Author: staceymeeker

Since GA contains the term “anthropology,” it is often asked in what sense we can call GA a “science.” As was made clear by a show of hands at the recent Ottawa conference, those who take an interest in GA are almost exclusively humanists, particularly literary humanists. Thus the chief organizers of all three of these summer conferences, Andrew Bartlett, Matt Schneider, and Ian Dennis, are professors of English, and next year’s conference in Utah will be run by professors of English (Peter Goldman) and French (Bob Hudson).

As the Marxists (the German ones, anyway) used to say, “there is no Chinese Wall” between science and the Humanities, but there is certainly a difference of mindset, one that makes GA’s “new way of thinking” uncongenial to those trained in anthropology and the other social sciences. Because GA focuses on the quasi-empirical issue of the origin of language, it cannot remain indifferent to new developments in cognitive science, neuroscience, ethology, and so on. Some of us, Richard van Oort in particular, have shown quite persuasively that GA is not only fully compatible with the advances in these sciences but often anticipates them on the basis of its more powerful originary model of the human.

To the extent that GA is indeed a science, it must be continually updated as new information concerning human evolution in its various aspects becomes available. But the essential, minimal kernel of GA is and will always remain a hypothetical heuristic, situated beyond the possibility of falsification by empirical data. We may call this affirmation of the freedom of the anthropological from the empirical a Humanist Declaration of Independence.

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As a field of study, the Humanities are not characterized by a well-defined philosophy or, as I prefer to put it, anthropology. The beauty of the Humanities is that they study beauty itself; when we teach courses on Shakespeare, Mozart, or Michelangelo, the students’ contact with the subject matter trumps any interpretation we may choose to offer them. The Humanities study representations, or as we tend to logocentrize them, texts, which, at least in principle, bear their value in the experience they provoke in us independently of institutional coercion. The realm of secular art since Homer has liberated itself from the sacred on the anthropological ground that the sacred is an effect that the artist can reproduce, make “portable” outside of a ritual setting. Art’s independence has often been compromised in the victimary era (and earlier, more brutally, in fascist art and “socialist realism”) by social pressure to affirm the significance of works of dubious esthetic quality, undermining the self-evidence that is at the heart of the esthetic project since Homer. Yet for the moment, and perhaps forever, the esthetic survives.

The other great Western textual enterprise is that of philosophy/metaphysics, which shares art’s ambition to take the place of the sacred, not by reproducing its effect, but by explaining it in “rational” terms, translating the ostensive truth of the originary event into propositions more or less rigorously linked in deductive chains. Philosophy is capable of dealing with ideas only once the possibility of ideation, the creation of truth-bearing propositions, has been accepted. Ever since Parmenides, the realm of Being as defined by propositional language rather than ostensive revelation has been the guarantee of philosophical thought. The contemporary reader is struck by the blitheness with which the most sophisticated thinkers of the recent past, not only Kant and Hegel, but also Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, take the possibility of (mature human) language for granted. Yet the analytic philosophy of Frege, Russell and their heirs, which deals with the details of the linguistic formulation of ideas, is equally indifferent to the anthropological basis of language, which it conceives as a formal system independent of its human implementation. Even when, as with the later Wittgenstein and especially Austin, analytic philosophy stumbles on clearly anthropological material such as marriages, baptisms, and promises, it never doubts that exploratory empiricism provides sufficient basis for its theoretical models.

The first postmodern inroads into this propositional security came in the guise not of a humanistic anthropology but a critique of “(phal)logocentrism.” Techniques of close reading that had been applied to Judeo-Christian scripture, as well as to literary texts beginning with Homer, in order to seek out the originary ostensive motivation behind the text (a technique that Girard radicalizes as the search for the real murder behind the myth), become “deconstructive” when applied to the texts of metaphysics. Deconstruction shows these supposedly self-contained discourses to be grounded on the implicit ostensive fiction of (self)-presence constitutive of the Subject of Western thought. The burden of Derrida’s masterwork, De la grammatologie, is to demonstrate that this same fiction applies to the chains of propositions that make up the texts of the social sciences: Plato, Rousseau, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, même combat.

The ideological motivation of deconstruction is to provide a basis for postmodern victimary thought, which interprets these texts as providing a spurious ideological justification for the domination of the “phallogocentric” Subject over its Other. By unveiling the unacknowledged ostensive basis of metaphysical texts, deconstruction, a mode of reflection originating in the Humanities, offers its victimary anthropology as the hidden basis of human science. By now even the humblest practitioners of the social sciences, such as may be found in Schools of Education, are quoting Derrida and Foucault.

The negativity of the deconstructive critique, of a piece with the often naive hostility to central authority characteristic of postmodern victimary thinking, should not mask its genuine anthropological significance. Deconstruction’s explicit reference to the originary ostensive-sacred dimension of the human, even if it be as a sinister fiction, is a major step toward originary thinking.

René Girard’s critique of desire, although indifferent to the question of language and far from having achieved the publicity level of the Parisian representatives of “French theory,” is very much a product of this same victimary mentality. But in Girard’s work, the centrality of the victim, understood from a Christian perspective as the bearer of the fundamental anthropological and sacred truth, becomes the source of a constructive anthropology. In retrospect, Girard’s indifference to the postmodern “linguistic turn” can be seen as a case of reculer pour mieux sauter. By distancing himself from the hypostasis of language as a means of discrediting the human subject—an enterprise whose strange complicity with apology for the perpetrators of the Holocaust was astutely pointed out by Tobin Siebers in “Mourning becomes Paul de Man” (in Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism, Oxford, 1993)—Girard uncovered the critical need to defer mimetically inspired violence that is the kernel of human culture. That he passed over the originary function of language in this operation is understandable, given “French theory’s” insistence on language as doing just the opposite. On this point, too, Siebers shows in The Ethics of Criticism (Cornell, 1988) how Derrida’s reading of Lévi-Strauss’ “writing lesson” in Tristes tropiques turns culture on its head by affirming that linguistic violence is more dangerous than physical violence.

What was needed was to bring together Girard’s constructive anthropology with a hypothesis about the anthropological underpinnings of the “logocentric subject” that went beyond the political silliness that so often accompanies victimary thought. If “(phal)logocentrism” is indeed an apology for the oppression of the “Other,” is it coeval with language or a later imposition on it? If the former, what makes its deconstruction on behalf of the excluded other possible? If the latter, what made possible its original corruption? The crudity of the implicit anthropology of “French theory,” founded on the binary paradigm of oppression that was the legacy, both empowering and stultifying, of Auschwitz to postmodern thought, stands in striking contrast to the subtlety of its textual analyses.

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The sticking point of GA is that, unwilling either to await the always tentative conclusions of empirical science or to hide behind the infinite regress of epistemology, it constructs a positive hypothesis of the origin of the human. I prefer to call GA a “way of thinking” than to pigeonhole it into either “science” or “philosophy.” The originary hypothesis differs from a falsifiable scientific hypothesis in that its pretension at describing reality is uniquely justified by the speculative constructions of “originary analysis” that it makes possible. In this it resembles the discourse of philosophy, but its a priori is a singular event rather than a general condition of “the mind.” I have been tempted to call it a “minimal religion,” although as Richard van Oort recently put it, no one will find GA in a foxhole; religion cannot remain hypothetical. Yet religion offers a better model of GA than philosophy because it begins with an assertion about reality rather than an ungrounded set of “ideas.”

What justifies our declaring the independence of the human from empirical research into its origins is the intuitive evidence that the events and signs of human history have a common origin. Regardless of the specifics of the originary event, which the hypothesis strives to describe as parsimoniously as possible, the heuristic value of cutting the Gordian knot by positing the reality of such an event for the synthesis of the ever-expanding richness of human experience is not likely to be disturbed by a paleontological discovery. And even in the unlikely event that such a discovery will one day provide clear evidence of human origin in the strong sense in which GA defines it, this should not prevent us from building a theoretical edifice which, even if we must eventually tear it down, can bequeath many valuable elements to its successor.

Whatever the usefulness of associating human behavior with this or that biological imperative, it is the height of arrogance to designate as the behavior’s “real” causes factors invisible to the consciousness of the actors themselves. Culture is irreducible to biology. Even the most fanciful cultural explanations of human activity contain a degree of self-understanding, not merely personal but generic, that on the one hand, has roots in the originary event and on the other, can be shown to constitute a source of our own self-understanding.

We few, we band of siblings…

What have humanists to gain from this Declaration that would correspond to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” our “inalienable rights” to which are affirmed in the original?

It is easy to understand the success of victimary thought. It satisfies the resentment of the marked and the guilt of the unmarked—both of which may be combined in the same person. The latter atone for the Holocaust and the Western history that it brings to an apocalyptic culmination by attributing to the former the privilege of having escaped the sinfulness of the human condition. This moral privilege, which its recipients are understandably happy to accept in perpetuity, brings with it important material benefits whose motivational effect is particularly strong in the chronically overpopulated academic profession.

Although the world of GA is so far, and perhaps forever, uncorrupted by the material rewards of white guilt, the white males who make up the dominant majority of contributors to GA (the Ottawa conference suggests a movement toward greater gender balance) are not expressing the inverted resentment of “white studies.” The sole privilege to which they can lay claim is that of being less tempted by victimary thinking than those who profit directly or indirectly from it. Meanwhile, the heroic figures in the minority community, the Thomas Sowells and Shelby Steeles, who recognize this profit as the wage of condescension, have more urgent tasks to perform than concerning themselves with fundamental anthropology.

At present, the independent Humanities of originary anthropology is all but invisible in the shadow of victimary thought. Although for the foreseeable future the elimination of stereotypical differences will be a moral imperative of greater urgency than originary thinking, I think we can be confident that the postmodern era will end; resentment always wears out its welcome. Meanwhile, our task is to show that the understanding of human society and culture made possible by originary thinking is not only more subtle but ultimately more conducive to moral liberation than that grounded in victimary resentment, liberation from which Christianity set as its highest priority two millennia ago.

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We construct the notion of an esthetic as the basis, perhaps implicit as a formal doctrine, but surely conscious as a set of rules of thumb, of an artist’s esthetic judgment concerning his attempt to generate a new esthetic experience in a potential spectator.

It does not seem useful to attribute to the myths, tales, songs, and works of plastic art from pre-Homeric times an esthetic independent of the “institutional” scene of representation inherited from the originary event. Culture at this stage is not distinguishable from ritual; objects of plastic art are cult objects; songs and dances are rites; folktales are sacred myths. The cave-paintings of Altamira and Lascaux suggest the existence of craft traditions and the sense of formal beauty that they cultivate, but not of a desire to generate a distinct esthetic experience. The absence of frames separating the esthetic space from the world or the individual paintings from each other is a useful indication of this. Nor can myth-narratives such as those collected in Lévi-Strauss’s mythologiques be said to have an esthetic form distinguishable from the narrative material itself.

The clearest sign of the absence of a fully developed esthetic even in ancient Egypt is its lack of true literature, which, given the linguistic sign’s maximal independence from ritual, elicits in its audience most unambiguously of all the arts a specifically esthetic relation to its creator. The conscience that presides over a work of literature and to which the reader or listener subordinates his own is “authorial” no less when the epic bard calls upon the goddess to sing his song. The gods’ understanding of the language of human desire is revealed esthetically by the construction of the world of gods and men through the literary sign rather than as an account of the prior ostensive revelation of the sacred. The crucial difference is whether the art object is designed to produce the effect of being intentionally created for the experience of the spectator, from which experience we are to derive our understanding of the relation of the human world to the transcendental, or whether this act of representation is intended to remind us of a prior, determining event.

In plastic art, centuries before the appearance of the humanizing element of the “Greek smile,” we find a different, death-oriented humanism in Egyptian “naturalist” sculpture. The Egyptian obsession with individual immortality gives rise to a deviation rather than a break from ritual art, more comparable to Christian tomb sculpture than to anything of the Greek classical era. As noted in The End of Culture, a similarly incomplete liberation from ritual is visible in the most literary of ancient Egyptian narratives, the 20^th century B.C. “Tale of Sinuhe,” whose protagonist’s independent narrative existence in the interregnum ends happily when the new pharaoh invites the exile to return and occupy at his death a magnificent tomb, a conclusion that is effectively an apotheosis.

Resentment, the first word of western culture

The Iliad, the oldest literary work of Western culture, is the best introduction to the classical esthetic. Those who labor to reveal the Homeric heroes’ naïve lack of self-consciousness from their placing the seat of intelligence in the lungs or the life-force in the belly should reflect that this first epic begins as an anti-epic, the story of its hero’s absence. Achilles inaugurates the scene of literary culture by withdrawing from it. The epic action centrally dependent on Achilles’ prowess begins with the narrative deferral of its exercise.

At the outset, Homer does not ask the muse to sing of Achilles, but of Achilles’ “rage.” As I pointed out in The End of Culture, the poem’s first word, menin, refers specifically to Achilles’ resentment of Agamemnon, who, as we soon learn, has arbitrarily (if not altogether without provocation) appropriated Achilles’ captive, Briseis, to compensate the loss of his own, whom he was obliged to return to her father, a priest of Apollo. As leader of the Greek expedition, Agamemnon must respect the gods but can command his human subordinates. The Iliad‘s point of departure is the necessarily imprecise nature of the ruler’s power over the best of his warriors, the undecidable conflict between order and value. Achilles remains resentful because the organization of the war party under Agamemnon’s leadership does not allow him to challenge the latter in personal combat, where he would surely prevail. Human hierarchy, invented long after humanity dethroned the alpha-beta pecking order of animal society, no longer operates through one-on-one challenges. On the counsel of Athena, Achilles subordinates his superiority in combat to Agamemnon’s leadership role.

Homeric society has reached, at least insofar as war is concerned—war is, to quote The End of Culture, “the first market,” in which value/valor/valeur is created and measured—a stage of complexity at which the scene of representation is no longer the locus on which sacred objects simply manifest their essence. The classical scene, often misunderstood as a showplace for human godlikeness (perhaps not altogether coincidentally, in line 7 Homer applies to Achilles the commonplace epithet “divine,” dios Achilleos, in opposing him to “the son of Atreus, leader of men”—anax andron), is in the first place the locus of the agony of self-limitation.

As if to emphasize the resentful constraint of human as opposed to divine rage, line 75 also begins with menin, referring to Apollo’s wrath at Agamemnon’s refusal to return Chryses’ daughter. As a god, Apollo need not, indeed, cannot remain resentful; in response to the king’s act of disrespect, he sends a plague that kills many Greeks, forcing Agamemnon to return his captive and take Achilles’ instead. The word menos is used throughout the Iliad in the sense of anger or simply ardor; but these usages only accentuate the significance of the opening line, where it designates the impotent rage of resentment.

Just as Apollo’s violence obliges Agamemnon, if only indirectly, to rescind his impious act, Achilles cannot refuse Agamemnon’s order, however unjustified, to deliver Briseis to him. Even Nestor, whose sage advice to leave Briseis with Achilles Agamemnon rejects, admonishes Achilles not to show disrespect to his superior, whose decision to pull rank by requesting Achilles’ captive takes its original motivation from Achilles’ insulting epithet “the most covetous of all” (philokteanotate panton) in line 122, commenting on Agamemnon’s reluctance to give up the priest’s daughter.

But Achilles pulls rank in his own way, going above the king’s head by asking his divine mother Thetis to request of Zeus that he give the Trojans the advantage in battle during her son’s absence. Although aware of his wife Hera’s fondness for the Greeks, including both Achilles and Agamemnon, Zeus grants this request. The gods expect humans to respect the laws of hierarchy, but their ultimate concern is to bring about a just apportionment of good and evil. Despite his superiority in battle, Achilles is obliged to defer to the king’s authority in accepting a lesser tribute, but he did not merit the insult of losing his captive. Agamemnon’s formal authority cannot guarantee his army the battlefield success that would be achieved by Achilles’ participation. The Greeks will suffer for his absence. It is only when their suffering reaches the point of endangering the divinely approved Greek expedition itself that the gods will invade Achilles’ own personal realm by sanctioning the death of Patroclus.

That Achilles’ resentment is originally approved by the gods is not a gratuitous addition to the story; it is the very mark of the secular-cultural, the sign that ritual hierarchy does not suffice to organize society. The participants submit in good faith to the transindividual values of this order in the awareness that its injustices can be appealed to the gods. Justice, Dike, refers in the first place to an equal/equitable distribution of goods and honors. The “equal feast” of the Homeric warriors recalls primitive ritual equality, even if we assume that the first has a larger share than the last. Unequal shares are compatible with the universal reciprocity of the moral model to the extent that their operational value can be justified to those lower down. When it cannot, the gods may be called upon to intervene.

The often comical “humanity” of Homer’s gods reflects their awareness and acceptance of personal resentments as an essential element of a hierarchical social order. Among the gods themselves, these disputes are settled without serious consequences; the divine order survives the conflicts that destroy the lives of mortals. Zeus recognizes Achilles’ grievance against Agamemnon because the Greek war party as a model of “modern” society is not a ritual order, an “Oriental despotism” like Pharaonic Egypt, whose ruler is himself a god.

Thersites’ complaint in Book 2 is the classical Homeric illustration of the limit of the non-heroic. Thersites’ condemnation of Agamemnon’s greed is superficially identical to that of Achilles, but as Odysseus contemptuously reminds him, he lacks the status to make it. And whereas Achilles simply points out that he has no personal quarrel with the Trojans, Thersites’ denunciation of Agamemnon’s personal motives leads him to reject the divinely approved mission at Troy. He exemplifies popular resentment in its indiscriminate conclusion from the leaders’ inadequacies to the invalidity of the social order itself.

The irony of the Thersites episode is that his defeatism is provoked by Agamemnon’s falsely claiming he intends to abandon the siege and return home in order to test the Greeks’ resolve. In response to Thetis’ request, Zeus has sent the king a deceitful dream encouraging a rash attack on the city by making him think that Hera has persuaded Zeus and the other Olympians to let the Greeks have an easy victory. As always, the “kingdom of heaven” provides a well-apportioned solution. Agamemnon has failed to appreciate Achilles’ importance, so Zeus encourages him to put this lack of appreciation into practice by attacking the Trojans in Achilles’ absence. Hera indeed wanted an easy Greek victory, but Zeus’ solution points up the contradiction between her support for the Greek cause as a whole and her refusal to take sides in the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon. As the rest of the narrative will show, a balanced resolution of this conflict must be reached before the gods’ original plan for the war can be realized.

Can we imagine the Homeric world without the gods? Cannot their interventions in the lives of the characters be reinterpreted as emanating from within them? When Athena stops Achilles from drawing his sword against Agamemnon, is this more than a figuration of his better judgment telling him to refrain from attacking his commander-in-chief? Or should we adopt instead the perspective put forth by Julian Jaynes in a book that made quite a splash a few decades ago, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), according to which Achilles himself would have experienced what we think of as moral reflection as a conversation with a deity inhabiting the other “chamber” of his “bicameral mind”?

We ask these questions because we are reluctant to read the Iliad as a religious narrative in which the gods dictate the action rather than as a story of human conflict working itself out, as things do in real life, without direct evidence of divine intervention. What is naïve about such questions is that they take for granted that the Homeric authorial subject will continue to carry out his transcendent role, whether or not narratively attributed to the gods, of administering poetic justice. Whether or not Athena is present in either Achilles’ imagination or our own in preventing the latter from drawing his sword, we know that “Homer,” the authorial subject, is responsible for the decision. The latter both is and is not free to tell the story any way he likes. If we find it appropriate that Achilles not draw his sword, it is because we know Homer could have had him do it, although had he done so—had he not deferred this act of violence—the story would have been ruined. The limit of narrative deferral depends on the rejected possibility of its negation. Similarly, the emission of the sign in the originary scene could have, had its violence not been deferred, been an act of appropriation, but then it would not have become a sign. Homer attributes his narrative judgment to the gods as he attributes to the goddess the voice in which the story is told. But when the bard sings those thousands of hexameters, we hear his voice, not that of a goddess; and when Athena counsels Achilles we hear his voice once removed, for even if he imitates the goddess’ voice, it is he who invents her words.

As for Jaynes’ theory, aside from its lack of parsimony, it accounts only for a limited portion of the appearances of the gods in the Iliad. Most of the time, the gods are either conversing among themselves on Olympus or acting on their human protégés rather than speaking with them, as when Apollo shoots his plague-arrows at the Achaeans or Aphrodite whisks Paris away from his single combat with Menelaus in Book 3. Are we to imagine that not only Achilles’ conversation with Thetis (and what does it mean to have a goddess for a mother?) but hers with Zeus take place in Achilles’ mind?

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To sum up: the classical narrative, as we encounter it in the Iliad, is generated by the deferral of purposeful activity through resentment. “The greatest warrior,” man in his highest form, is originarily resentful. Resentment arises in hierarchical society, given its inevitable tension with the reciprocal moral order and its extension to an “equal” system of distribution. But the originary source of our resentment is directed not at a human usurper of the sacred center but at the center itself.

Were the purpose of the epic merely to display Achilles’ “godlike” action, it would realize only the oneiric esthetic of Agamemnon’s dream. The author, like the gods, can do what he wills, but we entrust ourselves to him, as to them, because we know justice will be done. The deferral of action is not a mere postponement, but an ontological revelation: before we act, we must restrain our desire; when it does occur, our action is no longer an expression of desire but of duty. The military narrative culminates in Achilles’ defeat of Hector only once Achilles’ human resentment has been recognized and transcended. Thus the narrative climax of the Iliad, Achilles’ final act of mercy toward Priam in allowing him to carry out Hector’s funeral, affirms the solidarity of all mortals in the resentment that defines the human, directed not at a hierarchical superior but at the transcendent Other:

ὧς γὰρ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσι,
ζώειν ἀχνυμένοις· αὐτοὶ δέ τ᾽ἀκηδέες εἰσί.

For this fate the gods have spun for miserable mortals:
to live in pain; yet themselves are without care. (24, 525-26)

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The sad death of Michael Jackson at 50 reminds me of the last time I wrote about celebrity, on the occasion of Princess Diana’s death 12 years ago. At that time, influenced by the high status that was integral to the Princess’ popularity, I emphasized the role of the celebrity as an alternate mediator who allowed us to escape the potential superiority of others in our own milieu. If I am confronted with the signs of your superior status, I do not put forward competing signs of my own, but those of my celebrity-idol, whose status is far above anything either of us, you in particular, could possibly achieve.

This mode of celebrity was no doubt present in the case of Michael Jackson as well, although the singer’s penchant for self-mutilation and his sexual-legal troubles tempered the admiration he inspired, far more than for Di, with pity and even repulsion. At the time of her death, every girl wanted to be Di; no one of either sex would have wanted to be Michael Jackson. But before turning to his specific case, we should consider the question of celebrity in more general terms.

In the everyday world of nominally reciprocal relations, we owe each other a certain degree of consideration and polite acknowledgement. Celebrity may be understood as a supplement to the symmetry of a normal encounter. Whereas in the general case, meeting a person X is experienced as neither a gift nor a penalty, to meet a celebrity is, in principle, to receive a benefit; one is “privileged” to meet him or her. This supplement indeed defines celebrity, since one cannot be said to experience the other as a celebrity in its absence. Of course this does not prevent us from rejecting this experience and the supplement it provides; this would be the equivalent of refusing to worship a god whose divinity we can disavow but not claim to be simply unaware of.

No doubt there are different degrees of celebrity, quantifiable by such measures as TV time, magazine covers, and paparazzi. Furthermore, there are different arenas for celebrity whose participants rarely compete with each other. Athletes and singers famous in one country may be unknown in another. In the intellectual world, the late Jacques Derrida was a major celebrity (especially in the USA), but the average Michael Jackson fan had never heard of him, and would not have known how to react to his celebrity if s/he had. Yet despite its different degrees and flavors, celebrity is essentially a binary matter: either I feel compelled to treat you as a celebrity (resisting the compulsion is another story) or I do not. To put it differently, the vast majority of us do not possess a measurable degree of celebrity. Treating a “local celebrity” like a real celebrity is an act of make-believe. At the same time, persons of exceptional beauty or demonstrated talent may, without renown or reputation, appear to us as if surrounded by the aura of celebrity.

Not surprisingly, the phenomenon of celebrity confirms GA’s analysis of the scenicity of culture. The normal social gathering of two or more persons is not organized like a ritual scene, a concert, a lecture, or a classroom; scenes form and un-form, attention shifts from one person to the next. Persons who seek to monopolize attention are stigmatized, unless they display some esthetic privilege—talent or beauty—in justification. In what might be called the “default scenicity” of modern communities, the sacred center is merely implicit. The degree of this implicitness may be said to measure the community’s secularity, which even in the most extreme case allows us to distinguish between ritual or simply cultural phenomena and the interactions of daily life. Celebrity in our sense depends on the high level of overall secularity characteristic of the modern world, to which it adds a supplement of sacred presence. This supplement is not something inserted into this normal context of interaction so much as a supplementary scene of interaction. An implicit public, “institutional” scene surrounds the celebrity and makes us unable to relate to him as we do to ordinary people. The imaginary aura figures the focused attention of the public scene.

Although the public centrality of the celebrity overlaps with that of the big-man and his descendants, the historical roots of celebrity, whose originary model is the firstness manifested in the originary event, go back farther to phenomena such as that of the shaman, whose psychological peculiarity makes him a privileged mediator of the sacred in certain tribal societies. Like the shaman, the celebrity does not owe his role to an accumulation of surplus; his function is esthetic and “spiritual” rather than economic.

The celebrity nonetheless shares many benefits with the big-man, notably wealth and visible influence, and consequently shares as well the Schadenfreude that attends his every misfortune. The parallel between checkout-aisle accounts of celebrity suffering and disgrace and the “sacrificial” cultural form of tragedy is all too obvious. The human who dares occupy the center is an object of universal resentment that risks making him a Girardian scapegoat as soon as his centrality no longer appears indispensable. Since the celebrity’s area of operations is peripheral to social crisis, he rarely becomes an object of real violence. But to operate constantly on the public scene as an object of collective desire and resentment distorts the lives of all but the strongest, creating ample material for the tabloids.

Celebrity takes on its modern features in the mass-mediated urban cultures of the industrial era. Modern celebrity is a feature of democratic or incipiently democratic societies. It is, as Doug Collins used to say, pre-humiliated, a self-ironized version of what classical culture called fame. Heroes are not celebrities, and we rarely treat them as such; the aura of celebrity exceeds the recognition due to merit, making the resentment it generates both more virulent and more superficial. “Humanizing” celebrities contributes to their pre-humiliation: the trivia of their lives makes them comparable to ourselves, undecidably objects of greater sympathy and greater resentment. At the same time, the achievements for which we celebrate them help reconcile us to our anonymity. Actors are everymen who centralize our everyday problems; sports figures possess rare talents, but in areas peripheral to the needs of the modern world; and the abilities of entertainers like Michael Jackson are expended in performing our resentments as a sacrificial ceremony.

The aura’s power in social life is greater to the extent that the arena of interaction is of a more general nature, which is why celebrity fandom particularly affects young people, most especially adolescent girls, who are crucially concerned with acquiring their own aura of sexual attractiveness or glamour. The movie magazines so popular in Hollywood’s Golden Age supplied models that allowed young girls to ignore the limitations of their immediate environment, while providing guidance for not a few (such as Frances Ridste in San Bernardino, who dropped out of high school to become Carole Landis) who had the confidence to seek a celebrity of their own.

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For many, perhaps most who live in societies where a certain level of comfort is taken for granted, fame is the highest dream, as summed up in Warhol’s immortal quip that “in the future, everyone will be (world-) famous for fifteen minutes.” Daniel Henninger, in the July 3 Wall Street Journal, called “Michael” the last celebrity now that, thanks to the Internet, Warhol’s fifteen minutes have become a real possibility. Jackson won his fame through professional skill and hard work in the decades before the media became interactive and anyone could hope to achieve “viral” notoriety by uploading a video to YouTube.

The originary reciprocity of the “moral model” was not a static symmetry. The big-man’s command of the feast began as a simple extension of an individual clan’s periodic responsibility. When we achieve our fifteen minutes of fame, we are only reestablishing the structure of reciprocal gift-exchange that prevailed in pre-agricultural society; each recipient of the “gift” passes it and its accompanying mana to another down the line. Even if only a tiny proportion of the planet’s inhabitants have a chance at a quarter-hour of fame, “viral” or otherwise, this possibility, like the temporary celebrity accorded the participants in reality programming, or the chance at star-making on programs like American Idol, helps take the edge off the sacred resentment inspired by the occupants of the center.

Jackson got his start as a “crossover” artist in the 70s, when pop music was still largely divided between white and black performers. Rock ‘n’ roll, like jazz between the wars, was predominantly an importation of black musical modes into the world of white entertainment. By inscribing the integration of whiteness and blackness on his facial features, Jackson sought, with a bizarre authenticity, to extend his original crossover persona into the incarnation of universal humanity—”self-fashioning” with a vengeance. To appear as a fusion of black and white (as well as male and female, infantile and adult) was to realize a fantastic transcendence of the differences that obscure our common human origin. That this dream, however much one spends on plastic surgery, is an unrealizable chimera does not deprive it of its desperate nobility.

But whereas at the start of Jackson’s career African Americans, although advantaged through affirmative action in university admissions and certain job markets, were not yet freely accepted by the general public as celebrities on a par with whites, in today’s celebrity world, blackness, with its deeply rooted victimary credentials, is an unalloyed benefit. Among today’s major celebrities, African Americans are represented far out of proportion to their share of the population. Oprah Winfrey as celebrity-everywoman is the most obvious example, but the list includes musical performers, athletes and actors, poets and novelists, not to speak of the First Celebrity in the White House.

In contrast with Jackson’s fantasy of human synthesis, today’s emphasis on “diversity” embodies the opposite fantasy, with all the hypocrisy entailed by requiring us to be uncompromisingly diverse yet magically equal in all respects. Yet the ethical problem addressed by victimary thinking cannot be resolved by its logical refutation. However inconsistent its methods, the political-cultural process has been accomplishing the ever-necessary reconciliation of ethics and morality better than any a priori. One who would deplore the contribution of White Guilt to the success of Oprah Winfrey or Barack Obama has no alternative but to celebrate this success as the only effective means of reducing the guilt.

What connects the two aspects of post-millennial celebrity that mark Michael Jackson’s fame as the product of an earlier era: the rise of minority celebrity and the partial demystification of celebrity itself in the age of the Internet is that, just as the former phenomenon has helped improve the reciprocity of intergroup relations, the latter helps reconcile center and periphery by demystifying celebrity’s shamanistic role. These developments touch on the two central human paradoxes referred to in Chronicle 375: the secondary conflict of ethics and morality, by compensating what was once the arbitrary advantage of one group over another, and the primary tension between periphery and center, by making occupancy of the center less rigidly exclusive. They illustrate our claim that the fundamental problems of humanity remain those that humans have with each other, always essentially the same, always in need of new solutions.

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As for Jackson himself, it is not quite enough to say that his death is a demonstration of the unsustainability of mega-celebrity in our era. Reshaping his body into a living symbol of human unity would have been merely pathological had he not been able to enact during his performances the synthesis he sought to incarnate. Jackson’s was a true “performance art” that reveals the tasteless silliness of what normally goes under that name. In his all-time best-selling Thriller, his ever-graceful movements of simulated violence took on a universal meaning as the expression and esthetic transcendence of human resentment in general rather than (as in much black music since) the celebration of that of a specific ethnic group.

We stand in awe of the titans of the past because we have chosen to live in a world that has no place for them. Our world of diversity and microfame owes Michael Jackson, the Last Celebrity, the tribute of old-fashioned immortality.

Addendum (July 19, 2009):

Shortly after releasing this Chronicle, I received some independent information concerning Michael Jackson’s expressions of antisemitism, part of which I reproduce below:

While much of the world mourns the untimely death of the “King of
Pop” Michael Jackson, it is worth recalling one of Mr. Jackson’s
more unfortunate qualities: he was an anti-Semite.
In case you think I am making this up, allow me to refresh your memory.
Back in November 2005, Jackson was *caught*
(http:// pqasb.pqarchiver.com/jpost/access/937011291.html? dids=937011291:937011291&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Nov+24%2C+2005&author=NATHAN+GUTTMAN&pub=Jerusalem+Post&edition=&startpage=01&desc=Michael+Jackson+calls+Jews+ %27leeches%27) [this link provides the reference and the opportunity to purchase the article for $3.95 – eg] on tape in a voicemail to one of his former business managers
calling Jews “leeches”. The tapes were played on ABC’s Good Morning
America program, and Jackson was heard saying, “They suck. They’re
like leeches. It’s a conspiracy. The Jews do it on purpose.”
And in 1995, Jackson provoked a firestorm of protest when he
released an album called HIStory containing a song entitled “They
don’t care about us” which had the following lyrics: “Jew me, sue
me” and “Kick me, kike me”. He subsequently promised to re-record
the song and delete the offending lyrics.
But then, in February 1996, Jackson nonetheless *released*
(http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASUS_12/2662_12.asp)  a video of the
song in which he had re-instated the brazenly anti-Semitic remarks.

If I were to be asked how antisemitism is compatible with what I called the “bizarre authenticity” of Jackson’s attempt to sculpt himself into a figure of universal humanity, the answer would be, “sadly, all too obviously.” Independently of a history of black antisemitism going back at least to W. E. B. Du Bois’ classic Souls of Black Folk (see Chronicle 90), the Jews are the group most likely to be excluded from a “universal” reconciliation between opposites. Whatever their oppression, their firstness sets them on the side of the oppressor. Better to accept firstness, lastness, and everything in between, rather than squeezing out their uniqueness in a synthesis that will always be harder on the first than on the last.

To be charitable to the dead, I would say that, on the evidence provided, Jackson’s antisemitism tarnishes, but does not altogether negate, the “desperate nobility” of his persona.

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The just-concluded GA Summer Conference at the University of Ottawa was the most significant public event in the world of GA since I began developing these ideas in 1978, over thirty years ago.

The conference, organized by two Anthropoetics authors, Ian Dennis assisted by Amir Khan, brought together nearly forty speakers from Canada, the US, Europe, and Australia. The atmosphere was cordial and intellectually challenging throughout. Ian had assiduously contacted all the Anthropoetics contributors he could find, and nearly all the regulars and a good number of one-time contributors were there. Some of the speakers were old friends whom I hadn’t seen in years; others I had known only by correspondence. A sizable group was made up of graduate students from Ottawa and nearby universities, all of whose papers were of scholarly quality, and a number of which made real use of originary thinking. For the first time, the foundations of GA were taken as a normal working presupposition by more than a small core of GA practitioners. The receptivity of both participants and audience gave me some hope that these ideas would survive and perhaps one day enter the mainstream.

Unlike all the successful critical movements of the present generation, GA has no victimary clientele. It is understandable that those with victimary credentials prefer to use them to advantage by participating in the critical mainstream. Collective resentment remains the privileged discovery procedure in the humanities, and those who are not born into an appropriate collective are encouraged to attach themselves to one. But as with any mode of thought in a free society, years of success have made victimary thinking more nuanced and open to external influence. Thus none of the women who participated in the conference expressed the kind of feminist objections to GA often vehemently raised twenty years ago: that the originary event involves only men, that it privileges male violence over female nurturing, that it justifies the “patriarchy” and leaves no place for an Urmatriarchy…. That GA’s fundamental conceptions are no longer found offensive despite their focus on originary equality rather than intergroup domination suggests that victimary thought, without renouncing its advantages, is ready to accept inclusion within a broader framework of the sort I attempted to sketch in my talk (published as Chronicle 375). I will reserve discussion of the political implications of this development for another occasion (but see Adam Katz’s entry in the GABlog at http://dev.cdh.ucla.edu/GABlog/2009/06/the-holy-grammar-of-presence/ .)

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No doubt the model of the originary hypothesis is not easily applicable to all the works of culture, and the paradigms of “esthetic history” provided in Originary Thinking hardly cover the whole terrain. But the point of a minimal hypothesis is not merely to leave room for others to develop the theory itself, but to serve as a basis for a multiplicity of theoretical universes that need not consider themselves “derivations” of GA. The minimally incarnated hypothetical event inserts itself between empirical science and religious intuition as a fundamental understanding of the human that both the humanities and the social sciences can take as a point of reference. Even where return to the origin may not be necessary, it is essential that such a return always remain a possibility as a means of testing foundational hypotheses.

The firstness of a religious revelation is explicitly that of a historical contingency; however “abstract” a religion, and the figureless and nameless Hebrew God is no doubt the most powerful example of such abstraction, its historical emergence is by definition a revelatory event whose reality qua event is indispensable. (This fact itself suggests at the very least that we cannot conceive our emergence otherwise than as an event, although certain religions attempt to minimize the violence of this founding event.) The originary hypothesis, in contrast, is intended to concentrate the imagination on itself only for the purpose of facilitating its transfer to other subjects at hand. The hypothesis is not proposed in view of future empirical (dis)confirmation, but as a heuristic point of departure. No doubt the scientist will yearn for a truly “scientific” hypothesis that does away with events altogether, but this is not possible for all the reasons GA has alleged. It would be suspicious, indeed paradoxical, if the subject whose transcendent status allows it to create the sciences of the material world were able to establish its own beginning by means of the same techniques by which it studies the genesis of non-human phenomena.

This paradox is expressed in various ways by those who dissent from normal natural science—for example, by the advocates of the doctrine of Intelligent Design. I have admitted to a “grain of sympathy” for Creationism, which adverts explicitly to religious sources in rejecting the possibility of a “Darwinian” explanation of the human. No doubt Creationism is naïve in extrapolating from the impossibility of fully accounting for the human in evolutionary terms to the assertion that the theory of evolution simply does not apply to the human, let alone to other living creatures. But this very naivety keeps the emphasis on the need to supplement Darwinism’s inadequacy rather than on the presumed limits of the scientific method as such. In contrast, Intelligent Design claims that certain aspects of life are simply too complex to have emerged in the course of the Earth’s history otherwise than through creation by an “intelligent being.” In the absence of any concrete hypothesis concerning a natural such being, ID’s conclusory appeal to a deus ex machina explains no more than the statement that these aspects have not (yet) been explained. This procedure, antipodal to scientific parsimony, is disguised in the terminology of natural science. I mention it here merely as confirmation of the paradoxical origin of the human that cannot be thought without an originary hypothesis of some kind. No doubt Creationism too does not single out the creation of man as its central focus, but the Genesis story describes the creation of man (and woman) “in God’s image” as the final achievement and narrative telos of the creation, whereas the genetic operations alleged to require a creator by ID have no specific relationship with the human at all.

One common objection to the originary hypothesis is that it fails to take into account the latest scientific discoveries in animal behavior, or the paleontology of early hominids, or the neurological operations of the brain… In the first place, all the scientific advances I am aware of since 1981, when I published The Origin of Language, have only confirmed my claims about the uniqueness of human language (which was not so obvious at the time) and the consequent differences in the way that humans and animals think (see, for example, Richard van Oort’s “Imitation and Human Ontogeny” on Tomasello’s comparative studies of chimpanzee and human children). Back in 1981, teaching human language to chimps was all the rage, the purpose being to show that the two species weren’t “really” all that different. In other words, my a priori notion of human specificity has proved to be more plausible than the zero hypotheses promoted by the scientists themselves.

But my essential point is independent of these confirmations. It is that anthropology in the broadest sense of human thinking about the human cannot wait for the endlessly receding moment in which science will finally have enough facts at its disposal to create the definitive hypothesis (or “paradigm”) of human origin. Not only is such a moment not on the horizon, but there is no logical reason to assume it can exist. Absent some kind of laboratory reconstruction, the emergent phenomena of representation that define the human cannot be understood without reference to hypothetical scenic events. Human culture to this day is punctuated by such events, which form the heart of what we call “culture,” whether they be plays, concerts, dances, feasts, festivals, sports events, religious services, or what have you. Yet there is no presently conceivable way for empirical science to discover the originary model of the scenic event.

In short, the originary hypothesis is the only non-religious explanation available for the emergence of the phenomenon that defines the human. This being understood, whether GA be considered “scientific” or “unscientific” is a matter of arbitrary decision. The hypothesis is unnecessary for the empirical investigation of human phenomena, but the underlying intuition that is able to identify them as human phenomena can be explained only by the originary hypothesis or its equivalent. The fact that this hypothesis is not part of “natural science” as it is normally conceived is precisely what makes it the basis of a fundamental, generative anthropology.

To treat human activity as a set of natural processes can no doubt obtain results in specific areas; the operations involved in graphing height and weight distributions or testing a cure for a disease are the same for humans as for animals (although human knowledge of what drugs do must be distinguished from animal “conditioned reflexes”). But when the “science of the human” deals with the cultural aspect of humanity from language on up, in the absence of a theory of origin of its own, it cannot explain the religious and fictional “myths of origin” it encounters except as products of a (perhaps “adaptive”) delusion common to all but the enlightened few. Such analysis situates the scientific mind in a transcendent position with respect to its cultural subject matter, as though the transition between the primitive-cultural and the modern-scientific were more significant than that between the animal and the human. This remains true for “multicultural” studies that present the myths and customs of tribal societies with great sympathy as constituting a cultural whole fully comparable to, and perhaps more coherent than, our own. For the description of the whole remains the transcendent, “etic” one of the scientific observer.

Would it not be possible, one might ask, to explain culture just as GA does, as “the deferral of violence through representation,” but without an originary scene? This would be to accept the doxa of the social sciences in assuming that language and other cultural institutions arose gradually. It would still take us beyond Girard’s “mimetic theory,” which lacks a theory of representation. But when in this gradual emergence would the scenic event characteristic of human culture first appear? Once we admit that such events are the fundamental moments of culture, we are obliged to accept a first one, since by definition events are punctual and defined as such for their participants. If language did not emerge in the first such event, it would have to emerge separately. This would hardly be parsimonious; humans would then have language and culture. And how could a set of non-instinctual signs become accepted by a community in the absence of a communal scene? The use of language as well as other forms of representation in the scenic events of culture suggests a single origin that would make unnecessary a separate derivation of language itself.

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Because the principles of GA are not wholly empirical, it may be thought of as belonging to “philosophical” or “speculative” anthropology rather than as a branch of the social sciences. But it does not share the incompleteness, not to say naivety, of philosophy. The philosopher uses language without ever telling us where it comes from, speaks of “ideas” or of “being” as though by analyzing words and the propositions that contain them he can understand the ultimate constituents of the (human) universe. The originary hypothesis minimally grounds the necessary incompleteness of philosophy/metaphysics in the prehuman world.

In contrast, those total “philosophies” known as religions are complete systems that define a transcendent source from which the human has sprung, language and all. For the sake of completeness, religion admits supernatural beings incompatible with natural science, that can be known only through faith. I hesitate to put it in these terms, but GA may be thought of as a minimal religion, requiring a minimal “act of faith” in the originary hypothesis, which merely accounts for the obvious, that the human emerged at some point from the non-human.

Our fundamental moral intuition too is an object of faith. What explains that we all feel that “all men are created equal” and resent any indication that some are more equal than we? Is it enough to speak of this feeling as an adaptive trait, like the opposable thumb? Religion presents the law of moral reciprocity in various forms as a divine precept. Philosophy either postulates it as a law of “reason” (Kant) or attempts to derive it from a symmetrical thought-experiment (Rawls). GA’s scenic heuristic is more parsimonious than either religious doctrine or moral philosophy. The scene of language as a scene of reciprocal exchange is not a speculative construction but a configuration that we all experience daily, resenting those moments when we feel excluded or neglected.

Unlike philosophy or transcendental religion, GA is self-contained; it explains language, morality, and all other characteristically human phenomena from within itself. This does not mean that GA offers some magical solution to humanity’s concrete problems, either those of scholarship or those, more intractable, of social organization. Its claim is simply that for the sake of human self-understanding it is preferable to begin from a explicit, minimal heuristic than from either a dogma or a set of half-conscious assumptions.

But GA’s claim, however plausible, cannot be demonstrated in the abstract. The study of the human is a pragmatic enterprise—the ultimate pragmatic enterprise. I am happy to say that the Ottawa conference offers some hope that GA will have access to the time and intellectual energy to be able to justify its claim in practice.

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This is the very slightly emended text of the talk given at the third annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference at Ottawa on June 19-21, 2009. While apologizing for its length and discursiveness, I wanted to commemorate this extraordinary conference, put together by the devoted labors of Ian Dennis and Amir Khan. The conference theme was transcendence.

* * *

To speak about transcendence, one has to determine what it is transcendence of. From the perspective of GA, what is transcended in transcendence, like what is deferred in Derrida’s deferral, is violence, the breakdown of communal order. Just as deferring something does not eliminate it as a future possibility, so it is with transcendence. The elaborate systems of human culture by means of which we seek to transcend this breakdown can never achieve final success.

The different topographies of deferral and transcendence reflect their respective relationships to the genesis of the sign. The aborted gesture of appropriation that becomes the first sign defers violence by turning away from its appetitive aim, and thereby from potential conflict, to become a consciously self-contained act, an intentional rite that designates its focus, the deferred appetitive object, as not merely outside itself but outside its universe of possible action. This is the difference that, along with deferral, makes up Derrida’s différance. But it is a metaphysical reflex to situate this difference within a paradigm of signs; any sign, whether its paradigm contain one or a million members, marks its difference from the world to which it refers. Deferral is nonetheless only provisional. In the event described in the originary hypothesis, the representation of the central object is followed by its division in the sparagmos, where each obtains an equal portion of what cannot be appropriated as a whole. The nascent human community defers appetitive satisfaction in order to organize it, to assure its symmetry; the aborted gesture does not abandon appropriation; it only postpones it.

Transcendence, by contrast, implies a permanent relationship to what is transcended. This does not mean that transcendence abolishes violence; the transcendental world of representation does not abolish the world of appetite, but exists alongside it, “above” it, as it were, and there is no guarantee that it can hold in check at every moment the appetites of this world, which contact with the world of representation exacerbates as much as inhibits.

What makes the notion of transcendence useful is that it suggests, as deferral or even différance does not, the existence of a separate, transcendent universe, and thereby more appropriately takes into account the significance of the human as, to our knowledge, the only worldly creature to be acquainted with this universe. As the term also suggests, we do not inhabit this universe, as do the divine beings that we sometimes postulate as its necessary inhabitants. To sum up, the central object of deferral will shortly perish; the central object of transcendence is eternally divine.

(Transcendence cannot be guaranteed by memory alone; the disengagement of the transcendent from the concrete that we find in the Hebrew prohibition on “graven images” and in the Hebrew God’s taking as his name a declarative sentence depends on a process of historical revelation. One area that GA should explore more thoroughly is the phenomenon of inscription implicit in the category of “institutional” representation that I opposed to formal representation in The Origin of Language. Derrida’s intuition that writing precedes speech can be understood as the affirmation that the ostensive sign cannot point only at a mortal object, but implies a subsistent inscription of the place—the scene—in which the event took place.)

The permanence of transcendence can never provide more than the deferral of human conflict. The danger inherent in the notion of transcendence is that it suggests the existence of a stable duality between the worldly and the transcendent, whereas our access to the transcendent universe of representation guarantees only the eternal instability of mimetic desire.

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Today I would like to deal with the most salient factor of this instability, which I do not think has received the attention it deserves from those of us who are attempting to rethink the human in terms of the “new way of thinking” that is GA.

The heart of the hypothetical originary event is the exchange of the sign among the participants; each repeats the sign to his fellows, both emphasizing his own renunciation of the appropriative act and at the same time, the newly “sacred” status of the central object that is so desirable as to be beyond desire. Our accessibility to this sentiment of sacrality, which religion finds it necessary to cultivate (and which the secular can, although it may prefer not to, imagine vicariously), is what allows us to intuit the originary scene as our origin. A worldly object, say, a dead animal, is endowed with “supernatural” properties as a simple consequence of the intensity of human desire—or is it this intensity that permits us to experience the transcendent, to become in Heidegger’s Wagnerian term the “shepherds of being”? The advantage of GA is that, however hypothetical our scene, it is a concrete worldly experience that does not transport us to a metaphysical universe of ungrounded abstractions.

The exchange of the sign takes place in the topography of a circle with the sacred object in the center. The symmetry of the human participants contrasts with the central position of the object, and it is this contrast that will henceforth embody transcendence. Whether or not one conceives it as a wholly human invention/discovery, the transcendent world of representation is above and in any case not of the human. The symmetrical circle of humans exchanging a sign that represents what they cannot otherwise possess provides what I call the moral model of human interaction. We might say that this symmetry is already implicit at the very beginning of the scene in the interdiction that falls upon the formerly alpha animal and prevents him from appropriating the central object, but only the exchange of the sign provides a praxis of moral interaction.

The moral model provides a basis for various familiar affirmations of moral reciprocity, from the Golden Rule through Kant’s Categorical Imperative to the symmetry of John Rawls’s “original position” guaranteed by the “veil of ignorance.” This model also informs the symmetry between our active and passive use of language; to understand the sign is to be able to (re)produce it oneself. Language may embody hierarchy, but the essence of linguistic interaction is symmetrical.

From the earliest times down to 10,000-odd years ago, all human communities maintained this reciprocal, egalitarian organization. Then the Neolithic Revolution brought agriculture and the possibility of accumulated wealth in the form of a preservable surplus of production over consumption. Some years ago, in The End of Culture, inspired by Marshall Sahlins’ description of Pacific island societies concentrated around a big-man, I attempted a model of how this might have led to the demise of the egalitarian social order. I was struck by Sahlins’ observation that the big-man worked harder and had less to eat than anyone else in the village. The point was that in a culture of circulating ritual distribution such as the “totem” societies referred to by Durkheim, the big-man, by working harder than anyone else (and no doubt possessing advantages such as a more productive family workforce and more fertile land), had usurped the ritual center for himself. Why work hard to supply material for the feast when there is someone who will work harder for the privilege of taking over this responsibility? Although Sahlins says nearly nothing about ritual, it seemed obvious that the big-man, although not yet a king, was already a kind of high priest, furnishing and presiding over the sacrifices to the gods that accompany the sharing of the ritual feast, responsibility for which had previously rotated among the various clans.

I have since found no reason to reject this model of what Rousseau called the “origin of inequality.” But in order for GA to deal with the phenomenon of inequality in its own terms it must situate it, via what we call “originary analysis,” in the originary event itself. Even if the event created a symmetrical community, there must be an asymmetrical moment in the scene from which future asymmetries would eventually spring. It was Adam Katz’s introduction a few years ago of the Peircean notion of firstness into the description of the originary event that revealed its potential for inequality. If originary symmetry were truly the ultimate human condition, it could never have been disturbed. One thing of which the originary hypothesis reminds us is that humanity’s cultural or “spiritual” achievement begins and remains in the service of our material existence.

Adam observed that the emission of the sign should not be imagined as instantaneously unanimous; someone would be first to understand the aborted gesture of appropriation not merely as an instinctive act of recoil but as a sign that could be communicated to his fellows. In the originary event, the firstness of the first users of the sign was successfully propagated and symmetry was established—we may imagine earlier moments when language failed to emerge because the sign was not properly interpreted, with perhaps unfortunate consequences for its unsuccessful users. But the originary manifestation of firstness reminds us that human culture does not create a “collective consciousness,” that each individual adheres to it on his own terms, and that although our potential for mimetic rivalry is deferred in the originary scene, it cannot be permanently squelched.

I would propose that in our desire to understand the cultural products of hierarchical society in originary terms, we may have not paid the transition from symmetry to hierarchy sufficient theoretical respect. In particular, we should not let our duty to defend “the normal” from the excesses of postmodern victimary thinking prevent us from giving the anthropological basis for such thinking its proper weight. Attention to the historical manifestations of firstness should allow us to do this fully in the spirit of GA.

We may say, then, that since the advent of hierarchical society, the human has been defined by two tensions productive of pragmatic paradox, configurations that permit of no stable position. The primary tension, the one that defines us as human and that GA has explored at length, is that between the worldly and the transcendent, the mortal being and the immortal sign. When we say that we know we are going to die, this seems at first (from the perspective of “common sense”) to be a straightforward statement about the world. But the very possibility of making this or any other statement requires that we use words that are not themselves subject to mortality. We can only think our mortality in “immortal” terms. The paradox of a mortal possessing “immortal” thoughts gives rise to the idea of a soul that survives our bodies. This same paradox applies to the perishable being that occupies the center of the originary scene. The significance it bears is not itself mortal. Thus God may be defined (to quote a recent Chronicle) as the meaning of the originary sign, concerning which no distinction between referent and signified is possible. This is the originary, anthropological sense of the “ontological proof,” customarily expressed in terms of God’s “perfection.” To include existence as a predicate within God’s perfection—an inclusion rejected by Kant, the greatest of metaphysicians—is merely a roundabout way of acknowledging that the originary sign, while designating—pointing at—a real object, can only have meant, in order for it to subsist as a sign, the subsistent sacred being of which that object was merely a temporary embodiment. (Here again, I think we need to reflect more on the inscription that preserves the trace of this subsistence.)

In contrast to the alpha animal whose dominance is overthrown in the originary event, the first to use the sign gains no material advantage from his behavior. Since he inaugurates a mode of communication in which all can participate, his asymmetric act facilitates the establishment of symmetry. This provides a paradigm applicable to all examples of firstness: that of deferred reciprocity. Marcel Mauss’ model of gift exchange is an extension of this kind of delayed symmetry. Mauss discovered that the chief mode of exchange in tribal societies is not through transactions in the modern sense, but through “gifts” that generate temporary asymmetries that their recipients are required to pass on to other members of the group. The complexity of the structures that gift exchange makes possible is perhaps best illustrated by the “cross-cousin” marriage patterns described by Lévi-Strauss in his Structures élémentaires de la parenté. It is a source of wonderment to reflect that Mauss’ model remains applicable to our social life to this day; we still exchange birthday and Christmas gifts, or dinner invitations, in a recognizably Maussian fashion. But we no longer conduct our economy in this manner.

The Maussian system and its extensions constantly generate asymmetries, but these asymmetries are constantly resolved. The advent of hierarchical society applies the category of firstness in a qualitatively more radical manner. This gives rise to a second, subordinate but very real tension, which can be described most simply as the tension between ethics and morality. The divergence of a given ethical system from the moral model of reciprocity is paradoxical: the system’s sacred laws derive their authority from their transcendent status with respect to the individual members of the society (in the Durkheimean sense that the sacred expresses the interests of the society as a whole in contrast with those of its individual members), but the very language in which these laws are formulated embodies the originary symmetry without which no human society could exist. Thus both the master and the slave understand and implicitly mutually communicate their knowledge of the mastery of the one and the slavery of the other. Which is to say that slavery is by nature the deferral of freedom, as has been borne out by history in all but the most backward parts of the world.

Postwar, postmodern thought is characterized by an exclusive focus on this secondary paradox. The Holocaust paradigm of Nazi and Jew is a reductio ad absurdum of hierarchical society that delegitimizes any unequal relationship based on ascriptive or essentially unchangeable categories. I emphasize these categories because the entire weight of victimary pressure and the “White Guilt” it arouses in non-victims is based on group membership. The only kind of victimage that is relevant politically and ideologically requires that the victim define him or herself as a member of a group. Victimage is always, so to speak, a hate crime.

The first stage of postwar victimary thinking dealt with the ethical paradox in a manner that seemed wholly beneficial, as an Enlightenment exercise in demystification. Granting equal rights to Blacks in the American south or abolishing colonial regimes reaffirmed with broader scope that “all men are created equal.” The moral model of human reciprocity is blatantly violated when one group but not another can be served by a school or a luncheonette. But it soon became apparent that de facto as well as de jure group inequalities could be considered morally unjustified, regardless of the professed or real intentions of the actors. We are still debating the proper means to deal with such inequalities.

It would be foolish indeed to consider victimary thinking simply as a theory that GA can supersede or correct. But if we recognize its anthropological basis in what I have been calling the ethical paradox, we can not only better understand it but point out where it risks losing touch with the anthropological foundation on which its very moral sentiment is grounded.

Because victimary thinking understands human conflict as the result of the division of society into privileged and disadvantaged subgroups, it tends to see the cessation of this form of conflict as the end of human conflict in general. The anthropology implicit in this vision can be traced back to Rousseau, who associated social organization with the originary inequality of private property (“ceci est à moi”), which loosely reflects the Neolithic invention of agriculture. We all know that Rousseau considered la société commencée that he found in accounts of American Indian societies to be happier and more “noble” than European society as he knew it. What is less remarked upon is that Rousseau considered tribal, equalitarian society as devoid of genuine social organization. There was no need of ritual to promote “solidarity” or sacred language to express the values of the group over those of individuals. Indeed, there was no need for an originary event to generate language in the first place. Mimetic conflict over a given object would be prevented by the assurance of acquiring a similar object through withdrawal, so there would be no aborted gesture of appropriation, no sign, and no transcendence. The strange glissement between the state of nature and “begun” society in the Second Discourse reflects the paradoxical status of a sinless originary state fated by its own success (and the resulting increase in population density) to evolve into a sinful one.

Thus, even before the reconceptualization of the social order in terms of class conflict that emerges in the French Revolution and attains its highest expression in Marxism, Rousseau limits the necessary existence of human conflict to hierarchical society, as opposed to hunter-gatherer societies presented as only beginning to emerge from the state of nature.

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But the roots of what we now call victimary thinking stretch back well beyond Rousseau, to the very beginnings of Western civilization. The underlying human ontology that Rousseau was first to put into recognizably anthropological terms is already present in the biblical association of the fall of man with Adam’s obligation to till the soil. Indeed, the interaction that determines the Fall is interpreted by God in much the same way as I have described the emergence of the big-man, as usurping the sacred center. God’s central grievance against Adam is that having eaten of the tree of knowledge, he threatens to become a god himself, usurping the central role whose permanence belongs to God (or the gods) alone. “And God said, ‘Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken’” (Genesis 3,22-23).

The association of the Fall of Man with the advent of agriculture extends victimary thinking in its earliest form back to the religious origin of Western Civilization. Biblical religion, culminating in the insistence in both the Jewish and Christian traditions on the primacy of morality over ethics, cannot be understood independently of the ethical paradox of hierarchical society.

I remarked some years ago that perhaps the most fundamental parallel between the Greek and Hebrew components of Western culture is that between Platonic metaphysics, which reduces language to the proposition or declarative sentence, giving concepts an independent existence in a world of Ideas independent of their worldly manifestations, and the founding monotheistic revelation to Moses on Mount Horeb in Exodus 3, where God gives his name as a declarative sentence, “I am what/that I am.” Let me point out another parallel situated on a more primitive level in both traditions. Reading the Fall as an expression of the secondary ethical paradox is the Hebrew side of this parallel. The Greek side can be found in various writings of the pre-Socratics, some of which I have examined in Chronicles 372, 373, and 374. Heraclitus’ line “war/conflict” (to polemos) is the father and king of all things; some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free (53)” belongs to it. But the most intriguing example is no doubt the famous single sentence of Anaximander quoted by Simplicius, the object of a well-known essay by Heidegger:

And the place of the genesis of existing things is the same into which their destruction proceeds “by necessity, for they pay each other penalty/justice (diken) and retribution/fine (tisin) for their injustice (adikias) according to the measure of Time,” as [Anaximander] describes it in these rather poetical terms.In the penalty paid by each thing for its “injustice” we have the far-off ancestor of White Guilt. This insistence on what in market terms would be a transaction-based rather than a gift-based economy reflects a sense that being itself is asymmetrical, an intuition foreign to those societies in which the danger inherent in asymmetry is deferred by passing the gift on to the next link of the chain. There are no masters and slaves as in Heraclitus, but more profoundly, the mere fact of existence is seen as a usurpation, a debt that must be repaid.

Just as the Mosaic revelation of God’s nature is both ontologically prior and chronologically posterior to the story of the Fall, so Plato’s metaphysical ethics offers a perspective from which the ethical paradox raised by the pre-Socratics can be deferred. The biblical world is ruled by a God with neither a name nor an image that can be called on to bend his laws; the Platonic world is governed by an Idea of the Good that transcends the selfish interest of any individual. Understanding both metaphysics and monotheism as two complementary ways of dealing with the ethical paradox at the origins of the Western tradition allows us better to see postwar victimary thought as a radical product of this tradition, traumatized by the Holocaust into forgetting the fundamental hierarchy that precedes all others, that between the human and the transcendental.

Until the postmodern era, Western culture had always maintained the subordination of the ethical paradox to the fundamental paradox of the human. Tragedy, and the literary modes that derive from it, are structured by this subordination. We should reflect on Aristotle’s requirement that the tragic protagonist be “better than in real life,” which must be understood in terms of status as well as character. Girard is justified in interpreting tragedy as a form of “scapegoating” in which the protagonist is obliged to take on himself the blame for the mimetic conflicts that plague his city—as Oedipus himself, ironically enough, does explicitly both at the beginning and the end of Sophocles’ play. But I think we can better situate the Girardian phenomenon of “scapegoating” or “emissary murder” in our anthropology if we take it not as the model of the origin of the human, but, like Adam’s sin, as a model of the emergence of hierarchy, of the big-man who usurps the divine center and incurs the resentment of his fellows.

The “end of tragedy,” which so troubled the early romantics, corresponds to the beginning of the denial of the transcendent status of the primary human paradox over the second. When the human comes to be defined exclusively in terms of the oppression of one group by another, the problematizing of esthetic resolution is a symptom of this critical, albeit historically productive, anthropological misunderstanding. But it is the very excess of victimary thinking in the postmodern era that has provided the impetus for the return to the primacy of the transcendent, understood this time from a minimally anthropological perspective. In a word, victimary thinking was a necessary precursor of Girard’s mimetic theory, and subsequently of GA.

This general observation about postmodernity, needless to say, is not a substitute for either ethical judgment or anthropological analysis. I make it here in the hope that it may help clarify the former and encourage the latter.

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In a posthumously published essay, “The unknown Xenophanes: an attempt to establish his greatness” (in The World of Parmenides, London: Routledge, 1998), Karl Popper presents Xenophanes as no less than the “founder of the Greek Enlightenment” (33). With some justification, Popper attributes to Xenophanes the modest epistemology of the Popperian scientist, who never claims more than conjectural knowledge, and whose theories can be proved false but never true. Nor can we deny that this long-lived son of Colophon says things about sacred beings we will not hear again until the time of Voltaire—although the conjunction of Xenophanes’ epistemological modesty and his transcendental theology makes him an Enlightenment figure in the mold not of Voltaire but of Kant.

Xenophanes is best remembered today for two fragments: “Ethiopians say that their gods have snub noses and black skin, Thracians [today’s Slavs] that theirs have blue eyes and blonde hair” (Fragment 16; the text and the sometimes-modified translations are taken from Xenophanes of Colophon by J. H. Lesher, U of Toronto P, 1992); and “if horses or oxen or lions had hands . . . horses would draw the figures of the gods as similar to horses, and oxen as similar to oxen, and they would make the bodies of the kind that each of them has” (15).

Popper is particularly impressed with the evidence in Xenophanes of a near-Kantian critical distinction between ultimate truths and our certitude about them. Fragment 34, of which Popper says that “to me there is nothing in the whole literature of philosophy that is so critical, so self-critical, so correct, and so true” (46), is of particular significance:

And of course the certain truth no one has known
Nor will know, about the gods and what I say about (all) things,
For even if, at best, one happened to speak [the truth of] what has occurred,
Still he himself would not know it; but opinion/seeming is allotted to all.

This is a strikingly modern epistemological intuition: one might perchance speak the truth, but one cannot know its truth. Parmenides’ solution, as we have seen, was to limit the domain of true statements to the what-is, or in modern terms, to conceptual logic. As noted in Chronicle 372, like all pre-Socratic epistemologies, that of Parmenides lacks a clear distinction between meaning and reference. We should not assume that Xenophanes, Parmenides’ predecessor (some say, his teacher) has made this distinction; denying that we can know what Kant would call “things in themselves” does not lead Xenophanes to define a purely conceptual domain in which statements may be “analytically” true independently of “what has occurred” in the real world. The positive element in this conflation is that, in contrast with metaphysical philosophy to come, Xenophanes’s epistemological concern is centered on the sacred, which he understands to be the basis for all worldly knowledge. Language can model the world only because it first pointed to the gods.

Whether or not Xenophanes had a direct influence on Parmenides, the filiation between the two is plausible; rather than revealing, like Heraclitus, “invisible” processes behind apparently stable realities, Xenophanes accepts the impossibility for a human to have certain knowledge of a world ruled by a transcendental power. For Xenophanes, the limits of human knowledge are not simply the limitations of perception; they reflect the intuition that human language is separated from its originary source, that worldly experience cannot fully justify it. This is the negative moment of the metaphysical understanding of language as providing models of reality. Xenophanes’ rejection of the black or blond god corresponds in the visible realm to the Hebrew elimination of God’s vocative name; if the transcendental Being cannot be figured, it cannot be called upon either. But if this ostensive guarantee is missing, then language can seek its guarantee of validity only in itself, in the what-is of Parmenides’ Way of Truth. The very notion of a proposition as embodying “truth” as opposed to “opinion” can only be raised once its ostensive guarantee is no longer available.

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Among the classical scholars of the pre-Socratics, Gregory Vlastos was perhaps the most sharply conscious of their religious (and not merely philosophical) significance. In “Theology and Philosophy in Early Greek Thought” (in Studies in Presocratic Philosophy I, London: Routledge, 1970, originally in Philosophical Quarterly 2, 1952), critiquing Werner Jaeger’s Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, which understates the distinction between the theologoi such as Hesiod and the pre-Socratic philosophers, Vlastos raises the pertinent issue of the respective relationship of both groups to “cult” or ritual practices: the Pythagoreans engaged in such practices, but none can be reasonably associated with the speculations of Heraclitus or Anaximander, or even Xenophanes. Vlastos pertinently distinguishes the pre-Socratics’ religious doctrines, for which the divinity embodies as laws the regularities that govern the universe and that the philosopher sees as his task to discover, from theogonies based on ritual whose capricious gods reveal themselves precisely by their ability to violate natural regularities, which are attributed to necessity (ananke) but not to the gods to whom one sacrifices. The key passage is the following:

[T]he unique achievement of the Presocratics as religious thinkers . . . lies in the fact that they . . . dared transpose the name and function of divinity into a realm conceived as a rigorously natural order, and therefore, completely purged of miracle and magic. . . . The prophets of Israel and Judah fought a valiant rear-guard action against wizards, necromancers, and soothsayers. But they lacked the conceptual equipment to see that magic was not only a religious impropriety but a sheer impossibility; and they never cleared their minds of the notion of miracle which is the intellectual foundation of magic. . . . To present the deity as wholly immanent in the order of nature and therefore absolutely law-abiding was the peculiar and distinctive religious contribution of the Presocratics, and it should be put in the forefront of any account of their religious thought. They took a word which in common speech was the hallmark of the irrational, unnatural, and unaccountable and made it the name of a power which manifests itself in the operation, not the disturbance, of intelligible law. The transposition opened new religious possibilities. Had these been realized, Greek religion would have been freed of those evils which Lucretius in retrospect so justly imputes to it. (199-20)

This thinking expresses a profound anthropological intuition, but developed along metaphysical lines. What is missing is the link between ethical and cosmic totality. As we have seen, the application a la Anaximander of legal terminology to divine transcendence is above all a reaction to the ethical disequilibrium of the hierarchical society that had grown up under the protection of the old ritual culture. The notion of a divine law governing the cosmos as opposed to a capricious divinity who can be influenced by ritual or magic reflects the same development we see in the Mosaic revelation of the “nameless” god. If there is a difference in the social basis of these two parallel revelations, it lies in the fact that the Greek city-states experienced hierarchical inequality as an internal problem, whereas the Hebrews were faced in addition with problems of national submission, not to say, survival. To experience one’s “own” god as the One God is a deeper source of revelation when one loses a battle than when one wins. Thus the persistence of “miracles” in the thinking of the Hebrew prophets reflects the continuity of genuine religious activity within the framework of the Mosaic revelation, a phenomenon that Vlastos is not concerned to distinguish from the archaic ritual cults he describes in Greece. The pre-Socratic deity who is absolutely and therefore necessarily “law-abiding” is not a god but a metaphysical construction. Hebrew religion remembers what the pre-Socratics were in the process of forgetting: that a wholly immanent divinity, or in more neutral terms, a wholly immanent anthropology, is incapable of providing the ethical basis for a functioning social order. The genius of philosophical speculation is that it occurs in the margin of the central religious institutions of its society; in recent times, the only serious attempts to replace religion by philosophy have ended in disaster.

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Xenophanes’s long, much-traveled life exemplified the Greeks’ experience of cultural plurality that underwrote their liberation from the “compactness” of ritual culture. Xenophanes’ disagreement with mortals who “suppose that gods are born, wear clothes, have a voice and a body” (14) makes clear that he considers the attribution of specific traits to the divinity as not merely empirically groundless but a category error. Xenophanes’s wholly transcendent divinity, lacking in differential qualities, is perforce unique. Thus he speaks of one god who is “greatest among gods and men, not at all like mortals in body or in thought (23).” God sees, thinks, and hears “the whole” (24); he abides always in the same place (26); he “shakes” (kradainei) all things by the [mere] thought of his heart/lungs/mind (freni) (25). Xenophanes does not always insist on the uniqueness of his god. But when he says, “not from the beginning did gods intimate all things to mortals, but as they search in time they discover better” (18), the plural is inconsequential; what is important is the nearly explicit opposition between transcendental truth and human knowledge that can only improve its approximations to it.

Xenophanes’ reference to the gods of the Ethiopians and the Thracians is not satirical; it might almost be called ethnographic. Taken as a reductio ad absurdum, it leads to a purely transcendental conception of the sacred. But it can also be read as a statement of the necessary limits of the human religious imagination, in the sense that even when we recognize that the divinity cannot “look like us,” we have no better way of conceiving him (or her). Taking this point to its ultimate conclusion, we would interpret the constraint of the human imagination not as a sign of limitation but as a guarantee of truth; this would lead us to the Christian notion of a human “person” of God. That Christianity obliges us to encounter once more, and with a vengeance, the plain fact that a historical incarnation of God cannot “look like everyone” reminds us on a higher level of the historical particularity of both human origin and Hebrew monotheism.

Xenophanes’ theological conceptions may be said to parallel those of monotheism, but in their abstraction they cannot duplicate monotheism’s world-historical impact. Vlastos justly notes the lack of “conceptual equipment” that prevented the “prophets of Israel and Judah” from eliminating all vestiges of magic and miracles from their religious vision. But nothing in the pre-Socratics nor in Greek philosophy as a whole embodies the new conception of religion with the profundity and force of the biblical Ehyeh asher ehyeh. The ultra-Parmenidean truth of the divine self-contained being who names himself with a proposition could be revealed only through the “miracle” of a conversation between God and man.

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Les présocratiques dans le désordre.

One point most strongly made in Scott Austin’s Parmenides (mentioned in the preceding Chronicle) is his subject’s insistence on controlling predication. Austin points out that after telling us that we can only know what-is and not what-is-not, Parmenides proceeds to qualify what-is with a series of negatives, but never by negating the copula with ouk estin (is not). Instead, he uses privative terms such as akineton, anarchon, apauston: immovable, without beginning, without end. If metaphysics be defined by its assertion of the primacy and autonomy of the proposition or declarative sentence, Parmenides may be called the first metaphysician. That he nevertheless does not make the distinction, central to Aristotelian formal logic and implicit in Plato’s Ideas, between the conceptual content of a sign (Saussure’s signifié) and its potentially worldly referent reflects his pioneering status as the first philosopher to establish rules for a mode of discourse that must demonstrate its own truth (Kant’s “a priori”). Parmenides acclimates the sacred in philosophical discourse by transforming its absolute, ostensive nature into a quality, the absolute quality of being-what-is that justifies the use of the copula to designate its predicates/attributes. The what-is embodies the transcendence that is the ground of predication, although, given Parmenides’ conflation of being-as-ground and being-as-referent, the only conceivable predicates are privative. For before we can distinguish between the being (be-ing) of something that is, and the predicative relation expressed by the copula in “all men are mortal,” we must establish that what we make true predications about is; we must be sure that the originary ground of being that could only be pointed to has carried over into the realm of the proposition. Austin explains convincingly why Parmenides avoids negating the copula from within his own conception of being, but it is also useful to note that the privative nature of predicates such as immortal, unchanging, unborn, undying, establishes the act of predication itself as taking place in an “absolute” sign-world beyond mortality: what one says of something is said of it forever.

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By rights before taking up Parmenides I should have dealt with Heraclitus, the other leading pre-Socratic, who lived about a generation earlier (born around 540 BC, against 515 or so for Parmenides), and to begin with, Anaximander (born about 610 BC), who can be called the first real philosopher, since his mentor, Thales, the first of the Ionian physikoi, does not seem to have applied his speculations to human affairs. But it is not without value, after having sketched the origin of metaphysics in the passage from Parmenides through Socrates to Plato (and on to Aristotle, who completes the establishment by formalizing it in logic), to consider what is added to philosophy by these more “primitive” thinkers, in whose writing the fundamentally ethical purpose of the new thinking is made clear for the first time.

Heraclitus shares with the other pre-Socratics their distrust for worldly mentation. “What even the most respected man knows and defends are imaginings/opinions” (Diels 28A). The last word, dokeonta, is a cognate of doxa, “opinion,” which gives its name to the inferior Parmenidean “way.” Yet Heraclitus suggests that the paucity of the wise is due not to a cognitive but a moral failing. To his Delphic statement that he went “in search of himself” (101), he adds that “it is for all men to know themselves and be of good sense (sophronein)” (116).

Heraclitus is the first thinker to use the term logos in a restrictive sense to refer to a specifically philosophical mode of language. When he says that each human soul has a logos that augments itself (115), this logos, if we interpret it as the voice of truth that grows in each soul, links the originary language of the sacred to that of philosophy; it is the far-off ancestor of Kant’s Vernunft via the logos of the fourth Gospel. The logos that Heraclitus opposes to what Parmenides will call Opinion (doxa) refers ambivalently to his own discourse and to discourse in general, corresponding to the order of things. The longest fragment (1), which begins “although this logos is [true] forever men fail to comprehend it”—”forever” can be taken either with what precedes or what follows—appears to refer explicitly to his own text, sometimes considered the first prose book, to which it may have been an introduction. But the superiority of Heraclitus’ logos comes not from any Parmenidean restriction on its subject matter, but from the “commonness” that makes it inaccessible to ordinary mortals: “although the logos is [shared in] common, most live as though they possessed their understanding in private (idian) (2).” This Durkheimian opposition between community and individual interests is reiterated in “of all those whose discourses (logous) I have heard, none has reached the point of knowing that wisdom/what is wise is set apart from all [things or men] (108),” and, most succinctly, in “thinking (phroneein) is common to all” (113).

Like many other pre-Socratics, Heraclitus reduces the universe to a single “element,” that of fire: “All things are in exchange/requital (antamoibe) for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods” (90). But as opposed both to a material constituent such as Thales’ water or Anaximenes’ air and to the abstraction of Anaximander’s apeiron (unlimited), fire is a process, a release of energy. Indeed, Heraclitus could be said to anticipate Einstein’s discovery that the universe is best understood as composed of energy rather than matter. But the comparison with gold and goods makes clear that the primary source of Heraclitus’ intuition of dynamic unity is the human institution of the market, which is the new element that permits him to conceive even the most destructive phenomena as generative of new natural and human order. This new form of exchange supersedes that of ritual sacrifice, whose efficacy Heraclitus denies: “They are purified in vain with blood, those polluted with blood” (5).

In Heraclitus’ integrated view of the cosmos, any apparent stability results from the deferred violence of an equilibrium between conflicting forces. This principle is neither simple anthropomorphism nor an example of “physical” speculation; the emphasis of the fragments makes clear that Heraclitus’ principal concern is ethical. The difference between the human and natural orders is revealed by his dictum that human violence (hubris) must be quenched in preference to a fire (43); we may interpret this as a warning that human violence risks destroying the human itself, as opposed to the eternity of natural destruction and creation. This does not contradict Heraclitus’ better known assertion that war is the “father and lord of all [things/persons]” (53), where externally directed human violence provides a model for nature.

Heraclitus’ conception of order is that of an equilibrium under tension, a complex ontology that he declares beyond ordinary understanding; presumably because “private” thinking can grasp only one vector of force at a time, “[men] do not understand how a thing agrees in differing with itself; it is a harmonization turning back on itself, like the bow or the lyre (51).” This tension, which Parmenides would expel from his sphere of the what-is, expresses the originary ethical basis of the figure of totality as deferred conflict. We may understand in similar fashion Heraclitus’ criticism of Homer’s prayer that “conflict might vanish from among gods and men: for there would be no harmony without high and low notes, nor animals without male or female” (A22). Heraclitus’s most famous line, that one never steps twice into the same river (91), is the iconic statement of this dynamic conception of order. The river as a symbol of Being is the opposite of the Parmenidean sphere; it is a dynamic system whose stability derives from an equilibrium of forces, like that of the bow or the lyre, but which adds the temporal element of flow.

As befits his conception of being as constituted by conflicting forces rather than emerging from a transcendent source, Heraclitus seems to have believed in a cyclical “eternal return” of destruction and rebirth that effaces any consideration of originary symmetry. One source tells of a 10,800-year Great Year in which the world alternates between flame and water (A13). Crucially, like Heraclitus’ own society, the society that emerges from violence is specifically hierarchical: “war/conflict”(polemos) . . . makes some slaves, others free (53).” Violence produces a differential order rather than the originary symmetrical configuration of the human periphery around the sacred center, a configuration that will return in abstract form in the eternal, symmetrical equilibrium of Parmenides.

The additional complexity introduced by hierarchical society complicates the fundamental ontology of transcendence, the understanding of which is necessary to permit the birth of philosophy proper. Heraclitus’s philosophy is both archaic and modern in its recognition of the dynamic, conflictive nature of both natural and human order. Fascinating to our age “in the margins of philosophy,” his cyclical version of originary eventfulness is incompatible with the Parmenidean rigor that permitted the emergence of metaphysics. Until a definitive opposition has been established between the transcendent and the worldly, the world of signs and the world of things, thought cannot begin to reflect on itself as an autonomous process. The royal road of philosophy leads from Parmenides through Socrates to Plato, whose highly respectful Parmenides contrasts with his fanciful representation of Heraclitus’ thought in the person of his eccentric disciple, Cratylus.

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Going back another two generations before Heraclitus, we encounter “the first sentence of philosophy,” the Anaximanderspruch, the subject of a well-known essay by Heidegger.

And the place of the genesis of existing things is the same into which their destruction proceeds “by necessity, for they pay each other penalty/justice (diken) and retribution/fine (tisin) for their injustice (adikias) according to the measure of Time,” as [Anaximander] describes it in these rather poetical terms. (Simplicius)

Simplicius’ comment on the style of the passage allows us to consider it as an actual quotation, the only one we have for this early Milesian. The “injustice” of things, like Heraclitus’ figure of fire as genesis, conveys a vision of an asymmetrical social order in conflict with the symmetry of the underlying moral order, whence the binary language of injustice (adikia) and penalty/justice (dike); at the same time, the term fine (tisis)  suggests monetary compensation. This complication of the originary sacred-profane distinction perturbs the symmetry of Durkheimian “primitive classification.” Mauss’ system of gift-exchange, which reflects this originary symmetry, understands its endless series of disequilibria as generating obligations whose non-fulfillment carries a potential curse, but not as embodying injustice and penalty. Anaximander’s is a philosophical model of the original sin of hierarchical society, whose wage is the mortality of the things of this world. The apeiron or “unlimited” from which all things are born and into which they return is a figure of symmetrical emptiness, which alone preserves the originary equilibrium between center and periphery.

Anaximander’s original insight into the conflictive nature of human order may well have given birth to philosophy, but like that of Heraclitus, it must be put aside for the child to prosper. Parmenides’ compact sphere of being knows nothing of the language of injustice; it is infinitely substantial and symmetrical, leaving behind the incertitude of the profane world and transmuting the absolute truth of the sacred into that of conceptual logic. As Parmenides no doubt already intuited, and as Plato and the future course of philosophy would bear out, this abandonment of the originary symmetry of the “moral model” was not a turning away from ethical reflection but on the contrary, its only conceivable path of development.

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In the preceding Chronicle, I “defined” philosophy as an operation motivated by the conviction that all human conflict can be expressed and settled in language. The impetus for this development was given by the need to mediate the tension between individual and communal ethics, a role no longer effectively performed by sacred ritual in trading societies whose hierarchical organization lacked a stable ritual center. For the first philosophers, this meant little more than the sense that the world, indifferently human and natural, was a terrain open to the power of the human mind, newly liberated from the constraints of ritual dogma. But as the new thinking explored its possibilities and encountered its limitations, it evolved inexorably toward metaphysics, which cuts language off from its ostensive origin so that it can furnish “context-free” models of reality.

Anaximander’s cosmic figure of justice and retribution reflects the scandal of ethical asymmetry. Heraclitus’ figure/concept of fire reestablishes a central source of creation and destruction. His ontology generates being from suspended conflict in the harmony (armonian) of the lyre and the bow, incorporating punishment and even disease: “It is not favorable for men to get whatever they want; disease makes health sweet and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest” (110-111); “if it were not for [crime and punishment], they would not have known the name of justice” (105). Thus where Anaximander explained the hierarchical world in neo-Maussian terms as a guilt-laden gift exchange, Heraclitus’ universe obeys a transcendental ethic beyond our individual sense of justice: “For the god, all things are beautiful and good and just, but men have taken some this as unjust, others as just (102).” Heraclitus puts “unjust” first, emphasizing our originary resentment, but makes no ontological claim within his own logos as to the beauty and goodness of things; he merely observes that the values of the sacred orderer of the cosmos transcend those of men.

Yet when he turns to the specifically human order, Heraclitus insists on the rule of law (nomos); a city should fight for its law as for its walls (44).” These laws participate, in a way not specified, in the transcendent order; they are “nourished” (trefontai) “by the one, divine law” (114). Heraclitus cannot define more specifically the mediation expressed by “nourishment” any more than he can define what distinguishes the “best” who is worth ten thousand others (84B) or the “few” good men (104). Because he cannot define the place of his own logos with respect to transcendence, Heraclitus belongs to wisdom literature as much as to philosophy. What makes him nevertheless the most important thinker before Parmenides is his originary intuition that the stability of “being,” that of human institutions as well as of cosmic structures, is in reality the tension of forces in equilibrium—of deferred conflict. This allows him the first clear insight into the Durkheimian problem of distinguishing and mediating between communal and individual values that is at the heart of philosophy.

But Heraclitus’ conflictive characterization of being applies as well to his own logos. Like the ever-self-differing river, his propositions embody the tension between an apparently stable subject and a predicate that reveals its inherent instability. Metaphysics will have to banish this kind of poetry before it can invent a poetry of its own.

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If we define philosophy, as in the previous Chronicle, as the attempt to persuade us, despite a lack of apparent evidence, that our own good, or highest interest, coincides with that of the community, and metaphysics as a way of thinking that rejects the simpler syntagmatic forms postulated by the originary hypothesis and equates language with the declarative sentence, then the conjunction of the two phenomena suggests an implicit equivalence. But conjunction is not identity; the emergence of what we can already call philosophy, whose underlying ethical aim is not immediately foregrounded, precedes by two centuries that of metaphysics, by definition aware (albeit not in linguistic terms) of its hypostasis of the sign-world.

For words to be understood as shared ideas rather than ritual gestures, language must be cut off from the ostensive activities of ritual. The reciprocal exchange of signs around the originary central object is not the model for philosophical discourse. In terms of what we may call ostensivity, the degree to which a sign points to the presence that in turn justifies its emission, the idea-of-the-good is at the opposite end of the linguistic spectrum from the originary name-of-God. The latter, to the extent that it retains its original force, needs only to be invoked to suspend private appropriative activity in favor of ritual sacrifice. In contrast, the concept of the Good implies, without being able to “point to” any of them, the existence of possible actions and attitudes consonant with the maintenance of the ontologically necessary but not clearly visible harmony of the individual and the polis. The task of philosophy is to demonstrate that the very existence of the concept is a guarantee that language can be found in which to discuss its application to any given life-situation. What is metaphysical about philosophical language is not simply that it is formulated in declarative sentences, but that it embodies the faith that such sentences can always be produced in order to fine-tune the idea of the “good” in a given context to whatever specificity is necessary, via a series of what, in a context less independent of ethical interaction than appears at first glance, Peirce called interpretants. To put it more provocatively, in contrast with the praxis of the pre-declarative linguistic structures that point to ritual action, philosophy claims that human conflict can always be expressed in language and can always be resolved in language.

The reduction of language to the declarative sentence does not require denial of the sacred as the source of language, but it reduces the sacred to at best an external guarantee of what must be shown to be inherent in language itself. Thus the goddess in Parmenides’ poem reveals to the philosopher the transcendental basis of thought, which ordinary mortals, attached to their worldly pursuits, cannot grasp. In Plato’s ideal republic, knowledge does not emanate from a scene defined by the exchange of representations around a sacred center; on the contrary, in the anti-scene of the cave, we are shown the mechanism that makes scenes of sacred revelation a sham.

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The first philosophers appear coincidentally with the emergence of a trading culture, if not a market in the modern sense, in Ionian city-states in the margins of the Egyptian, Persian, and Mesopotamian empires shortly after 600 BC. These polities had become, no doubt for the first time in world history, sufficiently liberated militarily, economically, and ritually from imperial compactness to produce a shared intuition of themselves as social and not simply ritual communities.

The Presocratics’ preference for cosmogony over the concerns of everyday reality should not blind us to their ultimate ethical focus. Rather than seeing these thinkers as precursors of modern scientists, we should seek the unity of their inspiration in the desire to think the world—in the first place, the human world. Their speculations embody a new awareness of the distinction within one’s own mind between what Bacon would call the “idols of the tribe” and the transcendent truths that undergird the human enterprise. These truths are no longer objects of sacred revelation; they must be discovered through thought, yet knowledge of their existence is given a priori. Philosophy arises in response to the sense that ritual can no longer mediate satisfactorily between the everyday thinking of the individual member of society and the transcendent values or Ideas of the community. It is a new form of reflective thought constrained by what Kant would call the “categorical imperative” that it be universal cognitively in order to be universal ethically. The use of propositions to describe the thinkable world in universal terms independently of any revealed source relies on a sharing of representations that is implicit in the representation-world itself rather than imposed by a ritual context. The difficulty of the philosophical enterprise, which must be constantly renewed, stems from the fact that there is no self-evident path from the community’s preexisting sacred culture to the logical demonstration of the compatibility between individual and social values.

As the first thinkers to emerge from the ritual world, the Presocratics have a common disdain for the thinking of the worldly individuals whose activities in the marketplace make them narrow defenders of their own interests; in contrast with the near-contemporary biblical prophets, their hostility to the doxa is couched in cognitive rather than moral terms. The Presocratics maintain an aura of sacrality around the transcendental nature of language rather than seeing it, as would Socrates in democratic Athens, as the guarantee of the wisdom to be gained from the exchanges of the agora.

Nowhere is this aura more explicit than in the poem of Parmenides, arguably the masterpiece of presocratic philosophy, a work that exercised a profound influence on Plato, and perhaps on his master Socrates as well. Not that Parmenides is interested, like the latter, in learning from his fellow citizens. Implicit in his philosophy is that, as a prerequisite of any ethical reconciliation between the individual and the community, we must learn to think transcendentally, distinguishing being from not-being and the Way of Truth from that of Opinion, that is, thought whose object is of the same nature as its transcendental source from thinking that, naively taking the power of representation as given, uses it as an instrument for practical ends. Parmenides expresses in its purest form the presocratic understanding of philosophy as a mode of thinking, distinct from practical thought, that has access to the transcendent source of language, the embodiment of the human community as more than the sum of its members. Alone of the Presocratics, he is explicitly aware that the transcendental nature of thought entails that it applies to ideas, not things. His insistence on a total separation between truth as the thought of Being and the mere opinions of mortals poses the basis for all future philosophizing. The Way of Truth is a way of language that traverses an autonomous conceptual universe of “what-is.” Parmenides’ dictum, “thinking and being are the same” makes the being of what is thought itself transcendental, rejecting the real world as an object-universe to which true thinking might be applied. The notion of model essential to natural science is foreign to Parmenidean thought. His rigor reveals retrospectively that his more cosmologically-oriented predecessors too lacked this notion, since, unlike him, they fail to distinguish rigorously the realm of signs from that of things.

In Parmenides’ poem, the philosopher receives the possibility to think the what-is as a gift from the transcendental universe figured by the goddess; his voyage in the sacred chariot prefigures that of Dante. In ethical terms, the opposition between the unchanging truth of what-is and the confused thoughts of the mortal world opposes the transcendentality of the sacred-communal to the confused experience of the individual. Socrates will make this distinction accessible to the reader-interlocutor as the goal of dialogue, and in modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, it will become an existential model for the reader to reproduce in his own experience.

The goddess’ long list of the privative aspects of “what-is” is a catalogue of the qualities, also essentially privative, that we associate with the transcendent, although our intuitions concerning finitude and infinity have changed. Parmenides’ idea that Being simply is, that it cannot be spoken of in terms of change or growth, birth or death, is a direct characterization of the world of signs as opposed to the material world subject to the ravages of time. In each case, what is denied of Being is what we would deny of the sign: “it never was nor will be, since it is now, all together, one, continuous. . . It exists without beginning or ceasing … not imperfect … not deficient … equally balanced in every direction from the centre.” As Scott Austin points out in his rigorous analysis of the poem (Parmenides: Being, Bounds, and Logic, Yale UP, 1986), Parmenides seeks in being as such the logical relations that Aristotle would later formalize as relations of concepts alone; his insistence on the separation of what-is from what-is-not anticipates the law of the excluded middle. The spherical “perfection” of the what-is is finite, uniform, and symmetrical, so to speak a three-dimensional model of the originary human scene whose symmetry, generated by the equilibrium of its inner tensions, inaugurated the transcendent world of signs. This figure of the whole is one that cannot be imagined or perceived from within; only the goddess can reveal it.

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Unlike Parmenides a son of Athenian democracy, Socrates displays an ironic but not contemptuous acceptance of the common human intuition of language as he interrogates his fellow citizens to discover what ideas they all share, performing philosophy’s fundamental task of reconstituting the community of linguistic exchange through individual dialogue rather than communal exchange around a sacred center. Socrates’ purpose in questioning the use of words such as courage, friendship, or other variants of the Good was to make explicit their underlying universal content and thereby to point the way from selfish to shared values. The philosopher reveals, by demonstrating the inconsistency of the interlocutor’s prejudices, that the latter indeed shares in his own mind the universal notion of the common good that informs whatever specific category is under discussion. In claiming to “know nothing,” Socrates is not simply playing dumb; he is demonstrating that to understand what holds human society together, one must not begin with apodictic truth but with the faith that the common words or ideas we share guarantee the possibility of shared membership in the human community. This is evident in the more truly “Socratic” early Platonic dialogues, where the participants arrive only at the conclusion that there is no simple definition of these ideas; the abandonment of the narrowly individual definitions offered by Socrates’ interlocutor—who may go so far as to display (as with Callicles in the Gorgias) open disdain for the common welfare—leaves the field open to the universal value that stands behind them.

By revealing the embodiment of the transcendent in the words of everyday conversation, thereby restoring transcendence to its originary place at the horizon of all language, Socrates would take the first great step—that so horrified and fascinated Nietzsche—of desacralization. It remained to create philosophy as an ongoing enterprise for Plato to establish the Good and its derivatives in a transcendent world of Ideas that serve as mimetic models for the real world. This enshrining of language as the guarantee of a cosmic ethical order is the definitive institution of metaphysics, the removal of the objects of language to a sphere where they can no longer be pointed at like the things that imitate them. Plato would transform what for his master was an ongoing project of reform into a manual of construction for an imaginary Republic that could realize the Good in a way no longer thinkable in Athens.

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Thinking about the material world is monistic; thinking about the human is dualistic. Our dualism is monism deferred; the transcendent overlay of representation shields us from the mimetic conflict generated in the material world of appetite. To espouse dualism is to claim an ontological realm for the sign, as I did in the previous Chronicle on transcendence. And certainly the human is indissociable from the transcendent realm of representation. Yet as we use signs and representations, we still inhabit the world of things, and the Forms or Ideas we postulate can subsist only as inscribed in material reality. We can assert the independence of the world of ideas from the material one only so long as we survive in the latter, nor have we any guarantee that even the most peaceful and technically advanced human society can prevent the cosmos from returning to a prehuman state.

The transcendent ontology of the sign is not a supernatural addition to the material world but a supplement that humanity invents or discovers in inventing or discovering itself as the species that can avert self-destruction only by constituting itself as a community. I need not repeat here the details of the originary hypothesis, whose core, as must always be emphasized, is nothing but the affirmation that there was indeed an originary event in which the “transcendent” or “vertical” realm of signs emerged to defer potential mimetic violence. This moment signals the transition from appetitive mimesis to mimetic desire, which is coeval with the sign that designates its object as belonging to the transcendent universe of the sacred.

It does not suffice to lay to rest the issue of monism vs. dualism to claim that if the second layer of the dualist ontology can be shown to derive from the first, then there is really only one mode of being. Our very ability to raise the question exemplifies the emancipation of the world of representation from the material causality of the natural world. The impossibility of finding an independent criterion to establish whether this world deserves its own ontological status is the equivalent of a Kantian antinomy. Indeed, it is the anthropological basis for Kant’s antinomies, which all ultimately concern the human relationship to transcendence.

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Philosophy proper begins with the doctrine of Ideas, the ontological endorsement of transcendence. Plato created his “new way of thinking” because he realized that although the real world is always with us, it is the transcendent world of representations that makes us human. The early pre-Socratics reflected on reality as though it simply embodied categories of thought. It is charitable to view their speculations on the composition of the universe (Water? Fire? Earth, Air, Fire, and Water?) as primitive scientific hypotheses; they are better understood as attempts to reduce the universe to one or more concepts. Heraclitus and Parmenides raise the issue of the contrast between the permanence of concepts/Ideas and their changing worldly content, resulting in some provocative projections of the human condition onto nature (“war is the father of all things”), but their notions of “being” and “non-being,” “truth” and “opinion” do not belong to a conceptual realm shared with one’s fellow citizens. Unlike the concepts that provide the material for Socrates’ endless discussions, the “way of truth” as the object of Parmenides’ oracular vaticinations cannot be reasoned about by those who participate in the linguistic community’s collective self-understanding. Socrates and Plato begin the praxis of philosophy proper, the analysis of our common use of words or “ideas” as a privileged anthropological means of understanding “being.” The Ideas, all avatars of the Good, exist in language, not in the technical sense in which it is viewed by linguistics, but as our primary instrument of survival in a world where our instincts no longer suffice. Unlike Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel, Socrates was not concerned with producing a systematic understanding of the cultural and/or natural universe. The limits of Plato’s own “system” are those of the idealized political order of the Republic; the Good is that of the polis, the highest form of social organization he could conceive.

The goal of philosophical reflection is to understand how the individual member of the community can come to experience the Good, which is that of the community as a whole. By elucidating our universal agreement on the words that define our ethical norms, philosophy seeks to demonstrate that the harmony of the originary scene remains the truth of human existence, just as the task of religion is to maintain the same certitude through the ritual reproduction of the scene. In contrast with Durkheim’s sacred, whose projection of communal values is experienced by the individual as an alien power, philosophy attempts to show that, rightly considered, these values are those of the individual members of society as well, and that what appear to be their selfish interests are illusory. As I pointed out in “Plato and The Birth of Conceptual Thought”, in Socrates’ argument against Callicles in the Gorgias, repeated with variation in the Republic and elsewhere, Plato denies the indexical nature of the concept “good” (good-for-me is not equivalent to good-for-you) in favor of a transcendent concept of the Good, which he understands to be ipso facto prior to all individual “goods,” just as the peaceful order of the society as a whole is prerequisite to our own self-interest. This priority of the community contrasts with the philosophical reconstructions of the originary scene in the Enlightenment as a “social contract” among independent individuals, as well as with John Rawls’ “original position,” which begins with a collection of individuals wholly dependent on the community for their welfare but not for their individuality itself.

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The political connotations of monism and dualism are respectively radical and conservative. Marxists oppose “scientific” materialist monism to the “idealist” ideologies of the ruling class. Tracing the purportedly universal rules of morality to their origin in material practices reveals them as briefs for the ruling class’ control of the means of production. In contrast, although dualism does not necessarily support the status quo, it habitually affirms a moral universality not grounded in specific social relations (including production relations) but inherent in the transcendent world of signs/Ideas itself. Minimally, dualism attributes to the sign-world an independent, immaterial essence; but a purely formal dualism—such as an ontology derived from Saussure’s cours—would only postpone the critical ethical question of the status of signs for us, which is ultimately the question of their origin.

Although the argument between monism and dualism ostensibly deals with ontology in the broadest sense, there is a clear connection between radical monism of the Marxist variety and radical egalitarianism. Beginning with the originary exchange of signs, our use of language demonstrates the fundamental ethical equality of all humans even when the difference of the sacred center is used to guarantee the various forms of social hierarchy. To deny the independent status of signs is to deny that of the sacred, hence to denounce what purports to be the sacred voice of the community as the conscious or unconscious instrument of a particular group. In contrast, to grant transcendent status to the sign-world is to affirm its ultimate independence from specific interests even when on occasion it defends them.

In the place of the ontological split between ideas and things, Marxism introduces within the domain of ideas, conceived as reflections of material practices, a quasi-ontological opposition between the truth of proletarian thought, which anticipates that of a future classless humanity, and the ideology of the ruling classes. False ideas are “secreted” by the exploitative practices of the possessors of the means of production, whereas the value-creating praxis of the proletariat is the source of scientific objectivity. The objective truth supposedly embodied in the proletariat is functionally identical with the Platonic Idea of the Good that transcends all individual interests. Materialism thus provides the same guarantee of human solidarity as Durkheim’s sacred, the difference being that Marxism claims that no transcendence is necessary because the interests of the proletariat—revus et corrigés by the “vanguard party”—coincide with those of society as a whole. For radical monism on the Marxist model, the human periphery requires no sacred center; the only significant difference is class difference, a necessary evil during the “unfree” portion of history that will one day be abolished. The monist vision is bound to end in an apocalypse unless, as in the far more abstract and cosmological vision of “process theology,” it situates the ultimate dissolution of differences at an infinite point in the future.

Dualism, in contrast, accepts a permanent split in the nature of things; even Fall and future redemption do not abolish the difference between the human and the divine. It understands transcendence as a unique dual relationship rather than the Hegelian Aufhebung that supplies the motor for the Marxist apocalypse. Hegel’s monism is all about transcendence, but a transcendence that makes no ontological distinction between signs and things, the cosmological and the anthropological. If transcendence is everywhere, then the specificity of the transcendence accomplished by human representation is obscured. It is difficult to determine precisely at what moment representation enters the “phenomenology of the spirit,” but the best choice is the no doubt most obvious: the familiar master-slave dialectic in Chapter IV A of the Phenomenology. As I noted in The Scenic Imagination, this is the one moment in all of Hegel that approaches the drama of an originary scene, including the threat and fear of death.

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Dualist ontology is inherent in anthropology in our sense because its highest priority is maintaining the human community, guaranteed or not by the sacred, as a specific entity connected by representation and no longer equivalent to the sum of its individual members. In contrast, cosmology is monistic; the cosmos cannot reasonably be said to depend on the existence of the human community. When cosmology is taken to exceed anthropology as the truth of the universe of which we are but a small part, to grant representation a separate ontological category would be the functional expression of belief in a world-soul.

What the originary hypothesis adds to the age-old debate between monism and dualism is a concrete, plausible motivation of the link between the transcendental sign-world and the human community. The exchange of signs on the periphery of the originary scene generates the human community as directing its attention—its representations—to the sacred center. What makes these creatures human is that there exists for them a sphere of reality beyond appetite and the self-interest defined by it.

Condillac’s children begin to speak in order to communicate their individual deprivations. GA’s originary humans begin to speak in order to communicate their communal deprivation, which, because it is shared and communicated, is also the promise of future fulfillment. When we share the communal feast, our nourishment is simultaneously spiritual and physical. Yet the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation reminds us that there is no natural transition from matter to spirit, that the transformation of one into the other is wrought, whether by God or man, within the transcendent world of signs.

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