Cratos, Crisis and Cognition in Reference to Generative Anthropology and the Scene of Language/Culture Origin

This article will interpret Cratos, a mythic character and rhetorical personification present in the works of Hesiod and Aeschylus, as a multilayered and metaphoric figure of cognition, defining him in reference to the hypothesis of the origin of language and culture advanced by Eric Gans’s Generative Anthropology. Cratos was a violent oppressor of Prometheus, involved in provoking a crisis among both gods and humanity. This faithful and ruthless performer of the will of Zeus is viewed here as representing one of the deeper cognitive layers of mythological transfer, that is, as a representation of deferred, but always and anywhere prevalent intra-specific violence, the fundamental source and testimony of crisis in human societies.

From Analytical Аnthropology to Generative Anthropology

This article discusses the role of the technical in V.A. Podoroga's project of studying the literature worlds as archives of human experience. On the level of content, among many other components of these worlds he distinguished working and non-working machines, “gizmos” and various optical devices, including the mechanic eye, camera, mounting, etc. Formally, the action of these machines can be assessed as alienation, though in the context of modern media studies and exploration of the perspectives of anthropology, they can also be described as a problematic contact zone between the human and non-human, with a bias towards breaking the already historically disrupted bodily-affective interaction with the “outside”. Studies of Andrei Platonov's show the most radical interaction with the technical, in this case causing dissimilation of the human. However, even for this “inhuman” material, Podoroga chooses a form of human-measured approximation and distancing, which allows defending the position of an active researcher, observer, anthropologist. His efforts produce a kind of reconstruction, which at a certain time distance reveals the “seams”, “folds”, “cuts”, “plexuses”, “gaps” that formed at once the experience of the body and experience of writing. This is how the components of literature worlds are extracted, and from them “a picture of the universe can be deduced”. Although an external position to technics is considered to be the only guarantee of the human, even if it is strange, symptomatic, seizure-like, a different understanding of the technical is possible. Without claiming that a “machine” can assemble components in the absence of the observer's (reader's) comprehension ability, it seems nevertheless possible to relate the technical to more general principles: the methods of dispersion and gathering that form the form, the principles of intervalization and binding the heterogeneous, and most importantly, the principle of generating conditions for detecting an event. Then it will be necessary to clarify the relationship between techne and literature in the broader sense of poiesis, in the process of which elements can be formed from the indivisible “compressed”.

René Girard and the Deferral of Violence

René Girard’s anthropology goes beyond Durkheim and Freud in seeking knowledge in literary, mythical, and religious texts. Girard’s primary intuition is that human culture originated in response to the danger of violent mimetic crises among increasingly intelligent hominins, whose imitation of each other’s desires led to conflict. These crises were resolved by the mechanism of emissary murder: the proto-human community came to focus its aggression on a single scapegoat whose unanimous lynching, by “miraculously” bringing peace, led to its ritual repetition in sacrifice. Because this theory fails to found the signs of human language and worship on the deferral of spontaneous action, Girard can only attribute the internal peace necessary to the human community to the exhaustion of violent aggression. Instead, generative anthropology proposes that, beginning from the premise that the need to control internecine violence was the source of the human, an appropriative gesture toward an object of common desire, deferred out of fear of violence, becomes understood as a sign of the object’s sacred/interdicted status, after which it can be peacefully divided among the group. Following this originary event, the sacred/signifying universe of language and religion gradually comes to include the totality of human activity.

КРИЗИС ВИКТИМНОЙ ПАРАДИГМЫ (СЛУЧАЙ НОВЕЙШЕЙ РУССКО-ИЗРАИЛЬСКОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ)

The article describes a victimological paradigm in modern Russian-Israeli literature. The proposed opposition present in the two notions i.e. victim–victimizer is based on Eric Gans’s generative anthropology. The dynamics and possibilities of new form of victimological paradigm are analysed on the basis of chosen literary works in new Russian-Israeli literature.