I
The reader might wonder at my frequent reformulation with minor refinements of the originary hypothesis of Generative Anthropology. I cannot claim to have discovered the origin of language/religion/culture in the sense that a paleontologist discovers the skeleton of a new species of dinosaur. What I propose is a minimal hypothesis of the emergence of humanity, as defined by our ancestors crossing the “Rubicon” into a new sphere of interaction, characterized by (1) the voluntary interruption or deferral of a Pavlovian/“instinctive” act of appropriation, driven by the growing strength of what René Girard called “mimetic desire” that intensifies rivalry among those attracted to the same object, and (2) the designation—to be shared by others—of the deferred object of this appropriation by a sign, that is, of universal value to the proto-human community that forms around it and worthy of its unanimous contemplative attention. The aborted individual gestures of appropriation, by pointing to the object, each acquire the characteristics of an ostensive sign. Think of the gestures of two partygoers, both about to take the last canapé from a plate, who hesitate on seeing each other. The untouchable status of the object, extended to the community as a whole, is the origin of the sacred.
Given that the sign, in contrast with the original appropriative gesture, can be imitated without conflict by others, the scene thus created may be stabilized/ritualized by its repetition by the entire group. This is the minimal form of a scene of worshipful or religious attention paid by a community to a sacred central figure, whose eventual appropriation for alimentary or other purposes can only emerge as a communal effort.
What is essential to note is that the originary forms of both language and worship, the twin foundations of humanity, whose coevality Roy Rappaport postulated in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999), involve the static communal or scenic contemplation of a central object of attention.
The neologism différance first appeared in an essay published in Théorie d’ensemble (Seuil, 1968) by the late 20th century philosopher Jacques Derrida, a leading thinker of the era of French Theory in the US and in France. Derrida’s coinage takes advantage of the fact that in French, différer means both to differ and to defer. The point is that we first discover difference in the logical/semantic sense of distinguishing among different concepts and the signs that designate them through deferring the formerly reflexive act of attempting to appropriate what one finds appetitively attractive. It is through deferral in this sense that one is driven to contemplate the object of interest and thereby mark its distinction from other objects—in short, to begin the process of semiosis: the praxis of the philosopher.
Yet in Derrida’s essay, différance is presented as an always-already feature of a paradigm, a set of signs understood as potentially filling a “slot” in a sentence, such as a set of color-words from which the speaker must defer his choice in order to select the one that best describes a given object, rather than, as it must have been in its originary function, simply permitting the subject to focus freely on the object independently of instinctual drives, a phenomenon necessarily prior to the constitution of any differential paradigm.
In consequence, Derrida’s insight has not to my knowledge been applied to the analysis of the origin of language and culture in general. The simple fact is that no one appears to have previously pointed out that the originary use of a linguistic sign must be the result of conceiving the sign’s referent as (1) desirable (or “of interest”) and (2) improper/morally wrong for any individual to appropriate, thus implying that such appropriation must be deferred to a communal decision/distribution.
Hence we can state as the foundation of Generative Anthropology that the (linguistic/semiotic) sign is the consequence of this différance. And thus the pointing gesture that is the result of the abortion of an act of appropriation is “naturally” understood by the human spectator as an ostensive sign, a phenomenon (described as “joint shared attention”) that does not occur naturally among animals, even the great apes.
That the sacred and the significant both derive from this deferred act of appropriation is obvious once one understands that the stasis thus brought about is the freedom of what Sartre called the pour-soi, transferring Hegel’s term für-sich from the purely conceptual realm to that of the scenic, the terrain on which a desired object is contemplated following the abortion of an act of possession.
In Chronicle 806 I discussed the probable influence on Sartre’s 1943 masterpiece L’étre et le néant of the Buddhist notion of nothingness/Nirvana as a space of liberation. What appeared normal in 1943, yet particularly surprising in the light of the ontology developed here, is that Sartre never reflected on the dependence of this liberation on the deferral of appropriative action, whose stasis makes possible the scenic state of contemplation—in which the unapproachable referent takes on the quality of sacrality, interdiction, inspired by the real or virtual symmetrical presence of (equally desiring) others with respect to the object. As a result, neither in L’être et le néant or elsewhere did Sartre ever connect the unique “liberty” he attributes to the human pour-soi with our unique gift of language.
The conception of semiotic communication as originating in the deferral of appropriation is the sole theorization that unites (1) the insight of René Girard—derived from literary analysis—into the foundational importance of desire as a mimetic or “contagious” phenomenon, one attested by the multiplication in the proto-human brain of “mirror neurons,” beginning with the higher apes; and (2) the philosophical insights of Sartre and Derrida that describe a contemplative state (which we claim reflects the deferral of appropriative action) in which the emitter of a sign designates to his fellows the worldly reality that is the sign’s referent.
We all understand that the concept of sacrality imposes on the human community an interdiction of seeking to possess the object or creature it invests; but what had never before been clearly explained is that at its root this state of interdiction is common to both the forbidden sacred object and the “deferred” referent of a sign. Indeed, reading Sartre’s discussion of the pour-soi in the light of this elucidation makes it impossible to ignore that both the sacred and the significant are dependent on the non-appropriative différance between subject and object.
To sum up, the common foundation of language and the sacred in différance/deferral is the basis of human culture—the root of all that is specifically human. This is a foundational proposition of anthropology. It does not state an empirical fact, but affirms an essence: the human is what depends on this sacred/semiotic mechanism for all its modes of cultural creation and interaction—in the first place, language and religion. For sacralization is so to speak the passage to infinity of the mechanism of deferral found in ordinary signification.
II
But, you may be thinking, I have already said this in ten different ways; why should we pay attention to the eleventh? My answer is that twenty years ago everyone spoke of Derrida and deconstruction—now they all speak of Girard and mimetic desire. This is in a way a kind of progress; yet in another it is not. For Derrida’s sophistication cannot be thrown away for the sake of Girard’s simplicity. Of the two, no doubt Girard’s anthropology is the more fundamental; but his failure to appreciate the importance of language and its origin in deferral, in contrast with his preoccupation with the violent excesses of emissary murder in which mimetic desire overcomes the restraints of civilization, continues to limit the applicability of his fundamental insight.
Girard’s Mensonge romantique et verité romanesque (Grasset, 1961) is a great book because it discovers in the modern novel a model of human salvation through the overcoming of the romantic lie that denies the need to defer our mimetic temptations in favor of our common purpose: the perpetuation of our species through the continued refashioning of the means for the deferral of violence. But the apocalyptic tone of much of his later work, however apparently justified by events, abandons the positive humanism of his masterpiece for a pessimism in which deferral through signs and worship is neglected in favor of an insistent focus on violence itself and on the fear that it will be ultimately victorious.
Perhaps it will be; our attempts at theorizing are unlikely to change the world’s course. But I will evoke once more the example of Pascal’s pari, his bet on God’s benevolence—and in consequence, on that of the world in its ultimate reality—and affirm that our task as humans is to wager on this benevolence, for only thus can we do our very best to ensure our survival.
Whether with Generation Z modern humanity, as reflected in its negative birth rate and growing susceptibility to antisemitism, may have already started on the path of self-annihilation, we can only do our best on the premise implicit in Pascal’s pari: that the universe is oriented/was created in function of at least permitting our fulfillment; that the power, conscious or unconscious, that drives it has allowed us to become (as far as we know) its most advanced creatures, better adapted to it than any others. We must reject the apocalyptic intuition that we have overstayed our welcome and are fated to perish.
For what good would it do to prepare ourselves for our disappearance? Even were this somehow inevitable, we will still do best to follow Dylan Thomas’ deathbed advice to his father, to
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.