Eric Lawrence Gans (born August 21, 1941) is an American philosophical anthropologist and literary theorist.

He also publishes the Chronicles of Love and Resentment, a weblog dedicated to his reflections on a range of topics including popular culture, film, contemporary politics, philosophy and religion.

Gans has taught and published on 19th century literature, literary theory and film in the UCLA Department of French and Francophone studies.

Eric Lawrence Gans was born on 21 August 1941 in Parkchester, the Bronx to a middle-class Jewish family.

In the subsequent years he elaborated and refined his hypothesis in a series of works starting with The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology (1985).

In 1990 UCLA's French Department held its first GA colloquium, which featured Marvin Harris as keynote speaker.

Girard argues that human desire is essentially cultural or social in nature, and thus distinct from mere appetite, which is biological.

For Girard, this conflict is resolved by the scapegoat mechanism, in which the destructive energies of the group are purged through the violence directed towards an arbitrarily selected victim.

For Gans, language is essentially "scenic" in character, that is, structurally defined by a sacred center and human periphery.

The main source of criticism directed against Gans's work comes from Girard himself, who claims that generative anthropology is just another version of social contract theories of origins.