In the sciences, one does research by confronting new empirical phenomena, be they elements of physical or social reality. And to the extent that anthropology is a science, it must operate in this manner, by the examination of data relevant to some aspect of human culture.
Yet alongside the realm of empirical science, there is a key role for a generative anthropology tasked with constructing according to Occam’s razor a hypothetical scenario of the emergence of humanity.
In Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999), Roy Rappaport proposed language and religion as the coeval defining characteristics of the human. Taking this as our point of departure, generative anthropology seeks to define the parameters of this common birth. Save that in Rappaport’s formulation, we have replaced religion, which implies an established institution, with the collective/individual intuition of the sacred as the foundation on which religious institutions are constructed.
The human experience of both language and the sacred takes place on a scene on which worldly, practical activity is for the moment suspended. To use language, one defers physical interaction with a referent in referring to it by a sign. To experience a worldly being or person as sacred likewise is to separate it from everyday reality, such that actual contact with it, as in the Christian ceremony of communion, is experienced as miraculous.
Jacques Derrida’s neologism différance nicely captures the scenic separation inherent in both language and the sacred by taking advantage of the fact that in French, différer means both to differ and to defer. Derrida indeed exemplified this concept in a speaker’s need to defer his choice of a word in order to compare the different members of a paradigm, for example, in choosing the correct name of a color; but he failed to recognize it as the very principle of language, in which physical appropriation of an object is deferred in favor of designation by means of something different: the sign.
I believe that the authentic source of Derrida’s fame in the French Theory era was not his facility with cleverly named concepts, but what was in fact a powerful anthropological intuition. For it is indeed in the space of deferral, of the conscious renunciation of worldly interaction, that acts of language and worship take place; acts whose object, be it a linguistic referent or a sacred being, is conceived on a mental scene that defers such interaction for the sake of contemplation.
The colloquium “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” co-directed by René Girard and Richard Macksey at the Johns Hopkins University in October 1966, by bringing to the US a number of adepts of French nouvelle critique—far more influenced by philosophy and the contemporary social sciences than Anglo-American “new criticism”—set the stage for a significant intellectual movement that would come to be known as “French Theory.” It would flourish in American universities from the time of the colloquium through the early 1990s, beginning its decline with the American victory in the Cold War that some saw as the “end of history.” By reconceiving what had previously been studied as “literary history” as a revelatory aspect of anthropological evolution, this movement generated excitement in both Humanities and Social Science departments. The study of literary texts—and by extension, other art-forms—was increasingly understood as providing a privileged access to the core of human uniqueness, or, to use Girard’s term, “fundamental anthropology.”
Although the term “French Theory” is seldom heard today, rather than dismissing it as one intellectual fad among many, I believe that this movement should be understood as a major step toward a truly fundamental anthropology effectively defining the human in terms of Rappaport’s twin rubrics of language and the sacred: by no means the “end of history,” but a great stride toward a new fundamental understanding of ourselves.
The American academics who lionized Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault displayed little interest in Girard, whose analysis of mimetic desire in his 1961 masterpiece, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, was seen as a brilliant piece of literary scholarship rather than as a major step toward a minimal definition of the human. And when, beginning with La violence et le sacré in 1972, Girard came to take an explicit interest in anthropological matters, his insistence on the exemplarity of “emissary murder” or communal lynching, which he saw (no doubt on the model of the Crucifixion) as the originary act of the human community, led to his identification with the “scapegoat mechanism,” rather than with the far more significant analyses of Mensonge romantique that defined the lives of literary protagonists by their need to transcend the strictures of mimetic desire.
For it is not difficult to extrapolate from Girard’s analyses in the earlier book the conclusion that mimetic desire, the product of our ancestors’ growing intelligence, could no longer be successfully restrained by the Pavlovian mechanism of reflexive inhibitions such as those that prevent male animals from killing each other in mating duels—that a wholly new conscious restraint had become necessary—in a word, that our need to counter the dangers of mimetic desire was what made us human.
The path to the true appreciation of Girard’s intuition of the fundamental role of mimetic desire in the human condition requires that we reject his vision of originary violence and instead conceive of the first authentically human act as the deferral of violence. In the serial pattern of ape distributions, the Alpha animal takes from the prey what he wants and leaves the rest for the Beta animal, and so on down the hierarchy, each step of which is established through pairwise challenges. In contrast, the originary hypothesis of Generative Anthropology proposes that when a group of proto-human hunters/scavengers encounter a prey to be divided, at a certain moment in history, the force of mimetic desire can no longer be restrained by reflexive inhibition, and the hunters all reach at the same time for the animal… at which point, seeking to forestall the conflicts perhaps experienced on previous occasions, first one and then another becomes conscious of the need to abort his attempt at possession, and as a consequence, the members of the group end up pointing at the animal, designating it to each other by an ostensive gesture.
This pointing gesture is the birth of language—and of the human. Each displays to his fellows what amounts to the first sign, a gesture that sacralizes its referent by conceiving it on a scene where none of the participants have the individual capacity to possess it. The event would presumably conclude with the emergence of an accord, ultimately shared by all, to divide the prey equally among them, as is done after a hunt in today’s hunter-gatherer societies. Occam’s razor obliges us to conceive these fundamental elements of the human in a minimal context, rather than add potential causal factors such as the acquisition of weapons or a drive toward “domestication.”
It is in the deferral of appetitive action that Derrida’s “philosophical” notion of différance finds its anthropological basis. Humanity originates as a conscious community whose members have become able to defer their desire for a common object of desire by designating/sacralizing it by means of a sign.
Language and the sacred originate when the intensification of mimetic desire obliges its subjects to accede for their very survival to a new human world in which deferral/difference gives rise to what we call our conscience: a sense of a sacred interdiction obliging the individual to renounce his attempt at possession. Yet on a given occasion, the will to carry out this renunciation may not be forthcoming—whence the expulsion of the originary couple from Eden.
Conclusion
The idea of constructing a fundamental anthropology around the origin of language would have been inconceivable in the absence of either of the two branches of French Theory. Girard’s notion of mimetic desire defined the perturbing factor that made “instinctive” animal behavior incapable of regulating human conduct, and Derrida’s notion of deferral/différance pointed to the mechanism that, motivated by our ancestors’ growing sense of sacred interdiction, allowed our ancestors to avoid the potential conflict inherent in mimetic desire by substituting a sign for an worldly act of appropriation. In this way, Generative Anthropology’s originary hypothesis describes the simultaneous birth of the two elements of the human posited by Rappaport: language and the sacred, the sign, together with its motivation by the sense of sacred interdiction that provokes the originary deferral of appropriation.