Overview
Starting from the minimal principle of generative anthropology that human culture originates as the deferral of violence through representation the author proposes a new understanding of the fundamental concepts of metaphysics and an explanation of the historical problematic that underlies the postmodern end of culture. Part I begins with the paradoxical emergence of the vertical sign from the horizontal world of appetite. Two persons reaching for the same object are a minimal model of this emergence; their pragmatic paradox can be resolved only by substituting the representation of the object for its appropriation. The nature of paradox and the related notion of irony, as well as the fundamental concepts of being, thinking, and signification, are rethought on the basis of this triangular model, leading to an anthropological interpretation of the origin of philosophy and semiotics in Plato s Ideas. Part I concludes with an exploration of the psychoanalytic categories of the unconscious and the erotic.
Full Product Details
Author: Eric Gans
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Imprint: Stanford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.00cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.590kg
ISBN: 9780804727693
ISBN 10: 0804727694
Pages: 236
Publication Date: 01 June 1997
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Gans once again achieves in this book a level of explanatory coherence and a richness of ideas rarely seen today. In this extremely interesting and complex work, an event in itself, he proves himself a thinker of the first magnitude. --Tobin Siebers, University of Michigan
"""Gans once again achieves in this book a level of explanatory coherence and a richness of ideas rarely seen today. In this extremely interesting and complex work, an event in itself, he proves himself a thinker of the first magnitude."" - Tobin Siebers, University of Michigan"
Gans once again achieves in this book a level of explanatory coherence and a richness of ideas rarely seen today. In this extremely interesting and complex work, an event in itself, he proves himself a thinker of the first magnitude. - Tobin Siebers, University of Michigan
Author Information
Eric Gans is Professor of French at the University of California, Los Angeles. His previous books on generative anthropology are The Origin of Language (1981), The End of Culture (1985), Science and Faith (1990), and Originary Thinking (Stanford, 1993).
