Author: staceymeeker

“MQB,” the Quai Branly ethnological museum in Paris completed in 2006, embodies a simple idea of modernity: the visitor is modern, the objects of his attention are not. The implementation of this distinction has embroiled the museum in controversy. The West can never sufficiently atone for its “hegemonic” past, as though its superiority in economic power and ethical organization were fated through the inevitability of contact with its Other to provoke self-laceration.

There is no innocent way of dealing with the Other, but an originary perspective allows us to suspend the zero-sum critique of the museum-as-Subject, to accept its historical firstness as a given without which these objects would remain unknown to us, and to enjoy without arrière-pensée the facilities the museum offers us to see and appreciate them. Those Europeans who rail against themselves as former colonizers should heed Pascal Bruckner’s point in La tyrannie de la pénitence–see Chronicle 385– that self-flagellation in defense of the Other is just one more way of affirming the agency of the Self. If we are all really equal, then the power of the Other’s sacred will have its effect on us regardless of the details of its presentation.

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The artifacts on exhibit at MQB are, with no obvious exceptions, imbued with sacrality; they were either designed specifically for use in sacred ritual or associated with it in an auxiliary capacity, such as utensils for the preparation of food or jewelry for adornment. Our attention is commanded by decorated chamber walls, towering ceremonial poles and musical instruments, full-body costumes, and eerie masks made from skulls.

But the modern world has its own sacred objects. I came to Paris with an early iPad, at the time of writing in May 2010, Apple’s latest supergadget, not yet available in France. A device like this, a new platform for manipulating icons, scrolling through texts, playing games, watching movies… has practical and entertainment value, but on top of that, its novel features confer on it a “supplement” of prestige, of mimetic desirability. Visiting the museum led me to reflect on the fact that, abstracting from the concrete practices the objects are used in, the sacrality of the iPad and that of these dresses, spears, sticks, masks, bark paintings, ornaments, and decorated skulls has as its core the same embodiment of universal desirability. The consumer gadgets that we like to decry as artifacts of a degraded sacrality should rather be appreciated as versatile and potentially liberating forms of the same sacred that emanates from the masks and skulls on display.

From sex to sports to storytelling around the fire, every form of human interaction is influenced by the sense of worth conferred by the possession of objects that embody the sacred. I imagine the members of all societies spend a good deal of their time either feeling the envy that attaches to such objects or rejoicing in their possession. Each culture expresses the nobility of its sacred objects through the distinctive effort and skill involved in obtaining and working their raw materials; the hardwood masks and poles are carefully polished and sculpted, the metal and glass iPad made smooth and cool to the touch. The basis of sacrality is a socially shared guarantee of desire, whether or not reinforced by explicit institutional interdictions.

The respective source of this guarantee, whether in the activities of ritual or those of the electronic world of consumption, distinguishes the modern from the premodern. But this difference has another element, one that gives museums such as MQB a means of embodying the modern/traditional dichotomy in the contrast of fundamentally similar behaviors. The most characteristic feature of the modern gadget is that it is a communication device. Unlike a fetish or mask, its primary function is not to be beautiful/sacred, but to transmit beautiful/sacred content to and from its possessor. This allows us to understand the modern/premodern dichotomy in terms more fundamental than permanent/ephemeral or sacred/secular. Premodern societies sacralize representations; we sacralize the scene of representation; the first find mana in figures; the second, in screens, electronic spaces on which we can stage, among other things, the sacred images of the past.

We should take as given that before the invasion of the modern world, the peoples of the Amazon and the Sepik River found the same sense of fulfillment in the possession of a fetish or mask as we moderns do in a new gadget. The only difference, historically significant but anthropologically secondary, is that we replace the satisfaction obtained by the contemplation of one’s new fetish by a satisfaction presumably more ephemeral (do we really know the duration of the thrill procured by a new fetish?) but double of (1) obtaining a new gadget and (2) filling it with the supplementary “content” whose infinite potentiality makes the screens of our iMacs and iPhones and iPads objects of desire and envy.

Given the limitations of their sacred objects, traditional societies cannot, and presumably have no desire to, memorialize their Other, let alone express the faith that they can understand the Other’s sacred through its artifacts. The modern sacred alone, mediated by the screen, has the potential to contain its Other. The modern screen can hold the traditional fetish, but not vice versa; for a tribal culture first confronting it, the screen itself is just a new kind of fetish. Once tempted by screens, traditional cultures have no other choice than to uncompromisingly reject them or to become modern—a process that can be hopeful as well as tragic.

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An ethnographic museum’s chief task is to open the modern visitor to the sense of sacrality provoked by the objects on display. At the MQB, I found the dim lighting and background colors welcoming and conducive to quiet contemplation, an attitude, whether or not we imagine it to be that of a tribal initiate toward his mask or spear in anticipation of its ceremonial use, that we are familiar with as the need to limit external sensations when watching a screen, as in a darkened movie theater. The items are displayed mostly at eye level and above rather than in the traditional waist-high cases, and the frequent need to look up at them reproduces something of the awe whose provocation was clearly a major factor in their creation. Typically modern is the widespread use of sound and video transmission devices, with numerous screens distributed throughout the exhibit showing clips of tribal activities, ethnographic interviews, and lectures, or presenting series of photographs that display the objects of the collection in situ and in active use.

As its sacralization of the screen suggests, the modern has no permanently privileged content of its own to put there; the modern is the museum of the Other. When modernity attempts to house its own artifacts in Museums of Contemporary Art, its very openness to the Other risks assimilating sacrality to a mere posture of otherness, making the Artwork a product more of formal willpower than creative craft. In a world where the sacred is found on the screen, we can no longer retrieve what still remained in the modernist heyday of the tribal artist’s conviction that the object of his work, elaborate and skilled from the earliest times, is the incarnation of a god. The iPad is a worthier work of art than much of what hangs or crouches in our museums.

If to be modern is to create and inhabit the museum of the Other, using the screen-centered gadgets of modernity to contemplate the sacred objects of premodernity, then resistance to modernity is impossible from within either the world of the images or the world that watches them. The only way to resist the modern is as an iconoclast, refusing to play either role permitted by the screen, whether that of the image or of its contemplator. No human culture is conceivable without representation, but for the iconoclast, the only permitted form is the minimal one: formal representation, language, whose “arbitrary” non-resemblance to its referent situates all those who deal with it on the same plane. To limit our scene to the Bible—or the Koran—deprives us of a specifically modern position with respect to it; whether we can or cannot understand it, have never opened it or know it by heart, all we can show on our screens is the text itself. It is no accident that today the forces hostile to modernity gravitate to the most resolutely iconoclastic of religious doctrines, the religion of those who blow up ancient statues and put out death warrants on cartoonists.

Iconoclasm is the beginning of monotheism; the One God cannot be shown as an image. But he cannot be named either; the Hebrew God is beyond representation of any kind. The God who reveals himself to Moses gives his name as a sentence. In parallel with the Greek invention of propositional thought, this is already a first opening to modernity. The declarative sentence, an ontological step away from the sacrificial ostensives of religious practice, is already a screen on which we observe an Other. God’s self-being mediates the ostensive through the declarative, the immediacy of human presence through the self-withdrawal of transcendence. Like all religious innovation, Hebrew monotheism is not so much an invention as a discovery, a deepened understanding and articulation of the originary paradox of signification that defines the referent of the first sign as always already significant. The unique sacred Being that presides over this articulation is the potential guarantor of all possible propositions because his self-identity guarantees the scene on which they appear.

God appeared to Moses in the burning bush where nothing was consumed, but his worship required rites of real sacrifice. The objects of worldly desire remained suspect; violence had to be done to them to make them worthy of the transcendental. The Law, so to speak, imposes a grid on the screen.

Christianity humanizes the paradox of signification in the person of Jesus, in whom both the scene and its contents are traced back to the Word that first defined us as human by revealing and deferring mimetic violence. In Pauline Christianity the scenes of divinity and sacrifice become one. The West is the historical experiment that emerges from this combination, which liberates the potential of the screen/proposition to take on the entire span of worldly knowledge as incarnating the divine ontology of I am that I am. Christianity constructs the screen of modernity, metaphorically at first, but always tending toward its material realization as its ultimate goal, all but achieved at the end of the 19th century with Edison’s recording of sound and movement and the Lumieres’ screening of the latter. The screen, which allows us access not to any particular scene but the scene in general, is the modern desire-object par excellence, the goal of modernity that is also the “secular” fulfillment of Judeo-Christianity.

Although today we have become accustomed to witness ourselves on screen, some of us are old enough to remember how disquieting it once was to hear one’s own voice, to see one’s own moving image, as those a few generations earlier had been scandalized by photography. We have never altogether forgotten that the blank electronic scene of our gadgets, capable of transmitting the image of anything at all, renews in its abstraction the originary scene of our distant ancestors. Our continued fascination with the “elementary forms” of religion reflects our intuition that this abstraction is not primary but the product of the human institutions that from the first have made the scene the privileged locus of the deferral of human violence. We sense that the sacred of the Other, which not merely fills but uses the scene to generate and purge violent desire, holds the secret of our own origin. To contemplate it helps us to understand what humans found dangerously desirable enough to be worthy of representation in the days before the screen’s infinite promiscuity. Given the right atmosphere, as I find MQB generally creates, we open ourselves to these representations as both fetish-objects and enacted scenes of sacred ritual. The sacred object that concentrates our desire, the rite that affirms the common value of this object, even the “holy war” that stages a violent conflict with consecrated weaponry but ends abruptly on the death of the first victim (a video clip of such a war is on display at the museum), all fill our culture’s ultimate sacred object with images that only demonstrate that we modern habitués of the screen remain creatures of the scene.

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Modernity is still learning to deal with its Other. It admires it as it awaits its seemingly inevitable absorption into modernity, which has taken much longer than expected, and may take forever, if the enemies of modernity can fulfill their destiny as its destroyers.

Before WWII, the West was convinced that its vastly superior economy reflected a general human or “moral” superiority that justified colonialism and for a long time even slavery. The postmodern era destroyed this sense of superiority without providing a model for handling the inevitably conflictive cultural differences between the modern and the premodern. Yet there is consolation in the fact that what defines the human from the beginning is not the elimination of conflict but its deferral. As Hobbes and Girard each understand in his way, driven by mimetic desire, humans need order, and order, however “just,” generates resentment. If only we could accept this simple truth with humility instead of extrapolating it into apocalyptic utopias.

Can we recover at last from WWII? The association of the Holocaust with Hiroshima’s opening the door to human self-annihilation has paralyzed our response to victimary resentment for going on seven decades. In this context, where solutions beyond the ad hoc are inconceivable, we should appreciate a museum that offers us a space conducive to meditation and reverie in which their objects and our screens can share a common goal, where we find it a bit easier to feel the fraternity of masks and iPhones, fetishes and flat-screen TVs. Thus we are brought a bit closer to turning that horrible buzzword, diversity, into an authentic experience, that of the appreciation and exchange of human difference on the giant screen of the world’s “social network,” where all are by turns and simultaneously actors and spectators. In the service of this goal, our duty is to resist the dark impulses of iconoclasm and to share our screens of liberation with the world.

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In the previous Chronicle I pointed out some areas for improvement in Originary Thinking. This time, I would like to suggest an imaginary revision to a more recent book. Given that the subject was The Scenic Imagination rather than language origin per se, instead of turning in the final chapters to Terrence Deacon’s quasi-acknowledgement of an originary hypothesis and David Sloan Wilson’s acceptance of the selective value of religion, I might have done better to deal with the two most significant thinkers of the victimary era, Jacques Derrida and René Girard. In his insightful book, Violence and Difference (Illinois, 1992), Andrew McKenna points out the many parallels between them. I could have ended the book with a discussion of GA itself, whose theory of the sign makes a synthesis of these two thinkers: the deferral of violence through representation. It would have been appropriate to conclude the prehistory of the idea with the emergence of the idea itself.

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What is radically new about the postwar victimary thought that still dominates our post-millennial age is that it is a condemnation of the human with no clear promise of deliverance. Derrida’s deconstruction of the scene of presence and the constructive but violent anthropology of La violence et le sacré are the most highly articulated presentations of this condemnation; but even Girard’s explicitly Christian later writings run more to apocalypse than redemption. This is the lived final chapter of the scenic imagination in our era, and a generative epilogue with a happy ending is by no means assured.

At first glance, the Holocaust has nothing in common with the originary scene. It is the refusal of a scene; its victims are not sacrificed but exterminated. But all human relations are scenic, even if the scenic implications of the Shoah took over a decade to emerge. At first the Jews and others were taken–and took themselves–to task for letting themselves be massacred without fighting back. Isolated examples of resistance, such as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, were sought out as proof that some degree of human reciprocity had been maintained. This early malaise reflected an understandable reluctance to accept that something unprecedented had taken place, that the very scene of human interaction had been damaged. But once people had absorbed the images of horror that Resnais’ 1955 Nuit et brouillard revealed to the general public, it was no longer possible to “blame the victims” for their lack of reaction, and the scene of representation on which all that is specifically human takes place was forced to bear the stigma of having permitted this degree of inhumanity.

The postwar reaction to the Holocaust is the leading source of the paradigm shift that led to and was in turn reinforced by decolonization, the civil rights movement, and other causes defined by the moral imperative that hierarchical relationships have no claim on human ontology. Overall this was no doubt a positive development, one whose excesses can be tolerated because their sins against reciprocity are almost always less extreme than those they replaced. But the continuous search to right the wrongs done to “underrepresented” groups through “affirmative action” and other ways of seeking “equal results” reflects a generalized suspicion of human interaction as such; any relationship, present or past, between self and other risks henceforth being denounced as non-reciprocal. All historical reality from the present on back is henceforth an object of permanent suspicion and potential delegitimation by representatives or sympathizers of victimary groups, who read the past as the history of their oppression and the present as the era of its de jure but not de facto cessation.

The victimary thinking begun with Rousseau and expanded by Marx into a historical eschatology declares its independence from historical contingency and comes to present itself as the essence of human self-understanding. We should recall that Rousseau’s attack on society was meant to safeguard the individual’s internal scene of representation, an innocent Self whose essential goodness, realized in the absence of others and their desires, in turn provides a true intuition of their own unspoiled inner being: je sens mon coeur et je connais les hommes [I feel my heart and I know human beings]. In contrast, postwar victimary thought recognizes as innocent only victims, and this only to the extent that their presence on the scene is dependent on the copresence of a victimizing Other. No binary relationship is safe from this criticism. At its most radical, victimary thought discovers the binary asymmetry not merely of human interaction but of the human as such. The defense of victims against their oppressors becomes a critique of the human itself. The extremists who extol the superiority of a human-free earth only draw the final conclusion from this attitude.

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The object of deconstruction is the scene of representation, from the center of which purportedly emanates a plenitude of Being. This being may be figured as rays from a central sun, but its characteristic form is that of language in the voice of a self-present speaker. Derrida explicitly identifies this configuration with the metaphysical scene of the Platonic Idea, whose privileged source is the voice of the unwriting Socrates. Heidegger accused Plato and the metaphysics that he founds of turning away from Being to contingent beings, transmogrified into the transcendent sphere of Ideas; this critique is a major inspiration for Derrida’s more radical condemnation. More rigorously deconstructive than the German master, Derrida makes no allusion to a pre-metaphysical scene nor does he turn to the pre-Socratics as sources of a more authentically ursprünglich intuition of Being.

Derrida’s anthropological intuition is too fine to oppose an authentic to a fallen scene of representation. To insert a “forgetting of Being” between Anaximander-Heraclitus-Parmenides and Plato is to obscure both what is gained and what is lost in the origin of metaphysics, which is that of philosophy proper. Put in the terms of the originary hypothesis as the cutting-off of the sacralizing ostensive from the propositional declarative, the birth of metaphysics does not divide an “authentic” from an “inauthentic” grasp of Being; it permits the development of logical reasoning at the expense of the intuitive anthropology of the sacred. We should not fall into the trap of making the “repression” of the ostensive in metaphysical thought into our own version of the Fall. Remembering the originary sacred is not necessarily more productive than forgetting it. If we are now able to overcome this forgetting, it is because we can restore the originary sacred not as a lived reality but as a theoretical model.

Derrida retains Heidegger’s scorn for the fallen scene of metaphysics, not in comparison to an authentic, pristine state, but as the human scene of representation itself, the self-present illusion that denies the différance within the sign that Derrida calls écriture. The complicity of this self-presence with binary victimization is not the theme of De la grammatologie; the extension of logocentrism to phallogocentrism is Luce Irigaray’s, not Derrida’s. There is no politics to speak of in Derrida’s major philosophical texts; the inconsistency with the elementary epistemological basis provided by the scene would be too egregious. If indeed the philosopher belongs on the margin of the public scene, it is because clarity of vision requires detachment from the passions of the center; unlike Rousseau, expelled from the world by un accord unanime, Derrida claims no access to a presocial soul. But the self-presence of the center could not not be seen as victimary. In Derrida’s narcissistic version of the scene of representation, the denial of the space between the self who speaks and the self who hears himself speak, the space of différance and écriture, is inevitably reconfigured as a space of oppression. Its false auto-sufficiency is that of Hegel’s master who ignores his reliance on the slave. Yet for Derrida this solar myth of the self-present speaker is that of all of Western thought, and in the absence of any real or even conceivable counterexample, of all other human thought as well.

A creation of the prelude to 1968, deconstruction is the philosophical distillation of the most radical phase of postwar victimary thinking. For the first time, Western thought provides us with an irreparably flawed model of the human-in-general, one from which we can save ourselves only relatively, by fleeing the center as far as possible to the marges de la philosophie. Once deconstruction’s victimary corollary is made explicit–and Derrida’s political sympathies, more or less indistinguishable from those of Noam Chomsky, encourage us to do so–it is not an over-dramatization to describe deconstruction as the first coherent theory of inherent and irredeemable human evil. Derrida’s political posture, absent from his philosophical texts, is significant nonetheless as a symptom of the incoherence of the moral denunciation of asymmetry in the absence of either a human or a sacred power to which the revelation of the asymmetry itself and the moral law that condemns it can be attributed. As we shall see, Girard’s conception of God serves precisely this purpose, which is that of the originary sacred.

If Girard’s analysis of the human scene is so much clearer to the reader than Derrida’s, it is because despite the latter’s extraordinary subtlety of mind, Girard has a clearer understanding of what humanity is all about. Derrida’s scenic imagination is limited to the solitary central speaker; the peripheral audience need not be depicted because the scene of metaphysics is assumed to be universal, “everyone” being the implicit audience of “truth.” As for the sacred central object, the point of interest around which the scene was formed in the first place, it is simply conflated with the speaker as usurper of the center. Throughout Derrida’s discussion of language, the three-place relationship of speaker, interlocutor, and object of common interest, the target of the complicit pointing that humans do so naturally and apes do not at all, is alluded to only through the metaphysical term “Being” that abstracts away its worldliness. Derrida, whose anthropological intuition outclasses that of the social scientists who seek an evolutionary explanation for language origin, is aware of the sacred nature of this common object: Le signe et la divinité ont le même lieu et le même temps de naissance. L’époque du signe est essentiellement théologique. [The sign and the divinity have the same birth-place and -time. The epoch of the sign is essentially theological.] (Grammatologie 25). But a philosopher does not sully Being with worldly considerations such as hunger that actually pick out objects of common interest in the real world. Even Girard’s scapegoaters are more interested in killing than eating.

Girard replaces Derrida’s solipsistic speaker with a concrete scene, that of a collectivity exercising violence against one of its members. This originary (and not postlapsarian) manifestation of our fallen state is open to salvation through the revelation of its controlling emissary mechanism, Girard’s radical yet not heretical interpretation of Jesus’ message to humanity. The absence of language from Girard’s scene reflects his emphasis on the inherent méconnaissance of the emissary mechanism, the understanding of which is, with one miraculous exception, always distorted by myth. For Girard, the linguistic sign, far from being an originary source of understanding, comes late and brings misunderstanding. Only the Bible provides a gradual revelation of the emissary mechanism through a series of legendary and historical prophets culminating in Jesus, and Girard gives us to understand that this divinely sanctioned overcoming of méconnaissance could not have been accomplished by the normal human capacity for self-reflection. “Pagan” myths, even in tragedy’s maximally insightful demystification, can reveal the arbitrariness of the emissary mechanism only implicitly; literary form requires that the sacrifice retain its sacrality. In contrast, for Girard the Bible is never mythical because from the outset it presents victims as victims. The first example is Cain’s murder of Abel, the unambiguous biblical condemnation of which Girard brilliantly compares with the parallel myth of Romulus and Remus, in whose various versions the death of the latter is never simply described as a murder perpetrated by the former.

Thus, like Derrida, Girard takes the radical step of depicting the human scene as immoral from the outset. Were it not for God’s love, the human would be equally irredeemable in both cases. Nor does Girard’s account of Jesus’ revelation provide an obvious path for its implementation in the real world, which continues to depend on sacrificial modes of social organization rendered only less effective–and consequently more violent–by the need to dissimulate a truth already revealed. If Derrida’s politics, like those of most French intellectuals, follow Marx’s critique of capitalism without the socialist happy ending, Girard’s tend toward an apocalyptic exhortation to transcend resentment through universal love. Neither offer any clear hope for the liberal democracy to which we have no reasonable alternatives.

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It is far too early to interpret the enactment of “Obamacare” as a sign that the United States is in the process of aligning itself with a pacifist, post-national, and demographically exhausted Europe that would elevate the postwar victimary paradigm into humankind’s permanent credo. On the contrary, the resistance of the voting public to this and similar measures may signal a reversal of the long-term trend toward European-style étatisation. One sign of the greater vigor of American over European humanism is that Americans prefer to understand the human through physical rather than cultural or linguistic anthropology. Thus the gradualist Darwinism of the educated classes, virtually the only anthropology available to Americans outside of creationism, is not morally inflected like deconstruction. But this provides no more than a passive defense against the Western death-wish that apologizes to the Other for our prosperity and to Nature for our existence.

The originary hypothesis will not solve the world’s political problems, but it supplies us with an antidote to the postwar victimary nihilism that refuses, two generations after the Holocaust, to attribute a positive value to human existence. It might have been a good idea to end The Scenic Imagination on this note.

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In a recent email exchange, Matthew Taylor suggests that GA’s lack of currency in today’s intellectual market may be less a sign of its intrinsic incompatibility with our victimary Weltgeist than the result of a failure to link it on a “gut level” to the everyday experience of the scenic. These passages give the gist of Matthew’s idea:

If GA could be articulated more at the “gut level” (undoubtedly the attraction of Mimetic Theory is that it can at least appear to appeal directly to experience and observation) I suspect it could be more widely disseminated.

[W]hat would a “gut level” GA look like, exactly?  I’m not sure, but think it would appeal somewhat more directly to the qualia of conscious awareness.  We experience language in a certain way. We cannot NOT have an internal scene created when we hear or read or use language. We cannot . . . think, or feel, or communicate, or desire without calling up some kind of scene.  From there, people can be asked [to] think about the nature and texture of that scene, and from there back to the essentials of the first scene.  Likewise, center/periphery and resentment issues come up all the time in daily experience. GA would be thought astonishing (rather than fascinating but dauntingly arcane) when people realized that it describes and illuminates the way they are actually experiencing life and conscious awareness.

It seems that if GA could be shown to make [people] understand themselves and their surroundings markedly better in a concrete way, it would automatically be appreciated.

This exchange coincided with a let-down occasioned by reading in my seminar some chapters of Originary Thinking, which had aged more than I had realized since the book’s appearance in 1993. At that time, I was still addressing “the social sciences” in programmatic terms and, more than I had remembered, in the late metaphysical vocabulary of existentialist philosophy. Conversely, the book lacks reference to Durkheim and Mauss, whose relevance to GA I discovered only later in the 1990s.

Yet ideas take time to develop, and over the past decades, GA has been moving in the right direction, exploring its anthropological roots and developing its own vocabulary. It suffices to stick with the theme of the recent series of Chronicles to find the point of contact between GA and the gut level of human experience.

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I have been fascinated by paradoxes ever since I can remember. I have already mentioned in Chronicle 389 the impression made on me some forty years ago by Watzlawick’s concept of pragmatic paradox. The titles of three of my books contain the word “paradox.”

In the previous Chronicle I developed some consequences of the fundamental paradox of signification, which should really be called the fundamental paradox of representation, since all forms of representation have the same underlying structure. The more radically we explicate this structure, the more we free it from the metaphysical framework that takes language for granted, the closer we come to an understanding of the specifically human use of language and other forms of representation.

By definition, paradox cannot be “thought.” This is usually taken as a sign that paradoxes are small cracks in an otherwise consistent system of thought. Bertrand Russell was able to eliminate paradox from set theory by proposing levels or “types” of discourse/sets each of which could refer to/include only types lower down the list, but none of which could refer to/include discourses/sets of its own type. No doubt the enunciation of the theory cannot itself be given a type, but the addition of this metatheoretical postulate seems a small price to pay for preserving set theory from paradoxes of the Barber variety.

In the preceding Chronicle I showed that the terms of the Barber Paradox can be given an unproblematic expression in the real world; they are paradoxical only in the sign-world, where temporal causality has been eliminated. We can apply the same argument to the logically homologous set-theory paradox: the set S includes a given set x if and only if x does not include itself, or in formal terms, x € S <=> x ~€ x. The paradox arises when we set x to S. Starting on the left side of the equivalence, S is a member of itself. But if the set S includes itself on the left side, then it doesn’t have to include itself on the right side. Think of “including” like… shaving. Or, conversely, if it’s not included in itself on the right side, then it has the right to join itself on the left. This reasoning sounds stranger than the very same reasoning in the case of the barber, because the latter’s activities apparently refer to the “real world” whereas the operations of set theory do not. But that is only another way of saying that the world of metaphysics, of which logic is a part, was created in order to avoid the originary paradox of signification.

From the standpoint of the originary hypothesis, the originary singularity in which the sign is created necessarily has a paradoxical status within the system of signs. Let us return to our fundamental paradox: (S -> O) -> (S -> (S-> O)). Like the Barber Paradox, there is nothing paradoxical about this relationship if it is considered as a temporal progression: the sign represents its object, and as a result the object is transformed into the object-of-a-sign. We are appetitively attracted to the central object; we renounce appropriation of it and represent it by a sign; insofar as it is represented by a sign rather than sought as an object of appropriation, the object is experienced as sacred; consequently, the sign represents the object-as-sacred. It is only when we attempt to condense this temporal process into the atemporal meaning of the sign, which Saussure called the signifié, that we encounter a paradoxical, unstable, or simply oscillatory condition, in which the sacred is undecidably the referent and the signified, the cause and the product of signification. Historically this paradox has tended to be resolved by the postulation of a sacred prior to the originary scene (God created man), but there may well have always been skeptics for whom the opposite is true (man created God), and both can find support in the scene itself; was the sacred an invention or a revelation? Whence what I think is the most rigorous definition of God: as the being that is undecidably the referent and the signified of the name-of-God, both demonstrating and begging the question of the “ontological proof.”

All other paradoxes derive from the fundamental paradox, which is not a logical statement but, as we have seen, what logic exists to avoid. Why indeed do we assume that words have fixed meanings, or that the truth of propositions is independent of the time in which they are enunciated? No doubt because language works better that way, but the ontology of language is not independent of the humans who think with it. Every use of language or other forms of representation is susceptible of reminding us of the origin of representation, of the passage from the horizontal universe of appetite to the human world containing the transcendent second dimension of representation. To think this passage in terms of constituted language, which is the only way in which we can, strictly speaking, think it, necessarily encounters the fundamental paradox.

This is a question that can only be talked around, not faced directly through a logical exposition. It is no more “supernatural” than Gödel’s theorem or Russell’s Theory of Types or the good old Barber Paradox itself. What distinguishes the originary hypothesis is that it offers a way of imagining how representation with its paradoxical structure might have come into being; while acknowledging its debts to Freud and of course Girard, it is the first attempt to construct such a scenario.

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Formal statements of the originary paradox do not produce gut-level effects, but they can help us to understand the effects the experience of this paradox does produce, whether they occur, as most frequently, in the contemplation of a work of art, in the rarer moments of religious conversion, or in an experience familiar to most of us, that of falling in love.

Art: One experience that certainly generates a gut reaction is that of the esthetic, which I defined as a pragmatic paradox as soon as I became aware of the concept. Today, I would put this in much more fundamental terms: the esthetic is the experience of a given representation as originary paradox. The frisson (often accompanied by tears) that attends a successful esthetic experience is the mark left by this paradox on our psyche. In the artwork we experience the birth of meaning from nothingness, which could not produce meaning had it not already existed.

Religion: The originary hypothesis is a good place for believers and non-believers to get together, a minimal “belief” the sharing of which allows members of either group to appreciate the other’s position. As opposed to deism, which posits some form of minimal divinity without offering an explanation of its provenance, the originary hypothesis postulates no beings outside the originary scene itself. To meet on the common ground of GA, believers must agree to understand their belief as a mark of historical respect to the humans to whom a given explanation of human origin was revealed, however we understand the notion of revelation; the non-believers, having refused to accept historical documentation that is incompatible with Ockham’s razor, must accept their responsibility to explain human origins at least as well as the first group. In the past, belief was a social, “Durkheimian” phenomenon; today, in countries where religious doctrine can no longer be enforced, atheists are happy to tell believers that their creation stories are “myths,” but unwilling to accept responsibility for conceiving a hypothetical originary event of their own.

Love: It is no accident that “I love you,” a version of which I believe exists in every language, is an exemplary illustration of the paradox of signification. On the surface, the sentence is a simple constative; unlike performatives such as “I now pronounce you man and wife” or “I promise to pay you back next week,” saying “I love you” should do nothing. Yet we all know that “I love you” is indeed a promise, in principle of lifelong fidelity. Why then do we not say, “I promise to love you” or “I promise to care for you”? Such expressions, we immediately realize, would be offensive, because they would make of my love a purely voluntary engagement, a contract that I undertake, so that my promise would bind me in the same way as my promise to pay back the money. This is not the sign of a truly originary, sacred experience. “I love you” means that I recognize the love I feel and thereby convert it into the promise it always already implicitly was, just as our originary designation of the sacred central object conveys explicitly to each other the meaning of sacrality that the object always already possessed.

If anything hits us at gut level, it is love! Love is the dominant theme of these Chronicles, and the expression “I love you” was the subject of one of the earliest. The next time you say “I love you,” think of the originary hypothesis, and Matthew’s best hopes for GA will be fulfilled.

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When animals use indexical signals, a warning cry or conversely, a call indicating the presence of food or another desirable good, they communicate by contagion; the first emitter of the signal spreads its reaction to the others, since all are linked by common needs. A scream at the presence of a predator incites the other animals to flee; they understand it “sympathetically,” since their reaction on seeing the predator would have been the same. Similarly, a signal indicating the presence of food or water will attract other animals that can be presumed to have the same appetites.

In contrast with animals, humans pose a greater danger to themselves than do the rigors of the extraspecific world. Hence if we need a new system of communication, it is not to signal the location of either predators or food, but to avert the danger of mimetic conflict. According to the originary hypothesis, human language originates when the pecking-order animal dominance hierarchy is no longer able to regulate such conflict. The key transition occurs when the protohuman group as a whole (which need not by any means be the entire population of the local “society”) acts as a counterweight to individual dominance and prevents the Alpha from exercising its normal dominance by being first to appropriate, for example, a large edible animal encountered by a hunting party. In the proposed scenario, the linguistic or symbolic sign that represents the central object does not anticipate but aborts and replaces the act of appropriation. Even if the originary sign is not itself an aborted gesture of appropriation, it effectively substitutes for it: it designates the object–directs the interlocutor’s attention toward it–yet unlike the indexical sign, it is not linked to an attempt to appropriate it. On the contrary, in communicating the significance of the presence of its referent to the other participants, the linguistic sign also communicates the fact that the emitter does not intend to appropriate the object.

This originary sign is an ostensive, the simplest form of linguistic utterance, emitted in the presence of its referent. In the context of communication thus defined, the collective emission of the sign poses a pragmatic paradox:

(1) it designates its object as worthy of attention, and therefore of appropriation;

(2) by this very fact, it sacralizes the object, making it inaccessible to appropriation by any member of the group.

The pragmatic paradox generated by the originary ostensive precedes and is the source of the pragmatic paradoxes discussed by Watzlawick et al. in Pragmatics of Human Communication (Norton 1967). To say that the originary sign sacralizes its object is only another way of saying that it makes our relation to it paradoxical; the sacred may be defined as that to which we can relate only through the paradox just described.

Abstracting from the pragmatic situation in which signification serves to avert mimetic conflict, this originary paradox may be reformulated as what I shall call the fundamental paradox of signification:

(1) the sign refers to an object (S -> O)

(2) by this very fact, this object is no longer a part of the object world, but the object-referred-to-by-the-sign (S -> (S -> O))

It is important to recognize that this abstract formulation is not an exercise in symbolic logic; it derives from the successful negotiation of the pragmatic reality of the originary scene. The fact that in (2) the sign points to the object-as-pointed-to-by-the-sign can only become an object of logical analysis because it had in the first place the practical function of making the object inaccessible to appropriation. This is accomplished through the exchange of signs that represent rather than appropriating the object, and by so doing, represent it as representable but not appropriable, in other words, as sacred.

The imperative

Given that the simplest utterance form sets up a paradox in its interlocutor, it stands to reason that this must be true as well of the higher forms. The Origin of Language derives the imperative from the use of the sign in the absence of its referent in order to make the latter appear, no doubt originally in the form of a prayer to the central divinity. The imperative not only designates an object of desire but, taking the nominal imperative (“Scalpel!”) as the simplest imperative form, requests that it be made available to the speaker. If the originary ostensive may be said to generate originary resentment of the sacred object (which in the hypothetical event is discharged in the sparagmos by which the members of the originary community tear the object to shreds, each taking a share of it), the imperative, which requests that the interlocutor satisfy the desire of the speaker after it has aroused his own, generates in its interlocutor resentment of the speaker.

In the originary scene, the community as a whole exercises its authority through the medium of the sign to prevent individual appropriation of the object. In the imperative configuration, the emitter of the imperative asserts an individual authority that substitutes for that of the collectivity. In order that the imperative be “felicitous,” this authority must overcome the force of the fundamental paradox of signification. The surgeon’s command is not likely to lead to a struggle with his assistant for possession of the scalpel because the pragmatic paradox this command embodies is of limited force in comparison with the surgeon’s authority in the operating room.

Such imperative authority, whether temporary or permanent, is a prerequisite for the “double-bind” pragmatic paradoxes studied by Watzlawick. The paradox is these cases is caused by the contradiction between the interpretations of the object requested by the imperative as either (S -> O) or (S -> (S -> O)). For example, in the case of the robust paradox, “Don’t think of an elephant,” it is certainly possible not to think of an elephant (O), but not in the context in which this behavior is explicitly thematized (S ‑> O). “Be spontaneous” leads to a similar contradiction in the vaguer domain of general behavior.

The declarative and the esthetic

The Origin of Language derives the declarative sentence or proposition from the answer to a failed imperative (“Scalpel!” – “There isn’t any scalpel”‘; “The scalpel is in the next room”). In contrast to ostensive or imperative utterances, the declarative incites its interlocutor to situate its referent on his internal scene of representation; hearing “the cat is on the mat,” we imagine a mat with a cat on it. This permits the individual to internalize the relationship that had already obtained in the originary scene between him and the central object designated collectively by the sign. The declarative neither points ostensively to a real object to which it attracts our attention nor imperatively to a hypothetical object that we must produce; it invites us to imagine a state of affairs, which by the paradox of signification we find desirable within its inaccessible imaginary context.

The declarative thus sets up a short-term version of the oscillatory relationship that obtains in more elaborate form in our experience of an artwork. Namely, we first experience the work as a representation, we imagine the world (naturalistic or abstract) that it represents and infuse it with our desire, but in order to maintain contact with this imaginary world we must continually return to the artwork, either seriatim, as in a “chronological” work such as a novel or a symphony, or through aleatory visual interaction with a work of plastic art. The poles of this oscillation are the terms of the fundamental paradox of signification; perceiving the artwork, we imagine the object (S -> O), but on doing so, we experience the dependence of this imagination on our experience of the artwork (S -> (S -> O)). An artistic representation is explicitly designed to attract our desire to its imaginary world, situating it in a context where, unlike the real world, it is not susceptible to rivalry and contagion. The spectator traditionally experiences the paradox of esthetic desire with no possibility of contact with the work’s creator, who is in Girard’s terms an external mediator, standing in a transcendental relationship to the imaginary world his work generates in the spectator.

Logical paradox

With the declarative sentence there also appear logical paradoxes of self-reference, as exemplified by the barber who shaves all and only all those who do not shave themselves. Although it is not obvious at first glance, the Barber Paradox and all similar paradoxes are variants of the fundamental paradox of signification.

The Barber Paradox involves an equivalence or two-way implication: the barber shaves X if and only if X does not shave X. Substituting the barber himself for X leads to a contradiction. (Female barbers are not allowed in paradoxes.)

Since the paradoxical implication is the same in either direction, we can limit our analysis to the first half of the equivalence: if the barber shaves X then X does not shave X. The opposite implication, that if X does not shave X then the barber shaves X, can be analyzed in a similar manner.

To the extent that the sign represents the real world, we can understand the implication as a causal/temporal sequence; if (moment 1) the barber shaves someone, then (moment 2) the latter doesn’t shave himself, since he is already shaved. If we then substitute the barber himself for “someone,” the implication involves no paradox. The barber, like everyone else, needs to be shaved only once; whether it be he or another, having the barber shave him at moment (1) means he doesn’t have to shave himself at moment (2).

This situation becomes paradoxical only if it is taken out of its causal/temporal correspondence with the real world and detemporalized into a logical state, so that the implication that once the barber has shaved himself, he need not shave himself (again) becomes: if the barber shaves himself then the barber doesn’t shave himself. This flattening of worldly temporality into a synchronic state is the effect of the incorporation of the worldly description into the abstract sign-world of logic, that is, in the terminology used above, the passage from (S -> O) to (S -> (S -> O)).

We should note the analogy of this paradox with the sacralization of the object via the originary emission of the “aborted gesture”: the sign designating its object as sacred implies that it is already sacred, in other words, it flattens the causal/temporal relation that separates moment (1), in which the gesture renounces the attempt at appropriation in order to represent the object, from moment (2), in which the object is made sacred. In the language of postmodernism, the Barber paradox exemplifies the same always already, toujours déjà, as the originary emission of the name-of-God.

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We cannot conceive, let alone access, a sacred referent that is not at the same time the sacred-referent-designated-by-the-sign.  Applied to the originary sacred center, the fundamental paradox of signification justifies the characterization of “God” as the name that represents indifferently its signified and its referent, so that the “existence of God” can never be separated from the “existence of ‘God,’” of the concept itself.

Indeed, the very notion of the signified derives from this paradox. The originary sign or signifier that designates its sacred referent can only come to refer to a signified once the referent is reconceived as the referent-as-represented-by-the-sign, that is, in Saussure’s terms, as a part of the linguistic sign (which he defines as Signifié/Signifiant) rather than of the object-world, or in philosophical terms, as an Idea or concept.

This allows us to understand the realm of Ideas or metaphysics as founded on an agreement to expel or “bracket” the fundamental paradox of signification by taking declarative language as given. The language of philosophy, whether it speaks of God or the cat on the mat, agrees to ignore the paradoxical dependence that links the Idea of the cat, that is, the cat-designated-by-the-sign, to the cat tout court. The founding gesture of Platonic metaphysics is to grant ontological primacy not to the flesh-and-blood animal, but to the Idea.

We must never forget that the pragmatic paradoxes of language have as their originary purpose the deferral of the potential violence of mimetic rivalry for a central object of desire. To say that the sign defers violence is the equivalent of saying that the sign creates a pragmatic paradox that defers appetitive action and the conflict to which such action might lead. The emitter of the sign is blocked from worldly action; the abortion of the gesture of appropriation displaces it from a horizontal to a “vertical” or “transcendental” plane where it functions as a signifier with respect to its original object-referent-signified.

The fundamental paradox of signification is a difficult notion to grasp; constitutive of language, it is not normally accessible to it. The bargain struck by metaphysics, to take language for granted as a neutral medium for making propositional assertions, has been supremely advantageous for the conquest of the natural world. But only GA’s “new way of thinking,” which works through rather than around thought’s founding paradox, offers a unified understanding of language, art, and religion that does not depend on ad hoc empirical data. The greatest paradox is how few minds have been willing to make the effort to think this most powerful idea of all.

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An early step on the road to GA was taken in 1969-70, when Alain Cohen, a UCLA graduate who still teaches at UCSD, introduced me to The Pragmatics of Human Communication by Paul Watzlawick et al. (Norton, 1967), a product of Gregory Bateson’s psycho-communications “project” at Stanford. The notion of pragmatic paradox struck me as the key to the esthetic–so much so, that during a visiting professorship at Johns Hopkins in 1978, I offered a graduate seminar on le paradoxe esthétique with no predefined syllabus. The consequence of this decision, although professionally disastrous, was intellectually rewarding, since it was at Hopkins that I formulated the originary hypothesis.

Rereading Bateson after nearly forty years–and nearly thirty of GA–recalls my early affinities with his thought, yet also reveals a profound divide. As suggested by the title of his best known collection of articles, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Jason Aronson, 1972; all page references below are to this text), Bateson’s awareness of the interactive nature of thinking and consequent refusal to be confined within the individual psyche puts him in the line of thought that leads from Durkheim to GA. If nothing else, Bateson’s theory of the “double bind,” so to speak an Anglo-Saxon version of Girard’s “French triangle” (the quote is from James Joyce), guarantees his continued relevance. Yet he remains, as Derrida might have put it, behind la clôture de la métaphysique. Because Bateson analyzes communication in logical rather than semiotic terms, notably through Bertrand Russell’s “theory of types”–which creates a logical hierarchy that averts paradox by forbidding words to refer to others of their own ontological level or “type”–he lacks the conceptual means to grasp the qualitative difference between human and animal language. As Terrence Deacon (The Symbolic Species [Norton, 1997]) is still one of the few students of human language to recognize, the types of signs that C. S. Peirce called indexical and symbolic are discontinuous, ontologically and neurologically. Both humans and animals communicate through indexical signs, expressions of emotions that provide information to conspecifics, such as a cry of fear that serves as a warning signal. In contrast, the category of symbolic or in Saussurean terms, arbitrary signs, belongs only to humans, and Bateson fails to appreciate the impossibility of a logic-based “evolution” from one to the other.

Today when zoosemiosis is all the rage, it is considered bad form to insist on what anyone but a university intellectual can see is the qualitative superiority of human language over that of dolphins or bonobos. Indeed, Bateson’s “ecological” view of nature, in which not only humans and animals but their natural environment as a whole are all part of a single system, makes him a key ancestor of modern environmentalism, in its intelligent as well as its mindlessly victimary aspects. Bateson’s observations in his 1967 essay, “Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art,” that “mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life,” that “unaided consciousness must always involve man in the sort of stupidity of which evolution was guilty when she urged upon the dinosaurs the common-sense values of an armaments race,” and finally, that “unaided consciousness must always tend toward hate” (146) are prime illustrations of the sixties critique of “capitalism” and the Cold War whose roots lie in the postwar repudiation of the Fascist exaltation of the principle of dominance that culminated in the Holocaust.

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Bateson begins the 1955 essay “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” by describing his quest to understand the evolution of communication, “a very important stage [of which] occurs when the organism gradually ceases to respond quite ‘automatically’ to the mood-signs of another and becomes able to recognize the sign as a signal” (178). This stage is subsequently defined as “the drama precipitated when organisms, having eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, discover that their signals are signals. Not only the characteristically human invention of language can then follow, but also all the complexities of empathy, identification, projection, and so on” (179). In this passage, despite the affirmation of the uniqueness of human language implied by the biblical reference, Bateson displays his unfortunate tendency to conflate language with forms of emotional interaction already in evidence in the animal world.

A visit to a zoo revealed to Bateson that playing animals “were capable of some degree of metacommunication, i.e., of exchanging signals which would carry the message ‘this is play’” (179). This gave him the idea of using play as his primary model for a higher level of consciousness than simple (indexical) “mood signs”; in order to play, an animal must be aware that its own actions and those of its fellows are not “real.” Bateson describes play in logical terms: “‘these actions [of play] . . . do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which the actions denote.’ The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (180). After pointing out that this use of “denote” on two different levels violates Russell’s theory of types, he concludes that “the evolution of play may have been an important step in the evolution of communication” (181), presumably leading to human language.

Thus Bateson extends the term “denote,” which in its literal sense can only be accomplished by a signifier denoting its signified, to refer to the indexical association of one act with another. “The nip denotes the bite” may be interpreted as saying that in the universe of dog play, the nip means the bite, corresponds to what would be a bite in the “real world.” As for what the bite itself “denotes,” this cannot be defined in the play world, where the bite cannot exist; thus the paradoxical thought of its denotation constitutes a type violation.

Yet among dogs as among humans, an aggressive act does not normally “denote” anything. If we play cops and robbers, in Bateson’s terms, saying “bang bang” “denotes” shooting. If, however, I really shoot you, what am I “denoting”? Shooting might be considered an index of aggression, but what we refer to as an animal signal–a warning cry, for example–has a presumably adaptive communicative function, whereas a bite, like a gunshot, normally “communicates” nothing more than its practical consequences. Bateson’s metaphoric use of logical terminology beclouds the question of language origin that he originally posed in the unambiguously human terms of the Tree of Knowledge.

However pregnant with future evolutionary possibilities, animal play is not comparable to human symbolic representation, in which words and things belong to different universes rather than one being a “non-serious” form of the other. The formulation of the connection between nipping and biting demanded by Occam’s razor is not that the first denotes the second but that the first is an inhibited version of the second. Without going into the details of dog behavior, where play is largely subordinate to displays of submission and dominance, it suffices to say that a dog nips rather than bites because at the level of aggression at which nipping occurs, it has proved adaptive to avoid bloodshed by discharging this aggression while at the same time displaying an absence of intention to attack. The original source of the dog’s inhibition, we may assume, is fear of being bitten back, and eventually dogs come to “know” they are playing, but only an uncritical anthropomorphism would extend this knowledge to awareness that their nips “denote” real bites.

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Bateson goes on to develop a second model of “denotation,” Korzybski’s model of map and territory, which would seem to make more explicit than play the symbolic rather than merely indexical nature of the relationship between its terms. A map is not a reduced version of a territory, but a separate two-dimensional diagram. Yet Bateson uses the map-territory model rather to illustrate the paradoxical effect of ritual, where “the discrimination between map and territory is always liable to break down, and ritual blows of peace-making are always liable to be mistaken for the “real” blows of combat” (182). Thus even after quoting Korzybski’s line, “The word ‘cat’ cannot scratch us” (180), Bateson describes, as he did with play, ritual blows as “mapping” the real blows of combat.

These formulations reflect a genuine anthropological intuition struggling to express itself in an inadequate vocabulary. Bateson’s fascination with the ritual confusion between map and territory ultimately leads him to a pregnant quasi-Durkheimian reflection on religion:

Finally, in the dim region where art, magic, and religion meet and overlap, human beings have evolved the “metaphor that is meant,” the flag which men will die to save, and the sacrament that is felt to be more than “an outward and visible sign, given unto us.” Here we can recognize an attempt to deny the difference between map and territory, and to get back to the absolute innocence of communication by means of pure mood signs. (183)

The “metaphor that is meant” corresponds nicely to the sacred as both signified and referent of the originary sign; the originary “name-of-God” is meant in both senses of signified and taken seriously. And the soldier defending the flag is Durkheim’s own example of the secular sacrality that links modern France to the stone-age tribes of central Australia. But Bateson never conceives that this “attempt to deny the difference between map and territory” might refer, through the mediation of sacred history, to an originary moment in which the uniquely human difference of map and territory, sign and thing, first emerged.

The “absolute innocence” sought by religious sacrament is in fact wholly different from the indexical “mood signs” we share with animals. The “innocence” of the latter is simply their pre-human dependence on biological “moods”; animals are innocent whether nipping in play or slashing away in earnest. In contrast, the “innocence” of the ritual conflation of map and territory derives from its evocation of a sacred being that not merely reduces violence to play but suspends action altogether, so to speak transforming a real-world cat into Korzybski’s ‘”cat’ that doesn’t scratch.” This sacred guarantee of communal peace must precede the ritual pseudo-violence that culminates in sacrifice–and which, as Bateson emphasizes, sometimes breaks down in real violence. Maintaining peace in the human community is a difficult and not always successful undertaking, but the point to retain is that the “absolute innocence of communication” that is the aim of ritual and of all other cultural phenomena depends on our ability to transcend the violence of our worldly “moods” in the shared contemplation of a scene of communal significance.

Bateson concludes the essay with the reasonable but insufficient observation that “paradoxes of abstraction [i.e., that confuse different logical types] must make their appearance in all communication more complex than that of mood-signals, and . . . without these paradoxes the evolution of communication would be at an end. Life would then be an endless interchange of stylized messages, a game with rigid rules, unrelieved by change or humor” (193). Although this less than perspicuous formulation makes the important connection between paradox and (the origin of) human language, it displays no awareness that linguistic signs are neither “mood-signals” nor meta-communications about mood-signals on the model of “this is play.” Indeed, given that animal play must be understood as helping maintain social organization by deferring intraspecific violence, human language can emerge only when play of this sort and the pecking-order dominance hierarchies it supports have proved inadequate to maintain order. The stability of the human community is founded not on a one-on-one pecking order but on the symmetrical interaction of all its members around a central sacred object that defers mimetic violence, not by “subliming” it into play but by interdicting its appropriation as an object of worldly desire.

Before logical or linguistic categorization can take place, the community must establish through its exchange of signs a transcendental universe of representation, the world of Derrida’s différance. The sacred object, by being designated as inaccessible, as present on the scene of language rather than in the real world, is withdrawn as a potential source of mimetic violence. The fundamental paradox that underlies all logic and permits the subsequent establishment of “logical types” is that the sign designates its referent as “always already” part of this transcendent universe. What we point to is God, both/either because pointing makes it God, and/or because pointing recognizes its divinity.

Unlike the world of mathematics, the world of logic requires an object-universe to which its propositions refer–and reference to which risks generating paradoxical “objects,” such as Russell’s barber who shaves everyone who doesn’t shave himself. But this object universe can only be constituted in the first place by the act of faith that accepts that the object the sign designates as significant is significant independently of the sign. What bears out this faith is the ability of signification, of representation-as-sacred, to defer violence within the community. The social order rests on the equivalent of a Prisoner’s Dilemma enforced by the community as a result of its universal acceptance. The theory of types can only get off the ground once the first “type,” that of the sign as ontologically distinct from the thing it refers to, has been saved from the violence attendant on confusing “map” with “territory,” the “aborted gesture of appropriation” with a real attempt to appropriate the object, by the communal faith that the signifying gesture designates a sacred being inaccessible in the real world.

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In a later essay, “Redundancy and Coding,” which first appeared in a 1968 collection on animal communication published by semiologist Thomas Sebeok, Bateson makes a more focused attempt to distinguish between human and animal communication. He begins by rejecting the common-sense idea that “language replaced the cruder systems of the other animals” (417), not realizing that by denying this “replacement” he is in effect admitting that human language is discontinuous with animal communication and consequently cannot be derived from it.

After a good deal of inconclusive speculation on how our “digital” language might have evolved out of the “iconic” (that is, indexical) language of animals, Bateson settles on the emergence of the negative “not” as the simplest criterion of this transition. Bateson sees an important difference between “don’t” as a negative imperative that animals can communicate indexically, for example, by threat, and “not” as a simple negative referring in the case at hand to the animal’s own actions: “I will not bite you” (430), which can only be communicated symbolically.

[E]volution of a simple negative would be a decisive step toward language as we know it. This step would immediately endow the signals–be they verbal or iconic–with a degree of separateness from their referents, which would justify us in referring to the signals as “names.” The same step would make possible the use of negative aspects of classification: those items which are not members of an identified class would become identifiable as nonmembers. And, lastly, simple affirmative indicative statements would become possible. (431)

This absolute “degree of separateness” between sign and referent is what defines symbolic as opposed to indexical signification. Although Bateson does not make clear whether the negative is the source of this separateness or a sign of it, we can accept his principle that human language originates with the “negative,” provided that we interpret the latter not as linguistic negation but as cultural interdiction. This allows us to understand Bateson’s “don’t” vs “not” as opposing, in the first case, the animal’s one-on-one threat, and in the second, the communal scene of human language, where the reciprocal exchange of the “aborted gesture of appropriation” demonstrates that all members of the group have renounced the intention of appropriating the central object. If for no other reason, this seemingly adventurous extrapolation from Bateson’s thought is justified by the historical fact that Bateson’s “double bind” and Watzlawick’s “pragmatic paradox” provided the conceptual tools for the first step on the way from Girard’s theory of mimetic desire to generative anthropology.

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The postmodern notion of écriture dates from the beginnings of la nouvelle critique in Roland Barthes’ 1953 Le degré zéro de l’écriture. In this work (whose anti-leftist stance, like that of Truffaut’s famous 1954 proto-New Wave manifesto, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” tends to be forgotten in today’s academy), Barthes distinguished écriture from a writer’s personal style (le style, c’est l’homme même) as an essentially sinister phenomenon exemplified by the communist langue de bois. Écriture implicitly asserts a set of presuppositions, a Weltanschauung or vision du monde, prior to any specific content. The burden of Barthes’ book was that in a world increasingly dominated by écriture, the deliberately neutral prose of Camus’ L’étranger achieved a “zero degree” that we should find exemplary. But as Barthes himself would soon realize, the preexistence of écriture to actual writing suggests that it governs all discourse, making the degré zéro not merely utopian but unthinkable. In this perspective (as Althusser, for example, might have argued), Stalinist écriture could be justified by the need to correct the unconscious bourgeois écriture that would otherwise prevail by default. The interposition of écriture between the self and its language marks the demise of Sartre’s transparent notion of human freedom and the beginning of the postmodern ère du soupçon.

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Taking off from Barthes’ intuition, Jacques Derrida redefined the concept of écriture in his foundational works, De la grammatologie and L’écriture et la différence (both 1967) by, on the one hand, retrieving its literal meaning of writing as opposed to speech, and on the other, dismissing the speech-writing opposition as secondary to the essentially “written” nature of all language. In contrast with “writing in the narrow sense,” écriture for Derrida characterizes any sign system that generates meanings by means of a paradigm of differentiated signs, thereby “erasing” the “proper” sign of its (mythical) originary referent.

In Derrida’s earliest work, his analysis of Husserlian phenomenology in La voix et le phénomène (also published in 1967), it is the speaker’s self-presence in his voice that guarantees the authenticity of his thought. For Derrida, the “logocentrism” of Western metaphysical thought from Plato to Rousseau to Saussure–and Lévi-Strauss–is defined by the erasure or rature of writing from language, conceived as emanating from a (self-) present subject. Derrida’s analysis subverts or deconstructs this logocentric-metaphysical model of authentic language, denouncing it as a “myth of presence” that sustains the “solar” authority of political domination.

Derrida’s rebuttal to logocentrism is that all language is écriture. One cannot truly be “present” in one’s speech; the paradigms of language defer meaning because all the members of the paradigm must be taken into account to define the meaning of each of its components–the Saussurean notion of signification as a process of selection within a system of differences. Thus when I say “red,” the meaning either I or my interlocutor constructs from this word depends not solely on a concept of redness, but on the delimiting concepts of yellow, orange, etc., that allow the color “red” to be specified.

Although Derrida considers all language to be structured as écriture, he pays special attention to inscription, the creation of a permanent trace, as the form of language that explicitly embodies deferral and materiality detached from the ostensibly present subjectivity of its human creator. In his analysis of Lévi-Strauss’ leçon d’écriture from Tristes tropiques (ch. 28) in the second part of De la grammatologie, Derrida mocks Lévi-Strauss’ claim that because the Nambikwara’s graphic art is limited to “geometrical” lines and they call the act of writing faire des raies [drawing lines] (180), they can be said to be unaware of writing. Considering the notion of trace as more fundamental than what it might be a trace of, Derrida assimilates, more by innuendo than explicit affirmation, all forms of inscription to “writing” whether or not they provide a record of human language, and even throws doubt on the chronological priority of writing to speech.

These intuitions, however perversely expressed, are of great significance to generative anthropology. The originary hypothesis need not take sides on the anteriority of speech vs writing. The function of the originary sign is to re-present the central object and in so doing, to defer its appropriation. The simplest way of understanding this sign is as a gesture, the “aborted gesture of appropriation.” (Although Andrew McKenna long ago pointed out that the gesture that comprises the originary sign is in fact an aborted act of appropriation, I have maintained the proleptic term “gesture” to draw attention to the fact that the intentional, spatial nature of the “act,” once broken off, is taken over directly into the gesture-sign.) The hypothetical gesture takes place in an external space-time, whether or not accompanied by a production of the speech apparatus, which at the time of the originary event would obviously not yet be adapted to articulated human speech.

As pointed out in Chronicle 385, Durkheim’s intuition that the “absolute” opposition between sacred and profane is the founding distinction of human society and the basis for all further classification allows us to understand the process of signification as prior to the existence of “difference” in the Saussurean sense. The sacred-profane distinction has always been misunderstood by Durkheim’s successors precisely because it cannot be assimilated to a binary distinction on the Saussurean model, of which it is rather the originary source.

The deferral of mimetic violence through the emission and exchange of signs that defines the originary event is “inscribed” in a time and space that separates the peripheral emitters of the sign from the (sacred) central referent it represents. Différance is in the first place the deferral of violence. The representation of the sacred/significant in a scenic space-time of deferral generates meaning as interdiction and “non-appetitive attention” (Girard). The originary generation of meaning through deferral is the source of all subsequent systems of differences; of the two components of Derrida’s différance, difference is dependent on deferral rather than the other way around.

Derrida’s descriptions of the “proper” as defined by logocentric myth sound as though they refer to the emission of the sign in the originary hypothesis:

Il y a écriture dès que le nom propre est raturé dans un système, il y a “sujet” dès que cette oblitération du propre se produit, c’est-à-dire dès l’apparaître du propre et dès le premier matin du langage. . . . C’est parce que le nom propre n’a jamais été, comme appellation unique réservée à la présence d’un être unique, que le mythe d’origine d’une lisibilité transparente et présente sous l’oblitération ; c’est parce que le nom propre n’a jamais été possible que par son fonctionnement dans une classification et donc dans un système de différences, dans une écriture retenant les traces de différence, que l’interdit a été possible, a pu jouer, et éventuellement être transgressé . . . c’est-à-dire restitué à l’oblitération et à la non-propriété d’origine. (159)	There is writing as soon as the proper name is erased/crossed out in a system, there is a “subject” as soon as this obliteration of the proper takes place, that is, from the first appearance of the proper and from the first morning of language. . . . It is because the proper name has never been, as a unique appellation reserved for the presence of a unique being, anything other than the myth of origin of a readability that is transparent and present under obliteration; it is because the proper name has been possible only via its operation within a classification system, hence in a system of differences, in a form of writing retaining the traces of difference, that interdiction has been possible, has been able to function, and possibly be transgressed . . . that is, restored to its originary obliteration and non-propriety.
La mort de l’appellation absolument propre, reconnaissant dans un langage l’autre comme autre pur, l’invoquant comme ce qu’il est, c’est la mort del’idiome pur réservé à l’unique.  (162; italics mine.)	The death of the absolutely proper appellation, recognizing in a language the other as pure other, invoking it as what it is, this is the death of the pure idiom reserved to the unique being.
Nommer, donner les noms qu’il sera éventuellement interdit de prononcer, telle est la violence originaire du langage qui consiste à inscrire dans une différence, à classer, à suspendre le vocatif absolu. Penser l’unique dans le système, l’y inscrire, tel est le geste le l’archi-écriture : archi-violence, perte du propre, de la proximité absolue, de la présence à soi, perte en vérité de ce qui n’a jamais eu lieu, d’une présence à soi qui n’a jamais été donnée mais rêvée… (164-5)	To name, to give the names that it may become forbidden to pronounce, this is the originary violence of language that consists in inscribing in a difference, in classifying, in suspending the absolute vocative. To think the unique within the system, to inscribe it there, such is the gesture of archi-écriture: archi-violence, loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self-presence, loss in fact of what never took place, of a self-presence that was never given, only dreamt . . .

L’idéal qui sous-tend en profondeur cette philosophie de l’écriture, c’est donc l’image d’une communauté immédiatement présente à elle-même, sans différance.  (197)

The ideal that underlies in depth this philosophy of writing is therefore the image of a community immediately present to itself, without différance.

Except, of course, that Derrida constantly denies the reality of this “mythical” state of originary plenitude, presenting the introduction of différance as that of archi-écriture, the founding violence that the myth effaces.  All this confusion can be eliminated if we understand différance in its most concrete sense as the deferral of violence, that is, as precisely the desired result of the constitution of the community.

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When Derrida comes to offer a historical analysis of the origin of writing “in the narrow sense,” he conceives it as an instrument of the organization of production through the deferral of consumption, the management of the “reserve” or surplus. We may note in passing Derrida’s curious assimilation of human history to that of la vie en général, reflecting what appears to be the trace of an unavowed project in De la grammatologie to assimilate biology and perhaps even cosmology to the system of deferral and supplementation by which Derrida characterizes language.

Toute cette structure apparaît dès qu’une société commence à vivre comme société, c’est-à-dire dès l’origine de la vie en général, quand, à des niveaux fort hétérogènes d’organisation et de complexité, il est possible de différer la présence, c’est-à-dire la dépense ou la consommation, et d’organiser la production, c’est-à-dire la réserve en général. Cela se produit bien avant l’apparition de l’écriture au sens étroit, mais il est vrai, et on ne peut le négliger, que l’apparition de certains systèmes d’écriture, il y a trois à quatre mille ans, est un saut extraordinaire dans l’histoire de la vie. (190; italics the author’s)

This whole structure appears as soon as a society begins to live as a society, that is, from the beginning of life in general, when, at very diverse levels of organization and complexity, it becomes possible to defer presence, that is, expense or consumption, and to organize production, that is, the reserve in general. This takes place well before the appearance of writing in the narrow sense, but it is true, as we cannot ignore, that the appearance of certain writing systems between three and four thousand years ago was an extraordinary leap in the history of life.

Considered in the context of human history, writing extends and multiplies deferral. Derrida is not concerned to go farther than this, nor to distinguish specifically what about writing “in the narrow sense” contributes to this operation. What follows in his text is rather the observation that this occurred without any transformation notable de l’organisme, suggesting that différance stands in an inverse relationship to biological evolution, as it were in a grammatological reformulation of the nature-culture binary.

Neither Derrida nor Lévi-Strauss appear to be aware that the primary social function of writing is the production of documents. When Lévi-Strauss describes the Nambikwara chief after the leçon d’écriture as producing and “reading” a scrawled piece of paper to his people as a guarantee that the white explorer would provide them with certain requested items, he speaks of the paper as containing a “list,” but its primary function is as a contract. That Lévi-Strauss’ promises are supposed to be written on it makes it documentary proof that he made these promises and can be held to them.

The practice of writing is normally thought to originate with marks or icons included as a manifest listing the contents of a shipment so that the recipient can verify these contents on receipt. The “supplement” added by the document to the speaker’s absence objectifies his “speech” so that it can be maintained through time and verified not merely by his interlocutor but by any third party. This makes it possible for the transaction, which in contrast to Maussian gift exchange is essentially punctual, to be prolonged like the latter over time. This is a prerequisite for any kind of complex economic relationship, and it is easy to conceive that the expansion of such relationships would lead to the extension of writing to the recording of such things as laws and regulations. No doubt the societies in which writing emerged were hierarchical, but this does not imply that writing any more than speech is hierarchical in essence. Derrida himself points out the contradiction between Lévi-Strauss’ insistence that writing at first served the domination of a literate elite and his Foucaultian interpretation of the extension of literacy to the masses as the imposition of hierarchical social discipline: “La lutte contre l’analphabétisme se confond ainsi avec le renforcement du contrôle des citoyens par le Pouvoir. Car il faut que tous sachent lire pour que ce dernier puisse dire: nul n’est censé ignorer la loi” (“Leçon d’écriture“) [The fight against illiteracy is inseparable from the reinforcement of government control over the citizenry. For all must know how to read in order that authority may say: ignorance of the law is no excuse.]

If language be conceived as originating in the asymmetric sacred-profane distinction, which defers mimetic violence through the representation of the interdicted central object of common desire, then the effacement of the “proper” in the system of differences that constitutes mature language may be understood not as the erasure of this originary deferral but as its extension. Every significant object or phenomenon bears a parcel of sacrality; every utterance separates its subject from its surrounding background like the originary sacred center.  Like the totemic systems analyzed by Durkheim, or the pantheons of antiquity that create an ecumenical system from a heterogeneous assemblage of local gods, Saussurean paradigms of differences are the traces of unique experiences of significance.

The sacred is not a mysterious, otherworldly quality; it measures the human community’s sense of the danger posed to it by the mimetic desire aroused by different phenomena. What we call secularization is the process whereby these dangers come to be assessed within their concrete historical context rather than by reference to originary history as preserved in religious traditions. Pace the militant defenders of atheism, the progress of secularization over the past three centuries is far from having demonstrated the ability of modern societies to provide a rational basis for these assessments.

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The sociological context of the anxiety aroused by writing as opposed to speech is the familiar Gemeinschaft – Gesellschaft or status – contract opposition that distinguishes “compact,” “face-to-face,” traditional communities from modern societies composed of complex networks of mutual strangers. The ethnological perspective opened in the eighteenth century refocuses this distinction on the crucial watershed that divides egalitarian hunter-gatherer communities, which gave Rousseau his model of la société commencée, from the hierarchical agricultural and industrial societies that have almost completely replaced them. These egalitarian societies are indeed, as Durkheim assumed, “closer to the origin,” although in even the simplest community the originary presence reproduced in ritual must be extended to the everyday world through Maussian exchange.

The real basis for the “presence” that Derrida denounces as the founding myth of the logocentric social order is thus the self-presence not of the individual but of the community. The functional criterion of communal self-presence is the Durkheimian one of reinforcing “solidarity,” or in our terms, deferring mimetic violence by strengthening the interdiction of the sacred center and the procedures for its eventual division among the members of the group. “Presence” in this sense is realized in religious and other rituals to this day.

Western philosophy/metaphysics reflects from the beginning the loss of the compact community, and in its first flourishing, the precarious existence of an Athenian democracy supremely conscious of the difficulty of maintaining “solidarity” in a society where contract had largely replaced status. Plato’s abstraction of “Ideas” from language emancipates normative concepts from the face-to-face ritual community and makes them instantaneously and universally accessible. For Plato, the universality of the Idea of the Good–which is in fact no more than a sign–and its conceptual family gives proof of the existence of a good-in-general, which not merely trumps the good-for-me or the good-for-you but discredits these “indexical” concepts as subjective illusions.

Thus the metaphysician’s abstract communion in Ideas replaces the interactive communion of ritual by displacing the Ideas from their scenic origin, which ritual continues to reproduce, to an ideal world of infinite transparency that ignores the productivity of human time. In Rousseau’s extension of metaphysical transparency to the political sphere, the participants in the social contract discover the group’s preexisting volonté générale rather than generating it over time through a process of political debate. But language and cultural representation never exist in an abstract, timeless “presence”; the community’s self-presence takes place on a scene, with an open space-time of deferral between the sacred center and the human periphery. The collapse of the separation between center and periphery–notable in Nietzsche’s vision of tragedy–is the most dangerous of myths.

Metaphysics ignores the origin of propositional language in elementary linguistic forms (ostensive and imperative) and ultimately in an originary event. By taking the existence of the declarative sentence for granted, metaphysics cuts language off from its anthropological origins. Throughout the history of philosophy/metaphysics from its beginnings in the pre-Socratics, language remains an all-but-invisible vehicle for ideas. Even such explicitly language-oriented thinking as British “ordinary language” philosophy never conceives the need to provide an anthropological foundation for human language. That philosophy sees writing as merely “recording” speech is a corollary of the fact that philosophers from Plato to Kant and Hegel write about “ideas” as though they were independent of the language in which they are expressed. Throughout the vast bulk of philosophical writing, the “myth of presence” is exemplified in the assumption of the immediate mental presence to the thinker of his thoughts.

Descartes’ cogito, whose “idea” is equated with the enunciation of a specific proposition, opens a crack in the metaphysical edifice. The “early modern” era also gives rise to the Enlightenment speculation on the origin of language that will lead via the evolutionary thought of the nineteenth century to the postmodern thinking of Derrida, Girard, and GA (see The Scenic Imagination). But the virtual absence of language from Kant’s system, the final crowning glory of metaphysics, demonstrates the incompatibility of this anthropological speculation with the overall project of Western philosophy. Kant understood that the foundational analysis of the transcendental relationship between ideas and things must be pursued without reference to the words in which the ideas were expressed–that the unexplained availability of propositional language lies at the very core of metaphysics.

The value of Derrida’s critique lies in his recognition that metaphysics elides the human time of deferral, which is measurable in even the most intense ritual exchange, and which the extended temporality of writing forces into the open. What metaphysics rejects in writing is the confidence it embodies that the time separating the production of a document from its transmission is no obstacle to the mutual understanding that defers violence; writing can only function as “parasitic” on the “presence” of speech.

Where Derrida goes wrong is in seeing the temporality of deferral as itself a mode of violence. The human cannot be conceived without originary presence, but the very nature of language demonstrates that presence is constituted by deferral rather than by its expulsion. As Derrida noted in one of his last publications (see Chronicle 340), the ground of any act of language, whether in speech or writing, is the faith that others will share the meanings of the signs one has emitted. This sharing of meaning is a “presence” prerequisite to human communication and to the maintenance of the human community. Language does not place sous rature the “absolute presence” of the first sign; on the contrary, its system of differences extends this presence. Metaphysics’ suspicion of writing’s secondarity with respect to speech indeed reflects an originary intuition, but this intuition, rather than rejecting différance; seeks on the contrary to retrieve through detemporalization the originary différance that founds the human community. The cure for metaphysics is the retemporalization of its founding myth, not as the rediscovery of originary violence, but as the beginning of the never-ending history of its deferral.

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The day after Christmas my wife and I drove to Pasadena to see the special exhibit of Ingres’ portrait of la comtesse d’Haussonville, on loan from the Frick Collection in New York to the Norton Simon Museum. I had met the countess at the Frick over fifty years ago, in the course of a Fine Arts class at Columbia in 1958-59. The following year, when I moved into a little furnished room near campus to spare my senior year the daily three-subway trek from the Bronx, I purchased a reproduction of this portrait at the Metropolitan Museum and ordered a custom-made gilt frame; the total outlay exceeded $100, quite a sum for me in those days. I have had the countess on my wall ever since, either at home or, for the past few decades, in my office, where she hangs above my computer, shepherding the surrounding flock of Carole Landis lobby cards.

Seeing the original–which had undergone a cleaning–for the first time since the early 1960s, I was pleased with my reproduction’s fidelity to its blue color scheme. Even the difference in size was not as great as I had remembered. But even as her model has been renewed, my poor countess has declined, her colors faded and streaked from years and sunlight.

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The brief commentary by the Simon docent made me realize that through all these years I had never sought any biographical information about Louise de Broglie (pronounced breuil), comtesse d’Haussonville. The barrier to curiosity was higher in the era before the Internet, when learning even a few basic details about a minor historical figure required some effort. In recent years, I have chanced upon long-standing gaps in my knowledge, sometimes patched over by inaccurate speculations, that would be filled in a few seconds had they emerged today.

The biographical sketch in Edgar Munhall’s fine book, Ingres and the Comtesse d’Haussonville (Frick Collection, 1998), purchased at the museum, provided me with my first real information about Louise. As I learned, she was the granddaughter of Germaine de Staël, wife, daughter, sister, and mother of members of the French Academy, and the author of five published books, beginning with a biography of Irish patriot Robert Emmet, executed after a failed rebellion in 1803 at the age of 23, and including two about Lord Byron. Louise’s choice of subjects suggests in this noble lady an Anglophile fascination with Romantic dispossession and rebellion, sympathy if not for the Revolution then certainly for its liberating spirit.

Knowing her portrait, one still wonders what Louise really looked like; Munhall includes, mentions, no photographs. Could a wealthy Parisienne die in 1882 unphotographed? Mérimée, whose hostility to the countess reflects his unshared enthusiasm for the Second Empire, is quoted as writing in 1865 that she had gained much weight and lost much hair from smallpox; if true, this nastiness suggests a partial explanation.

Some small, early images of Louise reproduced in Munhall’s book share something of Ingres’ abstraction, as do a couple of early versions of his portrait, one study for which expresses a certain hauteur. Louise’s oval face and delicate features, close to the current norm of beauty, seem to have encouraged idealization. Certainly the face in the portrait is as if morphed into Raphaelesque purity by a proprietary graphics program. Louise’s face resembles that of an Ingres odalisque more than that of any real woman. Yet character and intelligence breathe forth from the portrait, in the fixity of the gaze, the strength of the lower lip.

The painter’s famous distortion of his subject’s arms sets art’s achievement beyond the capacity of photography. The arms are almost monstrous, far too big for her head, and as has often been noted, the right arm is lower down on her body that even the most monumental shrug could bring her shoulder. As I see it, the key to the countess’ upper body is that the oversized arms compensate for the non-representation of her bosom. The tiny projection of her dress beyond her left arm can barely be associated with her right breast, and the angle of that arm with her body leaves no visible room for the other. By substitution making up this deficit, the fleshiness of the arms and their position give the countess, mother of two children who would bear a third during the lengthy evolution of her portrait, a chastely maternal body, which, as a secondary compensation, makes acceptable what might otherwise strike us as a sensually provocative gaze: the odalisque as femme du monde. The extreme naturalism of the dress and other details sustain an illusion constantly betrayed by the spectator’s realization of anatomical impossibility, intensifying the esthetic oscillation between sign and internal image as does no comparable work, certainly no other nineteenth-century portrait, and according its subject an ineffable grace.

At the same time, the chaste body’s contained sensuality incites us to imagine Louise’s yearnings unfulfilled, however well they may have been met in reality by what was reputed a happy marriage. Thus it was not altogether inappropriate for this image to appear on the videocassette box of Renoir’s Madame Bovary (where, surely in unintended contrast with the delicate Louise, the heroine was played by a buxom actress in her forties). Emma would have given her eyeteeth for Louise’s dress, the vases on her mantelpiece, the cashmere shawl draped casually on the armchair in the lower right corner–or simply for a night in Paris, let alone in the Hôtel de Broglie. Yet there is something Bovaresque in this figure of Mme de Staël’s granddaughter, wealthy and sophisticated, literate and learned, who could paint, draw, and play an excellent piano–trained by Chopin, she preferred Bach to Rossini–yet frustrated of something that, after her grandmother, no Frenchwoman of her century, not even George Sand, would achieve: an unquestioned place among the leading creators of her time. Why this was possible in England, and even in Emily Dickinson’s Massachusetts, yet not in France, is a conundrum that the countess’ half-pensive, half-seductive bearing might be fancied to acknowledge.

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I have before me one of Louise’s books, which touches me as the work of an old friend whom I have just discovered to be a writer. Proust’s awe at the Duchesse de Guermantes’ (Proust attended Louise’s son’s receptions, they say) is transmuted into an imaginary communion of spirits. Les dernières années de Lord Byron was begun in 1872, when the countess was fifty-four and the memory of the recent Prussian conquest still fresh. The book makes frequent reference to Switzerland; the activity of composition in the family chateau of Coppet, Louise’s birthplace and her celebrated grandmother’s residence, which she would inherit a few years later, may have provided relief from the humiliation she must have felt as a resident of Paris.

The author displays a reflective and curious intelligence, a solid classical education (quoting Latin and Greek), and a thorough familiarity with European writers and thinkers of her day and of the past. Her harmonious prose, lyrical without striving for effect, at times conceding to cliché, maintains a classical balance, but enriched with more luxuriant imagery, like a rarely modest Chateaubriand or a less effusive Lamartine. Her descriptions of the Swiss landscape and the reveries they inspire are as lovely as anything in the genre. After a brief, apologetic preface, this is the opening passage:

Au bord de cette mer où s’égarent mes yeux, la fiction et la réalité se mêlent sans se confondre, comme à travers la lumière bleue qui les unit se marient les rives de la terre et du ciel. Que de visions glorieuses, d’apparitions charmantes flottent au hasard de ma rêverie, s’élèvent, glissent, disparaissent entre les plis de cette gaze aérienne qui les révèle et les dérobe tour à tour à mes regards! A chaque sinuosité de ce divin contour qui encadre le cristal de l’onde se dresse une figure célèbre, plane quelque création poétique aussi vivante, plus vivante que la réalité même. Entre tant de souvenirs divers qu’évoquent en ces lieux l’imagination et la mémoire, où s’arrêter et par où commencer? Après avoir quelque temps tournoyé dans le vague des airs au-dessus du magique miroir comme un grand cygne aux ailes blanches, ma fantaisie finit par s’abattre sur Lausanne. Lausanne, en effet, est un promontoire d’où l’on découvre tout le croissant du lac. Son arc lumineux s’étend des glaciers de Vevey aux riants coteaux de Genève. Montez sur les hauteurs de Lausanne et vous le verrez décrire sa courbe gracieuse aux pieds des Alpes que domine la pale silhouette du roi des neiges éternelles.

On the shore of that sea where my eyes wander, fiction and reality mingle yet remain distinct, as through the blue light that unites them are wedded the borders of earth and sky. How many glorious visions and charming apparitions float at random through my reverie, rise, slip, disappear between the folds of that airy gauze that by turns reveals and conceals them from my sight! At each sinuosity of the divine contour that frames the crystal waves rises a celebrated figure, floats a poetic creation as alive, more alive than reality itself. Between all the diverse memories that imagination and memory evoke in this place, where to end and where to begin? After having circled for a time in the uncertain air above the magic mirror like a great white-winged swan, my fantasy finally fell on Lausanne. Lausanne, in effect, is a promontory from which one can discern the entire curvature of the lake. Its luminous arc extends from the glaciers of Vevey to the smiling hills of Geneva. Mount the heights of Lausanne and you will observe it trace its gracious curve to the feet of the Alps dominated by the pale silhouette of the king of eternal snows.

The author of these lines cares little for self-promotion but has not abdicated for all that the privilege of the esthetic subject. At the start of her book, Louise revels for a moment in her freedom to choose what world to evoke; she will not make her own experience the material of her story, merely the basis of a knowledge she will share with her reader. It is this absence of competition with us that makes her prose flow so effortlessly. This is a feminine sensibility–more overtly feminine than that of Sand, but like hers, still disguised by anonymous masculine neutrality–that would acquire only in the following century a narrative voice in French letters. Louise is no creator of fictions, but her text is full of fine descriptions and interesting digressions, provocative observations and judgments on Byron and other English poets, on her fellow Swiss Protestant Rousseau and his moral limitations, on Byron’s relationship with Mme de Staël and admiration for the young beauty of Louise’s mother…

I feel a sense of pride in reading the thoughts and emotions of this woman who has shared her soul with me by hanging on my wall for fifty years. The intuition of culture and intelligence I felt in her portrait is more than confirmed. Louise’s writings may attract few readers in future centuries, but they are a precious legacy I have been entrusted with, more assuredly no doubt than that of Carole, which I wrote a book to preserve, only to discover that the cult of a lovely woman can be celebrated by some very unlovely people. Such misfortune is unlikely to attend my admiration for Louise’s graceful prose. I now have two of her books and will do my best to find the others. To renew my acquaintance with her portrait is the occasion of a rededication.

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Humans age and die, artworks remain “forever” young, or can at least be restored to youth. We purchased at the Simon the only reproduction available today, a poster from the Frick. It hangs now over our fireplace, where Louise stands coyly before us in her blue silk dress, having tossed her shawl on a chair, posed her opera glasses on the mantelpiece, and hung her little Chinese evening bag from the handle of the Japanese vase.

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Rereading Durkheim’s Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (PUF, 1960 [1912]), I am struck more than previously by the narrowness of the barrier that separates Durkheim from the originary hypothesis. Durkheim is the first thinker to have an anthropological understanding of the transcendental. This is something that has never been fully grasped even by his disciples and those whom they in turn have influenced. But what is most striking is that it was not fully grasped by Durkheim himself.

1. Origin(s)

Pour bien comprendre un délire et pour pouvoir lui appliquer le traitement le plus approprié, le médecin a besoin de savoir quel en a été le point de départ. Or cet événement est d’autant plus facile à discerner qu’on peut observer ce délire à une période plus proche de ses débuts. . . . Il en est de même pour la pensée religieuse. A mesure qu’elle progresse dans l’histoire, les causes qui l’ont appelée à l’existence, tout en restant toujours agissantes, ne sont plus aperçues qu’à travers un vaste système d’interprétations qui les déforment. . . . On . . . verra [dans cet ouvrage] comment, dans les religions primitives, le fait religieux porte encore visible l’empreinte de ses origines . . .	To understand a delirium and to give it the most appropriate treatment, the doctor needs to know its point of departure. Now this event is all the easier to discern as one is able to observe the delirium at a time nearer its beginning. . . . The same is true of religious thought. As one progresses through history, the causes that called it into existence, while remaining active, are perceived only through a vast system of interpretations that deform them. . . . We will see [in this work] how, in primitive religions, the religious phenomenon still visibly bears the impression of its origins . . .
L’étude que nous entreprenons est donc une manière de reprendre, mais dans des conditions nouvelles, le vieux problème de l’origine des religions. Certes, si, par origine, on entend un premier commencement absolu, la question n’a rien de scientifique et doit être résolument écartée. Il n’y a pas un instant radical où la religion ait commencé à exister et il ne s’agit pas de trouver un biais qui nous permette de nous y transporter par la pensée. Comme toute institution humaine, la religion ne commence nulle part. Aussi toutes les spéculations de ce genre sont-elles justement discréditées . . . Ce que nous voudrions, c’est trouver un moyen de discerner les causes, toujours présentes, dont dépendent les formes les plus essentielles de la pensée et de la pratique religieuse. Or, pour les raisons qui viennent d’être exposées, ces causes sont d’autant plus facilement observables que les sociétés où on les observe sont moins compliquées. Voilà pourquoi nous cherchons à nous rapprocher des origines.(1)	The study that we are undertaking is thus a way of taking up again, but under new conditions, the old problem of the origin of religion. Of course if by origin we understand a first, absolute beginning, the question is wholly unscientific and must be resolutely put aside. There is no radical instant in which religion began to exist, and we have no intention of seeking a means to transport ourselves to that instant in thought. Like every human institution, religion begins nowhere. Thus all speculations of this sort are justly discredited . . . What we desire is to find a means of discerning the causes, still present, on which the most essential forms of religious thought and practice depend. For the reasons just given, these causes are all the easier to observe as the societies in which we observe them are less complex. That is why we seek to return to the origins.(1)
(1) On voit que nous donnons à ce mot d’origines . . . un sens tout relatif. Nous entendons par là non un commencement absolu, mais l’état social le plus simple qui soit actuellement connu, celui au delà duquel il ne nous est pas présentement possible de remonter. . . . (10-11; emphasis the author’s)	(1) One sees that we give this word “origins” . . . a wholly relative meaning. We understand by it not an absolute beginning, but the simplest social state currently known, the state beyond which it is not presently possible to return. . . .

Durkheim’s comparison of religious thought to delirium is less Freudian, let alone Dawkinsian, than it appears; as the rest of the book will show, however “delirious” the manner in which religious thought deals with natural phenomena, this is entirely secondary to the ethical content of this thought and the way in which its norms are reinforced through collective ritual action. Nonetheless, one cannot help but be struck by the contrast between the concrete événement alleged at the origin of the delirium and the outright denial of any specific beginning in the “origins” of religion.

As a social scientist, Durkheim cannot be expected to tolerate unverifiable speculation about these origins. Yet his very use of the word origin is by no means justified by his methodological affirmation that the religions he proposes to study represent l’état social le plus simple qui soit actuellement connu, that is, relative to a necessarily unstable state of ethnological knowledge. However simple these aboriginal societies may be, they are nearly as far removed chronologically as the most advanced societies from the time of the first humans. Even putting aside the fact that their failure to advance very far in material culture in no way guarantees that they have not changed considerably in their religious culture, the equation of simplicity and originarity implies the prior historical existence of a maximally simple, originary religion. This necessity is borne out by Durkheim’s very own “digital” definition of religion as a system of beliefs and practices having at its core the binary pair sacred-profane. As we shall see, Durkheim’s own claim is that these two categories designate two absolutely different ontological spheres, a usage that he sees as unproblematically compatible with his resolute rejection of a premier commencement absolu for religion as a whole. Whatever faith we have in the biological dictum natura non facit salta [nature makes no leaps], such cannot be the case for a binary pair of categories, let alone one that divides the universe into two absolutely separate ontological zones. The implications of Durkheim’s conception of religion lead outside the domain of social science, which they show to be grounded on a historical construct—an originary event—with which it is incompatible.

This is not to say that our task is to “deconstruct” empirical social science as Durkheim shaped it. GA is not a rival to social science, but a way of thinking that complements it, not only by providing it with an ontological foundation, but by suggesting directions for empirical research—in the case at hand, the traces of the originary asymmetry from which the binary symmetries of language were born.

2. Sacred and profane

Durkheim lacked access to a category that would not enter the arsenal of modern thought until Saussure: that of semiosis, the creation of meaning through a differentiated paradigm of signs. Thus when Durkheim speaks of the primary opposition between the sacred and the profane, he ignores the analogy between this binary distinction and those of language. Indeed, he denies this analogy, insisting that the sacred-profane distinction corresponds to an absolute ontological distinction that contrasts with ordinary linguistic dichotomies such as black-white or good-evil, which oppose qualities applicable to the same kind of objects.

This ignorance of Saussurean semiology distinguishes Durkheim (and Mauss) from Lévi-Strauss, for whom structural linguistics supplies the definitive model for paradigms of thought as well as language. Yet, paradoxically, on this point it is Durkheim’s anthropological intuition that is superior. The sacred-profane distinction cannot be understood as a rudimentary system of “differences,” as Saussure describes la langue. The absolute distinction of the sacred creates an absolute asymmetry between it and the profane, in which all attention and specificity is concentrated on the former, the latter being merely a residue. This asymmetrical distinction, in contrast, corresponds effectively to the notion of language that emerges from the originary hypothesis. If anything, Durkheim’s presentation of the sacred-profane opposition is too symmetrical:

La division du monde en deux domaines comprenant, l’un tout ce qui est sacré, l’autre tout ce qui est profane, tel est le trait distinctif de la pensée religieuse . . . (50-51)

The division of the world into two domains comprising, one, all that is sacred, the other, all that is profane, this is the distinctive characteristic of religious thought . . .

Mais, si une distinction purement hiérarchique est un critère à la fois trop général et trop imprécis, il ne reste plus pour définir le sacré par rapport au profane que leur hétérogénéité. Seulement, ce qui fait que cette hétérogénéité suffit à caractériser cette classification des choses et à la distinguer de toute autre, c’est qu’elle est très particulière: elle est absolue. Il n’existe pas dans l’histoire de la pensée humaine un autre exemple de deux catégories de choses aussi profondément différenciées, aussi radicalement opposés l’une à l’autre. L’opposition traditionnelle entre le bien et le mal n’est rien à côté de celle-là: car le bien et le mal sont deux espèces contraires d’un même genre, à savoir le moral . . . tandis que le sacré et le profane ont toujours et partout été conçus par l’esprit humain comme des genres séparés, comme deux mondes entre lesquels il n’y a rien de commun. (53; emphasis the author’s)

But if a purely hierarchical distinction is a criterion both too general and too unspecific, only their heterogeneity remains to distinguish the sacred from the profane. However, what makes this heterogeneity sufficient to characterize this classification of things and to distinguish it from any other is that it is very particular: it is absolute. There does not exist in the history of human thought another example of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated, so radically opposed to each other. The traditional opposition between good and evil is insignificant in comparison, for good and evil are two contrary species of the same genus, that is, the moral . . . whereas the sacred and the profane are always and everywhere conceived by the human mind as separate genres, as two worlds that have nothing in common with each other.

What is striking in these passages is that in straining to oppose these two categories, Durkheim in fact makes them more parallel than they should be. The appeal to “the history of human thought” is particularly awkward, since Durkheim was the very thinker who affirmed that the sacred-profane distinction was in fact the point of departure for “the history of human thought.” The idea of a punctual origin, repudiated as “unscientific,” finds its way into Durkheim’s text through the use of hyperbole, of quantitative exaggeration intended to convey an absolute, qualitative distinction.

No doubt the fundamental intuition is more important than the rhetoric with which it is expressed, but the limitations of this rhetoric are also the limitations of the world of social science that Durkheim did so much to found on a rigorous basis. Recasting sacred and profane as a Saussurean paradigm of differences would only weaken the truth that lies behind Durkheim’s words: the sacred is the sole category of significance and it emerges not in opposition to another category that we call the profane but in opposition to the insignificance of the rest of the world. The paradigmatic experience of signification is not the division of the world between up and down, left and right, hot and cold, … but between the sacred that captures and holds our attention and everything else that does not. Thus Durkheim’s fortunate unawareness of his contemporary Saussure and of the “structuralist” paradigm of differences in which the sacred-profane distinction might have found its place allowed Durkheim to grasp and appreciate, expressed in however unsatisfactory a fashion, the asymmetry of the absolute distinction between sacred and profane.

3. Representation

Another passage in the Formes élémentaires lends itself to a similar analysis, but here the missing paradigm leads to a real misstatement, since what is missing here is not the paradigm of differences but the very notion of how the use of signs separates human from animal cognition. That sacred and profane, however understood, are uniquely human categories is never in question; the same is not the case in Durkheim’s use of the more general category of “representations.”

L’homme n’est rien autre chose, au point de vue physique, qu’un système de cellules, au point de vue mental, qu’un système de représentations : sous l’un ou l’autre rapport, il ne diffère qu’en degrés de l’animal. Et pourtant, la société le conçoit et nous oblige à le concevoir comme investi d’un caractère sui generis qui l’isole, qui tient à distance les empiétements téméraires, qui, en un mot, impose le respect. Cette dignité qui le met hors de pair nous apparaît comme un de ses attributs distinctifs, bien qu’il soit impossible de rien trouver dans la nature empirique de l’homme qui la fonde. (325; emphasis mine)

Man is nothing other, from a physical standpoint, than a system of cells, or from a mental standpoint, than a system of representations; in either case, he differs only by degree from the animals. And yet, society conceives him and obliges us to conceive him as invested with a sui generis character that sets him off, that keeps at a distance any foolhardy attempts to bridge the gap, in a word, that imposes respect. This dignity that puts man in a class by himself appears to us as one of his distinctive attributes, although it is impossible to find anything in man’s empirical nature that justifies it.

As a “system of cells” we may be only quantitatively different from other animals, but as a “system of representations” we are “absolutely” different, because our minds not only contain representations in the sense of perceptive traces but createrepresentations in the sense of words and artificial images. When Durkheim credits society for “conceiving” our mentality as “isolated” from that of other species, he is in fact giving it less credit than it deserves. It is “society,” that is, the human community, that is the source of the distinctly human symbolic representations that are indeed isolated from the signals of other species. Human language is isolated from animal communication not by “society” as an external agent, but by the embodiment of “society” in its very nature.

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As these passages make clear, originary thinking, rather than doing violence to Durkheim’s thought, gives it the coherent expression that it lacks in the author’s original formulations. It is paradoxically because Durkheim did not have access to the paradigms of structural linguistics that he retained, in spirit if not in vocabulary, the Kantian notion of transcendence, but now associated not with a disembodied mind but with human “society” as a collectivity unlike any other because defined by a set of shared “representations.” That Durkheim lacked the conceptual vocabulary to characterize these representations as different in kind from those of other animals is a trivial matter in respect of his achievement in valorizing the specificity of the human community that makes possible their sharing.

We should reconsider in the light of these observations the critique, generally considered unanswerable, of Durkheim’s “essentialism” by Lévi-Strauss, who reproaches his precursor for believing that the totem represents “society” rather than being an element in a mental paradigm. This structuralist critique attributes to Durkheim the naïveté of believing that signs “represent” things rather than signifieds in a Saussurian system of differences. But it is precisely this “naïveté” that makes Durkheim able to understand the originary status of the sacred-profane distinction. This distinction precedes and is presupposed by the formation of any paradigm of signification, not because it refers to things rather than ideas, but because for signification to take place at all, it must have a point of departure in the communal agreement to represent rather than to appropriate, to create a vertical relation in the place of a horizontal one. Seen from this perspective, it is rather Lévi-Strauss who is naïve in his insistence that signs can refer only to ideas, as though this process could somehow originate without reference to the things of this world and our relationship to them.

In a previous reference to Durkheim, I claimed that “However loftily he dismisses the ‘speculative’ question of the minimal constitution of society and representation, Durkheim’s sociology of religion is really Generative Anthropology avant la lettre” (Chronicle 198). The point of the present analysis is to make clearer how deeply the intuition of the originary-as-generative is located in the underlying pattern of Durkheim’s thought. I say pattern and not structure because, precisely, it is Durkheim’s ignorance of the semiotic ontology that would come to be called “structuralism” that allows him to combine the proto-structuralist claim that religious classifications are the basis for the categories of human thought with a way of thinking that points to the origin of structure in the singular designation of the sacred, whose binary, predicative opposition to the profane is clearly derivative of the absolute singularity of its ostensive origin.

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Although the term “white guilt” was inspired by the historically fraught relationship between America’s two principal racial groups, the phenomenon itself is more potent today in Europe than in the United States. Where the US had slavery and Jim Crow, Europe had colonialism and the Holocaust, and it is the last of these that has had the determining effect on the postmodern era. Furthermore, although the US has had its share of European-style penitents, including the last two Democratic presidential candidates, it also has world responsibilities that require it to maintain a dominant military establishment, while Europe, with its limited commitments, reposes comfortably under the American umbrella. Thus whatever one’s affinity for the European model in foreign affairs, the United States cannot give itself over to the kind of penitential posturing that Pascal Bruckner examines in his against-the-grain La tyrannie de la pénitence : essai sur le masochisme occidental (Grasset, 2006).

Bruckner accuses Europe in general and France in particular of taking a “masochistic” stance toward the world of its former colonies and dependencies. He detects in this self-flagellation an inverted moral narcissism through which former great powers attempt to retain their place at the center of the world by taking the blame for all its ills. Europe has become, in Bruckner’s view, a Hegelian “beautiful soul” who recoils from any concrete engagement with the world’s problems while pretending that they can all be solved through peaceful “dialogue,” leaving the heavy lifting to the United States.

While sharing the view defended in these Chronicles that the Holocaust provides the moral basis for the victimary thinking of the postmodern era, Bruckner detects this same inverted narcissism in the indiscriminate application of the paradigm of Nazi and Jew to every conceivable form of oppression, particularly including the noxious equation of Israeli self-defense measures with Nazi extermination. The constantly evoked Holocaust, he pointedly claims, has become an object of rivalry, with every “victim” seeking a verdict of Genocide. Bruckner carefully distinguishes this attitude of permanent victimhood from justified demands for equal rights. Like most French thinkers of both left and right, he is skeptical of “communtarianism” and sees the appropriate goal of anti-discrimination movements as seamless integration rather than the recognition of separate sub-communities.

Rare among European intellectuals, Bruckner maintains both a welcoming but not guilt-ridden attitude toward immigration and a positive one toward the United States. He has the courage to support Israel’s existence and to refuse automatic martyr status to the Palestinians, whom he accuses Europeans of fantasizing into the dernier bon sauvage. Immune to victimary blackmail, Bruckner denounces the cries of “Islamophobia” that seek to demonize legitimate concern with Islamic radicalism. That at the time of writing in 2006 he joined the rest of the Western intelligentsia in its knee-jerk repudiation of George W. Bush is no longer of great consequence.

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Bruckner’s book provides a welcome occasion for reflection on our civilization’s self-destructive tendencies. Is it implicit in the development of an economically and technologically advanced social order that it will become paralyzed with guilt at its own superiority and succumb to blackmail from its purported victims rather than defend itself as the only conceivable source of benefits for the rest of the world? Can Western firstness sustain itself long enough to transmit its advantages to the rest of the planet, or is the resentment it arouses fated to destroy it from within as well as without?

The common denominator of the “penitential” behavior described by Bruckner is the globalization of the human conversation. For the first time in history, every non-intimate assemblage must consider itself as virtually including every human being.

In this context, any assertion of Western firstness puts into question the moral model of universal reciprocity that is the basis of all human interaction. Prior to WWII it was tacitly accepted that some human societies were more advanced than others; the point of contention was whether their differences were biological and absolute or cultural and relative. In particular, the vast increase in productivity brought about by the Industrial Revolution provided an objective guarantee of European superiority over the rest of the world. This superiority was not limited to economic and military power; European societies were demonstrably and increasingly more successful than others in every domain of “quality of life,” from lifespan and public health to education to the availability of household goods. This does not of course imply that Western colonialism was a generally effective or appropriate way of opening up the rest of the world to this superiority.

What the Holocaust accomplished was to destroy the acceptability of any assertion of one group’s superiority to another. The very economic and scientific factors that had seemed to put Europe at the acme of social progress had contributed to the greatest moral horror; the industrial efficiency of death-camp “processing” cast a shadow over industrial society in general. Above all, the allegation of the superiority of the Western (“Aryan”) social order as a pseudo-scientific justification for the extermination of the Jews, arguably market society’s best adapted members, was fatal to the West’s pretensions of superior moral enlightenment.

In this overall context, the shift later in the postmodern era (“1968”) from the demand for (equal) civil rights to that for (unequal) affirmative action might have been anticipated from the outset. The imperative that emerged from Auschwitz was not to end discrimination but to include all humanity in one virtual conversation. The shift was nonetheless revelatory; the “color-blind” optimism of the civil rights era, with its clearcut heroes and villains, had spawned a virtual universalism that would be revealed to require not simply the discarding of “prejudices” but the rejection of any comparison among groups that might reveal invidious differences. Even conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh criticized Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994) for correlating America’s racial problem with the 15-point difference between black and white IQs.

No doubt, for participants in the universal conversation, this is the contemporary world’s problem in a nutshell, like the relative lack of female scientists that Larry Summers lost the Harvard presidency for trying to explain. But, precisely, naming the problem in this way, let alone attempting to find inherent differences to explain it, contravenes the moral model, which is the one thing that all humans have in common and the only conceivable basis on which they can interact harmoniously on a global scale.

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The extent of this global urgency appears in other guises, notably in the hysteria surrounding “global warming.” Whatever the actual danger of climate change or the possibility of modifying it through human action, the significance of the mobilization against global warming (as opposed, for example, to creating an international consortium to develop ways for preventing an asteroid from hitting the earth) is that it both affirms the existence of a universal human community and provides sacrificial acts for everyone to perform, from the individual user of a low-flow toilet to the United States of America pledging to reduce its CO₂ emissions by 83%. In this configuration, the planet, or “nature” itself, becomes our ideal Other, uniting us all in caring for it, while concomitantly subordinating our individual ambitions to the needs of the ecology-conscious community. The recent revelation of the falsification and destruction of climate data in East Anglia only confirms the passion with which the “science” of global warming has been charged. That this passion is also a vast source of research funds is an auxiliary consequence of the root phenomenon, which is the reinforcement of the global community, a cause many find sufficiently worthy to justify prevaricating and nudging ambiguous data. Sadly, proof appears to be accumulating that the planet is not cooperating.

Bruckner would like guilt-obsessed Westerners to remember their contributions to moral progress. The West may have practiced slavery, but so did every other society capable of profiting from it; yet the West abolished it, while it persists to this day in Africa and the Arab world. The West may have created the twin monstrosities of Nazism and Stalinism, but it also defeated them, while brutal dictatorships continue to flourish elsewhere. But the very need to make such obvious points, or to refute the absurd notion that Western prosperity is a product of the exploitation of the rest of the world, demonstrates the elemental power of the originary moral model, which, in the absence of ideological barriers, reads every unequal configuration as a zero-sum game whose winners can only have stolen from the losers.

Since the emergence of the first big-man, societies have generated ideological justifications for their inequalities as belonging to a divinely ordained order of things. But the market system has no all-reconciling ideology. To accept the market is to accept inequalities that cannot be justified a priori; the market’s openness to innovation is incompatible with any prior assignment of roles. This limits the persuasiveness of Western liberalism’s most consequent attempt at justifying firstness, John Rawls’ “theory of justice.” Rawls’ model of the inequalities that we should accept under the “veil of ignorance” is a model of distribution, yet the creativity of the market system requires that the roles that create inequality in a market system be dynamically generated rather than distributed. Hence it is not surprising that, although Adam Smith has defeated Marx in the field, he has not won the hearts of the intelligentsia, who with few exceptions take the side of the global economy’s resentful Other now that he (or she) can no longer be excluded from the conversation.

Bruckner’s frequent use of the term rivalité mimétique reveals a Girardian sensibility. He understands the double-bind faced by Europe, whose resentful reliance on America resembles a surly adolescent’s dependence on his parents. A sidebar entitled L’Europe sans frontières (214 ff) suggests that a mature, post-nationalist Europe that accepts its natural frontiers rather than seeking to blur its identity in indefinite expansion could set an example for other regions in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, or Latin America. This may be read as Bruckner’s modest variant on the hopes expressed in Girard’s recent Achever Clausewitz (Carnets Nord, 2007) that Christian Europe might continue to serve as a fount of wisdom for the world at large.

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The final question posed by Bruckner’s essay is whether Western-style liberal democracy can survive and flourish in a world that increasingly understands itself as a global community. At a time when the transatlantic alliance seems increasingly frayed, Bruckner sees Europe’s most urgent task as rejecting the temptation to isolate itself in its “cocoon of repentance” and taking its place alongside the United States in shouldering world responsibilities—although he curiously ends the book with the more modest exhortation to Europe to “inoculate” the world’s shameless dictators and authoritarians with its “poison” of shame, the very attitude he had devoted the rest of the book to denouncing.

But for even this to be possible, Bruckner affirms that “il s’agit de changer le regard que nous portons sur nous-mêmes, de procéder à un renversement complet des valeurs [we will have to change our attitude toward ourselves, carry out a complete reversal of our values] (246).” That is a tall order indeed. Bruckner’s lucid analysis of European white guilt and its dangers offers finally little reassurance against Mark Steyn’s ominous vision of Europe’s failure to resist jihad from without and depopulation from within: America Alone.

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