The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day 9780804779586

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the scenic imagination

The Scenic Imagination Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day

Eric Gans

stanford university press stanford, california 2008

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2008 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gans, Eric Lawrence, 1941–   The scenic imagination : originary thinking from Hobbes to the present day / Eric Gans.    p.  cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-8047-5700-3 (alk. paper)   1. Anthropology—Philosophy.  2.  Language and languages—Philosophy. 3.  Philosophy, Modern—History.  4. Europe—Intellectual life. I.  Title. GN33.G353 2008 301.01—dc22 2007007303

To Stacey, who made me read all those philosophers

Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction

1

part i. the scene liberated 1. The Enlightenment: From Hobbes to Condillac

23

2. Rousseau

46

3. Alternative Anthropologies: Vico and Herder

66

4. Kant’s Aesthetic Anthropology

77

part ii. the scene embodied 5. Ending the Enlightenment

99

6. Scenes of Philosophy

113

7. Scenes of Human Science

140

Conclusion: The Scenic Imagination Lost and Found

177

Notes

211

Index

217

Preface

This book brings together a series of studies of the “scenic imagination.” Although they were composed over a number of years, I think their unity is apparent. A number of these chapters began as lectures in my generative anthropology seminar; I am grateful to my students at UCLA and especially to those who made the trip from Irvine to attend. An earlier version of the chapter on Kant’s aesthetics appeared as “Originary and/or Kantian Aesthetics,” Poetica (Munich) 35, 3–4 (2003): 335–53. Eric Gans June 2007

the scenic imagination

Introduction

The approach to the human that I call generative anthropology can be traced back to my visiting professorship at Johns Hopkins University in 1978. René Girard’s Things Hidden since the Foundation of the Earth had just appeared, presenting for the first time Girard’s conception of the anthropological significance of Christianity. Our conversations stimulated me to sharpen my own anthropological ideas both in conjunction with and in distinction from his. The first expression of these ideas was The Origin of Language (1981), supplemented a few years later by The End of Culture (1985), where I used the term generative anthropology for the first time. I have continued to develop and elaborate this conception in a number of books and articles, as well as in the Chronicles of Love and Resentment. My thesis is that human experience, as opposed to that of other animals, is uniquely characterized by scenic events recalled both collectively and individually through representations, the most fundamental of which are the signs of language. It is significant that the primary meaning of the Greek word skene is not the stage itself but the hut or tent into which the actor retired to change his costume; the term later came to designate the stage building that provided a backdrop for the stage. That the “inside” of the scenic operation gave its name to its external surface and then metonymically to the scene as a whole reflects the profound intuition that

   Introduction skene and stage are internal and external versions of the same locus: the empty space—Sartre’s néant—in which representations appear, the scene of representation. Every occurrence on the human scene, in distinction from the comings and goings of the animal world, is a unique event, a singularity that has its place in the series of singularities we call history. If the human is indeed a series of scenic events—the notion of event entailing that its participants are aware that they are, here and now, participating in it along with their fellows—then the human must have originated in an event, the representation of which, the first example of language and “culture,” is part of the originary scene itself. I call this the originary hypothesis. My explanation for why this originary event occurred is that language and culture emerge not simply as products of our superior intelligence but with the explicit function of momentarily preventing or deferring an outbreak of violence. Deferral translates Jacques Derrida’s insightful neologism différance, which exploits the fact that the French verb différer means both differ and defer to suggest that the differences that constitute language serve to defer violence, the breakdown of social differentiation.1 I hypothesize that our originary use of representation creates a “sacred” difference between a significant object and the rest of the universe, insulating it at the center of the scene from the potential violence of the rivalrous desires on the scenic periphery. The violence is deferred, not eliminated; the central object, through the sacred interdiction conferred on it by the sign, becomes a focus of still greater desire and therefore of potential violence, which must in turn be deferred if the community created by the act of representation is to survive. Prehuman modes of authority and communication are one-onone; they do not construct a center and a periphery. When an alarm call from a single animal is heard by a number of others, they each hear and act on the call “instinctively” rather than forming a circle to listen to it and interpret it. But at a certain threshold of mimetic intelligence, the pecking-order hierarchy that is the principle of protohuman social organization (as exemplified in various ways in primate societies) can no longer operate; the alpha animal can face down the beta animal, but not the community as a whole. When the appetitive attention of a group of protohumans becomes focused on a single object, it becomes too danger-

Introduction    ous to be appropriated by even the most powerful among them. At this point, the old hierarchy is suspended and the appropriative gesture of the alpha animal, as of all the others, is aborted. I postulate that in the originary event, this aborted gesture is performed and understood, first presumably by a single member of the group (perhaps the dethroned “alpha” himself ) whose interpretation spreads through the group by mimetic contagion, as both designating the object as desirable and at the same time renouncing its exclusive possession. The aborted gesture is thus a sign that re-presents or names the central object in its inaccessibility; to make it the object of a sign and to sacralize it are originally the same operation.2 Through the mediation of the sign, all participants can imaginarily possess the object, and this common possession permits its division in equivalent parts in the subsequent tearing-apart or sparagmos, where each can take part in both appropriating and destroying the object without fear of giving the appearance of desiring its totality for himself. The sign that designates the inaccessible center may be called the originary name-of-God. What humanity has from the beginning designated as God is not the object that occupies the center of the circle but the Being of the center itself, which subsists after the destruction of its original inhabitant and whose will, conceived as the force that held the circle and its center in equilibrium at the moment of the emission of the sign, guarantees the sign’s timeless meaning. What we understand as God’s immortality is of the same nature as that of the sign, which belongs to an ontological universe beyond mortality to which we have access through the scene of representation. Symbolic reference cannot derive from the “horizontal” relation of appetite; it entails a “vertical” relationship of différance that is at the same time one of interdiction. The sign substitutes for the thing only because the thing itself cannot be appropriated. But this interdiction only increases the participants’ desire; the energy invested in this desire maintains the attraction between center and periphery that constitutes the uniquely human phenomenon of the scene. All ritual, including the secular rites of art, reproduces the same originary formal structure. Similarly, what we call the imaginary is a mise-en-scène before an implicit audience on a scene of representation internalized within the mind. The originary scene is the singularity that gives rise to the human,

   Introduction but every subsequent scenic event is in principle singular and memorable. The point of the term generative anthropology is that the scene of representation generates the meaning and structure that characterize the human. Among the representations that can appear on the scene of representation is that of the generative scene itself. I shall call the faculty that carries out this self-representation of the scene the scenic imagination. It is this faculty that makes it so easy for us to imagine scenes of origin for the institutions of human culture as well as other phenomena we whimsically treat by analogy, as in those “just-so” stories that conceive a scene of origin for the giraffe’s neck or the elephant’s trunk. We easily conceive meanings as generated within collective scenes because that is how culture has always operated, and it operates that way because it began that way. It is a common mistake to reject the scenic imagination out of hand as “unscientific,” as though the scenic could be reduced to a set of simpler neurological or genetic phenomena more amenable to scientific study. It is the purpose of this book to examine the intellectual context within Western thought, beginning with the Enlightenment, in which this error has been both accepted and challenged, although never before specifically described. The originary hypothesis cannot be demonstrated by an appeal to direct evidence. A modern time-traveler transported back in time to the event of human origin would no doubt be able to identify its configuration as a scene distinguishable from any occurrence among even our closest nonhuman relatives, but our traveler could not be sure that this was the first time such a scene had occurred. Yet its indemonstrability does not diminish the heuristic value of the hypothesis for the study of the workings of human culture, to which it lends a new coherence. v The originary hypothesis has no prerequisites either in esoteric knowledge or in philosophical reflection; anyone might have formulated it as soon as the language was available to do so. That this is not the case—that human culture has not been focused on the task of formulating a hypothesis of human origin in the most parsimonious terms—is itself a cultural phenomenon that requires explanation. Ultimately, religious creation myths as well as the more recent secu-

Introduction    lar uses of the scenic imagination are nothing more than less parsimonious formulations of the same originary hypothesis. But the importance of parsimony in this case is not a mere matter of minimizing the number of variables in an equation. In contrast with the accretions that Ockham’s razor can pare away, the minimal hypothesis is the core of the human. In the genesis of the human world of representation, nominalism is indistinguishable from realism. As derivatives of the originary configuration, all cultural phenomena have the same underlying structure; it is the historical implementations of this structure that reveal the possibilities latent within it. As new experiences in social exchange make visible still newer possibilities of human interaction, the history of human self-consciousness is marked by a series of locally irreversible revelations concerning the originary scene and its nature. The overall path of these successive revelations in the West, although far from rectilinear, has been from the more to the less sacrificial—the less dependent on faith in the central Being’s demand for the renewal of the sparagmos in order to refresh the mutual bond that permitted the favorable resolution of the originary “prisoner’s dilemma.” The relatively more independent variable is not the (cultural) evolution of the scene of representation itself, whether in religious ritual or art, but the evolution of economic and political exchange relations in the “secular” world outside the scene. The perceived rationality of the exchange system makes the central control of desire less necessary. With the emergence of modern market society, desacralization reaches the point where the collective communication with the central will that we call religion no longer plays a major role in the lives of large sectors of society and even of certain nations. Alternatively, the “personal God” that incarnates the central will may adapt itself to this rationalization, which can never altogether eliminate the potential violence of resentment, by rationalizing sacrifice itself as the charitable renunciation of satisfaction in the service of others rather than the violent renewal of the sparagmos. Roughly speaking, these two adaptations to modern rationality are respectively those of Western Europe and of the United States. In the most highly sacralized community, all power is attributed by the periphery to the center; it is at this end of the scale that one finds human sacrifice. Before the sparagmos, the victim/divinity is an object

   Introduction of resentment for its resistance to the group; afterward, it is as the shared representative of the central Being that it unifies the group. Throughout, the unanimously chosen victim attracts the mimetic energy of the community, deferring potential violence on the periphery. At the other end of the scale is a society built around the free market. Here the “center” serves only as a reminder of the virtual unity of the participants, who need not even share the same language or culture so long as they possess more or less the same information about exchange values. What must be centrally controlled are the external and internal mechanisms that assure the peaceful functioning of the market itself, which is expected to operate most of the time on its own. A perfect market does not imply a perfect society. To the extent that individuals are free to exchange goods and services, some succeed better than others, and some have more to begin with; the market inevitably generates resentments that must be dealt with in a political process. Just as no society can survive with a total absence of central authority, no society can be wholly absorbed by the tyranny of the center; a society fixated on its scapegoat will starve to death. The degree to which the central Being is personified is not on the same axis as the degree of sacrality necessary to the social order. The cliché that Marxism was the “religion” of the former USSR is not wholly misleading; any central authority is a mode of sacrality. But as a secular “religion” based on a historical eschatology, communism was explicitly atheistic because it claimed to be the necessary and free outcome of the “capitalist” market system, where the regulatory center set up by the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would eventually “wither away.” Because in socialist countries the real central authority was exercised by presumably temporary custodians, they could not be deified—made permanent—in the traditional sense. The resulting quasi-religion exhibits all the embarrassing paradoxes entailed by situating the transcendent in the immanent—for example, the public exhibition of Lenin’s mummified corpse, treated as a holy relic but claiming that status only “historically,” as though it were the embodiment of a rational historical sacred as opposed to the irrationality of an explicitly religious sacred. Christianity is the most highly articulated conception of the “personal God,” whose being, including the experience if not the finality of

Introduction    death, is fundamentally the same as that of his worshippers. The paradoxical role of Christianity is to be the principle of coherence of the most highly desacralized societies, precisely those that tend to lose the need for an explicit postulation of the will of the center independently of those on the periphery. The paradox of Christian secularization has recently been thrown into relief by the challenge of militant Islam, whose reliance on band-level organizations to carry out faith-affirming suicide attacks reflects its antipodal stance toward the increasing integration of nationstates into the “godless” global market, a movement that is a tribute to the power of Christian anthropology. v Humanity has a history because the imagination that conceives its memorable scenes is itself subject to the sequence of events through which human culture evolves. Although the hypothetical originary scene is the product of a universal scenic imagination, the mode of this imagination that constructs such anthropological scenes has not existed for all time, but has its beginning in the historical era we call the Enlightenment. Before the Enlightenment, the scenic imagination was exercised principally in a religious framework, where the products of this imagination are presented as endowed with the truth that has inhabited the sacred from the beginning. No doubt sacred myths and scriptures were created by humans, but these persons experienced them, or at least claimed to do so, not as the products of their own imaginations but as dictated by the divine will that resides in the scenic center. Nor were the consumers of these stories or texts generally expected or even permitted to exercise their own scenic imaginations in creating rival stories and texts. Originary culture is sacred culture; the profane exists within it only as sacrilege. It is of the essence of the sacred as an active force that it cannot be conceived as a form independent of its content; the concept of the sacred, defined by such independence, is incompatible with its efficacy. The appearance of secular literature, in the West the invention of the Greeks, corresponds to an emergent awareness that the scene is a locus on which timeless sacred significance is generated from the human mortality in which our fear of violence is rooted. Whereas myths recount the

   Introduction sacrificial transfiguration of mortals into meaningful sacred beings, often explicitly at the hands of immortals who incarnate the timelessness of the sign, literature proper reflects the return of meaning to mortality itself in the dangerous experience of being en scène. The beginnings of secular narrative may be traced to the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic of around 2500 bc at the end of which—assuming the original story ends, as scholars generally believe, with Tablet XI—the protagonist loses the herb of immortality or rebirth. Although Homeric epic and later, Athenian drama take most of their material from myth, they view myth not from the point of view of the gods, agents of transfiguration, but from that of the mortals engaged in the tragic agon. Religious discourse can make no distinction in kind between cosmogenesis and anthropogenesis, as witness most famously the first chapter of the Bible. God as the omnipresent center of the scene is the source of all meaning and of all things, natural and human, insofar as they have meaning. In counterpoint to the biblical tradition, Greek philosophy, beginning with the Pre-Socratics, offers naturalistic hypotheses of origin; whether playful like Plato’s myths or quasi-scientific like Aristotle’s physics, these hypotheses are cosmological rather than anthropological. No more than the Bible did ancient metaphysics conceive the scene of representation as requiring a separate hypothesis of origin from that of the object-world to which its representations refer. The imperfect reciprocity of slave societies, what we might call these societies’ “implicit violence,” was incompatible with imaginary social contracts. Thus even when it concerns itself with scenes of origin, classical philosophy does not thematize the scenic itself as something it must explain. On the contrary, in order to create what seems to it a free space for objective reflection, metaphysics, following Plato’s lead, hypostatizes the Idea as ontologically independent of the scene of human language on which it was created. Until the very recent and partial breakthrough of Austin’s speech-act theory, Western philosophy has recognized only propositions or declarative sentences; even today, it remains unthinkable that the context-free declarative sentence evolved from simpler forms that are only meaningful en scène. The imperative is the most obvious example of such a form; it requests and therefore refers to something in the worldly environment of the interlocutor. And as I showed in The Origin of Language,

Introduction    the imperative use of the sign is in turn inconceivable in the absence of its prior use as an ostensive. A toddler cannot learn to call for its bottle or its mother unless it has learned the words “bottle” and “mommy” in an ostensive context where their referents can be pointed to. Whether in metaphysics or art, the classical mind understands the scene of representation as a locus of significance independent of its content, but not as itself constituted by the mortal protagonists who enter upon it. The scene is given to or imposed on us by the gods, as the place of our limited contact with sacred meaning. Ancient philosophy never evolves a critical epistemology because it never conceives the scene on which it views reality as generated, even hypothetically, by human reflection. The cogito is a strictly modern phenomenon. The classical imagination is aware of the scene’s formal independence, but awareness of its anthropological constitution is unique to the emergent modernity of the Renaissance. Christianity, for which the unique, transcendent God is at the same time a mortal man, expresses the radical understanding that the human and the sacred have the same fundamental ontology. Throughout the Middle Ages, this understanding operated to explain the human on the basis of the divine; St. Augustine’s City of God conceives the aim of human society as abolishing itself in divine order rather than as attempting to emulate it. Yet the kernel of Christian anthropology is mutual love, reciprocal recognition among all human beings, founded on our common possession of an immortal essence. This vision presides over the collapse of the ancient slave economy and slowly generates, in the margin of medieval society, an economy of reciprocal market exchange. The ideal human reciprocity of the Kingdom of God, from a transcendental vision that turns us away from the world, becomes a goal that defines action within it. One way to define the Enlightenment is as the moment of Western history when it first becomes possible to conceive of human institutions as self-generating. The beginning of the Enlightenment is generally identified with the experimental rationalism of Francis Bacon (The New Organon, 1620), who theorizes a scene of objective empirical knowledge protected from the “idols” of collective mimesis, but the critical point at which the scene itself becomes productive is Hobbes’ conception, presented in his Leviathan (1651), of the covenant, later to be known as the

   Introduction “social contract,” that institutes “Commonwealth.” For the first time the attempt is made to envision the origin of a human institution in a hypothetical scenic event. This liberation of the scenic imagination is more than emancipation from religious tradition in a skeptical, Voltairean sense; a human institution is depicted as the product of a generative event taking place entirely among humans, whose energy derives from human interaction alone. Speculation on the origin of humanity and its institutions is at the heart of all culture, but in the Enlightenment, for the first time, this speculation acquires the status of a more or less rigorously controlled anthropological thought experiment, no longer concerned with what the gods have given humanity, but with what it has generated on its own. Although such thinking may not propose verifiable theses, it is legitimate in a domain where verification is an ethical rather than a logical operation: tracing human institutions to their root in order to assay their moral value. The human as a series of singular scenic events exceeds the scope of any empirical model based on repeatable phenomena: a scene exists only insofar as it is memorable, and what is memorable is not deducible from what is or might be observed. Enlightenment models of the origin of fundamental human institutions, whether Condillac’s or Herder’s scenario of language origin, or Vico’s more ambitious originary model of human language and religion, mark a new use of the scenic imagination as the basis for what we may call a science of origins. For the first time a human origin is found for the transcendental world of signs and symbols hitherto experienced as products of a sacred will. Hobbes’ covenant is oriented toward the central focus of all human institutions: to defer the violent excesses of mimetic desire, conceived specifically as a cultural phenomenon, driven by the very signs that were created to defer it. The Enlightenment is an optimistic age; inspired by the rationalization of the market economy, the exercise of the scenic imagination appears to make possible a rational understanding of human social and political organization no longer dependent on anthropological knowledge filtered through the texts and rites of the religious tradition. In this optimism, it seems possible to treat as testable hypotheses—by thought experiment if not in reality—assertions that religion presents

Introduction    not merely as the truth of transcendence and revelation, but as the revealed, transcendent truth. The Enlightenment was born in the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution. The first political movement to set as its goal something resembling what would later be called “liberal democracy” was the proximate cause of Hobbes’ equally revolutionary yet quite illiberal heuristic. Before creating his model of the generation of social order by human beings in the “state of nature,” Hobbes had witnessed an abortive attempt to generate a new order that seemed to him only to lead back to this chaotic state. At the same time, the Puritan Revolution demonstrated for Hobbes the bankruptcy of the old transcendental justifications for central authority. His anthropological model was intended to supply a new, wholly immanent justification. In opposition to the Puritans, who sought to establish a Calvinist commonwealth deriving its sole authority from God, Hobbes insists that the human scene derives its order from the institution of an earthly center. From the radical idea that human beings choose their own form of social organization, Hobbes paradoxically deduces that their choice is dictated by necessity; the only way to escape the excessive freedom of the state of nature is by freely alienating this freedom to the central Leviathan. Violence is for Hobbes an unambiguously human, “semiotic” phenomenon, the product of the volatility of mimetic desire, which can be constrained only by the authority of the chosen center of the scene of human interaction. However, Hobbes’ argument presents a pragmatic if not a logical paradox: once the central sovereignty that holds the social scene together is presented as the free choice of the periphery, the permanence and scope of its authority, deprived of its sacred guarantee, are no longer unconditionally legitimate. This explains the hostility Leviathan aroused among the English royalists whose fellowship in Paris had inspired Hobbes to write the book in the first place; despite the author’s own arguments to the contrary, to relinquish one’s sovereignty is not to renounce the freedom that founds the capacity for sovereignty. Hobbes’ political views were conservative, but the scenic imagination is inherently liberal. If it is the human actors on the periphery who establish the center, then they have the power, and the right, to replace or even abolish it. To transform Hobbes’ social contract into the basis

   Introduction of Lockean republicanism it suffices to attribute to the members of the community the stable identity conferred by property. The secret of the marvelous durability of Locke’s less radical version of the state of nature is that it is more concerned with the peaceful consequences of the originary scene than with its violent premise. The total nudity of self in Hobbes’ state of nature that gives his social contract scene its resemblance to an originary event is precisely what diminishes the value of this scene to a society in which the facility for peaceful economic exchange is paramount. Locke’s state of nature is a livable world, like Rousseau’s société commencée; farther than Hobbes from originary violence, Locke can better appreciate the virtues of post-originary exchange. v The Enlightenment liberation of the scenic imagination runs aground on Edmund Burke’s reflections on the French Revolution, the Enlightenment’s ultimate fulfillment and betrayal. Unlike Hobbes, Burke did not found his post-revolutionary conservatism on an originary anthropological model. Burke’s argument, far from justifying parliamentary monarchy on originary grounds, might be used to justify any social order whatever, provided it had evolved over time rather than being imposed all at once. Whereas Hobbes returns to the originary deferral of violence as the remedy for the chaos brought about by political revolt, Burke upholds yesterday’s organically evolved political forms in the face of a revolution rooted in the Enlightenment anthropology of which, ironically enough, Hobbes was the principal founder. Burke, having witnessed scenes of revolution, distrusts the scenic imagination, be it progressive or reactionary. His remedy is to reinforce our respect for history—history up to but not including the Revolution, the history of a nation proud of its traditions but not hubristic enough to seek to reinvent them. Burke’s notion of the historical process denies the validity of Enlightenment anthropological speculation despite the fact that it is within this process that the speculation was generated. The paradoxical nature of this position sets the tone for the post-Enlightenment reaction that demands of historical memory protection against history’s aberrations, in contrast with Joseph de Maistre’s view of the Revolution as a sacrifice ordained by providence.

Introduction    Rousseau uses the sparse ethnological data available to him as a counterweight to the Genesis creation-story in the construction of his originary models of humanity; the famous phrase from the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (1754), “Commençons donc par écarter tous les faits” (Let us begin by putting aside all facts), is directed more to the biblical “facts” than to the ethnological ones, and most particularly, to the Fall, which supplies the distressing circumstances that provoke the first use of language in Condillac’s scenario. In Rousseau’s universe, as in Hobbes’, the Fall is a result of interhuman rivalry, not of originary rivalry with God. But his secondhand awareness of pre-state cultures allows Rousseau to postulate a state of nature prior to “society,” to which Hobbesian rivalry is relegated. Writing before the Revolution, Rousseau allies the primitive with the originary; his nineteenth-century heirs in linguistics (Humboldt, Müller) and ethnology (Morgan, Tylor, Durkheim) would amass increasingly accurate and thorough data on tribal customs and beliefs at the price of abandoning the construction of originary models, whose uselessness the complexity of this data appeared to demonstrate— an appearance that remains unchanged today. Ethnological research, by widening the gap between the primitive and the originary, reinforced the preference for approaching the human exclusively through the former, attested by observable data, rather than the latter, which is not. This empiricist position, clearly articulated by Durkheim at the end of the nineteenth century, was shared by the folklorists, linguists, and ethnologists whose energies created the field of anthropology as we know it. Regardless of their political views, all were closer to Burke than to Robespierre. Their nostalgia for the primitive was homologous to Burke’s preference for tradition; they merely displaced humanity’s fall into the hubristic illusion of self-creation from the French to the Neolithic Revolution. This disillusioned retreat from the scenic imaginings of the Enlightenment would ultimately be beneficial to the scenic imagination. It is no accident that the model of the genesis of the center from the periphery that flourished in the Enlightenment was epitomized in the social contract, generative of state-level political institutions rather than of the human itself. Whether for Hobbes or Rousseau, the center is a focal point of human desire, not a locus of transcendence; the central authority is not, as it would be for Durkheim, equated with the sacred.

   Introduction The scenic imagination of the Enlightenment constructs an anthropological genesis for the ancients’ timeless conceptions of the social order; its science of origins remains on the political level, that of the public interaction of represented desires. The language by which we represent these desires does not itself appear to require a collective scene of origin; it is conceived either as emerging from the indexical signs of natural appetite (Condillac) or as the product of a unique faculty of free contemplation (Herder). Even Vico, who sees language as a providential means of suppressing violence through awe of divinity, never constructs a scenic model of either the violence that precedes or the language that follows. At the same time as the romantics are turning away from collective models to seek the source of post-Enlightenment anthropology in the depths of the self, a parallel strand of thought, beginning with Hegel, carries out a critique of the interactive basis of political relations, which until the French Revolution had been conflated with ethical relations in general. The Enlightenment affirmation of the functional identity of individuals in the political process, which finds its most eloquent expression in the American Declaration of Independence, is seen by Marx, Nietzsche, and their successors as an ideology to unmask, or more prudently, to deconstruct. Where the Enlightenment had thought it would suffice to eliminate the historical arbitrariness of the sacred for universal reason to take its place, Marx saw “bourgeois universalism” as a mask for exploitative production relations. For Marx, philosophy does no more than transmogrify the time- and class-bound “reason” of the current ruling class into universal truth; changing the world begins by demystifying this truth. Marx remained nonetheless a believer in reason—the reason of history, which he tried to show to be synonymous with the interests of the proletariat. Nietzsche replaces the triumph of historical reason with the triumph of the individual will over the imprisoning force of falsely universal truth. This paradoxical struggle of the Nietzschean self with its “own” representations has been the obsession of philosophy ever since, arguably even of analytic philosophy, haunted by the same paradoxes in a more dryly schematic form. The romantic retreat from Enlightenment originary thinking coincides with the reintroduction of the sacred into the human scene. This development, prefigured in the reality, if not the theory, of Enlighten-

Introduction    ment politics in the Revolutionary cult of L’Etre suprême (The Supreme Being), was theorized under the Restoration, most significantly by de Mai-stre, whose conception of the necessity of sacrificial violence puts him closer to Georges Bataille or René Girard than to Durkheim’s students Hubert and Mauss. v The most significant scientific development of the first half of the nineteenth century, the idea of biological evolution, including that of humanity, comforted the romantic distrust of a priori originary models while striking an apparent deathblow to the empirical status of divine creation. Darwin’s conception of evolution, gradual and uniformitarian, stands in sharp contrast to the punctual religious model, which nonetheless, however fantastic in detail, captures the key element of humanity’s scenic origin. Latter-day creationism may be viewed with a modicum of sympathy as a rearguard defense of the scenic intuition preserved in religious doctrine against the “scientific” denial of the eventfulness of human origin. Max Müller, whose early reflections on language and religion antedate the 1859 publication date of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, locates the origin of religion in the encounter of “the first [human] dwellers on the earth” with the naturally transcendent spectacle of the sun, an encounter that provides Müller with an originary model, indifferently solitary and collective, of the scene of representation. “Man” encounters the sun as an individual, yet his awe is the source of the collective phenomenon of myth, deprecated in Müller’s most memorable phrase as a “youthful disease of language.” Although Müller deserves recognition as the only nineteenth-century thinker to conjoin the origin of the central cultural phenomena of language and the sacred, his Condillac-like concentration on individual sensation and cognition (“think of the Sun awakening the eyes of man from sleep, and his mind from slumber!”) ignores the social dynamic within which language and religion are generated. In modeling the relation between humanity and its transcendent Other, this liberal Protestant scholar imagines that a scene with only two characters—a single human being and the sun—is more parsimonious than one in which the sacred is a locus of collective interaction.

   Introduction The generative function of scenes of origin, increasingly moribund throughout the nineteenth century (as witness the oft-cited 1866 charter of the Société linguistique de Paris that banned communications about language origin together with proposals for a “universal language”), was revived in the last decades of the century as a result of an infusion of scenic data from a new source: religious ethnology. Fleeing from the speculative imagination into the empirical study of the primitive, the ethnologist discovers the centrality of the scenic imagination in primitive culture itself, dominated by ritual models of the originary scene. Because human time is not merely evolutionary but historical, made up of events and not simply of phenomena, every narrative of human action is undecidably both particular and universal. Every human culture—indeed, each human representation—is both a unique singularity and a model of the human-in-general. Ethnological research cannot avoid this ambivalence, however much its practitioners describe with loving care the thick specificity of each culture while denying to humanity as a whole any specificity other than biological. At the time of the early systematization of data on primitive society by such scholars as Maine, Morgan, and McLennan, generality bore no stigma; the difficulty lay rather in including in one’s model the eventfulness that separates the human world from the natural. Morgan’s painstaking plotting of the stages of human evolution as a single Darwinian line sought to assimilate human history to a natural process; the reaction provoked by this intemperate theorizing among anthropologists of Franz Boas’ generation played a decisive role in swinging the pendulum in the direction of theory-shy empiricism, where it remains to this day. Durkheim criticizes both Müller’s “naturism” and Tylor’s “animism” for neglecting the essentially social character of the religious event. For Durkheim, the sacred distinguishes human society from its animal counterparts; semiosis—and by extension, language, although Durkheim forbears to take this step—begins with the binary distinction between sacred and profane. Durkheim was the first thinker to conceive of the sacred as a mode of interaction among human beings rather than as the expression of either their awe before the spectacle of nature or their communion with gods or “spirits,” whose constitutive immortality reflects that of the sacred sign. The most spectacular scenic imagination of the early

Introduction    twentieth century, however, belonged not to Durkheim but to Sigmund Freud. For Freud, human life was a series of scenes of which the earliest, consciously repressed but perpetually reenacted in the unconscious, were determinant. Freud’s early notion of the “primal scene” is akin in significance if not in content to an originary hypothesis scaled to the life of the individual. The family drama of the bourgeois child is an allegory of the genesis of humanity itself. Time has revealed the weaknesses of Freud’s ahistorical model of the human psyche as well as of his curative technique founded on the retrieval of repressed “primal scenes.” What remains of value is his overall scenic intuition. Freud made one major attempt to ground his key psychic model of the Oedipus complex in a hypothetical scenic event. In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud links the ontogenetic scene to its phylogenetic original through a renewed exercise of the scenic imagination, now nourished with ethnological data. Freud’s scene of origin, the most audacious speculative model of early ethnology, has been repudiated by even the most devout Freudians—especially by the most devout Freudians. This return from Durkheim’s prudent empiricism to the speculative mentality of the Enlightenment serves to this day as a caution to anyone tempted to follow in the master’s footsteps. Embarrassing to psychoanalysis, atavistic in the eyes of mainstream social science, Freud’s scene of the collective murder of the father by his sons is prophetic from the perspective of originary anthropology. Seen less literally, Freud’s model of the origin of internalized interdiction or guilt is a model of the origin of representation in general. The sons, no longer dominated “instinctively” by the father, must consciously reconstruct a social order. Dividing the women among them requires a system of classification, the origin of which is the sacred significance cast over his possessions by the father, whose posthumous influence makes him immortal like a god—or a sign. Although the Oedipus complex gives desire for the mother priority over rivalry with the father, we seek in vain in Freud’s description of the originary murder scene any mention of the women the sons are purportedly fighting for. That Freud intended his scene to serve as a prologue to the modern “family drama” should not be permitted to obscure its value as a model of the scenic generation of a new, human set of ethical relations, guaranteed and memorialized by

   Introduction shared representation. René Girard’s revival of the scenic hypothesis of origin on a newly rigorous basis in Violence and the Sacred (1972) owes a great deal to Freud’s model—and as I shall show below, shares some of its defects. v Let us recall our original quandary: what prevented these thinkers, or far earlier ones, from formulating the originary hypothesis in a parsimonious or “minimal” form? The key to this conundrum is to be sought in the history of the scenic imagination itself. Hobbes, at the outset of the Enlightenment, created the first generative model of a human institution in order to explain and justify the genesis of “Leviathan,” the centralized state. Although the very possibility of Hobbes’ thought experiment is dependent on the emergence of socioeconomic reciprocity in early market society—the ultimate force behind the English civil war—this first free exercise of the scenic imagination is intended to justify the abolition of the intolerable conditions that gave rise to it, which Hobbes schematizes in the violent symmetry of his state of nature as the “war of every man against every man.” If any society was ever founded on the forgetting of its origin, it is that of Hobbes’ Leviathan, the irreversibility of whose acquisition of absolute sovereignty can be guaranteed only by historical amnesia. The forgetting implicit in the use of the hypothetical scene of reciprocal exchange to justify a non-reciprocal centralization is not dependent on Hobbes’ particular political views. Rousseau’s radical social contract is, if anything, yet more constraining. The “general will” established in the originary political scene acquires an authority that extends even to the political imagination of the participants—whence the author’s sinister quip that to make someone conform to the general will is le forcer à être libre (to force him to be free). The anthropological lesson of both Hobbes and Rousseau is that an originary scene that brings together not protohumans in need of a new mode of interaction but fully constituted human beings incapable of finding peace in their “natural” (prestate) condition—such a scene is a configuration of tyranny. Because the thought experiment is not at the appropriate level of parsimony, it generates too much order from too much preexisting culture.

Introduction    We may contrast these early modern scenes with Freud’s fathermurder scenario in Totem and Taboo. Freud’s originary “social contract” is engaged in by beings not yet possessed of a fully human subjectivity. Although his model does not refer to language per se, it generates the primordially semiotic human behavior of interdiction, which the originary sign imposes on the members of the group. Freud’s scene lacks parsimony only insofar as it fails to respect the originary interdependence of language and interdiction, whereas the socially mediated desires that Hobbes describes are much farther from the origin. Long before mimetic crisis could have incited a group of humans to choose a sovereign, there must have been a crisis among protohumans in need of the most elementary form of human order. Similarly, but on a lesser scale, in Freud’s scene, if the interdiction of the women that follows the murder is to be the first human interdiction, it must be the occasion of the first use of language, in which case the sons would not have stood in a culturally defined kinship relation to the father but only in the pecking-order relationship characteristic of animal societies. A truly parsimonious originary scene would comfort neither Hobbes’ metapolitics nor Freud’s metapsychology. These thinkers could not conceive such a scene in the first place because they had no reason to conceive of originary thinking as an enterprise independent of politics or psychology—although individual psychology comes closer to the parsimony of the originary scene than state-level politics. What makes generative anthropology a new way of thinking is that it takes the parsimoniousness of the originary scene as the very foundation of its human ontology. Such an approach to anthropology, the pioneering example of which is Girard’s mimetic theory, is consequent on the revelation at the end of World War II of the absolutely crucial problem of deferring human violence. v Through the examination of the works of nineteen major Western thinkers, from Hobbes to Freud, this book traces the evolution of the originary models constructed by the scenic imagination as explanations of fundamental human institutions. These analyses, whose number could easily have been multiplied, are not intended to provide a system-

   Introduction atic history of modern Western thought. I have selected for analysis what I consider to be the most significant exercises of the scenic imagination during this period, even if in some cases the author’s contribution to human thought might arguably not be as great as others I have omitted. In the concluding chapter, I discuss several recent works on the origin of language and religion in an attempt to assess the still-controversial place of the scenic imagination in our newly post-millennial age.

chapter 1

The Enlightenment: From Hobbes to Condillac

1. From Hobbes to Rousseau The Enlightenment is the moment of human history when the imagined scene of representation was first used as a source of insight into human institutions, which were perceived with more or less clarity as dependent on it. The most fundamental such institution is language. Only in the last twenty-five years or so has there been a revival, on the foundation of vastly increased scientific knowledge, of the inquiry into the origin of language that attracted such interest during the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century saw numerous works exclusively devoted to the origin of language(s) by writers as diverse as Pierre de Maupertuis and Adam Smith; and many more, including Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746), which I shall discuss below, that were deeply involved with the subject.1 Most of these works were not grounded in anthropological reflection or linguistic research; they were thought experiments that sought to understand how perceptions and sensations could give rise to signs.2 What was lacking in these originary hypotheses for the quintessentially social phenomenon of language was the awareness that the scenes of origin for language and society must be understood as one. The discovery of the malleability of social forms that the English Revolution bequeathed to the Enlightenment seemed to

   the scene liberated imply that, on the contrary, the human speaking/reasonable being (zoon logon exon), constituted independently of its social forms, was free to reinvent them, or at least to justify them. In this era only Vico, as a result of his “medieval” indifference to political structures, was concerned to speculate on the common origin of language and the human community under the auspices of gods who resembled a cross between the sacred of Durkheim and the inhabitants of the Roman pantheon. With the partial exception of Condillac’s Essai, Enlightenment speculations on the origin of language are more significant in their aims than in their achievements. Such is not the case for the models that conceptualize the origin of human society. Language at a given time depends vanishingly little on contemporary theories of language origin; political forms, in contrast, owe their legitimacy to the degree to which they can be shown to originate from constraints inherent in the human condition. Two attempts to conceive the scenic origin of the social order, Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), followed by the more narrowly political The Social Contract (1762), may arguably be considered as defining the intellectual and roughly, the chronological limits of the Enlightenment scenic imagination as a basis for political theory. The first modern social theorist was a conservative, a royalist in parliamentary times. Understandably it is the thinker who resists the advent of the modern political configuration who is first to seek to (re)generate in theory the order whose permanence had hitherto been taken for granted. In contrast, Rousseau’s use of the scenic imagination to construct a model of the ideal polity is a radical extension of what began as an idealized model of society as it normally is. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712– 1778) are traditionally viewed as exemplifying opposite conceptions of human nature. For the first, the state of nature is one of universal strife, the war of all against all; for the second, it is an idyllic world not yet contaminated by the evils of imitative desire that civilization brings to the fore. This contrast, although revelatory of the respective temperaments of both writers, is nonetheless superficial. On the foundational anthropological issue, Hobbes and Rousseau are essentially in agreement: the central human problem is the violence caused by mimetic desire.

The Enlightenment: From Hobbes to Condillac    Both anticipate the mimetic model of human interaction that situates the crucial problem of human violence within a group (for example, a hunting band) defined by social rather than familial relations, situated at a level intermediate between the intimacy of the family and the inchoate and potentially hostile interactions of the “state of nature.” The inherent optimism of Enlightenment social thought is a consequence of its disinclination to situate the human potential for mimetic violence at the very core of human interaction. Hobbes and Rousseau had a clearer view of the phenomenon of mimetic desire than anyone else before René Girard. (Leviathan I, 13: “[I]f any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies”; Discourse II: “[T]he sociable man, always outside himself, only knows how to live in the opinion of others.”)3 Both understood that neither scarcity nor even inequality but the contagion of desire poses the most serious problem to human society, and both made the ability to hold this desire in check the sine qua non of a viable polity. The political structures designed by both Hobbes and Rousseau are means to expel mimetic desire and its attendant potential for violence from the core of the human community into the “state of nature” of external relations among men—the gendered term “men” is necessary, as I will show below. The difference between Hobbes’ notorious description of life anterior to the contractual establishment of “commonwealth” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” and Rousseau’s picture of the healthy, happy “savage” is attributable to their very different assessments of the intensity of these external relations. Beneath their disagreement, the “social contract” functions similarly in both writers to unite in a single social unit persons not biologically related to each other. Both understand “society,” whether Rousseau’s société commencée or Hobbes’ commonwealth, as constituted by the coming together of isolated individuals rather than as the preexisting matrix of humanity. This construction of human society, contrary as it may be to the ideas of modern anthropology, appears somewhat less radically atomistic if we attend to the gendered nature of the term “man.” A “man” in Hobbes’ terminology and occasionally even in Rousseau’s is not simply an atomic human being but the implicit head of a family, as is borne out by Hobbes’ description of the nuclear family as a miniature monar-

   the scene liberated chy (II, 20: “Of Dominion Paternal, and Despotical”). However abstract may be Hobbes’ description of the “state of war,” we should imagine it as existing among patresfamilias rather than among isolated individuals of one or both genders. The example of the modern nuclear family as the atomic unit within the emerging market system explains the failure of Enlightenment social thought to conceive of competition within what it considers to be the minimal social group. It is taken for granted that, in contrast to the medieval corporate order, society is made up of such atoms, so that rivals are essentially strangers, members of isolated family units. Hence these models of the constitution of human society focus on its highest-level structure, the state, as the sole agency of social unity. Hobbes shares with Rousseau the Enlightenment’s characteristic failure to consider that the minimal human group must first solve the problem of deferring internal mimetic conflict before it can enter into an external “state of war” with other groups or individuals such as would necessitate the establishment of state sovereignty over the means of violence. Although the idea of the “state of nature” reflects the discovery of the New World, the details of Hobbes’ model are extrapolated backward from his own demographically dense society, where the individual constantly encounters strangers and lives in a state of perpetual terror and hostility—or would do so in the absence of an all-powerful sovereign. Conversely, in Rousseau’s model, which takes from preromantic ethnography its vision of a simpler and sparser world, one encounters other people so rarely that mimetic vanity has no opportunity to develop. The words seul (alone) and solitaire recur constantly in Rousseau’s description of the state of nature; he reproaches Hobbes with having attributed to this state mimetic problems that, in his view, belong exclusively to constituted “society.” Unlike the Hobbesian warrior-against-all, Rousseau’s “savage,” when confronted by an aggressor, prefers to abandon his meal rather than fight for it, confident that he can find another elsewhere. v Hobbes, who worked for Bacon, traded polemics with Descartes (whose analytic geometry he considered unsound), and thought he could square the circle, is sometimes considered the first philosopher of lan-

The Enlightenment: From Hobbes to Condillac    guage.4 It is hardly coincidental that the first Western thinker to define the human not merely by “speech” (logos) but specifically by language, conceived as the use of man-made, arbitrary signs, was also the first to create a generative model of human society. Hobbes does not treat language as an emergent institution but as a given of the human condition. Words have a social origin, but since signs are arbitrary, purely instrumental, language as such is not dependent on any particular state of society. On the contrary, the language-instrument confers on its possessors the intellectual capacity for mimetic desire that provokes the chaos of the “state of nature” and obliges them to alienate their freedom through the choice of an absolute sovereign. For Hobbes, signs and things were not of different natures; he considered words not as tokens of an immaterial or ideal type, but as mnemonic “marks” that serve to retain thoughts so that we may reflect on them and communicate them to our fellows, as convenient abbreviations rather than Saussurean signifiers.5 This dogmatic nominalism was a facet of Hobbes’ very undialectical materialism; his mathematical errors proceeded from the conviction that ideal entities such as dimensionless points and one-dimensional lines were, like words, arbitrary signs that had no intrinsic existence that could be theorized about. For Hobbes, “universal names” like “tree” or “man” named a variety of objects linked by certain common traits in what later philosophers would call “natural kinds,” but the applicability of “tree” to a number of different objects remained a quality of the word and did not create a concept or signified “tree.”6 The words and syntactical forms of language are new kinds of objects that create the categories by which we think and bring order to the world, but they are merely “associated” with their worldly referents. Thinking is wholly dependent on language, whose arbitrary signs are a product of communal consensus. Yet to grasp the kinship of this consensus with that of the social contract is beyond the capacity of Hobbes’ discourse; he fails to see that the scene on which the potentially violent inhabitants of the “state of nature” agree to the social contract is also, and in the same instant, the originary scene of language, since the same crisis is required for everyone to agree on an arbitrary sign as for everyone to agree on a sovereign. It is precisely this separation between instrumental

   the scene liberated reason and desire, cognition and politics, that made possible the secular use of the scenic imagination in the first place. Yet Hobbes’ text surrounding the “invention . . . of speech” (Leviathan I, 3–4) already reveals, surely unbeknownst to the author, the generative paradox of language origin that Rousseau would later make explicit. (The marginal glosses in brackets are from the original text.) Those . . . faculties . . . which seem proper to man only . . . proceed all from the invention of words, and speech. For besides sense, and thoughts, and the train of thoughts, the mind of man has no other motion; though by the help of speech, and method, the same faculties may be improved to such a height, as to distinguish men from all other living creatures. [Infinite] Whatsoever we imagine is finite. Therefore there is no idea, or conception of any thing we call infinite. . . . When we say any thing is infinite, we signify only, that we are not able to conceive the ends, and bounds of the things named; having no conception of the thing, but of our own inability. And therefore the name of God is used, not to make us conceive him, for he is incomprehensible; and his greatness, and power are unconceivable; but that we may honour him. [Chapter 4: “Of Speech”] [Original of speech] But the most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of speech, consisting of names or appellations, and their connexion; whereby men register their thoughts; recall them when they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and conversation; without which, there had been amongst men, neither commonwealth, nor society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves. The first author of speech was God himself; that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his sight.

To sum up these consecutive paragraphs, we find that (1) speech is what sets us above other animals; (2) the name of God—the first “name” or word mentioned in the text—does not designate a concept but serves to “honor” or worship God; (3) without speech we would not have the “peace” of human culture but would live in a state of violence like wolves; (4) God is the “first author” of speech. A superficial reading of this text, seeing only the explicit assertion (4), would dismiss Hobbes’ account of language origin as “creationism”; however, the more careful reader will note that before God authors speech in (4), he has already been named by humans in (2). The symmetry of

The Enlightenment: From Hobbes to Condillac    the two references to God is accentuated by the fact that (3) is only an elaboration of (1), which makes more explicit the role of language in deferring violence. The statement of God’s authorship (4) follows naturally after (3): having been told that speech was a “noble . . . invention,” we expect to learn whose invention it was. The reference to God’s name in (2), however, does not follow from (1) at all. It concludes a chapter (I, 3) entitled “Of the Consequence or Train of Imaginations,” where Hobbes discusses what he calls in the quoted passage our “train of thoughts”; the raison d’être of this discussion of an unimaginable entity, the infinite, appears to be to end the chapter with a limiting case. It is significant, although not pointed out by Hobbes himself, that the infinite is the only “imagination” in the chapter to become associated with a “name”—the Name of God—the capacity for using which distinguishes man among all creatures. Thus, in the order of the text, the God who is the author of speech has already been named by us, not as a concept, but in a vocative—we may say, an ostensive—act of honoring, that is, of worship. Men name God and God creates speech; were we to situate these actions on the same scene, Hobbes’ generative scene of the political order would become that of humanity itself. v By the time the question of the origin of language reaches Rousseau, the tension between the two mentions of God in Hobbes’ text has been tightened into a conscious paradox. This most anthropologically sophisticated of Enlightenment thinkers was more aware than contemporaries such as Condillac or Maupertuis of the paradoxical difficulty of the task of reconstructing the origin of the sign without presupposing what one is attempting to generate. (Discourse I: “If men needed speech in order to learn to think, they needed even more to know how to think in order to find speech.”) Rousseau’s explicit statement of this originary paradox, by separating the origin of the human from the origin of language, allows the human to be defined prior to the emergence of the “society” that language mediates and consequently prior to mimetic desire. In the place of what in the Darwinian era would simply be stages of protohuman evolution, the emergence of language, associated with

   the scene liberated interdiction and guilt, within a vaguely defined prelinguistic state of humanity provides a secular equivalent of the Fall in the Judeo-Christian tradition—as well as a testimony to its anthropological significance that we should not make the Voltairean error of dismissing. Whereas Hobbes cannot yet conceive this prelapsarian space and Condillac, not unlike Vico, lodges his model of language origin in the fallen world after the Flood, Rousseau portrays this originary “state of nature” as humanity’s true habitat, lost with the Fall into society, desire, and language. Rousseau’s prehistoric utopia, visible only through the density of historical time, provides the model for the romantic temporal pathos that finds its objective correlative in the coupure wrought by the Revolution. This new sense of historical time motivates the nineteenth century’s turn away from a priori models to more concretely historical, and national, scenes of origin—a phenomenon foreshadowed in Rousseau’s own posthumous Essai sur l’origine des langues, discussed in Chapter 2 below. v Hobbes is the great early modern exponent of the anthropology of mediated desire. He sees the world of human relations as dominated by an unceasing rivalry in which appetite and its satisfaction play no independent role and value is conferred entirely by relative supremacy— in which the political wholly dominates the economic. Hobbes is well aware that the possession of language that sets us apart from the animals is directly correlated with the instability of any natural hierarchy, and that it is because we represent the equivalent desires of others to ourselves that we must strike first even if we would sincerely prefer not to fight at all. Hobbes’ state of nature is one great game of Prisoners’ Dilemma in which universal defection can be prevented only by universal self-enslavement.

2. Locke’s Little Bang Hobbes’ authoritarian solution to the mimetic rivalry of the “state of nature,” the first originary scene formulated in strictly human terms,

The Enlightenment: From Hobbes to Condillac    has had little influence on either political theory or practice. Hobbes was the bad boy of the Enlightenment, much as Machiavelli was the bad boy of the Renaissance, the one influential for revealing the secret means of power, the other abandoned for overtly theorizing its necessity. When, in reaction to the French Revolution, it came time to assert the sovereign’s absolute power once more, de Maistre founds it on a divine, sacrificial basis rather than Hobbes’ dangerously reversible anthropological model. Where Hobbes is incisive, John Locke (1632–1704) is prudently ambiguous; where Hobbes is rigorous, Locke is pragmatic. To quote Peter Laslett’s introduction to the latter’s Two Treatises of Government (1680–1690):7 [Hobbes] was the greatest of all the meta-political writers, those who refine and analyse political language and elaborate axioms into axiologies. For this reason his influence on thought about politics has been enormous, but his purchase over what men do politically has been negligible. (89–90) [Two Treatises] contained just that ingredient which Leviathan lacked—policy; statement of guidance of what men will accept, respond to and pursue. (91)

Locke’s state of nature is very different from Hobbes’: his affirmation of originary humanity’s lack of substantial conflict is the direct ancestor of Rousseau’s more elaborate and anthropologically grounded attempts to demonstrate that “man is good, men are bad.” Locke’s enormous influence on the theory and practice of liberal democracy demonstrates that his vision of our originary state is not only more flattering than Hobbes’ but far more politically pragmatic. On Hobbes’ anthropology could be built only tyranny; as Laslett points out (90), Hobbes’ failure as a political (as opposed to a philosophical) realist is revealed by the fact that he actually thought Leviathan would serve, as Locke’s Treatises in fact have served, as a blueprint for political action. Locke is more concerned with the outcome of the originary scene than with the crisis it resolves; his optimism, which he justifies by appeal to divine providence, is justified by the simple fact of our survival. Because his focus on results leads Locke to minimize the crisis that they resolved, his anthropology is less rigorous than Hobbes’ minimalist model, which defines humanity in the state of nature by the single trait of mimetic desire. For Locke, man in the state of nature already enjoys

   the scene liberated the essential advantage that in Hobbes’ universe can be conferred only by central authority: liberation from the state of universal war. Locke expresses this in theological terms: The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker, all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order and about his business, they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure. . . . Every one as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station willfully, so by the like reason when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind. (Second Treatise, sec. 6)

It would be hard to find a clearer expression of the function of the sacred in deferring mimetic violence. Because we are God’s workmanship, we are not merely obliged to avoid harming our fellows, but on the whole, being “equal and independent,” we are able to do so. Locke’s scenic imagination relies on biblical tradition rather than Enlightenment speculation; but Locke uses the fact that we are all God’s creatures not to impose any particular revealed law but to include all humans in a single moral community bound by “natural law.” The scene of God’s creation is the sole originary scene we will find in Locke’s discourse, but it functions nonetheless to make us all part of a virtual community in which each recognizes the others’ equal status and expects the same recognition from them. Locke’s individuals are not so much subject to divine power as empowered by it to affirm their autonomy. Where Hobbes sees the war of “every man against every man,” Locke claims that every man in the state of nature has the power to enforce natural law, for example, by putting a murderer to death. Because Locke understands the natural human condition as membership in a virtual community, violence in Locke’s as opposed to Hobbes’ state of nature is local and reversible rather than universal and contagious. Locke’s anthropology, derived from the outcome of the originary scene, is less radically minimalist than Hobbes’, which derives from its cause, but correspondingly truer to its task. Hobbes defines the human entirely by the scene of desire, but individual desire, which emerges throughout our “neotenous” childhood, could not exist

The Enlightenment: From Hobbes to Condillac    without the prior deferral of violence in the communal scene. Hobbes’ war of all against all is conceivable only as the breakdown of a human moral order, not as humanity’s originary state. If in Locke’s view each human being bears within himself the “law of nature,” why then do men subject themselves to governments? When Locke comes to answer this question, his image of the state of nature that precedes the “social contract” seems at first glance much like Hobbes’: For all being kings as much as [a given man], every man his equal, and the greater part no strict observers of equity and justice, the enjoyment of the property he has in this state [of nature] is very unsafe, very unsecure. This makes him willing to quit a condition which, however free, is full of fears and continual dangers . . . and . . . to join in society with others . . . for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property. (sec. 123)

This sounds like Hobbes, but it is in fact very far from Hobbes. Here fear and danger are punctual rather than pervasive, and this because they are attributed to persons who are no doubt egoistic (“no strict observers of equity”) but not uncontrollably mimetic. In Locke’s world, unlike Hobbes’, the desiring self is never naked; it is always clothed in property. Locke’s subsumption of even our “lives” and “liberties” under the category of property protects the desiring self from Hobbes’ naked triangularity by assuring this self ’s externality to all its objects of desire, including its own living body. The Lockean soul is present in its nakedness only to God; the mimetic crisis has ended and sacred Being has been established in advance of Locke’s state of nature. As a consequence, the scene in which men in Locke’s state of nature “join in society with others” is not presented as a moment of crisis, but of calm decision; renunciation of power to central authority takes place in a “little bang” rather than the big bang of Hobbes’ Leviathan. What is required of government is a set of established laws, impartial judges to apply it, and an executive to enforce it (secs. 124–26)—a tripartite division that, theorized more explicitly by Montesquieu, would provide the template for the liberal-democratic system of governance. But we must obey government only insofar as it promotes the “common good” (sec. 131). Just as we never lose sight of our own natural appetite for the sake of

   the scene liberated mimetic rivalry, so we never renounce the promotion of our own appetitive welfare for the sake of a central institution. For Hobbes, the transition from the state of nature to that of organized government is too absolute to be understandable as a historical boundary. It is rather a thought experiment: if there were no government, this is the condition we would fall into. On this point, Rousseau will accuse Hobbes of reading back into the state of nature “excessive” desires that exist only in society. Locke’s state of nature, in contrast, is the model of a state already protohistorical. As a refutation of those who might object that the state of nature never existed, Locke describes in some detail how government might have evolved out of patriarchal power in the family. Locke’s state of nature, unlike Hobbes’, is meant to be plausible, which means above all livable. Locke presupposes our equality under God not for the sake of mere piety but as a guarantee of potential cooperation. Hobbes’ universal war would lead to extinction, since total preoccupation with mimetic desire leaves no energy in reserve for the satisfaction of essential needs. In Locke, we are protected from this eventuality by our property; even the murderer who takes my life seeks to remove an external obstacle to his acquisition of my possessions, not the internal obstacle of my desire itself. Hobbes’ state of nature, like Girard’s mimetic crisis, goes beyond true minimalism in supposing that the participants abandon the appetitive for the “metaphysical,” the substantive object of desire for the mimetic essence of desire itself; both models consequently end with the focusing of all attention—and the conferral of all power—on the being at the center, whether by a common act of will or as a result of immolation and sacralization. What is missing from both is the economic result: the satisfaction of individual appetites resulting from the sacrificial sparagmos, in which each member of the community receives his portion of the consumable central object. Locke, in contrast, integrates the appetitive into the cultural. Property, he insists, already exists in the state of nature: we make natural objects our own through our labor. As opposed to Ricardo and Marx, who understand labor as physical effort, Locke defines it as agency; the turfs one’s servant cuts on one’s behalf are one’s property as much as those one cuts oneself (sec. 28). This concept of agency defines what we may

The Enlightenment: From Hobbes to Condillac    call in the broadest sense the bourgeois self. Instead of concerning myself with my neighbor’s property, I act to enhance my own, beginning with my own God-given life and energy. Although this position may at first appear naively to deny the power of mimetic desire that Hobbes so lucidly recognized, what Locke understands better than Hobbes is that the problem of mimetic desire cannot be faced head on and solved once and for all, but only deferred through the attachment of desire to appetitive objects. The future of market society lies in the expansion of the categories of such objects. The anthropological superiority of Locke’s to Hobbes’ model has been borne out by history. The fragile but real triumph of liberal democracy results from its capacity for recycling the energy of mimetic desire into economic activity. Locke’s refusal to address directly the threat of mimetic crisis is an act less of denial than of reticence. No doubt my desire and your desire feed on each other; “ultimately” we may well desire nothing but each other’s desire. But like Keynes’ long term in which we will all be dead, our ultimate desires are irrelevant to our concrete existence. Locke’s model of liberal government guarantees our property rights as the most effective means of turning our attention away from rivals toward objects that are or can be made our own. This guarantee sustains the modern market system, which continuously seeks to transform the rivalrous convergence of imitative desires on the same object into their parallel movement toward equivalent objects. Conversely, societies in which the free market is unable to function successfully remain dominated by Hobbesian problems and solutions. The twentieth century taught us the truth of Churchill’s quip that democracy is the worst form of government, with the exception of all the others. The only solution to the problems of a society founded on democratic exchange is more democracy and more exchange, and the only useful debate is over the relative weight to give each in a given circumstance. The dialogue of democracy is a conversation among Lockeans in which Hobbes serves only as a caution against the danger of proposing, paradoxically, its abolition. Those who would understand the human owe a great debt to the primary theorizer of history’s most successful model of large-scale human interaction.

   the scene liberated

3. Condillac’s Originary Scene Although not one of the most widely celebrated philosophes, l’Abbé Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–1780) has a strong claim to the title of the most significant philosopher of the French Enlightenment. Condillac’s first major work, the Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746),8 naturalized Locke’s epistemological sensualism in France, shorn of its moral and political baggage. It also contains the first articulated hypothetical scene of origin for human language. The sensualist principle that “nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses” stands at the head of Hobbes’ Leviathan; Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was the seventeenth century’s major attempt to work out its consequences for the genesis of our ideas. Condillac’s most fundamental divergence from Locke was his refusal to grant the human intellect an autonomous power of “reason” independent of the sense data it accumulated. Leibniz’ reaction to Locke’s implementation of nihil in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu had been a celebrated quip, Sed ipse intellectus: nothing was prior to the senses but the intellect itself, whose existence independently of sense data Locke had not thought to explain. Just as in Locke’s political philosophy man in the state of nature was presumed to have received from his Creator the means of biological and economic self-sufficiency, so in Locke’s epistemology the human being enters the world equipped to process its sensory inputs. What seems on the surface a radical individualism with each person a monad enclosed in the world of his sensations in fact presupposes, like Locke’s political model, a potential ground of community. Locke attributes to divine providence the effects of the generative scene of human origin. Condillac’s sensualism, more radical than Locke’s, takes Leibniz’ critique to heart. In Condillac’s model of the human mind, our senses provide us not only with the raw material of our knowledge, memory, and imagination, but also with the signs with which we think and the mental operations by which we think them. For Condillac, our ideas are not, as in Locke, independent of the linguistic signs with which they come to be associated. Condillac anticipates contemporary neurocognitive research in his contention that thought without language, such

The Enlightenment: From Hobbes to Condillac    as animals are capable of achieving, is effective only in its immediate context and leads to no long-term acquisition of knowledge. One can imagine a Condillacian “language module” that exists in all humans from birth and that, unlike the Lockean intellect, must be activated by the sensual experience of the world, both internal and external. Condillac’s reliance on the sign as what one can almost call a neuronal focus for thought throws the burden of explaining its origin on the scenic imagination. Whereas “the mind” may be considered a universal and fundamentally unchanging entity, the signs of language are wholly conventional. Making the conventional sign coeval with the human intellect implies not only that this intellect is reborn in each human being with the acquisition of language, but that it originated in a communal scene at the moment in human history when the first convention was established. Following the logic of this position, Condillac was the first thinker to go beyond generalities about the sensation-based language of the “first men” to construct a minimal scenario of the origin of language. Enlightenment anthropology characteristically follows Locke’s atomistic model of human relations. Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s state of nature consists of isolated individuals—with or without implicit families—whose only human relations beyond the immediate family are with strangers; Locke’s state of nature surrounds the individual with property, but not with significant human interaction. This atomism precludes the mimetic conflict within the minimal social group that supplies the originary motivation for human language. For Locke, the human individual is constituted as an idea-maker and language-user independently of any interaction with his fellows. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding devotes Book II to Ideas and Book III to Words. Treating ideas before words allows Locke to avoid finding the source of both in collective convention; by the time we get to words in Book III, there is already a set of ideas for them to refer to. Locke is aware of the difficulty inherent in monadic individualism—we have no absolute guarantee that my words and yours refer to the same thing—but he puts it aside as a superficial obstacle to communication that is guaranteed in its essence by the common nature of the ideas themselves within the human brain. Conversely, Condillac’s linkage of thought and language leads him to construct a

   the scene liberated model of the origin of linguistic convention that is simultaneously the origin of thought. Condillac’s account of language origin begins with Genesis, but he conceives linguistic transcendence as reemerging after the Fall in a strictly earthly context. The statue of Condillac’s Traité des sensations (1754) that acquires its ideas along with its senses is an illustration of Locke’s tabula rasa.9 But although both Locke and Condillac consider the senses to be the sole origin of our ideas, the experiential context of the sensations and consequently of the ideas privileged by Condillac is very different from that found in Locke. This difference may be summed up in the word that makes Condillac’s title something other than a translation of his model’s: origine. Locke is interested in how the senses write upon the paper of the already-given mind; his concern is with the source of a given idea in our sensations. Condillac is concerned less with the individual idea than with the mind as a whole; he hypothesizes a “blank” individual, figurable by an insensate statue, in order to trace the origin and progress of his sensation-based knowledge. The contrast is well illustrated by the two philosophers’ respective descriptions of our first ideas: [Locke:] First, our senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several perceptions of things, according to those various ways, wherein those objects do affect them. And thus we come by those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet. (Essay II, 1, 3) [Condillac:] Let us consider a man at the first moment of his existence; his soul [esprit] first has different sensations, such as light, colors, pain, pleasure, motion, rest—these are his first thoughts. (Essai I, 1, 3)

Locke’s “first” refers ambiguously to his own discourse and to a vague chronology; Condillac speaks explicitly of “the first moment of [a man’s] existence.” Locke’s conception of sensation is passive and unmotivated. His list of ideas is an arbitrary sampling of the senses from sight through taste; sound and smell are excluded, the former no doubt because of the possible confusion with the sounds of speech, the latter because there are no simple terms to describe its “perceptions.” In Condillac, on the contrary, “sensation” is understood not as mere perception but as impingement on a living, appetitive being. Although no

The Enlightenment: From Hobbes to Condillac    doubt inspired by Locke to begin with sight, he is concerned not with specific ideas (yellow, white) but with what affects the organism and provides it with its first thoughts: the proprioceptive sensations of “pain, pleasure, motion, rest” have no equivalent in Locke. Similarly, whereas Locke’s considerations on language emphasize the cognitive separation of individual speakers whose uses of the same word reflect the different “ideas” of each, Condillac’s hypothesis of language origin is founded on the speakers’ intent to communicate vital needs. v Let us turn to Condillac’s originary scene: Adam and Eve did not owe the exercise of the operations of their soul to experience. As they came from the hands of God, they were able, by special assistance, to reflect and communicate their thoughts to each other. But I am assuming that two children, one of either sex, sometime after the deluge, had gotten lost in the desert before they would have known the use of any sign. . . . [Note] “Judging only by the nature of things,” (says Dr. Warburton, Divine legation, Vol. II, 81–82) “and without the surer instruction of revelation, one would be inclined to accept the opinion of Diodorus Siculus (I, 8) and Vitruvius (De Architectura, 1) that the first people lived for some time in caves and forests, like beasts, uttering only confused and indistinct sounds, until, joining together for mutual assistance, they came by degrees to form distinct sounds for arbitrary signs or marks on which they mutually agreed so that the speaker could express the ideas he wanted to communicate to others.” . . . “But though,” (Warburton adds later) “God had taught language to men, it is not reasonable to suppose that this language went beyond the immediate human necessities and that he would not by himself have the ability to improve and enrich it. Thus the first language was unavoidably barren and narrow.” This entire observation seems very judicious to me. If I suppose two children under the necessity of imagining even the first signs of language, it is because I did not think it was enough for a philosopher to say that something had been achieved by special means, but that it was his duty to explain how it could have come about by natural means. (Part II, sec. 1)

It would be wrong to interpret Condillac’s opening sentence as a mere sop to the Church. Leaving to God the responsibility of the Cre-

   the scene liberated ation avoids the problem of anthropogenesis that would become accessible to scientific thought only with the emergence of theories of evolution in the next century. No doubt the children’s already-human status precludes the construction of a model that equates anthropogenesis with the acquisition of language. Yet the framework provided by the Genesis story gives Condillac’s model the advantage over the “natural” pagan ones cited by Warburton of avoiding the trappings of “woods and caves” that serve as mere alibis of prehumanity.10 By reducing the tension between isolation and communication to the minimal terms of the couple, Condillac articulates the need for “mutual assistance” that in the ancient scenario is simply taken for granted as the result of our emergence from the “state of nature.” Condillac’s point against Warburton is not to dismiss the religious tradition but to propose a more epistemologically sophisticated mode of transition between the Judeo-Christian creation story and a scientific hypothesis. Warburton’s way of reconciling the religious tradition with the needs of secular thought was to suggest that God gave man an elementary form of language that he was expected to “improve and enlarge.” In Condillac’s model, what God had done for man in the Garden of Eden, man was required to do for himself after the Fall; the point is not to integrate the two stories but to separate the (divine) creation of human beings from the reconstruction of a means of human communication in our fallen state. Although Condillac is understandably unconcerned with pointing out the mimetic cause of the Fall, his emphasis on desire and lack, in contrast to Locke’s passive cognitivism, is already a creative—and even creatively Judeo-Christian—step in this direction. The second part of Condillac’s Essai opens with a preliminary description of his famous thought experiment in which his two children generate human language. Along with the biblical example of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden, this scenario was no doubt inspired by Herodotus’ well-known anecdote about the Egyptian king Psammetichus who has two children brought up in a language-free environment in order to determine which language is the most ancient. (As their first observed “word,” bekos, resembled the Phrygian word for bread, the king concluded that Phrygian was the oldest language.) Condillac’s experiment

The Enlightenment: From Hobbes to Condillac    is more radically conceived; it uses the scenic imagination to construct a model for the origin of language itself. Here are the details of the experiment. I have retained Aarsleff ’s (and Condillac’s) exclusive use of the masculine pronoun, but the reader should recall that the two children are of different sexes. [Ch. 1] 1. So long as the children I am speaking of lived apart, the exercise of the operations of their soul was limited to that of perception and consciousness, which do not cease so long as we are awake; to that of attention, which occurred whenever some perceptions affected them in a particular manner; to that of reminiscence, when the circumstances which engaged them stayed before their minds before the connections they had formed were destroyed; and to a very limited exercise of the imagination. The perception of a need, for instance, was connected with the object which had served to relieve it. But having been formed by chance and lacking the steady support of reflection, these connections did not last long. One day the sensation of hunger made these children call to mind a tree loaded with fruit which they had seen the day before. The next day this tree was forgotten, and the same sensation called to mind some other object. Thus the exercise of the imagination was not within their power. It was merely the effect of the circumstances in which they found themselves.

This passage reflects Condillac’s thesis that the acquisition of longterm knowledge is impossible without signs. Associations of ideas in the absence of “reflection” are in his view confined to what we now call the short-term memory. In determining the content of these mental operations, Condillac sees the postlapsarian human being, as exemplified by the children, not as a Lockean perception machine but as a needy and functionally prehuman organism. The first and presumably primary object of perception is not an object but a lack; in this secular version of the Fall, the first common memory is that of the absent fruit tree, but in the absence of representation through signs, this common memory cannot become a building-block of long-term knowledge. 2. When they lived together they had occasion for greater exercise of these first operations, because their mutual discourse made them connect the cries of each passion to the perceptions of which they were the natural signs. They usually accompanied the cries with some movement, gesture, or action that made the expression more striking. For example, he who suffered by not having an object

   the scene liberated his needs demanded would not merely cry out; he made as if an effort to obtain it, moved his head, his arms, and all parts of his body. Moved by this display, the other fixed his eyes on the same object, and feeling his soul suffused with sentiments he was not yet able to account for to himself, he suffered by seeing the other suffer so miserably. From this moment he feels eager to ease the other’s pain, and he acts on this impression to the extent that it is within his power. Thus by instinct alone these people asked for help and gave it. I say “by instinct alone,” for reflection could not as yet have any share in it. One of them did not say, “I must bestir myself in that particular way to make the other understand what I need and to induce him to help me”; nor the other, “I see by his motions that he wants to have something and I intend to give it to him.” But both acted as a result of the need that was most urgent for them.

This section describes a prelinguistic state of nature where the “passions” are expressed by natural or indexical signs (sighs, tears) equivalent to animal calls, as well as by gestures. The author’s insistence on the children’s “effort to obtain” the object of desire by moving head, arms, and so on, indicates to us that these signs are not simply involuntary; they reflect an intention to appropriate the object. I am able to understand such signs because my instincts would generate in me the same cries in similar circumstances and because my own physical efforts to acquire the object would also be analogous to my companion’s. Yet the difference between voluntary and involuntary signs cannot become a subject of reflection in the absence of language. We note once more the relevance of Condillac’s reference to the Fall. His originary scenario is based not on sensation but on “needs.” The association of the two children, not otherwise motivated, is cemented by their sharing of “passions.” And however physical these “needs” may be, Condillac describes the couple’s mutual assistance in mimetic terms: “he suffered by seeing the other suffer so miserably.” When he asserts that they act “by instinct alone,” he refers of course to their prelinguistic, prereflective state, but this state is implicitly distinguished from similar states in animals by its protohuman mimeticism. One child does not aid the other by interpreting the other’s actions, rather “both acted as a result of the need that was most urgent for them [tous deux agissoient en conséquence du besoin qui les pressoit davantage].” The only coherent reading of this last assertion would be that as a result of witnessing the

The Enlightenment: From Hobbes to Condillac    other’s “need,” each acquired this need for him- or herself, making it “the need that was most urgent for them.” A further turn of the mimetic screw would lead us directly to the triangular impasse of mimetic desire, since the two wants, now equally pressing, could not normally be satisfied without conflict. 3. The frequent repetition of the same circumstances could not fail, however, to make it habitual for them to connect the cries of the passions and the different motions of the body to the perceptions they expressed in a manner so striking to the senses. The more familiar they became with the signs, the more readily they were able to call them to mind at will. Their memory began to have some exercise; they gained command of their imagination, and little by little they succeeded in doing by reflection what they had formerly done only by instinct. In the beginning both made it a habit to recognize, by those signs, the sentiments which the other felt at the moment; later they used the signs to communicate the sentiments they had experienced. For example, he who came upon a place where he had become frightened, imitated the cries and motions that were the signs of fear to warn the other not to expose himself to the same danger.

It would be easy enough to deconstruct this model of the birth of the representational or “symbolic” sign: if habit alone could transform the children’s instinctive cries and practical-instinctive gestures into signs, habit should effect this transformation in animals as well. Only the children’s prior God-given humanity can justify this difference of outcome. Nor is this a satisfactory model of the origin of the linguistic signifier. Words cannot be derived simply from the “cries of the passions,” representative examples of which are crying, screaming, and laughing. Although we can—not without difficulty—make voluntary use of our limited repertory of prelinguistic “cries” or “calls” in order to arouse a desired response in our interlocutor, such action, generally frowned on as dishonest, is very different from misleading through language: in one case, what is falsified is a proposition, in the other, an emotion. It is not without interest that in his discussion of language in the Essai, Condillac seems never to have thought of the possibility of lying; the words mentir and mensonge do not appear in his text. Condillac’s scenario is nonetheless a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of the origin of human language. By situating this origin specifically in the passage from the natural-indexical sign of need

   the scene liberated to its “arbitrary” linguistic counterpart, he focuses our attention on the possible motivations for this passage. Nor is it without significance that in the unique concrete example provided in the just-quoted paragraph, what the speaker points out to his companion is not a source of food, as modern theoreticians typically propose, but a place of fright and danger. It would suffice to attach this fear to the potential rivalry implicit in the “the need that was most urgent for them” of the preceding paragraph of the Essai to generate a scene where the first linguistic sign is emitted in order to prevent this rivalry from disturbing the community. Condillac’s cooperative model of language regenerates the fallen and dispersed human species through the family begun by his two children, whose own child is the first “native speaker”—a situation remarkably similar to that described in Derek Bickerton’s Roots of Language (1981), where fully linguistic creoles are generated by the second-generation native speakers of what had been for their original speakers protolinguistic pidgins. Condillac suggests that the new baby, finding itself—not unlike the child in Lacan’s “mirror stage”—unable to perform the coherent practical gestures of its parents, has recourse more readily than they to verbal language, whence what Condillac describes as a gradual evolution toward the dominance of spoken over gestural language. This speculation anticipates our view today, with the child’s habituation to the “arbitrary” sounds of language embodied over time in the evolutionary development of the vocal tract. For Condillac as for Rousseau, language as the exemplary means of human communication is a supplement to the “lack” engendered by the Fall. If Condillac’s critique of the misuse of language never puts in doubt, as it does in Rousseau, its essentially beneficial nature, this is because for Condillac the social cooperation it promotes never itself becomes, as it does for Rousseau, a source of mimetic conflict—this despite the fact that the potential for this conflict is present in germ in even the most constructive moments of Condillac’s text. In passing from Condillac to Rousseau, we reach the culmination of the scenic imagination of the Enlightenment and the beginning of the romantic reliance on the individual’s internal scene of representa-

The Enlightenment: From Hobbes to Condillac    tion as opposed to the collective public scene, mistrusted as enslaved to bourgeois mediation. Whereas Condillac, like the General Semanticists of recent times, sees human conflict as the result of preventable misunderstandings of signs, Rousseau understands that every use of signs bears a potential for mimetic conflict.

chapter 2

Rousseau

1. Language and Unanimity In a famous phrase in Tristes tropiques (1955), Claude Lévi-Strauss, speaking for the anthropological/ethnological community, called Rousseau “our master and our brother.” With respect to the standard discourse of academic anthropology, Rousseau is indeed the first thinker to construct a model of primitive humanity (“begun society,” la société commencée) on the basis of limited but reasonably reliable ethnographic data—a silver age paradoxically situated on the interface between the innocent state of nature and society’s corrupting mimetic influence. Rousseau’s expulsion of Hobbesian rivalry from human nature—in contrast with Locke’s mitigation-through-property—may well be called the first gesture of modern anthropology-as-ethnology; this washing away of the original sin of mimetic desire, which has continued to motivate anthropology as a discipline, has at the same time prevented it from constructing a generative model of the human. The theoretical centrality of Rousseau’s ideas on human origin, as expressed in the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality) (1754) and the posthumous Essai sur l’origine des langues (Essay on the Origin of Languages) (written in 1755, published in 1781), paradoxically reflects Rousseau’s situation at

Rousseau    the threshold of true modernity, just before the French Revolution and the rise of the modern market system. Jacques Derrida’s 1967 masterwork De la grammatologie (On Grammatology), which takes the Essay as its principal text, made “the moment of Rousseau” the central focus of high postmodern theory. The deconstruction of Rousseau’s anthropological model may be seen as a supreme attempt by the postmodern—in a word, anti-scenic—heirs of the Enlightenment to deny significance to the historical lessons of Christianity and of its secular product, the modern exchange system, by equating Rousseau’s critique of language-as-“writing” with that endemic to Western metaphysics in general. Yet Derrida’s critique of Rousseau implies despite itself a fundamental anthropology that only a yet more fundamental anthropology can properly evaluate. Derrida’s attack on the myth of “presence” is best understood not in the neo-Nietzschean context in which it is normally presented, where the object is to deny the legitimacy of the social order and its metaphysical justifications, but as a genealogy that traces the “context-free” declarative proposition of metaphysics back to its source in the ostensive sign whose emergence as a means of deferring violence defines the originary human scene. Rousseau is the thinker who first grasped the inextricable complicity of the sign with the violence that it was created/discovered in order to prevent: the sign designates its object as sacred and therefore inviolable, but this designation only increases our desire for it, with its consequent potential for mimetic conflict. Rousseau’s solution is to deny that mimetic desire is a fundamental characteristic of the human being, taken individually, and thereby to hold out the theoretical possibility that a form of community—that of the social contract—could bring together a group of individuals without arousing the other-directed passions characteristic of “society.” Rousseau’s contribution to mimetic anthropology makes him the key enabler of the romantic illusion that mimesis is unnecessary to anthropology. Lévi-Strauss’ consecration of Rousseau as a “brother” anthropologist is the founding text of deconstruction, in the sense that a grain of sand is the founding particle of a pearl. The core of Derrida’s grammatology is the proposition that anthropology, and human science in general, is just a new disguise for metaphysics. Human science is indeed a development

   the scene liberated of metaphysics, but it is a metaphysics open not only to empirical data about human cultures, which Rousseau was the first major thinker seriously to integrate into his model of the human, but also to the—far more subversive—potential infiltration of the metaphysical concept by the anthropological scene of representation, the locus not of Ideas but of events. The return from the metaphysical proposition to its root in the ostensive event reverses the dissolving effect of deconstruction: cultural phenomena, from language to ritual, that have operated from the beginning to defer mimetic violence cannot be delegitimized simply by showing them to be “arbitrary,” since it is this “arbitrary” designation of the sacred that makes language, culture, and eventually metaphysics possible. Rousseau is one of very few historical figures who may credibly be said to have initiated a new mode of consciousness. It is not enough to describe his innovation as a mode of thought; its most original aspect is interactive, a new way of dealing with one’s fellows in obedience to a calculated surrender to one’s resentment that might be called the “paranoid imperative.” The cultural-behavioral phenomenon of romanticism is rooted in Rousseau’s innovation, and the exposure of romantic illusion by consciousness does not suffice to provide a worldly alternative to it. Rousseau was the first person to realize that modern society’s principled rejection of sacrificial exclusion offers its individual members a permanent basis for blackmail. Although in the world of the literary imagination, Molière’s Misanthrope (and before him, Hamlet at Claudius’ court) preceded Rousseau in this strategy, he was the first to apply it openly in the real world, translating the noble’s disdain for bourgeois reality into a democratic, universally accessible attitude. Individual resentment at real or imaginary exclusion fueled a rhetoric of social injustice that flourished in the romantic era but that has truly come into its own in the victimary rhetoric of the postmodern age. It is not to disparage the victims of injustice to point out that nothing resembles justified resentment so much as unjustified resentment. In bourgeois society, the rhetoric of victimization serves to point out problems in the circulation of desire within the exchange system that are not as a rule—despite significant exceptions—reducible to simple injustice. The market system tends to deal with such problems by increasing the circulation of goods and desires, often neglecting to resolve the injustice

Rousseau    alleged as their cause. Conversely, the market system looks askance at any relation that generates unrecoverable resentment. As Hannah Arendt pointed out a propos of anti-Semitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), what tends to be resented is not domination or inequality in itself so much as domination or inequality that has lost its obvious function in maintaining the social order and has come to appear mere arbitrary privilege. It is the dying horses that attract the most beating. In Rousseau’s day, the French monarchy was the greatest of dying horses—it would expire a mere decade after he did. But Rousseau could not have predicted its demise, nor could he have anticipated the complicity between the market system and its critics that would make his critique of “society” so useful in the romantic era. Rousseau’s espousal of victimary rhetoric cannot be attributed to anything so crass as political self-interest; he followed the paranoid imperative wherever it might lead. It is this act of faith that separates him from the romantics, which is to say, from all of us who live in the wake of the French Revolution. What is the connection between Rousseau’s rhetorical blackmail and his theory of language origin? Unlike Condillac and his predecessors, Rousseau is aware of the paradox of representation, which he calls below les embarras de l’origine des langues. In contrast with the other thinkers of his day—and for the most part, with those of our own—Rousseau is aware that language cannot be explained as a simple prolongation of prehuman systems of communication; as he puts it rather abstractly, it could only have emerged if its use had become “indispensable.” May I be permitted to consider for a moment the embarrassment of the origin of languages. I could content myself with quoting or repeating Abbé Condillac’s investigations on this subject, all of which fully confirm my own conceptions and may well have provided them with their point of departure. But because Condillac’s solution to the difficulties that he poses for himself concerning the origin of instituted [that is, conventional, symbolic] signs shows that he presupposes what I put into question, that is, a kind of society already established among the inventors of language, I consider myself obliged to add my own reflections to his in order to expose these same difficulties in the light appropriate to my subject. The first difficulty that presents itself is to imagine how languages could have become necessary; for if men had no communication among themselves, nor any need to have any, one cannot conceive either the necessity or the

   the scene liberated possibility of this invention, in the event that [lit: if ] it was not indispensable. (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Part I)

I think “indispensable” should be interpreted here in a Darwinian sense. Language cannot have emerged gradually from animal communication; its revolutionary appearance implies a crisis that the latter could not solve. We may call it a “collective mutation” as opposed to a genetic one. Some population of protohumans reached the level of mimetic intelligence that made the discovery/invention of “symbolic” signs the only alternative to the breakdown of social order in mimetic crisis; conversely, a protohuman community that failed to do this, even if it managed to survive these crises without changing its mode of communication, would put itself at a disadvantage with respect to a newly human community. Rousseau’s argument continues: even when we “[suppose] this first difficulty vanquished,” that is, that language could have become “indispensable,” we encounter a “new difficulty, worse even than the previous one”: that if men needed language in order to think, they must have needed thought in order to speak. These paradoxes are accompanied by fragments of a hypothesis of origin that is in turn deconstructed: Man’s first language, the most universal, most energetic language, and the only one he needed until it became necessary [that is, in “society”] to persuade men in assembly, is the cry/call of nature [le cri de la nature]. . . . It was finally decided to substitute for [the cry] vocal articulations that, without having the same [sc. “natural”] relation with certain ideas, are more appropriate to representing the totality of ideas as instituted signs—a substitution that could not have taken place without common consent, and in a manner rather difficult to exercise for men whose crude organs had not yet any practice, and still more difficult to conceive in itself, since this unanimous agreement [accord unanime] had to be motivated, so that speech seems to have been very necessary in order to establish the use of speech.

Rousseau’s lucid recognition of the difference in kind between articulated language and le cri de la nature is an implicit refutation of Condillac’s unproblematic transition from one to the other. All that is lacking to turn Rousseau’s self-deconstructing argument into a positive hypothesis of the originary scene of representation is an equivalence that his own writing provides. No Rousseauian reading the expression accord

Rousseau    unanime in the preceding paragraph will fail to recall the famous opening of Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782), Rousseau’s final, posthumous work: “Here I am, alone in the world, with no brother, neighbor, friend, or society but my own. The most sociable and loving of humans has been proscribed from society by a unanimous agreement [accord unanime]” (Rêveries I). The identity of the words suggests an identity of structure: the same unanimous agreement that is the agent of scapegoating (and whose denunciation is the function of the victimary rhetoric that Rousseau inaugurated) is also the agent of the creation of human language, as distinct from the prehuman cri de la nature. This is the link we have been seeking between Rousseau’s invention of the victimary and his discovery of the paradox of representation, a tribute to the power of paranoia as a discovery principle. The unique self defined by his unanimous expulsion from society is a product of the same generative process that produces the first sign, a process for which Rousseau provides an existential model. The paranoid’s sense of victimage is a usurpation of the sacrificial center of the scene that at the same time provides a model for the scene’s originary constitution. In Girard’s anthropology, the model is applied directly: the scapegoat, expelled and/or murdered by the unanimous group, is the center of sacred significance around which all systems of signification, including but not foregrounding language, come into being. In my view, this model can be simplified; the common desire of the participants suffices, given a sufficient level of mimetic tension, to generate the scene and its sacred center as a means of preventing anticipated violence. But even if this simplification is anthropologically justified, it could only have been conceived as a simplification of the scapegoat model; the paranoid experience was necessary to make the sacrificial scene, defined by “unanimous agreement,” into a theoretical object. The scapegoat model provides the link between religious narrative and anthropological hypothesis, both in the contemporary world and in Rousseau’s own historical context, where he demonstrated for the entire modern era the heuristic power of the victimary mechanism as a means by which the individual self can conceive itself at the scenic center. Saul/ Paul on the road to Damascus is converted to Christianity by the vision of the one whom he persecutes, and in whose name he accepts to be

   the scene liberated persecuted in turn, having understood that it is persecution itself that is the proof of significance, that it is just the one whom he wishes to drive from his memory who will persist there. Rousseau’s intuition folds the singularity of the Christian revelation back into a symmetry that appears blasphemous from the Christian perspective but is in reality its triumphant generalization: in order to be oneself the/a center, to know oneself as akin to the son of God, one must experience unanimous persecution. And since no one knows what another experiences, the important thing is not the experience but the claim to it. Secular victimary rhetoric began with the individual Rousseau and was practiced during the romantic era by a self-styled elite. Since World War II and the Holocaust it has gradually become the dominant mode of “Western” discourse and interaction. The deconstruction of Rousseau’s “metaphysics of presence” is less a debunking of one author’s pretensions than the revelation of the nihilism that underlies an entire mode of thought, and of the concomitant necessity that liberal market society continue to provide—through religion, art, self-fulfillment, consumption, values of family and community—alternatives to it.

2. Rousseau’s Prelinguistic Pity Pity plays a central role in Rousseau’s originary anthropology as the fundamental principle of human interaction prior, ontologically if not chronologically, to the introduction of language. “A natural repugnance to see perish or suffer any sentient being and principally our fellow humans” is one of the “two principles prior to reason” that Rousseau recognizes as “the first and simplest operations of the human soul” in the preface to his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality—the other principle being l’amour de soi, the principle of self-preservation. The term “pity,” which does not figure in the preface, appears near the end of Part I, in the context of a polemic against Hobbes’ negative vision of man’s natural state. After accusing Hobbes of falsely attributing to humans in the state of nature the amour-propre or selfish vanity that Rousseau reserves for the members of “society,” he remarks that his adversary has failed to notice “another principle” that was given to man to temper both variet-

Rousseau    ies of amour: “an inner repugnance to see his fellow human suffer.” Here he names this principle “pity,” repeating that it precedes the “use of any reflection” and attributing it on occasion to animals as well. He relates how even Mandeville, author of The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714), “the most extreme detractor of human virtues,” was obliged to recognize man’s natural sympathy for his fellows. The key function of pity in Rousseau’s anthropology is to provide a guarantee of human reciprocity prior to “the tardy lessons of wisdom,” so that “we are not obliged to make of man a philosopher before making him a man.” If our “duties toward others” can be attributed to this natural principle, then we can detach morality from the language/sociability nexus and place it on the good, natural side of Rousseau’s famous dichotomy, affirmed in a footnote of the Discourse: man is good, men are bad. But we have learned all too well how to deconstruct Rousseau’s dichotomies. The positive mimetic moment of pity and the negative mimetic moment of Hobbes’ universal war are doubles. To pity someone is to “feel his pain,” to put oneself in his place. But putting oneself in the place of one’s fellow is precisely what mimesis is all about; to be in the same place as the other is to be the other’s rival. At the same time as tragedy puts us in the victim-protagonist’s place on the level of content, by obliging us to identify as well with the authorial will that presides over tragic form, it puts us in the place of his executioners. Rousseau rightly associates true violence with crossing the threshold between the natural and the cultural. Mimetic conflict among animals is limited to pecking-order challenges that never escalate into universal war. Nature red in tooth and claw is not in thrall to mimetic desire. Rousseau’s chimerical attempt to situate the nature-culture threshold within the human itself reminds us that he had to generate the cultural from the natural without the benefit of the idea that one species could evolve into another. The state of nature into which Hobbes put modern humans lacking only a system of laws is populated in Rousseau by “savages” who must double as pre-Darwinian hominids. In order to guarantee his distinction between “man” and “men,” Rousseau is forced to insist on their individual isolation much more rigorously than Hobbes. Where Hobbes’ “man” refers to a male paterfamilias implicitly supplied with spouse(s) and children, in Rousseau’s state of nature, women and men do not form

   the scene liberated families but go their separate ways, as if the women had no need for male support in the onerous task of caring for our “neotenous” infants that makes human sexual and family life so different from that of the apes. A more fundamental critique of Rousseau’s state of nature is that the insistence on its insulation from mimetic contamination implies what it seeks to deny. Rousseau’s savage is happier than Hobbes’ natural man, not because he is any less mimetic, but because his mimetic tendencies have only rare occasions to assert themselves. And nearly all these rare occasions seem to fall under the rubric of pity. In his disquisition on the subject near the end of Part I, Rousseau asserts that pity is the source of all our social virtues: “What are generosity, clemency, humaneness but pity applied to the weak, the guilty, or to the entire human race?” He then examines a potential objection to his claim, the assertion that pity is not a moral sentiment but a feeling of “identification”: Even if it were true that commiseration is an obscure feeling that puts us in the place of the sufferer, a feeling obscure and strong in the savage, developed but weak in civilized man, what effect could that idea have on the truth of what I am saying except to strengthen it? Indeed, commiseration would be all the more energetic in proportion as the spectator animal identifies [s’identifie] more intimately with the suffering animal. Now it is clear that this identification must have been infinitely closer in the state of nature than in that of reason. It is reason that engenders selfishness [l’amour-propre], and it is reflection that fortifies it, that turns man back upon himself, that detaches him from all that troubles and distresses him; it is philosophy that isolates him, it is through philosophy that he says in secret at the sight of a sufferer: perish, if you like, I am safe. [My emphasis]

Amour-propre has just been defined as a social passion “that leads each individual to make more of himself than anyone else” and that was unknown in the state of nature where “it is not possible that a sentiment originating in comparisons that [the savage] has no means to make could arise in his soul.” Amour-propre belongs to the negative moment of mimesis; to compare oneself with another is to render the identification of pity impossible. The savage, who, like David Reisman’s erstwhile “inner-directed” man,1 makes no such comparisons, can identify more intimately with others because he has no fear of losing his identity to them. Rousseau’s utopia denies the mimetic equilibrium of positive and negative. Rightly seeing that humans are centrally preoccupied with

Rousseau    minimizing the destructive effects of mimesis, Rousseau draws the illegitimate conclusion that the positive and negative moments of mimesis are mutually exclusive. He fails to see that if pity and vanity combat each other in the soul of civilized man it is because they are both generated by the same mechanism. To the extent that the savage is less mimetic, he must be less compassionate as well. Why does Rousseau make pity, as opposed, say, to learning or playful imitation, the exemplary form of positive mimesis? Why is our identification with others confined to their sufferings? As Rousseau himself observes, “natural pity” is intentionally generated by culture: Such is the pure movement of nature, anterior to all reflection, such is the force of natural pity that even the most depraved morals have difficulty in destroying, since we see every day in our theaters [spectacles] becoming moved and crying at the misfortunes of a sufferer a person who, were he in the tyrant’s place, would only increase the torments of his enemy.

Theater, particularly tragic theater, is a critique of sacrifice that presupposes its necessity. We pity the tragic victim only insofar as we are fellow participants in the tragic agon that guarantees his sufferings. We want Oedipus to escape his own investigation, yet we rely for this desire on our prior knowledge that he will not. This paradoxical, quintessentially cultural structure is the basis of Rousseau’s example of natural pity. As we will see in the next section, in the Essay on the Origin of Languages, the primary relation between men in their natural state is not pity but terror; when in Book III, a group of “savages” comes upon the member of another tribe, their fear makes them call the newcomers “giants.” Pity and terror are not “natural” sentiments. Pity, already present in Condillac as the recognition of shared need in our fallen state, is not the positive moment of mimesis but a recuperation of its negative moment. Natural pity can be opposed to social amour-propre only because pity, unlike simpler manifestations of mimesis, is a social emotion that contains its negative element in transcended form. The primary object of pity is not natural suffering but the cultural suffering engendered by sacrifice. Even today, archaic societies recognize no “natural suffering” with which to commiserate; no illness is untainted by at least the suspicion of a supernatural, which is to say, a cultural

   the scene liberated cause. Compassion is always compassion for the victim, and the victim is always sacrificial. Pity is a social passion that depends on the designation of the victim by a sign. Even the victims of a natural disaster evoke in us not the simple desire to heal their pain but a guilty sense that “there but for the grace of God go we.” By situating pity in the state of nature, Rousseau would deconstruct sacrifice before it is instituted. He performs the sleight of hand of evoking an effect of human language—and of the society it generates—as a demonstration of language’s contingency. The level of intensity of mimetic identification is irrelevant to the symmetry of its positive and negative moments. Where there is imitation, there is rivalry; where there is identification, there is competition. And where there is pity, there is terror. The savage who identifies “more intimately” with his suffering fellow and the savage whose fear makes him call the other a “giant” are one and the same. The victim is always already sacred; if we pity him, we fear him. No doubt the Rousseauian savage’s terror is realized in language, whereas his pity is expressed without words. But this is possible only because the word designating the victim has already been irrevocably pronounced. Rousseau’s half shrewd, half naive repositioning of pity for the victim as prelinguistic sympathy would become the defining sentiment of the romantic era, the mensonge romantique that is the basis of both its exaltation of the supposedly autonomous individual and its critique of the nascent market system. In 1848, the French elected Alphonse de Lamartine, the archetypal French romantic poet, as the first leader of their revolutionary government. But the romantic revolution failed. When, in the theatrical politics of the following century, “natural pity” finally prevailed politically over the cold mediations of the bourgeois order, the results were something less than utopian.

3. The Essay on the Origin of Languages Like many a posthumously published work, the Essay on the Origin of Languages is characteristic of its creator to the point of caricature. Although its history is unclear, it is difficult not to connect its unpublished status with its relative lack of discipline in the deployment of Rousseau’s

Rousseau    trademark nature-culture dichotomy in comparison with the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, to which it serves as a kind of appendix. But for the purposes of deconstruction’s denial of objective scientific value to metaphysical constructions, the more undisciplined the better; concentration on the Essay at the expense of the Discourse makes it easier to overlook their commonality of aims and achievements as proto-scientific texts. The world of the Essay resembles less the state of nature of the first part of the Discourse than the social world of the second part. To one in humanity’s already-fallen condition, for whom language has replaced le cri de la nature, the melodious voice serves as a supplementary substitute for his lost natural state. If the author of the more rigorous Discourse prudently refused to cut the Gordian knot of the paradoxical precedencerelation of language and thought, the author of the Essay, taking the existence of language itself for granted, confronts head on the paradox of the speaker’s vocal self-presence, which reproduces in the language of individual psychology metaphysics’ valorization of the “context-free” declarative proposition at the expense of the ostensive-imperative connection to external reality. The voice is self-contained only in order better to connect the self with others; it reveals the self in the guise of an autonomous being that has no need of revelation. As noted above, the primary extrafamilial relationship among humans in the Essay is determined, not as in the Discourse by prelinguistic pity, but by a Hobbesian fear that is, not coincidentally, the first passion to be expressed in language. The scene in chapter 3 contains the Essay’s most brilliant anthropological insight: “Upon meeting others, a savage man will initially be frightened. Because of his fear he will see the others as taller and stronger than himself. He will give them the name of giants.”2 The need to “supplement” this language of fear—to which I shall return below—inspires the sweetness of song (chapter 4), which in a typically Rousseauian redichotomization will in chapter 9 be restricted to the melodious, vocalic South in contrast to the harsh, consonantal North; for the Essay is as much a polemic promoting Italian over French music as it is a speculation about language. The scene in chapter 3 sketches the origin of human representation in two scenic moments: (1) The birth of the sign as the hyperboliz-

   the scene liberated ing/sacralizing of an Other (“giant”) recognized as a potential source of mimetic conflict; (2) the peaceful “supplementary” elaboration of this sign in ritual performance. The jeu du supplément that creates song in compensation for the lost harmony of nature is not a merely metaphysical operation; it reflects the passage from the purely formal emission of the sign to its institutional elaboration in ritual. Rousseau’s argument appeals not to the equilibrating construction of the musical supplement but to its naturalness, not to the sacrificial nature of ritual but to the erotic virtues of song: In the arid places where one could only obtain water from wells, men had to come together to dig them, or at least to reach agreement on their use. This must have been the origin of societies and languages in warm countries. There the first ties were formed among families; there were the first rendezvous of the two sexes. . . . There the first festivals took place. Feet skipped with joy, eager gestures no longer sufficed, the voice accompanied them with impassioned accents; pleasure and desire mingled and were felt together. There, finally, was the true cradle of nations: from the pure crystal of the fountains flowed the first fires of love. (ch. 9, emphasis mine)

However much the anthropological lesson of Rousseau’s text is subordinated to its polemical intention, Rousseau’s preference for the natural over the social may be stripped of its moralizing rhetoric to become a postulate of method, one not uncongenial to Durkheim’s sociology of religion: the sociologist focuses on the simplest forms of a given cultural phenomenon because they most clearly reveal that phenomenon’s originary function. What is at issue for human science is not the positive or negative moral valence of historical progress but its double temporality, which goes forward by returning ever closer to the origin. The contrast between the Essay and the Discourse on this point is instructive. The second Discourse, like its cruder predecessor, the 1750 Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, is not a polemic but a paradoxical diatribe against human history. Because its dark view of human society serves no practical cause, its critique is easily extended from the moral to the methodological domain; it suffices to read “good/bad” as “good/bad to study.” The extension is all the more justified in that the resulting values have practical implications for scholarship, whereas the only way to put into practice Rousseau’s moral critique of modernity would be

Rousseau    to obey the desire that Voltaire claimed the Discourse inspired in him to walk on all fours. (Or under the influence of The Social Contract, to seek to realize the “general will” through political action; but that is another story.) That this translation of moral into scholarly “goodness” actually took place is attested to by the emergence of ethnology as the flagship field of the domain we call anthropology. Already in 1791, François René de Chateaubriand traveled to the United States and returned a year later with an account of his travels among the Indians that contains this revelatory description of a young brave: “How grateful I was to him that he didn’t like me.”3 This is perhaps the first public expression of the “white guilt” of the citizens of modern market societies toward their less evolved Others. Here presented as a mark of individual moral refinement, “white guilt” would become a counterweight to the colonial adventures of the following century and emerge after World War II as the paradigmatic attitude of postmodernism, the chief motivating force in the “new fields” of ethnic and area studies, ethnomusicology, gender studies, queer studies, disabled studies, and so on, that have transformed the face of human science over the past generation. v Rousseau’s polemical purpose in declaring melody more natural than harmony is to endorse the Italian musical style, which he himself practiced and the philosophes generally favored, over the stiffer French style championed by Rameau. The diverse variations on the nature-culture dichotomy in the Essay may be read as so many corroborations of this endorsement. Thus the abstract preference of the Discourse for the primitive over the civilized is replaced in the Essay by a geographical preference for the South (Italy) over the North (France), or in cultural terms, the preference for a public, ritual culture mediated by song over a private, secular culture that communicates (if at all) through writing—in a word, for tradition over modernity. Rousseau’s own use of writing as a supplement to the lost state of nature translates into the literate ethnologist’s analytical insight into the operations of oral cultures, an insight in principle inaccessible to the participants in these cultures themselves. It is this implicit assertion of methodological superiority that makes classical

   the scene liberated ethnography so problematic today, when the representatives of archaic cultures have come to see the Western ethnologist—whose personal ideology is likely to be at the antipodes of any form of imperialism—as someone to be negotiated with rather than observed by. In the concluding chapter (20) of the Essay, entitled “Relationships between Languages and Governments,” Rousseau’s aesthetico-ethical model is given a communal and political context: Southern societies in which a general can address his entire army in public are favorably compared with Northern societies where language is private and might just as well be written as spoken. Putting this scene together with the “giant” scenario of chapter 3 suggests a Rousseauian model of the origin of language. In this scene, as in Condillac, language would be generated by fear of danger—from the “giants”—rather than positive appetite. But whereas Condillac understood the linguistic sign as emerging from the increasingly voluntary rationalization of the prehuman “call” elicited by this fear—and where Herder, a generation after Rousseau, would separate the linguistic sign not merely from the cri de la nature but also from the danger that motivated it—for Rousseau the danger posed by the “giants” displaces the sign ab ovo from any natural relationship with its referent. The no-longer-natural quality of the context in which the sign emerges is figured by the metaphoric nature of the sign itself. In the absence of a contrasting word for “man,” “giant” can convey no well-defined meaning, but insofar as Rousseau’s scenario is a model of glossogenesis, the same could be said of any first word. What is conveyed by “giant” is not simply great size but supernaturality, or in other words, sacrality. The différance with which language begins is not binary, Saussurean difference, but the sacred difference of the unique center that defers violence. Prior to becoming objects of aggression, the giants are objects of language. The victim is made sacred by the sign before he is made a victim. Whatever one may subsequently do to these giants, one first hesitates before their incarnation of supernatural force. The text of chapter 3 presents the speaker as isolated before a number of fearsome potential enemies, like Rousseau himself confronting the accord unanime. But the clear implication of the glossogenetic dynamic between a tribal group and a few strangers is that it is the speaker and his interlocutors who would have the advantage of number and force

Rousseau    over the “giants” that are their common referent. Nor, in the Hobbesian world of the Essay, would it be far-fetched to seek the source of the aggression directed outward at the giant-victims in the mimetic rivalries of the proto-community. The danger represented by the Other-as-giant is that constituted in Girard’s model by the scapegoat or emissary victim. Were these “giants” encountered in the “healthy” society we meet in the concluding chapter of the Essay, the general’s voice would transform his soldiers into a sacrificial lynch mob. v Rousseau’s scenic imagination, the most powerful of the Enlightenment, was driven by his ability to imagine himself at the center of a scene of persecution. All the elements of a hypothetical scene of origin are present; we are no longer required, as in Hobbes, to solicit them from the structural “unconscious” of his text. But we are still obliged to piece them together; the two functions of the accord unanime, designation of the object of sacrifice and agreement on the “arbitrary” sign that designates it, are not brought into synthesis. Whatever his own attraction to the collective structure of the sacred, Rousseau remains bound by Enlightenment epistemology, which generates, in opposition to religious tradition, the collective from the individual; he cannot conceive their common and interdependent origin. Such a conception would require the historical experience of a mature, not incipient, market system, whose maturation makes increasingly clear the collective, social source of individual desires and values; this vision of “organic solidarity” first emerges unambiguously over a century later in the work of Emile Durkheim.

4. The Social Contract We have observed that the concept of unanimity has a particular resonance for Rousseau. Completed in 1762, The Social Contract (Du contrat social)4 also refers to an originary unanimity: It would be better, before examining the act by which a people gives itself to a king, to examine that by which it has become a people; for this act, being necessarily prior to the other, is the true foundation of society.

   the scene liberated Indeed, if there were no prior convention, where, unless the election were unanimous, would be the obligation on the minority to submit to the choice of the majority? How have a hundred men who wish for a master the right to vote on behalf of ten who do not? The law of majority voting is itself something established by convention, and presupposes unanimity, on one occasion at least [suppose au moins une fois l’unanimité]. (I, 5; my emphasis)

Although Rousseau’s general will has the appearance of an ideal construct, “au moins une fois” evokes a hypothetical historical moment in which the community is unanimously founded. Rousseau implicitly criticizes Hobbes’ conception of the social contract that men in the state of nature make with a sovereign in order to put an end to universal war. Before “giv[ing] itself to a king,” a people must have “become a people”; hence Hobbes’ originary scene of hierarchy is secondary to the unanimous, egalitarian scene of self-constitution that grounds the general will in history. Furthermore, Rousseau’s point remains valid even if we accept Hobbes’ version of the event, since at the moment of relinquishing their sovereignty, by the very fact of acting unanimously, the contractees establish themselves as a “people” symmetrically arrayed around a (sacred) center. Once the collective “general will” (volonté générale) is established by that single occasion of unanimity, this will maintains a permanent virtual existence, like the divinity that endures after the sacrificial victim has been consumed. So long as the social contract remains in force, the general will decides every question pertinent to it. The people in assembly will not always be of one voice, but so long as the community wishes to remain united under the contract, the minority will perforce accept the verdict of the majority, taken as the expression of the general will. Hobbes and Rousseau mark the beginning and the end of the Enlightenment with diametrically opposed models of the social contract that, in contrast to the simplified originary scenes of Condillac, Herder, or Vico, must be enacted by the entire community. Yet neither Hobbes’ nor Rousseau’s contract scene is complete in itself. The mimetic rivalry of Hobbes’ state of nature is conceivable only within a preexisting community, the pre-hierarchical constitution of which his model cannot explain. Hobbes’ scene nevertheless contains a crucial element missing from Rousseau’s: a central figure who defers the violence of mimetic de-

Rousseau    sire. The troubling ambiguity of Rousseau’s general will, arguably the ideological foundation of both communism and fascism, stems from his elimination of this central figure, lacking which the occasion of the unanimity to which Rousseau appeals cannot be defined. Hobbes’ model valorizes the subordination of the periphery to the center that is inherent in the circular structure of the scene. Yet Hobbes presupposes that his central figure is a human subject like those who surround him; the sacralization of a unique individual serves to guarantee the monarchic power of the unique political center. Rousseau, both as a product of his Genevan heritage and as the inhabitant of an apparently stable monarchy, was less obsessed than Hobbes by the need to reaffirm a central authority; he therefore prefers to avoid the problematic implications of an individual sovereign for the anthropological scene he constructs. The center of Rousseau’s circle is solely occupied by the abstract object of the general will; all that subsists of the originary unanimity is this will itself, which, like a unique divinity, imposes the same law on all human societies. The clauses of [the social] contract are so determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would make them vain and ineffective; so that, although they have perhaps never been formally set forth, they are everywhere the same and everywhere tacitly admitted and recognized, until, on the violation of the social compact, each regains his original rights and resumes his natural liberty, while losing the conventional liberty in favor of which he renounced it. These clauses, properly understood, may be reduced to one—the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others. Moreover, the alienation being without reserve, the union is as perfect as it can be, and no associate has anything more to demand: for, if the individuals retained certain rights, as there would be no common superior to decide between them and the public, each, being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of nature would thus continue, and the association would necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical. Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he has.

   the scene liberated If then we discard from the social compact what is not of its essence, we shall find that it reduces itself to the following terms: “Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” (I, 6; emphasis the author’s)

The individual members of the group “alienate” themselves to the group as a whole, whose will replaces the central “common superior” of Hobbes’ contract scene. The exchange of “rights” among the members of the group involves no loss; endlessly reciprocal, it manifests the group’s moral superconductivity. Because the unanimous decision that constitutes the group is self-referential—to express unanimity is to become the unanimous community—the subsistence of the general will guarantees this ideal exchange throughout the community’s existence. v At the origin of The Social Contract’s society without residue is the seamless passage from nature to culture that Rousseau rejected in the second Discourse. Rousseau motivates the contract scene in the following terms: I suppose men to have reached the point at which the obstacles in the way of their preservation in the state of nature show their power of resistance to be greater than the resources at the disposal of each individual for his maintenance in that state. That primitive condition can then subsist no longer; and the human race would perish unless it changed its manner of existence. (Ibid.)

Hobbes’ men are warring mimetic rivals; Rousseau’s are isolated individuals whose problems are with nature rather than culture. What Rousseau’s omits from Hobbes’ model are the mimetic desires that he elsewhere attributes to men in society, and which are for Hobbes what necessitates the contract in the first place; when humans exist in a centerless mode of reciprocal exchange, they exchange not “rights” but violence. Rousseau’s general will is a modern version of the Platonic Good whose very conceptual existence denies, by a kind of ontological proof, the possibility of conflicting interests. Unlike Plato, Rousseau provides his universal Good with an anthropological origin, but he omits from his originary scene the conflicting desires on which the will imposes itself.

Rousseau    In Rousseau’s social contract we exchange “natural liberty” for “moral liberty, which alone makes [man] truly master of himself ” (I, 8) because it dominates our “appetites.” The social contract is a check on appetite rather than on the human conflict it occasions. In the final chapter of Book I, Rousseau explains this more fully: I shall end this chapter and this book by remarking on a fact on which the whole social system should rest: i.e., that, instead of destroying natural equality, the fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal right. (I, 9)

This is Rousseau’s version of the moral model of symmetrical reciprocity that derives from the unanimous and reciprocal exchange of the originary sign. The perfect unanimity of this originary moment is the unmediated kernel of Durkheim’s conception of the sacred as the emanation of the group’s unity. In this pure, objectless state, the sacred is not differentiated from the profane but subsists as a self-mediated communion akin to that of the groupe en fusion in Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique (1960). Unfortunately, self-sustaining communion is a utopian dream that, untempered by the otherness of the sacred object/victim/deity, provides a delusive model for political action. What Rousseau’s model polity inherits from the originary absence of conflicting desires is the absence of politics. In contrast with the “will” of a democratic society that is generated dynamically within the political process as the negotiated resultant of conflicting desires, the only effect of Rousseau’s majority vote is to discover a will that existed in latent form prior to the election. Rousseau rejects Hobbes’ model of mimetic violence in order to grasp the community’s primordial unanimity, but he does not see that the source of the unanimity itself can only be the critical necessity of deferring this violence. Hobbes conceived his authoritarian social contract as pointing the way out of his country’s civil war. From the French Revolution to the World Wars of the twentieth century, from the guillotine to the gulag, Rousseau’s volonté générale, at once democratic and tyrannical, would inspire the greatest acts of violence in human history.

chapter 3

Alternative Anthropologies: Vico and Herder

1. Vico’s Originary Scene The reputation of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) as a thinker rests on a set of powerful ideas that reveal a historically unique insight into the generative relationship between the sacred, language, and human order: that language is a product of mimesis, that the first language was participatory rather than simply referential, or as he put it, sung rather than spoken, that the objects of this language were sacred rather than profane, and—less often mentioned—that this elementary sacred, constituted by anthropomorphic explanations of natural phenomena, is a providential means for imposing order through terror on “savage” society. To these we may add the methodological principles of Vico’s “new science”: that we can only fully know (that is, analyze) what we ourselves have constructed (verum factum)—a principle that, when unpacked, is homologous to the originary hypothesis in its radical distinction between the epistemologies of what is and what is not traceable to the originary scene—and that we should study the human in general by discovering what all human societies have in common. It is not the least fascination of Vico’s writing that these intuitions and principles are accompanied by a sublimely uncritical approach to historical data. Although Vico’s La Scienza Nuova (1730–1744) is far from

Alternative Anthropologies: Vico and Herder    the only book that people talk about without (mostly) having read it, in contrast with the others—Hobbes’ Leviathan, Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Marx’s Das Kapital . . . —the less known parts of Vico’s book are likely to shock those familiar only with the author’s main argument.1 Thus we learn that after the Flood only the Hebrews remained of normal size while the “gentiles” grew into giants; that these giants were terrified of thunderstorms because lightning had been unknown for centuries after the flood; that the word “myth” is cognate with the word “mute,” demonstrating that myths were originally written rather than spoken, and so on. It is easy to forget in reading Vico’s mixture of folk etymologies and mythical just-so stories that he was only twenty years older than Voltaire and that the third edition of La Scienza (1744) antedated Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Inequality (1754) by only a decade. In Vico an Enlightenment ideal of scientific method is grafted onto a pre-Cartesian mind that takes biblical and classical lore at face value and invents word derivations that would make Plato’s Cratylus blush. Beneath his quasi-Spinozistic claims to logical rigor, the man often called “the greatest Italian philosopher” is closer in mentality and culture to the Robert Burton of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) than to Kant. Vico’s insights into the sacred and its relationship to representation are the result of the penetration of Enlightenment modes of thought into a society that was neither a nascent nation-state nor an emerging modern economy. In this context, Vico’s newly liberated scenic imagination, which elsewhere might have conceived a new form of the social contract, remained within the more fundamental sacred realm, into which it introduced a mode of anthropological reflection that anticipates that of Durkheim. In Book I of La Scienza, Vico expounds the principles of his science as a pseudo-Euclidean chain of “axioms” linked by a logic generously supplemented with tendentious interpretation. His three ages of world history—sacred, heroic, and simply “human”—each with its political, legal, religious, and social institutions described in considerable detail, situate him halfway between Hesiod and Auguste Comte. To these ages correspond three types of originary language: the language of the gods (mute, gestural and/or graphic), the language of heroes (half-mute, halfspoken), and the mostly spoken language of the common people. These

   the scene liberated languages, which respectively dominate the three chronological ages, are also described as coeval; Vico variously describes the first linguistic signs as gestures, graphic representations, onomatopoetic sounds, emotional interjections, and rhythmic monosyllables derived from song. All these pregnant speculations are informed by Vico’s central generative intuition—one ignored yet today by mainstream theories of language origin—that the first referent of language is an object of sacred terror that imposes order on a potentially violent nascent human community. Marcel Danesi’s proposal of a Vichian originary anthropology in Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language,2 is justified by this intuition alone, although Danesi unsurprisingly discusses Vico’s linguistic insights in the context of the individual mind rather than in the religio-ethical framework of what Vico himself calls “a rational civil theology of divine providence” (342), within which the first, “sacred” language serves the religious function of deferring violence. The following passage from Book I, the first and most incisive of several dealing with the origin of language and religion, reveals both the profundity and the limits of Vico’s anthropological intuition, as well as his inimitably assertive expository style: XXXI: 177. Wherever a people has grown savage in arms so that human laws have no longer any place among it, the only powerful means of reducing it is religion. 178. This axiom establishes the fact that divine providence initiated the process by which the fierce and violent were brought from their outlaw state to humanity and entered upon national life. It did so by awaking in them a confused idea of divinity, which they in their ignorance attributed to that to which it did not belong. Thus through the terror of this imagined divinity, they began to put themselves in some order. 179. Such an [initiating] principle of things Thomas Hobbes failed to see among his own “fierce and violent men” . . . XXXII: 180. When men are ignorant of the natural causes producing things, and cannot even explain them by analogy with similar things, they attribute their own nature to them. . . . XXXIII: 182. The physics of the ignorant is a vulgar metaphysics by which they

Alternative Anthropologies: Vico and Herder    refer the causes of the things they do not know to the will of God without considering the means by which the divine will operates. . . . XXXVI: 185. Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak. XXXVII: 186. The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons. 187. This philologico-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world’s childhood men were by nature sublime poets.

This series leads to the description of “savage and cruel” witches (190) as the originators of “bloodthirsty religions” and human sacrifice, thus confirming the saying “fear first created gods in the world” (Primus in orbe deos fecit timor—Statius, Thebiad); Vico concludes that “all this [religious violence] was necessary to tame the sons of the cyclopes and reduce them to the humanity of an Aristides, a Socrates” (191). Denouncing the artificial rationalism of Hobbes’ social contract model, Vico affirms that only religious “terror” can tame a “savage” people in the state of nature. Providence generates this terror by awakening the idea of the sacred, which is first attributed to the new post-diluvian phenomena of thunder and lightning. This natural sacred is understood anthropomorphically, following the principle that men attribute “their own nature” to forces they do not understand. Whence the universality of the storm-god Jove/Jupiter, who, Vico insists, is found (along with his son Hercules) in “every gentile nation” (196). The power to “give sense and passion to insensate things”—presumably, to make gods out of natural forces—is attributed to “the most sublime labor of poetry,” a product of “the world’s childhood” (186). Vico’s insight that the fearsome representation of the gods arrests violent conflict among the gentile “giants” is not very far from the hypothesis that the fear of the gods itself derives from the fear of human violence. No doubt Vico’s giants, unlike Rousseau’s, are not described as products of the human imagination, but Vico’s point in speaking of giants is not to compare them with normal humans but to impress upon us their potential for violence. Vico’s reference to “that frightful thought of some divinity which imposed form and measure on the bestial pas-

   the scene liberated sions of these lost men and thus transformed them into human passions” (340), while not precisely the description of a scene, nevertheless situates on the divinity’s internal scene of representation the sacred revelation that marks the transition between animal appetite and self-conscious, hence controllable, human desire. The divinity’s thought is homologous to or at any rate productive of the first human use of representation; this is the summit of Vico’s anthropological intuition. To derive explicitly the human thought of the sacred from the Hobbesian or Rousseauian fear of fellow human beings would have been inconceivable, not to say dangerously blasphemous. Thus, having anthropologized the sacred, Vico renaturalizes it: instead of fear of our fellow human beings, he has recourse to that age-old tarte à la crème, terror at thunder and lightning. We observed in Hobbes’ notion of God an unconscious duality, realized in his text but never conceptualized: God gives humanity the gift of language; “God” is a sign that “honors” its infinite referent without being able to describe it. Vico is the first thinker to articulate this duality. In Vico’s pseudo-biblical scenario, far more radical than Condillac’s, where the “fierce and violent” gentiles return to virtual prehuman status after the Flood, it is “providence” that infuses in them the “idea of divinity.” We may compare this with a later passage (II, 4: 447): “at the same time that the divine character of Jove took shape—the first human thought in the gentile world—articulate language began to develop by way of onomatopoeia. . . . By the Latins Jove was at first, from the roar of the thunder, called Ious; by the Greeks, from the whistle of the lightning, Zeus.” The fanciful etymology of the specific names for the storm-god is less important than the affirmation that the originary use of language served to affirm the god’s sacrality, “the first human thought in the gentile world.” However, for Vico, a world cut off from God cannot generate the sacred; even the imagination of false gods depends on the true God’s prior existence. Only providence can supply the paradoxical link between the transcendental concept of divinity and the worldly object of the gentiles’ fear. This intervention of providence is not a mere sop to the Inquisition. The divinity worshipped by the gentiles is derivative in relation to true divinity, just as the gentiles themselves are degenerate forms of an originally articulate humanity. Vico associates poetic mimesis with childhood, in nations as in individuals:

Alternative Anthropologies: Vico and Herder    215. Children excel in imitation; we observe them generally amuse themselves by imitating what they are able to understand. 216. This axiom shows that the world in its infancy was composed of poetic nations, for poetry is nothing but imitation.

Neither here nor elsewhere does Vico conceive the “infancy” out of which civilization emerges as an emergent higher level of mimetic intelligence. Even his insistence on the priority of poetry over reasoning is ultimately privative: “[T]he first men, the children as it were of the human race, not being able to form intelligible class-concepts of things, had a natural need to create poetic characters, that is, imaginative class-concepts or universals” (209). These “children” who think in concrete rather than abstract terms are identical with the “fierce and violent” creatures that must be “brought from their outlaw state to humanity.” Vico never understands the “savage” mimetic violence that the sacred defers as itself a product of nascent human intelligence; on the contrary, the supernatural force of providence is required to counter humanity’s decline into savagery. Rather than being generated within, and projected out of, the protohuman community, originary significance, being of transcendental origin, is attributed by the savage mind to the most distant and inhuman objects within the human world. The idea that humanity created the gods is at least as old as Xenophanes; what is new in Vico’s originary anthropology is the idea that in creating the gods, humanity created itself. The only Enlightenment thinker to conceive language and the sacred in holistic, cultural terms, Vico comes as close as the Enlightenment Weltanschauung permits to treating “gentile” religion as a purely human construction, although the Vichian sacred remains a transcendent force, analyzed in its effects if not in its constitution. In the post-Darwinian age of Nietzsche and Durkheim, the nature of the sacred—minus its fundamental relationship to language—begins to be analyzed within a wholly anthropological context. But only post–World War II victimary epistemology, which validates resentment as a denunciation of injustice, provides a sufficiently radical critique of human difference to allow us to conceive sacred difference itself in the light of our originary resentment of it, which is to say, to understand the

   the scene liberated sacred in its essential ambivalence as both the product and the means of human self-generation. We make ourselves human by discovering/ inventing a transcendent world of signs that is inaccessible to human control. Vico comes closer to anticipating this radically anthropological conception of sacred significance than any other thinker before the postmodern era. It is not Vico’s least claim to greatness that his most profound anthropological insights, conceived over a century before Darwin and two centuries before the Holocaust, have yet to be fully absorbed by the social sciences.

2. Herder’s Bleating Sheep In his prize Essay on the Origin of Language (1772),3 Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) puts forth a definitive rejection of Condillac’s attempt to derive human language from natural signs. This rejection obliges Herder to reject as well the interactional genesis of language, reasoning that since animals can communicate adequately through the natural signs that he has shown language not to be, communication cannot be language’s raison d’être. In this, Herder appears to anticipate the cognitivist position of Chomsky and his school, who see language as an epiphenomenon of the evolution of the brain. Man, placed in the state of reflection which is peculiar to him, with this reflection for the first time given full freedom of action, did invent language. . . . Man manifests reflection when the force of his soul acts in such freedom that, in the vast ocean of sensations which permeates it through all the channels of the senses, it can . . . single out one wave, arrest it, concentrate its attention on it, and be conscious of being attentive. He manifests reflection when, confronted with the vast hovering dream of images which pass by his senses, he can collect himself into a moment of wakefulness and dwell at will on one image . . . and can select in it distinguishing marks for himself so that he will know that this object is this and not another. He thus manifests reflection if he is able not only to recognize all characteristics vividly or clearly but if he can also recognize and acknowledge to himself one or several of them as distinguishing characteristics. The first act of this acknowledgment results in a clear concept; it is the first judgment of the soul—and through what did this acknowledgment occur? Through a distinguishing mark which he had to single out and which . . . struck him clearly. . . .

Alternative Anthropologies: Vico and Herder    Let that lamb there, as an image, pass by under his eyes; it is to him, as it is to no other animal. Not as it would appear to the hungry, scenting wolf! . . . Not as it appears to the rutting ram which feels it only as the object of its pleasure. . . . Not as it appears to any other animal to which the sheep is indifferent and which therefore lets it . . . pass by because its instinct makes it turn toward something else—Not so with man! As soon as he feels the need to come to know the sheep, no instinct gets in his way; no one sense of his pulls him too close to it or too far away from it. . . . White, soft, woolly—his soul in reflective exercise seeks a distinguishing mark—the sheep bleats! His soul has found the distinguishing mark. . . . This bleating, which makes upon man’s soul the strongest impression, which broke away from all the other qualities of vision and of touch, which sprang out and penetrated most deeply, the soul retains it. (sec. 2)

This passage demonstrates that Herder’s separation of language from communication is in fact quite different from that of modern cognitivism. Its emergence is described not as a mere manifestation of superior intelligence but as a liberation from instinct. Herder’s exposition suggests, albeit in the context of the lone Enlightenment individual rather than the group, the free-floating mimetic interaction that replaces in humans the animal determinism of appetite. For Herder as for JeanPaul Sartre, human freedom is a primary category, defined in negative terms but inexplicable merely on the basis of what it negates. The effect of this absence of determination is an otherwise unexplained desire to imitate not other persons in their similarity to us but other beings insofar as they force themselves upon our consciousness. Whence the “bleating sheep,” which is the best remembered passage in the Essay, no doubt because it comes closest to describing a scene. As the exemplary referent of the linguistic sign, Herder’s sheep in its innocuousness contrasts with Rousseau’s giants and Vico’s storms, even with Condillac’s scene of deprivation. Herder appears to have chosen this least fearsome of creatures to illustrate the disinterested nature of human language, in refutation of those for whom language originates in the unfree need to communicate one’s distress or one’s desires. Yet there is a rather obvious contradiction between the choice of the lamb, innocent victim and symbol of Christ, and the postulated disinterest of the human speaker in its edibility: the Lamb of God is a direct descendent of the eminently comestible Paschal lamb of the Hebrews. Herder in his Enlightenment optimism ignores the fact that its lack of

   the scene liberated fearsomeness is precisely what makes the lamb the ideal sacrificial victim, and as a consequence, the symbol of the sacred in the religious tradition that most clearly reveals the mimetic nature of the sacrificial. Herder divorces the peaceful designation by the sign from the subsequent collective sparagmos, as though our capacity to defer animal appetite were a blessing unconnected with our need to defer the violence aroused by desire. Herder, whose role in the inauguration of modern nationalism consisted essentially in presupposing the harmony of the “nation” on the basis of its common language, saw no need to distinguish a collective from an individual scene of origin. This benign presupposition, which guaranteed the unity of the “general will” without the articulation of a social contract, would prove even more disastrous in its long-term consequences than Rousseau’s original notion. Herder’s displacement of the connection between language and social harmony from the scene of human origin to the era of the nation-state provides the fundamental model for the romantic nationalism that followed the French Revolution. Herder’s arguments against Condillac’s derivation of language from natural cries are more negative than constructive. His own originary scene suggests the sacrality of language only by reductio ad absurdum: if man has no appetitive interest in the sheep, why should he feel “the need to come to know” it? In order to find an anthropological basis for what Herder sees as a purely gratuitous interest, we must situate it on a different level from the appetitive, which is to say, as the interest we have in the significant, in the sacred. Why is it the bleating of the sheep that “makes upon man’s soul the strongest impression”? As here presented, the “bow-wow” theory of language origin—the thesis that the phonetic substance of words is derived from the sound made by their referents—takes for granted not only the sonorous but also the mimetic nature of speech. We cannot ourselves become white and woolly in imitation of the sheep, but we are able to mimic its cry. As opposed to Condillac, who derives language from our own involuntary “calls,” Herder finds its source in the deliberate imitation of those of another creature. The obvious objection that many objects and actions, let alone grammatical words, are not associated with any particular sound suffices to refute the bow-wow theory as an overall explanation of the lexicon, but this critique is not entirely on the mark with respect to Herder’s

Alternative Anthropologies: Vico and Herder    originary scene. His choice of a higher animal, and the prototypical sacrificial victim to boot, allows us to construe his scene more generously. As the hypothetical referent of the first word, the sheep is an object of both desire and imitation. Despite Herder’s Enlightenment atomism, the only way to connect desire and imitation is through the desire of the human community: we all desire (to shear, to eat) the sheep, it acquires being as a result of its desirability, and we share in that being by representing/ imitating the sheep through its cry. To emit the sign is both to represent the object as desired and to take on the being of the object represented. Although this may not be a useful explanation of the origin of most of our vocabulary, it highlights language’s doubly mimetic structure, while reminding us of the professed identity between man and animal characteristic of what used to be called “totemic” religion. It is fitting that the Enlightenment’s ultimate statement on the origin of language should on the one hand evacuate Condillac’s model of continuity with nature that Rousseau had problematized but not really overcome, and on the other, reduce the scene of language origin to the confrontation between a meaningless nature and a free human spirit. Of these two operations, the first redefines the problem in all its paradoxicality for future students of the question.4 The second, in substituting the virtual community created by language for the Enlightenment reconstitution of the human community from an aggregate of individuals, looks forward to the romantic blurring of boundaries between the individual and collective scenes of representation. The two operations are inseparable; in the Enlightenment perspective, to be cut off from nature and its instincts is to be without any “natural” need for communication with a fellow creature. By abstracting away from the language situation the human other and its mimetic relationship with the self, Herder focuses our attention on the “vertical,” representational relation between speaker and referent, which in previous models, such as that of Condillac, had been subordinated to “horizontal,” appetitive relations. The trajectory of this movement away from the mediating other/rival and toward the sacred central object is that of the deferral of mimetic violence in our hypothetical originary scene. Herder is right to give primary emphasis to the individual’s free choice in representing the central being, but he sees no need to rees-

   the scene liberated tablish the relation with the human other on the basis of this mediating representation, whose harmonious sharing he takes for granted. Herder’s solipsistic model of language origin, however indispensable it may be to future progress, is a closure of the problem rather than a solution to it. This closure foreshadows and even today continues to lend credence to the nineteenth century’s turn away from scenic hypotheses of origin, whether of language or of culture. Herder’s model can be completed only once the absolute difference between free human speech and le cri de la nature can be understood as resulting from a collective event that inaugurates a radically new, symbolic form of communication.

chapter 4

Kant’s Aesthetic Anthropology

1. Kantian and Originary Aesthetics Because this chapter deals with Kant’s aesthetics as itself a theory of the scenic imagination, I beg the reader’s indulgence to develop some basic aesthetic concepts that will provide a context for this discussion. I define the aesthetic as a form of experience in which a representational sign is perceived as a necessary constituent of the imaginary referent that it evokes on our internal scene of representation. This perception is not given in advance, but realized in the course of the experience, which is paradoxical in the sense that it is composed of two unstable moments, contradictory and interdependent. In the first moment, the aesthetic sign gives rise to an imaginary reality more or less independent of the sign itself (more dependent in the case of music, less in that of prose). But as soon as our desires become attached to this imaginary reality, we are brought back in the second moment to this reality’s dependence on the aesthetic sign. The result is an oscillatory movement of the subject’s attention between the sign and its imaginary referent. On the one hand, the aesthetic representation refers us to an imaginary world of which the sign is “merely” a representation, but on the other, this world cannot exist independently of the sign. As a point of comparison, in the practical use of language, the word “tree” used in an utterance refers to a tree

   the scene liberated the experience of which is not dependent on the word; even if the tree referred to is not present, we can imagine it in the context of the utterance that predicates something of it: “The tree on Elm Street needs to be pruned”; “The tree over there is an oak.” On the contrary, to the extent that we refer back to the speaker’s words as the necessary context for the tree, we are listening to a story rather than using language instrumentally. Everyday language contains both aesthetic and practical elements, but in a situation formally configured as a narration, the aesthetic oscillation maintains itself by deferring any practical reference. The fundamental task of aesthetics is to show why this aesthetic relation is not a mere contingency but is implicit in representation and consequently in the human itself. Aesthetic oscillation is minimized in the linguistic sign; this minimization constitutes formal or symbolic representation.1 The efficiency with which the linguistic sign designates its referent allows the interlocutor to transcend the sign toward the referent. In Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1947), Sartre referred to this characteristic of language, which he limited to prose, as “transparency.” But language in its essence is no more prose than poetry; the intuition, most fully elaborated by Vico—we have found it in Rousseau as well—that the first language was (sacred) poetry reminds us that transparent linguistic minimization is not an a priori feature of representation but the product of a historical process of divergence from its diametrical opposite, the institutionalized reproduction in ritual of the originary scenic configuration. Standing between the minimality of ordinary language and the maximality of ritual, in which representation approaches full-fledged duplication, the oscillatory movement of the aesthetic affirms the mutual dependency of the sign and its sacred referent. Insofar as the referent is made to depend on the sign, it must be understood as imaginary, that is, as manifesting itself only on the individual’s internal scene of representation. This imaginary staging of the aesthetic requires some degree of staging in the real world, the minimum degree of which is no doubt the silent reading of prose narrative—the characteristic mode of the egocentric and novel-dominated nineteenth century—which obliges the imagination to construct its scene wholly from language. Whereas the destiny of language is to inspire the continual evo-

Kant’s Aesthetic Anthropology    lution of technologies that minimize its physical presence, institutional representation must occupy the human experience of time in order to transcend it; Mircea Eliade’s in illo tempore is not founded in an ideal past but in the evocation of this past within the ideal present of ritual. Aesthetic activity reproduces the collective dynamic of ritual within the experience of the individual who, by submitting as at the origin to the authority of the intentional sign, experiences the mutual dependency of representation and its sacred communal referent. Only on the imaginary scene that we derive from the transcendent, “timeless” vantage point of ritual can we be made aware of time’s passage. The recherche du temps perdu is characteristic of all aesthetic experience. v Western metaphysics does not typically describe aesthetic experience in originary terms. A philosopher who thought to define the aesthetic by the oscillation between the sign and its imaginary referent would consider such a definition as phenomenological, that is, in reference to pure experience. As such, its implicit anthropological basis would be supplied by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the theoretician of pure experience. In his third Critique,2 Kant situates “beauty” under the rubric of the “aesthetic judgment of finality” as the source of a pleasure that attends this judgment when there is no concept of the understanding to which the finality can be referred, as, say, the finality of a horse to the empirical concept “horse” (which would not prevent a horse from being beautiful if its appearance suggests a finality unclassifiable under the empirical concept “horse”). We experience the object’s purposefulness, its status as the intentional product of a will, outside the context of any specific purpose. The beautiful object gives the appearance of freedom, of being an end in itself: If pleasure is connected with the mere apprehension (apprehensio) of the form of an object of intuition, apart from any reference it may have to a concept for the purpose of a definite cognition, this does not make the representation referable to the object, but solely to the subject. In such a case, the pleasure can express nothing but the conformity of the object to the cognitive faculties brought into play in the reflective judgment, and so far as they are in play, and hence merely a subjective formal finality of the object. For that apprehension of

   the scene liberated forms in the imagination can never take place without the reflective judgment, even when it has no intention of so doing, comparing them at least with its faculty of referring intuitions to concepts. If, now, in this comparison, imagination (as the faculty of intuitions a priori) is undesignedly brought into accord with understanding (as the faculty of concepts), by means of a given representation, and a feeling of pleasure is thereby aroused, then the object must be regarded as final for the reflective judgment. A judgment of this kind is an aesthetic judgment upon the finality of the object, which does not depend upon any present concept of the object, and does not provide one. When the form of an object (as opposed to the matter of its representation, as sensation) is, in the mere act of reflecting upon it, without regard to any concept to be obtained from it, estimated as the ground of a pleasure in the representation of such an object, then this pleasure is also judged to be combined necessarily with the representation of it, and so not merely for the subject apprehending this form, but for all in general who pass judgment. The object is then called beautiful; and the faculty of judging by means of such a pleasure (and so also with universal validity) is called taste. For since the ground of the pleasure is made to reside merely in the form of the object for reflection generally, consequently not in any sensation of the object, and without any reference, either, to any concept that might have something or other in view, it is with the conformity to law in the empirical employment of judgment generally (unity of imagination and understanding) in the subject, and with this alone, that the representation of the object in reflection, the conditions of which are universally valid a priori, accords. And, as this accordance of the object with the faculties of the subject is contingent, it gives rise to a representation of a finality on the part of the object in respect of the cognitive faculties of the subject. (Introduction, VII: “The Aesthetic Representation of the Finality of Nature”)

For Kant, the beautiful object arouses a pleasure distinct from that provided by the satisfaction of appetite or interest. Because the finality of the beautiful object cannot be subsumed under a concept of the understanding, “the pleasure can express nothing but the conformity of the object to the cognitive faculties brought into play in the reflective judgment,” that is, the object pleases us because it demonstrates our ability as free beings to grasp finality in itself rather than as subordinate to a system of categories. (“For that apprehension of forms in the imagination can never take place without the reflective judgment, even when it has no intention of so doing, comparing them at least with its faculty of

Kant’s Aesthetic Anthropology    referring intuitions to concepts.”) The beautiful object displays its finality as if it were free, and we take pleasure in its revelation of our own freedom by which alone we are able to recognize this finality. Because aesthetic experience is that of a sign rather than an object in the worldly sense of the term, the pleasure it confers on its human subject is “disinterested,” independent of any material advantage that would distinguish this subject from any other, in contrast to appetitive pleasures, the experience of which cannot be shared without diminishing one’s own. As a consequence of the disinterestedness of aesthetic pleasure, the judgment of taste by which we declare an object beautiful is implicitly universal. This passage from the absence of material interest to universality is analogous to that of the originary scene, where the “disinterested” satisfaction unanimously conferred by the emission of the sign reflects the deferral of impending mimetic conflict. Conversely, the failure to agree on the validity of an aesthetic experience is tantamount to disagreement over the sacralizing effect of the originary sign on its referent. The pleasure in the judgment of finality derives from the sense of intentional formal closure that is first achieved in the performance of the sign. We need not deny the physiological component of this pleasure, but it is the representational, specifically human component of this satisfaction that is primary. What Kant calls the transcendental is generated by the release of tension attendant on participating in the communal representation of the central object rather than in mimetic conflict over its appropriation. The unanimity of this participation is the source of the universality of the “judgment of taste”; to take pleasure in a representation is to participate aesthetically in a community from which violence has been deferred. The source of the “judgment of finality,” which Kant attributes to our “cognitive faculties,” is more specifically our faculty of representation, understood not as a built-in component of the individual mind, and even less as a module of the cerebral cortex, but as a specifically human scenic capacity derived from the originary event. The ultimate source of Kant’s disinterested pleasure is the originary deferral of violence through representation. The community is critically interested in this deferral by which its individual members renounce their material, worldly interest in the object, situated by their act of representation on the transcendent plane of the sacred.

   the scene liberated The oscillation between sign and imaginary referent that defines the aesthetic renews the originary pleasure in participating in the aborted gesture of appropriation that defers violence through signification. Beginning with representation, we conjure up a world of desire (a moment of the aesthetic experience denigrated by Kant), but once within this imaginary world, we are forced to recognize our dependency on the cultural sign with its burden of “disinterested” renunciation of desire. Whatever neuro-physiological pleasure we find in harmonious form—and modernism and its successor movements demonstrate that harmonious form is by no means indispensable—is recruited to this experience of cultural harmony that is heir to the originary sacred. Kant locates the aesthetic effect, defined as “pure pleasure,” in the faculty of judgment, which he situates midway between the understanding, whose concepts make sense of the natural world, and reason, which “legislates” practical rules to our free will. The normal function of judgment is to subsume the objects of the natural world under the concepts of the understanding. But the aesthetic defeats judgment’s efforts; the object, explicitly or implicitly a representation, that provokes aesthetic experience cannot be subsumed under a concept. Concepts of nature contain the ground of all theoretical cognition a priori and rest, as we saw, upon the legislative authority of understanding. The concept of freedom contains the ground of all sensuously unconditioned practical precepts a priori, and rests upon that of reason. . . . But there is still further in the family of our higher cognitive faculties a middle term between understanding and reason. This is judgment. . . . [T]here is . . . a . . . ground, upon which judgment may be brought into line with [an] arrangement of our powers of representation . . . that appears to be of even greater importance than that of its kinship with the family of cognitive faculties. For all faculties of the soul, or capacities, are reducible to three, which do not admit of any further derivation from a common ground: the faculty of knowledge, the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and the faculty of desire. For the faculty of cognition understanding alone is legislative, if (as must be the case where it is considered on its own account free of confusion with the faculty of desire) this faculty, as that of theoretical cognition, is referred to nature, in respect of which alone (as phenomenon) it is possible for us to prescribe laws by means of a priori concepts of nature, which are properly pure concepts of understanding. For the faculty of desire, as a higher faculty operating under the

Kant’s Aesthetic Anthropology    concept of freedom, only reason (in which alone this concept has a place) prescribes laws a priori. Now between the faculties of knowledge and desire stands the feeling of pleasure, just as judgment is intermediate between understanding and reason. Hence we may, provisionally at least, assume that judgment likewise contains an a priori principle of its own, and that, since pleasure or displeasure is necessarily combined with the faculty of desire (be it antecedent to its principle, as with the lower desires, or, as with the higher, only supervening upon its determination by the moral law), it will effect a transition from the faculty of pure knowledge, i.e., from the realm of concepts of nature, to that of the concept of freedom, just as in its logical employment it makes possible the transition from understanding to reason. (Introduction, III: “The Critique of Judgment as a Means of Connecting the Two Parts of Philosophy in a Whole”)

What are we to make of Kant’s three “faculties of the soul”? Given that knowledge results from the application of the categories of pure (theoretical) reason to the natural world and that desire is the mode of the free will’s action on the practical (ethical) world, what, beyond its usefulness in Kant’s triadic system, is pleasure doing between knowledge and desire? Kant’s model is readily understood from an originary perspective. In the generative scene, the practical-ethical must precede the theoretical. The possibility of conceptual thought depends on the inaugural act of human freedom: the deferral of mimetic violence through the abortion of the potentially rivalrous act of appropriation and its transformation into the originary sign or name-of-God. This act is also the origin of desire, which we distinguish from appetite by its mediation through the sign. Richard van Oort, adapting the Peircean schema of Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species (1997), describes this originary transformation as the passage from the indexical signs of the associative world of appetite to the autonomous semiotic world of the symbolic sign.3 As a result of the emission of the sign, the participants experience the pleasure of the deferral of violence that is the foundation of all cultural pleasures. This moment also permits the dispersal of the newly constituted community, protected by the mediation of the sacred center that they have collectively represented. The application to the natural world of the concepts of the understanding is dependent not only on the sign’s prior existence but on the persistence of the deferral of violence that it

   the scene liberated inaugurates, and that we have just seen to be the source of aesthetic pleasure. In the passage from the originary ethical act to the emergent conceptual understanding of the natural world, the sign representing the central sacred object is transformed into an instrument of cognition; the name-of-God becomes an empirical concept. The aesthetic experience of representation is the moment of the originary event in which the unity of the two poles of transcendental sign and worldly referent is affirmed; as in Kant’s schema, it is intermediate between ethical and cognitive, sacred and profane. The sign as aborted gesture is the first gesture of human freedom, but as in Hobbes’ model of sovereignty, each participant’s emission of the sign expresses the free sacrifice of his appetite, which only then becomes desire, for (the sake of ) the sacred center. In contrast, the cognitive moment of originary signification transmits not sacrality but information concerning the worldly presence of the central object. The distinction between the central being as material object on the one hand and as the “immortal” subsistent signified of the sign on the other is the originary source of Kant’s distinction between the concepts of the understanding that make sense of the natural world and the concept of freedom that alone belongs to the realm of reason. What stands between, on the one hand, the sacralization of the object that coincides with renunciation of the attempt to appropriate it, and on the other, its cognitive classification under a concept (as “God”), is a moment in which the sign is no longer an act of ethical solidarity and not yet a mere instrument, but independently evokes its referent in the imagination, no longer as material object but as sacred being on the spectator’s internal scene of representation. The sacred sign is absolutely motivated; the sole criterion of its significance for the community is the formal closure that cuts it off from worldly action, not the specific form that this closure in fact encloses. On the contrary, at the cognitive pole, the sign is “arbitrary,” capable of being recalled in its specificity as a signifier designating a signified. What assures the affective link between the arbitrary sign and the experience of sacred interdiction is the possibility of imaginarily, that is, aesthetically, evoking the scene by means of the sign. The aesthetic moment is, so to speak, the becoming-portable of the sign. What makes this moment uniquely pleasurable is that it permits

Kant’s Aesthetic Anthropology    each of us to experience within our imagination the entire process of the sacred deferral of violence through representation. The aesthetic experience, however solitary, is always scenic and therefore at least implicitly collective. The pleasure of the aesthetic effect is not abstractly universal; it is experienced as implicitly shared by the human community; the peaceful sharing of aesthetic experience is a guarantee of communal harmony, in contrast with the mimetic rivalry provoked by “sharing” a desire for the same real object. What Kant omits from his description of the aesthetic experience, along with the intuition of communal solidarity, is the concomitant experience of the transcendence of desire through the oscillation between sign and imaginary object. As soon as I come to desire the imaginary object, which is to say, to experience an implicit rivalry with my fellows over it, I am obliged to recognize that the source of my imaginary conception is nothing but a representation, that is, something made possible by my existence within the human community constituted by the deferral of violence. The pleasure in the moment of sharing exists only against a constantly renewed background of painful desire that Kant does not mention. Kant recognizes the oscillation between pain and pleasure, possession and dispossession only in the case of the sublime, where “aesthetic” pain is primary and the pleasure comes wholly from the revelation that the faculty of reason transcends the senses. We may now revisit Kant’s affirmation that aesthetic pleasure “can express nothing but the conformity of the object to the cognitive faculties brought into play in the reflective judgment, and so far as they are in play, and hence merely a subjective formal finality of the object.” What is unintuitive in Kant’s description of “conformity . . . to the cognitive faculties” is precisely what is unanthropological: the “faculties” conformity to which provides the subject’s pleasure in the object’s “subjective formal finality” are not individual and cognitive but collective and ethical. The ultimate source of our pleasure in the “formal finality” of aesthetic representation is not our “cognitive faculties” but our intuition that the community’s shared participation in this finality or representational intentionality will protect us from mimetic violence. The aesthetic performs a function analogous to that attributed by Durkheim to religious

   the scene liberated ritual: it reinforces our solidarity with the sacred center and through its mediation, with our fellow members of the human community.

2. The Aesthetic Social Contract Although Kant’s concept of “representation” (Vorstellung) is limited to what he calls “rational creatures,” Kant never specifically associates it with language. Metaphysics, the Western philosophical tradition since Plato, treats language as always already constituted, with the declarative sentence or proposition as its fundamental form. For metaphysics, the power of language to posit an imaginary reality needs no explanation, let alone a derivation from more primitive forms. This philosophical prejudice in favor of the declarative has been carried over virtually unchanged to linguistics, so that in its grammatical models the imperative, although clearly more elementary both syntactically and morphologically than the declarative, is treated as a degenerate form of the latter rather than as its source; as for the ostensive, it is not considered a syntactical form at all. Kant is by no means unconcerned with the human moral reciprocity inaugurated by the originary exchange of signs, but the reciprocity that interests him is not that of empirical communication but of the virtual communion by means of which all humans share the moral law and the judgment of taste. It is this latter case, that of an experience that is wholly individual and falls under no law but is nonetheless implicitly universal, that has greater anthropological pregnancy, as befits the intermediate position of the judgment between representation and referential reality. In describing what he calls the “empirical” value of this virtually shared experience, Kant conceives a moral “social contract” that would constitute an originary scene were it presented as real rather than fictional (“as if ”): The empirical interest in the beautiful exists only in society. And if we admit that the impulse to society is natural to mankind, and that the suitability for and the propensity towards it, i.e., sociability, is a property essential to the requirements of man as a creature intended for society, and one, therefore, that belongs to humanity, it is inevitable that we should also look upon taste in the light of a faculty for estimating whatever enables us to communicate even our feeling to

Kant’s Aesthetic Anthropology    everyone else, and hence as a means of promoting that upon which the natural inclination of everyone is set. With no one to take into account but himself, a man abandoned on a desert island would not adorn either himself or his hut, nor would he look for flowers, and still less plant them, with the object of providing himself with personal adornments. Only in society does it occur to him to be not merely a man, but a man refined after the manner of his kind (the beginning of civilization)—for that is the estimate formed of one who has the bent and turn for communicating his pleasure to others, and who is not quite satisfied with an object unless his feeling of delight in it can be shared in communion with others. Further, a regard to universal communicability is a thing which every one expects and requires from every one else, just as if it were part of an original compact dictated by humanity itself [Auch erwartet und fordert ein jeder die Rücksicht auf allgemeine Mitteilung von jedermann, gleichsam als aus einem ursprünglichen Vertrage, der durch die Menschheit sebst diktiert ist]. And thus, no doubt, at first only charms, e.g., colors for painting oneself (roucou among the Caribs and cinnabar among the Iroquois), or flowers, sea-shells, beautifully colored feathers, then, in the course of time, also beautiful forms (as in canoes, wearing-apparel, etc.) which convey no gratification, i.e., delight of enjoyment, become of moment in society and attract a considerable interest. Eventually, when civilization has reached its height it makes this work of communication almost the main business of refined inclination, and the entire value of sensations is placed in the degree to which they permit of universal communication. At this stage, then, even where the pleasure which each one has in an object is but insignificant and possesses of itself no conspicuous interest, still the idea of its universal communicability almost indefinitely augments its value. (II, 41: “The Empirical Interest in the Beautiful”; emphasis mine.)

Having once drawn this ur-anthropological connection between the “original compact” of humanity and the “universal communicability” of aesthetic representations, Kant hastens in the following paragraph to deny its ontological significance: This interest, indirectly attached to the beautiful by the inclination towards society, and, consequently, empirical, is, however, of no importance for us here. For that to which we have alone to look is what can have a bearing a priori, even though indirect, upon the judgment of taste. For, if even in this form an associated interest should betray itself, taste would then reveal a transition on the part of our critical faculty, from the enjoyment of sense to the moral feeling. This

   the scene liberated would not merely mean that we should be supplied with a more effectual guide for the final employment of taste, but taste would further be presented as a link in the chain of the human faculties a priori upon which all legislation must depend. This much may certainly be said of the empirical interest in objects of taste, and in taste itself, that as taste thus pays homage to inclination, however refined, such interest will nevertheless readily fuse also with all inclinations and passions, which in society attain to their greatest variety and highest degree, and the interest in the beautiful, if this is made its ground, can but afford a very ambiguous transition from the agreeable to the good. We have reason, however, to inquire whether this transition may not still in some way be furthered by means of taste when taken in its purity. (II, 42)

The reference to “purity” in the last sentence is a segue to the following section on the “intellectual interest” in the beautiful; for Kant, following Rousseau, an aesthetic interest in nature as opposed to art is a sign of moral value. (“Now I willingly admit that the interest in the beautiful of art . . . gives no evidence at all of a habit of mind attached to the morally good. . . . But, on the other hand, I do maintain that to take an immediate interest in the beauty of nature . . . is always a mark of a good soul” [II, 42].) The “original compact” is characterized by reciprocal exchange, as emphasized by the sentence structure, with its balanced oppositions between ein jeder and jedermann, erwartet and fordert. Yet the collective entity formed by this exchange is “of no importance for us here,” and this because it is from the outset, and all the more as humanity advances from the Caribs and Iroquois to the height of civilization, contaminated with society’s “inclinations and passions.” Even considered a priori, taste cannot be “a link [Mittelglied] in the chain of the human faculties” because the “homage” it pays to inclination puts in danger the disinterested nature of the pleasure that it judges “in its purity.” This discussion betrays the influence on Kant of Rousseau’s fundamental mistrust of society; the individual’s taste is a universal claim, but only insofar as it remains “pure” of the mimetic contamination of others’ desires. However collective the empirical phenomenon of aesthetic experience may be, it is only when reduced to the purely virtual that it achieves authentic universality. Kant’s a priori derives, like Plato’s realm of Ideas, from the world of sacred representation, but whereas Plato simply hypostatizes the products of representation, lifting human words up into the sky, Kant’s a

Kant’s Aesthetic Anthropology    priori guarantees the vertical-transcendental realm of representation itself by separating it ontologically from the horizontal-empirical world of appetite. Yet the necessity of maintaining an absolute separation between the two worlds makes it impossible to conceive, let alone explain, the genesis of one from the other. Kant’s dualism comes closest to synthesis in the aesthetic domain. The judgment of taste returns the “cognitive faculties” from the conceptual analysis of the natural world to a reflection on their own originary nature; moreover, this operation depends on the existence of a community that at least virtually shares and mutually communicates this experience. It is but a short step from this configuration to a hypothetical scene of origin, yet this step is as impossible for Kant as the leap of an inhabitant of Flatland into the third dimension. Kant’s Carib and Iroquois ornaments are sacred objects like those of the “Aranda” that in Durkheim’s analysis incarnate the unity of the social order, but Kant’s Rousseauian privileging of the individual over the social blinds him to the derivation of the “charms” of the aesthetic from the critical social function of the sacred. Kant fails to realize that the indemnity from mimesis that he finds in individual human reason can be guaranteed only by the counteracting mimesis of unanimous sacralization, the source of representation and its universality. In the Critique of Judgment the aesthetic is cut off from the discussion of the transcendental religious questions that we find in the previous Critiques. Aesthetic pleasure is a worldly experience that intuits transcendence directly, without the need for the transcendental guarantees—the existence of God, the immortality of the soul—required by the upholder of the moral law. It is not coincidental that the texts we have been discussing are found, not in the “Analytic of Beauty,” where Kant defines the categories of aesthetic experience, but in the “Analytic of the Sublime.” This section in fact contains relatively little specific analysis of the sublime, but the sublime’s liberation from the closure of beautiful form makes it for Kant the privileged locus not only of the awe before natural phenomena to which Vico attributes our first intuition of the sacred but of the genesis of transcendence from immanence, whose mystery only anthropology, not metaphysics, can solve. Kant’s system is the final synthesis of the classical metaphysical vi-

   the scene liberated sion of the human that still remains the foundation of moral and aesthetic philosophy today, for example, in John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice.4 Kant looks down from the heights of the a priori of pure reason on what he considers the lesser empirical science of anthropology; he never tires of reminding us that the subject matter of critical philosophy is not Homo sapiens but the non-empirical category of “rational creatures.” Yet the highest goal of anthropology is to bring together in a single model the worlds whose separation, constitutive of the human, Kant was the first philosopher rigorously to respect—the a priori and the empirical, the domain of representation and the domain of reality. This can be done only by providing a parsimonious model of the historical generation from within the empirical world of Reason and its “realm of ends.”

3. The Kantian Sublime [T]he most important and vital distinction between the sublime and the beautiful is certainly this: . . . whereas natural beauty . . . conveys a finality in its form making the object appear, as it were, preadapted to our power of judgment . . . that which . . . excites the feeling of the sublime . . . may appear . . . to contravene the ends of our power of judgment . . . and to be, as it were, an outrage on the imagination.  —Kant, Critique of Judgment, I, ii, sec. 23

If Kant’s analysis of the beautiful depends implicitly on the paradoxical relationship between aesthetic representation and its object, in his analysis of the sublime the paradox is made explicit. Although the beautiful object cannot be subsumed under a concept, its contemplation provides a pleasurable stimulation to our cognitive faculty, which grasps beautiful form as something meant to be perceived and cognized by it. The sublime, on the contrary, makes us realize the limitations of this faculty. The pleasure provided by this initially unpleasant realization is of a moral nature; the experienced excess of nature over our power of judgment makes us aware of the transcendental relationship between our reason and the everyday world. The feeling of the sublime is . . . at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from

Kant’s Aesthetic Anthropology    this very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law. It is, in other words, for us a law (of reason), which goes to make us what we are, that we should esteem as small in comparison with ideas of reason everything which for us is great in nature as an object of sense; and that which makes us alive to the feeling of this supersensible side of our being harmonizes with that law. (sec. 27)

Kant’s “mathematical” sublime is a reaction to the purely quantitative; greatness of physical magnitude, by revealing to us the inadequacy of our “faculty of sense,” reminds us of its “smallness” in comparison with “ideas of reason.” In the context of a hypothetical originary scene, the conceptual movement from displeasure to pleasure may be understood as describing the passage from the conflict occasioned by the excess of desire for the object to the peace provided by the promotion of this object to a sign of transcendence. What we experience as too great for our (collective and individual) desire gives us pleasure as a sign pointing to the “supersensible” domain of signification that defers our conflict over desire. Kant’s statement that this experience “makes us alive to [rege macht] the feeling of this supersensible side of our being” is tantamount to a claim that this experience generates this feeling. Whereas the mathematical sublime triggered by quantitative magnitude merely negates our faith in the understanding, the infinity of power (“quality”) that we experience in the “dynamic” sublime provides a transcendental object of faith. The mathematical sublime is a negative moment between two forms of order, that of the understanding and that of reason, between the beautiful, which finds satisfaction in form, and the dynamic sublime, which substitutes for formal order that of an allpowerful divine will. But we may look upon an object as fearful, and yet not be afraid of it, if, that is, our estimate takes the form of our simply picturing to ourselves the case of our wishing to offer some resistance to it, and recognizing that all such resistance would be quite futile. So the righteous man fears God without being afraid of Him, because he regards the case of his wishing to resist God and His commandments as one which need cause him no anxiety. But in every such case, regarded by him as not intrinsically impossible, he cognizes Him as One to be feared. (sec. 28)

   the scene liberated Kant’s exposition of the relationship between the fearful and the sublime clearly owes much to Burke,5 but whereas the latter, as Kant himself points out, remains within the realm of empirical psychology, for Kant the dynamic sublime defines our relationship to transcendence. Kant’s categories of the beautiful and the sublime correspond to the two relationships between a representation and its referent that comprise the paradox of signification. On the side of form, the representation is a (beautifully) adequate substitute for its referent, just as the originary sign was an adequate substitute for the inaccessible central object; on the side of content, the representation is a (sublimely) inadequate substitute for its referent, whose sacred power it cannot fully reproduce, just as sharing the originary sign cannot replace but only defer the necessity for sharing the object it designates. The sign can function to defer mimetic rivalry for the central object only if it is an acceptable substitute for it. But the very peace brought about by this substitution transforms the participants’ relation to the central object and makes possible its appropriation in reality, not merely as a sign. Unlike the beautiful, which inheres in an object whose formal adequacy to our cognitive faculty is embodied in a universal judgment of taste, the sublime is a subjective attitude not inherent in the (natural) object that inspires it. But the preceding passage suggests that this “subjectivity” defines a relationship to a necessarily inadequate figuration of an unfigurable divine transcendence. The experience of the sublime reflects the Judeo-Christian rejection of idols that cannot incarnate the sacred but at best suggest it by their very ontological distance from it. The object that provokes the experience of the sublime is not a “graven image” but something that resists being experienced as a sign, and is for that very reason experienced as a sign of the limitations of signification. The concept of the sublime has played an eccentric role in aesthetic theory since Pseudo-Longinus in the first century. Yet opposing the sublime to the beautiful is unfaithful to aesthetic experience. This experience is an oscillation between the sign and its referent caused by the necessary inability of either representation or imaginary reality to create a stable plenitude of signification; the experience of beautiful form includes the sublime within it as the moment of the representation’s inadequacy. Kant

Kant’s Aesthetic Anthropology    describes this oscillatory movement only with respect to the sublime, which he contrasts to our “restful contemplation” of the beautiful: The mind feels itself set in motion in the representation of the sublime in nature; whereas in the aesthetic judgment upon what is beautiful therein it is in restful contemplation. This movement, especially in its inception, may be compared with vibration, i.e., with a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by one and the same object. The point of excess for the imagination . . . is like an abyss in which it fears to lose itself, yet again for the rational idea of the supersensible it is not excessive, but conformable to law, and directed to drawing out such an effort on the part of the imagination: and so in turn as much a source of attraction as it was repellent to mere sensibility. But the judgment itself all the while steadfastly preserves its aesthetic character, because it represents, without being grounded on any definite concept of the object, merely the subjective play of the mental powers (imagination and reason) as harmonious by virtue of their very contrast. For just as in the estimate of the beautiful, imagination and understanding by their concert generate subjective finality of the mental faculties, so imagination and reason do so here by their conflict—that is to say they induce a feeling of our possessing a pure and self-sufficient reason, or a faculty for the estimation of magnitude, whose preeminence can only be made intuitively evident by the inadequacy of that faculty which in the presentation of magnitudes (of objects of sense) is itself unbounded. (sec. 27)

The beautiful creates “concert” where the sublime generates “conflict.” This contrast, which effectively trivializes the beautiful with respect to the sublime, was revived to great effect in the era of modernism as a demonstration of the incompatibility of great art with comfortable bourgeois consumerism. In the postmodern era, what had been for the modernists a mere matter of rhetoric—the modernist artist would not deny his quest for a less vulgar species of beauty of which his work was meant to be the adequate incarnation—becomes a formal distinction carried out in practice in works that have no claim to beauty or even, as in “conceptual art,” to worldly existence. Whereas the sublime’s inherent excess with respect to representational form guarantees it an immense prestige in intellectual circles, the beautiful is disdained as a naïve and outmoded category, a quasi-synonym for kitsch. What is at stake is clarified by Burke’s psychological analysis, which associates the beautiful with the feminine and the sublime with the mas-

   the scene liberated culine: the greater spiritual resonance of the sublime would reflect the fact that culture privileges the deferral of violence over the fulfillment of desire, since without the former there would be no opportunity for the latter. Yet it is desire itself that inspires the violence; literature celebrates the sublimity of female desirability, from Helen of Troy to Molly Bloom. Burke’s segregation of the sexes is a means to guarantee the metaphysical firewall between the “supersensible” world of the arbitrary sign and the world of sensuous forms, natural or man-made. Beauty’s incarnation in the latter is misrepresented as complete in itself, as though signification had no part in it and only the violence of the unbeautiful sublime could express the abyss between signs and things. As an experience of transcendence cut off from its immanent basis, the sublime is a psychological effect divorced from any cultural context; the violence of storms and crags becomes a substitute for the human violence crystallized in the sacred. This was the original function of the sublime in antiquity. Whereas Aristotle could not have conceived of an aesthetic experience devoid of the experience of transcendence—the purging of pity and terror—by Pseudo-Longinus’ time the old gods had lost their credibility, not least in contrast with the God of Christianity, and could no longer guarantee this experience. The Enlightenment’s rediscovery of the sublime reflects its ambition to put away the Judeo-Christian God as well and construct a wholly empirical anthropology. Similarly, the prestige of the sublime in the modern and postmodern eras stems from its role as an anti-sacred sacred, a cultural Black Mass where the deliberate frustration of our desire for form substitutes for the truly sublime frustration of desire in form itself, as we oscillate between its realization within our imagination and the reality of the artwork outside us. Modern aesthetics is born in this conceptual splitting of its object into two parts, neither of which is complete in itself. In the place of the truly, sublimely beautiful, we must choose between the pretty and the monstrous, between the sign that loses itself in mimetic identity with its worldly object and the sign that bears its inadequacy on its face, the first providing a pleasure of the understanding, the second, the transcendent joy of reason. These dichotomies, and those of Kantian thought in general, situate within the categories of culture the split that culture is designed to mediate. In so doing, they display the limitations of the

Kant’s Aesthetic Anthropology    Enlightenment’s scenic imagination, which conceives the individual as a consumer whose desires are fixed before he enters the marketplace rather than emerging dynamically from within the activity of exchange. For Kant, the aesthetic scene is either charmingly pacific or fearfully agitated. That the peace of the former is the product of the fearsomeness of the latter is too radical an idea for even the greatest thinker of an era that could conceive the deferral of human violence as the source of human institutions, but not of the human itself.

chapter 5

Ending the Enlightenment

1. Edmund Burke: Revolution as Hubris In his early work, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757, over thirty years before his more important Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke (1729–1797) already displays his intuition of the foundational status of the deferral of violence for human culture.1 In terms not uncongenial to evolutionary psychology, Burke derives the sublime from our terror of “pain and danger”: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. (I, 7)

The sublime is our “strongest emotion” because we are more concerned with “sublime” threats to our life than with “beautiful” enhancements of it. It is not, however, the actual experience of “pain and danger” but their ideas that generate the sublime, which typically characterizes not a source of uncontrolled violence but an ultimately benevolent power; the book of Job provides many of Burke’s examples. What we would now call Burke’s “gendering” of the sublime-beautiful opposition is pro-

   the scene embodied phetic: in contrast with the general verdict of Enlightenment sensibilité in Condillac, Rousseau, Diderot, et al., Burke recognizes that (masculine) violence and its deferral are more crucial to our survival than (feminine) sympathy and beauty. For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small: beauty should be smooth and polished; the great, rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates it often makes a strong deviation: beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy: beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive. They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure. (III, 27)

Chapter IV, 6, “How Pain Can Be a Cause of Delight,” is an early version of “no pain, no gain” rather than a paean to sadomasochism. Burke couches his discussion in purely psycho-physiological terms (“Labour is not only requisite to preserve the coarser organs in a state fit for their functions; but it is equally necessary to those finer and more delicate organs [essentially, the sympathetic nervous system] on which . . . the imagination . . . act[s]”). Burke’s insistence on our native restlessness and thirst for action stands in significant contradiction both to Rousseau’s vision of the indolence of our natural state and to Herder’s picture of our speculative freedom from appetitive considerations; it suggests an ambience of free-floating aggression that must be purged by sacrificial activity. Similarly, what Burke might have called our aesthetic sense derives pleasure from the spectacle of pain without the mediation of Aristotelian catharsis: “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience” (I, 7). These indications of the incapacity of “feminine” beauty to control the “masculine” violence that manifests itself in the sublime strangely prefigure Burke’s horrified fascination for the spectacle of political violence that would provide the occasion for his only major work of political thought. v

Ending the Enlightenment    The Reflections on the Revolution in France has assured Burke an honored place in the Pantheon of modern conservatism. Burke’s critique, which seemed overwrought in 1790 but prophetic in 1793, marks the demise of Enlightenment confidence in the scenic imagination as a source of political renewal. Hobbes was driven by the English rebellion of the 1640s to construct an originary model in defense of the monarchical order it challenged; Burke’s experience of this rebellion’s more radical French descendent leads him to condemn, along with the Revolution itself, all such models as products of hubris. What he offers in their place is less traditional thought than a self-conscious appeal to tradition, a reasoned defense of historical gradualism that the twentieth-century heirs of the Enlightenment might have done better to heed. Burke condemns the arrogance of seeking to found social institutions on speculative models grounded in the scenic imagination rather than historical experience. To the Enlightenment’s imagined scenes, Burke opposes historical ones. He describes the events of the English Revolution that so terrified Hobbes as modifications of their preexisting context rather than as radically new beginnings, in order to contrast them with the French Revolution, whose attempts at re-origination have led only to violence. Burke’s concern is politics, not anthropology; indeed, his analysis can be read as a critique of anthropology as a basis for politics. For Burke it is rather in observing the crucial political locus of human interaction that we learn about humanity. The revolutionary scene offers a demonstration that implementing the Enlightenment’s radical anthropology produces not a more rational human order but a return to originary chaos: All circumstances taken together, the French revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. The most wonderful things are brought about, in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous, in the most ridiculous modes, and apparently by the most contemptible instruments. Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragicomic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed and sometimes mix with each other in the mind: alternate contempt and indignation, alternate laughter and tears, alternate scorn and horror. (15)

The emotions associated with this scene vary between “laughter

   the scene embodied and tears” depending on whether their subject feels himself in danger; their object is “out of nature” in either case. Our feeling toward the Revolution alternates not between love and hate but between distant “contempt” and proximate “indignation.” “Tragicomic” is not used here in its literary-historical meaning of a serious drama with a happy ending; it designates a “monstrous” mixture of tragedy and comedy, the blend of sublimity and ridiculousness that Victor Hugo would extol a couple of generations later in his “Préface de Cromwell” (1827)—the revolutionary association is not coincidental—as the romantic “grotesque.” For Burke, the scene that founds the political order lies outside it. His concept of the “social contract” is in deliberate opposition to the scenic models of the Enlightenment: Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure—but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement . . . to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. This law is not subject to the will of those who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law. (165)

The specific contract that binds us to the state cannot be figured as a scenic event of human accord; it is a “partnership in every virtue and all perfection” across many generations. Yet this contract is dependent on a scene explicitly both originary and transcendental; it is “but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society.” The terms “primeval” and “eternal” are no mere rhetorical gestures; they are necessary qualifications of the originary hypothesis required by the logic of Burke’s argu-

Ending the Enlightenment    ment. The foundation of human society lies outside it, at its unique and unrenewable point of origin. The “eternal” quality of the society thus founded is what guarantees in turn the “clauses” that define individual states. Burke’s originary scene is theistic because only an external sacred can guarantee both the universality of what is in effect a model of morality and the value of its specific historical manifestations. This is the point made by Kant’s far more explicit argument that the existence of God is necessary to individual moral existence. If the “social contract” is indeed a partnership between the living, the dead, and the yet to be born, then it is an anthropological rather than merely political contract; it legitimizes no particular social order, but denies legitimacy to any order that disregards its specific place in the continuum that links it with its origin. But I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. (12)

Burke’s condemnation of the construction of a political model on the basis of a “simple view” of human actions and concerns as metaphysical is the first of a long series of such critiques, which mark the bourgeois era’s emerging awareness that the originary function of human “reason” is the cultural deferral of violence. The Enlightenment had identified metaphysics with scholasticism, opposing reason’s clarity to the obscurities of the historical sacred. (“Let us put at the end of nearly every chapter of metaphysics the two letters used by Roman judges when they didn’t understand a plea: N. L., non liquet, this is unclear.” Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique portatif, 1764; translation mine.) For Burke, on the contrary, it is precisely this Enlightenment appeal to reason that is metaphysical. Metaphysics hypostatizes the philosophical proposition, the context-free declarative sentence, as if it sprang full-fledged from the brow of Homo sapiens instead of evolving from more elementary syntactical forms, the most primitive of which is the ostensive re-presentation of what is already present. Burke does not reject the scenic imagination

   the scene embodied of the Enlightenment because it is dependent on a hypothetical scene, but because that scene itself is presented as simply renewable (as a “social contract”) without reference to its origin, as though the propositions of philosophy were not themselves dependent on a prior founding of the scene of representation at a moment previous to the existence of the “context-free” declarative—that is, at a moment whose nature as event could not be abstracted from it. In this sense, Burke’s condemnation of the scenic imagination of the Enlightenment foreshadows the subsequent generations’ refocusing of this imagination on the early stages of human evolution. “Restraint upon [the] passions” rather than their sacrifice on the altar of “reason” is the central operation in Burke’s political anthropology: Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it, and exist in much greater clearness and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection; but their abstract perfection is their practical defect. By having a right to everything they want everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves, and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances and admit to infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle. (95)

Men’s potentially violent “passions” and “inclinations” must be subjected to “a power out of themselves.” For Burke, in contrast to Hobbes, subjection to central authority cannot be understood as arising from voluntary self-interested agreement. Its modalities “vary with times and circumstances” and are not subject to an “abstract rule,” but the source of this power is always external to the political scene. Pace the French revolutionaries, man is a “religious animal.”

Ending the Enlightenment    All other nations [than France] have begun the fabric of a new government, or the reformation of an old, by establishing originally or by enforcing with greater exactness some rites or other of religion. (60) We know, and what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society and the source of all good and of all comfort. In England we are so convinced of this, that there is no rust of superstition with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety. . . . If our religious tenets should ever want a further elucidation, we shall not call on atheism to explain them. . . . Violently condemning neither the Greek nor the Armenian, nor, since heats are subsided, the Roman system of religion, we prefer the Protestant, not because we think it has less of the Christian religion in it, but because, in our judgment, it has more. We are Protestants, not from indifference, but from zeal. We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long. But if, in the moment of riot and in a drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembic of hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should uncover our nakedness by throwing off that Christian religion which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one great source of civilization amongst us and amongst many other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition might take place of it. (151–52) The consecration of the state by a state religious establishment is necessary, also, to operate with a wholesome awe upon free citizens, because, in order to secure their freedom, they must enjoy some determinate portion of power. To them, therefore, a religion connected with the state, and with their duty toward it, becomes even more necessary than in such societies where the people, by the terms of their subjection, are confined to private sentiments and the management of their own family concerns. All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society. (156–58)

Burke anticipates Durkheim in considering religion to be not only the foundation of government but the “basis of civil society,” one that can be replaced only by superstition. To abandon religion is to fall into the “drunken delirium” of revolution. Nor is Burke’s notion of religion

   the scene embodied the deist’s si Dieu n’existait pas, il fallait l’inventer (if God didn’t exist, one would have had to invent Him). Established religion is the foundation of society, provided this establishment be perpetually accessible to and renewable by the citizenry. When Burke says “[w]e are Protestants, not from indifference, but from zeal,” he is referring to the “zealous” affirmation of the Christian sacred by a community that reads and relives the Bible—the religious equivalent of the electorate in England’s constitutional monarchy. This is about as specific as Burke ever gets about religion; the single word “Protestant” added to the overall institution of Christianity is the sum of his theology. Burke is not, however, loath to define the Christian sacred by opposition to its “Other.” An unfortunate corollary of his self-conscious traditionalism is an emergent anti-Semitism: [The English revolutionaries] were not like Jew brokers, contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils. (77) The next generation of the [French] nobility will resemble the artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their masters. (78) Are the church lands to be sold to Jews and jobbers or given to bribe new-invented municipal republics into a participation in sacrilege? (87)

Their “councils,” like those of the Elders of Zion, make the Jews “sometimes [the] masters” of the French nobility and, presumably, of France itself—a harbinger of Drumont’s La France juive (1886) nearly a century later. Nor can we dismiss as a coincidence Burke’s twelve-timesrepeated reference to “Old Jewry,” the “dissenting meeting house” in which a Dr. Price had delivered a pro-revolutionary sermon that was the proximate catalyst of the Reflections; this reference cements the association between the “bad scene” of Price’s un-Christian sermon and those who have rejected the scene of the Cross. Burke’s anti-Semitism, more social and less theological than Voltaire’s, is an early sign that by relieving the Jews of their stigmatized status, the French Revolution also made them more vulnerable to attack as the dual embodiment of tribal loyalty

Ending the Enlightenment    and “rootless” modernity—vulnerable, as would soon be apparent, from the Left as well as the Right. After Hobbes, with the exception of Vico, the Enlightenment appears to abandon the idea of foundational violence. The conclusion of Voltaire’s Candide (1759) presents the modern exchange system as the means to defer the picaresque mimetic violence that had predominated in the rest of the story; the produce of Candide’s famous garden is sold at the market in Constantinople. But the passage from violence to exchange is contrastive, not generative; it is an awakening from fantasy and superstition into common sense. In contrast, Burke, having witnessed the reemergence in France of what appeared to him a Hobbesian state of nature, realizes that the preservation of human society from chaos cannot be achieved through politics alone. The scene on which representations are exchanged requires a guarantee beyond these representations themselves; society must have a sacred basis. The imaginary construct of a “general will” cannot suffice; “[a]ll persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.”

2. Joseph de Maistre: Revolution as Sacrifice Rousseau’s expulsion of mimetic desire founds anthropology as an infinite, open-ended process; but it is the oft-demonized Savoyard counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) who deserves to be called the founder of anthropology as a minimal originary theory. De Maistre expresses in a religious vocabulary a Hobbesian pessimism about human desire. What makes him an anthropologist as well as a political philosopher is his focus on what the Enlightenment had ignored: the sacred generative center of all human society, to which we characteristically relate through sacrifice. If Rousseau is the precursor of Boas and Geertz, de Maistre is that of Durkheim and Girard. Like Girard’s Things Hidden since the Foundation (1978), de Maistre’s Eclaircissement sur les sacrifices (Explanation/Clarification about Sacrifices), published as a supplement to his posthumous magnum opus, Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg,2 applies

   the scene embodied the central insights of Christianity to historically existing institutions. In contrast with Rousseau’s anecdotal use of data, de Maistre argues from a corpus of sacrificial rites ranging from classical antiquity to the Aztecs. De Maistre’s religiously tinged rhetoric should not blind us to the fact that the discussion of pagan sacrifice that opens the Eclaircissement is essentially functionalist; the pagan gods are less supernatural beings than manifestations of an “idea of God” that de Maistre considers coeval with humanity: “I am far from believing that the idea of God could have begun for humanity, that is, that it could be less ancient than man” (284). Because for de Maistre the divine source of this idea is fully known only in Christianity, he rejects the ancient notion, revived by Vico, that “fear created the gods,” and insists on the inherent goodness of all conceptions of the divinity, however primitive. Yet the dichotomy between flesh and spirit coeval with the idea of God makes us feel guilty, so that we fear God’s just wrath and seek to allay it through sacrifice: [H]istory shows us that man has been persuaded in every era of this frightful truth: That he lived in the power of an irritated force, and that this force could be appeased only by sacrifices. . . . [We say:] “The Gods are good, and we are indebted to them for all the good things we enjoy; we owe them praise and thanksgiving. But the gods are just, and we are guilty: they must be appeased, we must expiate our crimes; and, in order to accomplish this, the most powerful means is sacrifice.” (284; emphasis here and elsewhere is the author’s)

De Maistre’s thesis is that spilling blood in sacrifice is the means by which we atone to God for the sinful physical nature whose appetitive “soul” (âme) cohabits in us with our transcendent “spirit” (esprit). Blood is the essence of life, and life is the source of the worldly appetites that require expiation. This explains why “[Sacrifice] was [sc. in pagan societies] always the basis of every kind of religious observance, regardless of place, time, opinions, or circumstances” (285). Christianity perfects but does not deny the principle of sacrifice that is the source of the partial truth of pagan religion; where the latter demands a regularly repeated “communion in blood,” Christ sacrifices his own divinely innocent blood so that the sacrifice can be renewed until the end of time without further bloodshed. Although the pagans had the right idea in seeking “redemp-

Ending the Enlightenment    tion through blood,” pre-Christian humanity “could not guess which blood it needed. How could man limited to his own resources suspect the immensity of the fall and the immensity of redeeming love?” (346). De Maistre is not unaware of the violent potential of mimetic desire, but he relies on the biblical tradition of the Fall and the Christian doctrine of original sin, which situate our rivalry with God historically as well as ontologically prior to rivalry among ourselves. Thus he pays little attention to the collective basis of sacrifice to which expressions like “communion in blood” ultimately refer. Yet although de Maistre would have considered Durkheim’s idea of the sacred as a projection of the social an abomination, his focus on blood sacrifice as apotropaic violence provides a better-articulated model of how the sacred functions in human society than Durkheim’s vague notion of ritual as reinforcing collective solidarity. De Maistre has even less interest than Burke in speculative scenes of origin. Taking his primary anthropological model from the scene of the Passion, he constructs a model of human society by hypothetical generalization from the historically observed phenomenon of sacrifice. Rather than either opposing Christian to pagan sacrifice as truth to falsity or seeking in the latter prophetic indications of the truth of the former, de Maistre presents sacrifice as a universal phenomenon, but one whose meaning is understood only retrospectively through the Christian revelation. The Passion becomes for de Maistre the basis for a general theory of sacrifice because it is recalled to him by historical experience. If Burke sees nothing but disorder in the French revolutionary scene, de Maistre, writing after the Revolution had run its course, finds in its very violence the seeds of redemption. One painful yet redemptive scene in particular obsesses de Maistre and influences all his subsequent writing: the execution of Louis XVI: We are continually confronted with the tiresome image of innocents perishing along with the guilty. But, without delving into that question, which is of the greatest profundity, we may consider it solely in relation to the age-old universal dogma of the reversibility of the sufferings of the innocent for the benefit of the guilty. It was from this dogma, I believe, that the ancients derived their universal

   the scene embodied practice of sacrifice, which they judged of value not merely for the living but even for the dead; a routine procedure that habit lets us observe without surprise, but whose roots are nonetheless obscure. . . . The coming of Christianity consecrated this dogma, which is infinitely natural to man, although it seems difficult to derive by logical reasoning. Thus there may have been [at the moment of his execution] in the heart of Louis XVI, and in that of the heavenly Elisabeth, an emotion [mouvement], an acceptance capable of saving France. (Considerations on France [1796], III)

There is another brief but telling reference to the king’s martyrdom in Eclaircissement: Men have always attached an infinite price to the submission of the just person who accepts his suffering. . . . When the ferocious jailers of Louis XVI, then a prisoner in the Temple, denied him a razor, the faithful servant who has given us the interesting history of that long and atrocious captivity said to him: Sire, show yourself to the National Convention with that long beard so that the people can see how you are being treated. The king answered: I must not seek to interest others in my fate. (347)

What Burke, writing nearly three years before the king’s execution, saw as mere unchained violence has become for de Maistre a sacrificial scene to be interpreted in the light of what he calls the “Christian Theory of Sacrifice.” In his writings, the dehistoricizing scenic imagination of the Enlightenment gives way to a new conception of the scene of representation, grounded in a dialectic between historical reality and the transcendentally given model that it both realizes and develops. De Maistre is the first thinker to find in Christianity the basis for the science of anthropology. v De Maistre’s insistence on the transcendental origin of the scene of representation led him to refute the Enlightenment presupposition that the origin of language could be explained in terms of everyday human experience. His discussion of language and its origin is found in the second chapter or “Entretien” of Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg.3 De Maistre affirms the transcendental provenance of language, scornfully

Ending the Enlightenment    rejecting Condillac’s gradualism and implicitly any continuity between “protolanguage” and real human language; language is not natural but arbitrary, and only a transcendent agent can establish the unanimous accord it requires: No language could have been invented, either by one man, who would not have been able to make himself obeyed, or by several, who would not have been able to understand/agree with each other [s’entendre]. The best thing one can say about speech [la parole] is what was said of him who is called the word [parole]. His origin goes back to the distant past, to the days of old . . . [Micah 5, 2]. Who shall declare his generation? [Isaiah 53, 8]. . . . . . . Rousseau . . . admits that . . . he does not understand very clearly how [language] was invented. But the great Condillac takes pity on such modesty. He is amazed that an intelligent man [homme d’esprit] like Rousseau . . . failed to see that languages came into being imperceptibly . . . one generation says ba, another bé; the Assyrians invented the nominative, and the Medes, the genitive. (67–68)

In de Maistre’s religiously grounded anthropology, language is intrinsic to the human and therefore complete from the beginning; in fact he thinks that “the prodigious talent of the first peoples for forming words” declines with the progress of civilization. New languages are formed from old, but this cannot explain the origin of language itself. There is a separation between historical and transcendental, ontic and ontological language origin: If, on this question of the origin of language . . . our century has missed the truth, it is because it was mortally afraid of encountering it. Languages have beginnings; but language [la parole] never, not even with man. The one [sc. la parole] must necessarily have preceded the other; for speech [la parole] is possible only through the word [le verbe]. Every specific language is born, like an animal, by way of explosion and development without man ever having gone from the state of aphonia to the use of language. He has always spoken, and it is with sublime justice that the Hebrews called him a “speaking soul.” When a new language is formed, it is born in the midst of a society in full possession of language. (73–74)

The historical/transcendental split stimulates empirical research into specific languages by bracketing the question of the genesis of lan-

   the scene embodied guage itself. Yet each language is a totality derived from the (divine) source of originary language: Each language, taken by itself, repeats the spiritual phenomena that took place in the beginning; and the more ancient the language, the more these phenomena are apparent [sensibles]. (73)

Although the historical—languages—is separated from the transcendental—language—each historical language “repeats the spiritual phenomena” of its origin. If to go forward in time is to explore, in anticipation of Humboldt, “the genius of each language” (75) in its historical context, going backward to the earliest times brings us closer to the mystery of human origin. As a man of faith, de Maistre is not concerned to explore the paradoxical relation between transcendence and immanence that language incarnates, but his insistence on both sacred origin and worldly history provides a basis for an anthropological dialectic that would find fruition only after World War II.

chapter 6

Scenes of Philosophy

1. Hegel’s Master and Slave In my student years, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was my favorite philosopher; I admired his ability to make a story of the progression of consciousness continually enriching itself with new layers of self-knowledge. In December 2001, I was privileged to be lodged in Berlin only a few yards from Hegel’s austere grave in the Dorotheenstädtische Friedhof, which I visited with some emotion. But as the years go by I find myself preferring the dry rigor of Kant’s critiques to Hegel’s flights of dialectical imagination. Kant’s ideas remain, however ahistorically, those of human minds; Hegel, in his admirable desire to situate ideas within history, makes the ideas do combat in the place of living (and dying) individuals. My own thinking remains more Hegelian than Kantian, but it is a Hegelianism stood back on its feet, not by Marx’s historical materialism, but by originary anthropology. This being said, there is no equivalent in Kant to chapter IV A of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind / the Spirit (1807), “Independence and Dependence [Unselbständigkeit, literally, non-autonomy] of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage,” more familiarly known as the master-slave dialectic, which since the publication of Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel in 1947 is the best-known section of the Phenom-

   the scene embodied enology, and perhaps of all Hegel. No doubt Kojève had political reasons of his own for singling out this text, which can be read as an originary analysis of the Marxist category of exploitation. But a more intrinsic explanation of its popularity is that it is the only moment in all of Hegel’s writings that can genuinely be called a scene. Hegel explains the origin of the internal differentiation that is essential to his model of human self-consciousness as well as of human society by substituting a historically conceived minimal human relation for the Enlightenment’s loosely defined states of nature. Philosophical abstraction notwithstanding, this chapter describes the confrontation of two distinct mortals of flesh and blood rather than a pair of antithetical ideas ready to be “lifted up” into a new synthesis. Once this has been done, the subsequent concepts of the Phenomenology such as the “unhappy consciousness,” the “beautiful soul,” or the state of “culture” remain inhabited by tragic mortality even if they do not refer to it explicitly. The appearance of self-consciousness sets the stage for this unique Hegelian scene. Consciousness of self is not mere negation of the object of knowledge, but the return of its otherness into the self. The “unity of self-consciousness with itself ” does not simply exist; it is something desired by the subject: “self-consciousness is the state of Desire in general.”1 As the dialectic develops, it appears that the object of the subject’s desire must be another self-consciousness: [S]elf-consciousness is thus only assured of itself through sublating [its] other, which is presented to self-consciousness as an independent life; self-consciousness is Desire. Convinced of the nothingness of this other, it definitely affirms this nothingness to be for itself the truth of this other, negates the independent object, and thereby acquires the certainty of its own self, as true certainty, a certainty which it has become aware of in objective form. In this state of satisfaction, however, it has experience of the independence of its object. Desire and the certainty of its self obtained in the gratification of desire are conditioned by the object; for the certainty exists through canceling this other; in order that this canceling may be effected, there must be this other. Self-consciousness is thus unable by its negative relation to the object to abolish it; because of that relation it rather produces it again, as well as the desire. The object desired is, in fact, something other than self-consciousness. . . . At the same time, however, self-consciousness is likewise absolutely for itself, exists on

Scenes of Philosophy    its own account; and it is so only by sublation of the object; and it must come to feel its satisfaction, for it is the truth. On account of the independence of the object, therefore, it can only attain satisfaction when this object itself effectually brings about negation within itself. The object must per se effect this negation of itself, for it is inherently (an sich) something negative, and must be for the other what it is. Since the object is in its very self negation, and in being so is at the same time independent, it is Consciousness. . . . The above general independent nature, however, in the case of which negation takes the form of absolute negation, is the genus as such or as self-consciousness. Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness. (IV, Introduction)

The otherness of the object of consciousness that one is conscious of grasping as other can maintain itself only if it is in fact another selfconsciousness. This is Hegel’s way of dealing with the mimetic nature of human interaction. Instead of beginning with a community of subjects, he generates intersubjectivity from within the individual subject, whose desire Hegel sees not as an appetite (which would simply be satisfied by production of its object) but as a self-perpetuating oscillatory process like Kant’s sublime—or like aesthetic experience in general. But this oscillation is not attributed, as in Kant, to an experience of representation. Desire runs up against the independence of an Other that it must continually subdue and regenerate. This process is embodied in the recognition that the self demands of the other. In order for me to be conscious of myself as a self, I must compel another self to recognize my unique selfhood, which can only be accomplished by eliminating the independence of this other, that is, by killing him. The symmetrical battle for recognition is the minimal Hegelian version of a mimetic crisis: each subject attempts violently to compel the recognition of the other. But no outcome of this micro-war of all against all can provide a satisfactory resolution, since my self-consciousness depends on my killing my rival, and once I have killed him, he can no longer recognize my selfhood. A society of such rivals will necessarily reduce itself to, at most, a single individual. The master-slave relation is the solution to this dilemma, one that alone, Hegel insists, permits true, “absolute” self-consciousness to manifest itself. Despite the reduction of the cast of characters to two, Hegel’s scene is indeed a scene of origin, not merely of political economy, but of

   the scene embodied humanity, whose “absolute” self-consciousness can emerge only from the death and rebirth of sublated/transcended conflict. The slave is he who renounces mastery to preserve his life, who grants recognition to the other in life in order to prevent being reduced to the empty recognition of death. Hegel’s universe of primordial selfconsciousness is Hobbes’ state of nature reduced to its most fundamental relationship: the condition in which mimetic rivalry altogether replaces appetite, so that the Subject’s only desire is the desire of the Other. Hegel’s originary society, like that of Hobbes, is hierarchical, but Hegel generates the hierarchy from within a community of equal warriors rather than bringing the sovereign in from without as a rex ex machina. Hobbes’ Enlightenment world of universal war among rational political units is distilled into a romantic scene in which the constitution of every one of these units depends on its acquisition of the absolute sovereignty of Leviathan. The great political discovery of the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath, as filtered through Hegel’s post-Kantian metaphysics, is that the autonomous individual of the Enlightenment, even if his best chance for happiness lies in Lockean civil society, is in the originary core of his humanity modeled on the sacred center and only secondarily and reluctantly a participant on the scenic periphery. But in contrast to the romantic pose that pits the absolute individual as a superior being against the Lockean mass, Hegel recognizes that modern society is an entire universe of superior beings forced to confirm their superiority through the mediations of the market. The key point in Hegel’s analysis is that it is not the master but the slave who emerges from this experience with genuine human selfconsciousness. The Hegelian slave, recognized by Kojève as the ancestor of the modern bourgeois (for Kojève, the “freed slave”), is the archetype of the human who must renounce the center for the sake of peripheral survival. For the first time, the human self, and not merely a human polity, is conceived as generated through scenic interaction, the outcome of which is economic; the slave survives to provide goods and services to the master, who as far as he is concerned might just as well be a supernatural object of worship. The comparison between Hobbes’ and Hegel’s staging of the individual’s renouncement of sovereignty demonstrates the anthropological deepening realized by the post-Revolutionary deferral of

Scenes of Philosophy    the political dreams of the Enlightenment into the categories of bourgeois exchange. We have seen what bondage is only in relation to lordship. But it is a self-consciousness, and we have now to consider what it is, in this regard, in and for itself. In the first instance, the master is taken to be the essential reality for the state of bondage; hence, for it, the truth is the independent consciousness existing for itself, although this truth is not taken yet as inherent in bondage itself. Still, it does in fact contain within itself this truth of pure negativity and selfexistence, because it has experienced this reality within it. For this consciousness was not in peril and fear for this element or that, nor for this or that moment of time, it was afraid for its entire being; it felt the fear of death, the sovereign master. It has been in that experience melted to its inmost soul, has trembled throughout its every fiber, and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it. This complete perturbation of its entire substance, this absolute dissolution of all its stability into fluent continuity, is, however, the simple, ultimate nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure self-referring existence, which consequently is involved in this type of consciousness. This moment of pure self-existence is moreover a fact for it; for in the master it finds this as its object. Further, this bondsman’s consciousness is not only this total dissolution in a general way; in serving and toiling the bondsman actually carries this out. By serving he cancels in every particular aspect his dependence on and attachment to natural existence, and by his work removes this existence away. (IV, A; my emphasis)

This extraordinary passage is in effect an anthropological scene of the origin of human self-consciousness through the deferral of violence. The references to consciousness being “melted to its inmost soul,” “trembl[ing] in every fiber,” suffering the “complete perturbation of its entire substance” stand out in high relief among the cognitive abstractions of the Phenomenology. It is the fear of death that makes the slave realize the difference between soul and body, spirit and flesh, which is to say, between representation and reality: the imminence of mortality reveals to him the non-mortality of the sign. If, however, we read this passage as describing a historical originary scene, the asymmetry between the participants is unexplained. Either this asymmetry is truly absolute, and the “master” becomes God, or it is contingent and oscillating, and the human participants are engaged in the reciprocal exchange that is the model of moral interaction. To affirm

   the scene embodied that the bondsman finds in the lord “the moment of pure self-existence” reduces the sacred to the anthropological, but fails to account for the persistence of this moment as the foundation of the self beyond the moment of fear and trembling that Hegel describes. “Consciousness” cannot absorb this moment and go on to other things; it must be able to represent it, both to itself and to others. Hegel’s vision of originary human relations lacks the mediation through the representation of the central object of desire that determines these relations as equal. Instead, the deferral of violence results from the absolute subordination of one man to another that excludes the possibility of reciprocal communication, and therefore of language and culture. The self-consciousness that passes through this revelatory moment has no one to share it with. Yet the labor through which the slave will attain what Hegel calls “a mind of his own” is not simply the “negation” of a worldly object in a purposeful act of production; in order for the emergence of true selfconsciousness to take place, the element of “absolute fear” in service to the master must be perpetuated: For this reflection of self into self the two moments, fear and service in general, as also that of formative activity, are necessary: and at the same time both must exist in a universal manner. Without the discipline of service and obedience, fear remains formal and does not spread over the whole known reality of existence. Without the formative activity shaping the thing, fear remains inward and mute, and consciousness does not become objective for itself. . . . If [consciousness] has endured not absolute fear, but merely some slight anxiety, the negative reality has remained external to it, its substance has not been through and through infected thereby. Since the entire content of its natural consciousness has not tottered and shaken, it is still inherently a determinate mode of being; having a “mind of its own” [der eigene Sinn] is simply stubbornness [Eigensinn], a type of freedom which does not get beyond the attitude of bondage. (Ibid.)

Here the master plays the role of God in maintaining the fear that is for Hegel the authentic hallmark of the originary scene’s transformative capacity. Hegel insists on the persistence of fear, and thereby of absolute power, because he wants to create a purely anthropological scene of origin for the operation of transcendent consciousness—something to which Kant would never have dreamt of attributing an origin of any kind.

Scenes of Philosophy    Why does the master of dialectic not refer to the sacred and its related cultural institutions rather than emphasize the reproduction of the visceral fear that makes “natural” or prehuman consciousness “totter and shake”? Hegel was surely no less familiar than Vico with Statius’ “Fear in the world first created the gods.” But Hegel’s anthropological scene of the origin of human consciousness cannot be the origin of transcendence itself because the transcendent status of the Weltgeist is at the origin of the Phenomenology. The operative concept of dialectic depends on the transcendental from the very start; which is to say that, like Plato’s Ideas, it is implicitly dependent on human language. Hegel will include in his dialectic the phenomena of human religion, but he cannot situate within this dialectic the emergence/discovery/invention of transcendence itself. Anthropology, as in Kant, remains distinct from metaphysics. Where Condillac generated the human from sensual interaction with reality (and language from the sharing of sensation with another), the line of thought that stems from Herder recognized the absolute dichotomy between the “horizontal” world of sensation and the transcendent world of signs. The eclipse of scenes of origin in the nineteenth century would reflect this raising of the bar of the scenic imagination; generating political agreement among sovereign individuals was a far less challenging task for a scene than generating transcendence in a world of immanence. It is in this context, following up on Kant’s meticulous ahistorical phenomenology of the transcendent, that the appearance of Hegel’s master-slave scene is so extraordinary. Its latter-day fame may be due in large measure to Kojève’s foregrounding, but this choice was anything but fortuitous. Although in Hegel’s overall scheme, the transcendent Spirit preexists the world within which it incarnates itself in a secularized version of the fourth Gospel, the hidden truth of Hegel’s system is that he is indeed dealing with a human spirit, a truth revealed nowhere as clearly as in this sequence. A century and a half of political and economic history have prepared our own age to grasp this truth better than Hegel, but only when it crystallized in the Holocaust were we led to realize that what makes us human is our precarious relationship to the deferral of mimetic violence through representation. Our transcendental appeal, be it to God or to Hegel’s Weltgeist, expresses the need for a higher peace that can permit the lesser violence of the self ’s battle for recognition, a

   the scene embodied peace whose ultimate fragility the masters and slaves of Auschwitz revealed to us. v Hegel is the first philosopher to preoccupy himself with the historical evolution not merely of institutions but of concepts. But it is not the lack of a Darwinian model for the origin of the human that prevents him from adapting to his schema the originary scenes of Rousseau or Condillac. What limits him is the historical circumstance that still conceives of a definitive end to the dialectical process. The human subject that is coeval with the transcendental dialectic can have no end within this dialectic; historical thinking cannot generate within itself the closure of history. The Spirit must be there from the beginning in order to find in the completed dialectic its full realization. The intellectual preformism that guarantees the Hegelian system is incompatible with a truly radical anthropology, for which the dialectic itself emerges only within human society. Although we cannot blame Hegel for the philosophical crudity of Engels’ Dialectics of Nature (1883), the latter is nonetheless an extrapolation of the master’s method, a work whose implicit political focus only makes clearer its anthropological limitations. Engels’ transformation of Hegel’s ideal dialectic into the “materialist” one of “scientific socialism,” far from being a simple vulgarization, renders in political terms the dialectic’s utopian intellectual aspirations. This vision of the final utopia, the “end of history,” is one that nascent market society could become able to reject only on the basis of a historical experience that could not have been anticipated in Hegel’s day. This too is the work of the Holocaust, which demonstrated the vulnerability of the market exchange system to the notion that authentic community can be created by annihilating those suspected of harboring a special claim to centrality. Only the experience of unspeakable violence legitimizes the idea of an originary event so violent that only the transcendence of the sign could defer it; like postmodernity, generative anthropology is the child of the Holocaust.

Scenes of Philosophy   

2. Karl Marx’s Sceneless Socialism Of the nineteenth century’s two great pourfendeurs of metaphysics, Nietzsche elaborates a critical genealogy of the scene from which its pretended objectivity derives, whereas Karl Marx (1818–1883) affects to consider, along with metaphysical thought itself, the entire scene of human culture as a mere epiphenomenon of material relations. Nowhere in Marx’s writings, from his satiric rendering of Eugène Suë’s Mystères de Paris (1844) in The Holy Family (1845) to his detailed analyses of the 1848 French Revolution and the 1871 Paris Commune, does Marx construct a scene within which events both occur and are represented. Events for Marx are transitions from one historical moment to another; he never lingers on them as significant in themselves. Yet, as we shall see, at the critical moments of his argument, Marx thinks in scenes that embody the participants’ self-consciousness, whether authentic or deluded. One of Marx’s most famous dicta is the “Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach”: “Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kömmt darauf an, sie zu verändern” (Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. [Emphasis the author’s]) The philosopher presumably “changes the world” by revealing the hidden reality of its class structure so as to hasten its radical transformation. No genuine scene of mutual presence, if one is to take place at all, is possible before the accession to the “realm of freedom” through the liberation of humanity’s productive forces; until then, all figures of scenic reciprocity are ideological shams of the ruling class designed to arrest the dialectical march toward liberation, images of spurious shared freedom in the present or salvation in a mythical future. The earliest definitive statement of Marx’s anthropology is the section entitled “History: Fundamental Conditions” in Part I A of The German Ideology.2 Marx first defines four “moments” that come together synchronically in the human: (1) “the production of material life itself ”; (2) “production of new needs” derived from this basic production; (3) “the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family”; (4) the combination of “a certain mode of production, or industrial stage . . . with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage.” He continues:

   the scene embodied [i.] Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of the primary historical relationships, do we find that man also possesses “consciousness,” but, even so, not inherent, not “pure” consciousness. From the start the “spirit” is afflicted with the curse of being “burdened” with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air—sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness; language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not enter into “relations” with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.

Language is “practical consciousness” in the sense of the materialized consciousness of the signifier “burdened with matter” that functions in the world of human interaction. Language alone mediates self-conscious “relations” among humans, which the concerned parties apprehend through the words that define them. There is no generative scene; Marx nowhere discusses the origin of language or other representational forms. Although the human is defined by relations designated by language rather than simply existing in the world, language does not originate in the spiritual realm of “pure” consciousness, but emerges, as one would expect, in the course of the productive process. To quote the preceding section of The German Ideology (I A 4, “The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History: Social Being and Social Consciousness”): “the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.” The “History” passage continues: [ii.] Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious. At the same time it is consciousness of nature, which first appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men’s relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousness of nature (natural religion [Naturreligion]) just

Scenes of Philosophy    because nature is as yet hardly modified historically. (We see here immediately: this natural religion or this particular relation of men to nature is determined by the form of society and vice versa. Here, as everywhere, the identity of nature and man appears in such a way that the restricted relation of men to nature determines their restricted relation to one another, and their restricted relation to one another determines men’s restricted relation to nature.) On the other hand, man’s consciousness of the necessity of associating with the individuals around him is the beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society at all. This beginning is as animal as social life itself at this stage. It is mere herdconsciousness, and at this point man is only distinguished from sheep by the fact that with him consciousness takes the place of instinct or that his instinct is a conscious one.

Here, in contrast with the previous passage, the human being is “growing self-conscious” and as a consequence humans confront nature as “a completely alien . . . force . . . by which they are overawed like beasts.” This derivation of “natural religion” from the conflation of the inherently cultural relation of awe with a pre-cultural, “animal” reaction to nature is typical of nineteenth-century explanations of the origin of religion; in the following chapter, we will witness its classic exposition in the work of Marx’s contemporary Max Müller. However absurd this derivation, whose association of religious awe with the animal’s presumably inferior abilities to cope with powerful natural forces makes of animality itself the source of religious feeling (“overawed like beasts”), what is most significant in this passage is that Marx’s attempt to theorize the emergence of humanity as he had previously defined it inevitably leads him, in however perfunctory a manner, to the sacred. In the parenthesis immediately following his Müller-like derivation, Marx associates nature-worship with human social relations: “We see here immediately: this natural religion or this particular relation of men to nature is determined by the form of society and vice versa.” But what we see “immediately” is rather that the parallel drawn here between religion and social form contradicts the earlier derivation of religion from man’s “purely animal” relation to nature. If indeed religion is not unilaterally determined by “the form of society,” as we might expect the superstructure to be determined by the infrastructure, but “vice versa” as well, then there is a reciprocal homology between religious ideology and the social order that cannot be explained

   the scene embodied by our “beast-like” awe before nature. Marx’s materialist disdain for the scene of representation reduces its originary manifestation to an animal act; as soon as we cease our diachronically oriented productive activities in order to attend to the scene of our potentially violent experience, we become as beasts. The only coherent explanation of “natural religion” is that our sense of a “completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force” proceeds not from our experience of nature but from the mimetic violence from which religion preserves the human social order. The “force” constitutes this order by remaining outside it, not in “nature,” but in the transcendental relation of the sacred. The fearful apprehension of nature as an alien force may be understood as the first stage of the historical process by which we harness this force to our productive enterprise, but the natural religion that results from the appearance of this force on the scene of representation exceeds this process in both directions at once; it is at one and the same time a prehuman emotional reaction and the ideological figuration of the productive relations by which the materialist dialectic is presumably constituted. It might appear curious that it is nature that provides Marx with the original resistance against which his human dialectic is made to operate; the theoretician of the class struggle passes up the opportunity to derive human self-consciousness from the scene of human conflict—for example, on the example of Hegel’s lord-bondsman dialectic. In this, Marx betrays the Rousseauian roots of socialist thought. A humanity born in Hobbesian internal conflict would lack an originary guarantee of the eschatological communist paradise in which class conflict is abolished; in other terms, it would be beholden to a scene. [iii.] This sheep-like or tribal consciousness receives its further development and extension through increased productivity, the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental to both of these, the increase of population. With these there develops the division of labor, which was originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual act, then that division of labor which develops spontaneously or “naturally” by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g., physical strength), needs, accidents, etc. etc. Division of labor only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor appears. [Marx’s marginal note:] (The first form of ideologists, priests, is concurrent.) From this moment onward

Scenes of Philosophy    consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of “pure” theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.

Once again, Marx hints at the originary significance of the transcendental dichotomy between signs and things: the division of labor that gives rise to a self-reflective human consciousness that “can really flatter itself [sich einbilden]” is that between “material” and “mental” labor, the latter, as if in anticipation of Durkheim, being attributed to the sacred functions of priestly “ideology.” The material progress that results from human labor produces consciousness only through the mediation of this sacred ideology, which exists detached from “existing practice” on the scene of its own “pure” representations. This is as far as Marx ever goes in the thematization of the scene of representation. Yet it is far enough to reveal that Marx’s materialist anthropology cannot coherently explain the scene’s dependency on the sacred, which, despite its origin in our animal fear of nature, gives rise not only to a homologous representation of the system of social relations but to human self-consciousness itself as distinct from the unreflective consciousness of the here-and-now. [iv.] But even if this theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. comes into contradiction with the existing relations, this can only occur because existing social relations have come into contradiction with existing forces of production; this, moreover, can also occur in a particular national sphere of relations through the appearance of the contradiction, not within the national orbit, but between this national consciousness and the practice of other nations, i.e., between the national and the general consciousness of a nation (as we see it now in Germany). Moreover, it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on its own: out of all such muck [Dreck] we get only the one inference that these three moments, the forces of production, the state of society, and consciousness, can and must come into contradiction with one another, because the division of labor causes intellectual and material activity—enjoyment and labor, production and consumption—to devolve on different individuals, and the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its turn of the division of labor. It is self-evident, moreover, that “specters,” “bonds,” “the higher

   the scene embodied being,” “concept,” “scruple,” are merely the idealistic, spiritual expression, the conception apparently of the isolated individual, the image of very empirical fetters and limitations within which the mode of production of life and the form of intercourse coupled with it move.

In conclusion, Marx reminds us that the above-mentioned “emancipation” of consciousness is in fact an illusion; consciousness reflects “social relations” and its liberation from “existing practice” is merely a reflection of the “contradiction” between these relations and the “forces of production.” Moreover, such a contradiction must occur, presumably because (the text is elusive on this point) the emancipated consciousness is that of a privileged class defined by “intellectual activity” that consumes the material goods produced by those engaged in the “material activity” of production. Here is the germ of post-metaphysical thought that changes the world not by reflecting the ideology of the bourgeois consumers but by elaborating the counter-ideology implicit in the productive activity of the proletariat, whose class conflict with the possessors of the means of production has the potential to render the latter, and all “division of labor” in the sense of class difference, superfluous. Consciousness “on its own” produces only “muck”; its “idealistic, spiritual” contents are merely fanciful representations of the “very empirical fetters and limitations” of the production process, as seen through the distorting lens of class (“social relations”). The justification for the socialist ideology that Marx would subsequently elaborate is that the “fetters” of the current mode of production had become so obvious that the proletarian ideologist could begin to envisage a world where production relations, and consequently social relations, would at last be without conflict: the classless society in which the division of labor would be “negated.” In class society, contradiction is inevitable because of the ideological mystification brought about by the division of labor. Yet the origin of this mystification, Marx tells us, is the sacred ideology first promulgated by priests, itself derived from animal fear before the forces of nature. In other words, however much these priests may take advantage of their flock’s credulousness to impose on them an ideology that justifies their own and their allies’ class privileges, this credulousness itself, this willingness to grant authority to those who speak in the name of the sacred, has

Scenes of Philosophy    its origins prior to the division of labor, in an “ideological” imperative that is nonetheless independent of humanity’s ideological divisions. The originary role of the sacred in the constitution of the human is one that neither Marx nor even Nietzsche could account for. v C’est la lutte finale Groupons-nous, et demain L’Internationale Sera le genre humain! ’Tis the final conflict Let each stand in his place The International working class Will be the human race!

Karl Marx wrote very little about the scene of “final conflict” celebrated in the Internationale. Yet the following well-known passage from Capital I (1867)3 demonstrates that his historical vision was indeed informed by a scenic imagination that he generally preferred to leave implicit: Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. [Die Stunde des kapitalistischen Privateigentums schlägt.] The expropriators are expropriated. (Capital I, Part VIII, ch. 32)

What is most striking about this revolutionary scene is its utter passivity. Even the expropriation of the expropriators takes place in the passive tense. The capitalist “integument” bursts in the absence of a human or even an anthropomorphic agent as the inevitable result of the growing

   the scene embodied incompatibility between the “centralization of the means of production” and “capitalist private property.” Marx’s aim is not to render the proletarians passive, but, on the contrary, by affirming the inevitability of the process, to encourage them to accelerate it. To this end, a natural necessity is affirmed in scenic, that is, cultural terms. An impersonal process is made into a spectacle; we are witnesses on the scene of history itself. And although the periphery lacks identifiable agents, the scene, like all scenes, is focused on its mortal center, the expropriators, the sacrificial nature of whose “expropriation” is underlined by the fatal implications of the striking hour (which the English “knell” renders in a more ecclesiastical register). The passage concludes: The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labor, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.

The first paragraph reinforces the process just described as the unfolding of an inexorable “law of Nature,” whereas the second concludes with a reference to a human agent, the “mass of the people [Volksmasse].” The action here is the same as in the preceding passage, the expropriation of the “usurpers.” But here it is made explicit that the role of the capitalist in history is to construct despite himself what turns out to be the final revolutionary scene. A footnote to this passage is yet more explicit: “What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

Scenes of Philosophy    Human history is divided into two phases: in the first, “incomparably more protracted,” “scattered” property is concentrated into a form “already practically resting on socialized production,” that is, into an economic totality involving large-scale cooperation (the primary model being that of the factory), a nineteenth-century version of today’s global economy. In contrast, the second phase, that of the “negation of negation,” is swift and automatic, and this because it takes place on the scene laboriously constructed in the course of the first phase. The “mass of the people” is in effect the entire society minus the few “usurpers.” On the one hand, we are witnesses to a sacrificial scene whose victims, “usurpers” or “expropriators,” play the central role; on the other, we observe a historical process in which this small group of capitalists is cast off as an “integument.” The historical function of the bourgeois is to construct the final and definitive sacrificial scene of human history, in which they play the central role as the last identifiable, and consequently superfluous, individuals, no longer necessary to the henceforth conflictfree historical process. The bourgeoisie, in other words, is a necessary, indeed, central component of the sacrifice that inaugurates the final utopia. Its elimination means that no more cultural scenes are either necessary or possible. For Marx, socialism succeeds by abolishing society. v As with his scene of revolution, Marx was equally reluctant to lay out that of the future communist paradise; his unique attempt to do so is equally revelatory. It is found in a famous passage from the early German Ideology (1845), very nearly contiguous to the passage analyzed above as representative of Marxian anthropology. Division of labor and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity. Further, the division of labor implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest,” but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labor is divided. And finally, the division of labor offers us the

   the scene embodied first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now. (My emphasis)

There is more than meets the eye in this semi-serious sketch of the communist utopia. Aside from the pointedly pastoral references to hunting and fishing, this vision of communism as a Marxian Abbaye de Thélème where each does as he pleases without constraint or specialization is reminiscent, in a more individualistic (and far more chaste) mode, of Fourier’s phalanstères, which were to be meticulously organized so that the members’ desires would all complement each other. But beyond blaming “the division of labor” for the mortality that limits the scope of our earthly activities—compare Musset’s Fantasio lamenting that it takes ten years to become a decent violinist—the heart of this passage is the bland but sinister phrase: “society regulates the general production [die Gesellschaft die allgemeine Produktion regelt].” In any other case, Marx would be the first to tell us that abstractions like “society” disguise specific class interests. This little phrase is a blueprint for totalitarianism; “society,” as incarnated in what Lenin would call “the vanguard of the proletariat,” brooks no political debate over the terms of its “regulation.” It is worth reflecting on the flaw in Marx’s anthropology that underlies the defect in his utopian vision. What we uncover in Marx’s phrase about society is, once again, a scene: for “society” to regulate production, it is necessary that the productive functions of the whole society be ac-

Scenes of Philosophy    cessible to a single decision-making body, like Hobbes’ men in the state of nature choosing their sovereign or Rousseau’s “unanimity, on one occasion at least.” Yet this scene remains unvisualized in Marx’s text, where the main clause describes rather the individual’s self-motivated lifestyle. The scene in which “society” decides who should produce what is syntactically subordinated to “my” desire to fish in the morning and hunt in the afternoon, as though “society” were a disinterested computer program that instantaneously transformed each individual’s desire to produce whatever he pleases into a “general production” that simultaneously satisfies all these same individuals’ desires to consume. The cavalier tone of the passage does not make it any less valuable as a revelation of the fundamental incoherence of Marx’s anthropology. He envisages the ideal society as a scene without conflict between periphery and center, as a body with a single, absolute will (Rousseau’s volonté générale), yet wholly lacking in self-presence, existing only to guarantee the individual independence of its members. Just as the sacrificial scene of revolution is disguised as an inevitable movement of impersonal forces, so the sacrificial scene of communism is disguised as the automatic harmonious operation of equally impersonal forces. Although throughout most of the twentieth century such a reading of Marx would have been denounced as perverse and reactionary, today we are able to realize in retrospect that these fragments of Marx’s scenic imagination have a good deal to tell us about the societies that took them as their model. As those who lived and died under twentieth-century despotisms learned to their detriment, denial of the scene of reciprocal human exchange is the most deadly denial of all.

3. Nietzsche’s Scenic Utopia Today when we are asked to name the most significant philosopher of the nineteenth century, we are likely to choose a man who was not a professional of philosophy and whose work, aphoristic rather than formally rigorous, is suffused with a rhetoric rooted more in Luther and Wagner than in the Western philosophical tradition. The particular modernity of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) reflects the fact that, in con-

   the scene embodied trast with his predecessors who took the human scene of representation as an a priori ethical model, Nietzsche situates the emergence of scenic self-consciousness, in its ethical as well as its aesthetic mode, in human history. Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1871),4 proposes an originary hypothesis of what the author presents as the exemplary scenic form. In a privileging of the aesthetic taken for granted since the German Enlightenment, the sacrificial dynamic of tragedy has replaced the Passion as the highest revelation of the human. Nietzsche contrasts the twin components of the tragic—the collective “witches’ brew” of the Dionysian, artistically exemplified in music, and the Apollonian art of the principium individuationis, as manifested in sculpture and “naïve” Homeric epic—with the anesthetic, rational-scientific attitude of Socrates that has dominated European culture since the Renaissance. Yet there is hope, for Germany at any rate: Wagnerian opera has reestablished the tragic tension between Dionysian music and Apollonian words and images. We should recall that The Birth of Tragedy appeared at the moment of the formation of the Second Reich after the German victory in the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War, a historical conjunction explicitly referred to in the original dedication of the work to Richard Wagner.5 German opera extends into the cultural sphere the geopolitical hegemony recently attained by the newly formed German nation-state over the country of Descartes and Voltaire, the modern homeland of Socratic optimism. For Nietzsche, Athenian tragedy emerges when the Dionysian “spirit of music” is supplemented by Apollonian language. Yet the emergence of this exemplary articulation of human unconsciousness and selfconsciousness is never staged in the text. Every one of Nietzsche’s formulations of the origin of tragedy stops short of describing a specific scene: [1.] I don’t think I’m saying anything illogical when I claim that the problem of [the origin of Greek tragedy] has not once been seriously formulated up to now, let alone solved. . . . This tradition tells us very emphatically that tragedy developed out of the tragic chorus and originally consisted only of a chorus and nothing else. This fact requires us to look into the heart of this tragic chorus as the essential original drama. . . . (7)

Scenes of Philosophy    [2.] Enchantment is the precondition for all dramatic art. In this enchantment the Dionysian reveler sees himself as a satyr, and then, in turn, as a satyr he looks at his god. That is, in his transformed state he sees a new vision outside himself as an Apollonian fulfillment of his condition. With this new vision drama is complete. With this knowledge in mind, we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus which over and over again constantly discharges itself [entladet] in an Apollonian world of images. (8) [3.] It is an incontestable tradition that Greek tragedy in its oldest form had as its subject only the suffering of Dionysus and that for a long time later the individually present stage heroes were only Dionysus. But with the same certainty we can assert that right up to the time of Euripides Dionysus never ceased being the tragic hero, that all the famous figures of the Greek theatre, like Prometheus, Oedipus, and so on, are only masks of that primordial hero Dionysus. (10) [4.] For this is the way religions tend to die out, namely, when the mythical preconditions of a religion, under the strong, rational eyes of an orthodox dogmatism become classified as a closed totality of historical events and people begin anxiously to defend the credibility of their myths, but to resist the naturally continuing life and growth of those myths, and when the feeling for the myth dies out and in its place the claim to put religion on a historical footing steps onto the scene. The newly born genius of Dionysian music now seized these dying myths, and in its hands myth blossomed again [sc. in tragedy], with colors which it had never shown before, with a scent which stirred up a longing premonition of a metaphysical world. (10; all emphasis mine)

The Dionysian-Apollonian dichotomy restores to the Kantian distinction between beautiful form and its sublime transcendence a temporal, dialectical dimension. The “discharge” of Dionysian energy into Apollonian form is the process by which the unconscious mimetic rhythm of desire is transformed into a formal opposition between sign and sacred object; in other words, it is a model of the originary event. The “suffering of Dionysus,” the “myth” to which Nietzsche refers in the fourth passage above, is that of the originary sparagmos, yet the chorus that “discharges itself ” through its figural vision of the god is never designated as the cause of his suffering, nor is this suffering presented as the link between a mortal victim and the “Apollonian” figure of the sculpted god.

   the scene embodied Thus Nietzsche’s theory of the scene begins in medias res with the aesthetic already in place and the Dionysian “witches’ brew” of sacrificial ritual well behind us. The contrast with Hegel is striking; where the latter, for whom the scene of representation or Weltgeist is the one category for which the question of historical genesis cannot be raised, defines the scene within which human self-consciousness emerges as one of mortal combat, Nietzsche, the great theoretician of the scene, conceives it as constituted precisely by the aesthetic transcendence of any such violence. Tragedy is conceived less as a functioning institution than as a privileged cultural state in which the Athenians of a certain period were privileged to dwell, where the Apollonian principium individuationis stands in perfect equilibrium with the depersonalizing Dionysian flux of mimetic desire. The temporal flow of the latter is “discharged” in the stability of the former through an anthropogenic suffering, death, and transfiguration in which real mimetic conflict is nonetheless always already transcended in representational unanimity. Thus the central figure who emerges from within the chorus of satyrs is already transcendent; the single actor playing the role of the god is not opposed agonistically to the others, but merely incarnates their “vision.” Nietzsche’s scene eliminates the constitutive tension between sacred center and human periphery. On the contrary, elsewhere Nietzsche describes the scene as constituted by unanimous suffering in imitation of Dionysus: [W]e have now come to the insight that the scene [Scene] together with the action is basically and originally thought of only as a vision, that the single “reality” is the chorus itself, which creates the vision out of itself and speaks of that with the entire symbolism of dance, tone, and word. This chorus in its vision gazes at its lord and master Dionysus and is thus always the chorus of servants. The chorus sees how Dionysus, the god, suffers and glorifies himself, and thus it does not itself act. But in this role, as complete servants in relation to the god, the chorus is nevertheless the highest, that is, the Dionysian expression of nature and, like nature, thus in its frenzy speaks the language of oracular wisdom, as the fellow-sufferer as well as wise person reporting the truth from the heart of the world. So arises that fantastic and apparently jarring figure of the wise and frenzied satyr, who is, at the same time, “the naïve man” in contrast to the god: an image of nature and its strongest drives, the very

Scenes of Philosophy    symbol of nature and at the same time the announcer of its wisdom and art: musician, poet, dancer, visionary—in a single person. Dionysus, the essential stage hero and centre of the vision is, according to this insight and to tradition, not really present in the very oldest periods of tragedy, but only imagined as present. That is, originally tragedy was only “chorus” and not “drama.” Later the attempt was made to show the god as real and then to present in a way visible to every eye the visionary figure together with the transfiguring setting. At that point “drama” in the strict sense begins. Now the dithyrambic chorus takes on the task of stimulating the mood of the listeners right up to a Dionysian level of excitement, so that when the tragic hero appeared on the stage, they did not see something like an awkward masked person but a visionary shape born, as it were, out of their own enchantment. (8)

What appears on the Nietzschean scene is not violence and its deferral, but the chorus’s “vision” of the suffering god, seeing which “they do not act,” yet combine in their inaction all cultural roles: wise and frenzied, natural and artistic. Nietzsche’s collectivity only “later” takes on the role of the divinity to the end of “stimulating the mood of the listeners,” who in turn see the actor as the Apollonian “visionary shape” of the god. The satyr-actors imitate suffering, but never make each other suffer. Nietzsche’s vision of tragedy is full of mimetic contagion, yet it is at no point agonistic, as though the agon were not the very heart of tragedy. Nietzsche’s concern with the tragic scene is neither antiquarian nor anthropological; it is a manifesto of cultural nationalism, both the most extreme and the most insightful of the countless efforts of German thinkers since Herder to identify the emerging German nation with the cultural glory of Greece. The sole “tragic” scene Nietzsche describes in any detail is taken from a Wagner opera: To these genuine musicians I direct the question whether they can imagine a human being who would be able to perceive the third act of Tristan and Isolde, without any aid of word and image, purely as a tremendous symphonic movement, without expiring in a spasmodic unharnessing of all the wings of the soul? . . . But if such a work could nevertheless be perceived as a whole, without denial of individual existence; if such a creation could be created without smashing its creator—whence do we take the solution of such a contradiction? Here the tragic myth and the tragic hero intervene between our highest musical

   the scene embodied emotion and this music—at bottom only as symbols of the most universal facts, of which only music can speak so directly. But if our feelings were those of entirely Dionysian beings, myth as a symbol would remain totally ineffective and unnoticed, and would never for a moment keep us from listening to the re-echo of the universalia ante rem [universals before things]. Yet here the Apollonian power erupts to restore the almost shattered individual with the healing balm of blissful illusion: suddenly we imagine we see only Tristan, motionless, asking himself dully: “The old tune, why does it wake me?” And what once seemed to us like a hollow sigh from the core of being now merely wants to tell us how “desolate and empty the sea.” And where, breathless, we once thought we were being extinguished in a convulsive distention of all feelings, and little remained to tie us to our present existence, we now hear and see only the hero wounded to death, yet not dying, with his despairing cry: “Longing! Longing! In death still longing! for very longing not dying!” And where, formerly after such an excess and superabundance of consuming agonies, the jubilation of the horn cut through our hearts almost like the ultimate agony, the rejoicing Kurwenal now stands between us and this “jubilation in itself,” his face turned toward the ship which carries Isolde. However powerfully pity affects us, it nevertheless saves us in a way from the primordial suffering of the world, just as the symbolic image of the myth saves us from the immediate perception of the highest world-idea, just as thought and word save us from the uninhibited effusion of the unconscious will. The glorious Apollonian illusion makes it appear as if even the tone world confronted us as a sculpted world, as if the fate of Tristan and Isolde had been formed and molded in it, too, as in an exceedingly tender and expressive material. (21)

The operagoer participates in the originary passage from “expiring” to a “blissful illusion” that is presented as a remedy for “the primordial suffering of the world.” The “symbolic image” of myth and its “thought and word” save us from the “unconscious will” that is nothing other than the potentially deadly force of mimetic desire. Tristan is dying, but the Dionysian music of death has now been imaginarily transformed into the “sculpted world” of immortal form. Here the tragic saves us from the temporal necessity of death by suspending time in “sculpted” timelessness. This opposition does not coincide exactly with the spectator’s oscillation between identification with the work’s desiring content (fulfillment of Tristan’s love) and that with sacrificial form (which requires his death). In the latter case, the

Scenes of Philosophy    transcendent meaning of tragic representation would emerge from the opposition between the states of the human condition in which the spectator participates: fulfillment of desire (as if it were mine) and its necessary sacrifice (as the desire of the tragic victim). Nietzsche’s opposition is rather between two modes of participation: the impersonal Dionysian flux and the individualized Apollonian vision, each one of which is already formalized in art. Just as the Bacchic chorus is never accused of the murder of Dionysus, so the operagoer is never accused of desiring the hero’s death. To identify with Tristan as an individual is to separate oneself from the participatory flux and imagine him as “sculpted,” that is, as immortal. When, in contrast, we participate in his death, it is not by identifying with his sacrificers but by “expiring” along with him “in a spasmodic unharnessing of all the wings of the soul.” Whether I lose or affirm the individual self, it is never a matter of my affirming my self through the death of the other. In his desire to see tragedy as a dynamic equilibrium between the mortal world and the timeless universe of representation, Nietzsche ignores or denies the central violence from which this equilibrium emerges. The Birth of Tragedy already bears the seeds of the horrors that would emerge from German aestheticism in the following century. The “tragic” as an antidote to decadence replaces the petty pleasures of worldly exchange and conflict with a utopian communion in death and life. We all know of Nietzsche’s contempt for vulgar anti-Semitism—that of his brother-in-law, for example—yet he is not loath to put forth tragedy as the mark of Aryan masculine dignity in contrast with the “feminine frailties” of the Semitic: The legend of Prometheus is indigenous to the entire community of Aryan races and attests to their prevailing talent for profound and tragic vision. In fact, it is not improbable that this myth has the same characteristic importance for the Aryan mind as the myth of the Fall has for the Semitic, and that the two myths are related as brother and sister. . . . Man’s highest good must be bought with a crime and paid for by the flood of grief and suffering which the offended divinities visit upon the human race in its noble ambition. An austere notion, this, which by the dignity it confers on crime presents a strange contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall—a myth that exhibits curiosity, deception, suggest-

   the scene embodied ibility, concupiscence, in short a whole series of principally feminine frailties, as the root of all evil. What distinguishes the Aryan conception is an exalted notion of active sin as the properly Promethean virtue; this notion provides us with the ethical substratum of pessimistic tragedy, which comes to be seen as a justification of human ills, that is to say of human guilt as well as the suffering purchased by that guilt. (9; emphasis the author’s)

The same proleptically sinister opposition between Aryan and Semite will reappear in the Genealogy of Morals (1887) at the moment of Nietzsche’s most consequent philosophical achievement, the promotion of ressentiment to its rightful anthropological role. Ressentiment is a Semitic vice, in contrast with Achilles’ noble “wrath”; Christianity is the triumph of “the slave revolt in morality” begun by the Jews. This contrast, however ill-founded, remains with Nietzscheans to this day. In Nietzsche’s eyes, the scene of aesthetic representation is constituted by the suspension of the ethical. I need not elaborate on how the dignity of crime was interpreted in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Nietzsche’s eirenic picture of the aesthetic scene masks its originary violence; the world of art is a world of unanimity without contradiction, of collective suffering with neither agent nor victim. Only the “Philistine” is excluded from the scene, not as its central victim, but as one unworthy to participate in it. This updating of the romantic paradigm allows for the integration of the “good” community of Dionysian worshipers around the central hero, whose Führerprinzip they imitate without rivalry, while keeping the “bad” community of Others—the real victims, as it turns out—off the stage. Nietzsche’s enormous influence on writers like Gide or D’Annunzio reflects the popularity of this mode among intellectuals exposed to early versions of mass culture; traces of its fallout are visible throughout the first half of the twentieth century, from Heidegger to the Frankfurt school to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. What Nietzsche adds to the figure of the solitary romantic victim surrounded by the uncomprehending crowd is the solidarity of the aesthetic scene, with its “good” crowd of its own. The seductive ApolloDionysus dichotomy is one of tension, not of violence. By restoring this aesthetic tension, which is, as we have seen, an avatar of that established by Kant, following Burke, between the beautiful and the sublime, Nietzsche presents a vision of high aesthetic culture as complete in itself,

Scenes of Philosophy    a sacred without conflict for a potential society of “artists” in harmonious tension with each other, like the themes in a Wagnerian opera. Nietzsche is the first thinker to recognize the power of the scenic as such. The Birth of Tragedy, written under the spell of Wagner, sets the scene, in the most literal sense of the term, for his fragmentary later work, whose every sentence puts author and reader en scène more compellingly than any thinker since Pascal.6 v Nineteenth-century opera, with Wagner at its summit, embodied for several generations of European aesthetes the transcendence of the nascent consumer society in which they found themselves.7 In the second part of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the first novel to take a consommatrice as its heroine, witnessing a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor sets the stage for Emma’s own mise-en-scène of her second, fatal, love affair. As an object of aesthetic consumption, the Gesamtkunstwerk was designed to achieve a full catharsis of all the trivial, mimetic desires aroused in the spectator by daily activity in the marketplace. For Nietzsche, it was a revelation of what the aesthetic was meant to accomplish, the rebirth of tragedy in the modern era. Nietzsche’s appreciation of the human centrality of the scene of representation made him its first genuine theoretician; his uncritical affirmation of his discovery led him to invert, with the most terrible consequences, the Judeo-Christian tradition in presenting the scenic as the transcendence of the ethical, “beyond good and evil.” We will be able objectively to evaluate Nietzsche’s anthropological achievement only when neither the Right, as in the Nazi era, nor the Left, as in our own, is able to exploit this transcendence for its partisan ends.

chapter 7

Scenes of Human Science

1. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Pre-Darwinian Structuralism The beginning of full-fledged market society in the early part of the nineteenth century coincided with and was emblematized by a new formalization of linguistic knowledge; the systematic exchange of things inspired the systematic study of the exchange of words. Parallels between various Indo-European languages, including Sanskrit, had been noted as far back as the sixteenth century;1 in 1786, William Jones’ third “Anniversary Discourse” to the Asiatic Society first sketched the Indo-European family tree as a whole. Languages were no longer cast into vague categories such as Rousseau’s “Northern” and “Southern”; their historical relationships were beginning to be worked out in detail. The establishment of the Indo-European tree in turn inspired interest in languages outside it: How many families and types of languages were there? What other trees would it be possible to construct? Of the growing number of students of language in the first half of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) was the one most deeply concerned with these questions. Fluent in a dozen languages, he is said to have studied over three hundred. Although Humboldt’s philosophy of language is filled with romantic mist, his work in classifying languages into families and above all in creating a general lin-

Scenes of Human Science    guistic typology (agglutinating, incorporating, isolating, inflected) shows him to be no longer a philosophe and already a professional linguist. Humboldt’s major theoretical work on language, his posthumous 1836 Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus und seinen Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind), published most recently in translation as On Language,2 was intended as a theoretical introduction to Humboldt’s incomplete magnum opus on the ancient Kawi language of Java. Humboldt’s work grounds the emerging field of comparative language study in a pre-Darwinian linguistic structuralism. In contrast, under the influence of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), social scientists in the latter part of the nineteenth century such as Morgan, Tylor, and Durkheim (not to speak of Marx and Engels) classified cultural phenomena in (often abusively) strict diachronic schemes. Humboldt’s work, written in an earlier time, exhibits a flowering of synchronic dominance that would emerge from its eclipse in the Darwinian era only well after the turn of the twentieth century, most significantly in the langue-focused linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), expounded in his posthumous Cours de linguistique générale (1916), and in the “cultural relativism” of the American school of anthropology founded by Franz Boas (1858–1942). This post-Darwinian turn away from historicism, suspected of racism or at any rate of Eurocentrism avant la lettre, produced a synchronic structuralism, this time in explicit opposition to diachronic genealogy. The new “post-evolutionary” structuralism sedulously avoided the invidious cross-comparisons that had made Humboldt’s early linguistic classifications the intellectual basis of the racial theory developed by Gobineau (1816–1882) and others, whose readiness to extrapolate from supposed differences in linguistic excellence to demonstrations of racial superiority had contributed to the discredit of historicism. Humboldt’s pre-Darwinian structuralism reflects the vast accumulation of empirical knowledge that separates him from his eighteenthcentury precursors. The more facts one learns about specific languages, the more clearly one becomes aware of the vast gulf that separates unverifiable speculations about a hypothetical originary language from concrete

   the scene embodied descriptions of language in its present state. It is this dichotomy that underlies Humboldt’s statement, itself wholly speculative, that [l]anguage, indeed, arises from a depth of human nature which everywhere forbids us to regard it as a true product and creation of peoples. It possesses an autonomy that visibly declares itself to us, though inexplicable in its nature, and, seen from this aspect, is no production of activity, but an involuntary emanation of the spirit, no work of nations, but a gift fallen to them by their inner destiny. . . . It is no empty play upon words if we speak of language as arising in autonomy solely from itself and divinely free, but of languages as bound and dependent on the nations to which they belong. (sec. 2, 24)

Rather than seek the path from “language” to “languages,” from the “involuntary emanation of the spirit” to the empirically known “work of nations,” Humboldt insists on their incommensurability, not because he has any less insight than Condillac, but because he has far more linguistic knowledge, which he can articulate in a manner qualitatively more concrete and verifiable than any discussion of language’s roots in the “depth of human nature” could possibly be. The chief difficulty encountered by the modern reader of Humboldt’s treatise stems from the unclear articulation between his synchronic typology and the diachrony of each individual language. Where contemporary comparatists such as Joseph Greenberg or Aharon Dolgopolsky are content with alluding to diverse linguistic structures in order to argue for one or another configuration of one or another historical tree, Humboldt wants his typology to tell a story that is neither strictly linguistic nor strictly chronological. The breadth of linguistic knowledge that takes him far beyond the Indo-European and the related Semitic families makes him—quite rightly—wary of postulating any kind of historical progression from one family of languages to another: One might certainly suppose . . . a gradual progression [from the Chinese to the Sanskrit/Indo-European languages]. But if we truly feel the nature of language as such, and of these two in particular, if we reach the point of fusion between thought and sound in both, we discover there the outgoing creative principle of their differing organization. At that stage, abandoning the possibility of a gradual development of one from the other, we shall accord to each its own basis in the spirit of the race, and only within the general trend of linguistic evolu-

Scenes of Human Science    tion, and thus ideally only, will regard them as stages in a successful construction of language. (sec. 4, 32)

Humboldt posits an “evolution,” a set of “stages in a successful construction of language,” but this evolution is “ideal” rather than historical. The relation between Chinese and Sanskrit is not one of linear genealogy but of differentially successful offshoots from a common stem, like that between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. If Chinese were an earlier stage of Sanskrit, we could assume that its speakers would eventually evolve into speakers of the “more successfully” articulated tongue. But there is no such evolution. Chinese speakers incarnate a different, inferior, creative principle, one that has its own unique virtues and capacities but that can never acquire the higher ones of the superior linguistic-national stock. The clarity and precision of language gain through the habit of expressing enlarged and refined ideas. . . . But this whole progress of improved language-making can only go on within the limits prescribed to it by the original design of the language. A nation can make a more imperfect language into a tool for the production of ideas to which it would not have given the original incentive, but cannot remove the inner restrictions which have once been deeply embedded therein. To that extent even the highest elaboration remains ineffective. (sec. 4, 34; emphasis here and elsewhere is the author’s)

Paradoxically, Humboldt’s justified disinclination to force languages into a scheme of linear evolution leads directly to the linguistically grounded racialism that would become so important later in the century. Although Humboldt’s focus on languages rather than language reflects the emergence of the positivist empiricism that would eventually reject originary speculations as unscientific, he has not altogether abandoned the Enlightenment imperative to discourse, albeit rather dismissively, on the ultimate origin of language. Humboldt associates language with “sociality” by means of a causal link reminiscent of Condillac, to which he adds, with little concern for coherence, the Herderian idea of language as free reflection (“mental cultivation”): The individual man is always connected with a whole, with that of his nation, of the race to which the latter belongs. . . . His life is necessarily tied to social-

   the scene embodied ity. . . . In the merely vegetative existence, as it were, of man on the soil, the individual’s need for assistance drives him to combine with others, and calls for understanding through language, so that common undertakings may be possible. But mental cultivation, even in the loneliest seclusion of temperament, is equally possible only through language, and the latter requires to be directed to an external being that understands it. . . . Man thereby at once discovers that around him there are beings having the same inner needs. . . . For the intimation of a totality, and the endeavour towards it, are given immediately with the sense of individuality. (sec. 6, 41)

Language for Humboldt is famously not a product but an activity, not Ergon but Energeia (sec. 8, 49), whence its affinity with sound, which “streams outward from the heart’s depths” (sec. 9, 55). Language is essentially social; linguistic exchange requires the reproduction in the interlocutor of the thought processes encoded in the speaker’s utterance. But once this has been established, Humboldt finds himself obliged to deny the very words he had previously used to explain the origin of this exchange. The following passage is clearly aimed at Condillac: Even the beginning of language should not be thought restricted to so meager a stock of words as is commonly supposed when, instead of seeking its inception in the original summons to free human sociality, we attribute it primarily to the need for mutual assistance, and project mankind into an imagined state of nature. . . . Man is not so needy, and to render assistance, unarticulated sounds would have sufficed. Even in its beginnings, language is human throughout. . . . Words well up freely from the breast, without necessity or intent, and there may well have been no wandering horde in any desert that did not already have its own songs. (sec. 9, 60)

The same “mutual assistance” that produced sociality in the earlier passage is now shown to be insufficient to determine human language; calls for help could be handled at a prehuman level. Language (again echoing Herder) is a “free” activity; yet to define this freedom, Humboldt finds himself obliged to deny not merely “necessity” but also “intent.” No doubt these were familiar quandaries that the previous century’s speculations could not resolve; what is new here is the author’s lack of serious interest in resolving them. The originary hypotheses of the past are inadequate because they construct only a protolanguage, whereas, as Humboldt observes, “even the languages of so-called savages, who would have

Scenes of Human Science    . . . to come closer to such a state of nature” (ibid.) are always already fully articulated. As for the origin of the “sound-form” within which this articulation takes place, it is dismissed in a gesture that Durkheim will repeat at the beginning of the following century with respect to religion: The creation [of a sound-form], if it is to be a true and complete one, could hold good only of the original invention of language, and thus of a situation that we do not know about, but only presuppose as a necessary hypothesis. (sec. 10, 76)

No conceivable hypothesis can take us from the “original invention of language” to the creation of a (specific) sound-form. Humboldt the proto-structuralist sees language as a “totality”; but there is no point that can serve as the origin of all the dynamic totalities that humanity has generated out of the struggle between innere Sprachform and external sound-substance. The only way of reconciling the specific and the general would be to postulate an articulated Ursprache from which all languages would derive. This ancient idea—revived in more recent times notably by Morris Swadesh,3 by the reconstruction of “proto-World” by Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Greenberg,4 and, on a more modest level, by Dolgopolsky and Illich-Svitych in their “Nostratic” hypothesis5—is incompatible with Humboldt’s empirically driven but “ideal”—that is, Platonic—hierarchical classification system. Articulated language is always already differentiating and differentiated. To go beyond the variety of “sound-forms” to the common human fact of language itself can be done only by hypothesizing a scene of origin prior to the articulation of difference. This hypothetical scene had haunted the speculations of the previous century and would return near the end of the following one; Humboldt’s still inchoate linguistic science derives its professional self-consciousness from its expulsion.

2. Max Müller’s Originary Sunrise Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), the translator-editor of the Vedas and other fundamental Hindu texts who spent most of his career at Oxford, was the most important Western Sanskritist of the nineteenth century and arguably its major figure in the study of religion as well. De-

   the scene embodied spite the naivety of his fundamental ideas about religion and his failure to formulate a clear thesis of language origin—not to speak of his role in developing the unfortunate “Aryan invasion” theory that fed the myth of the “master race”—Müller was virtually alone in conceiving an originary anthropology that gives language and religion equal weight.6 Both his achievement and his limitations are encapsulated in the dictum (from the 1861 Lectures on the Science of Language) for which he is best remembered today: “Mythology is an infantile disease of language.” Although Durkheim decisively refuted Müller’s “naturistic” theory of the origin of religion in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), his own theory of the sacred as a projection of the social never comes to grips with the problem of origin. This helps explain why even today the typical common-sense hypothesis of the origin of religious belief remains what we might call the Vico-Müller theory: humans came to believe in god(s) through their awe at the wonders of nature. According to La Scienza Nuova, at the first sound of a thunderclap, post-diluvial men bowed down in fear and prayed to the thunder god to spare them. A century after Vico, armed with a vastly expanded set of data, Müller sacrifices even the banal eventfulness of the lightning flash to the universal visibility of the sun in its daily phases, particularly its emergence at dawn: One of the earliest objects that would strike and stir the mind of man and for which a sign or a name would soon be wanted is surely the Sun. It is very hard for us to realize the feelings with which the first dwellers on the earth looked upon the sun. . . . But think of man at the very dawn of time: forget for a moment, if you can, after having read the fascinating pages of Mr. Darwin, forget what man is supposed to have been before he was man; forget it, because it does not concern us here whether his bodily form and frame were developed once for all in the mind of a Creator, or gradually in the creation itself. . . . [T]hink of him only as man (and man means the thinker), with his mind yet lying fallow. . . . [T]hink of the Sun awakening the eyes of man from sleep, and his mind from slumber! . . . Few nations only have preserved in their ancient poetry some remnants of the natural awe with which the earliest dwellers on the earth saw that brilliant being slowly rising from out the darkness of the night, raising itself by its own might higher and higher, till it stood triumphant on the arch of heaven. . . . For so prominent an object in the primeval picture-gallery of the human mind, a sign or a name must have been wanted at a very early period. But how

Scenes of Human Science    was this to be achieved? As a mere sign, a circle would have been sufficient. . . . [I]f such a sign was fixed upon, we have a beginning of language in the widest sense of the word. . . . With such definite signs, mythology has little chance. (Introduction to the Science of Religion, 366–70)7

Müller then proceeds to note that a “real,” that is, spoken name is required and that such a name could be derived only from a primitive verbal root signifying one of the sun’s effects: If the sun itself was to be named, it might be called the brilliant, the awakener, the runner, the ruler, the father, the giver of warmth . . . but there was no possibility of naming it, except by laying hold of one of its characteristic features, and expressing that feature by means of one of the conceptual or predicative roots. (Ibid., 373)

The reference to Darwin is significant. We see in Müller’s exposition the last remnants of a pre-evolutionary mindset that cannot quite fathom the transformation wrought by evolutionary theory on the study of human origins. It was easy for Durkheim to show that even the earliest men would look at the sun as a pure banality; if humans evolved from prehuman ancestors, then there was no inaugural moment at which “man” and the sun came in contact for the first time. Pace Müller, it does indeed “concern us here whether his bodily form and frame were developed once for all in the mind of a Creator, or gradually in the creation itself,” since in the latter case, the phrase “man at the very dawn of time” becomes meaningless. Müller’s hymn to the sun nevertheless proposes, however implausibly, a scene of language origin founded on the concentration of human desire on a central object. That this object is central to desire but not to the topography of the scene is not without relation to the fact that “man” is presented here, still in Enlightenment fashion, as indifferently singular and plural. If we consider “man” more concretely as a protohuman community, then it becomes clearer that what is essential in Müller’s scene is not the celestial primacy of the sun but the unanimous nature of the desire directed toward it. A specific group of not-yet-men would be more likely to come to blows over a beast of prey than over the sun, but “man” can unanimously desire only something humans everywhere can see. Whatever the weaknesses of Müller’s conception, his intuition

   the scene embodied that the sacred and language both spring from the human community’s inaugural contact with an external and unanimously shared object of desire supplies a crucial element lacking in Durkheim’s otherwise far more mature anthropology. As a scholar of the oldest extant corpus of religious literature written in the language that the pioneering Indo-Europeanists of his day considered the closest thing to an Ursprache, Müller saw language and religion as fundamentally interrelated and coeval with the human. This would no longer be the case in the following generation. Tylor, Frazer, Durkheim, and their disciples would focus their attention on religious “representations” (Durkheim’s term) but not on language as such, which they took for granted as a human a priori; conversely, linguists such as Meillet and Saussure would no longer concern themselves with the names and tales of gods. In the passage quoted above, Müller suggests an originary “sign” for the sun that is not spoken or even gestural, but graphic. Jacques Derrida would have been happy to know that the quintessential nineteenth-century philologist not only put written before spoken language but did so for fear that the pure inscription would be corrupted by sonorous speech. In a language limited to this simple sign, “mythology would have little chance”: the “infantile disease” would not yet threaten because the mere circle would lack anthropomorphic possibilities—although Müller suggests that if the circle “reminded the people of an eye,” “the germs of mythology would spring up” (370). Circle or word, the idea that the first sign is also the name of the first sacred object is a powerful one indeed, a clear advance beyond Herder’s sheep. Yet Müller does not stop to develop this intuition because, although he sees religion as the sign’s first cause, he cannot conceive of words originating as ostensives. Hence, passing over the “mere sign,” Müller has recourse to the “primitive roots” of language among which the sun’s first names are presumed to be found. But because these roots express basic human actions and qualities, their attribution as names to the sun makes inevitable our fall into the disease of anthropomorphic mythology. Once the sun is no mere circle, it fatally becomes “the awakener, . . . the father, the giver of warmth.” But whence come these roots that preexist man’s awe of the sunrise? Here is Müller’s explanation:

Scenes of Human Science    The 400 or 500 roots which remain as the constituent elements in different families of language are not interjections, nor are they imitations. They are phonetic types produced by a power inherent in human nature. . . . Man, in his primitive and perfect state, was not only endowed, like the brute, with the power of expressing his sensations by interjections, and his perceptions by onomatopoeia. He possessed likewise the faculty of giving more articulate expression to the rational conceptions of his mind. That faculty was not of his own making. It was an instinct. . . . Man loses his instincts as he ceases to want them. . . . Thus the creative faculty which gave to each conception, as it thrilled for the first time through the brain, a phonetic expression, became extinct when its object was fulfilled. The number of these phonetic types must have been almost infinite in the beginning, and it was only through the same process of natural elimination which we observed in the early history of words, that clusters of roots, more or less synonymous, were gradually reduced to one definite type. (Lectures on the Science of Language, 385)8

In this quasi-evolutionary depiction (composed less than three years after the 1859 appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species), articulate speech is a human instinct irreducible to either Condillac’s “interjections” or Herder’s “onomatopoeia.” In failing to provide an explanation for the origin of this “instinct,” Müller seems to have abandoned Herder for the latter’s bête noire Süssmilch, for whom language was a product of divine will. But Müller reintroduces an evolutionary element in the struggle for life among the “almost infinite” roots of earliest speech that reduces them to a few hundred. In the beginning, the language instinct was young and word-creation unbridled; with the decline of the instinct’s creative force, the roots had to fight for survival and were drastically reduced in number. In none of this discussion of the earliest phases of human language is there any question of awe before nature, religion, or even the “childhood disease” of mythology. Müller’s roots are verbs and adjectives designating simple actions or qualities rather than nouns. The nominal is, in Müller’s eyes, a late development, one closely associated with the mythological; in its pure state, the lexicon is uncontaminated by hypostasis. But this picture of a healthy language composed of a small number of basic roots is the result, we learn from the above, of the hecatomb of countless others of less general and therefore less useful scope. Should we not assume that

   the scene embodied these redundant forms were essentially nominal, even ostensive? Müller’s theory of lexical proliferation appears to echo, not altogether consciously, a notion that goes back (at least) to Locke and that was often expressed in the eighteenth century, notably by Rousseau and Maupertuis: that early in the development of language, each separate object of perception would receive an individual name, and that general names would arise only gradually through our learning from experience that tree A has a great deal in common with tree B. Müller’s new wrinkle, based on his philological studies but hardly demonstrated by them, is that the end products of the evolutionary struggle were not nouns like “tree” but verbs and adjectives like “grow” or “green.” To account for the original proliferation, the only plausible assumption is that words were first attached to individual objects and only subsequently became generalized and denominalized into verbs and adjectives. What “instinct” could justify this proliferation of names in the unmentioned but implicit communal context where their struggle for survival would later take place? If we confront Müller’s theory of language origin with his theory of religious origin, we observe that he describes the origin of nouns in two moments: a God-given “instinctive” moment (the “language faculty”) and a God-creating mythological moment (first seeing the sun). The only thing lacking for these two moments to dissolve into one is a plausible motivation common to both religious worship and language. Müller comes close to such a motivation by designating the sun as an object of common fascination, but he never situates the language cum worship directed at the sun within the dynamic of the human community, whose first need is to avert violence. If Müller had made naming/worshipping the sun the model for the first exercise of our language “instinct,” he would not have had to postulate a proliferation of words beyond a limited plurality of divinities—each with its own “root”—and the struggle for life between the names for tree A and tree B would take place as a competition between gods. Müller chooses the sun as his model divinity precisely because it is the most undoubtedly unique of referents. But despite his lyricism, Müller presents our attribution of root-names to the sun as a gratuitous act of mythological enfantillage rather than a practical act of language use. What is missing in Müller is what Durkheim would supply, a social pur-

Scenes of Human Science    pose for religion. But what is lost from Müller in Durkheim’s conception of religion as the representation of a social ideal is the originary relationship, whether as disease or as motivation, of religious representations to the signs of language. Durkheim sees the crucial need of society as that of maintaining “solidarity,” if not explicitly that of deferring violence. In Müller’s world, solidarity goes without saying, since the sun is, like Hobbes’ Leviathan, an awe-inspiring center that focuses desire on itself and away from the potential rivals on the periphery. In an age that viewed war as a punctual activity directed to limited goals, an “extension of politics by other means,” Müller’s background in ancient Indian civilization rather than tribal cultures led him to take the normal stability of the social order for granted. Under such conditions, Müller saw the only potential for serious violence as embodied in “mythology,” a “disease” that anthropomorphized natural forces and risked converting them into models of potential human destruction. But it was only because Müller had so eirenic a vision of the originary scene that he was able to grasp as no one else in his century, and precious few in those that have followed, the underlying equivalence of the two fundamental scenic phenomena of language and religion.

3. Morgan and McLennan: Darwinian Anthropology The appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 sparked a considerable interest in tracing the origins of human society, but in a linear vein more typical of Herbert Spencer than of Darwin himself, who emphasized the randomness of variations.9 The skeptical empiricism that under the influence of Franz Boas would dominate Western and particularly American anthropology after the turn of the century was in large measure a reaction to the unilinear speculations of enthusiastic evolutionists, most notably J. F. McLennan (1827–1881) in Great Britain and Lewis H. Morgan (1818–1881), the dominant figure in American anthropology in the late nineteenth century.10 In his first major work on family structures, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1870),11 which runs to 590 folio pages, Morgan designates the most primitive level of human organization as that of “promiscuous intercourse,” which he describes as

   the scene embodied the lowest conceivable stage of barbarism in which mankind could be found. In this condition man could scarcely be distinguished from the brute, except in the potential capacity of his endowments. Ignorant of marriage in its proper sense, of the family, except the communal, and with the propensity to pair still undeveloped, he was not only a barbarian but a savage; with a feeble intellect and a feebler moral sense. His only hope of elevation lay in the fierceness of his passions, and in the improvable character of his nascent mental moral powers. (487)

This notion of the “lowest conceivable stage” of mankind is a typical construct of early evolutionism. Although Morgan is a loyal Darwinian, he cannot help seeing early humans not as a new development from previous species—in which case he would have to ask what circumstances made this qualitative transformation possible—but as the “lowest” form of man, devoid of all human traits save “potential capacity.” Morgan’s distasteful vision of the first humans reflects the need to reconcile Darwinian gradualism with an intuition, sustained by religious doctrine, of qualitative superiority to the beasts. Instead of positing a fundamental transformation at the outset, Morgan defines the early human as a “brute” with “potential capacity,” presumably for such things as language, failing to remark that this retread of the Enlightenment notion of “perfectibility” cannot be explained in evolutionary terms unless it can be shown to have an adaptive value in the concrete circumstances of these creatures’ lives. This paradox would be resolvable only by positing the emergence of this “capacity” in a collective event. Seven years after Systems, in his magnum opus, Ancient Society (1877),12 Morgan expands his discussion of the stages of human social evolution to include four different criteria: invention (of material techniques), government, family, and property. In the “family” category, the lowest form Morgan discusses is the “consanguine” family, in which all members of the same generation are designated by the same terms, with the men and women of my own generation called brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters indistinguishable from nephews and nieces. Extrapolating yet farther back to his old “lowest stage,” Morgan claims that “it will be perceived that the state of society indicated by the consanguine family points with logical directness to an anterior condition of promiscuous intercourse” (417–18).

Scenes of Human Science    Morgan presents his data within the framework of a strictly linear progression through various stages of “savagery,” “barbarism,” and “civilization.” In the third chapter, “Ratio of Human Progress,” Morgan reascends this scale of development from civilization to the infantile period of man’s existence, when mankind were learning the use of fire, . . . and when they were attempting the formation of articulate language. In a condition so absolutely primitive, man is seen to be not only a child in the scale of humanity, but possessed of a brain into which not a thought or conception expressed by these [later developed] institutions, inventions and discoveries had penetrated;—in a word, he stands at the bottom of the scale, but potentially all he has since become. (37)

The near-“brute” of the earlier work is now described as a “child”; but this metaphoric shift from phylogeny to ontogeny is even less explanatory than the previous analogy; if all species are constantly evolving into new ones, what unique difference between our species and all the others is hinted at by this image of rebirth? Designating the first stage of human organization by “promiscuous intercourse”—an idea inherited from McLennan, although Morgan disagrees with the latter about the place of the later stage of polyandry— suggests, against Darwin’s own admonition that sexual jealousy must have been present in humanity from the beginning, that the first humans enjoyed a Rousseauian freedom from mimetic conflict—an idea later dubiously corroborated by Margaret Mead’s 1928 best-seller, Coming of Age in Samoa.13 The absence of sexual constraints at the outset allows human potential to realize itself through their gradual imposition, but this implies that the apes from which humans evolved had no constraints of their own, although it avoids emphasizing this implication through the use of the metaphor of “infancy.” Thus early humans are described as apprentices preoccupied with learning such fundamental techniques as fire and language rather than with mutual (adult) interactions. Morgan’s only reflection on language origin appears in a footnote on page 36, where after remarking on the current abandonment of speculation on this subject “by common consent,” he returns to Lucretius’ suggestion that the first language must have been gestural. The “infantile” state of Morgan’s early humans spares them from

   the scene embodied Hobbesian conflict, which even their “sexual promiscuity” is not presumed to provoke. McLennan, more concerned with mimetic rivalry than Morgan, had derived man’s primordial promiscuity from a complex and dubious speculation: because early humans’ survival depended crucially on (male) “braves and hunters,” they presumably engaged in female infanticide, resulting in a scarcity of women; as a consequence, their choice was either to quarrel over women and separate, or “in the spirit of indifference, [indulge] in savage promiscuity.”14 But when McLennan explains this possibility by the fact that “savages are unrestrained by any sense of delicacy from a copartnery in sexual enjoyments,” he too evacuates the Hobbesian problem, suggesting that those who quarreled and separated, cut off from the group, would simply die out, leaving those less prey to mimetic desire to survive and multiply, passing their hereditary non-conflictivity to their descendants via what would today be called the “peace gene.” Thus because of his failure to equate the origin of humanity with that of interdiction, McLennan is obliged to make modern humans descend from those protohumans farthest from mimetic crisis, that is, those who have in evolutionary terms the least potential for becoming human. Rather than understanding human social order and communication as resulting from the breakdown of their protohuman forms, early evolutionary anthropology presupposes that our animal ancestors had neither social order nor language, yet refuses to take the next step of defining the human by their emergence. Instead, it paints a picture of originary humanity that, consciously or not, owes more to the Bible than to ethnography, in which representation and interdiction begin with the human, but not the human with representation and interdiction. Humanity is described as emerging from its “infancy” through a gradual, unconscious process within which language and other modes of representation appear not as solutions to ethical crises but as by-products of increasing intelligence, just as the entire sequence is a movement from darkness to light, from primitive to barbarian to civilized society. As Morgan puts it: With the production of inventions and discoveries, and with the growth of institutions, the human mind necessarily grew and expanded. . . . The slowness of this mental growth was inevitable, in the period of savagery, from the extreme difficulty of compassing the simplest invention out of nothing, or with next

Scenes of Human Science    to nothing to assist mental effort; and of discovering any substance or force in nature available in such a rude condition of life. (37)

This conception is not only incompatible with the originary hypothesis; it is irreconcilable with an originary event of any kind. No allusion is made to any crisis or other singularity that would explain why the emergence of our species should be understood as a rebirth described in metaphors of “infancy” rather than as merely one more link in an endless chain of life forms evolving into each other through natural selection.

4. Durkheim and Sacred Representation For Emile Durkheim (1857–1917), the fatal weakness of Max Müller’s “naturist” theory of religion is that the radical otherness of the sacred cannot be derived from the human reaction to nature, even the unusual in nature. Yet, as we have already observed, Durkheim’s far more sophisticated theory of the sacred as an ideal projection of “society” nevertheless fails to explain how this projection was generated in the first place. In turning away from speculation about origins to the study of the place of religion in the social order, Durkheim abandons Müller’s two most valuable intuitions: that the sacred is the product of a memorable event, and that the most concrete and durable trace of this event is to be found not in ritual but in language. This having been said, in his insistence that the sacred is the source of the categories by which we understand the world around us, Durkheim puts collective, scenic phenomena at the origin of representation and the culture founded on it. His insight into the sacred might be more appreciated today had he not made the unforeseeable marketing error of describing primitive religion in terms of “totemism.” (The neglect of Freud’s Totem and Taboo [1913], another proto-generative work, springs no doubt in part from the same source.) The idea that totemism is a constant feature of “elementary” religion has been generally discredited. Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Le totémisme aujourd’hui (1962) reduces totemism, to the extent that it may be said to exist at all, to a classificatory system disassociated from sacrificial ritual; totems are, as Lévi-Strauss puts it, “good to think” rather than “good to eat.”

   the scene embodied Latter-day anthropology’s rejection in principle of Durkheim’s search for a universal model of religion is one more case of the empirical trees overgrowing the theoretical forest. It is important to study the diversity of ethnological facts, but it is equally important to formulate models that parsimoniously explain these facts. The excesses of the early evolutionists do not discredit the conception of an evolutionary history of religion; to take a broader view of evolutionary categories is not to abandon them altogether. The inappropriateness of an anthropological model based on mechanical correlations between kinship relations, economic activities, and religious systems, such as those outlined in Morgan’s massive Systems of Consanguinity, does not mean that the kinship relations, economic activities, and religious systems of pre-state societies stand outside the essential historicity that is inherent in our use of representations. Skepticism is not an epistemology. Nonetheless, with the exception of the writings of René Girard and some more recent—and quite reductive—work by evolutionary biologists and “rational choice” theorists,15 evolutionary models disappeared from the study of tribal religion for a long time. The fact that the elements of totemic systems are better to think than to eat does not discredit the hypothesis that the totem was originally a sacrificial animal any more than the apparent arbitrariness of a given signifier in contemporary language discredits the hypothesis that this signifier was originally motivated.16 To reduce the sacred to a product of our classifying intellect is to ignore its central role in human genesis. The designation of the sacred as significant is the origin of the signification that distinguishes human from animal communication systems. Contemporary research into the origin of language has revived interest in this distinction, but with few exceptions, the neuroscientists and paleoanatomists who conduct this research are not professionally inclined to take an interest in the sacred. The strength of Durkheim’s understanding of religion lies in his uncompromising insistence on the separation of the sacred from the profane. This makes Durkheim a “dualist” in a sense far more anthropologically significant than that defined by the incommensurability of mind and brain. Although Durkheim never discusses the origin of language, it is a small extrapolation from statements like the following to the more fundamental hypothesis that sacred difference (if not precisely the sacred-profane distinction) is the origin of meaning itself.17

Scenes of Human Science    Religious forces . . . are moral powers because they are made up entirely of the impressions this moral being, the group, arouses in those other moral beings, its individual members. . . . Their authority is only one form of the moral ascendancy of society over its members. But, on the other hand, since they are conceived of under material forms, they could not fail to be regarded as closely related to material things. Therefore they dominate the two worlds. . . . It is this double nature which has enabled religion to be like the womb from which come all the leading germs of human civilization. Since it has been made to embrace all of reality . . . the forces that move bodies as well as those that move minds have been conceived in a religious form. That is how the most diverse methods and practices, both those that make possible the continuation of the moral life (law morals, beaux-arts) and those serving the material life (the natural, technical and practical sciences), are either directly or indirectly derived from religion. (Book I, ch. 7, sec. 3, 254–55)

All that is lacking here is consideration of the relationship between religion and language. Religion is the “womb” or matrix of culture because it “dominate[s] the two worlds.” The notion of “religious forces” as “conceived of under material forms” is a reference to totemism, but at stake is the more general point that what is sacred and therefore the basis for significance manifests itself at the same time in the material world of appetite. We can only grasp a meaning, signified, or Idea when it is attached to a material referent whose mortality demonstrates the formal separation of words and things, ideal and real. Durkheim rejects “naturism” because, as he puts it, “[t]he impressions produced in us by the physical world can, by definition, contain nothing that surpasses this world” (2.7.4, 256). A worldly reality can be elevated into a totem only through the significance-conferring mediation of the group or clan. The sole element lacking in Durkheim’s model is an explanation of how the clan comes to be “represented” by the totem—a representational relation most simply attributed to the concentration of the group’s desire on the object. Under this assumption, Durkheim’s tentative insights into the origin of the totemic representation of the clan may be applied more radically to the origin of language, the linguistic sign being the most abstract form of representation. Durkheim’s own explanation of the clan’s attachment to its totem as a symbol of itself is a petitio principi:

   the scene embodied We have shown how the clan, by the manner in which it acts upon its members, awakens within them the idea of external forces which dominate them and exalt them; but we must still demand how it happens that these forces are thought of under the form of totems, that is to say, in the shape of an animal or plant. It is because this animal or plant has given its name to the clan and serves it as emblem. In fact, it is a well-known law that the sentiments aroused in us by something spontaneously attach themselves to the symbol which represents them. . . . This transference of sentiments comes simply from the fact that the idea of a thing and the idea of its symbol are closely united in our minds; the result is that the emotions provoked by the one extend contagiously to the other. (2.7.3, 251)

At this point, we still have not learned why this specific totem is chosen as the “emblem.” The word “contagiously” refers ostensibly to a relation of signs in the mind, but its more fundamental referent is the group itself. Durkheim continues: For we are unable to consider an abstract entity, which we can represent only laboriously and confusedly, [as] the source of the strong sentiments which we feel. We cannot explain them to ourselves except by connecting them to some concrete object of whose reality we are vividly aware [my emphasis]. Then if the [abstract entity] itself does not fulfil this condition, it cannot serve as the accepted basis of the sentiments felt, even though it may be what really aroused them. Then some sign takes it[s] place; it is to this that we connect the emotions it excites. . . . The soldier who dies for his flag, dies for his country. . . . Now the totem is the flag of the clan. . . . It is therefore natural that the impressions aroused by the clan in individual minds—impressions of dependence and of increased vitality—should fix themselves to the idea of the totem rather than that of the clan; for the clan is too complex a reality to be represented clearly in all its complex unity by such rudimentary intelligences. More than that, the primitive does not even see that these impressions come to him from the group. He does not know that the coming together of a number of men associated in the same life results in disengaging new energies, which transform each of them. . . . However, he must connect these sensations to some external object as their cause. Now what does he see about him? On every side those things which appeal to his senses and strike his imagination are the numerous images of the totem. . . . . . . Placed thus in the centre of the scene, it becomes representative. The sentiments experienced fix themselves upon it, for it is the only concrete object upon which they can fix themselves. It continues to bring them to mind and to

Scenes of Human Science    evoke them even after the assembly has dissolved, for it survives the assembly, being carved upon the instruments of the cult. . . . It is still more natural to attribute them to it for, since they are common to the group, they can be associated only with something that is equally common to all. Now the totemic emblem is the only thing satisfying this condition. By definition, it is common to all. During the ceremony, it is the centre of all regards. (2.7.3, 251–52)

I have quoted this passage at length in order to demonstrate both how close Durkheim comes to a scenic hypothesis of origin and how effectively this hypothesis would resolve the residual obscurities of his text. As we see, no specific reason is ever given for the choice of a given object as the totem of a given clan. On the level of individual psychology, the association is explained in the italicized phrase by the individual’s vivid awareness of a concrete reality. In what follows, the totem is presented as such a reality in the context of a preexisting totemic ceremony. Yet although the origin of the ceremony itself is not given, the centrality of the object and its “vivid” presence to each individual participant are precisely the conditions for the arousal of mimetic desire in a hypothetical originary scene. Durkheim is the founder of modern religious anthropology. We can only regret that, despite all the attention his work continues to receive, his most fundamental contribution to human science has been put aside by his empirically minded successors. For Durkheim, religion was in the first place a social phenomenon; he had little patience for discussions focused à la William James on individual “religious experience.” But Durkheim’s aversion to subjectivism was also a judgment concerning religion’s originary function. Before refuting Max Müller’s “naturism” in the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, in an earlier essay, “Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena,” published in L’Année sociologique 2 (1899),18 Durkheim rejects the definition of religion in Müller’s Introduction to the Science of Religion as “a mental faculty or disposition which . . . enables man to apprehend the Infinite under different names and under varying disguises.” On the contrary, Durkheim asserts, “[f ]ar from seeing the supernatural everywhere, primitive man sees it nowhere.” The universe is wholly explicable to the “completely uncultivated mind” because this mind makes no distinction between its “inner states” and

   the scene embodied external nature. Only a scientific age can have a conception of a “natural order” to which the “Infinite” or supernatural may be opposed; the primitive sees only a profane world inhabited by and in the grip of sacred forces (76). This reasoning displays the superiority of Durkheim’s conception of the social, functional nature of religion to question-begging explanations on the model of Müller’s Infinite. At the same time, there is a curious contradiction in its articulation. In the first part of the essay, where it is a matter of refuting the Infinite, the “primitive” is said to inhabit an intellectual universe much like that described by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in La mentalité primitive (1922), lacking in objective contours: “As his understanding is not yet formed . . . it is with his imagination that he views the world. . . . The inner states which [the imagination] is fashioning . . . are made up of such insubstantial, plastic material, their contours are so blurred and wavering, that they are easily modified according to the whim of the subject” (Pickering, 78). Yet later in the essay, the primitive is seen to participate in the familiar binary “division of things into sacred and profane, which is fundamental to all religious organization” (90). Since this division, as Durkheim later explains, provides the basis for all further classification, notably the division of the tribe into totemic clans—“these systemic classifications are the first we meet with in history, and . . . they have taken the forms of society as their framework” (Elementary Forms, 169)—Durkheim now seems to have rejected LévyBruhl for Lévi-Strauss’ La pensée sauvage (1962). The coherence of Durkheim’s construction can be salvaged only if we follow his logic to its ultimate conclusion and make the sacred-profane distinction the foundation not merely of conceptual and classificatory thought but of representation and language itself. We may then take a more charitable view of the Infinite than Durkheim without betraying his insistence on the functional core of even the most ostensibly irrational religious practices. The Infinite is simply the sacred, understood as the source of the “vertical” world of the sign that transcends the finite, “horizontal” world of prehuman appetite. Durkheim’s theory of religion was not well received in his own time outside the circle of his disciples, a situation that is little changed today. An important contributory factor to this disfavor is his reliance on not

Scenes of Human Science    altogether trustworthy second-hand data. But the heart of the problem is Durkheim’s use of an empirical model of “elementary” religion, a choice that derives in turn from his desire to found a positive sociology rather than a minimal anthropology of religion. Durkheim was hostile to speculation on the origin of religion: “Like every human institution, religion did not commence anywhere. Therefore, all speculations of this sort are justly discredited; they can only consist in subjective and arbitrary constructions which are subject to no sort of control” (Elementary Forms, 20). But by insisting that his model of Australian totemism was exemplary of “elementary” religion and thus of religion tout court, Durkheim became vulnerable to a far more devastating criticism than the mere questioning of his data: akin to Morgan and McLennan, he made his sociological model of religion dependent on a model of human social evolution that obligatorily passes through the stage of totemism as he describes it. There is another quality of Australian totemism, beyond its “primitive” nature, that explains Durkheim’s attraction to it. The “elementary” society must be compact and egalitarian if the totem is to be the center of the circular configuration of the (originary) human scene. The symmetrical presence of the clan around the sacred totemic center transforms the worldly into the transcendental. This scenic self-presence of “society” in religious ritual is indispensable to the emergence of “concepts” or “representations,” if not of language as such; Durkheim derives all conceptual thought from religion. Causality, for example, is first understood not in everyday experience, where there is nothing but a series of events, but through the encounter with sacred forces acting in the collective context of ritual: Let us bear in mind how the law of causality, which the imitative rites put into practice, was born. Being filled with one single preoccupation, the group assembles: if the species whose name it bears does not reproduce, it is a matter of concern to the whole clan. The common sentiment thus animating all the members is outwardly expressed by certain gestures . . . and after the ceremony has been performed, it happens that the desired result seems obtained. So an association arises between the idea of this result and that of the gestures preceding it. . . . But since a social interest of the greatest importance is at stake, society cannot allow things to follow their own course. . . . So it demands that this ceremony . . . be repeated every time that it is necessary. . . . [I]t imposes [the

   the scene embodied ritual gestures] as an obligation. Now they imply a certain definite state of mind which, in return, participates in this same obligatory character. To prescribe that one must imitate an animal or plant to make them reproduce, is equivalent to stating it as an axiom which is above all doubt, that like produces like. Opinion cannot allow men to deny this principle in theory without also allowing them to violate it in their conduct. So society imposes it . . . and thus the ritual precept is doubled by a logical precept which is only the intellectual aspect of the former. The authority of each is derived from the same source: society. (Elementary Forms 3.3.3, 410–11)

For Durkheim, it is society that “imposes” on us the passage from the prehuman level of “association” to the logical principle of causality. But this imposition can only be a verifiable fact in the course of an event in which the society as a whole is present to itself. In the Conclusion, this point is made explicit: [S]ociety cannot make its influence felt unless it is in action, and it is not in action unless the individuals who compose it are assembled together and act in common. It is by common action that it takes consciousness of itself and realizes its position. . . . Then it is action which dominates the religious life, because of the mere fact that it is society which is its source. (465–66)

The social cohesion that Durkheim thought he had found in totemic ritual is that of a hypothesis of scenic origin. By grounding his religious sociology on a minimal hypothesis rather than on empirical data that can be contested in both accuracy and significance (is totemism really the center of Arunta religion?), Durkheim would evacuate the criticism leveled at his already outdated linear historicism. For Durkheim, the transparent religious totalization of the social among the Australians can no longer be attained in the modern world, where “we are going through a stage of transition and moral mediocrity” (475). But the contrast between modern secular and primitive religious societies obscures the key methodological point that in the absolute concentration that Durkheim requires of it, the social cannot be encountered empirically anywhere. The social as the source of the world of representation is conceivable only as the minimally, hypothetically human. The fact that the Arunta appear to exemplify some of Durkheim’s ideas about the originary function of the social does not relieve him of the obligation to

Scenes of Human Science    provide a model of the genesis of human social organization along with that of the common moral representations it exists to enforce. No doubt Durkheim would have been unwilling to abandon the empirical basis that he considered indispensable to the foundation of a science. But precisely, the fundamental anthropology that he is practicing is not scientific in the usual sense of the term. It was not for nothing that W. E. H. Stanner (Pickering, 300) called Durkheim “the arch-hedgehog.” However loftily Durkheim dismisses the “speculative” question of the minimal constitution of society and representation, the coherence of his sociology of religion is implicitly dependent on a scenic hypothesis of origin.

5. Freud’s Originary Parricide and Girard’s Originary Scapegoat It is fitting that Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the greatest psychologist of the scene, should be the first thinker to construct a genuine collective scene of human origin. Hobbes situates the origin of human ethics in a communal accord or “social contract,” but nothing in the state of nature as Hobbes describes it explains how its solitary inhabitants could come together in order to become parties to such a contract. Vico is well aware of this incompatibility, but he relies for humanity’s scenic discovery of the sacred on an extra-anthropological providence. In contrast, Condillac’s wholly human scenario has no collective scenic event; language, information-bearing but not sacred, emerges seamlessly from post-diluvian nature. Freud’s father-murder is the first self-consciously event-centered originary scene, even if its author never clearly grasps that the crucial element of any such scene must be not the violence exercised by its peripheral participants on a unique central figure but the deferral of this violence through an act of representation. Totem and Taboo19 attempts to develop a comprehensive psychoanalytic model of communal interdiction (“taboo”), beginning with the fundamental and universal interdiction of incest, which Freud associates, as did Durkheim, with the prohibitions of the “totemic” clan. The dramatic scene of parricide recounted in chapter 4, section 5—seven-eighths of the way through the book—is presented as a founding explanatory

   the scene embodied model for the ethnographic data presented earlier, although its notoriety has tended to eclipse the rest of Freud’s argument: One day, the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually. (Some cultural advance, perhaps, command over some new weapon, had given them a sense of superior strength.) Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers; and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind’s earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion. (176)

A few words of explanation are in order. The “patriarchal horde” was a conjecture of Darwin concerning the earliest form of human society: a mature male, his harem of females, and immature males (“brothers”) to whom the women were forbidden—a construction rather more sophisticated than the crude stage of “promiscuous intercourse” postulated by Morgan. The “totem meal” is a feast in which the members of a totemic clan are allowed to eat as a collectivity the totem animal that is forbidden to them at all other times. The status of Freud’s “criminal deed” with respect to human origin is never made explicit. If the Darwinian horde was the social order of “primaeval man” (quoted on page 156), then there were humans before what Freud refers to as “the beginning of . . . social organization . . . moral restrictions and . . . religion.” Yet whatever Darwin’s notion of the primeval, the logic of Freud’s text suggests that the fundamental traits of the human are those that appear after the scene of parricide. This leaves an obvious opening to Freud’s critics: if its aim is to explain the origin of “moral restrictions,” particularly the incest taboo, then the scene is unnecessary, since the father had already forbidden the women to his sons. What is more, the very fact that we can speak of a father and sons implies the prior existence of family and therefore of a rudimentary level of human social organization, with the interdictions that this organization im-

Scenes of Human Science    plies in order to maintain among other things the orderliness of generations. Finally, for the sons to join together, they must be able to identify themselves as a group, an identification inconceivable in the absence of a system of representation and therefore of human culture. v All these objections are duly noted in René Girard’s critical reading of Totem and Taboo in chapter 8 of La violence et le sacré.20 For Girard, Freud is correct in tracing totemic classification and the incest taboo to a founding murder, but the patrocentric ideology of psychoanalysis prevents him from realizing that this foundation depends on the scenic configuration alone, the “emissary victim” being not the already-central father but an arbitrarily chosen member of the murderous group. Preempting the accusation commonly leveled at scenes of origin— that they contain from the outset the categories they were supposed to create—Girard’s scene begins with no significant difference at all. The emissary mechanism generates significant/sacred difference from a trivial local imbalance that emerges chaotically within the mimetic war of all against all. The mimetic crisis is resolved by the division of the formerly undifferentiated group into the unique victim and the community that has newly defined itself by excluding and destroying it. As a result of this sequence of events, the community conceives the sacred central figure as both harmful and beneficial, bringer of violence and bringer of peace— the double valence of the sacred. The mimetic crisis, having eliminated all trace of prehuman difference, is thus resolved by the generation of a new, sacred difference through the emissary mechanism. Similarly, Girard’s objection to Freud’s model of tragedy (Part 7, 192–93), which opposes the lone protagonist to the undifferentiated chorus, is that the protagonist was originally a member of the chorus just as undifferentiated as the others. Yet there is a kernel of anthropological truth at the center of Freud’s patriarchal fantasy. Even if—setting aside the problem posed by the fact that primitive religion was and is focused mostly on animals, somewhat on women, and almost never on men—we grant full credence to Girard’s model, the emissary murder as Girard describes it does not suffice to generate the human because it is not a self-conscious event and does not

   the scene embodied therefore constitute a scene, and the same is true of the mere repetition of the mechanism qua mechanism. Insofar as the lynching of the victim becomes a source of meaning, it cannot remain a paroxysm of violence; it must become ritualized. But at that moment, it is the repetition no longer of a mechanism but of a representation. The Freudian father is taxed with redundancy because his murder is motivated by the very interdiction that this murder was supposed to bring into being. But this redundancy of interdiction with which Girard, quoting Lévi-Strauss, reproaches Freud’s scene (“[there is] a vicious circle that makes the social emerge from a process that presupposes it,” 265) is rather a point in its favor. For a new order to emerge, it must come about as a result of the breakdown of an old order. The “father’s” dominance enforces a prehuman mode of interdiction founded not on a represented rule but on the animal emotion of fear. When a rival is no longer afraid to challenge the father/alpha animal, the two battle for supremacy, in some cases enlisting allies. In times of anarchy, or where wealth can be gained with relative impunity from activities stigmatized in the larger society, humans too return to pecking-order groups or gangs of this type, which can operate with considerable effectiveness, although in the long run they cannot sustain an independently viable society. The preexistence of the central interdiction of Freud’s murder scene is precisely its strength as an originary model: all that need be added to the prior configuration of authority in order to transform it from animal to human is its representation within a scene. Representing the “father’s” central power is the revolutionary act that bridges the gap between the one-on-one pecking-order hierarchies of animal societies and the centerperiphery one-against-all model that obtains only among humans. To put the “father” in the center of a scene of representation is to reveal the universality of his power that had previously been experienced separately by each “son,” and consequently to expose the “father” to the resentment of all the “sons” together, constituted as a community. Parricide is inherent in the structure of the scene itself. Freud’s scene, which implicitly originates in the breakdown of the animal social order of the protohuman “horde,” is conceived as a scene of representation; the murdered father, in contrast with Girard’s scapegoat-victim, is truly memorable—both representable (by the “totem”)

Scenes of Human Science    and ritualizable in sacrifice. In order that the victim become the scenic source of culture, it must be made the center not only of an act of violence but of its deferral. Freud’s sons have always already deferred—in time—their project to kill the father; once the murder has taken place, they defer through exogamy—in space—the possession of the women he had kept for himself. Ending the first deferral ensures the permanence of the second. With the lifting of the paternal interdiction, the sons would, as Freud himself makes clear, fight among themselves over the women. No doubt, as Girard rightly points out, their potential sexual rivalry is not dependent on common paternity, but the essential point is that the institution of a rule of exogamy enforced by the group as a whole can be explained only by the replacement of the animal system of authority, whether or not it resembled that of the Darwinian-Freudian “horde,” with a new system founded on the human scene of representation. Yet the scene that brings together the community of “sons” cannot be generated merely by their hostility to preexisting paternal authority. The authority of the “father” qua alpha animal is only virtually central; communal allegiance to a sacred center must challenge and supersede fear of the bearer of animal authority. The minimal condition of the new collective order is that it be formed around a new center. In the last analysis, both Freud’s uniquely predestined central figure and Girard’s arbitrary victim suffer from the same defect: the centrality of both presupposes in the minds of the originary participants an already-human “theory of mind.” In the two models, the central figure is blamed for violence and credited with peace. Rather than being itself an object of common desire, this figure is perceived as the unique obstacle to the realization of this desire, whether its object be the “father’s” women or the benefits of collective order that Girard’s scapegoat is accused of destroying. In both Freud and Girard there is a shift of interest from the object of desire to the rival accused of obstructing its appropriation; both scenes have two centers. In Girard, these are (1) the original object of contention, and (2) the emissary victim thrust forward by the scapegoat mechanism to put an end to this contention; in Freud, the sons kill the father (2) in order to possess the women (1)—who, significantly enough, are altogether absent from Freud’s depiction of the murder. The shift from one center to the other is the point at which a theory of mind and there-

   the scene embodied fore of human representation is smuggled into a scene that is purported to generate it. In Freud’s case, the representation of the father as center is a simple given; in Girard’s, for the repetition of the originary murder to be a cumulative cultural rather than an identical natural event, the designation of the emissary victim, described as the result of an arbitrary mechanism, must be in reality the moment of deferral, and therefore of representation, that constitutes the human historicity of the scene. Neither Freud nor even Girard is willing to face the radical eventfulness of the birth of representation. Yet it is Girard who has made the crucial breakthrough in constructing his anthropology around the originary collective scene. Freud constructed his around the private scene of the “family drama,” for which the anthropological scene provided only a posteriori confirmation, and the general disdain of his disciples for his anthropological speculations reflects their marginal status in psychoanalytic doctrine. Of the many differences between Freud and Girard, the most important is no doubt that whereas Freud believed in science and “civilization,” despite its “discontents,” Girard is a Christian believer writing in the postmodern era under the shadow of the Holocaust, which in his eyes Christianity allows him to understand and transcend. Both Freud and Girard see the essence of the social order as the deferral of the violence occasioned by desire, but whereas Freud sees this deferral as working all too well and is concerned with its harmful effects (“repression”) on individuals, Girard is aware that by far the greater danger lies in the potential violence of the collectivity, deferral of which can never be taken for granted. Hence he takes the crucial step of making his hypothetical originary scene not merely the origin of a crucial aspect of the human but the model for all cultural phenomena. Yet Girard no more than Freud equates the originary scene of humanity with the originary scene of language. Freud never raises the question of whether his scene implies a prior use of language, whereas Girard locates the origin of language after the originary scene, as a means of supplementing the absent victim. Freud’s murderers are men before they start; Girard’s become men without speaking—which gives his hypothesis a clear advantage in parsimony. In consequence, to speculate on the origin of the language that arose under the reign of the father is to abandon Freud’s scene altogether, whereas Girard’s scene can readily be

Scenes of Human Science    modified to become the originary scene of language—the modest transformation that is the basis of generative anthropology.

6. Franz Boas and the Eclipse of the Scenic Imagination Originary thinking is scenic; to think of human origin is to propose a hypothetical originary scene. Throughout human history, this has been done through sacred texts. In the period from Hobbes to Freud, it was often done through the exercise of the thinker’s own scenic imagination. From World War I until the end of the twentieth century, however, this was rarely the case, nor is it even today in most contexts. The only sizeable group of people who have retained faith in the explicative value of the originary scene are creationists, but for them we are the scene’s beneficiaries and in no way its creators; the scenic imagination is wholly subordinated to scenic revelation. The social sciences in general and anthropology in particular mistrust the singularity of the originary scene as incompatible with human diversity. If any stories of origin are to be told, they will be the emic tales of specific human societies rather than the global etic narrative of the anthropologist. Contemporary academic anthropology’s only real quarrel with creationism is that it proposes its narrative as a context-free truth rather than as the dominant religious myth of its culture; lacking this, we denounce the imperialism of the etic yet deny ourselves the right to an emic of our own. In the United States, the discrediting of universal theories of human origin and evolution in favor of data-gathering, emic description, and an ethic of cultural relativism is most closely associated with the work of Franz Boas, often called the “father of American anthropology.” Boas, trained first as a physicist and then as a geographer, saw the anthropologist’s primary task as grasping the specificity of each particular culture, or as he put it, “tracing the full history of the single phenomenon.” For Boas, the uniqueness of each individual society consists in its singular combination of discrete traits rather than its specific place in an evolutionary tree. Each culture combines these traits differently, and even groups of related cultures that share many of them do not embody a Lévi-Straussian “structure” from which we can predict the configura-

   the scene embodied tion of the traits that remain. The product of an intellectual tradition, as exemplified by his mentor Rudolf Virchow, hostile to Darwinist determinism, Boas reacted with justified skepticism to the linear evolutionary schemas of McLennan, Morgan, and others. However guilty Boas may be of having thrown out the anthropological baby with the pseudo-evolutionary bathwater, the baby could hardly have survived further immersion in these sweeping gradualist speculations. v Boas’ ethnographic descriptions are never couched in terms of scenes. The only scenic moments to be found in his writings occur within the separate myths he collected from the Pacific Northwest (Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Haida, Bella Coola . . . ), myths whose text he translates as literally as possible, accompanying his translations with phonetic transcriptions in the original language. Yet implicit in his method is that the unique character of a specific society, given that its diverse elements cannot be said to obey a principle of structural coherence, can be grasped only in actu, in the context of a socially significant scene. Clifford Geertz’ importance in American anthropology reflects his understanding of this implication; his famous “thick description” of the Balinese cockfight defines Balinese culture by means of a characteristic quasi-sacrificial scene whose typicality can be appreciated by the ethnologist’s public only through the mediation of an aesthetic narrative.21 Boas was profoundly hostile to cultural uniformitarianism. His stricture that in human history, as a result of the diffusion of cultural elements across social boundaries, “equal causes” do not produce “equal effects” is a simple but damning indictment of Morgan’s methodological claim that a human community’s degree of savagery or barbarity is all we need to know in order to predict its kinship structure, technology, and mode of social organization: The grand system of the evolution of culture, that is valid for all humanity, is losing much of its plausibility. In place of a simple line of evolution there appears a multiplicity of converging and diverging lines which it is difficult to bring under one system. Instead of uniformity, the striking feature seems to be diversity. (“The History of Anthropology,” 34)22

Scenes of Human Science    Although Durkheim refused to speculate on the origin of the sacred, he nonetheless recognized it as the basis for a universal human scenicity. Boas has no theory of the human scene; he not only does not but cannot propose a theory of human origin because he will not and cannot tell us what the human is. Boas’ discussions of religion, language, and art simply take these human institutions as empirically given. Whether the cultural material he discusses be marriage patterns, taboos, myths, art, or technology, Boas never relates it to the fundamental human activity of representation. Yet the representational nature of human culture is the very justification for Boas’ skepticism; it is only because culture is transmitted through representations rather than genes that its elements diffuse readily across different social groups, making linear filiation along the lines of a taxonomic tree impossible. Here, for example, is Boas’ most highly articulated definition of religion: For the purpose of a brief description of the religion of the American Indians we may define religion as that group of concepts and acts which spring from the relation of the individual to the outer world, so far as these relations are not considered as due to physical forces the action of which is accounted for by purely rationalistic considerations. The scope of religious concepts will depend to a certain extent, therefore, on the knowledge of the laws of nature; and, since the border-line of the natural and the supernatural, as conceived in the mind of primitive man, does not coincide with our view of this subject, there will be marked differences between the scope of religion among civilized nations and that among less advanced peoples. (“The Religion of American Indians,” 257; my emphasis)23

Boas’ definition of religion as a substitute for “rationalistic” knowledge of “physical forces” inverts that of Durkheim, who makes a fundamental distinction between religious discourse, which enforces the maintenance of the social order, and the practical language by which we understand the natural world. Boas’ idea of religion befits a civilization that attributes the effects of natural forces to the intentional acts of anthropomorphic gods only until such time as these effects can be derived from mathematically expressed laws of nature. As Stocking points out in the Boas anthology from which I have just quoted, this is a “residual” definition of religion as what is left over when rational explanations have been exhausted, one incompatible with the Durkheimian conception of

   the scene embodied religious prescriptions as constraints imposed by the society as a whole upon its individual members. Later in the same essay, Boas rides roughshod over another of Durkheim’s seminal distinctions, that between (social) religion and (individual) magic; he refers to the numerous customs of purification that are required in order to avoid the ill will of the powers. These, however, may better be considered as constituting one of the means of controlling magic power, which form a very large part of the religious observances of the American Indians. (262)

In the discussion following this passage, individual prayer and amulets are listed along with public sacrifices as means for controlling “magic power.” Although Boas would surely agree that the concept of “magic power” has its source in the collectivity, he sees no need to privilege the collective operations inspired by this concept over the private activities that are parasitic on it. Boas’ empiricist skepticism is exemplified by his failure to provide a clearly articulated definition of anthropology. He rejects the necessity of positing from the outset a unique object of study: man, or as we would say today, humankind. Just as he defines religion as what remains when the rational explanations of the world have been eliminated, so he tends to see anthropology as what one studies about man when the subject matters of the other human sciences have been subtracted. In “What is Anthropology?” the introductory chapter of Anthropology and Modern Life (1928),24 Boas never gives a direct answer to the question posed in the title. He opens by dismissing the common view that anthropology is “a collection of curious facts . . . about . . . exotic people . . . describing their strange customs and beliefs” (11). He then tells us that in order to persuade us of the contrary, he “must explain briefly what anthropologists are trying to do,” which activity turns out to share features with the work of the anatomist, the physiologist, and the psychologist. As early as 1904, in his lecture on “The History of Anthropology” (ibid., 35), Boas had claimed that the “general anthropologist” was giving way to specialists in biology, linguistics, and ethnology-archaeology. Although it has received less attention than his more direct influence on fieldwork, language description, and the nature-nurture equilibrium, this breakdown of the field may well be Boas’ most enduring impact on the

Scenes of Human Science    practice of American anthropology. This division of the subject among biologists, linguists, and ethnographers presages the current subdivision of departments of anthropology into nearly autonomous subunits of physical, linguistic, and cultural anthropology, institutionalizing the abandonment of the original conception of anthropology as a unified “science of man” that proposes and tests hypotheses of universal scope. The difference between the anthropologist and the different scientists who study different aspects of the human, Boas affirms, is that whereas these scientists are concerned with “the individual as a type,” to the anthropologist, “the individual appears important only as a member of a racial or a social group” (12). Anthropology is not so much “a single science” as a “point of view.” Furthermore, although such sciences as anatomy and physiology “are amenable to an individual, nonanthropological treatment,” this is not true of “all basically social phenomena, such as economic life, social organization of a group, religious ideas and art” (14). The culmination of this section is the following paragraph, which could almost have been written by Durkheim: In short, when discussing the reactions of the individual to his fellows we are compelled to concentrate our attention upon the society in which he lives. We cannot treat the individual as an isolated unit. He must be studied in his social setting, and the question is relevant whether generalizations are possible by which a functional relation between generalized social data and the form and expression of individual life can be discovered; in other words, whether any generally valid laws exist that govern the life of society. (15)

Almost Durkheim, but not quite, because the question raised in this paragraph as to the possibility of generalizations must be answered before we can speak of anthropology as a “science of man,” that is, as something other than “a collection of curious facts.” The only substantive change in the profession of academic anthropology since Boas’ time is that contemporary ethnology expresses even greater reverence for the “curious facts” of pre-state societies, complemented by a diminished respect for the “strange customs and beliefs” of advanced societies such as our own. It is not enough to claim that the distinctive trait of human action is that it is essentially social; the social is constitutive of the human itself.

   the scene embodied “Human science” is not contingently but necessarily the science of humans in society, using language and engaging in religious rites and other symbolic practices; the fundamental objects of this science are the specific features that distinguish human societies and modes of intraspecific communication from their animal counterparts. Although Boas makes the social the determining factor of anthropology, he never extends this pragmatic definition into an ontological claim about the human. And just as Boas sees religion as a set of residual beliefs and practices with no central social function, he avoids any discussion of the origin or the originary function of language. In the chapter on “Early Cultural Traits” in his The Mind of Primitive Man,25 Boas cites as universals “elementary features of grammatical structure,” “belief in the supernatural,” and “belief in the multiplicity of worlds” (154), finally affirming that “[l]anguage is . . . a trait common to all mankind, and one that must have its roots in earliest times” (156); yet he proposes no theory concerning the unity of these “beliefs” with language itself in the constitution of the human. v Beyond the need to refute the exaggerated claims of the early evolutionists, a second important factor in Boas’ extreme skepticism about theories of human cultural evolution was his desire to counter the racist doctrines that were becoming increasingly prominent during his formative years in Germany. In the United States, Boas expended a good deal of effort measuring skulls and other anatomical features of immigrants of different races and ethnic groups in order to confirm his hypothesis that physical differences among peoples tended to diminish in their new American environment. According to his data, even the relative dimensions of the heads of immigrant children born in the United States were closer to the American norm than those born abroad. Although he did not go so far as to deny that there might be intellectual as well as physical differences among different racial groups, Boas strongly rejected the idea that some races were more “primitive” or less amenable to civilization than others. But this praiseworthy concern for minimizing the intrahuman differences exaggerated by contemporary racialists was complemented by a naively latitudinarian view of the possibilities of cultural difference.

Scenes of Human Science    It was her desire to corroborate Boas’ prejudice in favor of nurture over nature that inspired Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, which describes Samoan adolescents as practicing a guiltless, conflict-free sexuality. In Anthropology and Modern Life, which like Mead’s book appeared in 1928, Boas affirms the value of Mead’s fieldwork as a test of his personal conjecture concerning adolescent sexuality (albeit with a nuance not respected in Mead’s dithyrambic popularization): It may well be questioned whether the crises that are so characteristic of adolescent life in our civilization and that educators assume to be organically determined, are not due . . . in part to the artificial sexual restraints demanded by our society. . . . It is necessary that the crises and struggles that are characteristic of individual life in our society be investigated in societies in which our restraints do not exist while others may be present, before we assume all too readily that these are inherent in “human nature.” . . . An instructive example of the absence of our difficulties in the life of adolescents and the occurrence of others is found in the studies of Dr. Margaret Mead on the adolescents of Samoa. With the freedom of sexual life, the absence of a large number of conflicting ideals, and an easy-going attitude towards life, the adolescent crisis disappears, while new difficulties originate at a later period when complexities of married life develop. (188–90; my emphasis)

Boas’ faithful collection of tribal myths and legends in the original language was an important advance over the westernized texts of his predecessors. But once the data were gathered, his reluctance to submit the products of the tribal scenic imagination to the scenic hypotheses of anthropology testifies to a lack of faith in human universality. For Boas, no member of any group is able to create models that can encompass the experience of other groups, including those in pre-state societies. This attitude has only intensified since Boas’ time. Model-creation by “hegemonic” Western society, rather than being cited as proof of humanity’s ability to understand itself, is seen as a form of cultural imperialism, with anthropological universals mere masks for imperial aims and the scenic imagination a tool of domination. What mitigates in part this negative picture is the growing familiarity of members of tribal cultures with the “first world” as a cultural as well as economic trading partner, making possible their accession to higher education, including the study of ethnology.26 No doubt anthro-

   the scene embodied pological theory is a “Western” creation, and however scrupulously we attempt to let tribal cultures speak for themselves through the products of their own scenic imagination, we cannot borrow from these cultures a model of the ethnologist’s procedures. Yet nothing essential prevents the members of tribal societies from adapting these procedures for their own use. Insofar as Boas’ turn away from anthropological universalism was a reaction to theories of anthropological inequality, the affirmation of human equality in practice should permit the eventual return to a “science of man” expanded to include all humanity. The long-term historical role of Boas’ empiricism has been to sweep away his predecessors’ imprudently content-rich models of human evolution, leaving an empty space at the origin in which the singularity of representation can be more easily perceived. In this respect, Boas may be regarded as a necessary precursor of generative anthropology.

Conclusion: The Scenic Imagination Lost and Found

The originary hypothesis affirms that humanity and its institutions are most parsimoniously described as originating in a singular event. When the mimetic conflicts generated by the lability of protohuman appetite can no longer be contained by the pecking-order arrangements of protohuman social structure, a new means is needed for preventing the breakdown of the social order. This means is representation, and the first representation is that of the sacred. To represent is to defer mimetic violence until it can be focused on the shared destruction and consumption of the material center, while preserving the ideal or spiritual center from which meaning and with it, the human, emerge. In this generative scenario, the desire-object at the center becomes the victim of appetitive violence; what we call God is what subsists in the aftermath of this violence as the indestructible because transcendental source of the meaning of the sign that designates the center. The first sign is the name-ofGod; re-presenting the material center of desire gives it the meaning of the subsistent center of the scene of representation, thereby undecidably discovering and inventing its significance. Hence there is a non-mystical sense in which, since all words derive from the representation of a central object of desire, every word is a name of God. Whether or not the reader agrees with this hypothesis, the subject matter of anthropology cannot be defined without addressing the

   Conclusion question of how the realm of symbolic representation came into being, how the “vertical” designation of an object by a sign was generated from “horizontal” appetite, how eternal meaning emerged from temporal experience. Unless our capacity for representation is first situated in a hypothetical narrative that explains how it first manifested itself, all the empirical analysis in the world will not make up for the omission; one cannot ground a theory of the human on the results of data collection. This fundamental mechanism for the generation of transcendence underlies all examples of religious functionality, including even the ecological utility proposed by Marvin Harris to explain religious taboos (for example: Jews and Muslims do not eat pork because there is not enough surplus vegetable matter in the Middle East to feed pigs; Hindus do not eat their cows because their families would starve without dairy products).1 What is missing from the sociobiological explanation of such interdictions (those who raise pigs or eat their cows lose reproductive fitness) is an explanation of the cultural, which is to say, representational institution of interdiction itself. It should not surprise us that sacred interdiction may on occasion or even generally be materially functional, but the crucial function on which all others depend is the substitution of the peaceful exchange system of the ritual feast for the communitydestroying violence of unrestrained mimetic desire. Animals in normal circumstances already obey ecological constraints similar in effect to religious dietary laws. If the imposition of these constraints were the primary function of such laws, we would have to explain why humans evolved a radically new mechanism in order to do what animals had been able to accomplish without it. The success of transcendental representation in deferring human violence explains why we are likely to appeal to it to protect us from nonhuman violence as well. “God helps those who help themselves” is a way of claiming that God’s protection extends to natural violence only through the mediation of the deferral of human violence, as manifested in the ritual reaffirmation of what Durkheim referred to as “solidarity” within the community. The rain dance may not bring rain, but it brings the dancers into closer unity and consequently makes them better able to sustain the drought. In more concretely functional cases such as the ban on pork, the sacred arguably becomes an empirical discovery procedure.

Conclusion    Following the originary model in which the sacred functions to defer mimetically enhanced and therefore “excessive” appetite, the long-term unfavorable consequences of an act of appetitive self-indulgence are attributed to divine will; when the pork-raiser suffers the consequences of wasting valuable resources for the sake of his taste buds, the explanation is that God has cursed his enterprise. The scenic hypothesis has among its other advantages that of avoiding purely verbal disputes about whether animals have “ritual” or “language.” Whether or not one uses these terms to refer to animal behavior, what is specific to human language and ritual is historical derivation from a scene whose memory is culturally preserved in representation, in “symbolic” or “arbitrary” signs. Human ritual may be understood as the attempt to reproduce this scene, that is, as a historical phenomenon, in contrast with biologically driven animal behavior. In the general case, ritual goes beyond the minimal energy required to generate linguistic signs, if only through the rhythmic repetition characteristic of music, dance, and poetry. But it is less important to establish boundaries between the categories of language and ritual than to situate cultural phenomena with respect to their ultimate origin. If language, ritual, the sacred, desire, and all other fundamental categories of the human emerged in the same scene, then we can examine each historical manifestation of culture with respect to how it performs the fundamental operation of this scene: the deferral of violence through representation. As opposed to the behavior patterns of animals, human institutions are scenic; they constitute themselves as totalities rather than as sets of piecemeal relations. This is as true of economic exchange as of religion. The scene is a model of generative human interaction; its product is representation, the establishment of the sign, or system of signs, as a separate, transcendent mode of being that brings the things of this world within the purview of human culture. The fundamental task of anthropology is to explain the emergence of this uniquely human realm. Conversely, once we are in possession of a model of this emergence, that is, of an originary hypothesis, we need have no fear that any phenomenon of human culture will falsify it. Mainstream anthropology refuses to countenance the idea that human representation comes into existence as a means to defer intrasocietal

   Conclusion conflict. Yet the simplest definition of the human is one that Hobbes might have approved: as the species that poses a greater danger to its own survival than the dangers it encounters in nature. To humanity thus defined, language and culture are means for deferring ever-threatening chaos. The originary scenic structure of representation arises when the species, in focusing on itself as its own greatest danger, discovers that the postponement of this danger depends on the interdiction of shared appetite through an entirely new form of relationship that replaces the worldly and appetitive by the representational and transcendental. The current science of anthropology is heir to the Enlightenment’s skepticism about transcendence, which, by inspiring the secularization of the scenic imagination, was the point of departure of the social sciences. Yet humanity subsists only by turning its attention to the transcendental center in order to ward off the ever-present threat of mimetic violence. To recognize the radical newness of transcendence in the evolution of life is to accept its pertinence not merely to religion but to language and all the other forms of human culture. What is needed is not an anthropology of religion or the sacred, but an anthropology of the human that offers a model of how the defining phenomenon of representation first emerged. In any such model of the human, language and the sacred will be not merely coeval, but identical in their central core. v The following sections examine some recent attempts by leading scholars in the fields of religion and language to formulate hypotheses of origin. The very fact that such hypotheses are being formulated, whatever their inadequacies, is a sign that the scenic imagination is awakening from its long slumber in the waning years of the postmodern era. Yet the vast majority of these hypotheses lack a sense of the scenic; their authors fail to understand that to speak of the origin of religion or language is to speak of an event. Instead, once the question of origin has been broached, the singularity of the originary event is dissipated in an endless series of imperceptible changes that create the human in the same way that the grains of sand create the pile in Zeno’s paradox. To uphold the event’s singularity would be to affirm the radical nature of the difference be-

Conclusion    tween humans and other animals, and such affirmation goes against the grain of the postmodern spirit, always fearful of formal differences of value that can be used to distinguish among humans themselves on the indelible model of the Nazis and the Jews. Postmodernity is haunted by the fear of repeating the Holocaust; yet the real lesson of the Holocaust is that human society, religion, and language, so qualitatively different from the modes of animal interaction, are responses to the vastly destructive potential for mimetic violence that defines us as human. In the area of religion, I have chosen to discuss a single work, generally considered the most significant in its field, that deals specifically with the question of the place of religion in “the making of humanity.” In the field of linguistics, where work on origins is both more extensive and more fragmentary, I examine three shorter essays by leaders in the field, if only to demonstrate that to a surprising degree the defects of these theoretical endeavors have more in common than their specific hypotheses. In the concluding sections of this chapter, I will discuss the writings of two scholars unconnected with generative anthropology whose work is compatible with it and capable of dialogue with it.

1. Roy Rappaport and the Originary Anthropology of the Sacred The late Roy Rappaport (1926–1997) is arguably the leading recent American anthropologist concerned with religion. His last, posthumous book, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity,2 develops a general theory of religious phenomena explicitly characterized as anthropogenetic. The work of Rappaport may be taken as exemplifying the best social-science thinking about religion in the last years of the twentieth century. Rappaport begins his magnum opus by defining the human through language: “Our forbears became what might loosely be called ‘fully human’ with the emergence of language” (4). He first explains this emergence by means of a familiar Darwinian tautology: “It is obvious that the possession of language makes possible ways of life inconceivable to non-verbal creatures, and even proto-language . . . must have con-

   Conclusion ferred important advantages upon the hominids among whom [it] developed” (4). This does nothing to distinguish the origin of language from the origin of the elephant’s trunk or the giraffe’s neck, all of which “confer important advantages” on their possessors. A few pages later, however, Rappaport insists on the qualitative difference between language and any other adaptation: But even such far-reaching claims as “Language is the foundation of the human way of life” do not do language’s importance justice, for its significance transcends the species in which it appeared. Leslie White used to say that the appearance of the symbol—by which he meant language—was not simply an evolutionary novelty enhancing the survival chances of a particular species, but the most radical innovation in the evolution of evolution itself since life first appeared. . . . With the symbol an entirely new form of information (in the widest sense of the word) appeared in the world. . . . That language permits thought and communication to escape from the solid actualities of here and now to discover other realms, for instance, those of the possible, the plausible, the desirable, and the valuable, has already been emphasized. This was not quite correct. Language does not merely permit such thought but both requires it and makes it inevitable. (7–8; emphasis the author’s)

Not only is language described as the most radical innovation since life itself, it is specifically distinguished from any mere “evolutionary novelty enhancing the survival chances of a particular species.” This suggests, at the very least, the necessity of a specific hypothesis concerning the circumstances in which this innovation might have emerged. Rappaport observes that once language exists, humans can, indeed, must, concern themselves with such things as possibility and desire. This leads him, however, not to an examination of the relationship between language and the mimetic conflict implicit in the possibilities of desire, but to the affirmation that language becomes not merely the motor of human adaptation but an adaptive force in itself: [A]daptive systems can be defined as systems that operate (consciously or unconsciously) to preserve the true value of certain propositions about themselves in the face of perturbations tending to falsify them. . . . [T]he propositions favored in human social systems are about such conceptions as God, Honor, Freedom, Fatherland, and The Good. That their preservation has often required

Conclusion    great or even ultimate sacrifice on the parts of individuals hardly needs saying. Postulates concerning the unitary or triune nature of god are among those for whom countless individuals have sacrificed their lives or killed others. (9–10)

Here violence—a term that does not merit an entry in the book’s index—is associated with language, not because language is from the outset focused on deferring violence, but because the “preservation” of the “propositions favored” in language-possessing “adaptive systems” is so important that individuals have been sacrificed in large numbers to the necessity of maintaining them. Wars are fought over propositions because human evolution has made the preservation of these propositions the central adaptive trait to which all else must be subordinated, and sacrificed when necessary. But because no link is made between the sacred propositions and the deferral of violence within the community, no explanation can be given for the source of inter-communal violence between defenders of different propositions. How could sacrificing “countless individuals” be adaptive unless the propositions to which the sacrifice is directed preserved the community from still greater violence? Yet the implication of Rappaport’s text is rather that although the lives in question are sacrificed to human rather than natural violence, human violence has no particular causal relationship with the loss of fitness that would be occasioned by the non-preservation of the propositions. That is, although we kill them when they threaten our fundamental propositions, the adaptive value of these propositions is not presumed to have anything particular to do with preventing us from killing each other. The propositions are theorized as promoting a Durkheimian solidarity, but the breakdown of the social order—the threat against which this solidarity defends—is never explicitly conceived. For Rappaport it is the notion of the proposition that cannot be falsified that provides the connection between language and religion. Language permits one to talk about imaginary realities, hence inevitably, about potentially false realities. We can lie. Rappaport demurs at making the problem of lying the explicit cause of the emergence of religion, affirming instead that “religion emerged with language. As such, religion is as old as language, which is to say precisely as old as humanity” (16; emphasis the author’s). Yet the sole explanation he offers as to why indeed

   Conclusion religion emerged along with language is that contained in the following italicized affirmations: I will argue, among other things, that aspects of religion, particularly as generated in ritual, ameliorate problems of falsehood intrinsic to language to a degree sufficient to allow human sociability to have developed and to be maintained. (15; emphasis the author’s)

The tension between the hedging in this statement (“among other things,” “aspects,” “particularly as”) and its emphatic italicization reflects the contradiction between explaining the emergence of religion by the need to “ameliorate problems of falsehood” that can only be posterior to the origin of language and affirming that religion and language are indissolubly linked moments of an implied originary scene. On the one hand, language has adaptive value; on the other, its “problems of falsehood” can be resolved only by the affirmation of unfalsifiable religious truths. Rappaport’s favorite example of such an unfalsifiable truth is the elemental Jewish prayer, the Shema (“Hear O Israel, the Lord thy God, the Lord is One”), which he calls the “Ultimate Sacred Postulate” of Judaism; its maintenance permits all lesser “postulates” to evolve while preserving the Jews as a religious community united around this linguistically unchanging, because unfalsifiable, kernel of faith. In Rappaport’s view, religion and its core operation, ritual, function to protect humanity against excesses of language that would otherwise undermine sociality by creating confusion between lies and truth. Whereas Durkheim explained religion as a means for maintaining solidarity with respect to a society’s central ethical values, Rappaport sees it as a means for maintaining solidarity with respect to the society’s central propositions. Max Müller called mythology a disease of language; Rappaport, to the contrary, views mythical, that is, unfalsifiable, propositions as a cure for linguistic and social disunity. But if language and religion are, as Rappaport affirms, truly coeval, then the “important advantages” conferred by language must at the outset have been identical with those conferred by religion, that is, those obtained by asserting unfalsifiable propositions, as opposed to the cognitive advantages of language as a means for communicating about reality (“the food is over the hill”). If indeed language and religion emerged at

Conclusion    the same time, then one cannot separate language’s adaptive advantages from the possibility of linguistically provoked disunion that religion is required to allay. The first assertions, in a protolanguage that could not have articulated them in declarative sentences, must have been themselves religious, and consequently, as Durkheim insists, useless as a means of understanding and communicating about empirical reality. Rather than as remedies for lying about empirical facts, the unfalsifiable propositions of religion result from the substitution of shared acts of signification for potentially violent acts of appropriation. What these propositions come into being to oppose is not another (falsifiable) kind of proposition, but a prehuman world lacking in shared symbolic signs of any kind, in which no communal meaning, and consequently no communal interdiction, is possible. Language emerges when the prehuman pecking-order control of mimetic conflict cannot withstand the mimetic pressure of a common desire; the first “unfalsifiable proposition” could not have been something like “God is one,” but rather “[neither I nor you can/should seek to appropriate this because it is] God!” We have it from Rappaport that lying poses problems of social incoherence—intrasocial violence—from which religion protects us by making us agree on a core set of unfalsifiable postulates that may ultimately be reduced to a single one. We also know that the defense of these ultimate postulates has led to a great deal of intersocial violence. The most parsimonious hypothesis that accounts for these two phenomena is that the violence with which a given society defends its postulates against outsiders derives its energy from the same source as the violence against which these postulates protected it in the first place. Both language and religion emerged in order to prevent the outbreak of mimetic violence, or as I prefer to say, to defer it. Before lying could become a problem, that is, before the danger to the social order could be described in terms of a conflict between propositions, there must have been a potential conflict that could not yet express itself in propositions, but that could be allayed through participation in the originary forms of language. What Rappaport considers the capsule statement of his theory of religious practice is found in a section called “The foundations of humanity” at the end of the chapter entitled “The Numinous, the Holy, the Divine”:

   Conclusion The unfalsifiable supported by the undeniable yields the unquestionable which transforms the dubious, the arbitrary, and the conventional into the correct, the necessary, and the natural. This structure is the foundation upon which the human way of life stands, and it is realized in ritual. (405; italics the author’s)

The unfalsifiable is sacred discourse, founded on the Ultimate Sacred Postulates; the undeniable is the experience of the numinous, realized primarily in a collective environment; the unquestionable is the experience, mediated by ritual, of the Ultimate Sacred Postulates. Without dwelling on the lack of clarity in the articulation between the intellectual quality of unfalsifiability and the experiential quality of unquestionableness, what is evident from this formulation is that the passage from disorder to order is conceived as a change in our relationship to propositions. What is dubious becomes correct, what is arbitrary, necessary. Yet what such a formulation cannot tell us, even in its most generous interpretation, is how these propositional relations got started. However much Rappaport insists on the coeval nature of religion and language, his model of religion is always posterior and corrective with respect to language, as the very formulation of his italicized mantra demonstrates. A binary formula can never explain the emergence of transcendence within immanence; its explicandum is part of a structure of meaning in which dubious and correct, arbitrary and necessary are already defined with respect to propositions. Rappaport’s most significant articulation of the coevality of religion and language is no doubt that found in the following passage from the chapter on “The Idea of the Sacred,” in which a transspecific conception of ritual provides the context for their common emergence: Insofar as the quality of unquestionableness is the essence of the sacred, the sacred itself is a product of the very form which is ritual, or rather, of the incorporation of language into the ritual form which, we noted in chapter 1, is widespread if not, indeed, universal among animals. . . . Although there is no way to demonstrate it, the argument unfolding here suggests that the idea of the sacred emerged in the course of evolution, perhaps inevitably, as expressions from developing language were assimilated into and subordinated to the orders of non-verbal rituals in which, it is plausible to assume, our infra-human forebears participated. The concept of the sacred thus may

Conclusion    be as old as language, which is a way of saying as old as humanity itself. (286; emphasis the author’s)

Whether or not it is appropriate to claim that language was from the very first a vehicle of “concepts,” what is more important in this passage is that the specificity of the human, presumably guaranteed by language, is subordinated to the not merely primate or mammalian but universally animal form of ritual. The suggested pattern of evolution is that language, which presumably developed “neurophysiologically” on a parallel track, is incorporated into preexisting ritual structures, thereby generating the “idea of the sacred.” The implication of Rappaport’s text is that religion emerges as the intersection between the arbitrary freedom of the symbolic sign (in Peirce’s sense of the term) and the constraints of ritual. In order to subordinate language’s capacity for formulating “alternatives” to the fixed patterns of animal ritual, religion must formulate Ultimate Sacred Postulates, which in turn permit the elaboration of language guaranteed by “the unfalsifiable supported by the undeniable” that can serve as the basis for what Rappaport, following Victor Turner, calls communitas. Instead of evolving in conjunction with the evolution of the primate social order, language is deemed to emerge independently, presumably as a source of cognitive advantage. Which is to say that language in itself has no particular link to ritual; it is “assimilated into” it. Rappaport fails to make a closer connection because he fails to see that both language and ritual perform the same primary function: that of the deferral of conflict. To claim that the sacred is the product of the introduction of human language into the preexisting form of animal ritual is to view language as posing a problem that the sacred’s unfalsifiable postulates solve rather than as itself a solution to the same problems that had previously been resolved by no-longer-adequate animal ritual. Ritual for Rappaport is fundamentally always the same; at whatever level it occurs, it imposes an order beyond that of the individual performer. That is the meaning of Rappaport’s cryptic definition of ritual as “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers” (24; emphasis mine). Leaving aside what it would mean to say that a crustacean’s acts are or are not “encoded by the per-

   Conclusion former,” the point is that the source of these acts is beyond the individual and consequently a factor of collective unity. Because Rappaport conceives ritual abstractly as a pattern of order with no specific function of quelling disorder, language’s role as a vehicle of a superior order—the sacred—is presented as a constraint upon language by ritual form rather than as the very reason for language’s emergence. This split at the origin of Rappaport’s typology cannot be healed by affirming that the sacred “may be as old as language.” If language “may be” coeval with the “concept of the sacred,” it may also not be. Such an ontology is inherently non-parsimonious. If, on the contrary, the coevalness of language and the sacred is necessary, then language is from the beginning the vehicle of the sacred; rather than being “assimilated into” ritual, language and representation in general give rise to a new, human form of ritual in the place of ritual-like animal conflictavoidance patterns. Human ritual, mediated by language, is not simply more “complex” than animal ritual; unlike the partial networks of animal relations, it is structured around a sacred center. All the unique characteristics of the human are attributable to this difference, yet one seeks in vain throughout Rappaport’s long book a clear formulation of it.

2. What’s New and Old about the Origin of Language As we have just seen, the best-designed typology of religious phenomena cannot make up for a deficient theory of origin. Although Roy Rappaport was intuitively aware that religion is an originary activity of the human coeval with language, he saw no need to present a hypothesis that would explain this joint emergence. Almost all recent scientific studies of the origin of language suffer from a similar deficiency. Indeed, the comparison is generally to the credit of Rappaport, who understood that religion—a term that goes unmentioned in the vast majority of studies of language origin—is as critical a determinant of the human as language. Rappaport also understood, following Durkheim, that religion exists primarily to maintain the social order, and he was aware that language puts this order in question, even if he failed to recognize the common source

Conclusion    of linguistic and religious representation. Such understandings have had almost no resonance in studies of language origin. Empirical scholarship in the areas of archaeology, physical anthropology, anatomy, neurology, population genetics, ethology, and other related fields has produced many useful results in the field of early language study whose demonstration is in most cases largely independent of any overall hypothesis of origin: the descent of the larynx that makes modern speech possible, the movements of early humans out of Africa, the discovery of “mirror neurons” that facilitate imitation, and so on. But at some point in most books and articles about the origin of human language, the authors feel free, or rather, obliged to leave the terrain of empirically verifiable subjects to extrapolate from their research to a hypothesis of how human language originated, explaining what is by their own admission the radically new phenomenon of human language either by gradualistic Darwinian arguments (language enhances fitness) or by a mechanistic reliance on Mendelian ones (language cannot emerge until a genetically determined language capacity—the “language gene”—comes into being by mutation). Out of an abundance of material, I have chosen to discuss three representative examples by distinguished scholars taken from three recent compilations. That the scenic blindness of contemporary social science demonstrated here can be at least partially overcome and the historical study of language and religion, separated in principle since the days of Max Müller, can be tentatively brought together, will be the burden of the concluding section. 1. Merlin Donald, “Preconditions for the Evolution of Protolanguages”3 Merlin Donald has over many years developed a theory of mimesis that unfortunately lacks any connection to Girard’s seminal theorization of the subject.4 Thus Donald shows no awareness of the fundamental association between mimesis and violence. In his language origin scenario the specter of aggression shows its head, only to vanish without a theoretical trace:

   Conclusion The emergence of mimetic skill would also have amplified the existing range of differences between individuals (and groups) in realms such as social manipulation, fighting and physical dominance in general, toolmaking, tool use, group bonding and loyalty, pedagogical skill, mating behavior and emotional control. This would have complicated social life, placing increased memory demands on individuals; but these communication tools would also have created a muchincreased capacity for social coordination, which was probably necessary for a culture capable of moving a seasonal base camp or pursuing a long hunt. It is important to consider the question of the durability of a hominid society equipped with mimetic skill: adaptations would not endure if they did not result in a stable survival strategy for a species over the long run. Mimesis would have provided obvious benefits, allowing hominids to expand their territory, extend their potential sources of food, and respond more effectively as a group to dangers and threats. But it may also have introduced some destabilizing elements, especially by amplifying both the opportunities for competition, and the potential social rewards of competitive success. (112–13)

In the first paragraph, Donald responds to his own objections. If, on the one hand, increased mimetic skill leads to sharper hierarchical differentiation, on the other hand, the “communication tools” associated with this skill permit a higher level of social coordination. What is unclear is the nature of the creatures we are discussing. Whereas ape societies are hierarchical, tribal-level human societies are egalitarian. The ability of language to enhance the social coordination of steep hierarchies is expressed in human societies only at the chiefdom level; otherwise the evidence suggests that increased mimesis, in leading to language, brings about rather the dissolution of the hierarchical structures that we find in primate societies. Although societies with language can and inevitably do see themselves as cultural wholes, Donald’s text refers to “communication,” “fighting,” “dominance,” and so on only in the one-on-one context characteristic of animal societies. Hence, when we arrive at the second paragraph, we are faced with a contradiction that, this time, cannot be dealt with even verbally, but can only be left to us as a problem for the future. It is indeed pertinent to speak of the dangers occasioned by enhanced “mimetic skill”; enhanced mimetic ability, with its concomitant dangers, is the independent variable in the generative theory of anthropogenesis.

Conclusion    But Donald’s caveats receive no reply in his own text, and consequently appear as no more than propitiatory gestures. These paragraphs conclude a section entitled “The cultural impact of mimetic skill distributed in social groups.” The following section, “Mimesis as a preadaptation for protolanguage,” makes no mention of the “important” problem posed by these “destabilizing elements,” a problem that is never again broached in Donald’s text. Donald’s discussion of mimesis is handicapped by the lack of any theorization of the difference between one-on-one imitation and the collective, scenic forms of human mimesis that serve to control rather than to exacerbate competition. This failure in turn reflects a more profound failure to recognize the inherently conflictive structure of mimesis. Rather than being mediated by “the opportunities for competition, and the potential social rewards of competitive success,” the “destabilizing elements” to which mimesis is said to give rise are already present within mimesis itself. One finds a clearer model of the “triangular” structure of mimesis in Girard’s early writings on literature than in those of the one anthropologist who puts mimesis at the center of his anthropology. 2. Manfred Bierwisch, “The Apparent Paradox of Language Evolution: Can Universal Grammar Be Explained by Adaptive Selection?”5 Bierwisch seeks to avoid a paradox familiar in different forms to students of language origin since Rousseau: since the usefulness of language depends on its being shared with others, it would have to emerge in many minds simultaneously—an idea sometimes made to imply that a simultaneous genetic mutation must have occurred at the origin of the human linguistic capacity. It is obvious that this problem vanishes if we can construct a plausible hypothesis for the collective origin of language. But those who study the question seem convinced that, whether or not communication is the force driving protolanguage evolution—and a surprising number of scholars think it is not—the only way to speak of the origin of language is as the emergence of a capacity for language in the individual “phenotype.”

   Conclusion Bierwisch’s solution is to separate “linguistic capacity” from “linguistic knowledge,” the latter, but not the former, being “within the range of linguistic theorising” (71). He proposes that a “protolexicon” emerges, relying on Herder for the notion of “reflection” as the origin of what he calls the “stimulus-free and situationally independent assignment of structured signals to conceptual representations” (71). To posit this kind of “assignment,” however, takes for granted precisely what a hypothesis of the origin of language must explain. Bierwisch notes that once a protolexicon comes into being, there are no fixed, genetically determined limits to the number of items it can contain. His hypothesis is that it is the increase in this number that drives the development of syntactic and morphological organization: I have proposed how to avoid the paradox of language evolution by combining two distinct but interrelated problems, both of which have to be solved anyway: the evolution of the language capacity and the origin of linguistic knowledge. These frequently confounded issues must be clearly distinguished because they depend on fundamentally different conditions affecting the genetic heritage as well as possible knowledge based on it. But it seems that a plausible scenario emerges if they are construed to depend on each other in a non-vicious circle. The capacity to accumulate lexical items could gradually lead to a developmental stage where a random variation indeed leads to an improvement of the linguistic capacity, justifying the urgently desired selectional benefit. (79)

It is hard to disagree with the notion that “the language capacity” increases in tandem with the increased use of language rather than either appearing all at once through the miraculous acquisition of a “language gene” or evolving gradually as a purely cognitive capacity that suddenly manifests itself as language—a hypothesis that is either a truism (language can only emerge in a brain that is ready to acquire it) or an absurdity (language is an epiphenomenal communication to others of conceptual connections already present in the individual mind). Bierwisch’s solution is to reduce the problem of language origin in the spirit of intellectual parsimony to that of the origin of the first “protolinguistic” sign—that is, to the problem addressed by the originary hypothesis. Once the sign exists, it will multiply and structure itself syntactically and morphologically, generating Baldwinian (behavior-driven) selection pressure toward an ever-greater language capacity.

Conclusion    Although this plausible-sounding argument no doubt pays insufficient attention to the non-gradual syntactical gradations of ostensive, imperative, and declarative, it is acceptable in its overall conception. The missing link is a hypothesis that would account for the origin of the “protolinguistic” sign itself. Bierwisch has the modesty not to attempt to supply such a hypothesis. However praiseworthy this modesty, the fact remains that one cannot solve the paradox of language evolution by proposing a theory that accounts for this evolution only once language, even in its simplest form, has already emerged. The equivalent would be explaining the evolution of life after taking as given the existence of the first living organism. Any theory of language origin is incomplete that does not offer a hypothesis of the event in which language originated. 3. Derek Bickerton, “Foraging Versus Social Intelligence”6 It was Derek Bickerton who first proposed the idea of protolanguage in Roots of Language7 on the basis of his study of pidgins, simplified versions of languages spoken by nonnative speakers that lack complex morphology or syntactic rules, and that evolve into creoles when they become the native languages of children brought up in these cultures. Bickerton’s argument (which has been contested by other specialists) is that creoles all share the same simple syntax, which cannot therefore be derived from the more complex languages of which the creole is constructed and may consequently be attributed ex hypothesi to an underlying protolinguistic mental substrate. The notion of protolanguage, the application of which is extended to such cases as apes that are taught versions of human language, appears to offer a bridge between prehuman modes of communication and language proper. It does not, however, as no intermediary concept could, answer the essential question of the origin of symbolic communication, the passage from animal signals to human signs. In the text under discussion, Bickerton takes issue with what he refers to as a trend over the past few years of considering language to have arisen “as a direct result of increased and intensified social interaction”; the emergence of language would reflect the increased level of “social intelligence” required to organize an increasingly complex society. This

   Conclusion hypothesis conceives language as a means of enhancing social control rather than of amplifying practical cognition. [T]his chapter argues that the initial impetus for a [human] means of “information donation” quite distinct from means employed by other primates—that is, some form of protolanguage—arose directly from the requirements of group foraging, predator avoidance, and instruction of the young, rather than from specifically social interactions between individuals. (209)

Bickerton’s main argument is this: given that human language is absolutely different from the communication systems of other primates, whereas the higher apes too have complex social relations, the uniqueness of language cannot be explained by the unique complexity of human social relations. Whatever selective pressures might have driven the development of language in humans, these same pressures, in lesser form, would have been present in our ape cousins; yet whereas our language is highly complex, “no other species has developed language at all” (209). But Bickerton fails to consider that although what drives the emergence of language cannot be a mere increase in “complexity,” it can very well be an increase in mimetic capacity that makes animal forms of communication inadequate to prevent the breakdown of the social order in mimetic violence. Bickerton’s own explanation for the emergence of protolanguage is as follows: [T]here is abundant evidence that hominid ecology did differ from that of other primates: our ancestors lived on open savannahs or in marginal woodlands rather than in deep forest, and they were primarily terrestrial rather than primarily arboreal. An even sharper distinction relates to an ecological niche occupied from the time of the Olduwan industry (approx. 2.3 million years ago) onwards. . . . Hominids became principally scavengers and were able to compete with other scavengers and predators for the carcasses of large animals across a wide range of habitats. . . . How did hominids succeed against fierce competition? Not, surely, by wandering round like a troop of baboons and eating what they happened to stumble on. They must have been able to (1) locate fresh carcasses with extreme certainty and rapidity, and (2) fight off competitors, probably with barrages of flung rocks. . . . In such a context, the crudest beginnings of some form of language would

Conclusion    have paid off from day one. Any hominid group capable of discriminating food sources (and perhaps also of indicating the relative dangers involved in their exploitation) would have enjoyed an advantage over other hominid groups. Note that the first linguistic communications need not have been monomodal, nor need their units have been arbitrary in the Saussurean sense. Directional gesturing with the hand, accompanied by the imitation of the noise made by a mammoth, could easily have been interpreted as meaning “Come this way, there’s a dead mammoth.” (218–19)

The key giveaway in this just-so story, which explains the origin of language by its cognitive-practical use, is found at the end of the first sentence of the third paragraph quoted above: language “would have paid off from day one.” The purpose of this assertion is clearly to avert the main difficulty of deriving human language from its practical application: that it can have no practical application until it already exists. “Day one” is a metaphorical way to posit a moment of origin without needing to define it. A scenic originary hypothesis would truly have something to say about “day one,” but Bickerton’s does not; there is no single moment when what he formerly called the “Rubicon” can be crossed, and his “ecology-based” theory is no advance whatever on the many earlier attempts to find in the obvious usefulness of language the explanation for its emergence. v I could have cited dozens more texts like these three, written and compiled by leading scholars in the field. What they suggest is that the problem of constructing a hypothetical scene of origin of language as a singular event is beyond the reach of the methodologies of contemporary social science. One might wish to call it an a priori ontological problem, but that would risk situating it in the context-free realm of metaphysics. It is indeed an anthropological problem, yet one of a sort that mainstream anthropology has long abandoned. It is a trans-departmental problem that can be approached only by synthetic, scenic thinking. It should therefore not surprise us that over the past decade, the most significant steps in the conceptualization of human origin have been made not by linguists or social anthropologists but by a few ad-

   Conclusion venturous practitioners of the life sciences, attracted by the goal of constructing a unified “human science” on the basis of evolutionary theory. This renewed interest in the human as such rather than in the continued description of its diversity focuses on the scenic institutions that define our humanity, the most fundamental of which are those explored in this chapter, religion and language. This turn toward the scenic in turn implicitly revalorizes the question of human origin. Unlike the majority who ignore or deny the pertinence of the singular event of origin for anthropological discourse, those who attempt to construct a rigorous evolutionary model of the human encounter this singularity as an element that necessarily remains in a transcendental relationship to it, approachable only through the constructions of a renewed scenic imagination. The works examined in the following sections exemplify this renewal, once again, in the two crucial domains of religion and language.

3. Religion and Evolutionary Biology: David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral 8 marks a significant development in the quest to extend the methods of evolutionary biology to the phenomena of human society. By resuscitating the supposedly discredited categories of functionalism and group selection, Wilson renews Durkheim’s conception of the ethical functionality of religion in the context of evolutionary theory and restores the human community to its rightful place as the critical unit of cultural evolution. Having played a significant role in evolutionary biology’s recent abandonment of the dogma of individual selection, Wilson is not afraid to challenge the anthropological establishment’s own version of the dogma, its rejection of community-level functionalism, whose “demise . . . in the social sciences bears an eerie resemblance to the demise of multilevel selection theory in biology” (48).9 Wilson revives Durkheim’s key insight that the primary function of religion is to reinforce the cohesion of the social order rather than to provide supernatural explanations for the functioning of the natural world; “pragmatic” religious prescriptions concerning human behavior serve a different function from “factual”

Conclusion    thinking about external reality. A chapter-length study of Calvinism and briefer discussions of tribal and Judeo-Christian religion offer persuasive examples of the functionality of religion in the practical world of human relations, both in the promulgation of society’s ethical laws (a phenomenon well observed by Durkheim) and in the discouraging of “free riders” who would profit from the ethical order at the expense of the community (a phenomenon that Durkheim does not explicitly discuss). If beliefs in supernatural beings have the practical value of discouraging free riders by their very absurdity, then it is pointless to denounce this absurdity from a factual standpoint. Wilson recycles Tertullian’s paradoxical credo quia absurdum as a criterion of evolutionary adaptivity. Convinced of “the need to step back and rebuild the social sciences from first principles, making the various subdisciplines consistent with each other and with evolutionary biology” (84), Wilson sees functionalism and multilevel selection as holding out the possibility of unifying the presently disparate social sciences under the banner of a Darwinism broad enough to encompass cultural as well as biological evolution. Yet missing from Wilson’s account, as from Durkheim’s, is any account of the genesis of religious ideas. A biological evolutionist more than anyone should be sensitive to the requirement that functionalism not be divorced from genealogy. To say that an organ has evolved because it is useful is a valid explanation only if one can show from which earlier structure it developed and along what path. In biological evolution, whatever the gaps in the fossil record of a given genealogy, there is no difficulty of principle in tracing it. The situation is quite different in the crucial human domain of representation. Wilson’s reference to Terrence Deacon’s exclusive attribution to humans of symbolic thought suggests that Wilson has not sufficiently reflected on the problems posed by the genesis of symbolic thought to his theory of religion (Deacon, as we shall see below, is not guilty of this lapse):10 Deacon . . . has recently argued that symbolic thought sets humans apart from all animals and evolved to enable enforced social contracts such as marriage. If he is correct, it will be an impressive confirmation of Durkheim’s claim that human social life is only possible thanks to a vast symbolism. (54–55)

Can humanity’s possession of symbolic language be treated as hy-

   Conclusion pothetical (“If he is correct”) in a book that is in large measure a study of the functions of religious symbolism? Surely not unless one can show how religious practices and discourses might be understood in the absence of “a vast symbolism.” Otherwise, one would expect Wilson to propose, as does Rappaport, a hypothesis concerning the origin of symbolic language and religion, and to take a stand on their coevalness. Durkheim refused in principle to entertain speculative theories on the origin of religion because he saw no way of advancing the question empirically. However, one who treats the function of religion in the context of evolutionary theory cannot be content with such a dismissal. In his failure to raise the question of religion or language origin, if in nothing else, Wilson seems content to obey the standard social-science taboo on originary scenes. Wilson’s functionalist approach to religion is a radical and welcome challenge to the paralyzing descriptivism that has for several generations dominated anthropological practice. To this mode, typified by Clifford Geertz’ method of “thick description,” which views each society as a unique whole sharing a quasi-aesthetic unity, Wilson opposes a vision of societies as adaptive systems within which “organs” such as religion share a fairly specific common function across different cultures. Unfortunately, he lacks a method for dealing with the crucial fact that the “organs” of religion and language are closely related manifestations of the same fundamental human ability to create arbitrary or symbolic signs. Researchers focused on the rational exploitation of the environment by Homo economicus are loath to speak of the “function” of religion even as they analyze its operations. In the case of language, however, not even the most radical cognitivists, who see language as a “spandrel” of the evolution of the brain that subsequently proved useful, have ever thought to deny its functionality. On the contrary, language’s evident functionality has long been an obstacle to the explanation of its origin, inspiring a thousand variations on the just-so story about the selective advantage of being able to tell the other members of one’s hunting party about the food on the other side of the hill. The emergence of language having been taken for granted as a functional adaptation, a theoretician such as Rappaport then proceeds to explain religion as operating to counteract the disturbance that this adaptation poses to the social order, whether as a means for limiting the social effect of lying and more generally of spec-

Conclusion    ulative thought, or as an application of language to a preexisting animal propensity to ritual behavior. It is clearly a positive step for Wilson to follow Durkheim in claiming that religion makes pragmatic use of symbolic thought independently of its function of modeling the phenomena of the natural world. But the burden of explaining the emergence of religion is thereby only rendered more difficult; if religion is not a mere by-product of the emergence of symbolic thought, then even the most robust theory of language origin would be insufficient to explain how the early users of language, assuming that its original function was helping us to make sense of the object world around us, ever came upon religious discourse as a tool of social pragmatism. This difficulty disappears if we hypothesize that language and religion had a common origin in a scene in which symbolic language was from the outset pragmatic but not informative, emerging as a new means of deferring intra-group conflict. (Vico’s familiar claim that the first language was sung and poetic rather than spoken and prosaic is an early version of this claim.) If we then attribute to originary representation overall the pragmatic social function of religion, we require no additional hypothesis to stipulate that the factual component of language, eventually embodied in the declarative sentence, subsequently proved adaptive in dealing with the natural world. Only as a result of this later adaptation would religious representation, which concentrates on the reinforcement of the social order through the deferral of internal conflict, be increasingly perceived as separate from the phenomenon of representation in general. In a whimsical coda that “begins and ends [his] career as an inspirational writer” (233), Wilson constructs from a series of thought experiments about the aesthetic value of an airplane in different guises (the plane as a functioning entity, the plane marred by chewing gum or a tool left in the motor, a drawing of a plane, a deconstructed plane converted into a sculpture . . . ) a paradigm for the modes of aesthetic experience that seems meant to persuade us that religious thought, which he has just shown to be fundamentally utilitarian, also has beauty on its side. Just as he does with language, Wilson has every reason to include beauty within religious experience, but he never stops to consider that if religious representations are ethically pragmatic and if pragmatic representations,

   Conclusion like functioning airplanes, are beautiful, then one should expect there to be an originary connection between representation, religion, ethics, and beauty. Failure to examine the relationship between religion and language prevents Wilson from articulating within a unified scenic concept of representation his valuable distinction between its pragmatic and factual uses, and a fortiori from giving biological rigor to the Kantian idea that the aesthetic domain stands between religious-pragmatic and factual representation. Similarly, Wilson sidesteps the question of defining the anthropological status of the “supernatural.” Although he is right to reject the narrow definition of religious discourse (adopted by the rational-choice theorists) as “language concerned with supernatural beings,” whether or not there exist religions without gods,11 the propensity of the vast majority of religions to posit the existence of supernatural beings cannot go unexplained. The simplest explanation is that this tendency reflects the transcendental nature of representation. Whereas the “profane,” everyday use of language ignores its transcendental origin, religion exists to remind us of it, because the transcendence inherent in representation is the guarantee of the ethical order of the community. The simplest form of this reminder is the attribution to the object of sacred representation of the transcendent, scenic qualities that are observable only in the sign. The representation of a transcendent being tends to evoke skepticism, there being no unequivocal evidence for its existence, which in turn tends to provoke its defenders to a more explicitly extra-rational—and implicitly pragmatic—expression of faith. (That religious skepticism is found only in the post-Renaissance West is an Enlightenment myth.) Arguing about the “existence of God” is no threat to the ethical values guaranteed by transcendence; the debate serves, however slowly, to bring together the anthropologies of the opposing sides. If the origin of humanity can be fully understood only as an event, then the familiar Darwinian mechanism of genetic mutation does not provide an adequate basis for a hypothesis of human origin. The futility of speculation about the appearance of the “language gene” and its distribution within the protohuman group—must the mutation be present in two members of the group so that they can converse together?—reminds us of the grain of truth in creationism: although the attribution

Conclusion    of natural consequences to supernatural beings is a category error, the emergence of the exclusively human phenomenon of representation at the point of contact of the supernatural and the natural can be conceived only as a singular scene. The Genesis creation story, whatever its other qualities and deficiencies, exemplifies the event-nature of human origin; the Darwinian account does not. Although the notion of a singular event is not incompatible with Wilson’s extension of Darwinian evolution, it is unsurprising that he does not consider this hypothesis, let alone discuss its consequences for the theory of human evolution. No accepted mode of discourse currently exists in either the mainstream social or natural sciences in which a hypothetical singularity, by its very nature inaccessible to empirical observation, is the central organizing principle. Outside of the writings of generative anthropology, only in religious thought and its secular derivatives in philosophy is such thinking permissible. v Wilson’s up-to-date conception of evolution markedly includes non-biological cultural evolution. Genetic change not only does not normally precede cultural change, in principle it follows it. The genetic changes in genus Homo have been dominated by Baldwinian, behaviordriven evolution, and the most crucially important human behaviors are those concerned with representation. Far from being a by-product of the evolution of the human brain, to the extent that language remains adaptive over a long period, individuals and their brains tend to be selected for their facility with it, whether or not centralized in a “language module.” With the appearance of Homo sapiens, all of whose members are more or less equally adapted to language and related forms of representation, the genetic element in human evolution becomes still less significant, and the crucial battles for the “survival of the fittest” are carried out almost exclusively on the plane of social organization. Although Wilson’s updated Darwinism can accommodate the brain’s Baldwinian adaptation to representational “behavior” and is therefore open in principle to including as a determinant of this “behavior” the scenic context in which it emerges, Wilson still has no way of specifying this behavior as an emergent event. The hypothetical postulation of

   Conclusion an originary scene of representation must remain outside the domain of falsifiable propositions that make up Darwinian theory in particular and social science in general. Yet this hypothesis is nonetheless, in a manner analogous to the true but indemonstrable propositions of arithmetic whose necessary existence was demonstrated by Gödel, a necessary but unprovable supplement to any empirically based model of human evolution.

4. Language and Neuroscience: Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species What the representative studies of language origin discussed earlier in this chapter all have in common is the repression of the scenic imagination. They are products of a conscious effort, sometimes pushed to the point of question-begging, to avoid discussing the origin of either language or religion in scenic terms, let alone the origin of both together. In Roots of Language, Derek Bickerton recognized the anomaly of the origin of human language and its discontinuity with previous forms of communication. But on the analogy of the difference he discovered between pidgins and creoles, Bickerton splits this origin in two, as first that of a “protolanguage” of some two million years’ duration and then, about 50,000 years ago, as a result of the maturation of the languageselected brain, the appearance of syntactically modern language. This allows him to sidestep the critical question of what motivated the first origin, which he implicitly admitted he could not answer. Protolanguage, it is often suggested, can be taught to apes and can therefore be considered the product of gradual evolution; mature language, although discontinuous with other forms of animal communication, becomes “merely” the final stage of the evolution of protolanguage. The writings examined earlier in this chapter, including Bickerton’s own, propose different gradualistic hypotheses of the origin of protolanguage, while making use of the protolanguage-language distinction as a means to avoid conceiving a scenic origin for either. Terrence Deacon’s important book The Symbolic Species is an exception to the ban maintained in the social sciences since Totem and Taboo

Conclusion    on hypothetical scenes of language origin. Once again, the breakthrough is the work not of a social but a laboratory scientist. Deacon is a neuroscientist; his scenario of human origin appears in a speculative epilogue to an ambitious overview of the emergence, evolution, and present reality of the brain’s language function from the perspective of neuroscience. Deacon’s sense that a scenario of some kind is needed to make clear the adaptivity of human “symbolic” language leads him to associate language origin with ritual, interdiction, and the difficulty of making peace among groups of male hunters. Deacon is the one scientific investigator of the origin of language who has dared to conceive it in scenic terms, even if he is reluctant to give his necessarily speculative originary scenario equal weight with the conclusions drawn from empirical research on brain function.12 Deacon’s specialized knowledge of the neuronal connections in the cortex between language and perceptual and motor functions allows him to avoid Bickerton’s dichotomized vision of language as either mature language with syntax or protolanguage without it. Over the early history of humanity, language and the human brain adapted to each other. There are areas of the brain more or less specialized in different aspects of language, but Deacon sees no necessity for a “language module” as conceived by Chomsky and his school; the child’s brain adapts itself readily to language because language itself is adapted to the child’s brain; what children learn most easily is passed on to the next generation. Deacon’s adaptation of C. S. Peirce’s semiotic categories of icon, index, and symbol to the stages of evolution of animal communication and its expression in the brain is a model of the scientific assimilation and application of philosophical thought. Yet even more than its author’s semiotic sophistication and neurological expertise, what sets The Symbolic Species above all other scientific writing on language origin is the power of his anthropological intuition. This researcher of brain functions has grasped the social nature of language better than any social anthropologist. In speculating on the possible origin of this new form of social activity, he revives in a new context the ideas of the nineteenthcentury cultural evolutionists, while demonstrating far more concretely than his predecessors the link between language and ritual in its function

   Conclusion of establishing peace through the interdiction of ethically destabilizing behavior. To the context of meat-eating and all-male hunting parties familiar to students of human origin, Deacon adds a new consideration: the necessity of reinforcing the monogamous bond within which our caredemanding “neotenous” children are nurtured. Because certain protohuman societies depended on meat, groups of male hunters might be absent from home for long periods. In order to assure the stability of the couple and protect the male’s investment in his offspring, the symbolically guaranteed bond of marriage, based not on mere association but on true ethical interdiction, would become advantageous for the group as a whole in a way that had never previously been the case in primate societies. A stable bond, according to Deacon, has two requirements: The first requirement . . . is that there must be a means for marking exclusive sexual relationships in a way that all members of the group recognize. Sexual access and a corresponding obligation to provide resources are not just habits of behavior; they cannot be more or less predictable patterns, or just predictions of probable future behaviors. Sexual access is a prescription for future behaviors. No index or memory of past behaviors can present this. Nor can any index of present social status or reproductive state mark it. Even the refusal or avoidance of sexual activity only indicates a current state and is not necessarily predictive. Sexual or mating displays are incapable of referring to what might be, or should be. This information can only be given expression symbolically. The pair-bonding relationship in the human lineage is essentially a promise, or rather a set of promises that must be made public. These not only determine what behaviors are probable in the future, but more important, they implicitly determine which future behaviors are allowed and not allowed; that is, which are defined as cheating and may result in retaliation. The second problem is how to verify and guarantee the assent of the other individuals that could conceivably be involved, both as possible cheaters and as support against cheating. For a male to determine he has exclusive sexual access, and therefore paternity certainty, requires that other males also provide some assurance of their future sexual conduct. Similarly, for a female to be able to give up soliciting provisioning from multiple males, she needs to be sure that she can rely on at least one individual male who is not obligated to other females to the extent that he cannot provide her with sufficient resources. Unlike a pair bond in a species where the male and female remain isolated from other potential

Conclusion    sexual competitors, establishing an exclusive sexual bond in a social setting is not just a relationship between two individuals. . . . Males and females must be able to rely both on the promise of a mate and, probably more importantly, on the support and threats of other males and females who are party to the social arrangement and have something to lose if one individual takes advantage of an uncondoned sexual opportunity. (399–400)

The key features of these two requirements, which are the two faces of ethical interdiction—its representation by a “symbolic” sign and the communal accord that guarantees its enforcement—are independent of sexuality per se, whose role in Deacon’s demonstration is to supply a plausible problem for which a genuinely ethical solution is necessary. Sexual interdiction is certainly adaptive in the long term; the difficulty it raises in this context is that the passage from indexical to symbolic signification, which Deacon rightly qualifies as “an unprecedented evolutionary adaptation” (376), “a radical shift in communication strategy” (379; emphasis the author’s)—and whose fundamentally communal nature he continually emphasizes, in contrast to those theorists whose model of language use is private conversation or even the vocalizations of mothers and their offspring—is conceivable only as a scenic operation. Not unaware of this dilemma, Deacon conjectures that the group’s members learned the new form of association embodied by the sign through collective repetition in “ritual”—a phenomenon whose sacrificial connotations he ignores, but on whose association with signification he nonetheless sheds a good deal of light: Indeed, ritual is still a central component of symbolic “education” in modern human societies, though we are seldom aware of its modern role because of the subtle way it is woven into the fabric of society. The problem for symbol discovery is to shift attention from the concrete to the abstract; from separate indexical links between signs and objects to an organized set of relations between signs. In order to bring the logic of token-token relationships to the fore, a high degree of redundancy is important. . . . Repetition can render the individual details of some performance automatic and minimally conscious, while at the same time the emotional intensity induced by group participation can help focus attention on other aspects of the objects and actions involved. In a ritual frenzy, one can be induced to see everyday activities and objects in a very different light. This aspect of many ritual activities is often explicitly recognized as a

   Conclusion means to help participants discover the “higher meaning” of the otherwise mundane, while at the same time promoting group solidarity. Thus, many ritual activities, from repeated prayer to pubertal initiation ceremonies, quite explicitly take the form of an ideal symbol discovery process. (402–3)

Deacon sharpens Durkheim’s concept of the sacred as a projection of social solidarity by focusing on the element of representation; the communal cohesion inherent in the notion of solidarity can be described most simply as that required in order to share the meaning of a sign, a phenomenon that provides a minimal definition of a human community. As opposed to animal communities, which also share modes of communication that exclude nonmembers within the same species, such as the chemical signals of insects or locally adapted call systems (for example, bird songs), the human community cannot “evolve” its signs; it must learn them in a collective context. The only thing lacking in Deacon’s exposition is a sense of the event-nature of the ritual scene, its mediation between violence and peace as the repetition of a collective experience. It is striking how small a role religion plays in his book; the word “religion” is not even in the index. Both Wilson and Deacon emphasize the importance of ritual in maintaining the human social order, but the specific form of organization given to ritual by religion’s reference to the transcendental plays no role in Deacon’s analysis. His only reflections on religion come as an afterthought, thirty pages after his discussion of ritual: One of the essentially universal attributes of human culture is what might be called the mystical or religious inclination. There is no culture I know of that lacks a rich mythical, mystical, and religious tradition. And there is no culture that doesn’t devote much of this intense interpretive enterprise to struggling with the very personal mystery of mortality. Knowledge of death, of the inconceivable possibility that the experiences of life will end, is a datum that only symbolic representation can impart. . . . But this news, which all children eventually discover as they develop their symbolic abilities, provides an unbidden opportunity to turn the naturally evolved social instinct of loss and separation in on itself to create a foreboding sense of fear, sorrow, and impending loss with respect to our own lives, as if looking back from an impossible future. No feature of the limbic system has evolved to handle this ubiquitous virtual sense of loss. Indeed, I won-

Conclusion    der if this isn’t one of the most maladaptive of the serendipitous consequences of the evolution of symbolic abilities. . . . In many ways this is the source both of what is most noble and most pathological in human behaviors. Supported by these interpretations, reason can recruit the strength to face the threat of emptiness in the service of shared values and aspirations. But the dark side of religious belief and powerful ideology is that they so often provide twisted justifications for arbitrarily sparing or destroying lives. Their symbolic power can trap us in a web of oppression, as we try through ritual action and obsessive devotion to a cause to maintain a psychic safety net that protects us from our fears of purposelessness. . . . Few if any societies have ever escaped the grip of powerful beliefs that cloak the impenetrable mystery of human life and death in a cocoon of symbolism and meaning. (436–37)

This passage is reminiscent of Müller’s calling myth “the childhood disease of language.” Deacon insists on the relation between religion and fear of death, yet he does not connect this fear with the ritual process, which in his model is its ultimate source, via the inculcation of abstract symbols by which alone we can represent our own death. Lacking the notion of an event of origin in which the sign emerges as a means of averting the threat of violent death at the hands of one’s fellows, Deacon can only present the emergence of this “radical shift in communication strategy” as the outcome of a gradual process. Deacon nonetheless has the rare distinction of understanding that the original function of language is ethical, that the crucial ethical problem is “to mediate . . . peace” (403), and that the meanings of language are social realities not reducible to any individual’s brain state. In terms that Wilson quotes with approval, Deacon recognizes the power and centrality of religious belief as a feature of the human use of symbols, and although he presents these beliefs as artifacts of our brain projecting its symbols onto reality rather than as extrapolations from the common origin of language and religion, he makes this common origin more plausible than any other recent scientific work. And although Deacon does not follow his analysis of the commemorative function of originary language to its radical scenic conclusion, his hypothesis is by no means incompatible with an event of origin. At the very end of The Symbolic Species, Deacon speculates on the possibility that we might create artificial beings capable of using lan-

   Conclusion guage. Dismissing the digital computer as a model of language use—the final chapter contains an enlightening discussion of John Searle’s wellknown “Chinese room” model of computer intelligence13—Deacon proposes that only a creature possessing “sentience,” the ability to perceive and react to its environment, could be taught to use language as we do. This may some day come to pass. But Deacon’s description of the brain’s Darwinian networks of synapses in which the fittest associations survive to become “knowledge” suggests something else: a new justification for humanistic thought. The operation of representing the originary central object, and to a non-vanishing degree, every subsequent object, is a self-confirming one, the association with a perceived object not of a worldly, metonymic index but of a symbolic sign bearing a meaning whose apparently atemporal objectivity depends on the human configuration of mimetic desire that surrounds it and whose potential violence is deferred by it. From the standpoint of logical thought, we may legitimately speak of the paradoxical nature of this operation, in which a timeless sign “substitutes for” a worldly object, yet in the brain’s operation there can be no paradoxes, only the reinforcement of certain synapses at the expense of others. This presence of the paradoxical that is in language but cannot be in reality, that is in the mind but cannot be in the brain, suggests that however far neuroscience may advance in its description of mental operations, it can never explain the emergence of significance and therefore of language. This impossibility does not reflect the presence in human language of some mysterious indeterminacy of the kind that led the mathematician Roger Penrose in The Emperor’s New Mind 14 to seek the source of the human sense of free will in quantum undecidability. It is merely an artifact of the incommensurability between our logical use of concepts and the way they are generated in the brain. Were the brain truly, as artificial intelligence researchers claimed not long ago, a biological Turing machine, this problem would not arise, but then human consciousness and the use of signs would not have arisen either. But because our brain is capable of reacting to a collective situation of mimetic crisis by transforming an appetitive association into an inhibitory sign, its operation cannot be described in algorithmic terms; its representation of its environment is interdependent with that environment. Whence the need for

Conclusion    the paradoxical, scenic models of humanistic thinking to represent this interdependency in terms that can make it understandable by turning it into an object of potential desire for these very same human brains. The growing confluence of humanistic and scientific thought that Deacon’s and Wilson’s books exemplify is conducive to the renewal of the scenic imagination in a newly rigorous context. Whatever its neural platform in the individual brain, the scene of human culture is indelibly communal. Every act of representation is a singular event whose potential modification of this scene is susceptible of being transmitted to the entire human community, whether the sign generated by this act be a neologism or a new religion. The knowledge we accumulate of the scene’s neuronal substrate, far from making the human brain seem more like a digital computer, permits us to articulate with increasing clarity our intuition of the scene’s irreducibility. Deacon’s work in particular gives proof that the scenic imagination, which bore its first secular fruits nearly four hundred years ago, remains our central source of anthropological insight.

Notes

introduction 1.  See Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3–27. 2. I owe the increased parsimony of the idea that a single member of the group first conceives the aborted gesture as a sign to Adam Katz; see Katz’s “Remembering Amalek: 9/11 and Generative Thinking,” Anthropoetics 10, 2, www. anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1002/amalek.htm. chapter 1 1.  Pierre de Maupertuis, Réflexions philosophiques sur l’origine des langues, 1748, on which Turgot wrote a commentary; Adam Smith, “A Dissertation on the Origin of Languages,” published as a supplement to his The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1767. 2.  The most authoritative scholarly reference is still Hans Aarsleff ’s papers collected in From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 3.  Quotations from Leviathan are taken from the 1998 Oxford edition, edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. The text of Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes is found on-line at http://un2sg4.unige. ch/athena/rousseau/jjr_ineg.html. All translations are my own. 4.  See, for example, Deborah Hansen Soles, Strong Wits and Spider Webs: A Study in Hobbes’s Philosophy of Language (Brookfield, Vt.: Avebury, 1996). 5.  “A mark therefore is a sensible object which a man erecteth voluntarily to himself, to the end to remember thereby somewhat past, when the same is objected to his sense again; as men that have passed by a rock at sea, set up some mark, thereby to remember their former danger, and avoid it.” Human Nature [1640] 5, 1; quoted in Soles, Strong Wits, 59. This extreme nominalism that fails to distinguish between what Peirce calls indexical and symbolic signs reminds one of what Gulliver learns at the Lagado Academy: that “Words are

   Notes only Names for Things”; the “Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever” involves replacing words with the contents of a sack of “Things” carried on the speaker’s back (Gulliver’s Travels, III, 5). 6.  See Stephen K. Land, The Philosophy of Language in Britain: Major Theories from Hobbes to Thomas Reid (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 20. 7.  Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1960). All passages from the Treatises are taken from this edition. 8. My text follows and occasionally modifies the recent translation by Hans Aarsleff, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 9.  “Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? . . . To this I answer, in one word, from experience. . . . Our observation [is] employed either about external, sensible objects or about the internal operations of our mind.” Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979 [1690]), II, 1, 2. 10.  Bishop William Warburton, 1698–1779, was famous for his work on language, The Divine Legation of Moses (1737), which included an “Essay on Egyptian Hieroglyphics.” chapter 2 1.  The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950). 2. Citations from this text are taken from John Moran and Alexander Gode’s translation in On the Origin of Language (New York: F. Ungar, 1967). 3.  The text is from Chateaubriand’s Essay on Revolutions, published in England in 1797; see my article, “Maistre and Chateaubriand: Counter-Revolution and Anthropology,” Studies in Romanticism 28, 4 (Winter 1989): 559–75. 4. Citations are taken from G. D. H. Cole’s public domain translation, online at www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm. chapter 3 1. All citations are from The New Science of Giambattista Vico, tr. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948). 2.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. 3. Citations from Herder’s text are taken from John Moran and Alexander Gode’s translation On the Origin of Language (New York: F. Ungar, 1967). 4.  To quote Alexander Gode, the translator of the Essay, “Can we today,

Notes    armed as we are with an infinitely more vast array of documented primary data than Herder, excel over Herder in his ultimate insight into the nature and the mystery of language? The answer, I fear, can only be in the negative” (175–76). chapter 4 1.  See my The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 2.  The Critique of Judgment, tr. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952 [1790]). 3.  See van Oort’s “Cognitive Science and the Problem of Representation,” Poetics Today 24 (2003): 237–95. Deacon’s book is discussed in the Conclusion, below. 4. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. 5.  See the discussion below in Chapter 5, sec. 1. chapter 5 1. Citations from A Philosophical Inquiry (by part and chapter) are from the on-line Harvard Classics edition at www.bartleby.com/24/2/327.html; citations from Reflections (by paragraph) are from the same edition at www.bartleby. com/24/3/. 2.  Oeuvres complètes V, 283–360 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1979 [1884; 1821]); all translations mine. 3.  The text of the Soirées is that of the edition of La Colombe, 1960 [1821]. chapter 6 1.  Phenomenology IV, Introduction; translated by J. B. Baillie, on-line at www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/ToC/Hegel%20Phen%20ToC.htm. All citations are taken from this text. 2.  Written 1845–1846; published in full, 1932; tr. Institute of Marxism-Leninism, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/. 3.  The text of Capital is taken from www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1867-1/index.htm. 4. Citations are taken from Ian Johnston’s translation at www.mala.bc.ca/ johnstoi/Nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm. 5. Nietzsche’s dedication reads: “In this connection, you will remember that I gathered these ideas together at the same time that your marvelous commemorative volume on Beethoven appeared, that is, during the shock and grandeur of the war which had just broken out.”

   Notes 6.  See my “The Unique Source of Religion and Morality,” Anthropoetics 1, 1 (June 1995), www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0101/gans.htm. 7.  See my “Mallarmé contra Wagner,” Philosophy and Literature 25, 1 (April 2001): 14–30. chapter 7 1.  See Daniel Droixhe, De l’origine du langage aux langues du monde: études sur les XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Tübingen: G. Narr, 1987). 2. Cambridge University Press, 1988; all references here are to this edition. 3.  The Origin and Diversification of Language (Chicago: Aldine, Atherton, 1971). 4.  See Merritt Ruhlen, The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue (New York: Wiley, 1996). 5.  See Aharon Dolgopolsky, The Nostratic Macrofamily and Linguistic Palaeontology (Cambridge, England: MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998). 6. Müller called the speakers of the Indo-European language family the “Aryan nations,” which he describes “[a]t the first dawn of traditional history” as “migrating across the snow of the Himalaya southward . . . and ever since India has been called their home” (A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, Chowkamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1968 [1859], 11). Some of the formulations of this peaceful scholar have an unfortunate ring today: “The Aryan nations . . . have been the prominent actors in the great drama of history, and have carried to their fullest growth all the elements of active life with which our nature is endowed. . . . In continual struggle with each other and with Semitic and Turanian races, these Aryan nations have become the rulers of history, and it seems to be their mission to link all parts of the world together by the chains of civilization, commerce, and religion” (ibid., 13). 7.  London: Longmans, Green, 1873. This edition includes two essays that were not included in a later edition of the Introduction; the texts quoted come from the second of these, entitled “The Philosophy of Mythology.” 8. New York: Scribner’s, 1862. 9.  For a bracingly cynical view of the entire process (which denies the validity of the very concept of “primitive society”), see Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth (London: Routledge, 1988). 10. I owe this point to Gabriel Andrade of the Universidad del Zulia, Maracaibo, Venezuela. Other early evolutionists worthy of mention are J. J. Bachofen, whose matriarchal theory elaborated in Das Mutterrecht (1861) was defended by Engels in his 1884 Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State; and the legal historian Henry Maine, author of Ancient Law (1861), whose evolutionary

Notes    views, rooted in Roman history rather than “primitive” society, were less relentlessly schematic than those of McLennan and Morgan. 11.  Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1870. 12. New York: H. Holt, 1877. 13. New York: W. Morrow, 1928. Franz Boas, Mead’s mentor at Columbia, wrote a foreword to this volume, written under his inspiration; Boas refers to it favorably several times in his Anthropology and Modern Life (New York: Norton, 1928). (See the discussion in section 6 below.) For a debunking of Mead’s conclusions, see Derek Freeman, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), as well as my review in Heterodoxy 7, 3–4 (June–July 1999): 22–23. 14.  Primitive Marriage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 [1865]), 68–69. 15.  See Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2002), and Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion (Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996 [1987]), as well as Stark’s many other works in this field. 16.  To take an example from Saussure: we see no motivation in the word “pigeon,” which derives, in French as in English, from the Latin onomatopoeia pipio. That the word “pigeon” is inedible does not preclude its origination in the life-world of its edible source. 17. Citations are from The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, tr. J. W. Swain (New York: Free Press, 1964 [1912]). 18. In Durkheim and Religion, ed. W. S. F. Pickering (London: Routledge, 1975). 19. New York: Norton, 1950 [1913]; tr. James Strachey. 20.  Paris: Grasset, 1972. 21. Geertz’s famous analysis is found in “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” in his The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1972). 22. In The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911: A Franz Boas Reader, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 23. Ibid. 24. New York: Norton, 1928. 25.  First published in 1911; revised edition, New York: Free Press, 1963. 26.  See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

   Notes conclusion 1.  See Harris’ Cows, Pigs, Wars & Witches: The Riddles of Culture (New York: Random House, 1974). 2. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 3. In Becoming Loquens: More Studies in Language Origins (New York: P. Lang, 2000), 101–22. 4.  See Donald’s Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 5. In New Essays on the Origin of Language, ed. Jürgen Trabant and Sean Ward, in the Trends in Linguistics series (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001), 55–79. 6. In The Transition to Language, ed. Alison Wray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 207–25. 7. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Karoma, 1981. 8.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 9.  See also Wilson’s The Natural Selection of Populations and Communities (Menlo Park, Calif.: Benjamin/Cummings, 1980), and Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), written in collaboration with Elliott Sober. 10.  Deacon’s The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997) is discussed in the following section. 11.  Wilson himself notes that in A Theory of Religion (New York: P. Lang, 1987), rational-choice theorists “Stark and Bainbridge contend that [in principle godless] Buddhism as actually practiced is chock full of gods” (221). 12. In a personal communication, Deacon insisted that his language-origin scenario is not essential to the book. But the fact remains that it occupies some thirty-five pages, comprising the totality of section 12, and is anticipated in the preceding section. 13.  This model first appeared in Searle’s “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980): 417–24. 14. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Index

Aarsleff, Hans, 41, 211–12 Achilles, 138 Andrade, Gabriel, 214 Apollo, 132–38 Arendt, Hannah, 49 Aristides, 69 Aristotle, 8, 94, 100 Augustine, 9 Austin, J. L., 8 Bachofen, J. J., 214 Bacon, Francis, 9, 26 Baillie, J. B., 213 Bainbridge, William Sims, 215–16 Baldwin, James Mark, 192, 201 Bataille, Georges, 15 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 213 Bergin, Thomas Goddard, 212 Bickerton, Derek, 44, 193–95, 202–03 Bierwisch, Manfred, 191–93 Boas, Franz, 16, 107, 141, 151, 169–76, 215 Boyer, Pascal, 215 Burke, Edmond, 12–13, 92–94, 99–107, 109–10, 138 Burton, Robert, 67

Chateaubriand, François-René de, 59, 212 Chomsky, Noam, 72, 203 Churchill, Winston, 35 Clifford, James, 215 Cole, G. D. H., 212 Comte, Auguste, 67 Condillac, Etienne de, 10, 13–15, 23–24, 29–30, 36–45, 49–50, 55, 60, 62, 70, 72–75, 100, 111, 119–20, 142–44, 149, 163 Danesi, Marcel, 68 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 138 Darwin, Charles, 15–16, 29, 50, 53, 71– 72, 120, 141, 146–47, 149, 151–53, 164, 167, 170, 181, 189, 197, 200–02, 208 Deacon, Terrence, 83, 197, 202–09, 213, 216 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 47, 148, 211 Descartes, René, 26, 132 Diderot, Denis, 100 Diodorus Siculus, 39 Dionysus, 132–38 Dolgopolsky, Aharon, 142, 145, 214 Donald, Merlin, 189–91, 216 Droixhe, Daniel, 214

   Index Drumont, Edouard, 106 Durkheim, Emile, 13, 15–17, 24, 58, 61, 65, 67, 71, 85, 89, 105, 107, 109, 125, 141, 145–48, 150–51, 155–63, 171–73, 178, 183–85, 188, 196–99, 206, 215 Eliade, Mircea, 79 Engels, Friedrich, 120, 141, 214 Euripides, 133 Fisch, Max Harold, 212 Flaubert, Gustave, 139 Fourier, Charles, 130 Frazer, James, 148 Freeman, Derek, 215 Freud, Sigmund, 17–19, 155, 163–69 Gaskin, J. C. A., 211 Geertz, Clifford, 107, 170, 198, 215 Gide, André, 138 Gilgamesh, 8 Girard, René, 1, 15, 18–19, 25, 34, 51, 61, 107, 156, 163–69, 189, 191 Gobineau, Arthur de, 141 Gode, Alexander, 212–13 Gödel, Kurt, 202 Greenberg, Joseph, 142, 145 Harris, Marvin, 178, 216 Hegel, Georg W. F., 14, 113–120, 124, 134, 213 Heidegger, Martin, 138 Helen of Troy, 94 Hercules, 69 Herder, Johann G., 10, 14, 60, 62, 72–76, 100, 119, 135, 143–44, 148–49, 192, 212–13

Herodotus, 40 Hesiod, 67 Hitchcock, Alfred, 138 Hobbes, Thomas, 9–13, 18–19, 23–37, 46, 52–54, 57, 61–65, 67–70, 84, 101, 104, 107, 116, 124, 131, 151, 154, 163, 169, 180, 211–12 Homer, 8 Hubert, Henri, 15 Hugo, Victor, 102 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 13, 112, 140–45 Illich-Svitych, Vladislav, 145 James, William, 159 Johnston, Ian, 213 Jones, William, 140 Kant, Immanuel, 67, 77–95, 103, 113, 115, 118–19, 133, 138, 200 Katz, Adam, 211 Keynes, John Maynard, 35 Kojeve, Alexandre, 113–14, 116, 119 Kuper, Adam, 214 Lacan, Jacques, 44 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 56 Land, Stephen K., 212 Laslett, Peter, 31 Leibniz, Wilhelm von, 36 Lenin, Vladimir, 6, 130 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 46–47, 155, 160, 166, 169 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 160

Index    Locke, John, 12, 30–41, 46, 67, 116, 150, 212 Louis XVI, 109–10 Lucretius, 153 Luther, Martin, 131 Macchiavelli, Niccolò, 31 Maine, Henry, 16, 214–15 Maistre, Joseph de, 12, 31, 107–12, 212 Mandeville, Bernard, 53 Marx, Karl, 6, 14, 34, 67, 113–14, 121–31, 141, 213 Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis de, 23, 29, 150, 211 Mauss, Marcel, 15 McLennan, J. F., 16, 151–55, 161, 170, 215 Mead, Margaret, 153, 175, 215 Meillet, Antoine, 148 Mendel, Gregor, 189 Meredith, James Creed, 213 Molière, 48 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de, 33 Moran, John, 212 Morgan, Lewis, 13, 16, 141, 151–56, 161, 164, 170, 215 Müller, Max, 13, 15–16, 123, 145–151, 155, 159–60, 184, 189, 207, 214 Musset, Alfred de, 130 Nidditch, Peter H., 212 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14, 47, 71, 121, 127, 131–39, 213 Ockham, William of, 5 Oedipus, 17, 55, 133 Oort, Richard van, 83, 213

Pascal, Blaise, 139 Paul, 51 Penrose, Roger, 208 Peirce, Charles S., 83, 187, 203, 211 Pickering, W. S. F., 215 Plato, 8, 64, 67, 86, 88, 119, 145 Prometheus, 133, 137–38 Psammetichus, 40 Pseudo-Longinus, 92, 94 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 59 Rappaport, Roy, 181–88, 198 Rawls, John, 90 Reisman, David, 54 Ricardo, David, 34 Robespierre, Maximilien, 13 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 12–13, 18, 23– 26, 28–31, 34, 37, 44–65, 67, 69–70, 73–75, 78, 88–89, 100, 107–08, 111, 120, 124, 131, 140, 150, 153, 191, 211 Ruhlen, Merritt, 145, 214 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2, 65, 73, 78 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 27, 60, 141, 148, 195, 215 Searle, John, 208, 216 Sims, William, 215 Smith, Adam, 23, 67, 211 Sober, Elliott, 216 Socrates, 69, 132 Soles, Deborah Hansen, 211 Spencer, Herbert, 151 Stanner, W. E. H., 163 Stark, Rodney, 215–16 Statius, 69, 119 Stocking, George, 171, 215

   Index Strachey, James, 215 Suë, Eugène, 121 Süssmilch, Johann Peter, 149 Swadesh, Morris, 145 Swain, J. W., 215 Tertullian, 197 Trabant, Jürgen, 216 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 211 Turner, Victor, 187 Tylor, Edward, 13, 16, 141, 148

Vitruvius, 39 Voltaire, 10, 30, 59, 67, 103, 106–07, 132 Wagner, Richard, 131–32, 135, 139, 214 Warburton, William, 39–40, 212 Ward, Sean, 216 White, Leslie, 182 Wilson, David Sloan, 196–202, 206–07, 209, 216 Wray, Alison, 216 Xenophanes, 71

Vico, Giambattista, 10, 14, 24, 30, 62, 66–73, 78, 89, 107–08, 119, 146, 163, 199, 212 Virchow, Rudoph, 170

Zeno (of Elea), 180 Zeus (Jupiter), 69–70