Eric Gans
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Eric Lawrence Gans (b. August 21, 1941) is an American literary scholar, philosopher of language, cultural anthropologist, and professor of French at UCLA. Gans invented a new science of human culture and origins he calls Generative Anthropology, based on the idea that the origin of language was a singular event and that the history of human culture is a genetic or "generative" development of that event. In a series of books and articles beginning with The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (1981) Gans has developed his ideas about human culture, language, and origins. In 1995, Gans founded (and edits) the web-based journal Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology as a scholarly forum for research into human culture and origins based on Generative Anthropology and the closely related Fundamental Anthropology of René Girard. Since 1995, Gans has web-published his Chronicles of Love and Resentment twice-monthly, consisting of reflections on everything from popular culture, film, post-modernism, economics, contemporary politics, the Holocaust, philosophy, religion, and paleoanthropology.
The term “post-millennialism” was introduced in 2000 by the American cultural theorist Eric Gans[[1]] to describe the epoch after postmodernism in ethical and socio-political terms. Gans associates postmodernism closely with “victimary thinking,” which he defines as being based on a non-negotiable ethical opposition between perpetrators and victims arising out of the experience of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. In Gans’s view, the ethics of postmodernism is derived from identifying with the peripheral victim and disdaining the utopian center occupied by the perpetrator. Postmodernism in this sense is marked by a victimary politics that is productive in its opposition to modernist utopianism and totalitarianism but unproductive in its resentment of capitalism and liberal democracy, which he sees as the long-term agents of global reconciliation. In contrast to postmodernism, post-millennialism is distinguished by the rejection of victimary thinking and a turn to “non-victimary dialogue”[[2]] that will “diminish […] the amount of resentment in the world.”[[3]] Gans has developed the notion of post-millennialism further in many of his internet Chronicles of Love and Resentment[[4]] and the term is allied closely with his theory of Generative Anthropology and his scenic concept of history.
