Eric Gans

Eric Lawrence Gans
Eric Gans at Tokyo GASC in 2012
Born	(1941-08-21) August 21, 1941 (age 75)
Occupation	Professor of French Literature, Literary Critic, theorist,
Subject	Generative Anthropology, Philosophy of Language, French Literature, Film

Eric Lawrence Gans (born August 21, 1941) is an American literary scholar, philosopher of language, and cultural anthropologist. Since 1969, he has taught, and published on, 19th century literature, critical theory, and film in the UCLA Department of French and Francophone studies.

Gans invented a new science of human culture and origins he calls Generative Anthropology, based on the idea that the origin of language was a singular event and that the history of human culture is a genetic or "generative" development of that event. In a series of books and articles beginning with The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (1981) Gans has developed his ideas about human culture, language, and origins. In 1995, Gans founded (and continues to edit) the web-based journal Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology as a scholarly forum for research into human culture and origins based on Generative Anthropology and the closely related Fundamental Anthropology of René Girard. Since 1995, Gans has web-published his Chronicles of Love and Resentment, consisting of reflections on everything from popular culture, film, post-modernism, economics, contemporary politics, the Holocaust, philosophy, religion, and paleoanthropology. In 2010, the Generative Anthropology Society & Conference was created for sponsoring annual conferences dedicated to Generative Anthropology.

Generative Anthropology grew out of Gans' association with Girard at Johns Hopkins University. Gans was Girard’s first doctoral student, receiving his PhD in 1966. But it was only on the publication of Violence and the Sacred in 1972 that Gans became interested in Girard's idea of mimetic desire and the connection between violence and the sacred in Girard's work. The concept of mimetic desire forms one of the cornerstones of Generative Anthropology. Girard argues that human desire is essentially cultural or social in nature, and thus distinct from mere appetite, which is biological. For Girard, desire is triangular in structure, an imitation of the desire of another. Desire, therefore, leads to conflict, when two individuals attempt to possess the same object. In a group, this mimetic conflict typically escalates into a mimetic crisis which threatens the very existence of the group. For Girard, this conflict is resolved by the scapegoat mechanism, in which the destructive energies of the group are purged through the violence directed towards an arbitrarily selected victim. Girard sees the scapegoating mechanism as the origin of human culture and language.