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Adam Katz, ed., The Originary Hypothesis:
A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry
Critical
Studies in the Humanities
The Book
Eric Gans’
Originary Hypothesis, in contrast to virtually all
contemporary thought in the Western academy, posits an
origin to humanity, an origin that discloses to us our
ethical limits and possibilities. This collection
demonstrates the extraordinary power and range of the
hypothesis in dealing with questions of aesthetics,
morality, theoretical method, and historical and political
thought.
Eric Gans has
hypothesized the origin of language and humanity in a scene
of mimetic crisis, in which the first sign, a gesture of
aborted appropriation, prevented the self-immolation of the
newly human community. Gans has explored the consequences of
the hypothesis in a series of books for a wide range of
historical, philosophical, ethical and aesthetic questions.
The
Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic
Inquiry brings together a series of new essays by
collaborators of Gans and Gans himself that demonstrate the
sophistication and applicability of Gans’ hypothesis as
well as its ability to transcend formalistic and narrowly
disciplinary approaches to the arts and social sciences.
Reviews
"Eric Gans' originary hypothesis opens a new horizon for
scholarship across the disciplines. The essays in the
present collection are a timely summons to fuller engagement
with the work of this profound, generous, surpassingly
elegant thinker."
—Mark Vessey, Professor of
English, Canada Research Chair in Literature / Christianity
and Culture, University of British Columbia
"The 'culture wars' and the
clash of civilizations demand renewed pursuit of the origins
of the human. Yet science and academic philosophy seem
unwilling or unable to engage this quest. Conventional
evolutionary theory leaves no place for the notion of
instantaneous origin, required to explain the sudden or
'eventful' emergence of man. Contemporary philosophy, for
its part, has either given up any attempt to think
systemically about human origins, or it has ruled them out
for reasons of post-modernist ideology. Yet the question of
origins is a touchstone of philosophical seriousness, a sine
qua non of the deepest thought. And never more than at
present has history called into question the very meaning of
the “human.” If man is a being whose being is inseparable
from its origins, then contemporary intellectual culture, it
seems fair to say, has largely given up on humanity.
"René Girard, the
French-American theorist of violence, religion, and mimetic
desire, is the first of post-war anthropological thinkers to
advance an 'eventful' theory of human origins, in terms of
the religious institution of sacrifice. But is has fallen
to one of his most original students, Eric Gans, to reflect
on the question of origins as such, in a way that bridges
the gab between anthropology and philosophy. In so doing, he
has produced a groundbreaking revision of Girard's
anthropology. On the basis of the modern 'linguistic turn'
and of European semiotics, Gans stresses the decisive role
of language, while still doing justice to Girard's theories
of sacrifice and 'mimetic desire.' The core of this
creative correction is the notion that language is the
definingly human power. The use of signs enables inchoate
humans to defer conflict so as to create an enduring
community on the basis of culture.
"According to Gans, language
is thus the condition of the emergence of man and of
religion – not the other way around, as Girard thinks. This
theory addresses critical issues in the theory of human
origins as an 'event,' a sudden (not gradual) emergence.
When Gans' theory of the origin of signs as the definingly
human trait is fleshed out, it leads to a novel defense of
modernity against its post-modernist critics.
"Such
a dedicated theory of modernity is absent in Girard
himself. It does this in part by deconstructing the
incoherent self-hatred that has become such a central part
of our culture – the 'White Guilt' of the 'deconstructors,'
radical feminists, post-colonialists, and other assorted
accusers of Western culture.
"This fine collection of
essays introduces, explains, applies, and extends Gans'
creative revision of Girard's theory of the 'sacrificial'
origins of the human. In doing so, it reveals the rich
potential and range of Gans' thought – its ability to
illuminate politics, ethics, religion, history, culture,
aesthetics, literature, and semiotics. It does so, moreover,
on a philosophical plane. One of its most compelling aspects
is its brilliant demolition of the 'victimary' thinking of
post-structuralism, the tyranny of the 'oppressed' that has
come to dominate the moral discourse of our world. It has
much else to offer as well, in essays on Shakespeare,
Aristotelian causality and 'originary hypothesis,' the
history of philosophy, romanticism, Protestantism, and
theology. Not everyone will be convinced by Gans'
provocative ideas, but readers cannot fail to find these
essays rewarding and illuminating. It is an excellent
introduction to the 'originary thinking' of 'generative
anthropology.'”
—Stephen L. Gardner
Associate Professor of
Philosophy
Department of Philosophy and
Religion
The University of Tulsa
Contents
Introduction: The Consequences of the Hypothesis,
Adam Katz
On Firstness, Eric Gans
Originary Aesthetics and the End of Postmodernism,
Raoul Eshelman
Epigenetic Evolution of the Immaterial Intellect on the
Originary Scene, Christopher S. Morrissey
The Question of Originary Method: The Generative Thought
Experiment, Adam Katz
Generative Anthropology and Bronx Romanticism, Eric
Gans
Hamlet’s Theater of Resentment, Richard van Oort
“The reforming of Reformation itself”, Peter Goldman
The Dispensations of Moira: Matter, Mind, and Culture
from Thales of Miletus to Walter Pater,
Thomas F. Bertonneau
Intensity and Ambiguity in Romantic Poetics, Matthew
Schneider
What is the Human? Eric Gans and the Structure of the
Hypothesis, Chris Fleming and John O’Carroll
Accusations of “Playing God” and the Anthropological Idea
of God, Andrew Bartlett
The Contributors
Andrew Bartlett
teaches analytical writing and literature in the English
Department at Kwantlen University College in Surrey, British
Columbia. He has published critical articles on Joseph
Conrad, Cormac McCarthy, and nuclear war movies, along with
book reviews on Canadian fiction. He participates in the
annual meetings of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion
and a Vancouver reading club, Sparagmos, devoted to the
study of Generative Anthropology.
Thomas
Bertonneau is the author of over fifty articles on
literature, religion, anthropology, and other topics. He
serves on the editorial board of Anthropoetics, of
which he was one of the originators, of Praesidium,
and of Modern Age, to all of which he also regularly
contributes. His book, The Gospel According to Sci-Fi,
cowritten with Kim Paffenroth of Iona College, appears early
next year from Brazos Press. He has articles forthcoming on
Augustine and Ibsen, Petronius and Apuleius, V. S. Naipaul,
and Karen Blixen. He was the first executive director of the
Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is a
longtime affiliate of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural
Renewal and of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
Raoul Eshelman,
an American Slavist who has lived and worked in Germany
since 1979, has a Ph.D. in Slavic Literature from Konstanz
University and his Habilitation in the same field from the
University of Hamburg. At present he is Slavic Department
Coordinator for the Honors M.A. Program in East European
Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He
has published numerous articles on GA in English as well as
German. His book Performatism, or the End of
Postmodernism, is forthcoming as a publication of the
Davies Group.
Chris Fleming
is Lecturer in Philosophy in the School of Humanities and
Languages at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.
Among his publications is the book René Girard: Violence
and Mimesis (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
Eric Gans
attended Columbia College and the Johns Hopkins University,
where he received his doctorate in Romance Languages. He has
taught French literature, critical theory, and film at UCLA
since 1969, and written a number of books and articles on
aesthetic theory as well as on Flaubert, Musset, Racine, and
other French writers. Beginning with The Origin of
Language (1981), Gans developed the concept of
generative anthropology and has written five other books on
the subject, including Originary Thinking (1993),
Signs of Paradox (1997), and the forthcoming The
Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the
Present Day.
Peter Goldman
is a Professor of English at Westminster College in Salt
Lake City, Utah, where he teaches classes on Shakespeare and
English Renaissance literature. His publications include
articles on Shakespeare, John Bunyan, popular culture,
literary theory, and Generative Anthropology. In 1997, he
attended Eric Gans’ seminar on Generative Anthropology at
UCLA, and he serves on the editorial board of
Anthropoetics. Currently, he is working on a book
entitled Shakespeare and the Problem of Iconoclasm.
Adam Katz
teaches writing at Quinnipiac University, is on the
Editorial Board of Anthropoetics and writes on the
originary hypothesis of Eric Gans, the Holocaust,
composition and the innovative fiction of Ronald Sukenick.
Christopher
Morrissey, a certified member of the Institute for Advanced
Physics, teaches Ancient Greek, Latin, and Classical
Mythology at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby. He also
teaches Medieval Philosophy, Medieval Ecclesiastical Latin,
and a course in the Metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas at
Redeemer Pacific College in Langley.
John O’Carroll
is a lecturer at Charles Sturt University in the School of
Social Sciences and Liberal Studies. Previously, he taught
at the University of Western Sydney, and at the University
of the South Pacific in Fiji. He has written on issues of
multiculturalism, culture study, and generative
anthropology. With Bob Hodge, he is author of Borderwork
in Multicultural Australia (Allen and Unwin 2006), and
with Chris Fleming a number of articles in Anthropoetics.
Richard van
Oort (Ph.D. University of California, Irvine) has been on
the editorial board of Anthropoetics since the
journal was founded in 1995. He currently teaches in the
English Department at the University of British Columbia in
Vancouver, where he is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Canada
Research Chair in Literature / Christianity and Culture held
by Professor Mark Vessey. He has published widely on topics
in generative anthropology, literary theory, and
Shakespeare, and has recently finished a manuscript on the
anthropological foundations of humanistic research. His next
project is called Shakespearean Anthropology.
Matthew
Schneider, a founding member of the GA seminar, holds a PhD
in English from UCLA. He is professor of English at Chapman
University in Orange, California, where he has taught since
1991. The author of Original Ambivalence: Violence and
Autobiography in Thomas De Quincey (Peter Lang, 1995)
and the forthcoming A Long and Winding Road: From Blake
to the Beatles (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Schneider has
also published essays on Jane Austen, John Keats, Charles
Dickens, William Blake, critical theory, and Biblical
exegesis.
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