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Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures
Starting from the minimal principle of generative anthropology—that human culture originates as "the deferral of violence through representation"—the author proposes a new understanding of the fundamental concepts of metaphysics and an explanation of the historical problematic that underlies the postmodern "end of culture." Part I begins with the paradoxical emergence of the "vertical" sign from the "horizontal" world of appetite. Two persons reaching for the same object are a minimal model of this emergence; their "pragmatic paradox" can be resolved only by substituting the representation of the object for its appropriation. The nature of paradox and the related notion of irony, as well as the fundamental concepts of being, thinking, and signification, are rethought on the basis of this triangular model, leading to an anthropological interpretation of the origin of philosophy and semiotics in Plato's Ideas . Part I concludes with an exploration of the psychoanalytic categories of the unconscious and the erotic. Part II develops the idea that material exchange originates in the sparagmos or violent rendering of the sacrificial victim from which each participant obtains a roughly equal portion. The dependence of the process on the central victimary figure culminates in the Holocaust, the extermination of the Jews, whose crucial role in Western culture is their rejection of the central image in favor of peripheral exchange. As a result, postmodern dialogue becomes dominated by the rhetoric of victimage, and the culture of centrality gives way to an aesthetic of the marginal.
236 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1997
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May 13, 2026
Eric Gans has invented a style of thought he calls "generative anthropology" to address the dead-lock of intellectual mediation under the influence of the postmodern condition. Influenced by Freud's Totem and Taboo, generative anthropology involves coming up with, or making up if we wish to be pejorative, supposedly irreducible historical-anthropological scenarios that may ground reflection on the human condition in a post-philosophical age. Compared to Freud, Gans advances the idea that his model is "minimal" in that it is an originary fact that is located at the dawn of conceptual thought so that it features less of the accidental than Freud's ad hoc- scenario about murdering the alpha male father, with its inexplicable appearance of a high-level emotion like guilt right after the transgression. In truth, Gans' mode of proceeding is anything but rigorous since there is not much effort, at least in this book, to explore other candidates for a minimal originary event. The model is described and interpretations are made. This is not to say that it is not a thought-provoking and even persuasive model but rather that it is lacking in necessity. Still, Gans seems to be onto something with his simultaneous critique of metaphysics and rejection of Derrida - a position which actually puts him close to thinkers like Laruelle(RIP), who was seeking a "science of man" in frustrated response to the perceived auto-eroticism of philosophical self-critiques, an approach which led Derrida, himself accused by Foucault of obscurantist terrorism, to pass on the charge to Laruelle.
Generative anthropology attempts to universalize the reflections it places on concrete, primitive human situations by connecting this situation to conceptual thought and use of language on a fundamental level. By this stratagem, we reach a kind of "ever-present origin" that is "always already" there but in a very different sense than in the Heideggerian project where the division between originary Being and the metaphysical sense of a plurality of beings is located in the transition from Presocratics to Platonists. From the perspective of Generative anthropology, this division is still promptly within what is at question, namely, the human use of language, whose unstable character was articulated via Derrida's concept of the trace. However, Derrida never crosses over into the anthropological but makes his criticism immanent to any utterance which, while it allows him to dispense with speculative anthropology that would make him vulnerable for easy criticism, makes it impossible to transcend the sphere of metaphysics to a larger perspective which accounts for its emergence in a primitive sense.
The scenario described by Gans owes much to theory of mimesis which separates him even further from the tendencies of postmodern and post-structuralist philosophy that place themselves in an antithetical position to it on account of its Greek passivity. Gans does not take desire as primitive but seeks to explain the emergence of desire as a symptom of language and the sign. In Gans' mind, intensifying mimesis between individuals results in a paradoxical situation when the imitative behaviours helpful in satisfying appetite come in conflict which, in large groups, results in a momentary paralysis, emission of the sign in an aborted gesture of appetition and the beginning of sacrality. The resulting resentment is purged via Dionysian excess of destruction, which stands at the beginning of the excessive slaughters known from sacrifices all over the world. However, the empty scene of this so-called sparagmos still bears the memory of the abortive gesture, even though the sparagmos attempted to destroy the now-signified object of appetition that was transformed by the abortive gesture from a simple object to be taken to a collective property. From this are derived sources of aesthetic, religion, metaphysics, rhetoric, politics and even romance: the newly created sign-object which never coincides with the pure object of appetition becomes a source of aesthetic oscillation as well as the foundation of the conditions of propositional thought which predicates properties of subjects and forms a self-contained, well-connected "cosmos" which contains no arbitrary reference. Political-rhetorical manipulations concerned with propositional predications and abstracts like Justice belong to the Athenian heritage while focus on the imperative character of the originary scene forms the religious, Hebraic heritage.
In some ways, Gans comes close to Nietzsche's genealogical style by way of Rousseau but he takes it further by turning the postmodern cynicism against itself by noting that instead of the problem of evil, the postmodern world has a problem of the good. His distinction between appetition and desires serves well to define the contours of this problem: desires are towards subjects with predicates ie. unstable combinations of sign and real object while appetite is only for the object previous to the aborted gesture that sanctified it. Cioran perhaps put this inverse problem best: Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?. This question forces us to theorize the painful origins of the good instead of estimating ourselves coolly as apex predators by default. I think this is the correct move and Gans is certainly correct to point out the paradox in attempting to explain every aspect of group altruism via individual sexual selection which is most times in direct conflict with the interests of the group. No pre-existing utilitarianisms apply because in the pursuit of the object there is yet none of the "good life" which is all predicated on the oppression of religion and symbolism. Even an ubiquitous "emotion" like love is in reality a symbolic game whose purpose is to prevent the collapse of civilization.
Gans conceives language as a form of irony because it is based on the deferral of resentment, intensified with any critical movements against sacrifice we might think of. All language is taken to bear the imprint of this originary paradox and so even deconstruction does not escape because instead of the appetitive object it posits the trace as an inexplicable ideal by which to criticize metaphysics: conclusion of which must be "liberating", free play etc. In all propositions we are forever confronted with paradox of generality and particularity while in our erotic attachment to figures we vacillate between the peripheral mass and domination of the sign as they existed in the originary scene. Nothing we say is ever manifest, like when we say ironically "What a nice day" when it's raining: and this is precisely the Makom or the place where absence is made manifest in the aftermath of sparagmatic resentment. This constitutes the essence of religious revelation as opposed to political control and metaphysics. Christian religion remains fixated on the paradoxes of the figure although it includes the Father, representing the original appetitive object, to qualify its Greek metaphysical inclinations.
This book is dense and ends up running in many tangents because it is not exactly clear what all is relevant for the originary scene and what dilutes it. It is forever contestable because the originary scene includes everything. It all seems to culminate in the Holocaust where an attempt was made to purge society of everything that reminds people of the lack of social obviousness. The bleak implication is that as long as there are Jews, the perfect image is not considered to be complete because Jews have never been part of it and their whole mode of existence has challenged it. The figure is never truly reached and this situation erupts in resentful violence but this time not directed against the "king" but against the polluting reminder of the non-sentimental basis of the world, in a pattern similar to Armenian Genocide. The post-Enlightenment concealed immanence of the normative, reflected in the decadence of Weimar Republic, had reached such heights that there was widespread desire to destroy various unfit groups in pseudo-scientific basis. This is Greek metaphysics applied on mass level - there is no king to kill, only lesser groups of people. After WW2 we enter a kind of decentralized era defined by postmodernism, consumerism and minoritarianism - popular music represents dissolving into the sparagmatic mass that resentfully consumes their designated lot in the entire system. Consumer culture provides a whole new system of divinity with an additional layer of distance to the actually political - the resentful effects can be seen in environmental destruction on mass scale, incredible amount of material waste etc.
Gans has an interesting take on the vagaries of current day existence which are far beyond any problem of modernism and have already taken on completely strange aspects historically speaking. His analysis focuses a lot on the role of blacks in the modern landscape, following the tradition of Adorno and Evola: this cannot be disputed since never before has black influence been so culturally visible in USA-Europe. This is, however, a limited analysis since in fact it is the whole popular music which is new, even in its decidedly non-black aspects like punk rock and heavy metal, which involved sentiments against multi-racial, queer genres like Disco or House - both more underground styles of music compared to metal and punk, both challenging the reification of the symbolic in the record that characterizes rock culture. Rock music worships the debauched degenerate much like tribes without a heroic or kingly culture worship the mentally ill, schizophrenic and the epileptic as a shaman. We see more evidence of regression to shamanism in neo-tribalistic metal subcultures which revolve around growled vocals reminiscent of throat-singing and animalistic performance. Rock music also takes this much farther than blues or jazz - so rock capitalized on the degenerate before the rap phenomenon. It may have roots in blues but by the time of punk and metal those roots are all but gone and as such, it's far from exclusively a "minoritarian" phenomenon since a lot of the backlash against "woke" minoritarianism comes from people who are also immersed in cultures that support degeneracy worship like rock. Metal fans can't extricate themselves so easily from degeneracy and claim supratemporal trans-civilizational connectivity by blaming black culture and reading choice books by Evola while partaking in types of metal music that are inconceivable to objects of their veneration.
In general, Gans' mimetic model insists on the origin of desire in the mass and in the social. This accords with the concept of Jewish religion which is tribal: the sacred originates in an abortive gesture of a multiplicity of people for whom imitation and empathy are no longer enough to prevent total war and consequent fall into non-existence. To my mind, however, his formulation suggests even more exciting possibilities: the conflict between mimesis and object-appetition does not happen only at the level of objective pursuit but it may just as well appear as an individual realization of the incommensurability of those two modes. In imitating your superior in terms of technique to attain objects of appetite, the naive idea is to embody the superior and to perceive consistent styles or patterns in his movement. By an internal change, however, the pseudo-obvious connections can be picked apart in order to focus on the object in first-person mode only, without the figure of the father looming over your effort. This cuts away delusive, excessive material and lets you contemplate the object without habit so as to explore its properties. Such a change can happen in different people and it could have happened without an actualization of mimetic conflict, leading these people to form elitistic lines of civilization operating hiddenly from the "mimetics".
In my own version of the "originary" event, these people would be termed "orphans". Although this is not all orphans since many orphans end up just as slaves like in the Greek system. The difference between my idea of an originary event and Gans' is that Gans does not take into account the feminine element, or at least he does not mention it. There is a massive blank between the invention of language and arrival at sexual based taboos. In my version, we start with primal encounter of female with male where male penetrates her and then leaves her alone with the child. This is the rock-solid basis of the matrilineal and primitive strata of culture and in my idea, it is accompanied by the woman conceiving mythical male or phallic figures for her child as surrogate fathers. This explains the absence of God. The male child is then driven to find other females to mate with on this model of the conqueror and also due to the mother's instinct of protecting her female children from weak males. This marks the dawn of exogamy. We still must explain the European Goddess-cult which refers to absent, idealized, desexualized females, an idea that repeats throughout Eurasian culture and here my idea converges with Gans'. The first thought is posthumous birth but then why not let one of the sisters act as the mother? But if the mimetic conflict described by Gans had WOMAN as its appetitive object during a competition with various males, they might have murdered the woman exactly following this sparagmos-idea. First, the sexuality develops from mimicry of paternal-mythological figures but then ultimately there is a woman so beautiful that everyone decides to pursue her so they are no longer mimicking: they are focusing on the object. The pitch of sexuality reaches its asocial point. After the emission of the sign, they would murder the woman they most love together in order not to kill each other over her - which starts the cult of the absent woman and patrilineality, embodied in all metaphysics, propositions etc. This would be a remarkable inversion of Freud's patricidal myth and what's more, completely plausible.
In terms of cultural development, patrilineality develops a far stronger dynamism than the matrilineal version which, while it makes more sense on the surface, could lead to mitochondrial hybrid breakdown that could also lead to prevalence of various mental diseases interpreted as shamanism or wisdom. This is because the the mitochondrial dysfunction is transmitted through female line only. Modern western consumerist culture reflects the negative traits of this type of culture - at least since Christianity there has been no clear "birth control" - in terms of worship of mental illness, humongous waste, conspicuous and destructive consumption etc. Destructive urges of the deficient by birth become signs of supernatural power in concert with the model of the original invader God. Patrilineal culture has an inborn protection against this development because the effects of mitochondrial breakdown only appear in two generations: but since all children of the in-group females are rejected from the community, the danger of the breakdown would never arise. This creates a solid-minded conqueror culture who act under the aegis of the ever-receding feminine horizon. This system, however, creates the orphans who, unless slaves, would live completely without mimesis, only studying objects objectively - disadvantaged in any imaginary social hierarchy but also liberated from its mentally taxing slavery which reduces everything to the mimetic.
Generative anthropology attempts to universalize the reflections it places on concrete, primitive human situations by connecting this situation to conceptual thought and use of language on a fundamental level. By this stratagem, we reach a kind of "ever-present origin" that is "always already" there but in a very different sense than in the Heideggerian project where the division between originary Being and the metaphysical sense of a plurality of beings is located in the transition from Presocratics to Platonists. From the perspective of Generative anthropology, this division is still promptly within what is at question, namely, the human use of language, whose unstable character was articulated via Derrida's concept of the trace. However, Derrida never crosses over into the anthropological but makes his criticism immanent to any utterance which, while it allows him to dispense with speculative anthropology that would make him vulnerable for easy criticism, makes it impossible to transcend the sphere of metaphysics to a larger perspective which accounts for its emergence in a primitive sense.
The scenario described by Gans owes much to theory of mimesis which separates him even further from the tendencies of postmodern and post-structuralist philosophy that place themselves in an antithetical position to it on account of its Greek passivity. Gans does not take desire as primitive but seeks to explain the emergence of desire as a symptom of language and the sign. In Gans' mind, intensifying mimesis between individuals results in a paradoxical situation when the imitative behaviours helpful in satisfying appetite come in conflict which, in large groups, results in a momentary paralysis, emission of the sign in an aborted gesture of appetition and the beginning of sacrality. The resulting resentment is purged via Dionysian excess of destruction, which stands at the beginning of the excessive slaughters known from sacrifices all over the world. However, the empty scene of this so-called sparagmos still bears the memory of the abortive gesture, even though the sparagmos attempted to destroy the now-signified object of appetition that was transformed by the abortive gesture from a simple object to be taken to a collective property. From this are derived sources of aesthetic, religion, metaphysics, rhetoric, politics and even romance: the newly created sign-object which never coincides with the pure object of appetition becomes a source of aesthetic oscillation as well as the foundation of the conditions of propositional thought which predicates properties of subjects and forms a self-contained, well-connected "cosmos" which contains no arbitrary reference. Political-rhetorical manipulations concerned with propositional predications and abstracts like Justice belong to the Athenian heritage while focus on the imperative character of the originary scene forms the religious, Hebraic heritage.
In some ways, Gans comes close to Nietzsche's genealogical style by way of Rousseau but he takes it further by turning the postmodern cynicism against itself by noting that instead of the problem of evil, the postmodern world has a problem of the good. His distinction between appetition and desires serves well to define the contours of this problem: desires are towards subjects with predicates ie. unstable combinations of sign and real object while appetite is only for the object previous to the aborted gesture that sanctified it. Cioran perhaps put this inverse problem best: Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?. This question forces us to theorize the painful origins of the good instead of estimating ourselves coolly as apex predators by default. I think this is the correct move and Gans is certainly correct to point out the paradox in attempting to explain every aspect of group altruism via individual sexual selection which is most times in direct conflict with the interests of the group. No pre-existing utilitarianisms apply because in the pursuit of the object there is yet none of the "good life" which is all predicated on the oppression of religion and symbolism. Even an ubiquitous "emotion" like love is in reality a symbolic game whose purpose is to prevent the collapse of civilization.
Gans conceives language as a form of irony because it is based on the deferral of resentment, intensified with any critical movements against sacrifice we might think of. All language is taken to bear the imprint of this originary paradox and so even deconstruction does not escape because instead of the appetitive object it posits the trace as an inexplicable ideal by which to criticize metaphysics: conclusion of which must be "liberating", free play etc. In all propositions we are forever confronted with paradox of generality and particularity while in our erotic attachment to figures we vacillate between the peripheral mass and domination of the sign as they existed in the originary scene. Nothing we say is ever manifest, like when we say ironically "What a nice day" when it's raining: and this is precisely the Makom or the place where absence is made manifest in the aftermath of sparagmatic resentment. This constitutes the essence of religious revelation as opposed to political control and metaphysics. Christian religion remains fixated on the paradoxes of the figure although it includes the Father, representing the original appetitive object, to qualify its Greek metaphysical inclinations.
This book is dense and ends up running in many tangents because it is not exactly clear what all is relevant for the originary scene and what dilutes it. It is forever contestable because the originary scene includes everything. It all seems to culminate in the Holocaust where an attempt was made to purge society of everything that reminds people of the lack of social obviousness. The bleak implication is that as long as there are Jews, the perfect image is not considered to be complete because Jews have never been part of it and their whole mode of existence has challenged it. The figure is never truly reached and this situation erupts in resentful violence but this time not directed against the "king" but against the polluting reminder of the non-sentimental basis of the world, in a pattern similar to Armenian Genocide. The post-Enlightenment concealed immanence of the normative, reflected in the decadence of Weimar Republic, had reached such heights that there was widespread desire to destroy various unfit groups in pseudo-scientific basis. This is Greek metaphysics applied on mass level - there is no king to kill, only lesser groups of people. After WW2 we enter a kind of decentralized era defined by postmodernism, consumerism and minoritarianism - popular music represents dissolving into the sparagmatic mass that resentfully consumes their designated lot in the entire system. Consumer culture provides a whole new system of divinity with an additional layer of distance to the actually political - the resentful effects can be seen in environmental destruction on mass scale, incredible amount of material waste etc.
Gans has an interesting take on the vagaries of current day existence which are far beyond any problem of modernism and have already taken on completely strange aspects historically speaking. His analysis focuses a lot on the role of blacks in the modern landscape, following the tradition of Adorno and Evola: this cannot be disputed since never before has black influence been so culturally visible in USA-Europe. This is, however, a limited analysis since in fact it is the whole popular music which is new, even in its decidedly non-black aspects like punk rock and heavy metal, which involved sentiments against multi-racial, queer genres like Disco or House - both more underground styles of music compared to metal and punk, both challenging the reification of the symbolic in the record that characterizes rock culture. Rock music worships the debauched degenerate much like tribes without a heroic or kingly culture worship the mentally ill, schizophrenic and the epileptic as a shaman. We see more evidence of regression to shamanism in neo-tribalistic metal subcultures which revolve around growled vocals reminiscent of throat-singing and animalistic performance. Rock music also takes this much farther than blues or jazz - so rock capitalized on the degenerate before the rap phenomenon. It may have roots in blues but by the time of punk and metal those roots are all but gone and as such, it's far from exclusively a "minoritarian" phenomenon since a lot of the backlash against "woke" minoritarianism comes from people who are also immersed in cultures that support degeneracy worship like rock. Metal fans can't extricate themselves so easily from degeneracy and claim supratemporal trans-civilizational connectivity by blaming black culture and reading choice books by Evola while partaking in types of metal music that are inconceivable to objects of their veneration.
In general, Gans' mimetic model insists on the origin of desire in the mass and in the social. This accords with the concept of Jewish religion which is tribal: the sacred originates in an abortive gesture of a multiplicity of people for whom imitation and empathy are no longer enough to prevent total war and consequent fall into non-existence. To my mind, however, his formulation suggests even more exciting possibilities: the conflict between mimesis and object-appetition does not happen only at the level of objective pursuit but it may just as well appear as an individual realization of the incommensurability of those two modes. In imitating your superior in terms of technique to attain objects of appetite, the naive idea is to embody the superior and to perceive consistent styles or patterns in his movement. By an internal change, however, the pseudo-obvious connections can be picked apart in order to focus on the object in first-person mode only, without the figure of the father looming over your effort. This cuts away delusive, excessive material and lets you contemplate the object without habit so as to explore its properties. Such a change can happen in different people and it could have happened without an actualization of mimetic conflict, leading these people to form elitistic lines of civilization operating hiddenly from the "mimetics".
In my own version of the "originary" event, these people would be termed "orphans". Although this is not all orphans since many orphans end up just as slaves like in the Greek system. The difference between my idea of an originary event and Gans' is that Gans does not take into account the feminine element, or at least he does not mention it. There is a massive blank between the invention of language and arrival at sexual based taboos. In my version, we start with primal encounter of female with male where male penetrates her and then leaves her alone with the child. This is the rock-solid basis of the matrilineal and primitive strata of culture and in my idea, it is accompanied by the woman conceiving mythical male or phallic figures for her child as surrogate fathers. This explains the absence of God. The male child is then driven to find other females to mate with on this model of the conqueror and also due to the mother's instinct of protecting her female children from weak males. This marks the dawn of exogamy. We still must explain the European Goddess-cult which refers to absent, idealized, desexualized females, an idea that repeats throughout Eurasian culture and here my idea converges with Gans'. The first thought is posthumous birth but then why not let one of the sisters act as the mother? But if the mimetic conflict described by Gans had WOMAN as its appetitive object during a competition with various males, they might have murdered the woman exactly following this sparagmos-idea. First, the sexuality develops from mimicry of paternal-mythological figures but then ultimately there is a woman so beautiful that everyone decides to pursue her so they are no longer mimicking: they are focusing on the object. The pitch of sexuality reaches its asocial point. After the emission of the sign, they would murder the woman they most love together in order not to kill each other over her - which starts the cult of the absent woman and patrilineality, embodied in all metaphysics, propositions etc. This would be a remarkable inversion of Freud's patricidal myth and what's more, completely plausible.
In terms of cultural development, patrilineality develops a far stronger dynamism than the matrilineal version which, while it makes more sense on the surface, could lead to mitochondrial hybrid breakdown that could also lead to prevalence of various mental diseases interpreted as shamanism or wisdom. This is because the the mitochondrial dysfunction is transmitted through female line only. Modern western consumerist culture reflects the negative traits of this type of culture - at least since Christianity there has been no clear "birth control" - in terms of worship of mental illness, humongous waste, conspicuous and destructive consumption etc. Destructive urges of the deficient by birth become signs of supernatural power in concert with the model of the original invader God. Patrilineal culture has an inborn protection against this development because the effects of mitochondrial breakdown only appear in two generations: but since all children of the in-group females are rejected from the community, the danger of the breakdown would never arise. This creates a solid-minded conqueror culture who act under the aegis of the ever-receding feminine horizon. This system, however, creates the orphans who, unless slaves, would live completely without mimesis, only studying objects objectively - disadvantaged in any imaginary social hierarchy but also liberated from its mentally taxing slavery which reduces everything to the mimetic.
August 16, 2010
I had been meaning to read Gans for some time now. Having been a little disappointed that as an Anthropology undergrad all my professors seemed to talk about was how "all anthropology is imperialistic" and the best we could do was declare our field dead. So the idea of a new theory past the pomo deadlock sounded interesting to me.
Gans' "event" theory of language is plausible but lacking in substance, which the author admits is all hypothesis (yet he strings a lot on to the hypothesis.) His understanding of logic is poor. And the last part of the book is one of the most inane backlash rants I've ever heard from an anthropologist.
Gans' "event" theory of language is plausible but lacking in substance, which the author admits is all hypothesis (yet he strings a lot on to the hypothesis.) His understanding of logic is poor. And the last part of the book is one of the most inane backlash rants I've ever heard from an anthropologist.
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