GABlog

In the interests of minimalism and dropping extra weight as we try to stay above water I would suggest that all the morality that we need can be summed up in the injunction not to feed your fantasies and addictions. Everything else, all the Judeo-Christian stuff, everything essential in modern ethics, would follow from [...]

Continue reading Exodus from the Dead End of History, 2

Liberal democracy is predicated upon the severing of liberty and equality. For liberty and equality to be sustainable, they must be reciprocally defining and supporting: I can only be free together with my equals; I can only be equal with others within a reciprocal respect for each other’s freedom. The supposed tension between liberty and [...]

Continue reading Exodus from the Dead End of History

There are a few categories central to originary thinking: center-margin, vertical-horizontal, sign-object. We can multiply such categories, adding rather obvious ones which are probably already there, like inside/outside, and others, as necessary, perhaps less obvious: concealed/open, before/behind, amongst/amidst, visible/invisible, whole/rent, and so on. These are all very basic experiential categories, deeply [...]

Continue reading A Little Social Theory

Eric Gans noted a while back that the first “market” was war, insofar as value is established through competition in a public space. According to that criterion the market can be traced further, to the most primitive hunting and gathering societies: one hunter would prove himself more proficient than others and the subsequent [...]

Continue reading Post-millennialism and Originary Grammar

Health care, as we speak about it today, is a completely modern phenomenon. Hippocrates aside, if you go back maybe 150 years, doctors had no effect on their patients: your chances of recovery if you did see a doctor were identical to your chances if you didn’t. “Health care,” or the medical profession, emerges along [...]

Continue reading Health Care

I’m much more interested in what is going on in Wisconsin than in the Middle East. The Middle East is the business of Middle Easterners now—America gave up its pretentions as a superpower, or leader of the Free World, or hegemon, or whatever, with the election of Barack Obama. Who knows—maybe it’s for [...]

Continue reading Madison, not Cairo

Two speeches given the same day in response to the shootings in Tucson; one, by all accounts, brilliant, Presidential, conciliatory, the other, by most accounts, petty, small minded and self-serving. And I don’t find too much to object to in President Obama’s platitudinous remarks. But, in each speech there is a certain logical tension worth [...]

Continue reading Obama and Palin: Opposing Anthropologies

Only after reading Eric Gans’s recent Chronicle (#403, “Heuristic Necessity”) did the obvious relevance of Gans’s definition of God as that word whose signified and referent are indistinguishable to originary linguistics and grammar strike me. But, then, since, as Gans also notes elsewhere, ultimately every word (but also, then, sentence, discourse, etc.) is the [...]

Continue reading Language, Inquiry

I will lay down a marker right away—for me, the main criterion for supporting a Presidential candidate is that he or she knows what the left is; anyone who thinks that a Republican president will be able to settle into the White House in 2013, put on the green eyeshades, and start balancing the budget [...]

Continue reading Sarah Palin, Anyown, and the Constitutional Reformation

Anyone familiar with TV crime shows knows how pervasive the figure of the serial killer has become in American popular culture, and how stereotyped—there is the imputed traumatic foundation of the killer’s addiction to violence, there are the idiosyncratic and extremely regular habits, the fixed idea of grievance, the ideal victim, and so on. [...]

Continue reading The Rights of the Anyown 2: The Idioms of the Anyown