Ainsi mourut la fille d’Hamilcar pour avoir touché au voile de Tanit.
Thus did Hamilcar’s daughter perish for having touched the veil of Tanith.
Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô (1862)
This year’s conference, whose cultural bonuses included a ballet and a Chopin concert, as well as a visit to Warsaw’s recently opened National Library Museum, went off smoothly under the direction of GASC President Magdalena Złocka-Dąbrowska. I was particularly gratified when, on the last day of the conference, three different speakers from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University made use of GA’s originary hypothesis to reach new understandings in their fields: Magdalena herself in Anthropology, Agnieszka Burakowska in Religion, and Felicja Okulicka-Dłużewska in Artificial Intelligence.
As I have pointed out many times in these Chronicles, GA’s originary hypothesis brings together the two elements that remained apart throughout the “French Theory” era, inaugurated at the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.” Throughout this period, René Girard’s thought remained peripheral to the “deconstructive” branch of French Theory led by Jacques Derrida. But since the turn of the century, with the decline in interest in the secular notion of deconstruction, Girard’s religion-based thought has reached a new level of popularity, making GA’s synthesis potentially more accessible to a broader public—provided that interested readers are able to bracket Girard’s own dismissal of GA as a “Social-Contract Theory” in Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (Continuum, 2011).
Mimetic Desire and The Originary Hypothesis
The centerpiece of Girard’s thought, as established in his masterpiece Mensonge romantique et verité romanesque, published in 1961 during my first year at Johns Hopkins, is his notion of mimetic desire as humans’ chief source of potential conflict. By focusing on this problematic element of human relations, Girard was able to understand great “novelistic” (romanesque) literature as providing exemplary moral models for human behavior, in contrast with the “romantic lie” that encourages the individual to deny desire’s mimetic nature.
Building on Girard’s insight, generative anthropology shows how mimetic desire drove the human to distinguish itself from all other life-forms by its need to consciously defer rather than reflexively inhibit its potentially conflictive impulses. The peaceful appropriation of a common object of desire could take place only once potentially conflicting gestures of appropriation were aborted, converting them into the shared signs of designation that constitute the first signs of human language.
Sadly, Girard himself was never willing to understand to what extent his own thought was at the root of this founding anthropological vision.
Let us now return to a domain that is familiar to all the creators of French Theory, including both the Girardian and the “deconstructive” school: Sartrean existentialism, with its ontological distinction between pour-soi and en-soi, which for Sartre distinguish the human from the animal mind. This dichotomy, established in Sartre’s 1943 magnum opus L’Etre et le néant, mirrors that defined by the exclusively human possession of language. Yet Sartre’s lack of any reference to language in this context, which surprises us today, is the very mark of the Western philosophical tradition, for which language is an instrument of thought rather than a generative force worthy of attention in its own right.
No doubt Sartre saw language as unique to humans, but he would never have thought to derive the freedom of the human pour-soi from the phenomenon of language, which he saw as one artifact of this freedom among others. The pour-soi’s freedom is that of a Subject whose thought is unbound by worldly limitations, including ultimately those of language itself.
Jacques Derrida’s work was the major revelation of the Hopkins conference. Generative anthropology relies on Derrida’s notion of différance (deferral/difference) in defining the specificity of the linguistic relationship between signifier and signified, thereby allowing us to understand its subsumption under an anthropological understanding of the sign, in contrast with the merely formal relations of structural linguistics. Yet Derrida himself never addressed language as an anthropological phenomenon. His primary example of différance was as a way of understanding the speaker’s need to choose from within a paradigm of words possible in a given sentence, such as the choice of what color-word to use to describe a given object. The idea that the use of words/ideas was itself the result of the deferral of an appropriative action toward the object is absent from Derrida’s reflections on this subject.
To sum up GA’s minimal hypothesis of the origin of language as presented in these Chronicles: when a group of proto-humans are attracted to a single object (e.g., the cadaver of a large edible animal), each individual’s sacred “conscience” leads him to abort his original gesture of appropriation, thereby transforming it into a gesture of designation, that is, an (ostensive) sign—subsequent to which the contested object can be divided equally among the members of the group. Language is in the first place a means of preventing conflict over a claim of possession, replacing it by a mutually shared and understood sign that temporarily “sacralizes” the desired object, deferring its appropriation by any individual until its equal division can be carried out by the group. Ceremonies of food-sharing remain as much an element of human life today as they were, in this hypothesis, for the first humans.
Why has this simple explanation of language origin never previously occurred to those who have reflected over the millennia on this question? And why has the originary hypothesis, whose first version I presented in The Origin of Language (TOOL—UC Press, 1981), met with so underwhelming a reception? The most obvious explanation is that the very idea of explaining in anthropological terms what was originally experienced as an effect of the sacred bears a stigma of sacrilege. For if the sign is indeed the first manifestation of the sacred, then to explain it in practical terms is a violation of what we have always understood to be beyond worldly explanation.
The Scene of Language
Let us now recall my earlier point about Sartre’s pour-soi/en-soi distinction’s purporting to define the specific difference between human and prehuman intelligence without the least reference to language. Somehow we are asked to believe that the sense of separation, metaphorized as the “empty space” or néant separating the human subject from the objects of his perception—in contrast with what is presented as an absence of such space between the animal and what it perceives in its surroundings—is wholly unrelated to the fact that humans use language to refer to objects of perception while animals do not. Indeed, the absolute nature of this distinction is constantly contested by ethologists, who refer to animal communication via aural, olfactory, visible… signals as forms of language, admittedly less “advanced” than human languages, but not of a fundamentally different nature.
All these refusals to understand the significance of the originary hypothesis can be understood as denials of the underlying ontological distinction between the human and the non-human, which is based on deferral and its resulting scenicity, the sense of implicit separation among human subjects that embodies the human sense of the sacred—and permits the flourishing of cultures that allow linguistic and related forms of communication to mediate relations among humans and the objects of their interest/desire.
The famous rule established in 1866 by the Société Linguistique de Paris that:
la Société n’admet aucune communication concernant, soit l’origine du langage — soit la création d’une langue universelle
the Society does not allow any communication concerning either the origin of language, or the creation of a universal language
which places in parallel the utopian project of a “universal language” and the fundamental anthropological task of explaining the existence of real human languages, makes clear that the taboo on the latter project cannot simply be explained as an attempt to eliminate fantasy. On the contrary, it would be difficult to demonstrate more clearly the Société’s sense of the blasphemous nature of the attempt to reveal the secret of human language, which it is preferable simply to ignore than to seek to state it in affirmative worldly terms.
And thus the many books that claim to describe the origin of human language inevitably refuse to accept and explain its qualitative difference from animal communication systems—a point that I have discussed in reference to a number of such books in these Chronicles over the years; see for example “Conceiving Language Origin” (https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw528/).
Given the role of language as the most unambiguous sign of humanity, the world’s refusal to recognize what is objectively the simplest explanation of its emergence demonstrates the persistent power of the sacred as the means through which the human protects itself from the dangers of desire.
That, over 40 years after the publication of TOOL, only a handful of people have any idea of the originary hypothesis and its significance should suffice to convince the reader that the “secret” of the human/non-human distinction is really quite simple. It is the denial of this simplicity that explains its invisibility. In a word, it is the power of the sacred that resists what is experienced as the revelation of its secret—as when, in the last sentence of Flaubert’s Carthaginian novel, Salammbô dies from having touched the veil of Tanith.
It was René Girard who first pointed out the critical nature of the conflicts arising from the emergence of mimetic desire—conflicts for which only human language could provide a solution, or more precisely, a deferral. But sadly, the simple meaning of John’s revision of Genesis: En arché en ho logos—In the beginning was the Word/Language—eluded Girard, so that he was never fully able to separate the sacred, through which the human conscience expresses its love as rejection of rivalry with its fellows, from the violence incurred by disobedience to the sacred.
It is the taboo on understanding the sacred itself that remains the greatest obstacle to human self-knowledge. Yet I dare hope the reader will agree with me that the mystery of human language need no longer remain hidden behind Tanith’s veil.