Gans demonstrates that human representation—language, ritual, art—could only have originated as an event taking place on a scene present to the consciousness of its participants. This volume lays the foundation for an important revision of our understanding of cultural achievement.

The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology

Politics & Social Sciences

Gans, Eric

Social Sciences

University of California Press

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.

Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Stanford University Press

The Scenic Imagination argues that the uniquely human phenomenon of representation, as manifested in language, art, and ritual, is a scenic event focused on a central object designated by a sign. The originary hypothesis posits the necessity of conceiving the origin of the human as such an event. In traditional societies, the scenic imagination through which this scene of origin is conceived manifests itself in sacred creation narratives. Modern thought is defined by the independent use of the scenic imagination to create anthropological models of the origin of human institutions, beginning with the social contract scene in Hobbes's Leviathan that puts an end to the reciprocal violence of the state of nature. Eric Gans follows the work of the scenic imagination in selected writings of twenty thinkers including Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Boas, and Freud and concludes his book with a critical examination of contemporary writing on the origins of religion and language. In the process, he demonstrates that the originary hypothesis offers the most cohesive explanation of the origin and function of these fundamental institutions.

The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day

Science and Faith explores the phenomenon of religious revelation in the light of the originary hypothesis, which postulates the origin of human language and culture in a unique event. It is the third in a series of works by the author, including The Origin of Language (1981) and The End of Culture (1985), that develop a generative anthropology founded on this hypothesis.

Science and Faith

Religion & Spirituality

Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc

Despite appearing in twenty-eight movies in little over a decade, Carole Landis (1919-1948) never quite became the major Hollywood star her onscreen presence should have afforded her. Although she acted in such enduring films as A Scandal in Paris and Moon over Miami, she was most often relegated to supporting roles. Even when she played the major role in a feature, as she did in The Powers Girl and the film noir I Wake Up Screaming!, she was billed second or third behind other actors. 
This biography traces Landis's life, chronicling her beginnings as a dance hall entertainer in San Francisco, her career in Hollywood and abroad, her USO performances, and ultimately her suicide. Using interviews with actors who worked with Landis, contemporary movie magazines and journals, and correspondence, biographer Eric Gans reveals a tragic figure whose life was all too brief. 
Landis's big break came in 1940 with Hal Roach's One Million B.C. She appeared in thirteen Twentieth Century-Fox pictures between 1941 and 1946. In 1942-43, Landis entertained troops in England and North Africa in the only all-female USO tour. The trip led to her memoir, Four Jills in a Jeep, and a Fox movie of the same title. After her last American film in 1947, she completed two projects in England while having an affair with married actor Rex Harrison. Tormented by a love that could not lead to matrimony and depressed about growing older, she took a fatal drug overdose on July 5, 1948.

Carole Landis: A Most Beautiful Girl (Hollywood Legends Series)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

A New Way of Thinking locates the major areas of human representation, religion, philosophy and art in the context of the originary hypothesis: given the scenic nature of all the forms of human culture, the human is best understood as having its roots in a scene of origin. When prehuman intelligence outgrows the peacekeeping capacity of the ape pecking order, humanity begins as a community symmetrically arrayed around a central desire-object whose very desirability makes it sacred and therefore forbidden. The reconceptualization of the forms of human culture in scenic terms provides a new approach to the tired controversy of whether or how we can speak of God. It explains the limits of philosophy and situates its project within rather than above that of universal morality. Finally, it elaborates a scenic theory of art and explains in its terms the difference between “popular” and “high” art, and the reasons why it finds this distinction increasingly less useful. The book includes a running footnote dialogue with fellow Generative Anthropologist Adam Katz.

A New Way of Thinking: Generative Anthropology in Religion, Philosophy, Art

Anthropology

The Davies Group, Publishers

Science and Faith, originally published by Rowman &amp; Littlefield in 1990, recapitulates, focuses, and recontextualizes much of the thinking done in Gans’ first two books formulating his “new way of thinking,” Generative Anthropology: The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (1981) and The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology (1985). Science and Faith conceives religious revelation as a cognitive phenomenon, a method for the discovery of human truth. The anthropological truths contained in biblical and other religious texts cannot be perceived by those who treat them as ethnological artifacts. Religion remains faithful to the conception of human origin as an event, a hypothesis non-generative anthropologies refuse to consider. Gans argues that only a human science that respects this fundamental religious intuition is capable of assimilating the human self-understanding on which Western culture, including its science, is founded. This new edition of Science and Faith, with a new Preface by the author and a new Foreword by the series editor, is jargon free, requiring no detailed disciplinary knowledge, while addressing issues in anthropology, religion, philosophy of history, and linguistics. All it requires, as Marx once said, is a reader ready to think for him or herself.

Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation (Deferrals and Disciplines)

Noesis Press

The Origin of Language: A New Edition

“Mysteries should not be multiplied beyond necessity.”
The Origin of Language remains as completely original and unprecedented (and intellectually demanding and satisfying) today as when it was originally published, so much so as to constitute a kind of intellectual scandal.

Philosophy

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

The Origin of Language
remains as completely original and unprecedented (and intellectually demanding and satisfying) today
as when it was originally published, 
so much so as to constitute
a kind of intellectual scandal.

Spuyten Duyvil

At a time when there is an evident socio-economic, political and cultural structural shift in the processes and practices associated with contemporary manifestations of antisemitism globally, it is important to explore its origins and examine whether the circumstances of its genesis can shed light on its longevity and adaptability. Few scholars are more qualified to undertake such a task than the authors of this volume, who have done so much to develop and advance the discipline of generative anthropology. In this study their groundbreaking hypothesis on the singular event that gave rise to human language and by extension human culture finds a fascinating parallel in the Jewish people's discovery/invention of monotheism, giving rise to historical resentments and hostility. The volume will be of interest to scholars working in the field of anti-discrimination and antisemtitism, as well as human rights scholars and cultural historians in general.

The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism

History

Katz, Adam

World

Martinus Nijhoff

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gans, Eric. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gans, Eric

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gans, Eric. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology

Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures

The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day

Science and Faith

Carole Landis: A Most Beautiful Girl (Hollywood Legends Series)

A New Way of Thinking: Generative Anthropology in Religion, Philosophy, Art

Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation (Deferrals and Disciplines)

The Origin of Language: A New Edition

The Origin of Language: A New Edition

The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism