of the animal pecking-order.

The chief problem of secular anthropological thought since the beginning has been its reluctance to see the emergence of the human “deferral of violence through representation” as something absolutely new in history. Religions grasp this uniqueness, but explain it as a manifestation of the divine rather than as an act of human self-creation. And no doubt it cannot be thought as such until humanity has become able to demystify or simply “bracket” its attributions of sacrality/significance and face up to the necessity of a purely humanistic description of the process. Which is not at all the same thing as the “Enlightenment” view that there is really nothing to explain, that religious faith is superstition, and that human intelligence is just an extension of animal intelligence. Atheism only becomes a respectable intellectual position when we can explain in human terms all the phenomena that depend on the sacred, including human language. The marginality up to now of “atheistic” GA shows how far we are from this goal.

If in formal systems, natural language and its derivatives, the sign is so to speak transparent to its meaning, efficiency being of the essence, conversely, the temporality of institutional representation recalls that of the originary event in order to reproduce/reinforce its peace-making effect. Thus the duration of a rite, as opposed to the communication of a piece of information, must be sufficient to absorb the energies of the group and refocus them on the sacred center, not merely as an intended object of perception, but as an object of worship. This is familiar to us from our own religious ceremonies in the Judeo-Christian and other traditions, supplemented within the everyday world by briefer ceremonial acts such as greetings, blessings, ritual gestures, and the like.

In pre-civilized societies, there is no real distinction between the narratives, music, and images that belong to ritual and those that comprise what will later be called “art.” But along with more complex forms of social organization, variants of ritual forms appear that are no longer linked to religious practice and that constitute an increasingly important independent cultural sector.

Starting with Aristotle’s Poetics, there have been countless attempts to explain what can broadly be called “the esthetic.” Whereas the aim of the humanistic disciplines is to formalize humanity’s self-knowledge, or to put it in less “atheistic” terms, our knowledge of (our) ultimate reality, the aim of art, whatever knowledge it may convey, is above all to entertain us, or as Pascal put it, to divert us from this ultimate reality. This is true whether or not art may be said to teach us about the world or ourselves, or to provide spiritual therapy by “the catharsis of pity and terror” or as “music soothes the savage breast.” And whereas expository discourse, however elaborate, obeys the ideal of minimality expressed by Ockham’s razor, the arts thrive on multiplicity. A work of art, of whatever nature, requires a certain time to assimilate, and cannot be “reduced to lowest terms.”

We may be said to have both a broad and a narrow conception of the esthetic. On the one hand, it characterizes an aspect of the effect on the spectator/participant of all institutional representation, whether or not explicitly in the religious realm; on the other, it refers specifically to the effect sought in the independent domain of “the arts.” And within this latter domain, we note that what were originally intended as religious artifacts and ceremonies may be experienced in “secular” terms, as artworks not contributing explicitly to a communal end.

Pascal’s term divertissement expresses a disapproval of “diversion” (which for Pascal includes far more than the arts) from the perspective of one who sees the essential task of human beings as contemplating their sinfulness and their consequent need for divine grace. For Pascal, the aim of human thought is to realize its inadequacy to explain itself without invoking a transcendental agency, rather than to “divert” itself with self-contained human activities such as art, games, and appetitive acts.

But in taking note of the curious similarity between “diversion”/divertissement and “deferral”/différance, we realize that the religious attitude that Pascal expresses is precisely the inverse of the “natural” attitude from which the sacred itself, and the sign that manifests it, seeks to “divert” us, which is to say, an appropriative drive not subordinated to the maintenance of the community. We have called the originary sign an aborted gesture of appropriation, but we might equally well have called it a diverted gesture, since it is in our hypothesis turned back upon itself from its original aim to become a means of communication with one’s fellows, a symbolic sign as opposed to a merely occasional or indexical one demonstrating its worldly purpose.

In other words, the originary sign was a “diversion” from the appetitive drive toward the object of desire whose pursuit had proved too dangerous. This cultural deviation from the world of appetitive drives—for animal inhibition deviates from the appetitive for what remain appetitive/instinctive reasons—was by that very fact enshrined as the originary act of the human. Much later, the revelation of the priority of human peace over the satisfaction of appetite was made explicit by the Christian substitution of a “miraculous” transubstantiation for the nourishing sacrificial feast, with parallel developments in other religions. Once there is no more direct alimentary benefit to religious practice, it reveals its essence as a celebration of the deferral of the appetitive, something that humans alone can achieve.

What then is the esthetic effect common to religious and secular institutional representations? In the first place, we note that religious representations always involve at least a modicum of participation, whereas making the spectator “participate” in art is possible only as a transgression of his normal role. Indeed, we can’t help be aware that there is no general term appropriate for the recipient of an artwork; spectator hardly applies to concert-goers, let alone readers. But in all cases, save for the marginal exception noted, the role is a passive one. One can attend a ballet and watch the dancers, but if one goes to a “dance,” one is no longer enjoying an artistic performance. Conversely, we would not use a word like “spectator” to describe one who attends a church service, even if all the actions are performed by persons in a priestly role. The performance of a classical mass or oratorio is on the margin of what can be considered a religious rite; listening to Bach’s Mass in B Minor is not analogous to attending mass, although listening to Verdi’s Requiem may be.

How can we separate the strictly ritual element of religious activities from their esthetic element? The esthetic effect of a religious service is meant to be experienced as a sign of reverence for the sacred and not to be dwelt on for its own sake; it is an ornament, not an essential component of devotion. This suggests that, on the contrary, secular art may be defined by its self-sufficiency, its closure. It is the danger of esthetic closure that provokes among the religious the suspicion of idolatry, and that motivates iconoclastic movements in which religious rites are purged of the esthetic temptations occasioned by “graven images” and the like.

In a simple sacrificial rite, the appetitive conclusion is dependent on the transcendental function of the sacred that inheres in the scene of representation and its extra-human source, just as the deferral of the appropriative gesture is both a sacrifice of one’s appetite to a “higher power” and the guarantee of a superior appetitive outcome. But with the replacement of this conclusion by a purely spiritual one, the spiritual itself paradoxically risks becoming a source of “esthetic pleasure” no longer connected to sacred transcendence.

Whereas religious rites are focused clearly enough on reinforcing communal reciprocity and redirecting resentment toward cooperative ends, neither the social function of artworks nor the source of the pleasure they give us is similarly obvious. Yet they are an important part of most lives, increasingly so as humanity liberates itself from activities of survival. In particular, the proliferation of “screenic” culture in the modern era: first cinema, then television, computers, and now cell phones, has led to the saturation of everyday life by the esthetic as never before. It seems clear that when people are given “leisure time,” they fill great portions of it by “consuming” works of art, whether or not they take advantage of the facilities accorded by contemporary media to create artworks of their own.

Thus it remains to us to explore the nature of the esthetic effect and the pleasure it brings.

To be continued…

It is Generative Anthropology (GA)’s ambition, not to synthesize the substance of these discourses, let alone to “inter-disciplinarize” them, but to trace them back to their originary roots and explain why they diverged, and why their diverse paths were in some sense necessary.

In The Origin of Language (TOOL) I made a fundamental distinction between two ways of “commemorating” or “reproducing” or “repeating” the originary scene: the formal and institutional reproduction of the scene. None of these words corresponds exactly to what I am referring to, which is the fundamental representational behavior, using the “same” representation at different times either to characterize analogous preexisting situations or to create replicas of them. On the one hand, language, which repeats the scenic device of designating the center of attention; on the other, ritual, which reproduces the scene’s participatory element, characteristically ending with an alimentary payoff, although this may be “transcended” in what we call the “higher religions.” In one case, we regenerate the scene itself, as though society had fallen into what Girard calls a “mimetic crisis” and needed reconstitution, or as Durkheim put it, to reinforce its “solidarity”; in the other, the scene is taken for granted and used to shed on new matters the kind of attention originarily given only to the sacred center and its supremely desirable occupant.

Whereas the ritual commemoration of the originary event is directly concerned with this origin, such is not the case for formal representation or language. At some point, perhaps quite some time after language began to be used, the center of the scene of linguistic representation, unlike that of ritual, becomes desacralized, and language acquires its “secular” functions of expressing worldly desires (imperative) and finally of furnishing information through (declarative) predication about the world. Nothing about this use of language destines it to be used for reflection on the “human condition,” whereas ritual and the discourses that are attached to it, whether derived directly from ceremonies or elaborated on their basis (myths, sacred legends, prayers), are by nature reflections on this originary sacred/significant reality.

Which is to say that what we may call “anthropological” discourse in the broadest sense, representations concerning the foundation or “creation” of the human, were until the inauguration of philosophy in ancient Greece the exclusive domain of ritual-related or religious discourse. And as those engaged in the modern science of anthropology realized from the beginning, religious discourses offer a privileged insight into early humanity’s self-image, just as the texts of the higher religions still furnish our deepest intuitions about the human.

Philosophy is from the beginning a meditation on life in a polis freed from sacred kingship. Ethics is its central concern, and the faith that subtends it, which is made explicit by Socrates/Plato, is that the community can come together around a common concept of the Good, as we would say that it did originarily around a common designation of the sacred.

As I have attempted to show (see “Plato and The Birth of Conceptual Thought,” https://anthropoetics.org/journal/ap-vol-2/ap0202/plato/) the key ethical concept of the metaphysics instituted by Plato is that, given that the human community shares the Ideas and their moral valence, rightly understood, its members should never come into conflict. Thus when Plato claims that the Good is something we all seek, the idea that “goods” are indexical, that my good is not the same as yours and may indeed be opposed to it, is an illusion of desire that can never be valid in principle. Doing evil to others for one’s own immediate advantage is never truly in one’s interest, since the Good is in the interest of the entire community. But in contrast with a given community’s faith in a specific embodiment of the sacred, the Good does not require what we would call an ostensive act of faith, since for the philosopher, the Idea subsists independently of the human community.

What allows us to have faith in this assertion is the fact of our shared language itself, in which the Ideas are formulated. Which points to the key limitation of metaphysics: its insistence on the primordiality of propositional language, of the declarative sentence, whose “self-evidence” philosophy never puts into question, and indeed, can never think of as being capable of being put into question. Reference to Socrates/Plato as the founders of the “discipline” of philosophy, as the term “pre-Socratics” suggests, makes clear that it is their reification of predicates such as (the) Good, Courage, Beauty… that distinguishes full-fledged philosophy from the less disciplined meditations that we find in their predecessors. The postulation, which we need not call “faith,” that these predicates have a single meaning that can be elucidated by analyzing their usage is the very basis of philosophy, which is to say that philosophy is founded on our common possession of formal as opposed to institutional representation, in a word, of language as our common possession and the principle of our unity. But what this means is that, unlike religion, which conceives of itself in one way or other as the commemoration of our moment of origin, philosophy cannot conceive of an origin of language, or of a conception of language in which the declarative sentence or proposition is not present from the outset. It is this fundamental characteristic that is best understood as the definition of metaphysics.

The social sciences are a different story, with a history that is far less clear. But they all have their roots in the Early Modern period, and their ancestors in antiquity. Tracing their history is not germane to my purpose here, which is to define an originary anthropology that can be compared with religious and philosophical “origins.” The fact that philosophy cannot conceive a state of “being” without language (philosophical speculations on the origin of language, being detached from the problematic of philosophical language itself, are already a form of “social science”) means that it cannot approach a truly anthropological conception of origin. Hegel’s point of departure in Being, which Heidegger and even Sartre did not reject, is mystified in its very nature, given that “Being” is a word of human language, not a “thing” or “substance” that can be pointed to in the world. Indeed, in the Western religious tradition, it is God who defines himself as “being what/that I am.” Whereas, whatever its limitations, the social science of anthropology can at least address the problem of the worldly origin of language, and consequently, of the human, painting a plausible picture of the world as being at one moment without (language-using) humans and at a subsequent moment becoming home to them.

Because it accepts the temporal existence of humanity, which necessarily involves a beginning within a world that already includes other life-forms, the social science of anthropology should have no difficulty in principle in considering GA’s originary hypothesis, and more generally, the idea of an originary event. Yet this is precisely what anthropology as a social science has never considered. The reconstruction of a hypothetical originary event, as inaugurated by Freud’s Totem and Taboo and pursued by René Girard, has never been accepted into the anthropological canon.

The search for a minimal definition of the human implies a punctual origin, since the human is a creature of events, and events are significant, not merely unnoticeable “happenings” that add up over the millennia, such as transformations of DNA through mutations. One can certainly quarrel with Freud’s metapsychological definition of the human as it emerges from his father-murder scenario, as well as with Girard’s simplification of it into “emissary murder,” but today the very possibility of a scientific as opposed to a religious or philosophical scene of origin is not so much refuted as rejected on methodological grounds. Because we cannot hope to find empirical evidence for such an event in what remains to us of the bones and artifacts of our distant ancestors, the whole question is abandoned in favor of an eventless gradualism.

No doubt the example of the physical sciences, where from a human perspective, objective, natural “events” can be said to occur, leads science-thinking astray. For clearly there is a difference in time-scale between a planet orbiting a star, making its way around its orbit over millions of years, and a supernova, or a collision between black holes. And indeed, we have no evidence of anything in “prehistoric” evolution that corresponds to the latter as opposed to the former. But the analogy is faulty. Planets and stars have no culture. Celestial bodies don’t remember the changes that occur in them, whether (from a human perspective) imperceptibly or suddenly, even if they bear their physical imprint. We fail to see the difference, because for us events, in nature as well as human history, are what is memorable to the community that recalls them, in language and/or in reenactment, as human society recalls supernovae and eclipses but not each moment of a star’s daily routine.

Thus the intuition that human culture begins with an event is by no means refuted by exposing the naiveté of a given hypothetical event’s purported motivations. Even the “Oedipus complex” as the memory residue of guilt for an originary father-murder is worthy of more than a sneer. To grasp what Derrida would later call deferral as the primary human characteristic, whose origin must be given a plausible etiology, is to take a great step toward reconciling the religious accounts of human origin with the Sartrian pour-soi, the most refined metaphysical picture of the human scene of representation.

The Oedipus complex is, as Girard has pointed out, an overloaded formulation, the specificity of the paternal relation being obviously dependent on a far from universal form of family relations. But if all this is stripped away, Freud’s scenario depicts the origin of guilt and withdrawal more insistently than Girard’s own “scapegoating” scenario, where any final withdrawal is the result of satiation rather than a sense of interdiction. Yet the originary hypothesis needs not be encumbered with Freud’s specificity, nor even Girard’s, where the “emissary victim” is drawn from the group and singled out for expulsion on the example of the scapegoat in Leviticus.

I have no intention of blaming the excessive specificity of these scenarios for the discredit into which all “myths of origin” have fallen. The problem of methodology that rejects a priori any such scene because it cannot be empirically demonstrated is of a more general nature. I have discussed elsewhere (see Chronicle 555) how “Big Data” has captured the social science imagination by its ability to provide results beyond our capacity for conceptual intuition, somewhat in the same way that a computer has recently “taught itself” to master Go, using only the rules and not the human history of the game. Unfortunately, in explaining cultural phenomena, as opposed to winning at board games, one cannot avoid the “emic” realm of the conceptual, as well as the origin of the realm of the conceptual itself, that is, of language, within a pre-human universe.

Whence the pertinence of both Freud’s and Girard’s emphasis on violence, extrapolated in different ways from the prevalence of sacrifice in ritual—although, curiously enough, both models ignore the obvious alimentary function of sacrifice. Perhaps the Jews no longer bring their sacrifices to the Temple in Jerusalem, but as anyone knows who has attended a Seder, or for that matter, a Christmas dinner, the important thing in these ceremonies is sharing a meal. But if that is the case, why do humans need a cultural superstructure to do what animals accomplish without it? This chain of reasoning leads us, as expected, to the originary hypothesis.

The insistence on deferring violence at the expense of alimentary satisfaction no doubt owes its intuitive evidence to the “higher religions.” Christianity’s abolition of sacrifice reflects the destruction of the Temple and the end of its sacrificial activities. A similar withdrawal is visible in Buddhism and even in Hinduism. But although it is true that these religions embody a more lucid and therefore more originary anthropology than more primitive ones, this implication is not equivalent to a minimal hypothesis.

John’s “In the beginning was the Logos” sums up GA’s ambition to combine religion, philosophy, and anthropology in a formula more striking than any other, including our own admittedly less dramatic definition of the human as the deferral of violence through representation. But John’s sentence must be interpreted, for it attributes human transcendence to an extra-human source. Girard’s own disinterest in the alimentary element of sacrifice has always seemed to me a simple consequence of the equivalence of Christ with the “Word,” and the consequent dematerialization of ritual sacrifice into transubstantiation in the communion ceremony. Such practices no doubt embody a more profound spiritual intuition than that which presides over traditional animal sacrifice, but they are only possible because their participants can rely on a more advanced social order for physical nourishment. The deferral of violence is indeed the essence of Christianity and of religion in general, but its divorce from alimentation is a step forward that only through analysis clarifies the sense of the original “sacrificial” event.

Only the originary hypothesis has successfully offered such an analysis. Indeed, the fact that its explanation is so clear, so simple, makes it easy to understand why, like the emperor’s birthday suit, it has been ignored for thirty-seven years. I have more faith in its truth than in humanity’s capacity to absorb it. But I have not yet altogether lost that faith either.

The opposition between the ostensive and the declarative elements of culture is not one of linguistic forms, but of fundamental modes of human communication. The root of human culture is the birth and rebirth of the community in the sharing of the ostensive sign, as a mark of the deferral of individual appetite and its integration into the will of the group, subordinate to the scenic center of desire. Essential to this foundation is the ability of all to produce the sign and thereby affirm both this deferral and the designation of its central cause. The detachment of this act of designation from its originary object, and its focus on a figure of the center as inhabited by a conscious will that we intuit on the basis of our own, are what justifies the dictum that theology is good anthropology. We understand ourselves as we understand this central force, and ultimately there is no anthropology without theology. But GA’s “theology” is designed to defer indefinitely any attribution to this force of powers over phenomena other than human—whence the second half of the formula, that theology is bad cosmology.

GA is a new way of thinking because it constitutes a substantially new starting point for reflection on the human. This reflection includes all three families of discourse in which humanity has expressed its self-understanding: anthropology, philosophy, and theology, with the proviso that the dogmatic mode of the latter is incompatible with the hypothetical mode of science. Thus although we can endorse John’s “In the beginning was the Word/logos,” we must distinguish our hypothetical reading from the apodictic one originally intended.

It would be pleasant to think that given the radical nature of the shift GA proposes (I would not call it a “paradigm shift,” since we are resetting the boundaries of the fields of study themselves), it must correspond in some way with a major advance in human welfare. But the mindset of GA militates against prophecy; the history of human culture is one of continual revelation about ourselves and the world, but also of frequent backsliding and disaster.

The reciprocal communication of the ostensive sign in the hypothetical originary scene establishes the moral model against which we measure the morality of all our interactions. Corroborating this assertion is our readiness to resent any infraction of reciprocity, even when social constraints prevent us from acting on this resentment. The originary hypothesis offers the only plausible explanation for this phenomenon, which we find so “natural” that we see no need to justify it. It is not that we conserve some visceral memory-trace of the euphoria of the first emission of the sign around the sacred object, but that this model of moral equality is the foundation of the human community, as commemorated institutionally in religious rites as well as in civic and national ones, and formally in our common capacity for language.

But although the equality that consists in all emitting the same ostensive sign creates and maintains the community, this form of language cannot be used to think, to create potential verbal models of reality that can be empirically tested. It is only with the declarative proposition, by means of predication, that we can say something, true or false, about the world. Yet once the world imposes on our language a criterion of truth, the community can no longer be confident in sharing and reciprocally exchanging it. Once we are no longer commemorating the originary event but adventuring into external reality, some will speak about it more correctly than others. This, not superior physical force, is the source of the hierarchies humanity has experienced ever since the first “big-man” put together enough surplus food to unbalance the previously symmetrical cycle of “totem” feasts and dominate the ritual system.

GA differentiates itself from philosophy/metaphysics in its insistence that the declarative sentence is not the originary, “natural” form of language, but could only have emerged as an evolutionary development of the ostensive, with the imperative serving as an intermediary stage.

In The Origin of Language (TOOL), I hypothesize that the imperative emerges from the “inappropriate” use of the ostensive sign, normally emitted in the presence of its referent, as a means to (re)produce this referent in its absence, as a child hearing “mommy” as his mother’s “name” will call it in her absence to make her appear. We must assume that at the origin, the correspondence of word and referent is not yet understood as the product of an “arbitrary” act on the part of the human speakers; it is the sacred central referent, for the moment inaccessible, that seems to command the signs we use to refer to it.

Thus the imperative is an extension of the ostensive to refer to a non-present reality, which its interlocutor is commanded to make present. But this making-present is a real-world action, one vulnerable to failure. The declarative comes into existence as a response to an imperative that could not be obeyed, making use of language to correct a prior non-correspondence of language with external reality. The act of predication reflects the failure of the interlocutor, or in a more general sense, of “the world,” to respond to the “magical” use of the ostensive-as-imperative in order to make present its referent or signified. With the declarative, language becomes for the first time the instrument of a “reality principle” that cannot be obviated by the sacred accord of the community.

In the originary event, all had to renounce their desire, and the ostensive sign was the mark of this renunciation, but the payoff of this shared gesture was the ability to peacefully share the (edible) object of contention as a group purged of its former pecking-order hierarchy, that is, as a community. The obstacle overcome by the originary ostensive, in other words, was internal to the proto-human community, however much it must have appeared to the group as imposed by an external force centered in the object of common desire. In contrast, the renunciation imposed by the declarative is not determined by the community itself, and consequently guarantees no communal payoff. At best, further action will be required to bring about the success of the original imperative, whose goal may well have to be abandoned for a lesser one.

Thus at this stage the moral equality of the human community is no longer germane to the task at hand. If at the origin, all are in principle both equally obliged and equally capable of renouncing and subsequently of sharing, when it comes to responding to the worldly situation brought about by a failed imperative, not all are equally able. An individual who succeeds in righting the situation may well feel entitled to a reward beyond that of the others. Yet just as those who first understood the originary sign as a sign and not merely an aborted gesture of appropriation presumably received no reward beyond the common distribution, so in hunter-gatherer societies down to the present day, the more adept are as a rule forced to share equally with the others. Hunters are expected to bring back their prey to the group and divide it up evenly. Until such time as the cultivation of land permits the accumulation of a surplus that can be exchanged for a superior social position, these societies remain egalitarian.

But by the same token, contrary to their Rousseauean idealization, these societies are characteristically violent. Egalitarianism breeds resentment. If all are supposed to be equal, then the least difference is an offense that must be avenged, leading to cyclic feuds that can span many generations. The collectivity maintains a general order, but cannot prevent “private” acts of hostility. Murder is frequent, as are the casting of spells and other attempts, rational and irrational, to even the score with those one suspects of violating the norm of communal equality.

It is this unwelcome lesson that is ignored by those who would see the social order as a great T-ball game in which no score is kept and everybody wins. Society beyond its first stages cannot function to make everyone feel equally useful and deserving of its rewards. Although Israel owes a great debt to the pioneers of the kibbutz movement, the kibbutzim have largely been converted into collective residences where the members each earn their own living. After the first, heroic generations, they had become refuges for the least ambitious members of Israeli society, and their original insistence on all sharing equally in all tasks was incompatible with the technological and managerial needs of a post-agricultural economy.

Thus the fundamental ostensive morality of the originary community must be supplemented by a declarative ethic: a way of organizing society that respects the moral equality of its members, yet does not fail to encourage the initiative, the firstness, of each individual in his or her own domain, well understanding that not all can attain an equal degree of excellence.

The contemporary West’s victimary obsession, which contrary to my prediction at the time, has drastically increased since 9/11/2001, is founded on its insistence on applying the originary model of moral equality to all examples of social difference. An exemplary case of the absurdity of this procedure in worldly terms is a recent article that disparages mathematics as an attribute of “Whiteness.” (See Chronicle 563.) We should note that the real referent of “Whiteness” here, whatever the intention of the author, is not Caucasian skin color but unmarkedness, the absence of the victimary quality presumably shared by “people of color.”

But if the moral model indeed exists from the first moment of the human, why then is it only now that victimary identity politics has taken over wide swaths of the Western political spectrum, from Mélanchon’s La France insoumise to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, and become the dominant force in the US Democratic Party?

GA’s historical explanation of the victimary phenomenon traces it back to the Holocaust’s demonstration of the horror of Nazi racialism. But the victimary is part of a historical development that began in the French Revolution, with the conception that the natural end state of the bourgeois market is some form of universal economic equality. The self-regulating market having taken over from religious ritual as the dominant source of social order, this utopian ideal had gone through various avatars since the days of Robespierre. It was on this background that the Holocaust appeared to furnish the reductio ad absurdum of any system that comes in conflict with the originary moral model by imposing de jure distinctions among human groups. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91, this contemporary version of victimary thinking in terms of ascriptive groups has largely absorbed and replaced the older Marxian class analysis.

Traditional Burkean conservatism lacks the weaponry to defend what had once been common-sense distinctions against the universal application of the criterion of moral equality. Thus objection to “marriage equality,” a notion undreamt of a couple of decades ago, is now stigmatized as “homophobia.” More ominously, schoolchildren are increasingly taught that the economic and military superiority that had led to the world dominance of Western civilization are evidence of the same racism that led the Nazis to exterminate the Jews.

None of this is based any longer on anything like a Marxist assertion of economic inevitability. It is instead founded on the notion, ever more broadly applied, that allegedly “objective” truth-values are merely masks for “white privilege.” How then do Western economies continue to function in the face of a powerful movement that constantly condemns their “injustice”?

It is at this point that we must consider the difference between ideology and reality. The difference between successful modern industrial societies and the basket cases one finds in many parts of what was once called the “third world” is that in the former, the choice of economic roles remains based predominantly on competence rather than favoritism and corruption, whether or not in the name of “socialism.”

It is something of a relief to realize, given the extent to which victimary values have become dogma, that the social order in advanced societies like the US has nonetheless not been seriously perturbed. Major scientific work continues to be done in our universities, including serious scholarship in history and the humanities, despite the vast sums devoted to what can only be called victimary studies and to the proliferation of “Deans of Diversity” and the like. Enterprises such as Google remain highly profitable despite their management’s fanatical commitment to the victimary credo, with dissenters obliged to hold their tongues or face dismissal.

The situation in Europe is if anything more severe, if less given to the “snowflake” forms of offense-taking that reflect the university focus of the victimary in the US. Nothing like the Rotherham “grooming” scandal has to my knowledge occurred here, and not even the worst American neighborhoods can be described as “no-go zones” (zones de non-droit is the sinister French term). One is almost forced to consider that the discharge of victimary resentment and the “virtue-signaling” White Guilt that accompanies it are tolerable byproducts of a social order that increasingly depends on high levels of technical skill.

As I have pointed out (see Chronicle 541), this development is not simply a matter of quantity becoming quality, as the less skilled jobs become less numerous and offer fewer paths to advancement. It reflects a social differentiation that shows signs of breaking down the common religio-civic culture that has in one form or another always held human societies together. Class distinctions are far less rigid than they were as recently as the days of Downton Abbey, but today’s status differences are more clearly rooted in skills of symbol-manipulation that reflect more than mere status. In this context, associating mathematics with “Whiteness” signals a genuine problem. No amount of approval for such nonsense will make mathematical skills less of a prerequisite for an increasing number of key positions in modern society.

GA’s derivation of today’s ascriptive victimary thinking from the moral model rooted in the event of human origin brings out not merely the underlying reason why it is impossible to contradict it directly—for the moral model is universal—but is able to account for its historical genesis. It also allows us to distinguish between the guarantee provided by originary morality and the needs of modern society, which requires an ethics of difference.

It is the critique of our supposedly “meritocratic” ethic in terms of ascriptive difference that is the real crux of today’s victimary identity politics. The justification provided for victimary moralism is not simply that all humans are moral equals, hence equally deserving, but that the ostensibly merit-based distinctions that allow for a “fair” distribution of privileges are instead based on ascriptive privilege, understood on the model of the Nazi concentration camp or antebellum slave society.

Calling mathematics a sign of “Whiteness” is not equivalent to simply denying its social value because it accords an allegedly undeserved privilege to those more skilled. It claims, with no apparent need for proof, that this privilege is unfair because it is conferred by skin color rather than by any inherent quality of intelligence. The mere fact that whites do better at math than blacks (forgetting about Asians, whose minority status is alleged only when convenient) is taken as prima facie proof of racial privilege, just as the disproportionate number of blacks in prison is often cited as proof of racial discrimination.

Originary analysis cannot “solve” this problem—the problems of difference and resentment can never be “solved.” But the virtue of this analysis is that it both clarifies the source of the values in question and shows the limits of their application. Rather than proposing a specific social model as a utopia to work toward, GA doesn’t pretend to know the future. It sees Western Civilization and the liberal democracy that embodies its values as worthy of preservation, not because it constitutes the “end of history,” but on the contrary, because it is the social form possessing the highest number of degrees of freedom, where to the greatest extent possible, the process, economic and political, can be trusted to produce satisfactory results without tyrannizing over individual interests. But “the greatest extent” is not infinite.

Humanity is founded on the moral model, but its increasingly dogmatic application and the vast hypocrisy this entails cannot continue on their present path. Only to the extent that we realize that our current system is and will always remain “the worst system with the exception of all the others,” will we devote ourselves to preserving and strengthening it, rather than, by seeking to “deconstruct” it, allying ourselves implicitly or explicitly with the far more sinister systems that seek to supplant it.

For a certain time I have sensed that GA’s failure to be taken seriously by the professionals of the social sciences is not merely a product of its practitioners’ lack of professional standing. No doubt being a member of the club would make these ideas more acceptable, but the fact is that they are simply not in the ballpark of today’s social-science thinking. I have noted Big Data as one important factor in the disaffection from “speculative” thinking (see Chronicle 555), but there is more to it than that. For one thing, how do we explain the long-lasting engouement of American social scientists for the writings of Jacques Derrida and even the more obscure “French theorists”? If anything is speculative, it is this kind of writing, not to speak of its often deliberate obscurity. Why then did, and to some extent still do, social scientists find an interest in such writings, whereas those of GA, or of René Girard, for that matter, speculative perhaps, but clearly and logically presented, remain beyond the pale?

If there is one thinker whose thinking seems utterly inimical to the methodology of the social sciences, it is certainly Derrida. Not only is it intuitive rather than data-driven, but its conclusions are diametrically opposed to those philosophers of science draw to justify and explain the methods and results of the sciences, physical or social. No doubt one can understand the interest of literary scholars and even a certain type of political thinker for deconstructive thought, and as Andrew McKenna first pointed out in Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction (U Illinois P, 1992), it has very interesting implications for anthropology. Only these implications are precisely the opposite of those drawn by the practitioners of the social sciences who apply his thought to their practice.

A very interesting work of scholarship could be written to trace the effects of deconstruction on the “soft” social sciences such as psychology or information studies. The purpose of this Chronicle is to offer an admittedly impressionistic overview of the matter insofar as it concerns Generative Anthropology.

Deconstruction is an internal critique of metaphysics that, from the perspective of GA, demonstrates that metaphysics’ fundamental, if tacit, presupposition, the ahistorical subsistence of propositional language, is a fiction designed to mask the “original sin” of unequal power relations—the underlying premise of victimary thought.

Derrida makes this point quite explicitly in his deconstruction of presence. Beginning with his writings on Husserl in the 1960s, presence is for Derrida the spurious assertion of metaphysical thought since Plato that the speaker is authentically present in his speech (in contrast to the author’s “absence” from his writing), and that this “immediate” communication of his will permits him to exercise control over his audience. In fact, we know that the search for ontological certainty in propositional language is bound to fail, given that the metaphysical attitude refuses to ground such language in anything but itself. GA permits us to understand both the power and the limitations of Derrida’s analysis, as well as the limitations of the entire metaphysical project, of which he would appear to be malgré lui the last significant exponent.

GA’s own adaptation of Derrida inverts the decentering thrust of his critique of metaphysics, which is to say, of the philosophical proposition. Derrida’s central deconstructive notion is la différance, a “misspelling” of différence that makes it into a verbal noun, the gerund of différer in the sense of postpone or, as it is commonly translated, defer. For Derrida, this term applies to the “hesitation” we supposedly experience in deciding which member of a paradigm to use: is it red, or fuschia, or pink? Derrida’s point is that because the possible terms differ, the decision to use any one of them must be deferred to permit the speaker to choose among them. This should be understood less as an empirical postulation about the speaker’s psychology than as a statement about the ontology of the proposition. In contrast with the “false consciousness” of transparency that attends the assertion of a proposition for classical philosophy, so that my stating it out loud or to myself makes its meaning self-evident, the connection between subject and predicate being “present” to my consciousness, Derrida insists on the temporal delay between the one and the other, a space into which “non-presence,” a post-structural version of Sartre’s liberating néant, intervenes.

Sartre was a true metaphysician, and in the most important sense, the last of the breed: someone who remained entirely within the province of metaphysics’ presupposition of language as a neutral background of thought that requires no examination of its specificity, and above all of its historical emergence. As opposed to animal consciousness that lacks this cultural space of reflection, what Sartre calls the human pour-soi contains a néant that lets us stand back from and intend our objects of perception. I have pointed out elsewhere (see, e.g., Chronicle 478) that this néant is precisely the equivalent of Derrida’s notion of deferral.

That Sartre, who knows that negation is a product of language, never takes off from there to examine the function of language in bringing about this freedom, reflects his fealty to the metaphysical tradition. Classical philosophy simply cannot deal with this question, and even when, as in the 18^th century, it ventures into speculations on the origin of language, they are never such as would subject the language of philosophical discourse itself to the domain of historical contingency. Hegel recounts the history of the world-spirit, but the origin of language cannot be a part of this history, because the history itself begins with words. Being and non-being are not like rocks or atoms; one cannot conceive of them as subsisting in a world lacking the equivalent of a human mind.

Structuralism in linguistics and the other social sciences was intended to replace the philosophical idea of causality among individual cultural entities with measurable correlations among these entities as elements of a structure. Its application to anthropology allowed Lévi-Strauss and his colleagues to describe tribal societies in terms of configurations purportedly found in all aspects of a given cultural universe, from topographical patterns of habitation, to systems of animal “totems,” to linguistic structures, myths, the organization of rituals, etc. All these cultural complexes were defined by analogy with Saussure’s conception of language as a “system of differences.” In this perspective, words exist both as sounds and as meanings (signifiants and signfiés) only within systems of phonological and semantic differences. Saussurian synchronic linguistics does not deny linguistic diachrony, but it insists on the fact that we can trace the history of language only so far, whereas the structures of a given language at the present moment are directly available to us. In this perspective, seeking as I have done to derive the declarative sentence from more elementary utterance forms would be dismissed as idle speculation.

Structuralism is, from our vantage point, language’s revenge on philosophy’s “Hegelian” confidence that metaphysics’ deliberate blindness to language’s existence within history would not prevent philosophy from being able to reconstruct its own history and consequently its ontology. Thus in Hegel’s dialectic, which “brackets” the history of the physical universe, being generates its history out of its dialectic with non-being. But no, structuralism tells us, there is no origin of difference; structures of differences were there from the beginning.

This originary agnosticism is the first truly post-metaphysical stage of the deconstruction of metaphysics, various avatars of which, from Marx to Nietzsche, had appeared a century earlier. But structuralism continues to rely unreflectively on human language and understanding, while refusing to seek an explanation for how this language and understanding itself might have arisen. This recoil from the consideration of origins can already be found in Durkheim, the originator of structuralism in anthropology, who dismisses speculations about the origin of religion as not grounded on empirical evidence.

Derrida’s post-structuralism, as opposed to the sociological constructions of Foucault or the psychological intuitions of Lacan, is founded on revealing the dependence of structuralism on the metaphysics that it purports to transcend. For Derrida, la différance “shakes up” (ébranle) the differential paradigms of which “structures” are composed. It is at this point that Derrida comes closer than any of the “French theorists” to the anthropological insight first realized by Girard: that, very simply, human culture can only be understood from the standpoint of its scenic origin.

But close, as they say, is still no cigar. Derrida still thinks of language as a system of differences, a paradigm, and “shaking up” a paradigm does not reduce it to unity. We observed in Chronicle 535 Derrida’s nostalgia for Heidegger’s nostalgia for “the word” of originary Being. But “Being” is as good a word as any. Cosmology is one thing, but the fundamental anthro-philosophical question is not Heidegger’s Why is/are there Being(s) rather than nothing? but Why is there language? Nostalgia can only wonder, but not attempt to answer the question.

Derrida’s shaking-up, like Foucault’s attempts at demystification, all have a victimary motivation. In Foucault, the historical epistémés are determined in more or less Marxist fashion by power-relations, although no longer wholly dominated by economics. For Derrida, who is principally concerned with the philosophical underpinnings of human reality, deconstruction is a way of undoing the fictional construction of this reality for the benefit of the “ruling class.”

Derrida never concerns himself with the awkward fact that the first human societies, the first users of language, like hunter-gatherer societies to this day, were essentially egalitarian. While criticizing Rousseau for opposing speech to writing in parallel with the opposition between la société commencée and the “unequal” society inaugurated by le premier qui dit: Ceci est à moi, Derrida merely projects Rousseau’s critique of civilization and its written culture back onto spoken language itself. Language for Derrida is always already an instrument of oppression, one that propagates by its very nature the myth of the “presence” of meaning and truth within the spoken word in order to compel its listeners to obedience.

This originary insistence on not just différance but oppression clashes with the freedom of the pour-soi that différance might have been expected to confirm. But the political excitement of deconstruction, which rapidly morphs into a much more concrete critique of “oppressive” binary distinctions much in the spirit of our victimary age (male vs female, white vs black, right vs left…), unfortunately overtakes the real anthropological insight that Derrida never allows to assert itself. Derrida’s deferral was in effect a sophisticated homology of Girard’s intuition that human culture is inaugurated by the deferral of violence. But the deferral of violence is not a shake-up but a pacification, not a proliferation but a centralization. And the simplest understanding of this pacification is the origin of language and culture as described by the originary hypothesis, the deferral of violence through representation.

Superficially, one might think that social science would be content with the denial of originarity already instituted by structuralism. And in effect, if deconstruction may be said to have conquered the humanities, until it was in turn superseded by approaches both more openly victimary and less dependent on the kind of intellectual subtlety today associated with “Whiteness,” it never provoked more than a peripheral fermentation in the softer social sciences. But this phenomenon is of interest to us to the extent that GA claims to be closer to science than philosophy. If we can rethink the main concept of deconstruction as the central feature of our theory of representational culture, then we should be able to adapt this same rethinking to the various social sciences that have been tempted by deconstruction.

I have already done this with the relevant aspects of linguistics. Language may be “nothing but differences,” but the first difference is the difference/différance between appropriating an object and representing it, by deferring its appropriation and converting by that act the gesture of appropriation into an ostensive sign of designation.

Not having researched the question in depth, I can only offer an impression. It seems to me that deconstruction has influenced the social sciences primarily in two ways. The first is that of Big Data, which whatever its limitations has been productive of interesting results in many areas of cultural study. It avoids, I think deliberately, the political crudeness of the second, overtly victimary approach, which is to “deconstruct” Western ideas to the benefit of their “victims.”

1. Big Data

Our Big Data era sees structuralism as outmoded, pre-cybernetic. Structuralism is an “emic” mode of thought that takes a target culture’s own categories as primary, and seeks only to systematize the relationships among them, noting for example the homology between kinship-relations and village geography. There is nothing in structuralist analyses that cannot be said to be implicitly present in the minds of the members of a culture; adding the concepts that make these parallels specific remains on a meta-level.

What deconstruction does for Big Data by delegitimizing the emic categories of a given culture is to justify their abandonment in favor of parameters of which the human subjects are presumably unaware, parameters to be derived by statistical analysis from the “raw” data themselves. This approach permits the researcher to develop algorithms to predict, or retrodict, results whose multiple causality would be unthinkable by the members of the culture, or indeed by anyone not in possession of the data and the tools of computer analysis. This helps explain why those who practice such methods, unlike the anthropologists of earlier generations, tend to be dismissive of religion. Religious rites can only with great distortion be studied in terms of empirical data, that is, as behaviors, without concern for the categories of thought used by their participants.

In practice, correlation matrices are easy to generate; indeed, they emerge directly from the computer once the appropriate regression equations have been solved. Translating such results into the emic language of any culture, including the researcher’s own, can be left to popular vulgarizations, the common mode of which is to tell us how little we know of our “true” motivations when we believe we are behaving rationally.

2. Victimary deconstruction

This cruder approach is no doubt the more common. In fields like information studies, where conceptual structures cannot be replaced with Big Data correlations, and in any domain with political implications, deconstruction is used to reinforce the anthropologist’s traditional insistence on the validity of the emic categories of the target culture by attacking the “supremacist” values implicit in those of Western thought. Edouard Said’s Orientalism owes nothing specific to Derrida, but they are allies in the broader movement of victimary thinking in the postmodern era. More recently, what we had “naively” thought to be objective distinctions, such as that between correct and incorrect grammar, or the presence and absence of mathematical competence, are revealed in a distant caricature of deconstruction to be reflections of “white privilege.” See, for example, Chronicle 563.

I hope the reader will agree that the truly liberating interpretation of deconstruction is that of the originary hypothesis: to understand the historical origin of the human as the product of the différance of appetitive drives by means of the consciously intended and communally shared sign. Language and culture cannot have begun with the violence of domination and resentment, but only with the deferral of violence that we call love, whether understood as of divine or human origin.

In a conversation some years ago, Richard van Oort made the point that GA is not a religion and would be of no use in the proverbial foxhole. What is a religion supposed to do for you in that foxhole, hearing the shells explode all around you? By praying to God, however you conceive the term, you are admitting your powerlessness to control the violence around you, but expressing your hope that in submitting to a “greater power,” the latter will “have mercy” on you and spare you from harm. This could occur just as easily in a natural disaster, in the midst of a tornado, for example. Meditating on the originary hypothesis would not calm your fears in the same manner.

For GA, however respectful it is of the world’s religions, expecting God to save you from a bombardment or a hurricane is clearly a category error. Religion, to repeat the catchphrase, is good anthropology, but bad cosmology. Even if a disaster is man-made, as terrorism has been described to avoid “Islamophobia,” it has cosmological, or simply physical, manifestations that are not subject to the peace-making abilities of representation and its accompanying deferral. Yet, in its defense, prayer when death threatens is a possibly final acknowledgement of the transcendental source of our consciousness that brings the possibility of human peace. Having faith that God will save you from the bombs or the winds is not the equivalent of thinking that if I say some nice things to God, he will be good to me; it is rather the admission that “he knows best,” that since the human world, despite its own and nature’s violence, has survived and even thrived under the dispensation of human/divine, or divine/human, representation, I have a chance to survive as well. This is the Panglossian grain of truth that sustains us all, from Voltaire to the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Given that we have a minimal anthropological hypothesis, we can define religion rather than merely give “family examples” of it. We call religion the ideological and/or institutional complex that we accept (whether voluntarily or as an imposed social norm) as recalling to us humanity’s originary deferral of violence through representation. Hence to designate as “victimary religion” the affirmation of the universal applicability of the originary reciprocal exchange of the sign is to offer as a justification for the SJW’s moral fervor his refusal to accept as more than a stopgap measure any social arrangement that deviates from this reciprocity. We need not dwell on the murderous hypocrisy that allows such “stopgaps” to justify feasts for the nomenklatura in the midst of starvation. The victimary religion itself does not demand this explicitly; its downside is that it is unconcerned with why things always turn out that way.

Creating a definition does not solve the world’s problems, but it shines a bit more light on them than we are used to. As I tried to do in the preceding Chronicle 571, we can diagnose the flaws in the political deductions from such religious principles in originary terms, in this case by reference to the difference between unanimously sharing an ostensive sign of adhesion/renunciation and being obliged to evaluate according to worldly evidence the truth or falsity of a declarative proposition.

The world’s great religions are less vulnerable to such critiques, because they were born and tested in the establishment of modes of social order. Whatever one may think of Sharia, its adherents have on their side at least the argument that at certain times and places it has served, and to an extent still serves, to maintain a reasonably stable social order—something of which the revolutionary ideologies that obey the victimary religion have been incapable, although the Chinese variant, by jettisoning the mantra of the command economy for the disciplinary control of individual citizens, has so far progressed well beyond the Soviet model, let alone the “socialism” practiced in Cuba or Venezuela.

But the illustration that is of specific interest to me both personally and as a crux that offers a lesson to the world is the case of the Jews.

That we persist in calling Jew-hatred antisemitism is already a demonstration of the Jews’ unique status, as well as of their own as well as everyone else’s inability to define the dimensions of, and thereby successfully to name, the unique hostility it arouses. Even calling it “hatred” is not very useful; antisemitism cannot be reduced to an emotion. Resentment would be better, but the fact that there is no term comparable to Jew-resentment is clear enough evidence that the creation of such a term would go against the spirit of neologism. New words come into being and flourish to the extent that they simplify thinking about what they designate. Indeed, even Judeophobia scarcely exists—although it would surely be more justified than the scare-word Islamophobia, a “phobic” hostility to Muslims that has only been detected since Muslim terrorists began slaughtering people. We don’t say Judeophobia because one cannot “fear” the sons of dogs and pigs, and more generally, one cannot explicitly admit that hostility to Jews is in any way pathological. Today antisemitism is a deniable reference to a defunct belief-system. In all the surveys on the subject that detect “levels” of antisemitism in various places, I somehow doubt that the poll-takers ever ask, point-blank, “Are you antisemitic?” Hitler would have said Jawohl, but today the term is pejorative, like racist, leaving no presumably neutral name for this classic hostility.

But the real question is why the subject arises at all. Why is Israel the object of the vast majority of UN condemnations? Why does Putin’s takeover of Crimea and chunks of Georgia and Ukraine evoke yawns, whereas Israel’s “occupation” of territory after repulsing several invasions is unacceptable, not only to the “Palestinians,” who discovered their nationality in response to the establishment of a Jewish state, and not only to their Arab and/or Muslim “brothers,” but to the members of the European Union, and probably the majority of the personnel of the US State Department?

We are so used to this anomaly that it is bad form to mention it, and of course one can always find “reasons,” but whereas the resentment of the descendants of Arab families who once inhabited Israeli land is understandable, what is not is that this resentment has been cultivated by the international community for 70 years, is supported by a unique UN agency that anomalously defines “refugee” as a hereditary status unto the nth generation, and remains the object of a commiseration that is not granted to any comparable group of displaced persons, not because anyone really cares so much about the Palestinians, but because they are the “victims” of the Jews.

As for the little matter of Israel’s contributions to the world economy and to science and technology, in embarrassing contrast to that of the other nations of their region, n’en parlons pas. Clearly whatever the details, and there are always details, the only explanation for all this is that they are Jews.

A couple of years ago, Adam Katz and I published The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism (Brill, 2015) as an attempt to explain, in admittedly discursive fashion, the phenomenon we still label antisemitism. This book has to our knowledge still not been reviewed, nor has it been more than minimally advertised or promoted by ISGAP (Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and Policy), the association that sponsored its publication. But the one obvious truth is that neither ISGAP nor the rest of what might be called the “antisemitism community” sees our book as either agreeable to their ideology or financially promising. What people want to read about antisemitism is scandalous facts: pogroms, numerus clausus, sales of Mein Kampf and the Protocols; and fanciful accusations: the blood libel, updated with the sale of Palestinian organs, well-poisoning, another recent Abbas accusation, and more generally, the International Jewish Conspiracy. Ah, but once you begin to “explain” these things, in a sense you justify them. Yes, but not explaining them doesn’t make them go away. To quote La Fontaine, Qui veut noyer son chien l’accuse de la rage [He who would drown his dog accuses it of rabies]. But the real question is why this one particular breed is the object of, to use the UN as our touchstone, over 95% of the accusations.

It is useless to try to measure Israel and the Jews generally against other “comparable” entities, because there is nothing comparable. It is the very idea of a Jewish state that offends not only Arabs and Iranians (or at least the mullahs and their supporters) but Europeans and even quite a few Americans—including Jewish Americans. The idea that the PA has steadfastly refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state would be unbelievable in any other case; and were the rest of the Western world not ready to agree at least partially, or shall we say, remain “neutral” between the “two sides,” this would not have remained possible. And then there is the UNRWA…

But one should understand that any discussion that remains on this level is committing a category error. We should listen, but in a “different key,” to the crass absurdity of Abbas and Co. claiming that the Jews have never had a historic relationship with Jerusalem. This is, to coin a phrase, the purest BS. But as Harry Frankfurt pointed out some time ago, BS is unconcerned with truth, which, as I noted (see Chronicle 429), only puts it closer to the originary purpose of language, which is to defer the resentments of its audience. I would supplement this point today by noting that, although declarative or “constative” propositions nominally have a truth value, this value is commonly recruited for what we might call ostensive purposes, as in religious narratives, of which the disconnection of Jews from Jerusalem (founded, as we all know, by Abbas’ “ancestors,” the Canaanites) is a good example.

In other words, whereas politics and international affairs always contain a certain amount of BS/mythology, where the Jews are concerned, we are fully within the domain of the supernatural. If God can create the world in six days, then Jerusalem can have been founded by Canaanites who morphed into desert Arabs in the seventh century. And let us remind ourselves that it isn’t just Middle Easterners who think this way; our so-called allies in Europe are happy to support whatever measures at the UN serve to humiliate and delegitimize the notion of a Jewish state, or “sh…y little country,” as a French ambassador once put it.

Can it be that Trump, so despised by the Europeans, represents the only sane position on this issue? To look on the bright side, one possible way to mitigate antisemitism is to be able to point to examples of Jewish stupidity. I recall a number of American Jews and sympathizers who claimed they were ready to leave for Canada or elsewhere when the “Fascist” Trump was elected—an event that some even had the chutzpah to compare to Kristallnacht. Today some of these people affect to find Trump’s position on the Jerusalem issue a disastrous “obstacle to peace,” as though accepting to support for decades the Palestinians’ refusal to “recognize” a Jewish State were part of a “peace process.” Is it simply a matter of cruel irony that the victims of the Holocaust are described, in the words of such as Erdogan, as “worse than the Nazis” in their “genocide” of Palestinians?

Once more, sarcasm is not the point. What is the point is that the obscene absurdity of such remarks belongs to the same mindset as the less obscene but equally absurd affirmations of victimary thinking, such as the mathematics=Whiteness meme discussed in Chronicle 563. In both cases, what is being attacked is firstness. Except that in one case, one is presumably taking the side of those disadvantaged by “white” society, whereas in the other, the “colonial” oppression exercised by Israeli Jews is supplemented, to use a Derridian term, by a much richer historical complex.

We have been over this before, but I would now insist more strongly on the parallel between the “unspeakable” hostility to Jews and what I call the victimary. We should note that neither this term nor any synonym is in popular usage. PC, unlike antisemitism, is an ironic and, dare I say, almost affectionate term for what is at worst a harmless eccentricity rather than a pernicious hatred. Yet Trump and Haley see the connection, even though it is not considered good form to associate an appeal to sanity, as one might describe dissenting from today’s more extreme victimary idiocies, with something so controversial as Zionism. As the Nazis would have been glad to tell you, Jews are certainly no “whiter” than Arabs, but they are not “people of color” because they are associated (to put it modestly) with Western Civilization, the source of 95% of the well-being (not to speak of 99% of the weaponry) that its modern enemies, internal and external, take for granted.

What is wrong with the victimary religion? In a word, it confuses the conditions for a successful ostensive—unanimous and reciprocal sharing—with those for a declarative proposition, which, in mathematics as in most worldly operations, works better if it is true. It is no coincidence that the basis of Hebrew religion, as I made clear in Science and Faith, is a God who gives his name as a declarative sentence.

Once one realizes that PC idiocy and the noble cause of anti-Zionism/BDS are “the same,” perhaps one can take at least a step toward rejecting the victimary religion that they both embody. In both cases, the scandal is not that some people oppress others, which is no small problem in itself, but that it has always been the case that some people perform feats better than and invent/discover ideas before others, and while this does not justify the tyranny of the first, it justifies even less their persecution by the latter.

Jesus’ inversion of first and last takes place only in God’s kingdom. In the real world, his and Caesar’s realms are not coterminous. Or to quote someone who understood his point rather well, qui veut faire l’ange, fait la bête.

1. Qui perd gagne [the loser wins]

Jean-Paul Sartre deserves much more attention than he gets today, not simply for historical reasons as the world’s leading intellectual in the postwar era, but because his work embodies the final attempt of classical metaphysics to achieve a, shall we say, non-deconstructive view of the world. In his longest work, L’idiot de la famille, unfinished in three thick volumes, he analyzed Gustave Flaubert’s juvenilia at the same time as I was writing my dissertation on the same subject. Fortunately, his book appeared just after my dissertation was published in 1971. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whose analyses are sharper.

Readers of these Chronicles will recall that I have long preferred Sartre to the more “profound” Heidegger, and even Sartre’s deliquescent Marxism to Heidegger’s halfhearted but unrepentant Nazism. It is curious that both he and I chose Flaubert as our primary literary model. Sartre had long been intrigued by the great bourgeois anti-bourgeois, and had long anticipated this magnum opus that he was never to complete. Like Sartre, I too had planned (back in the 60s when there was no reigning dogmatism in the humanities and one had to work out one’s own approach) to discuss Flaubert’s complete works, so much less voluminous than those of Balzac or Zola: three novels, a book of four contes, and a “closet drama” published in his lifetime, plus the juvenilia and the posthumous Bouvard et Pécuchet.

And I too, for more modest reasons than Sartre’s (that is, to get my PhD in a reasonable amount of time), had to stop before reaching the major works, in my case, even before the end of the early ones—to which I had devoted a chapter, cut from my dissertation, that some future thésard may perhaps choose to examine, assuming it isn’t all tossed in the incinerator upon my demise. Above all, Sartre chose as Flaubert’s implicit motto the phrase qui perd gagne, who loses, wins, or simply, the loser wins. Which concerns me less as an explanation of Flaubert, whose quasi-epileptic attack in 1843 allowed him to escape the legal career anticipated by his family and devote himself to literature, than of my own career, which has been marked by no great formative crises, but which I can say in all honesty has, at least so far, been that of what our president would call a loser.

Which should yet perhaps be considered a sign of victory.

There is nothing more romantic than the claim enunciated in the first sentence of Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Rousseau’s swan song, unpublished at his death in 1778:

Me voici donc seul sur la terre, n’ayant plus de frère, de prochain, d’ami, de société que moi-même. Le plus sociable & le plus aimant des humains en a été proscrit par un accord unanime.

Here I am then alone in the world, having no longer brother, fellow, friend, acquaintance other than myself. The most sociable and the most loving of humans has been banished from their midst by unanimous agreement.

What makes Rousseau the prophet of Romanticism and of the modern ego generally is his remarkable ability, although he was at the time one of the most famous men in Europe and nowhere near the Bastille, to actually think of himself as what René Girard called a victime émissaire. Interestingly, Girard never seemed to care for this passage, no doubt because it held ambiguities not easily resolved by the vérité romanesque that attends similar passages in Dostoevski’s Notes from Underground. For Dostoevsky knows what Girard knows, indeed, was one of his instructors, whereas Rousseau ignores it, deliberately or otherwise, yet can nonetheless not simply be denounced as a peddler of le mensonge romantique. Call it a Christ-complex, if you like. But in my case, and I think not so much for me personally as for the central and to my mind world-historically significant idea that the originary hypothesis represents, I continue to believe that “banishment” is, on the one hand, a sign less of universal hostility than of incomprehension, and on the other, a proof of validity.

2. Victimary Religion

The persistence of the victimary phenomenon that I have been denouncing for so long—to his visceral opposition to which our current president, whatever you may think of him, owes his victory as well as whatever chance this country has to maintain our national status in the world and the whole “global” liberal-democratic complex that depends on it, whose triumph in 1989-91 appears more Pyrrhic every year—only confirms my conviction that unless GA, in its “minimal” simplicity, can one day be understood by our intelligentsia, our civilization will not be able to maintain itself, and will give way to something far more regimented and confining, on the order of China, Turkey, and Iran, if not to nuclear extinction.

All of which leads me to insist that, although my ideas are anything but apocalyptic, and their survival at their present level is something of a miracle, even if they remain in the shadow of “mimetic theory,” we should retain our hope that they are more than a footnote to intellectual history, but destined to be recognized as necessary components of any future anthropology. Or at the very least, that they point the way to the only possible solution, one not taken for reasons beyond the power of ideas to control.

Let me put it in the simplest terms. The “most advanced” religion shares GA’s minimal simplicity. Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος : in the beginning was the Logos, which is usually translated “the Word,” but which simply means “the utterance.” Is that not exactly the substance of the originary hypothesis? “The beginning” may be for all we know the very inception of the universe, although physicists find it more useful to conceive of “time” as beginning, or rebeginning, 13.8 billion years ago. All we know is that we couldn’t “know” anything before we had language. And that language was from the outset a shared mode of communication.

One can go on from there to construct the evolution of the declarative sentence, and alternative theories of its emergence are certainly possible, but the originary moment of the ostensive as the deferral of our appropriative “instinct” is both impossible to deny and easy enough to grasp, and yet it has zero purchase on the world’s intellectual life, as though such matters were not really of interest when we can discuss anatomy and physiology and neurology and artificial intelligence.

Perhaps the one further step that we might take, one that we will hopefully have the time to explore and perhaps even the chance to demonstrate its timeliness, is to forget about what we have always been taught about “religion” and return to our originary hypothesis for a renewed understanding of how this category has been transformed in the modern age. It is no accident that, in the West that has inherited the Hebrew One God, “religion” is always associated with the idea of God. But religion, whether we believe that “God exists” or not, is about humanity. This is something that even the most pious believer cannot deny. God doesn’t have a religion; even Jesus cannot be called a “believer.” Which suggests that religions “without God” are just as much religions as the others, even if their historical record is hardly illustrious.

How can this reflection help us to understand the problem of victimary thinking, or PC? How worrisome is it that one can find comically pathological examples of its application to essentially every “normal” behavior of modern society? What indeed are the originary roots of the victimary?

At first glance, there are no “victims” in the originary scene; by deferring their acts of appropriation, all are equal and, precisely, there is no longer an Alpha and then a Beta and a Gamma… to dominate the rest. But the key attitude that presides over the emission of the sign is not some Sartrian celebration of liberty; it is resentment. Each fears to become the target of the resentment of the others, and the ultimate resolution that leads to a satisfactorily peaceful solution is that the central being itself becomes the object of the resentment of all. The sparagmos is a “feeding frenzy,” but it is also an act of revenge on the animal that had acquired from the group the strength to prevent, for a time, any individual participant from touching it.

The same prevalence of resentment applies to the life of primitive egalitarian societies. Field anthropologists remark on the frequency of murder and other forms of violence in these societies, of spells cast on neighbors and long-lasting feuds. We need ever so often to disabuse ourselves of Rousseau’s idyllic portrayal of la société commencée in order to recall that human equality exists more as a state whose absence we resent and any deviation from which to our detriment excites our anger, than as a shared experience of communal bliss. The ritual repetition of the originary event in the context of a festive celebration reinforces the community’s “solidarity” precisely by drowning out our everyday resentment in the egalitarian excess of the festivities; this experience is as real today as it was among our earliest ancestors.

To say that resentment is as old as humanity is not to express Schopenhauerian despair; it is simply to make clear that love is better described as the overcoming of resentment than the other way around. But neither does it suffice to explain the historical specificity of the current moment.

Perhaps we can take our clue from the fascinating document dealt with in Chronicle 563 that classifies mathematics as an example of Whiteness (forgetting about the “prejudice” that Asians are “good at math”). How can one possibly take such nonsense seriously? But precisely because mathematics is so essential to the technological world and even more central to the digital one, the fact that proficiency in it is not equally distributed among the races poses a “problem.” The author doesn’t even claim that minority inferiority in math is the result of oppression, merely that since whites do better in math than “minorities,” any emphasis on math is oppressive. Nor does she make the claim that we should honor athletic ability equally with math ability, or even that minority talents should be sought out to even the balance. Her one point is that studying math perpetuates a sense of inferiority among those who do poorly in it and thus contributes to the affirmation of white privilege. Whether studying math is a useful preparation for one’s future career is not considered; the important thing is not to be exposed to what I would call ascriptive humiliation.

This is a classic example of “the soft racism of low expectations,” one that will surely do nothing to close the achievement gap among the races, just as the whole affirmative action world of the universities and beyond only reinforces the idea, which must be infuriating to those who actually could compete regardless of race, that minority members who succeed must have benefited from special treatment. But if human culture is primarily a means to minimize the disturbance created by resentment, what the victimary culture is reacting to is that a strict meritocracy generates more resentment than one that pays blackmail to those who complain of racial oppression and all its related ills (see my “Originary Democracy and the Critique of Pure Fairness” in The Democratic Experience and Political Violence, ed. David Rapoport and Leonard Weinberg, London: Frank Cass, 2001, 308-24). And this culture can defend its sense of moral superiority, however absurd from the “objective” standpoint of the familiar Nazi-Jew / master-slave model, by arguing that, precisely, rational arguments for meritocracy, even of the most sophisticated Rawlsian kind, fail to address what is really the central function of human culture, which is the deferral of resentment.

That many “whites” enthusiastically embrace their White Guilt and joyfully accuse their racial fellows of racism for daring to differ from them is not pretty, but to make this point is not really to refute their position. Their arrogance is based on the undoubted fact that they have a better intuitive understanding of the “end of culture” than those who would rationalize social privilege as a just recompense for one’s contribution to society.

Not that the meritocracy need be scrapped; on the contrary. But paying a bit of hush money is often the more profitable course, and if it makes the society run more smoothly, how can one really argue against it? Yet the more widely the “cynical” view I am expressing here is proclaimed, the greater would be the resentment of those who would be forced to see their benefits as the result of extortion—Mau-Mauing the flak-catchers, as Tom Wolfe called it a few decades ago, in perhaps his most memorable neologism.

An analogous phenomenon occurs on the international level in the classification of migrants as victims, whence Angela Merkel’s “instinctive” refusal to turn them away that inspired her unprecedented admission of 1.5 million “refugees” in 2015. The power of the scare-word Islamophobia need only be mentioned. Whereas ethnic minorities have been a constant element in the US and their assimilation has been, as these things go, relatively successful, this has not been the case for Muslims in Europe, leading to no-go zones, the recrudescence of antisemitism, and a split between Western Europe where White Guilt predominates and Eastern Europe, whose inhabitants feel that they have suffered enough invasions in recent history.

Yet it is easy enough for our “social justice warriors” to justify all this by reference to the model of human moral equality embodied in the originary event and maintained in the distribution system of primitive cultures, and in moral principle, in all cultures. Firstness, as opposed to reciprocity, has no “instinctive” roots in our consciousness/scene of representation. Hence what victimary thinking continually discovers is that, rhetorically at least, no cultural norm is invulnerable to the victimary critique, even the teaching of mathematics or common politeness or correct grammar. And the obscene proliferation of four-letter words in today’s speech is as clear an indication of the generalization of victimary resentment as we need. Whether or not speaking politely is a micro-aggression against the uncouth, speaking scatologically is an aggression against the very existence of norms, one that no longer shocks (save those of my generation) but which for that very reason has taken on the frustrated rage of binge-drinking or drug addiction. (I recommend the 2011 film Bridesmaids to those who might doubt this, although there may well be better, more recent examples.)

Let us then return to the subject of religion.

Since the days of Robespierre, the promotion of the moral model, the return to our originary state of universal reciprocity, has become an ur-religion that has no doubt caused more death and destruction than all the other religions in history. If our wise intellectuals tell us that “God is not Good,” that God is a “delusion” and a “failed hypothesis,” they have nothing to tell us about the disasters provoked by their own “secular” belief-system. It is ironic that the atheists of our era are in agreement with the most extreme fundamentalists in understanding religion as primarily a cosmology rather than an anthropology.

Once all norms are put into question, tautologically accused of perpetuating the present system defined in the usual Nazi-Jew mode, we return to the originary “mimetic crisis” that provoked the inauguration of language and culture. But language having already been invented, we have no comparable new resource available to find our way out of Rawls’ “original position.” The reestablishment of generally acceptable norms can only be enforced by a consensus that can resist the victimary critique without simply denying the legitimacy of the “victims’” resentments. The United States is in this respect in a far healthier situation than Western Europe, and, forgive me for saying it, there is no leader in Western Europe comparable to Trump, as Thatcher and John Paul II were to Reagan. All they have are center-left politicians and a left-of-center pope.

The cult of originary equality is the most pernicious of religions because it is founded on the crudest interpretation of our fundamental truth, which is that sharing language gives us all an equal right to use it. But if language were reduced to the imperatives of fear and desire, and we could not evaluate truth in propositional language, humanity would never have evolved beyond its primitive state.

Once we recognize that the appeal to originary equality is as much a religion as the others, and that its apparent atheism only masks a faith more absurd than any other—that our moral equality in sharing the ostensive guarantees the cognitive equality of our declaratives—the victimary religion appears in the light of day as thuggish as the ideology of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which featured adolescents beating and torturing their teachers to death for counter-revolutionary “crimes” little different from those of today.

Yet I still have hope that the US and a few of its saner allies can reeducate the rest of the civilized world to this truth, before our global society is forced to choose between the barbarities of Salafist fanaticism and the Brave New World of Chinese totalitarianism.