Richard van Oort’s Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment affords a product... more Richard van Oort’s Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment affords a productive encounter between René Girard’s mimetic theory and Eric Gans’s generative anthropology, where the center/periphery structure is the model of cultural origins and subsequent organization. Lear’s abdication of the royal center precipitates a lethal mimetic vortex all along the periphery of an apocalyptic tragedy. By rigorous contrast with Hamlet, it is the king’s resentment that unleashes “a theater of envy,” where madness figures centrally, literally, as cultural meltdown (12-21).
We might begin with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century. For that is where our proble... more We might begin with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century. For that is where our problematic quest for origins begins, with the discrediting of Biblical authority, of Scriptural orthodoxy, in terms of which, origins, being divine, are by definition no problem. This in part is the point of Rousseau’ s insistence, towards the beginning of his Discours sur l’ origine de l’ inegalite parmi les hommes, that “We must begin by discarding all the facts” (III: 132). The context of this remark clearly suggests that he is sidestepping the authority of Biblical narrative, la lecture des livres sacres, which officially at least represents the facts for his culture. This in turn appears to be no problem for our resolutely profane, scientific culture, though part of my argument will concern a relation to the sacred informing and deforming our own quest for origins.
... The serially cadenced claims of the Dancing, the Music, and the Fencing Master about the hono... more ... The serially cadenced claims of the Dancing, the Music, and the Fencing Master about the honor ... in every sense of the word a critique of differ-ence between signifier and signified as ... designated this gesture as a category error, an error of set-theoretic typing whereby philosophy ...
Richard van Oort’s Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment affords a product... more Richard van Oort’s Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment affords a productive encounter between René Girard’s mimetic theory and Eric Gans’s generative anthropology, where the center/periphery structure is the model of cultural origins and subsequent organization. Lear’s abdication of the royal center precipitates a lethal mimetic vortex all along the periphery of an apocalyptic tragedy. By rigorous contrast with Hamlet, it is the king’s resentment that unleashes “a theater of envy,” where madness figures centrally, literally, as cultural meltdown (12-21).
We might begin with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century. For that is where our proble... more We might begin with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century. For that is where our problematic quest for origins begins, with the discrediting of Biblical authority, of Scriptural orthodoxy, in terms of which, origins, being divine, are by definition no problem. This in part is the point of Rousseau’ s insistence, towards the beginning of his Discours sur l’ origine de l’ inegalite parmi les hommes, that “We must begin by discarding all the facts” (III: 132). The context of this remark clearly suggests that he is sidestepping the authority of Biblical narrative, la lecture des livres sacres, which officially at least represents the facts for his culture. This in turn appears to be no problem for our resolutely profane, scientific culture, though part of my argument will concern a relation to the sacred informing and deforming our own quest for origins.
... The serially cadenced claims of the Dancing, the Music, and the Fencing Master about the hono... more ... The serially cadenced claims of the Dancing, the Music, and the Fencing Master about the honor ... in every sense of the word a critique of differ-ence between signifier and signified as ... designated this gesture as a category error, an error of set-theoretic typing whereby philosophy ...
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