Everyone must agree that at one time human or symbolic language didn t exist and that at a later time it did. The bottom line is the heuristic value in conceiving a scene of origin versus reconstructing the social and ecological context of protohuman culture from the rapidly growing body of neurological, paleontological, primatological, and other data. I think the best response to Marina s challenge would be to divide the question. In contrast, those who would construe the meaning of cultural forms have no reason to fear the strong hypothesis of the originary scene. Ancient philosophy substituted the sign-Idea for the god, but proposed no anthropological genesis for the sign, and therefore no anthropology as such.
Modern thought is historical and therefore anthropological.
What we should retain of the social contract is that it is a hypothetical event that creates peace out of violence. Its flaw is its artificial separation of the collective formulation of the contract from the collective violence to which it is the solution. The scene of the contract figures the originary passage from violence to peace without being able to justify it because it fails to describe the birth of the sign that is the specifically human instrument of this peace. To interpret a literary work is to explain this effectuation, or, in other terms, to conceive the artwork as an originary hypothesis. We cannot fulfill the critic s obligation to bridge the gap between representation and reality if in demonstrating the work s significance we take significance itself as an unanalyzable term.