Eric Lawrence Gans (born August 21, 1941) is an American philosophical anthropologist and literary theorist. Gans established a human science called generative anthropology (GA), which is based on the hypothesis that representation, language—insofar as it is the most fundamental form of representationEric Gans, The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 29-31.—and the human species—insofar as it is defined against other animal species by its unique possession of language—could only have originated in an event, and which explains culture—insofar as it constitutes systems of representationsGans, The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation, 4.—as the "generative"Per Gans the word "generative" here should not be understood in the sense of Noam Chomsky's generative grammar but in that of the French word génétique i.e., pertaining to genesis and generation. See Eric Gans, "Learning from Chomsky," Chronicles of Love and Resentment, January 9, 2016, https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw504/. development of this event.
Gans claims that GA serves as a better foundation for the human sciences than the alternatives of (a) the natural sciencesPer Gans this includes the social sciences, which ultimately adopt empirical methodologies in emulation of the natural sciences. See Gans, The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation, 4-5. and (b) religion as it: (a) actually explains the origin of language unlike the natural sciences, which, by "explaining" it in terms of human language gradually emerging from non-human animal sign systems—ultimately in an attempt to ignore the uniqueness of human language—do not actually explain it at all;Eric Gans, Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation (Savage, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), 2, 7-9, 21. and (b) nevertheless remains consistent with the natural sciences unlike religion, which, despite actually explaining the origin of language, makes recourse to the supernatural in its explanations.Gans, Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation, 13, 21.
Gans edits Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology, an academic journal devoted to GA. He also publishes the Chronicles of Love and Resentment, a weblog dedicated to his reflections on a range of topics including popular culture, film, contemporary politics, philosophy and religion.
Gans has taught and published on 19th century literature, literary theory and film in the UCLA Department of French and Francophone studies.
Life Eric Lawrence Gans was born on 21 August 1941 in Parkchester, the Bronx to a middle-class Jewish family.Eric Gans, "Prolegomenon to an intellectual autobiography," Chronicles of Love and Resentment, April 15, 2023, https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw769/.
In 1957 Gans graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. In the same year he attended Columbia College. During his first year he majored in mathematics before switching to French at the end of his second. In 1960 he graduated with a BA in French. In the same year he attended Johns Hopkins University. During this period he studied with René Girard, who directed his dissertation on the early works of Gustave Flaubert. In 1961 he received an MA in Romance languages and in 1966 a PhD. From 1965-67 he taught at SUNY at Fredonia and from 1967-69 at Indiana University.
In 1969 Gans started teaching at UCLA. During this period he continued studying with Girard and was introduced to Batesonian psychology, particularly the notion of "pragmatic paradox" in Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas and Donald deAvila Jackson's Pragmatics of Human Communication (1967), which influenced his own notion of "esthetic paradox" in Musset et le drame tragique (1974), Le Paradoxe de Phèdre (1975) and Essais d'esthétique paradoxale (1977). In 1976 he received full professorship and from 1974-77 sat as chairman of UCLA's French and Francophone Studies Department. In 1977 he was invited by Girard to Johns Hopkins as a visiting professor. At the end of his visit he conceived the germ of GA by combining his notions of esthetic paradox and the "ostensive sign"See Eric Gans, "L'origine des structures linguistiques élémentaires," Archives et documents de la société d’histoire et d’épistémologie des sciences du langage 4, (1984): 1-21. with Girard's notion of the scapegoat mechanism in La violence et le sacré (1972). Upon returning from Johns Hopkins he started writing The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (1981).Eric Gans, "Origins of Generative Anthropology," Chronicles of Love and Resentment. April 22, 2023, https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw770/.
In 1981, the same year that The Origin of Language was published, Gans resat as chairman of UCLA's French Department. In the subsequent years he elaborated and refined his hypothesis in a series of works starting with The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology (1985). In 1987 he started teaching seminars on GA. Later, in 2010, alumni of these seminars would found the Generative Anthropology Society & Conference (GASC), of which Gans is an honorary member. In 1990 UCLA's French Department held its first GA colloquium, which featured Marvin Harris as keynote speaker. In 1994, as a result of the activity of GA seminar alumni, the MLA held a session on GA at its annual meeting. In 1995 Gans co-founded Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology, a scholarly journal devoted to GA. During the 90s he sponsored a series of talks at the UCLA Society for the Study of Religion, which was chaired by David C. Rapoport.Gans, "Origins of Generative Anthropology." In 2007 he was honored with distinguished professor status. In 2014 he resigned from his professorship after being found in violation of UCLA's sexual misconduct policy.Jacob Preal, "Professor emeritus found to have violated UC sexual misconduct policy," Daily Bruin, February 28, 2017, https://new.dailybruin.com/post/professor-emeritus-found-to-have-violated-uc-sexual-misconduct-policy. Since 2015 he has assumed distinguished professor emeritus status.
Generative anthropology
Bibliography Books and monographs The Discovery of Illusion: Flaubert's Early Works, 1835–37. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. . Un Pari contre l'histoire: les premières nouvelles de Mérimée (Mosaïque). Paris: Minard (Lettres modernes), 1972. Musset et le drame tragique. Paris: J. Corti, 1974. Le Paradoxe de Phèdre suivi du "Paradoxe constitutif du roman." Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1975. . Essais d'esthétique paradoxale. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. . The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. . The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. . Madame Bovary: The End of Romance. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989. . Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation. Savage, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990. . Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993. . Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997. . The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2007. . Carole Landis: A Most Beautiful Girl. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008. . A New Way of Thinking: Generative Anthropology in Religion, Philosophy, Art. Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group Publishers, 2011. . The Girardian Origins of Generative Anthropology. Imitatio/Amazon Digital Services, 2012. bijela krivnja / white guilt. Zagreb, Croatia: Kršćanska Sadašnjost, 2013. . Les fleurs du mal: a new translation. New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2015. . Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation (2nd ed.). Aurora, Colo.: Noesis Press, 2015. . (with Adam Katz) The First Shall Be The Last: Rethinking Antisemitism. Leiden: Brill/Martinus Nijhoff, 2015. . The Origin of Language: A New Edition. New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2019. .
Selected articles "Differences." Modern Language Notes 96, no. 4 (May 1981): 792-808. https://doi.org/10.2307/2905837. "The Culture of Resentment." Philosophy and Literature 8, no. 1 (April 1984): 55-66. https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.1984.0043. "The Unique Source of Religion and Morality." Anthropoetics 1, no. 1 (June 1995). http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0101/gans. "Mimetic Paradox and the Event of Human Origin." Anthropoetics 1, no. 2 (December 1995). http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0102/mimesis. "Plato and the Birth of Conceptual Thought." Anthropoetics 2, no. 2 (January 1997). http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/Ap0202/plato. "The Holocaust and the Victimary Revolution." In Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding, and Textuality, edited by Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries, 123-39. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. "Originary Narrative." Anthropoetics 3, no. 2 (February 1998). http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0302/narrative. "The Little Bang: The Early Origin of Language." Anthropoetics 5, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1999). http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0501/gans-2. "The Sacred and the Social: Defining Durkheim's Anthropological Legacy." Anthropoetics 6, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2000). http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0601/durkheim. "The Body Sacrificial." In The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification, edited by Tobin Siebers, 159-78. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. "Originary Democracy and the Critique of Pure Fairness." In The Democratic Experience and Political Violence, edited by David C. Rapoport and Leonard Weinberg, 308-24. London; Portland: F. Cass, 2001. (with Ammar Abdulhamid) "A Dialogue on the Middle East and Other Subjects." Anthropoetics 7, no. 2 (Fall 2001/Winter 2002). http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0702/dialog. "The Market and Resentment." In Passions in Economy, Politics, and the Media, edited by Wolfgang Palaver and Petra Steinmar-Pösel, 85-102. Vienna: Lit Verlag, 2005. "White Guilt, Past and Future." Anthropoetics 12, no. 2 (Fall 2006/Winter 2007). http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1202/wg. "On Firstness" and "Generative Anthropology and Bronx Romanticism." In The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, edited by Adam Katz, 45-57 and 153-64. Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group Publishers, 2007. "Generative Anthropology: A New Way of Thinking?" Anthropoetics 13, no. 2 (Special GATE Issue, Fall 2007). http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1302/1302gans. "On the One Medium." In Mimesis, Movies, and Media (Violence, Desire, and the Sacred 3), edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge, 7-15. New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. "World War II and the Victimary Era." In Apocalypse Deferred: Girard and Japan, edited by Jeremiah L. Alberg, 41-54. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2017. "Generative Anthropology." In The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion, edited by James Alison and Wolfgang Palaver, 447-53. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. "The Screenic." In Mimetic Theory and Film, edited by Paolo Bubbio and Chris Fleming, 109-21. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. "In the Beginning Was the Word: Generative Anthropology as a Religious Anthropology." In Generative Anthropology as Transdisciplinary Inquiry: Religion, Science, Language & Culture, edited by Magdalena Zlocka-Dabrowska and Beata Gaj, 21-34. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2018.
See also Fundamental anthropology Deconstruction
Notes
References Gans, Eric. The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Gans, Eric. Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation. Savage, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990. Gans, Eric. "Prolegomenon to an intellectual autobiography." Chronicles of Love and Resentment. April 15, 2023. https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw769/.